All Episodes
Previous Next
March 29, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:56
Episode 438 - Geoff Schumacher

Journalist/researcher Geoff Schumacher in Las Vegas with the inside story on the amazing but strangely reclusive US billionaire Howard Hughes - the man whose name I've proudly carried all my life...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
I hope that you're staying safe and you're staying healthy in the middle of all that the world is going through at the moment.
Please connect with me if you want to, from whichever corner of the world you are in.
And, you know, I'd be grateful for your emails and your communications.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, if you want to make a guest suggestion, any suggestions about the show, the way it's done, or if you just want to tell me how things are with you, it would be great to hear from you now as we all work in our solitary bunkers as I am now.
Theunexplained.tv is the website designed and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam, for all that you do here.
So please connect with me.
And if your message, your email requires a response, then I will certainly send it to you.
And if I haven't, if there's something that you've communicated with me about and I haven't responded, please remind me.
Please do.
Thank you so much for all of your communications and the nice things you say.
Don't forget, of course, the official Unexplained Facebook page.
It's the Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Be part of that.
Very, very important.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the show, then that would be gratefully received to allow this online work, which I've been doing for 14 years now, to continue.
One thing, you know, a lot of you say that you can't make a donation.
That's okay.
Please enjoy the show.
I understand, especially at this time, where money is really tight for all of us, that you may not be able to do that.
If you can't make a donation, please could you review the show?
Maybe on iTunes or on my Facebook page or wherever.
You know, if you could just give it a rating if you're enjoying it, that would be tremendous for me because all of these things are important.
And because we're independent, I'm not taking in big subscriptions and making, as, you know, some shows make tens of thousands of dollars, you know, monthly, which some of them do.
All of those things are important to me to, you know, get the message out there and get as many people listening to this if you like it.
So what are we going to talk about this time?
Well, it's a recording of a conversation that I put together here for my radio show about, well, possibly a subject that I'm interested in more than most others.
Howard Hughes, the famous, amazing, eccentric American billionaire, and his bizarre and fabulous life and times.
Jeff Schumacher has written a book about him and extensively researched him.
He's based in Las Vegas, where Hughes himself, of course, spent his declining years.
So I want to bring you that conversation now and see what you think about this.
Fascinating subject, fascinating man.
I've lived all of my life as Howard Hughes, as you know.
And things like traveling to America are always fun because you arrive and they look at your passport and it says Howard Hughes and they turn and they say, we've got Howard Hughes here.
And their friends come over.
It's always been like that.
But I'm proud to bear this name.
And I want to tell you about the man, the remarkable, bizarre aspects of his life and the things that you may never have heard about.
So we're going to do that.
Don't forget, my website, vunexplained.tv, send me an email from there.
And I hope that you're staying healthy and safe during these times.
All right, let's get to Las Vegas, Nevada now, and speak with Jeff Schumacher about Howard Hughes.
Jeff, how are you?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you for having me on.
I don't know whether those words I said about Howard Hughes were the sort of words I should have been saying at the beginning of this, but they're the words that meant something to me.
What would you say about him?
How would you sum him if somebody who'd never heard of Howard Hughes and never heard of the things that he did, somebody said to you, who was Howard Hughes?
What did he do?
What would be your two-sentence or three-sentence reply to that?
You know, he is a person who is difficult to summarize, but I will say, you know, my summary would be something along the lines of, you know, one of the most dynamic and intriguing figures of the 20th century.
I mean, he, not just in the United States, but all over the world, he was well known.
He was highly regarded as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, as an innovator.
So that's on the positive side.
Many people, though, know him or remember him as this very odd, reclusive person.
And so there's multiple facets to him that can be explored.
Sure.
And look, when I came into this world, and I'm talking about when I was aware of things and watching television shows, all I can remember is reruns of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In Show, where Howard Hughes would be a topic of fun most weeks.
Absolutely.
I mean, he was, you know, going back a little bit before that period, 1938, Howard Hughes flew around the world in record time.
And he didn't hire somebody to fly around the world.
He flew around the world in record time in a plane of his own devising.
And, you know, he was the most famous person in the world at that moment.
There were ticker tape parades in three different U.S. cities.
And, you know, he was on the front page of every paper.
He stopped in, you know, places all over the globe as part of that rapid flight around the world.
And, you know, you couldn't top him.
There was nobody who was better known.
And then, you know, so from then, you know, he went on to many other exploits.
But, you know, really in the 20th century, there are only a handful of people who accomplished as much as he did.
Right.
He came into the world rich, didn't he?
He had what we would call here in the UK the best possible kind of start.
Yes.
You know, his father invented an oil drill bit.
In other words, a bit that was so much more effective in drilling oil wells that he basically cartered the market on that particular device and became very rich.
And so Howard, you know, actually Howard wasn't born rich because when he was born, his father was still trying to make his fortune.
But by the time Howard knew what was going on, you know, by the time he was seven or eight years old, his family was very wealthy.
And yes, he inherited that wealth at a very young age as well.
He was 18 years Old when he took over his father and his mother died when he was a teenager, and he took over the company.
And what do you think it was about him that allowed him to take control at such a young age and do things and tell people what to do who were in many cases decades and decades older than him?
You know, that is something that fascinates me because when he was 18, you know, nobody in his family expected that he was going to take over the company.
You know, they thought, well, you know, he could work his way up through the ranks or something like you would typically see.
Well, in his case, he was like, there's no way I'm taking over now.
I'm going to buy out all my family members, which he did.
And he took control of the company.
He certainly had many had people working for him from whom he took advice.
But for the most part, he was his own man from a very, very young age.
And I think it had to do just with his confidence and it had to do with his forcefulness about it.
Where did he learn the multiple and manifold skills that he had?
Because I said in the introduction there that he was an engineer, an aviator, he was a golfer.
He got into the movies.
How did he learn all of this stuff?
Well, you know, what's interesting about Hughes is I think he was, you know, he was inherently very smart and very curious.
And, you know, he was always tinkering with objects of one kind or another, whether it was motors or radios or whatever, as a young man.
But his formal learning is pretty limited.
He was not, you know, he did not have a degree in engineering, yet he was working alongside the most advanced aviation engineers in the country when he was developing airplanes.
When it came to the movies, he was just learning on the job and a lot of instinct and a lot of just learning from other people and then taking what he learned from them and then creating his own way forward.
And so I think he was just sort of like a, you know, people will debate whether he was a genius, whether you can use that word.
I think he probably was.
I don't know if anybody ever checked his IQ, but I mean, he's an incredibly smart person.
Incredibly smart person.
Aviation was massively a part of his life, not only flying planes, that as you said at the beginning of this, he flew around the world, but he was a great flyer, an accomplished flyer, but he also designed aircraft.
But during all of that, though, he had an accident, didn't he?
He had a really bad accident flying a plane.
And I always thought, and some of the books I've read about him suggest, that that was something of a turning point in his life.
Oh, absolutely.
What you're referring to was really probably his fourth or fifth plane crash of his life.
He was a very good pilot, but he was very reckless because he wanted to test these airplanes to see what they could do.
And oftentimes the planes were not really ready for prime time, if you know what I mean.
He was testing out to see how they would do, what adjustments needed to be made to make them ready.
So he had some crashes even early on in his life in the flying game.
But in 1946, he crashed into the Los Angeles Country Club, and the plane hit very hard.
The plane was on fire, and Hughes was trying to escape the plane.
He had been very badly hurt, and he was pulled out by a bystander who helped him escape this flaming wreckage.
Well, Hughes went to the emergency room, and he had so many problems, whether it was third-degree burns, broken bones, contusions of one kind or another, that doctors were telling the press that evening that they weren't sure he was going to make it through the night.
That's how serious the accident was.
It turned out Hughes was in the hospital for about six weeks when he walked out on his own power.
And that sounds like a miraculous thing to do.
And it was, but it was really, he should not have done that.
He really should have recuperated longer because that was the beginning of, as you mentioned, a turning point because he became very dependent on painkillers at that point.
And that developed into an addiction that kind of ruined his life, his latter part of his life.
Right.
And do we think that the addiction to painkillers was something, and we've seen this in so many famous people, but maybe something that caused him to, on one level, he was still achieving a great deal.
Of course he was.
He was still a big, famous guy.
But on another level, perhaps it made him lose his grip on reality.
Oh, I think so.
He became more and more reclusive.
In the 30s and 40s, he was dating all the biggest starlets in Hollywood.
Jeff, you will know the names.
I read a list of those people a couple of months ago.
It was astonishing.
The ones who'd either gone out with him, nearly married him, had some kind of dalliance with him, the list would start.
My apartment is the room that I'm speaking to you in now is about nine, ten feet high.
You could write down the names and roll out the paper and it would touch the floor, I think.
It was astonishing, wasn't it?
What did he, when it came to women, this is a silly question because he was very, very rich, but he must have had more than just money because he was a magnet for women.
Yes, he was.
And I think, to be honest, I think the money had something to do with it.
But I think they were also fascinated by this larger-than-life figure, this character who was hard to get to know.
He wasn't a guy who you became intimate with.
And I don't mean that physically, but who you really got to know very easily.
And so I think women were drawn to him.
He could be very charming.
He was boyish, Really, with women.
That's what they would say.
And that appealed to them.
He did not put on airs, as it were.
I mean, he did not dress very well.
He drove very mundane vehicles.
His cars were average run-of-the-mill cars.
And this was a marvel to some of these Hollywood actresses in particular who were accustomed to men trying to impress them in one way or another.
And Hughes was comfortable asking them to go on a date and pick him up himself in a Chevrolet rather than having some more fancy car or somebody driving for them.
So I think that's part of it.
And so he was very much in the limelight during that time.
And as he got older, and I think after the accident, he became really dependent on painkillers.
And that made him paranoid, I think.
And also, he really started depending on this small group of aides who surrounded him.
And they were really the only people who saw him.
He still communicated with the outside world and did his business through phone calls and memos, but he didn't really see people after about 1958.
Right.
So he was on the path to the reclusiveness, the reclusivity that we all read about in the 1970s.
He was well on that path by the end of the 1950s, which is, on one level, a big shame, really, because if he'd been more, if he'd been able to be more forthcoming and perhaps more able to get out and about more, who knows what he would have achieved.
But there were things about him, and I want to get to this in the next segment, there were aspects of his life that were very much a sort of 007-style aspect to them, in that he had connections because he was a patriot.
He was a great American patriot.
He had connections with the government because of what he could do and what he could supply.
Of course, he supplied aircraft in wartime.
And towards the end of his time, he was questioned about how all of that money was employed.
He was put before, I think it was a grand jury, wasn't it?
A federal grand jury and questioned.
Senate committee.
Senate investigating committee, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And he fought them back.
I've watched the original newsreel footage of him fighting them back.
But he had connections, and some of it was deeply mysterious and incredibly secretive in a way.
We're talking about Howard Hughes tonight, not me, but the one who was there before me and the one whose name that I've borne for all of my years and have been proud to because of the great things that he did do.
It was sad in many ways that he ended as he did as a recluse in a hotel suite, in a hotel that he'd bought, surrounded by the immediate people who supplied him with what he required.
That was sad.
But there were aspects of his life that were deeply intriguing in the literal sense of the word.
We're going to explore that next with Jeff Schumacher, who has written extensively and researched Howard Hughes, and we're better for Jeff Schumacher to be based than Las Vegas, where Howard Hughes spent his final days.
We're talking about Howard Hughes, not me.
The Howard Hughes, the aviator, the filmmaker, the golfer, the engineer.
Remarkable man, but a man who had secretive aspects about him.
We're talking with Jeff Schumacher in Las Vegas, who's written about him.
Jeff, because he had money and because he was producing things for the government, because he was influential and important, he did have connections right up to the very top in the U.S., didn't he?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, he was a defense contractor.
You know, he was not a big one.
He wasn't Boeing or, you know, some of these companies that mass produce large numbers of things, but he was very, very sought after, especially when it came to communications, satellite communications and that kind of radar and things like that.
And so, no, he was involved with a lot of different programs, very secretive programs that were developed during the Cold War.
And he was also involved with a couple things with the CIA.
So, you know, he was definitely connected in that way.
He was.
And what about the secretive aspects of this?
I've read so many things, so many things over the years, that have had Howard Hughes at the bottom of them or involved in them.
What exactly, you know, to what level and extent did that secrecy and desire to help the U.S. government, to what level did that get?
Well, you know, I think probably the epitome of a secret project that Hughes was involved with was the Glomar Explorer.
Now, some people might recognize that phrase.
The Glomar Explorer was a giant ship that was put together to retrieve a Soviet submarine that had sunk in the Pacific Ocean.
It had sunk in the late 1960s.
The U.S. government knew about the submarine, and they very much wanted to retrieve it so that they could learn about how it was built, how it operated, and any information that they might, secret information they might be able to glean from inside the submarine.
So the government created a cover story.
And the cover story, there was that Howard Hughes was putting this ship together so that he could do deep sea mining.
And he was going to mine these manganese nodules from the bottom of the ocean.
And it's a real thing, but they were very hard to get.
And the idea was that Howard Hughes was the type of man who was fearless, and he was going to go and dig to the bottom of the ocean for these manganese nodules that would be very valuable.
So that was completely a cover story, though.
What the CIA was doing behind the scenes was creating this ship with this giant claw that would descend Down, the ship would be positioned right over the top of the submarine, and then this claw would be sent down into the water down to grab, literally grab the submarine and pull it to the surface.
And they were successful.
They found the sub.
This claw descended into the water.
It attached it to the submarine and started pulling it up.
Well, about two-thirds of the way up, a couple of the tines on the claw broke and the part of the submarine fell back to the bottom of the ocean.
But they went ahead and grabbed the rest of it and brought it up onto the ship.
Very secretive.
They set up the ship in such a way that no one visibly could see what was happening.
They brought up the rest of that submarine and they found in there not quite as much information as they were hoping for, but they did find the bodies of six Soviets in there.
They gave those guys a proper burial at sea, but they also found some other machines and they found some other information, a diary that was kept by one of the submariners.
But most importantly, they discovered that the submarine was not nearly as sophisticated as the United States had thought.
In other words, the Soviets had been very good about talking up their game, that they were well ahead of the U.S. in so many different ways during the Cold War.
And it turned out that the thing was kind of a bucket of bolts.
It was not nearly as sophisticated a piece of machinery as the U.S. had thought.
And so they gave a shot of confidence that the U.S. was on the right track.
Right.
But Howard Hughes had done his patriotic chore and done it well.
He'd done what was required.
Were there rewards for him in that?
You know, I think there were.
I don't know if there certainly weren't personal rewards for him at that point because he was pretty far gone that way.
But his companies benefited greatly from it.
The confidence that Hughes organization was able to keep this secret for several years and that they were able to accomplish what they were able to accomplish.
I mean, definitely we gave a boost to Hughes Aircraft Company, which is probably the company that had the most secret projects with the government.
So they definitely was a benefit in that way.
Was he the kind of man, from what I understand, sorry to jump right in, sorry, was there another point you wanted to make about that before I do?
I was just going to say that for Hughes, though, this kind of thing wasn't about money, right?
He, as you mentioned, was a patriot and he just wanted to do his part.
And he loved intrigue of any kind.
So this was a chance for him to be involved in something firsthand.
So, you know, he was all for it.
From what I've read about him, he was the kind of guy who could pick up a phone on his office desk or get someone to do it for him and get straight through to Hoover.
Is that so?
Oh, I think so.
I think at certain times, he did run into some roadblocks.
He wasn't omnipotent.
For example, in the late 1960s, Howard Hughes, when he was in Las Vegas, initiated a campaign to stop atomic testing, nuclear testing.
He was very concerned about the nuclear tests, the bombs that were going off about 60 miles from Las Vegas, and he wanted that stopped.
And of course, that's a big ask, but he went as far as he could go.
He went to President Lyndon Johnson to ask him if he would stop the testing.
And Johnson said, no, I'm not going to stop it.
So Hughes was not able to manipulate the President of the United States on this particular case, but he was able to reach him.
Right.
And what were his connections with the Kennedys?
Well, it's interesting.
Those are somewhat mysterious.
He definitely knew Joseph Kennedy, Joe Kennedy, the father, because during the 1920s, Joe Kennedy was involved in the movie business and he was involved in bootlegging during Prohibition.
And Hughes was interested in both of those things.
The RKO Pictures, Kennedy was one of the early executives at RKO Pictures.
Later on, Howard Hughes purchased RKO Pictures, and he ran that movie company in the late 40s and 50s.
So they knew each other.
Later, Hughes became involved with campaign contributions to the Kennedys.
But he was kind of an equal opportunity political donor.
He just wanted to go with the winner.
So he might go, he'd give the equal amounts to both parties.
And whoever won, then he had favor with.
It didn't matter.
Right.
So everything was business.
It had to be.
He was very business-oriented.
Politically, he was a little bit ham-fisted.
Frankly, he sort of was of the mindset that everybody had a price.
And that isn't always true.
I think history shows not everybody has a price.
Can you think of anybody, you know, anybody prominent who didn't have a price, who couldn't be persuaded with the Yankee dollar from Howard Hughes?
Well, I didn't give the whole story about Lyndon Johnson because Hughes tried to bribe him to stop the testing.
He wanted very much to give Lyndon Johnson $100,000 for his reelection campaign, but Johnson would not have been interested in that.
So I think there was an example.
He was more influential with Richard Nixon.
And I think that if Hughes had been a little bit more with it at that time when Nixon was president, Hughes no doubt would have tried to influence, to use his influence even more with him.
Did he?
Sorry, you were saying.
No, no, that's it.
Watergate, you know, the first big scandal that I can remember in my life was huge.
Of course it was.
It brought down a president.
You said that he had good relations with Nixon.
Did Howard Hughes have involvement in or knowledge of Watergate?
So, Watergate is a tricky one.
My full understanding of that is not as great as it could be, and it's part because everybody's in the same boat with that.
He had a connection to Richard Nixon because his brother, Donald, had received a $200,000 loan from Hughes.
And Nixon didn't want this to get out.
And so he was concerned about what Howard Hughes knew.
And he, so one of the reasons that Watergate occurred, the Watergate break-in occurred, it is believed, is because Nixon wanted to know what the Democrats knew about Howard Hughes and his loan to Donald Nixon.
That's Richard Nixon's brother.
Right, because if that had got out, it would have looked not nice.
And what had happened is Hughes had hired a man named Larry O'Brien.
And Larry O'Brien was involved with the Democratic National Committee.
And so this was the connection that Nixon was nervous about, that somehow Hughes was going into league with the Democrats at that time.
But it really wasn't like that.
I think Hughes was just looking for the best political operators to be on his team.
It wasn't a partisan thing.
It was just him wanting the best guy.
And so, and or, and this is why it's speculative, right?
If Hughes had leverage with Nixon, then he could have used that leverage.
And so that's what made Nixon nervous, that, you know, Hughes might say, hey, I know this about you and your brother, and I'm going to say something about it unless you do this for me, you know, that kind of thing.
Right.
So Nixon would have been worried about being a puppet on a string for Hughes.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Boy.
Yes.
There's another small piece to that.
And there was Hughes' memos were, you know, that he wrote when he was in Las Vegas, when he was holed up on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn Hotel here in Las Vegas to his number one aide, Robert Mayhew.
Those memos were really, nobody knew about them until later, but they contained a ton of information about Hughes and what he knew and what he wanted to do and a lot of his ambitions and some of his strategies.
And Nixon very much wanted to see what those memos contained.
And he learned that a batch of those memos were copies of which were in a safe of a newspaper editor named Hank Greenspun.
Hank Greenspun was the editor and owner of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.
And as the story goes, the Watergate burglars also burglarized the Las Vegas Sun offices in Las Vegas.
It's not a lot of clarity around what they found, but they were going after these memos, supposedly.
Howard Hughes was a patriot.
We've established that.
He was a great American patriot, and his companies are still at the core of the United States economy.
Those people who got in his way, those people who crossed him, what happened to them?
In the case you mentioned earlier about the Senate committee that was investigating the Spruce Goose, you know, what he called the Hercules plane.
This was the transport plane that could carry hundreds and hundreds of troops across the ocean.
That was the intention.
This was an enormous gargantuan for people who are not aware of this.
And if you saw the Leo DiCaprio movie about how it used, you would be aware of this because it starts that way.
But he designed a massive, huge wooden, multi-engined plane, a seaplane, because international planes, you know, were mostly sort of seaplanes in those days.
So it's a massive seaplane.
And that was his pet project, wasn't it?
That was the apex of his, he wanted it to be the apex of his achievements.
Yes, and he was developing that during World War II with the intention of them using it during World War II.
But he was given very little money by the government to do it.
They really, after the initial excitement about the plane, they moved on to some other projects and the thing kind of just moved very slowly.
Not that Hughes wasn't working hard on it, but it did not have the machinery of the government behind it anymore.
And so as the war ended, Hughes was still working on this plane and he still believed in it.
And there were people in the Senate, U.S. Senate, who were skeptical that Hughes was working seriously on this plane, that he somehow he had just gotten millions of dollars from the government for his own slush fund to play around with this airplane.
So he was summoned to Washington, D.C. to be interviewed by a Senate committee about the Spruce Goose, which he didn't like that phrase, by the way.
He called it the Hercules.
And so Hughes stood before this Senate committee and he blew them away.
He was so eloquent and so forceful in his explanations of what he was working on, why he was working on it, why it took longer than he expected, and what he intended to do.
He insisted that there was no corruption, there was nothing like that at all.
And he went so far as to say, to vow that this plane would one day fly.
He said, I will put my own money into it, and you will see that this is not a waste of money.
This turns out to be something, this is going to turn out to be something valuable.
And before we get to the result of that statement and the one that followed it, it's just worth remarking at how adeptly you said that he handled that committee so well.
I've seen the newsreel footage of it.
It is astonishing because he turned the tables on those guys.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, it became clear that they were no match for him.
And the press saw it and the public saw it.
And the senators who thought they had Howard Hughes in their sights were quickly admonished that they were in way over their heads.
I have to say, when I watched that for the first time, I was watching it on a little phone and I was lying in bed there saying, Go, Howard, give it to him.
I was completely with him there.
But I have my reasons for being that way.
But this is where, as his problems were developing and continuing, and we talked about his issues that ultimately led to him becoming a recluse.
But he made a statement along the lines of this plane, the spruce goose as they called it, the Hercules, would fly.
And if it didn't fly, then he was just going to go off the scene.
Yeah, he was going to leave the country, he said, and never come back.
Well, instead of that, after his successful visit to Washington, he went back and they redoubled their efforts to keep working on the Hercules.
And lo and behold, in 1947, he flies the plane in Long Beach Harbor.
He's invited the press.
He's invited the public to come take a look.
He's skimming the waters of the harbor and speeding up much faster than people expected.
And the point is, he didn't tell anybody he planned to lift off the water that day.
He was supposed to just be taxiing around in the water.
Well, Hughes sped up the plane to the point where it took off.
It did indeed fly for about a mile, and then he brought it back down smoothly onto the water and huge cheers.
And people were amazed that this giant plane had flown.
So he had proved to these senators and everyone else that he was going to fulfill what his promise was to them.
But it was all too late by then.
You know, it was.
I mean, the plane was somewhat impractical for heavy use.
One of the reasons was, you know, it probably could have been a metal plane, like most of them are.
But at the time in the war effort, he wasn't allowed to use metal.
It was needed for other things.
I guess there are planes as big as the Spruce Goose flying today.
So he set the model.
And other companies ultimately took up this challenge of building these giant airplanes, transport planes.
And it was really Hughes who was responsible for that, although he never flew that plane again.
It was on display for many, many years as a tourist attraction.
And it currently is a tourist attraction in a museum, an aviation museum in Oregon.
And one of these days, before I turn up my toes, I have, for reasons that we talked about, it's my name.
I have to go and see it.
The Las Vegas years, Jeff, are fascinating because Howard Hughes ended his days in a hotel suite as a recluse in Las Vegas.
What is the story, if there's a potted version of the story of how he got there?
Because when he was moving into Las Vegas, and I'm talking in a business sense, moving into Las Vegas, the mafia were in charge, weren't they?
Yes, I would say so.
So in 1965, Howard Hughes sold his stock.
He sold his shares in Trans World Airlines, TWA, and he received a check for $546 million.
Which by today's standards, that's billions today, isn't it?
Exactly.
Huge amount of money.
And he got it all at one time.
And if you're the Internal Revenue Service, you're looking at that and you're ready to say, okay, we're going to take a big chunk of that check.
So Hughes needed a way to reduce the tax burden on his, you know, this newfound riches.
So he decided to move to Las Vegas and start spending his money on land, on businesses, and continue to develop his empire.
And this by using that as capital to buy new things, he could avoid the tax burden.
So that's the first thing.
The second is he comes to Las Vegas very secretively.
By this time in his life, he's a recluse and he is just very, very concerned about people having access to him in any way.
So he decides he wants to come to Las Vegas by train.
He's living in Boston at the time.
I'm sorry to interrupt here, but why would the great aviator want to go there by train?
Well, that's the funny question.
Nobody has a great answer for that.
But some people have said, well, he didn't trust other people to fly.
In other words, if he couldn't fly himself, he didn't trust others to do it.
I'm not sure that's true, but he made the decision that he wanted to come by train.
And his newfound number two man named Bob Mayhew was given the task of coming up with a way for him to take the train to Las Vegas across the continent without anybody knowing.
So what Bob Mayhew had to do was put together a train that was exclusive to be used exclusively by Howard Hughes.
And then he had to reroute all the other trains by all the other train companies so that his train would not run into them.
So he had to Mayhew had to contact using Howard Hughes as the power behind working for Hughes.
He contacted these train companies and they all routed their schedules so that this secret train could make its way across the country.
And it did.
And it stopped in a suburban part of Las Vegas in the middle of the night.
And Hughes was taken off the train, put into a van on a stretcher.
And then he was transported in the middle of the night to the Desert Inn Hotel, taken up the fire escape by his aides, and set down in a suite on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn Hotel, which was the top floor, the penthouse suites.
He was rented the entire top floor and part of the eighth floor, so he didn't want anybody bugging his room from beneath.
So he was that paranoid.
He was due to his Las Vegas adventure.
So he was that paranoid that he thought that somebody would want to bug him.
He was worried about it.
Yeah, he was very paranoid by that time about a lot of people wanted to sue Howard Hughes.
That was one of the things he was concerned about.
He never wanted to come across a process server who was going to hand him papers ordering him to testify anywhere.
He did not want to do that.
And he became very, very concerned about it.
So he created these layers of security.
And one of those was that he did not want anybody on the eighth floor as well as the ninth floor whom he didn't know.
And so Hughes arrives in Las Vegas and he's ready to start spending a chunk of this $546 million.
But the first thing that comes across the plate is the owners of the Desert Inn Hotel want him to move out.
He'd been there only a few weeks, but they were like they would rather have gamblers in those suites, people who are actually going to spend money in the casino.
Right, but even it doesn't matter who you are.
How do you evict Howard Hughes?
Well, they were prepared to have, by that point, they were prepared to have the sheriff come and physically escort him from the premises.
However, Hughes decided the solution to this problem was that he would buy the hotel.
And the hotel at that time was owned by a man named Mo Dalitz.
And Mo Dalitz was involved with the Cleveland mob.
And Dalitz, though, had been a bootlegger during the 1920s.
He was not a young man anymore.
And he saw an opportunity.
He decided to go ahead and sell the hotel and casino to Hughes.
Right.
And by this stage, we have to say, and sorry to jump in just here, just to clarify this, this was the stage at which the mafia was moving towards legit operations.
Yeah, the mafia had a great deal of control in Las Vegas, on the Las Vegas Strip in particular.
They had built many of the casinos and they were operating many of them either in the front or from behind in the shadows.
And they were skimming money from the casinos in significant amounts of money, taking money off the top before paying taxes.
And they were sending that cash back to Chicago and Cleveland and New York and Miami and so forth.
But there was increasing scrutiny of the mob both at the federal level and at the state level in Nevada.
They were starting to feel the heat.
And so they weren't necessarily wanting to go legit, but they were looking for a way out.
And that's what happened at the Desert Inn for sure.
They found somebody who was willing to pay top dollar for the hotel, and they jumped at the opportunity.
Right.
So rather than saying, you know, we don't want you getting a piece of our action, they were pretty relieved and grateful.
Yes, I think so, because, you know, especially since Hughes was not trying to, you know, pay bottom dollar for these casinos.
He was willing to pay top dollar, and he did.
And there were some, you know, there are some people who will argue that even after Hughes bought these casinos, the skimming continued, that there were employees and there were people in his employee at the casinos who were secretly doing this.
In other words, ripping off Hughes, not only the government, but Hughes as well.
I think there's a chance that that's true, but I don't have the evidence that I've been able to uncover that that is true.
But as soon as Hughes bought the Desert Inn, he decided he took a liking to this idea of owning casinos.
And even though it was not his original plan, he ended up buying five more casinos in Las Vegas and one in Reno.
And did the mafia leave him alone when his business affairs were running tangentially with theirs?
Did they leave him alone?
You know, I think they did.
You know, Hughes brought in his own accounting people and he brought in his own managers, and these were not mob people generally.
And it was okay.
You know, Las Vegas was always regarded by the mob as an open city, quote unquote, open city.
And there were two meanings for that.
The first meaning was that any different mob organization or mafia organization could operate in Las Vegas freely.
In other words, it was a true capitalist system where everybody had a chance to succeed, as opposed to, say, New York City, where the mafia families were constantly feuding over territory.
That's not the way it worked in Las Vegas.
Everybody had a chance there.
The second thing is you saw that the mob was comfortable working side by side with legitimate mainstream companies.
And it only helped them that there were mainstream companies in between, you know, up and down the strip.
They could kind of be a little more anonymous if there were other companies that were more public about what they were doing.
So, yeah, they didn't bother Hughes in that way.
There is a concern, you know, that there was skimming that was still happening while he owned the casinos.
But for the most part, what Hughes did was he opened the door to the future of Las Vegas.
He opened the door for the mob to eventually be pushed out entirely and huge corporations to step in.
And am I right in saying that he did all of this in what we call today, in these circumstances that we're living through in 2020, in lockdown, in a hotel suite, with his hair overgrown, needing vast quantities of tissues because he was afraid of picking up germs and viruses and bugs and things, and naked much of the time.
All those things are correct.
It's interesting to think about us today, you know, being sort of hunkered down in our homes, doing our work, you know, from our homes.
And think about it.
I hadn't even thought about that quite the same way until you just mentioned it, but that's exactly what Hughes did for the latter part of his life.
He ran huge multinational corporations, billions of dollars changing hands without ever leaving his home.
In his case, his home was a suite and a hotel.
But It was telecommuting before there was such a thing.
So he remained right to the end, astute, amazing, and ahead of the curve.
And he had issues.
I've always been sorry for him in that respect, that he ended up like that.
Why did nobody, or maybe they did, why did nobody close to him ever try and help him?
You know, that right there is the crux of my research.
And my book talks a lot about, I talk a lot about this.
How did this happen?
How did he end up dying with broken needles in his arms and 90 pounds?
And how could this have happened to such a rich and beloved man?
Well, what happened is there were people surrounding him who were manipulating him to their personal advantage.
In other words, there were executives at Hughes who wanted more power, they wanted more money, and they saw the deterioration of Hughes as being to their benefit.
So they controlled the personal aides who were surrounding Hughes, and they paid them a very nice wage for doing pretty mundane work.
And I don't mean to demean the work, but it was medical assistance, minor medical assistance.
It was cooking meals.
It was, you know, that kind of thing, delivering messages.
And these guys were paid a very handsome wage for that.
So they did not want to rock the boat.
You know, anytime you start making noise in your company, in that company, especially with its secrecy being so important, you probably get fired.
And they didn't want that.
So they kind of observed the deterioration of Hughes without blowing the whistle.
As for the executives, they were manipulating, they saw advantages in Hughes being increasingly dependent on drugs, increasingly not communicating with the outside world.
That was only to their benefit.
And it's a very, very dark story once you're in Las Vegas with Hughes and then afterward, he did leave Las Vegas in 1970.
And he traveled around the world, including to London.
I heard that incognito.
Yes, and he actually had a few weeks where things were really starting to perk up for him in London.
He flew an airplane even at this late stage of his life.
He flew around Europe in an airplane.
But after he came back from the flight, he broke his hip and he never left a hospital bed again.
And that was ultimately the final straw for Hughes.
And he ended up dying on an airplane that was leaving an emergency flight from Acapulco, Mexico to Houston, Texas.
And he died in the plane.
And unfortunately for Hughes, you know, there was really nobody on his side by that time of his life.
Wasn't that sad that nobody loved him enough and nobody was able to get an in to him to help him?
Nobody was there to care at the end.
Yep.
And, you know, I think there were people, we'll say, you know, there were people from the Hollywood community and there were certainly people in the aviation community who probably would have helped Hughes if they could, but nobody could get access to him.
All avenues were blocked.
And so that's how it ended up.
And then, of course, there was the book about his life and times that was written at the end of his period on earth and was a fake, was written by a jobbing author who ultimately went to prison and then came out and became a legitimate author.
But all of that happened.
And then there was the phone call from Howard Hughes to a bunch of journalists who were there to assess whether this book by Howard Hughes about his life and times was real or fake.
And most of them believed that it was real until Howard Hughes phoned them and explained that it wasn't the real deal.
That is such, and you can find that, maybe you've listened to it.
You can find a recording of that phone conference if you look for it online.
And it is really fascinating to listen to.
What happened is, you know, this book was going to be published.
And Hughes got wind of it.
And his people were like, this, you know, it's obviously not a real book.
But this Irving, Clifford Irving, had done such a good job of convincing the publisher in New York that this was real that they were moving forward with this book.
They had given him a huge advance.
They were completely snowed by this book.
So Hughes put together this phone conference with a group of reporters in Hollywood whom he knew.
He handpicked the journalists to be part of this.
And most of them he knew from his old aviation days.
These were not the investigative reporters from Washington, D.C. or New York.
These were aviation reporters.
But the importance of having them was they could verify that the voice on the phone was in fact Howard Hughes because they knew him personally.
Right.
And just like the government committee that he testified in front of, he was able to polish that off in a few words.
Yes, it became clear very quickly to the reporters in the room that this was indeed Howard Hughes on the phone.
And when he said the book wasn't real, that it was fake, that was the end of that.
The jig was up for Clifford Irving.
Yeah, and a great movie with Richard Gere starring Clifford Irving.
Hey, listen, Jeff, we're out of time, and I would like to speak with you for another hour about this.
So maybe sometime we can pick up the threads of this conversation if you've enjoyed it and do some more here.
Thank you very much.
I find Howard Hughes completely fascinating, and I want people to remember him for the amazing character that he was, because in this day and age, we don't really have anybody like that.
What do you say?
You know, I can't find a current parallel.
I mean, there are people in business who are doing very innovative things, but nobody like that.
If people want to read about your work, where do they go online?
The book, Howard Hughes, Power, Paranoia, and Palace Intrigue, is available at all your retail online outlets.
And I encourage you to take a look.
There's a lot of great information.
Thank you very much, Jeff.
Good to talk with you in Las Vegas, and please stay safe there.
Will do.
Thank you.
What an amazing story.
What an amazing man.
Thank you very much to Jeff Schumacher for being part of this.
We will continue that conversation at some point.
But that's it.
Please keep your emails coming.
And until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do in these times, stay safe, stay healthy, stay home.
And above all, stay in touch.
Please keep in communication with me.
Take care.
Thank you very much.
▲
Export Selection