Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas

Click image for enlargement. Howard Hughes, is shown in the cockpit of an aircraft in 1947, demonstrating a radar device that he believed would prevent a large share of airline crashes. Robert Maheu, assistant to Howard Hughes, sits in his car in front of his Las Vegas home.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Geoff Schumacher's "Sun, Sin & Suburbia."

Howard Hughes was one of the most fascinating and bizarre men of the 20th century. He is remembered as a movie mogul, a record-setting pilot, an aviation innovator, an entrepreneurial businessman, a playboy who dated Hollywood starlets and a behind-the-scenes political manipulator who had an indirect role in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. He was often described as the richest man in the world.

But while Hughes no doubt would have preferred to be remembered for his movies or his flying exploits, he is best known for his reclusive and eccentric habits later in life, for his intense phobias about people and germs, for his drug addictions and for the tragic story of how he died in 1976. His deteriorating mental and physical health, kept secret by his inner circle of lieutenants, lawyers and nursemaids, began to leak into the public arena during Hughes' four-year residence on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas from 1966-70.

It is this relatively brief period of Hughes' very full life that has most fascinated journalists, biographers and the public. The intense secrecy surrounding Hughes during this time, the mystery, accounts for much of this. But it's also because Hughes, though in declining health and confined to one hotel, was extremely active in business and political affairs during this period. Using the telephone and handwritten memos, Hughes commanded his empire, paying particular attention to the new fiefdom he was building in Las Vegas.

Hughes added another line to his biographical summary: casino owner.

He went on a buying spree, picking up casinos, airports, ranches, mining claims and choice land parcels in Las Vegas and across Nevada, revealing to his close associates that he intended to take over this burgeoning little city in the desert. Robert Maheu, who was Hughes' chief aide during most of the time he stayed in Las Vegas, wrote, "He wanted to become King of the Strip." Hughes was well on his way to becoming just that when, his anxieties getting the best of him, he abruptly left Las Vegas in 1970.

While Hughes continued to own and operate his Las Vegas holdings for six more years until his death, making decisions from his new farflung lodgings in the Bahamas, London and Acapulco, he gave up his grand dreams for Las Vegas. He had described extensive plans for the city, sometimes privately to his aides, sometimes publicly. At the height of his Las Vegas machinations, he explained in a memo to Maheu what he envisioned for the city. Recalling the high-rolling Hollywood glamour of Las Vegas when he was a frequent visitor and part-time resident in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hughes wanted to give the city a new dose of class, as well as an environment conducive to his personal obsessions.

"We can make a really super environmental `city of the future' here -- no smog, no contamination, efficient local government, where the taxpayers pay as little as possible, and get something for their money," Hughes wrote.

Hughes announced plans for a $150 million "new super Sands" that would be the world's largest resort with 4,000 rooms. He envisioned one floor dedicated entirely to shops open 24 hours, another floor full of family recreation, including a bowling alley, a billiards room, an ice skating rink and rooms dedicated to games such as chess, bridge and table tennis. The resort also would have a state-of-the-art movie theater showing first-run films.

"A resort so carefully planned and magnificently designed that any guest will simply have to make a supreme effort if he wants to be bored," Hughes wrote.

Hughes also announced plans to build a giant airport in Las Vegas to accommodate the new supersonic jets. Rather than filtering his ideas through his lieutenants, Hughes took pen in hand and drafted his announcement to the public. He saw Las Vegas becoming the new hub for air travel in the Southwest, with high-speed trains running to Los Angeles, Phoenix and other cities. The idea received mixed reviews. While local officials praised the proposed $200 million investment, federal aviation officials considered it a bit pie-in-the-sky. They suggested that McCarran Field (now McCarran International Airport) was a perfectly suitable airport for Las Vegas.

Hughes responded angrily with another personally crafted press release. Defending his vision of a regional airport, he made a prophetic statement: "I do not believe Las Vegas will remain dormant without future growth. There is no reason in the world why this city should not, in a reasonable number of years, be as large as, say, Houston, Texas, is today. If this sort of growth should take place, the present location of McCarran Field would be approximately comparable to having the airport for Los Angeles located on Wilshire Boulevard at Miracle Mile."

Hughes never followed through on his ideas. Some of them were implausible and he rejected others. More significantly, his physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly in his final years. He bought hotel-casinos, airports and numerous tracts of land in and around the city, but he did not develop them much, if at all, after he acquired them. What's more, his vision for Las Vegas did not resemble the development that would become his greatest legacy.

It's ironic that Hughes' largest contribution to Las Vegas -- the Summerlin master-planned community -- did not take shape until well after he died in 1976. And it's also interesting that a master-planned community never came up on his radar. While he talked of building airports and casinos, it's unlikely he would have entertained the mundane task of building cohesive neighborhoods, parks and shopping centers.

And yet, although Hughes' direct involvement with Las Vegas was relatively brief, he left a huge imprint on the community, one that continues to be felt in a variety of forms to this day.

Weird tales

Hughes' strange behavior during his Las Vegas residency is well-documented -- from the urine-filled Mason jars to walking around with Kleenex boxes on his feet -- and much of it appears to actually have been true. A few of the best stories aren't as well-known: A year after buying the Desert Inn Hotel, Hughes canceled the annual Easter egg hunt held at the resort. The prospect of hundreds of tiny vandals rampaging through his property was too much to bear. Hughes sent a six-page memo to Maheu explaining his paranoia. "I am not eager to have a repetition, in the Desert Inn, of what happened at Juvenile Hall when the ever-lovin' little darlings tore the place apart," he wrote.

In "Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years," James Phelan relates the infamous Baskin-Robbins saga. Hughes' favorite ice cream was Baskin-Robbins banana nut. For months, he ate two scoops of it with every meal. His assistants kept large containers of it available at all times. When the supply ran low one time, aide Mell Stewart was sent to get more. "He came back with bleak news," Phelan reports. "The ice cream chain, which adds new varieties periodically and drops others, had discontinued the Hughes favorite. No more banana nut. The aides went into a panic."

With the supply running out, the aides called Baskin-Robbins and asked the company to make some more. Company execs said it could be done, but the minimum order would be 350 gallons. Fearing Hughes' reaction to an announcement of no more banana nut, the aides agreed to the 350-gallon order. The ice cream was made in Los Angeles and trucked overnight to Las Vegas, where it was stored in the Desert Inn's kitchen freezer.

According to Phelan, after the banana nut was served to Hughes the next day, he decided it was time for a change to French vanilla. "It took the Desert Inn almost a year to get rid of the stockpile of ice cream," Phelan writes. Stewart became known in the community for his generosity in giving away ice cream.

Hughes' "Palace Guard," the handful of attendants with whom he interacted while in Las Vegas, as well as the administrators he entrusted with his most secretive assignments, were almost all Mormons. Although few of them had much business experience, Hughes trusted them above the executives who ran the day-to-day activities at his various companies. The extensive Mormon network was largely the handiwork of Hughes' top administrator, Bill Gay, who often advertised job openings on the Mormon Church's bulletin boards.

In his memoir "Fly on the Wall," longtime Las Vegas publicist Dick Odessky related a story he was told about Hughes in the early '50s. Hughes, who stayed for long periods at the Flamingo and eventually, with his staffers, occupied an entire wing, called the hotel's publicist, Abe Schiller, to his room. "Schiller found him in the sitting room holding a large pink blanket, one of the standard linens the Flamingo used on its beds," Odessky reports. Hughes asked Schiller to help him drape the blanket over the picture window in the suite's bedroom.

"Hughes stepped back and admired his work," Odessky writes. "He then sat on the bed, turned on the lamp, picked up a book, and turned it in various directions to test the light for reading. Finally he gave the makeshift curtain his approval. "That's absolutely perfect, Abe. Now, I want the exact same blankets placed over every window in my rooms."

It turned out there were 78 windows in the rooms Hughes had rented, all of which he expected to be covered exactly the same way.

Hughes bought KLAS-TV, Channel 8 mainly so he could control what movies were aired and when. He tinkered with other aspects of the station's programming as well, but the late-night movies were his passion. Hughes often stayed up late in his Desert Inn penthouse, and he wanted to see movies all through the night and only ones he liked, adventure flicks such as the submarine thriller "Ice Station Zebra." Channel 8's late-night movie show was called the "Swinging Shift," and Hughes picked the movies, sometimes at the last minute, rendering the TV guide useless.

Bob Stoldal, a Channel 8 reporter and anchor in the late '60s, does not recall Hughes doing much meddling with the local newscasts. "What he did do was, we'd get calls after the newscast at night, and someone would say that Mr. Hughes was watching and would like you to get more information on such and such a story. So we'd go get more information and read it into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The idea that you were reporting directly to Hughes was fascinating."

One time, Stoldal recalls, an executive who reported directly to Hughes advised the fledgling newsman to smile more on the air. "Mr. Hughes thinks you frown too much," he said.

Despite his too-serious countenance, Stoldal went on to become news director and a top executive at Channel 8.

On a more serious note, Hughes was a blatant racist. As "Citizen Hughes" relates, at one point Hughes wanted very badly to buy the ABC television network. But he abruptly changed his mind after watching back-to-back episodes of "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game" -- both Chuck Barris-produced game shows. In a memo to Maheu, Hughes wrote: "I think all this attention directed toward violence on TV dramatic shows is certainly misplaced. These two game shows represent the largest single collection of poor taste I have ever seen."

But Hughes wasn't merely commenting on the quality of the shows. He was incensed that the "Dating Game" episode featured interracial contestants. In an ironic twist, Hughes did not realize that a white woman selected to go on a date with a black man actually was a light-skinned African-American.

The rioting that broke out in many cities in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. only steeled Hughes' racist resolve. In another memo to Maheu, he wrote: "I can summarize my attitude about employing more negroes very simply -- I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else. I know this is not a very praiseworthy point of view, but I feel the negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it."

Casino buying spree

After Hughes settled into the Desert Inn's penthouse suite, he embarked on a Las Vegas buying spree that was the talk of the still-small city. He had a lot of money to spend. Hughes recently had sold his stock in TWA for $546,549,771, receiving a check that was believed at the time to be the single largest ever written.

Hughes started with the hotel-casino in which he was living. Just a few weeks after he and his staff commandeered the entire eighth and ninth floors, Desert Inn officials started complaining that they wanted the rooms back for their high-rolling guests. The obvious answer was to buy the place. An intense negotiation ensued, with Hughes niggling over every dollar. The final purchase price was $13.25 million, and the deal closed on April 1, 1967.

Maheu, Hughes' right-hand man and public face during his Las Vegas years, soon learned that the Desert Inn purchase was a huge tax benefit for the billionaire. In his memoir "Next to Hughes," Maheu says Hughes quickly decided that he wanted to expand his burgeoning Las Vegas empire. "Howard wanted every casino in town," Maheu wrote. "He wanted to become King of the Strip. He was acting like the Howard of old."

Licensing turned out to be no problem, although Hughes normally would be required to appear before the Nevada Gaming Commission before he could receive permission to operate a casino. But Nevada officials were so eager to have Hughes on their team -- offering the state a degree of respectability to counter its mob reputation -- that they awarded him licenses sight unseen.

"He was not fingerprinted, interviewed or investigated," wrote Omar Garrison in "Howard Hughes in Las Vegas." "Also waived was the usual requirement that a photograph taken within the past two years accompany the application form. ... Answers to questions contained in the applications were also few and far between. The only personal information given was what everybody already knew: Howard Hughes was 61; height, 6 feet 2 inches; weight, 150 pounds; eyes, brown; occupation: self-employed."

One of Hughes' biggest backers at that time was Hank Greenspun, crusading publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun had known Hughes from the billionaire's early '50s forays into Las Vegas, and he became a go-to guy for Hughes subordinates. But Greenspun's primary value for Hughes was as a public relations vessel. Through his front-page column, Greenspun urged Las Vegans not to bother the reclusive Hughes. Later, he championed Hughes' effect in improving the city's image.

Next on Hughes' agenda was the Sands, which he bought on Aug. 1, 1967, for $14.6 million. The purchase particularly embittered crooner Frank Sinatra, who had been the uncrowned king of the Sands for years and once owned a piece of the hotel. He and Hughes had a history of enmity dating to when Sinatra starred in several movies for Hughes' RKO Pictures, and Hughes set out to put the singer in his place. After learning that his credit line at the casino had been suspended, an angry and drunk Sinatra drove a golf cart through a plate-glass window at the D.I.

As Garrison tells it: "In a frenzy of frustration and anger, the manic troubadour shouted more curses and gutter phrases in the presence of lady patrons, threw chips in the face of a casino employee, and defied hotel security officers who tried to quiet him. He staggered into the Garden Room, the Sands' 24-hour restaurant. There he found (casino manager) Carl Cohen at his customary front table. Spluttering curses, Sinatra grasped Cohen's table and overturned it onto the casino manager."

This was a mistake: Cohen was a large man of about 275 pounds. "With a single, well-aimed blow to the mouth, he sent the singer reeling backward onto the floor. When Sinatra picked himself up, he had a bloody nose and two missing front teeth."

Sinatra promptly took his show to Caesars Palace.

Hughes' next conquest was the Frontier, which he purchased on Sept. 22, 1967, for $14 million. Once again, Hughes took over a casino that had a reputation for mob influence. Soon after, he purchased the smaller Castaways for $3 million. Then he snapped up another small property, the Silver Slipper, for $5.3 million.

The spending spree would have continued with Hughes' purchase of the Stardust, but before that could happen the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division stepped in, raising concerns that Hughes' ownership of Las Vegas casinos was on the verge of monopoly. Rather than tangling with the feds, who conceivably could subpoena him to testify, Hughes decided to back out of the Stardust deal.

Behind the faãade

While Hughes was the most powerful individual in Nevada, his casinos weren't making him richer. In fact, they were losing money. Hughes' Nevada operations lost $700,000 in 1967, $3.2 million in 1968, $8.4 million in 1969 and $13 million in 1970. Different reasons have been cited for this poor record. Local observers noted that when Hughes bought a casino, he tended to hire people with no gaming experience to run it. Hughes blamed Maheu, whom he came to believe was stealing from him. Maheu blamed Hughes for buying properties "to boost his ego, rather than as sound business investments. He acted on impulse, rather than recommendation." Sergio Lalli, writing of Hughes in "The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas," suggests that Hughes' casino purchases did not rid them of mob influence as conventional wisdom suggests.

"Popular lore gives Hughes credit for chasing the mobsters out of town and for ushering in the era of corporations," Lalli writes. "He supposedly pioneered the way for reputable corporations by showing Wall Street that it was safe to run a legitimate casino business in Las Vegas. None of this is true, except by happenstance. ... While Hughes did bring an image of legitimacy to the gambling industry, it was only that, an image."

Lalli writes that "it is too much to say that Hughes chased the mob out of town. Mobsters, as well as everyone else in Las Vegas, tried to take advantage of Hughes. ... Hughes had often boasted that he could buy any man or destroy any man, but Hughes was just as often exploited by those around him."

The Desert Inn and the Sands "probably were plundered" by mob interests, Lalli contends. "Overnight they went from being two of the Strip's money-making jewels to fading has-beens. ... While the inexperienced Hughes executives wallowed in their big offices, the casino employees who had been there from the early days may have helped themselves to what they could. It must have been a free-for-all."

When Hughes died in 1976, his gaming properties were sold. Today, only one of his six Strip casinos is still operating. The Sands was imploded in 1996 and The Venetian was built in its place. The Landmark was imploded in 1995 and the property became an overflow parking lot for the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Silver Slipper was torn down in 1988 to make room for a parking lot. The Castaways was closed in 1987 and demolished to clear a space for Steve Wynn's Mirage Hotel. The Desert Inn closed in 2000 and was demolished to make way for Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas resort. The one former Hughes casino standing is the Frontier, whose owner, Phil Ruffin, has announced plans to implode it and build a new resort in its place.

While Hughes did not kick the mob out of Las Vegas, he did help usher in a new era of corporate ownership of casinos, and his presence gave the city a degree of legitimacy it did not enjoy before. In 1967 and 1969, the Nevada Legislature revised state laws to allow corporations to be licensed to operate casinos without having to conduct background checks on each and every shareholder. At the time, Gov. Paul Laxalt said Hughes' investment in Las Vegas had given the city the "Good Housekeeping seal of approval." Despite what was happening behind closed doors, there was an element of truth to the sound bite. "Hughes' arrival brought respectability to a city overrun by organized crime," Maheu wrote.