Howard Hughes in Las Vegas

From 1968 to 1972 Howard Hughes holed up in a suite in the Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas. Addicted to morphine and living on candy bars and milk, he was in bad shape. When he was told to leave, he bought the hotel and stayed. Soon he owned half of Vegas. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:34Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:44Josh Clark?

  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. Rootin', tootin', Wild West, mobbed up, Vegas spectacular.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  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, the Greatest Generation podcast, they have done a very brave thing and got out on their own.

• 2:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  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. They're loyal fans to support them with a mere at entry level, $6 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.

• 2:44Josh Clark?

  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 $6 and then some?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  They are going, Adam is sending everyone to greatest.supercast.com and, you know, support these guys. Support independent artists. It's like I said, it's a, 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. They keep promising me.

• 3:23Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  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 chain like that. And I was wrong and they have not stopped making fun of me since then about that.

• 3:38Josh Clark?

  Is it from scratch there? Oh, why?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  They cook all that stuff, even like their sauces, dude.

• 3:43Josh Clark?

  Wow. No, I had no idea. I'll have to send them that gift certificate we got for Jerry for Cheesecake 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 good use.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  All right. So thanks for letting a shout out these guys. And now on to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas.

• 4:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, well, also huge thanks to our sponsor of the episode Cheesecake Factory.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Oh, man, that'd be great. I don't see why they don't sponsor Ben and Adam because almost everything they rate pretty highly.

• 4:16Josh Clark?

  That's a great idea. Get to it, Cheesecake Factory.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 4:20Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you 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 Scorsese. About.

• 4:39Josh Clark?

  Oh, are you asking me? I have not, no.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's, you know, it's a great movie, obviously. It's Scorsese, but they they cover a bit of Howard Hughes's stint in Vegas. Probably about 10 or 15 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.

• 5:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, naked as a jaybird.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Naked as a jay, you get to see Leo's butt, you know?

• 5:07Josh Clark?

  Well, he does a helicopter at one point, I hear.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 5:12Josh Clark?

  No, the the the scene inside of Howard Hughes' 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 in basically every sense of the word dark.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  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 1905, and he 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 18, 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.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and he was really interested in two things. He wanted to make movies and he wanted to build airplanes.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and flying.

• 6:19Josh Clark?

  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 Studios. 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 starlets in Hollywood. He went to all the right events. He was like a proto Tom Ford.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. He very famously dated both Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. He was his own test pilot, 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, he was sort of a national hero, but he was in, in pretty bad shape, partially because of the plane crash, for sure. Because that led to a morphine and opioid addiction, which was really put him, put him down for the count.

• 7:40Josh Clark?

  Did you ever see Dope Sick?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Did I see Dope Sick? No, I never saw that.

• 7:44Josh Clark?

  That's the one with Michael Keaton, right?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never saw that. Heard it's great.

• 7:48Josh Clark?

  So good, Chuck. Go back and watch. It is so good.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:06Josh Clark?

  And that's exactly what happened to him as well. By the middle of the 1950s, he was completely addicted to opioids, like totally dependent on them. And it had such an impact on his life that he stopped going out in public by 1961. That's the last time the public saw Howard Hughes.

• 8:27Josh Clark?

  And he actually began to decline so much that he lost about four inches off 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

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  that could make somebody just completely twisted. Like he had all of those just coming together.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  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. He was, 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. He, I mean, we'll get through sort of the nitpicky details as we go. But like you said, public eye drops out in 61, moves to Vegas.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Well, didn't move initially, went to Vegas in 1966. And not because he had any interest in casinos or anything. He went because he, 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. Had been investing in the state throughout the 40s and the 50s. I think he did a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management, which got him about 40 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.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like you, the person, like the tourists going out to Vegas at the time were probably not in danger and you'd 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, you're just, a very specific kind of person would go to Vegas and most people would avoid it entirely.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that was, it was Sin City back then. And now it's Sin City with a sheen over it.

• 11:43Josh Clark?

  For sure. A sheen of jello.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  So Hughes arrives in Vegas, like I hinted at earlier, he did not go there to move initially. He went there for, it was supposed to be like a 10-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, oh, what was the name of it again?

• 12:08Josh Clark?

  The Desert Sands?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Desert Inn Hotel and Casino, and decided to stay, stay there forever, basically.

• 12:17Josh Clark?

  He did. Like, like, I mean, he had the whole ninth floor to himself, right?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:23Josh Clark?

  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. If you know about Howard Hughes and you know about his mental illness, this is where all of the legends, some of which seem to be totally true, all came from.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, you know, blacked out the windows with curtains, apparently never once opened them at all, right?

• 13:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's a legend that he, 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.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  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 59 years old at this time. And I think there was that story about the ice cream that he, he ate just like gobs and gobs of this specific flavor of ice cream.

• 13:47Josh Clark?

  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 Baskin Robbins banana ripple ice cream.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:58Josh Clark?

  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 200 gallon increments. Like, Baskin Robbins was like, sure, we'll make you a special order, but you have to order 200 gallons of it at a time.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:33Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  And that was a recurring theme while he was in Vegas, and this was one of them. So he bought, you know, the 200 gallons and very soon after, apparently, was like, you know what? I like French vanilla the most. And so apparently, the hotel was then stuck with that 200 gallons that they took about a year to get rid of, which, by the way, way too long to keep that ice cream in the freezer.

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  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...

• 15:05Josh Clark?

  Like posthumously, basically, everybody who knows the story is 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 12 steps to opening a can of peaches and putting it in the bowl that it would be served in.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  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 bare 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, in the Aviator, in that part, you know, there's just tissue boxes everywhere. And of course, we're going to

• 16:17Speaker 02

  mention The Simpsons, because Mr. Burns in the episode where they lampooned this time, where Mr. 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 thing 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.

• 16:45Josh Clark?

  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 in bare feet or whatever, he was basically using tissue boxes as disposable sterile slippers.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I just want to 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.

• 17:31Josh Clark?

  That's a deep cut, though, man. If you're, 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.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  I mean, or maybe it's not Howard Hughes. Now I'm like doubting myself. It looked like Howard Hughes, but...

• 17:48Josh Clark?

  It was Wayne Newton.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  All right, I feel like we should take a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about who was there helping Howard Hughes on the ninth floor of that hotel, right after this.

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• 21:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:49Josh Clark?

  That was confirmed. Yeah, that's not like a legend. That's crazy. I saw he worked for him for 15 years even potentially. And he was his, one of his closest confidants, but since May he 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 Mormons. So I don't have to worry about my closest employees being, you know,

• 22:33Josh Clark?

  suspect or untrustworthy.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:51Josh Clark?

  Probably not, although you never know.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  That's why they hired him. You know, he want, he liked his loyalties, right?

• 22:57Josh Clark?

  Yes. And like, these were the people who interacted with him physically, personally with tissues on their, like wads 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 tissues that he would use and they helped him communicate with Mayhew, along with tons of other stuff. But like, these were the, the men who interacted with them. And it's 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

• 23:40Josh Clark?

  and say they had to do something like get his hearing aid out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Howard Hughes would not go into that bathroom for a while and end up just like peeing on the carpet and covering it with tissues. Cause 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.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. He also.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Saved his own urine and peed in bottles. I think that one has been confirmed, at least confirmed enough for Martin Scorsese to have Leo DiCaprio peeing in bottles and saving his own urine.

• 24:12Josh Clark?

  And confirmed enough for Matt Groening.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  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 he wanted that ice cream.

• 24:24Josh Clark?

  I was too.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  But I guess he didn't need to since they made it for him, but he had a habit of doing that. One great example is when he would just sit around, like you 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.

• 25:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what their purpose was essentially. It just so happened that other people could watch the movies too, you know?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:08Josh Clark?

  He was obsessed with movies and he would watch certain films, like he loved aerial combat films. One of the films he produced was Hell's Angels, which is about fighter pilots. He also loved Ice Station Zebra. Have you ever seen that movie? I've, I've heard of it, but I've never seen it.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  No. Howard Hughes saw it a lot though, right?

• 25:26Josh Clark?

  150 times, they say.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 25:30Josh Clark?

  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 10, 15 years.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  What movie do you think you've seen the most?

• 25:45Josh Clark?

  Hmm. That is a great question, man. I am not sure.

• 25:53Josh Clark?

  I have no idea what I've seen the most.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  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 Ark. Or Spinal Tap, or maybe Blazing Saddles.

• 26:08Josh Clark?

  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?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Did you find a good example?

• 26:24Josh Clark?

  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?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  No, I don't even remember that rec.

• 26:36Josh Clark?

  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.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's definitely worth watching. And if like, his character like annoys you, just hang in there.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:54Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  That's always a good caveat.

• 26:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I hope it's a good one.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  I do too. Well, it doesn't have to be.

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  I mean, I'm gonna be like, The Remains of the Day.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Wait, was that Scorsese? No, no, no, that was Merchant Ivory.

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  I was thinking of the other one that's set in high society in New York.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  That's what Scorsese did. With Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder.

• 27:24Josh Clark?

  The Age of Innocence?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  The Age of Innocence, that was it.

• 27:28Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Which is just okay. All right, so where are we? All right, we're outside of Howard Hughes Hotel at this point.

• 27:36Josh Clark?

  Oh, I know, I know.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Oh, God, what is it?

• 27:39Josh Clark?

  I know. It's probably tied. One is Gleaming the Cube.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 27:46Josh Clark?

  Or Dazed and Confused. Two 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.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  I have seen Dazed and Confused a lot as well. And so I will recommend to you, boy, this is going to go long today. That's okay. The Oral History of Dazed and Confused is a really, one of the better books that I read last year.

• 28:15Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  It's called All Right, All Right, All Right. The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused by Melissa Mears.

• 28:21Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  From 2020. And it's, if you like Dazed and Confused, you will love this book.

• 28:27Josh Clark?

  Do you have that book in front of you or you just have all that memorized?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Well, I looked it up real quick because I always like to shout out the author. But next time I see you, I'll loan it to you. It's great.

• 28:36Josh Clark?

  Okay, thanks.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  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 polite, quote unquote, request that he 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, this floor for New Year's Eve. And Mayhew, his right hand man, 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.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  And he bought it for 13.25 million and was all of a sudden in the hotel and casino business.

• 29:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I mean, we talked very briefly about this in the History of Vegas episode.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:40Josh Clark?

  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 bear in mind, he didn't pick up a phone. He didn't write a note. He said, go buy this hotel. That's, that's a fine idea. I don't want to move. I don't want to get up by the hotel. That genuinely happened.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  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, and, 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 seedy people would go to gamble. So he's the first one to have that real vision. And in 1967, started buying up hotels and casinos.

• 30:48Josh Clark?

  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. 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 1966 to 1968, hotel casinos, I should say. And almost all of them were from the mob, if not all of them.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, he bought the one he was in, the desert inn. 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 and corporations could do business and like possibly families might even come one day. But he wanted it to be what he called it, an environmental city of the future. He didn't want, because again, he was a germaphobe. So he had this vision of a smogless city with an efficient government where like taxpayers didn't have to get fleeced. And like, he, like sort of as a utopia almost.

• 32:09Josh Clark?

  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? 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 the local county and in 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 that he was essentially trying to shape Vegas into his own image.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  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 pull he had.

• 33:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Like, you're not supposed to be able to buy a casino that easily. And in fact, that would 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.

• 33:39Josh Clark?

  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 a 1960s sentiment, not just his. He wanted to outlaw rock festivals.

• 34:19Josh Clark?

  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?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I think he, I don't know.

• 34:38Josh Clark?

  What was the last one?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Uh, the last one was he wanted to be exempted himself from having ever to go to court, um, or any board for any reason at all. Like he wanted to ensure that he could stay in that room. Um, he also wanted to get rid of the, uh, the nuclear testing site nearby. They did not do that. And he also wanted to, uh, 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, uh, they were like, yeah, we're not going to do that.

• 35:17Josh Clark?

  No, because there will not be any more Las Vegas without that water supply. So.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by the way, if everyone is horrified that I booed outlawing rock festivals and not keeping things segregated, that's, that's because there's a larger point to be made, um, later about Howard Hughes, uh, being very racist, uh, which he had, he had a long reputation of being very racist against black Americans specifically.

• 35:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was something that I, uh, my eyes were opened about. Like I, I was never like, I've got Howard Hughes t-shirts and I love him. He's my, 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, I sympathize with him for that, but he also just the views he held and some of the things he did, um, were just terrible. Like really kind of added up to making him a not great guy. Like one other thing, his first wife divorced him because he locked her in the house for three weeks. Like he

• 36:23Josh Clark?

  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 the views he held.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  In September of 1968, here's another example. He had, it was gonna be the first annual Desert Inn Invitational Tennis Tournament.

• 36:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Like a very big, high-profile tournament. And he tried to cancel it because he found out that Arthur Ashe, an African American, was gonna 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 Ashe ended up winning the singles title at that tournament.

• 37:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Which is pretty awesome. And he, but he was stopped sort of right there as far as his casino empire goes. I think at the six that he bought, because he tried to buy another one and got the initial sort of A-OK, but then the Fed stepped in and said, you know what? This, you're on your way to getting monopoly on Las Vegas gambling. So they filed an antitrust lawsuit against him and he was never able to get that seventh casino. So he's kind of locked in with the six.

• 37:34Josh Clark?

  Right. They said, go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Should we take another break?

• 37:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back after this.

• 37:57Josh Clark?

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• 38:20Josh Clark?

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• 38:36Speaker 02

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• 39:43Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so Howard Hughes, at the time, and 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.

• 40:26Josh Clark?

  So this very respected person was now associated with Las Vegas, which is great. That actually attracted other respected businessmen who decided to kind of follow in Hughes' footsteps or rival him, if you were looking at it from Howard Hughes' perspective. And the first one was Kirk Corian. He was a billionaire who built the International Hotel in, I think, 1968. And Howard Hughes was not happy about that at all.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  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 gotta 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 Hughes says, yeah, you know what? I've got one that's even better at my hotel, a 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

• 41:43Speaker 02

  by this and Mayhew had to kind of, kind of pull it out of his rear end to make any kind of event happen.

• 41:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he really was Mr. Burns and I get the impression Mayhew is Mr. Smithers.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:54Josh Clark?

  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 31 stories and Kirk Kerkorian's International Hotel was going to be 30 stories. So right off the bat, that attracted Hughes. And then he had the grand opening the day before Kirk Kerkorian's, just as petty as, as you can be. Kirk Kerkorian had the, the upper hand though. Like this was a massive, very nice, huge casino hotel and the Landmark

• 42:35Josh Clark?

  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, for that to really turn a profit.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I couldn't figure out how they allowed him to buy that when they had just stopped them 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 if Hughes buys it, it'll not be a blight.

• 43:00Josh Clark?

  I think it's also possible he bought it right before he went to go buy the stardust.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 43:05Josh Clark?

  Because they were both in 1968 and the feds objected sometime in 1968, so like the second half of it. So it's possible that he bought it before then. I don't know.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  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 were 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 50 million bucks off of Howard Hughes. And even as rich as he was, that put him in pretty dangerous financial shape.

• 43:52Josh Clark?

  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 1966 and left Thanksgiving Eve of 1970. 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

• 44:32Josh Clark?

  Bahamas where he set up at the Xanadu Beach Resort and basically did the same thing. Camped out there, was outstayed his welcome and bought that place next.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  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 kinda with a shirt on and pants on kinda walks out and everyone's like, oh my god, like, Howard Hughes just left his room. Or, you know, I think the woman in the scene was like, Mr. 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.

• 45:22Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I saw that he is 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?

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always just weird, though, when there's a biopic 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 is not a good ending.

• 45:54Josh Clark?

  That's right. We need to give him like a magical cricket in his wishes to become a real boy.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Oh, man, those are two pretty good Scorseses. Who knew?

• 46:04Josh Clark?

  I didn't know. Did I just do a good Scorsese? I was just doing you doing Scorsese.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Well, I think we both did a pretty good one. And that means, you know, you know, one day when we stop doing this show, maybe we can have a second act as a co-Scorsese onstage bit.

• 46:19Josh Clark?

  Well, that's a good one.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Scorsese the Scorsese starring Josh and Chuck.

• 46:23Josh Clark?

  That's right. We just talk about how good movies were.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Welcome to the show, everybody.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  All right, so where are we? I guess we should cover his passing. He died on April 5, 1976, on a plane flight from Mexico to Houston. And he was 70 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 40 square miles I talked about where he was gonna put Hughes Aviation? That is now Summerlin, a planned community just outside Vegas. Yeah?

• 47:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Josh Clark?

  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 turned Vegas into an actual legitimate tourist destination. And he, it wasn't him specifically buying these casinos. We say that because, you know, it essentially was, but his corporation, Summa Holding Corporation, was the one actually buying them. So that opened the door to other corporations buying casinos, like tearing them down, building brand new casinos.

• 47:48Josh Clark?

  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.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. As far as like, you know, the postmortem on what he had going on in his life. In his autopsy, he weighed 93 pounds at the time of death. And apparently had enough codeine 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 on the show, Melvin and Howard, about supposedly Howard Hughes, played by Jason Robards. I think Howard Hughes' middle name was Robard.

• 48:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  It's a really good movie, a little indie from the 1980s, I think.

• 48:43Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Maybe 70s, but I think 80s. But there were a lot of fake wills that turned up after his death. But his $2.5 billion estate in $1976 was then sort of, I guess, sort of up for grabs?

• 48:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, a lot of people came forward like, that belongs to me. No, that belongs to me. I think 11 or 12 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. 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 weighed 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,

• 49:42Josh Clark?

  any patient that you've not actually interviewed or taken care of yourself. But Fowler basically did as good a job as you possibly could in, in, you know, creating a psychological sketch of somebody, just from the research he did.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  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 germaphobe 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, it probably stemmed from that, that childhood with his mom.

• 50:40Josh Clark?

  For sure. There's also like, I mean, just the intense loathing he had of germs and the instructions that he, 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, he clearly had OCD. But to be able to trace it back to, you know, his mother's influence, who, who seemed to have been a hypochondriac herself.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he, 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.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know The Aviator covered it in, you know, 12 minutes or so. But I think there's an entire film of the Vegas years to be made.

• 51:31Josh Clark?

  I was looking for a documentary on it and I could find basically nothing. I was really surprised. I thought

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is surprising.

• 51:38Josh Clark?

  American Experience would have done it or something, but no, nothing. So yeah, we just had to make all this stuff up.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  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

• 51:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, true, true.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  A lot of talking and Ken Burns style photos of like mobsters, I guess.

• 51:59Josh Clark?

  Right. Just pan across the photo and everybody will be cool with it.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could make a movie, though.

• 52:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they did.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Maybe we'll do that after our Scorsese bit.

• 52:09Josh Clark?

  Yes, there you go. Uh, you got anything else?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 52:14Josh Clark?

  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.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  That's right. This is a bit of a myth busted from our Aussie friends, although this Benjamin here is from Albuquerque. But we did get other emails from Aussies. 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.

• 52:43Josh Clark?

  Okay, good. Thanks.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Uh, that the origin of the word kangaroo may 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 2016, in which Amy Adams, linguistics professor character, tells the kangaroo story to Forest Whitaker in relation to the misunderstandings that may happen when communicating with the aliens. In the next scene, Jeremy Renner tells her that he's surprised to hear the story, to which he 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. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that has possibly multiple times, happened possibly multiple times throughout history.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned the film Enemy at the end of the episode, because Arrival was also directed by Denis Villeneuve. It's a phenomenal film that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it.

• 53:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it is.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you recommended it and we've both seen it, so. Take that, Benjamin.

• 53:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah. No, I think he was talking about Arrival.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw Arrival, too.

• 53:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that is. I've seen that a couple of times. It's great.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Well, we didn't like, didn't get that from Arrival, but we definitely got people that wrote in and said that was a myth.

• 53:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  About the origins of the kangaroo name.

• 53:54Josh Clark?

  Right. And hopefully Arrival got it from it's a, the fact that it's a myth and the myth didn't arise from Arrival.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:01Josh Clark?

  Because that means that we got duped by Arrival and we like to think that we're better researchers than that.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  I'd like to think so.

• 54:07Josh Clark?

  All right. Well, sorry. Who was that again?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Benjamin.

• 54:10Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Benjamin. Sorry about that one. And thanks for setting us straight and to all of our Aussie listeners who set us straight. We appreciate it. And if you want to get in touch with us, like all of our Aussie listeners did, you can send us an email to [email protected].

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 54:45Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean, massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.