But you’d have thought Khrushchev and Mao were putting in a bid for TWA and Pan Am the way some people reacted. The Air West board of directors started to scream. I could never quite figure it out, except that maybe they didn’t want the heavy hand of Howard Hughes pushing the buttons and making them jump. The excuse they gave was that they didn’t think the CAB would give me permission to own another airline after the TWA-Northeast fiasco, but they were wrong. They might have stopped me if the airline hadn’t been so close to bankruptcy, but, in the end, the power of the dollar won out. They said, ‘Okay, Mr. Hughes if you insist. We’ll let you save our skins.’ The preliminary vote had been thirteen to eleven against selling to me. The board waited until exactly three minutes before my offer officially expired – then they voted seventeen to seven to sell.
Then, with all the effort you put into it, why didn’t the SST scheme work out?
There are two basic reasons. The first one’s not so important, but it had to do with the failure, at least for the moment, of Boeing’s development of the plane itself. I spent so many hours of my time working to implement that vision, only to have those shortsighted politicians in Washington cut the ground out from under the project’s feet. Once that happened there was a general lack of enthusiasm for any concrete plans for super-airports. You don’t need an SST airport if you haven’t got any SSTs to land on it. Well, you do, of course, because the Concorde and the Tupolev will be operational eventually, but the United States government has never been keen to sink billions of dollars into projects that will only benefit foreign manufacturers.
But that wasn’t the chief reason that I struck out swinging, at least for the moment. Lyndon Johnson was President when I started things going in Las Vegas. I’ve never met the man but we’d spoken many times on the telephone, and we were pretty much in accord on things, except for the way he so sneakily got us up to our eyeballs in trouble in that Vietnam adventure – and also, I might add, for the fact that he gave the go-ahead to the Atomic Energy Commission to blow up half of Nevada. Other than those two disagreements I had good reason to believe that Johnson would swing his weight behind me when it got down to the nitty-gritty as to where the western SST port of entry would be. You could even say I was counting on him.
However, this was 1966 and 1967 when I got deep into this thing, and if you’ll recall it looked like Johnson was going to run again for reelection and probably win. Then he backed out, which few people, and certainly not I, had foreseen, and Mr. Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968.
His election was one of the great disasters, not only to the best interests of the American public, but to me personally. It was known by then that I was lobbying for Las Vegas against Los Angeles for the SST port, and the California politicians and industrialists naturally yelled bloody blue murder against me. Dick Nixon is from California, and when he gets his ass booted out of the White House eventually he’ll undoubtedly go back to California. He’s the one who, behind the scenes, did his best to stab me in the back on the Las Vegas vision. I’m sure it’s partly revenge for what happened in 1960 when the details of the loan to his brother came out, and it cost him the election.
I’m a patient man, and we’ll see what happens in the future in Nevada.
What sort of life did you live for five years on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn?
Behind steel doors and drawn curtains, tended by my five faithful Mormons, growing my fingernails and toenails eight inches long, shuffling around in Kleenex boxes, and watching old movies all night long. By the way, I’ve always wondered: if you had eight-inch toenails, how could you fit your foot inside a Kleenex box?
That’s what I’ve read and I’m sure you’ve read it too. That’s all so far from the truth that it’s almost worth keeping up the pretence just to provide me with an occasional chuckle – but that’s not why I’m sitting here telling you the story of my life. My purpose is to sweep away the myths and tell the unadorned and maybe not-so-glamorous truth.
I was in Las Vegas probably for a total accumulated time of eighteen months out of those whole five years, and I treated the ninth floor of the Desert Inn like one of my ten or twelve bungalows scattered around the western hemisphere. It was a convenience, a comfortable place to stay from time to time, and nothing more, I had a private elevator and a private exit. Only I had the key. I had to do that because there was always the sensation of panting hordes moving in the corridor outside, waiting for His Eminence to speak. If I ever pulled the drapes and looked out at the street, fifty cameras would go click. Several newspapers offered as much as $25,000 to anyone who could get a photograph of me. Can you imagine?
Why did you hire so many Mormons as close associates during that period?
I had a fellow named Bill Gay as my chief executive assistant. He had been a vice-president at Toolco. He was a Mormon and he wanted his own kind around, no more profound reason than that. I personally had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t have cared less. The newspapers have often referred to them, in connection with me, as the Mormon Mafia. Well, they’re Bill Gay’s Mormon Mafia, not mine. I just found that in general the guys he hired were reasonably competent and discreet and didn’t ask too many questions, probably because they don’t have the imagination to ask too many questions. They don’t drink or smoke. They’re some of the dullest people I ever met, and that suits me fine.
The other significant lieutenant I had was Bob Maheu, an ex-FBI agent who ran the Nevada operation. In all the five years he worked for me I wrote him a lot of letters and talked to him often on the phone, but I never met him face-to-face. That suited me too.
Of course you can get into some peculiar situations living the way I lived then, and something happened once that could have been a minor disaster. It turned out to be a fiasco but not such a funny one when you think what might have happened. There was a kidnapping.
This was in 1967, and it’s one of the most bizarre things that’s ever happened in my life. First I have to tell you that I employed doubles from time to time. Not one but several. They made it easier for me to leave the hotel and travel.
This time I went away to meet Helga in Mexico, at Zihuatanejo, that Pacific coast fishing village. I’d bought a cottage there on the beach, in another name. People had no idea where I was going. My normal practice when I went on such trips was to tell my people: ‘I’m going into a period of total seclusion. I’m not to be bothered, to be phoned, to receive any communications, under any circumstances, unless I communicate.’ They usually thought I was on the premises because one of my doubles – in this instance his name was Jerry Alberts – took my place, ate my food, read the books and watched the movies I had ordered.
I wasn’t feeling too well down in Zihuatanejo, and Helga had to leave earlier than planned, so I left. I made a stop in Houston on the way back. I went back there with some sentimental idea of catching a glimpse of Sonny. But Sonny was swallowed up in that mass of fifty-story buildings that had gone up since I left there.
You didn’t contact anybody there?
Who? I didn’t know anybody. I took a cab out to Yoakum Boulevard, to have a look at the old house, but the old house was long gone, which I should have known it would be. Some school, St. Thomas’s, had been built on the lot.