And yet, paradoxically, my business life in recent years – and that includes the Nevada operation, which involved an expenditure of close to a billion dollars – was of little interest to me. Because these last years have been a period in my life when, for the first time – up to a point – I was able to let my business operations grow by themselves, so that I could do what I wanted to do, quietly and anonymously, in my private affairs.
I say ‘up to a point’ because of course I couldn’t just abandon the habits of a lifetime and keep my hands off enterprises that had a far-reaching purpose – and into which, incidentally I’d sunk a good part of my fortune. And there were times, I’m sorry to say, when I got involved right up to my eyeballs and beyond. I tried to take over the American Broadcasting Company in 1968, with a tender offer through Toolco for a controlling interest in the stock, about two million shares, but ABC management opposed me. It was the same old story – I was going to do the company irreparable harm. Get the logic of this. The stock was selling for about $58 a share before I made the offer. I offered $74 a share. Naturally the stock jumped to over seventy. That’s what they call ‘irreparable harm.’ They ran ads begging their stockholders to turn me down, and I came up 400,000 shares short.
With that, and other endeavors, I had to do a hell of a lot of organizing, because once I’d fired Noah Dietrich I was alone up there on the top of a pretty big heap. And then came the plunge into Las Vegas.
How did you manage to keep your affairs in order with your right-hand man gone?
Call him my left-hand man. I was always my own right-hand man. But I have to admit that it was a problem. The first person I turned to was Bob Gross. I tried to get him to take over the stewardship, I guess you’d call it, of the Hughes empire. He was still president of Lockheed. He didn’t want to give that up.
And in 1961 he died, which was a terrible blow for me because he was the best friend I’ve ever had since my youth. I’m not being egoistic when I say it was a blow for me. For Bob it was simply a quick finish.
When you’re alive you fear death, but when you’re dead, you’re dead and you don’t know a goddamn thing about it. I never feel sorry for anyone who dies. I feel sorry for the ones they leave behind and, all too often, alone. I mourn, if I ever mourn, for the living. They suffer. The dead just decompose.
I was no stranger to Las Vegas. The first time I went there was just after I’d gone on a little riding trip in Death Valley with Ruth Elder, my pilot pal. That was around 1930. We’d been away for a long weekend and ridden out into the desert, under a blue sky without a single cloud, although it was baking hot. Then we had an accident. Ruth’s horse was bitten by a rattlesnake, and panicked. Ruth held on, she was an excellent horsewoman, but the poison went through that horse like crap through a goose. He fell dead before he’d gone a hundred yards. Ruth landed clear, but that kind of took the bloom off the day, and we left Death Valley.
We spent the night in Las Vegas – my first sight of the town, which was just a pimple in the desert, with probably not more than five thousand people living there. Gambling was illegal. There were some tinhorn joints downtown but no one in his right mind would go in there.
Later I visited again, flying out from Hollywood. I flew over the whole state of Nevada ten or fifteen times. Every time I looked down I’d say, ‘What the hell is that? That wasn’t there before!’ The towns seemed to be leaking out from the center – Las Vegas in particular. And I got interested in it. First of all, I liked clean, dry desert air. Germs can’t live well, I thought, in that kind of air.
Later on I wanted to locate the avionics division of Hughes Aircraft there and I had business meetings in Nevada with Bob Gross and Zeckendorf and dozens of other men. In 1950 I rented a bungalow out there. By then the town was moving right along. But I still had no real interest in buying in. I did pick up a little real estate – fifty or sixty thousand acres here and there. I did that in Arizona, too, in Scottsdale, because I could see that area had the potential for tremendous development. I’ve still got that land in Arizona – I’m damned it I know what’s happening to it.
Then, around 1960, I became seriously interested in Nevada. I looked into the future and I saw the tremendous pace with which the airline and the aircraft building industry was accelerating. The SST was an inevitability.
By the mid-1960s I was ready to move. What I lacked then was sufficient liquidity, and that was supplied when I dumped my block of TWA stock on the market. Then I had half a billion dollars ready cash to play around with.
I moved into a hotel, the Desert Inn, rented the top floor, the ninth floor, and set up headquarters. One day they announced to me that they needed part of the ninth floor for some big gamblers who were coming to Vegas for Christmas, and they always had those rooms, and would I mind giving them up? Well, I did mind, and I already had the Desert Inn on the list of properties I wanted to buy – but this business of their asking me to vacate some of the rooms on the ninth floor seemed to me like a golden opportunity to make one of those gestures that endear you to the hearts of the local citizenry and also throw a bit of a scare into the local politicos. So I said, in effect, ‘No, I’m damned if I’ll move. I’ll buy the hotel before I do that.’
And I bought it for $13 million cash. But it took a while, because the place was owned by a syndicate, and I insulted the head man, some racketeer named Moe Dalitz. I had a private meeting with this guy Dalitz, who I disliked. The meeting took place a short time before Christmas, because he said to me, ‘Mr. Hughes, it’s my birthday in a few days, and I’d be honored for you to come to a little birthday party I’m having.’
I said I’d try to make it. Naturally, I had no intention of doing so. He said, ‘It’s going to be in your honor as well, Mr. Hughes, because I have the same birthday as you.’ I felt a certain sense of revulsion at that idea. I said, ‘I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I was twenty-one years old. Birthday parties are for children,’ and I walked out of the room.
I had the same set-up there in the Desert Inn that I’ve always had where I live. I’m indifferent to my surroundings as long as the basic comforts are there. My own apartment on the ninth floor was sparsely furnished, except that when I first arrived and started buying stuff I somehow acquired a huge Persian carpet that had belonged to Adolf Hitler. It was a beautiful old carpet and it cost thirty thousand dollars. It wasn’t worth that much, of course, but someone in my organization no doubt got a fat kickback. Hitler had eight of them made for him back in the Thirties, woven by eight master weavers from the Arab countries. This one wound up on my bedroom floor in the Desert Inn. I used to pace back and forth on it and sometimes laugh like hell when I realized what I was doing. Good thing the newspapers didn’t know about that. They would have had a field day.
Other than the extravagance of Hitler’s carpet I had my amplifying equipment and closed-circuit television installed. I did have the drapes changed. They were too flimsy. I don’t like the idea of the awareness of time passing, so I had very heavy drapes put in to keep out the light. That’s something I’ve done all my life. I’ve refused to be a slave to time. And one way I’ve been able to get around it is to insulate myself against light from the outside so that, since I have no clocks and no watch, I don’t know what time it is. I run by an internal clock. When I want to sleep, I sleep, and when I want to work, I work. And when I want to pick up the telephone and call somebody, I call them. I don’t know if it’s noon or five o’clock in the morning or what.
That inconveniences a lot of people, doesn’t it? To be called at three and four o’clock in the morning?