Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. Root and Toot and wild West Mobbed Up Vegas Spectacular.
That's right. Before we get going, though, we want to very quickly just say our friends Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica, who we talk about a lot, genuine friends of ours of the Greatest Generation podcast. They have done a very brave thing and got out on their own. Yeah, and left the Max Fun Network, which is always kind of a scary thing, and they are they're looking for people
to support them there. They're loyal fans to support them with a mirror at entry level six dollars a month for an ad free version of not only The Greatest Generation, but my favorite two podcasts that they do, the Factory Seconds podcast where they one by one eat their way through the cheesecake Factory menu, and the Santa Monica Mountains podcast their rewatch of Baywatch.
That's just those guys are just a delight as people, as podcasters all of that. So where would they go? Where would somebody go and be like, take my six dollars and then some.
They are going. Adam is sending everyone to Greatest dot supercast dot com, and you know, support these guys, support independent artists. It's like I said, it's a very sort of brave thing to do to go out on your own these days and try and be an indie artist in any creative realm. So we love Ben, we love Adam. I love those podcasts, and so I signed up obviously because I still got to get my I'm eventually going to be a guest on Factory seconds to keep promising
me nice. I'm a bit of a heel so far, because at one point I said that the Cheesecake Factory just I assume they did like bagged food like every other big cheer like that, And I was wrong, and they have not stopped making fun of me since then.
About that?
Is it from scratch there? Oh? Wayay?
They cook all that stuff, even like their sauces.
Dude, Wow, No, I had no idea. I'll have to send them that gift certificate we got for Jerry for She's Cake Factory that she was like, I don't want this. She wouldn't take it. So we're gonna have to give it to them. They'll put it to kids use, all right.
So thanks for letting shout out these guys, and now onto Howard Hughes in Las Vegas.
Yeah. Well, also huge thanks to our sponsor of the episode, Cheese Cake Factory.
No, man, that'd be great. I don't see why they don't sponsor Ben and Adam because almost everything they rate pretty highly.
That's a great idea, get to it. Cheese Cake Factory, agreed. You know who I would have guessed could probably make that happen, but it turns out it was a toss up whether they'd be able to or not. Howard Hughes.
Yeah, you've commissioned this one, and I'm really glad you did, because I don't know if you've seen the movie The Aviator from Martin Scorsees.
About me.
I have not known.
Yeah, it's it's you know, it's a great movie. Obviously it's scarsezy. But they cover a bit of Howard Hughes's stint in Vegas, probably about ten or fifteen minutes of the movie there with with Leo obviously playing Howard Hughes hold up in his hotel room. And when I say hold up, I mean hold up.
Yeah, naked is a j bird, naked is a jake. You get to see Leo's but you know.
Well, he does a helicopter at one point, I hear, oh god, no. The scene inside of Howard Hughes's real life hotel room in Las Vegas was the opposite of the kind of place where you'd see a helicopter. It was not at all celebratory or funny or childish or juvenile. It was a dark, dark place and basically every sense of the word dark.
Yeah, for sure, we should probably do a little bit of background on Hughes himself. He was born in Houston. He's a Houston guy in nineteen oh five, and he came from an oil family, but not like a Getty oil family. His dad had co patented a drill bit, and sometimes you can make a huge fortune just by doing something like that. But that revolutionized oil drilling, and he made a ton of money doing it. And by
the time Hughes was eighteen his parents had passed. He inherited that vast fortune and business and dropped out of college, bought out his family members and said this is my company now.
Yeah, And he was really interested in two things. He wanted to make movies and he wanted to build airplanes. Yeah, yeah, and he did both. He founded Hughes Aircraft Company, and then he also bought a bunch of shares in Transworld
Airlines so that he controlled that company. And he bought controlling shares in RKO Studio, so he started producing movies, he started building airplanes, and he very quickly became one of the most famous people in the United States, if not the world, because he was dashing, He had a great mustache. I believe he was six foot four. He knew how to attract like Starlit's in Hollywood. He went to all the right events. He was like a proto Tom Ford.
Yeah, for sure.
He very famously dated both Catherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. He was his own test pilot and you know which meant at some point he crashed and he was very badly injured and lived a lot of his life in chronic pain due to a lot of things, but for sure the second third degree burns that were over most of his body. And like you said, America loved him. He was sort of a national hero.
But he was in.
Pretty bad shape, partially because of the plane crash, for sure, because that led to a a morphine and opioid addiction, which was really put him put him down for the count.
Did you ever see Dope Sick?
Did I see Dope Sick?
No?
I never saw that.
That's the one with Michael Keaton.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I never saw that.
Hurd scre so good, Chuck, go back and watch it is so good. Yeah, But that seems to be like generally, how opioid addictions outside of adolescence develop, Like somebody injures himself. They're like, here, take these for the pain, and then all of a sudden you're like, I'm going to keep taking these. Yeah, And that's exactly what happened to him
as well. By the middle of the nineteen fifties, he was completely addicted to opioid It's like totally dependent on them, and it had such an impact on his life that he stopped going out in public. By nineteen sixty one, that's the last time the public saw Howard Hughes. And he actually began to decline so much that he lost about four inches of his stature and started just dropping weight by the tens of pounds, and mentally he really started to decline as well. It wasn't just his opioid
addiction to morphine. He was set up to have serious mental illnesses from the outset, as we'll see, and they were exacerbated by the fact that he was gobsmackingly rich, did not have to worry about anyone saying no to him for any reason, was beloved by the public. Like all of the risk factors that could make somebody just completely twisted, like he had all of those just coming together.
Yeah, for sure. You know, the germophobia is something we're going to talk a lot about, but that was a big part of what kind of crippled him. It wasn't the kind of germophobia where he was worried about cleaning himself because as we will see, when he was in Vegas, he would bathe once a year, and you know, grew his fingernails very famously out. Not grew them out, but they grew out. It wasn't something he was working on, but he just quit taking care of himself and all
hygiene went out the window. But he was afraid of everything else getting him sick. He was afraid of the water being dirty. He drank only bottled water. I mean, we'll get through sort of the nitpicky details as we go, But like you said, public eye drops out in sixty one, moves to Vegas, well, didn't move. Initially went to Vegas in nineteen sixty six, and not because he had any
interest in casinos or anything. He went because, you know, he heard about it being a great tax shelter and he had sold a ton of stock I guess all of his stock in twa that year and had a big tax bill. So he'd been sort of eyeing Vegas for a while. It had been investing in the state throughout the forties and the fifties. I think he did a land swap with a Bureau of Land Management which got him about forty square miles which was the most land that anybody had at the time in Clark County,
and didn't do anything with it for a while. It was supposed to be the future home of Hughes Aircraft, but nobody was you know, Vegas at the time. Was this you know, out in the middle of nowhere, mob run town that respectable business didn't want anything to do with. So he couldn't get anyone as far as the higher ups and the engineers to leave California from Hughes aircraft.
Yeah, like you the person, like the tourists going out to Vegas at the time were probably not in danger and you probably be treated well out there. But it was a really exotic, risky place, like in the mind of the American public because it was so thoroughly mopped up,
it just was not a place that people go. And those of us around today, it's hard to conceive of Vegas being like the opposite of a tourist place, like it's yeah, you're just a very specif a kind of person would go to Vegas, and most people would avoid it entirely.
Yeah, I mean that was it was sin city back then, and now it's sin City with achine over it.
For sure. A sheene of jell O so.
Hughes arrives in Vegas, like I hinted at earlier, he did not go there to move. Initially, he went there for was supposed to be like a ten day stay, I think, to kind of check things out. And once he got there, he didn't leave. He arrived by private train, was very secretly shuttled to the ninth floor, which is the top floor of the uh oh, what was.
The name of it again, the Desert Sands.
Yeah, the Desert in yeah, the Desert Inn hotel and casino, and just decided to stay stay there forever.
Basically he did like like I mean, he had the whole ninth floor to himself, right, Yeah, and again, he hadn't been seen in public in five years. He was he was declining terribly, And this is where it seems to have just become full blown because he took the spot and made it a just a warren or a little cubby hole for him and all of the mental
illness that he was suffering. So if you know about Howard Hughes and you know about his mental illness, this is where all of the legends, some of which seemed to be totally true, all came from.
Yeah, he you know, blacked out the windows with curtains, apparently never once opened them at all.
Right, Yeah, there's a legend that the housekeepers when they finally came in after he left, that they found the drapes were rotted because they'd just been in the same place the entire time.
Yeah, he didn't allow housekeeping in I think one time while he was there for what ended up being what like four years, he was suffering from anemia and malnutrition.
He was.
He was eating candy bars and sweets and canned like really sweet canned fruit and drinking milk. He was fifty nine years old at this time, and I think there was that story about the ice cream that he ate just like gobs and gobs of this specific flavor of ice cream.
Yeah, it's a really good example of how powerful and rich he was, but also just how much he liked ice cream. Right, it was banana. It was Baskin Robbins banana ripple ice cream, right, and he was totally nuts
about it and loved it and would eat it. And then Baskin Robbins, I guess didn't know this, and they discontinued the banana ripple ice cream, and so Howard Hughes had to start ordering it special order, I think, in two hundred gallon increments, like Basket Robins like, sure, we'll make you a special order, but you have to order two hundred gallons of it at a time.
Yeah, And so he said, fine, as we'll see when you're like you said, The sort of combination of wealth and this, you know, unfortunate mental illness meant that he could kind of get anything done that he wanted, and that was a recurring theme while he was in Vegas,
and this was one of them. So he bought, you know, the two hundred gallons and very soon after apparently it was like, you know what, I like French vanilla the most, And so apparently the hotel was then stuck with that two hundred gallons that they took about a year to get rid of, which, by the way, it's way too long to keep that ice cream in.
The preezer for sure. So yeah, that is a really good example of that. So of course, like he like you said, he's becoming malnourished, anemic. And he also was like posthumously, basically everybody who knows the stories, like he
clearly had some form of OCD. Even if it wasn't like that was the main you know, mental illness he had, it was certainly a comorbidity, and that is evidenced by the minute directions he instructed his staff to use to do everyday things, like very famously he wrote twelve steps to opening a can of and putting it in the bowl that it would be served in.
Yeah, for sure, he you know, like you have to get the label off, you have to scrub the can on the outside until it was down to the bar metal. You had to then wash the can on the outside again, pour the contents into the bowl without touching the can to the bowl. Apparently the secretaries who typed things up had to use gloves just to type things that would
go to him. Tissues were a very big thing, the amount of instruction on tissues and have this many tissues to open this door, and have this many tissues to handle this thing that you give to me. And in the movie and the aviator, in that part, you know, there's just tissue boxes everywhere. And of course we're going to mention the Simpsons because mister Burns in the episode where they lampooned this time where mister Burns was the stand in for Howard Hughes also wore tissue boxes on
his feet. And there's a picture of the only picture I know of of Howard Hughes in that hotel room. There may be more than one, but the only one I could find is a picture of long, gray bearded, gray haired, and fingernailed Howard Hughes sitting there with tissue boxes on his feet for shoes.
Really, I didn't know that that existed. Okay, well, that confirms that that. Wow, that's great man that you found that, because that's a that was a semi confirmed legend from what I could find, and the best explanation I could find why you would wear Kleenex boxes on your feet
is that to him? Like you said, he used tons of tissue because they were sterile, So of course the boxes that the tissues came in would be sterile as well, So rather than walking around a bare feet or whatever, he was basically using tissue boxes as disposable sterile slippers.
Yeah, and I just want a caveat that by saying the picture looks real to me, so I hope it's not one of those things where like, dude, you fell for the Howard Hughes picture.
That's a deep cut though. Man, if you're making deep fakes today, you're probably not super familiar with Howard Hughes. So to go back and make that is, I mean, hats off to that guy.
Really, I mean, or maybe it's not Howard Hughes. Now I'm like doubting myself. It looked like Howard Hughes, but.
It was Wayne Newton.
All Right.
I feel like we should take a break and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit about who was there helping Howard Hughes on the ninth floor of that hotel right after this, all right, we're back.
I think we set the stage pretty well.
Of what's going on there on the ninth floor of the hotel there in Las Vegas. But we need to tell you how. You know, you need a lot of help there to live this way, and he had all the money in the world to do that. So he had a right hand man named Robert Mayhew, who was kind of did everything. He was a chief of security.
He represented him publicly for everything. Possibly may have stood in for him on the telephone as Howard Hughes, and he worked for him for about eight years, and this is fairly shocking, but apparently never met him in person. They spoke on the phone. I think they had memos exchanged. I think they talked through the door even at some point, but they never met face to face.
That was confirmed. Yeah, that's not like a legend. That's crazy. I saw he worked for him for fifteen years, even potentially, and he was one of his closest confidants. But since Mayhew was running the show, he was actually following orders from Howard Hughes. But he wasn't always getting them directly, like by phone or like you said, through the door. He would get them in notes or memos, which I think you mentioned as well. But they were carried for him by a group of six men known as the
Mormon Mafia, because five of the six were Mormon. Because Howard Hughes is like, well, they're not allowed to drink, not allowed to smoke, or gamble or anything like that. I'll just hire Mormon so I don't have to worry about my closest employees being you know, suspect or untrustworthy.
Yeah, And I guess this before Elvis got there, because I was wondering if the Memphis Mafia and the Mormon Mafia ever rubbed elbows. But probably not, because it sounds like the Mormon Mafia obviously would not have been anywhere near the gaming tables or the bars.
Probably not. Although you know, no, that's.
Why they hired him, you know, he wan he liked his loyalties, right.
Yes, and like these were the people who interacted with him physically personally with tissues on their like mods of tissues of course, but they would inject him with his morphine although he tended to do that more often himself. They brought him the tissue that he would use, and they helped him communicate with Mayhew, along with tons of
other stuff. But like these were the men who interacted with them, and like you said, there was a he had like kind of a strange version of OCD where he was freaked out by other people's germs, was not
afraid of his own germs. And so I have the impression that when these men would come in and say they had to do something like his hearing aid out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, Howard Hughes would not go into that bathroom for a while and would end up just like peeing on the carpet and covering it with tissues because again, nothing wrong with his germs, but he couldn't bear to go into the bathroom for a while after somebody had been in there.
Yeah, he also.
Saved his own urine and pede in bottles. I think that one has been confirmed, at least confirmed enough for Martin Scorsese to have Leo DiCaprio ping in bottles and saving his.
Own urine, and confirm enough for Matt Greeny.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned that he could. He had a reputation for sort of like, I'm surprised he didn't buy Baskin Robbins when I wanted at ice cream, But I guess he didn't need to since they made it for him. But he had a habit of doing that. One of great example is when he would just sit around, like he said, naked and watch television and watch movies.
And when he found out that there weren't like good movies showing in Las Vegas on the local TV at the time, he bought a local TV station and reportedly like programmed the lineup himself. And there's one source that even says, like, you know, if he missed the start of the movie at least one time, he would call down to the station and have them start it over again so he could see the whole thing.
Yeah, I mean that's what their purpose was. Essentially. It just so happened that other people could watch the movies too, you know, right. He was obsessed with movies, and he would watch certain films, like he loved aeriel combat films. One of the films he producers, Hell's Angels, which is about fire pilots. He also loved Ice Station Zebra. Have you ever seen that movie? I've heard of it, but I've never seen it.
No, Howard you saw it a lot though, right, one.
Hundred and fifty times they say, yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, it's about like the It's a Cold War movie where the US and the Soviet Union have a confrontation at the North Pole. So basically it's like, what's happening eventually in the next ten to fifteen years.
What movie do you think you've seen the most?
That is a great question, man, I am not sure. I have no idea what I've seen the most.
Yeah, I don't. I mean, I definitely don't have a count. But if I had to guess, it would be probably either like Raiders of the Lost Stark huh or Spinal Tapper, maybe Blazing Saddles.
All good ones to watch over and over again. I genuinely don't know. I'll have to think about that. I'll blurt it out later. But you did bring up something I wanted to mention. Do you remember when I was like, you should never let a person write, direct, and star in a show?
Did you find a good example?
I did. I don't know if you saw this or not, but I sent I told you to watch it. It's Onyx, the Fortuitous and The Talisman of Souls. Did you ever watch that? No?
I don't even remember that wreck.
Okay, well go watch it. It's on Prime and this guy named Andrew Bowser wrote, directed and stars in it. And it is just a lovely little movie.
Okay.
Yeah, it's definitely worth watching. And if like his character, like annoys, you just hang in there.
Okay, Okay, that's always a good caveat Yeah, all right, So back to Howard Hughes and hopefully you'll blurt out, you know, back to the future at some point or something like that.
Yeah, it's a good one, you do. Well, it doesn't have to be I'm gonna be like The Remains of the Day.
Wait was that Scorsese? No, no, no, that was a me and I.
Yeah, I think so.
I was thinking of the other one that set in high society in New York. Uh did with Daniel day Lewis and win Ona.
Writer at the Age of Innocence.
The Age of Innocence?
That was it?
Okay, which is just okay? All right? So uh where are we? All right?
We're outside of Howard Hughes's hotel at this point, because I know.
I know, Oh god, what is it?
I know? Uh, it's probably tied. One is Gleaming the Cube, oh wow? Or Days and Confused different summers in my life. Every day I would get up and start my day watching Gleaming the Cube, and then several years later I would start my day watching Dazed and Confused. So those two are probably the ones I've seen the most.
I have seen Dazed and Confused a lot as well, and so I will recommend to you, boy, this is going to go long the day.
That's okay.
Uh.
The Oral History of Dazed and Confused is a really one of the better books that I read last year.
Oh okay.
It's called all right, all right, all right, the Oral History of Richard link Clatter's Days and Confused by Melissa Mayers from twenty twenty. And if you like Days and Confused, you will love this book.
Do you have that book in front of you or you just have all that memorized?
Well?
I looked it up real quick because I always like to shout out the author. But next time I see you, I'll love it to you. It's great, thanks, you can just have it, all right? So where we were was outside Howard Hughes hotel room because we need to talk about a little bit about what's going on in Vegas at the time. What's happening in that hotel is the hotel management is getting pretty upset because, like I said, he's supposed to be the week and a half, he
keeps staying. He keeps staying, he's paying for all this stuff. But they're still like, hey, listen, man, you've taken the entire floor of our hotel and we need this. At one point, I think Jimmy Hoffa himself made a plight quote unquote request that he'd be allowed to stay because he's you know, he's got a lot of influence Howard Hughes obviously. But management finally was like, listen, we're going to physically throw you out of here. We need this
floor for New Year's Eve. And Mayhew, his right hand end, said hey, listen, man, if you want a place to sleep, you damn well better buy the hotel. So again he is just like, fine, I'll buy the hotel, and he bought it for thirteen point twenty five million, and was all of a sudden in the hotel and casino business.
Yeah, I mean, we talked very briefly about this in the History of Vegas episode. Yeah, but yeah, I'm glad we're talking about this too, because just that alone is worth an episode on Like that, you don't want to get kicked out of a hotel, so you buy the hotel. He actually did that kind of stuff. And yeah, bear in mind, he didn't pick up a phone, he didn't write a note. He said, go buy this hotel. That's a fine idea. I don't want to move. I don't
want to get up by the hotel. That genuinely happened.
Yeah, and then once he got into the hotel and casino business, he was like, wait a minute, casino earnings are taxed at a lower rate than these lousy stocks I've got, And he said, so you know what, I'm going to legitimately get involved in the casino and hotel business and literally try and make it a legitimate thing. Like he had a vision of Las Vegas to be I think, he said, as respectable as the New York
Stock Exchange. He wanted to make it not a mob town that only kind of the CD people would go to gamble. So he's the first one to have that real vision and in nineteen sixty seven started buying up hotels and casinos.
Yeah, and again like this was a time where the FBI essentially had like they were camped out in these hotels and casinos because they were conducting so many investigations all the time. Yeah, so this was a it was a gamble, if you'll forgive the pun, unintentional for him to buy this stuff, because he did start to buy it in the eye of like changing the entire city, and that was not a given. We know it worked out in retrospect, but he didn't know that at the time,
so it was kind of risky him doing that. Plus also he had to deal with the Mob. He ended up buying six hotels from nineteen sixty six to nineteen sixty eight, hotel casinos, i should say, and almost all of them were from the Mob, if not all of them.
Yeah, he bought the one he was in the desert in, He bought the Sands, he bought Castaways, the Silver Slipper, the Landmark, and the Frontier. And not only did he have a vision for Vegas as sort of a legitimate town where people in corporations could do business and like possibly families might even come one day, but he wanted it to be what he called an environmental city of the future. He didn't want because again he was a germophobe.
So he had this vision of a smogless city with an efficient government where it was like taxpayers didn't have to get fleeced, and he like sort of as a utopia.
Almost.
Yeah, let's talk about that city of the future. Some of the stuff he wanted to do to Vegas and Nevada to kind of create that city of the future. Remember when I said that, I think that he could have had a pretty good chance of getting the Cheesecake Factory to sponsor Factory Seconds podcast with Adam and Ben. There's also a toss up because he might have been turned down. He had a lot of ideas that the local county and city and state legislatures were like, hey,
that's a great idea. We'll get back to you on that. Some of the ideas were just terrible as well. But he was essentially trying to shape Vegas into his own image.
Yeah, for sure, he had a sort of list of things that he proposed but never really got done, and like he had a ton of influence, Like he got this casino without having to appear before the Gaming Commission or anything like that to get licensed. Like that's how much pool he had. Yeah, like you're not supposed to
be able to buy a casino that easily. And in fact, that that would open the door for the Nevada Corporate Gaming Act, which made it easier for public companies to get into the business because previously they had a requirement that every stockholder had to submit background checks to be involved in Las Vegas. So that went away and really
opened the door. So all this to say he had a ton of pull and could really get things done, but he has a laundry list of things he wanted to get done that they all were just sort of like, yeah, we'll look into that.
Yeah, there was this great list in the Las Vegas Review Journal that some of the stuff he was pushing for. He wanted to keep dog racing illegal. I could not find what his issue with dog racing was. He wanted to repeal repeal the sales tax, gas tax, cigarette tax. He wanted to keep Clark County School district segregated. So now you're starting to be like, oh, he wanted to prohibit the booking of talent from communist countries. It's kind of I could see that being an nineteen sixties sentiment,
not just his. He wanted to outlaw rock festivals boo. He wanted to And I could not find out why for this one either, But he wanted to require Vegas or Clark County to consult with him before they realigned any streets. I don't I could not find out. Why do you have a guess? H No, I think he'd I don't know what was the last one.
The last one was he wanted to be exempted himself from having ever to go to court or any board for any reason at all, Like he wanted to ensure that he could stay in that room. He also wanted to get rid of the nuclear testing site nearby. They did not do that. And he also wanted to, like I said, he had a big problem with the water.
He thought the water was dirty. And once he found out that Lake Mead fed water into a system where you know, kind of like it's very common today where wastewater is treated and fed back into the system, he was like, no, no, no, you need to get rid of that. And they were like, yeah, we're not going to do that.
No, because there will not be anymore in Las Vegas without that water supply.
So yeah, And by the way, if everyone is horrified that I booed outline rock festivals and not keeping things segregated, that's because there's a larger point to be made later about Howard Hughes being very racist, which he had a long reputation of being very racist against black Americans specifically.
Yeah, that was something that my eyes were opened about. Like I was never like I've got Howard Hughes T shirts and I love him, He's my hero or anything like that. But I had no idea that he was kind of a bad person in a lot of ways. Very sympathetic in the sense that he had one of the worst documented cases of mental illness of any kind
of public figure of all time. So I sympathized with him for that, but he also just the views he held and some of the things he did were just terrible, like really kind of added up to making him a not great guy. Like, yeah, one other thing, his first wife divorced him because he locked her in the house for three weeks. Yeah, Like he was an abusive person even and yes, he had horrible problems. A lot of it was from his upbringing, but that still doesn't excuse a lot of the stuff he did or.
Though for sure held in September of nineteen sixty eight, here's another example he had. It was going to be the first annual desert In Invitational tennis tournament, like a very big, high profile tournament, and he tried to cancel it because he found out that Arthur Ash, an African American, was going to be competing, and he was worried about his you know, black fans coming to his casino to watch. So Mayhew was like, listen, man, we can't cancel this thing.
It'll be all right in a little bit of sweet victory. Arthur Ash ended up winning the singles title at that tournament. Yeah, that's just pretty awesome. And he but he was stopped sort of right there as far as his casino empire goes. I think at the sixth that he bought because he tried to buy another one and got the initial sort of AOK. But then the FED stepped in and said, you know what, you're on your way to getting monopoly
on Las Vegas gambling. So they filed an anti trust lawsuit against him, and he was never able to get that seventh casino, So he's kind of locked in with the six right.
They said, go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
Should we take another break?
Yeah, all right, we'll be right back after.
This, okay, Chuck. So Howard Hughes at the time when he still hasn't left his hotel room, and he's changing the face of Las Vegas. He's changing the city at its core just by buying these things up and not being a mobster. And so the local politicians are just like, this guy is saving the city. He's giving it an
actual bright future just his involvement. The fact that America is now starting to associate Las Vegas with this beloved figure, Howard Hughes, who they remembered him before he started to decline, so that was everyone's image. They were just like, that guy is just reclusive. Now. They had no idea what was going on with Howard Hughes at the time. So this very respected person was now associated with Las Vegas,
which was great. That actually attracted other respected businessmen who decided to kind of follow in Hughes's footsteps or rival him if you were looking at it from Howard Hughes perspective, and the first first one was Korian. He was a billionaire who built the International Hotel and I think nineteen sixty eight, and Howard Hughes was not happy about that at all.
No, he tried to stop it because it was going to be the largest hotel not only in Vegas, but the largest hotel in the world and the first big sort of giant resort in Vegas. And Hughes was like, I got to stop this thing. So he got kind
of consumed with halting its progress to no avail. So eventually, when the International Hotel was like, all right, we got a big grand opening night an event, Howard Hugh says, yeah, you know what, I've got one that's even better at my hotel, this huge event that had not even you know, he literally just kind of blurted that out, had no
plan for this event. Apparently spent like weeks and weeks just like working on the guest list, Like he was entirely consumed by this, and Mayhew had to kind of kind of pull it up out of his rear end to make any kind of event happen.
Yeah, he really was, mister Burns, And I get the impression of Mayhew is mister Smithers. Yeah, so, Yeah, what it was was the grand opening of the Landmark Hotel and Casino, which had been built just a couple of years before, but I think they had stopped just short of completing it, so he came in and bought it. The reason he bought the Landmark is because it was thirty one stories and Kirk Krekorian's International Hotel was going to be thirty stories right off the bat. That attracted Hughes.
And then he had the grand opening the day before Kirk Kirkory's just as petty as you can be. Kirkoryan had the upper hand though, like this was a massive, very nice, huge casino hotel and the Landmark was not built. It was poorly built and designed as far as running a profitable hotel or casino goes. It was just too small for that to turn a profit.
Yeah, that couldn't figure out how they allowed him to buy that when they had just stopped him from purchasing the Seventh. But the only guess I have is that this thing was in such bad shape they were like, well, at least a Hughes bides that it'll not be a blight.
I think it's also possible he bought it right before he went to go buy the Star Dust Oh okay, because they were both in nineteen sixty eight, and the FEDS objected sometime in nineteen sixty eight, so like the second half of it. So it's possible that he bought it before then.
I don't know, all right, So we should point out, you know, you said he wasn't mobbed up, but the mob was still there. It's not like he moved in and the mob moved out. They basically just had people working on the inside at Hughes's casinos, and we're fleecing him. You know, everyone's always on the take and skimming from the top that's or the bottom, and that's just how
it worked in Vegas, and that's what they did to him. Apparently, in less than four years, the mob skimmed about fifty million bucks off of Howard Hughes, and even as rich as he was, that put him in pretty dangerous financial shape.
Yeah, for sure, he don't worry about him. He was still mega rich, but eventually he got to the point where he was like, I'm sick of Vegas, and he decamped in the middle of the night. I think four years to the day. I think he showed up on Thanksgiving Eve of nineteen sixty six and left Thanksgiving Eve of nineteen seventy. I don't know why, but it's pretty
circular and complete. He left Vegas on a stretcher because he was unable to walk around himself, certainly go down a fire escape set of fire escape stairs, which they allegedly took him out of under the cover of night. They put him on a plane. They flew him to the Bahamas, where he set up at the Xanadu Beach Resort and basically did the same thing. Camped out there, was outstaated as welcome, and bought that place next.
Yeah.
I think that's definitely where Scorsese went off book and made stuff up, because in the movie, at one point, after all this time there you see the door open up to his room and he kind of with a shirt on and pants on, kind of walks out and everyone's like, oh my God, like.
Howard Hester just slept his room or you know.
I think the woman in the scene is like, mister Hughes, like no one had seen him, and he was like, I don't have shoes. I need shoes, and then he leaves and goes and sees Ava Gardner and she helps him with his like clearly OCD with like washing his hands and stuff. But I don't know if that stuff never happened, or if it was just artistic license or what.
I don't know. I saw that he has known to have left his room three times in the four years he was there, and they were all for like business meetings, and those are basically the times that he shaved and washed and cut his hair and cut his fingernails and like that was it. I don't know. Maybe one was to go see Ava Gardner, but I mean we're talking Hollywood here, you know.
Yeah, it's always just weird though when there's a buyap that just strays so far. But it was toward the end of the movie, So maybe Scorsese was like having him go to the Bahamas and doing the same thing. It's not a good ending, that's right.
We need to give him like a magical cricket and his wishes to become a real boy.
Oh man, those are two pretty good scorsesees.
Who knew I didn't know. Did I just do a good Scorsese? I was just doing Scorsese.
Well, I think we I think we both did a pretty good one. And that means, you know, you know, one day when we stopped doing this show, maybe we have a second act as a.
Co Scorsese on stage. Bit.
Well, that's a good one.
Scorsese v. Scorsese starring Josh and Chuck.
That's right. We to talk about how good movies were.
Welcome to the show, everybody, all right, So where are we? I guess we should cover his his passing. He died on April fifth, nineteen seventy six, on a plane flight from Mexico to Houston, and he was seventy years old at the time. They listed the cause of death as kidney failure. After he died, Mayhew was let go and his holding company remember that forty square miles. I talked about where he was going to put Hughes Aviation That is now Summerlin, a planned community just outside Vegas. Yeah.
Yeah. And also, like I think a lot of people are like, yeah, Howard Hughes got rid of the mob in Vegas, and that's just not the case. Like he had a huge effect on Vegas. The mob getting out of Vegas was mostly the Justice Department, but his again, his name attached to Vegas made it okay for Americans to start coming and turn Vegas into an actual legitimate
tourist destination. And he it wasn't him specifically buying this casino, as we say that because you know it, it essentially was, but his corporation, sum a holding corporation was the one actually buying them. So that opened the door to other corporations buying casinos ripped like tearing him down building brand new casinos that Ace Rothstein basically said. It was like Disneyland at the end of casino and then it's like checking into an airport. That all started thanks to Howard Hughes.
Yeah, for sure. As far as like you know, the post mortem on what he had going on in his life and his autopsy, he weighed ninety three pounds at the time of death and apparently had enough codine in his system they said to stop five beating hearts. And even though it was kidney failure, technically neglect is kind of what the doctors talked about. He didn't have a will.
The very famous movie I know we've talked about before in the show Melvin and Howard about supposedly Howard Hughes played by Jason Robards I think Howard Hughes's middle name was Robard. Yeah, it's a really good movie, a little indie from the nineteen eighties. I think maybe seventies, but I think eighties. But there were a lot of fake
wills that turned up after his death. But his two point five billion dollar estate in nineteen seventy six dollars was then sort of, I guess, sort of up for grabs.
Yeah. A lot of people came forward like that belongs to me, No, that belongs to me. I think eleven or twelve people ended up splitting the whole estate. But a group of them hired hired an attorney who hired Raymond Fowler, who at the time was the head of the American Psychological Association. Oh yeah, to conduct a psychological autopsy they called it on Howard Hughes, to basically determine
his mental competence toward the end of his life. And this gave the world again people were just like, wait, he waited, how much? How long was his hair when he died? What was going on when he died? Like all that news started to come out. This gave the world like an actual psychological profile, and you're not supposed to you're not supposed to diagnose anybody, any patient that
you've not actually interviewed or taking care of yourself. But Fowler basically did as good a job as you possibly could in you know, creating a psychological sketch of somebody just from the research he did.
Yeah, tons of research like obviously interviewing staff and reading newspaper documents, court depositions, personal letters that he wrote back and forth with his mother, phone call logs, pilot logs, and you know where we ended up was he most certainly had OCD. I think everyone kind of agrees on that. His germophobia they think may have stemmed from his childhood. Apparently his mother was a germophobe and constantly worried about little Howard getting sick from polio, and so she was
checking him every day for signs of polio. And they think, yeah, probably stemmed from that childhood with his mom.
For sure. There's also, like, I mean, just the intense losing he had of germs and the instructions that he gave his staff for interacting with inanimate objects in his room, like using tissues and stuff like that. Like that in and of itself is like, yeah, he clearly had OCD, but to be able to trace it back to you know,
his mother's influence, who seemed to have been a hypochondriac herself. Yeah. Yeah, he was definitely set up from the outset to have some serious troubles throughout his life, and they really became full blown after he injured himself and adopted morphine and stopped taking care of himself.
Yeah. I know the aviator covered it in you know, twelve minutes or so, but I think there's an entire film of the Vegas years to Bete.
I was looking for a documentary on it, and I could find basically nothing. I was really surprised.
I thought, yeah, the.
American experience would have done it or something, but no, nothing. Huh so yeah, we just had to make all this stuff.
Uh well, I wonder if one reason there's not a documentary is just because there's so little. There's zero footage, and I think that one photo, so.
It's just yeah, true, true.
A lot of talking and ken burnstyle photos of like mobsters. I guess you're right.
Just pan across the photo and everybody, you'll be cool with it.
Yeah, you could make a movie though, Yeah, they did.
Maybe we'll do that Scorsese bit.
Yes, there you go. You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
Well, if you want to know more about Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, build a time machine and go pound on his door until he lets you in. But bring a bunch of Kleenex and it's time for listener mail.
That's right. This is a bit of a myth busted from our Ozzie friends. Although this Benjamin here is from Albuquerque, but we did get other emails from Azzi's so apologies for not reading one from the Native Land. But guys, in the Kangaroo episode, Josh mentioned and I was on board too, so you're not taking the ball for this, okayot thanks that the origin of the word kangaroo have come from a misunderstanding of an Aboriginal person, saying, I
don't know. Think the origin for this myth might be the film Arrival from twenty sixteen, in which Amy Adams linguistics professor character tells the Kangaroo story to force Whitaker in relation to the misunderstandings that may happen when communicating with the aliens, and the next scene, Jeremy Rinner tells her that he's surprised to hear the story, to which she says it's not true, but it illustrates my point.
I'm not a learned linguist myself, so I can't provide any more information about it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. It wouldn't be surprised to hear that has possibly multiple times happened, possibly multiple times throughout history. Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned the film Enemy at the end of the episode, because A Rival was also directed by Dinny Billineux. It's a phenomenal film that I highly
recommend if you haven't seen it. Yeah, but you recommended it and we've both seen it, so take that.
Benjamin.
Yeah, No, I think he was talking about Arrival.
Oh yeah, yeah, I saw a Rival too.
Yeah, seen that a couple of times. It's great.
Well, we didn't didn't get that from Arrival, but we definitely got people that wrote in and said that was a myth.
Yeah.
I hope the origin said the kangaroo name right.
And hopefully Arrival got it from it's the fact that it's a myth and the myth didn't arise from Arrival, right, because that means that we got duped by Arrival, and we like to think that we're better researchers than that.
I'd like to think so.
All right, well, so who was that again, Benjamin? Thanks a lot, Benjamin, Sorry about that one, and thanks for setting us straight. And to all of our Ozzie listeners who set us straight, we appreciate it. And if you want to get in touch with us, like all of our Ozzie listeners did, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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