Howard Hughes in Las Vegas

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I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and this is "Stuff You Should Know," rooting to 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,

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“genuine friends of ours, the greatest generation podcast.”

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- All right, so thanks for letting us shout out these guys, and now onto Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. - Yeah, well also, huge thanks to our sponsor of the episode, cheesecake factory. - No man, that'd be great.

I don't see why they don't sponsor Ben and Adam, 'cause almost everything, they rate pretty highly. - That's a great idea. Get to it, cheesecake 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 Scorsese about-- - Oh, are you listening to me? - I have not, no. - Yeah, it's great movie, obviously. It's, of course, Aisy.

But they cover a bit of Howard Hughes's a stint in Vegas, probably about 10 or 15 minutes of the movie there with Leo, obviously playing Howard Hughes, hold up in his hotel room, and when I say hold up,

- Yeah, naked as a J-bird.

“- Naked as a J-bird, you get to see Leo's, but, you know.”

- Well, he does a helicopter at one point in that year. (laughs) - Okay. - No, 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 place in basically every sense of the work 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 1905, and he came from an oil family,

but not like a, 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." - Yeah, and he was really interested in two things. He wanted to make movies, and he wanted to build airplanes. - Yeah.

- And flying. - Yeah, and he did both.

He founded Hughes Aircraft Company,

and then he also bought a bunch of shares and trans-world 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 starlets and Hollywood. He went to all the right events. He was like a proto-tomphord. - Yeah, for sure.

“He very famously dated both Catherine Hepburn”

and Ava Gardner. He was his own test pilot, 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 loves him. He was sort of a national hero, but he was in pretty bad shape, partially,

because of the plain crash for sure, because that led to a morphine and opioid addiction, which was really put him down for the count. Did you ever see Dope Sick? - I see Dope Sick.

- No, I never saw that. - That's the one with Michael Keaton, right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, never saw that.

- 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 themselves.

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

- Yeah, for sure, the germophobia is something we're gonna 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 bottle water.

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

Went to Vegas in 1966.

And not because he had any interest in Casino's 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 a stock in TWA that year and had a big tax bill.

So he'd been sort of eyeing Vegas for a while. It'd been investing in the state throughout the 40s and the 50s.

“I think he did a landswap with a 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. 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 in the engineers to leave California from Hughes aircraft. - Yeah, like you, the person, like the tourist going out

to Vegas at the time, were probably not in danger and you probably 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 will 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 specific kind of person would go to Vegas, and most people would avoid it entirely.

- Yeah, I mean, that was, it was since city back then. And now it's since city with a machine over it. - For sure, a machine of yellow. - 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 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?" - The desert sand? - Yeah, the desert sand? - Yeah, the desert in hotel and casino,

and decided to stay there forever, basically.

- He did, 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 declining terribly.

And this is where it seems to have just become full blown, because he took the spot and made it just a war in, or a little cubby hole for him in 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. - 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, but like four years, he was suffering from anemia and malnutrition. 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 ate just like gobs and gobs

of the 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. 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 200 gallon increments, like Baskin Robbins, like sure we'll make it special order,

“but you have to order 200 gallons of it at a time.”

- Yeah, and so he said fine. As we'll see, when you're, like you said, this sort of combination of wealth and this unfortunate mental illness meant that he could kind of get anything done that he wanted.

- Right. - And that was a recurring theme while he was in Vegas and this was one of 'em, so he bought the 200 gallons and very soon after apparently was like, you know, unlike 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, by the way, way too long to keep that ice cream in the freezer. - Oh sure.

So yeah, that is a really good example of that. So of course, like you said, it's becoming Mount Nourish's anemic. And he also was, like, poshimously,

like he clearly had some form of OCD.

Even if it wasn't like, that was the main 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. - 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.

- Mm-hmm. - Apparently the secretaries who type things up had to use gloves just to type things that would go to him. - Yeah. - Tissues were a very big thing.

- Mm-hmm. - 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 Mr. Burns in the episode where they lampooned this time,

where Mr. Burns was the stand-in for Howard Hughes. Also were 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 I could find is a picture of”

long, gray bearded, gray hair and fingernailed Howard Hughes sitting there with tissue boxes on his feet for you. - Really? I didn't know that that existed.

Okay, well that confirms that. That's, 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 to caveat that by saying, the picture looks real to me, so I hope it's not one of those things we're like, dude, you fell for the Howard Hughes's picture.

- That's a deep cut, though, man. If you're making deep fix today, you're probably not super familiar with Howard Hughes, so to go back and make that, I mean, hats off to that guy, really. - I mean, or it may not, 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 9th floor

of that hotel right after this. (upbeat music) - Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what, we have some big news. - What's the news, Beach News?

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- All right, we're back. I think we set the stage pretty well

“of what's going on there on the night 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 15 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 he said through the door, he would get them in notes or memos, which I think he 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 suspect or untrustworthy.

- Yeah, and I guess it was 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, I don't know.

“- But that's why they hired him, you know,”

he liked his loyalties, right? - Yes, and like these were the people who interacted with him physically, personally, with tissues on their, like, wards 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 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 it, his hearing aid out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, Howard Hughes would not go into that bathroom for a while, when I ended up just like being 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. - Yeah, he also, 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 de Caprio peeing in bottles and saved his own urine. - And confirmed enough for Matt Greene.

- Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned that he could, he had a reputation for sort of like, I'm surprised he'd been by Baskin Robbins when I was in that 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 the great examples 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 aerial combat films,

one of the films he produced was Hell's Angels, which is about five of the 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? - 150 times they say, yeah, it's a lot. - Yeah, it's about like 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? - What movie do you think you've seen the most? - Hmm. - That is a great question, man, I am not sure.

- 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 Tapper, maybe Blazing Settles. - Mm-hmm, I'll get one still, I'll turn over again.

- I genuinely don't know. I'll have to think about that, I'll blur 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 told you to watch it. It's onix the fortuitus 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 point. And this guy named Andrew Bowser wrote directed and stars and it is just a lovely little movie.

- Okay. - Yeah, it's definitely worth watching. And if like his character, like a noise 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 blur it out, back to the future at some point or something like that. - Yeah.

- I hope it's a good one, actually too. - Well, it doesn't have to be. - I mean like, I mean, it'd be like the remains of the day. - Wait, was that square sazy? - No, no, that was merchant ivory.

- Yeah, I think so. - I was thinking of the other one that set in high-sciety in New York. - What's square? - It's square.

- With Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder. The Age of Innocence? - Age of Innocence, that was it. - Okay. - Which is just okay. - All right, so where are we?

- All right, we're outside of Howard Hughes hotel at this point because we need to-- - I know, I know. - I know. - I know, God, what is it?

- I know, it's probably tied. One is gleaming the cube. - Oh, wow. - Or day's in confused. - It's beautiful.

- 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 days and confused. So those two are probably the ones I've seen the most.

- I have seen days and confused a lot as well. And so I will recommend to you, boy, this is gonna go long that day, that's okay. The oral history of days 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 Linklatter's days can be used by Melissa Mayers from 2020

and it's, if you like days and confused, you will love this book. - Do you have the book in front of you or you just have all that memorized? - Well, I looked at it real quick

'cause I always like to shout out the author,

but next time I see you, I'll loan it to you. - Okay, thanks. - You can just have it. All right, so where we were was outside Howard, he was 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 other week and a half. He keeps staying, he keeps staying.

He's paying for all the stuff, but there's 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 plate quote unquote request that he'd be allowed to stay because he's, he's got a lot of influence, Howard Hughes, obviously. But management finally was like, listen, we're gonna physically throw you out of here.

We need this floor for New Year's Eve and may you, his right hand man, said, hey, listen, man, if you want a place to sleep, you damn well better by the hotel. So again, he is just like, fine, I'll buy the hotel.

And he bought it for 13.25 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 right? 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 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, you know what? I'm gonna 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 1967, started buying up hotels and casinos. - Yeah, and again, like this was a time

where the FBI essentially had like they were camped out

'cause they were conducting so many investigations all the time.

“So this 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 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 front tier.

And not only did he have a vision for Vegas as sort of a legitimate town where people and corporations could do business and 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, 'cause again, he was a germifob. So he had this vision of a smogless city with an efficient government where taxpayers didn't have to get fleeced and 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 in 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 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 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 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 pool

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 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 1960 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 re-aligned any streets. - Don't, I could not find out why. Do you have a guess? - No, I think he, 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 sturdy. And once he found out that Lake Mead fed water into a system where, you know, kind of like it was 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 any more Las Vegas without that water supply, so. - Yeah, and by the way, if everyone is horrified that I booed outlawing rock festivals

and not keeping things segregated. - Okay, 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 I,

my eyes were open 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.

one of the worst documented cases of mental illness

“of any kind of public figure of all time.”

So I sympathize 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 one other thing, his first wife divorced him

because he locked her in the house for three weeks. 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 the future held.

- In September of 1968, here's another example. He had, it was gonna be the first annual desert in invitation to an astronomer, like a very big high profile astronomer, and he tried to cancel it because he found out that Arthur Ash and African-American

was gonna be competing, and he was worried about his black fans coming to his casino to watch. So may he 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 single title of that tournament.

- Yeah, that was just pretty awesome. - But he would stop 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, okay, but then the fed stepped in and said, you know what, 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 $200. - Should we take another break? - Yeah.

- All right, we'll be right back after this. (upbeat music) - Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news.

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“- I think it was on a call about what we should call it.”

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- 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 cities, 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

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 one was Kirk Chercorian.

He was a billionaire who built the International Hotel

“and I think 1968 and Howard Hughes was not happy about that at all.”

- No, we tried to stop it 'cause it was gonna be the largest hotel, not only 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 know a veil. So eventually when the International Hotel was like, all right, we got a big grand opening, night and 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 by this and Mayhew had to kind of pull it out of his rear end to make any kind of event happen. - Yeah, he really was Mr. Burns and I get the impression Mayhew is Mr. Smithers.

- Yeah. - So yeah, what it was was the grand opening of the landmark hotel in Casino, which had been built just a couple 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-Curcorean's International Hotel was gonna be 30 stories.

So right off the bat, that attracted Hughes. And then he had the grand opening, the day before Kirk-Curcorean just as petty as you can be. Kirk-Corean 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 really 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 if he was buy it, 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 1968 and the Fed's rejected. Sometime in 1968, 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. He uses casinos and we're fleasing 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. - 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 Bahamas

where he set up at the Xanado Beach resort and basically did the same thing. Camped out there was outstate 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, how much he's just left his room? Or, you know, I think the woman in the scene is 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. - I don't know. I saw that he, as known to have left his room three times in the four years he was there and they were all for like business meetings

that he shaved and washed and cut his hair and cut his fingernails and that, 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 biopic that just strayed 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. - That's right.

- We need to give him like a magical cricket in his wishes to become a real boy. - Oh man, this is a pretty good Scorsese, you knew. - I didn't know, did I just do a good Scorsese? I was just doing a good doing Scorsese.

- Well, I think we, I think we both did a pretty good one and that means, you know, one day when we stopped doing this show maybe we could have a second act as a Coast Scorsese on stage fit. - Well, that's a good one.

- Scorsese, V Scorsese, starring Josh and Chuck. - It's all right. We just talked about how good movies were. - Welcome to the show, everybody. - All right, so where are we?

I guess we should cover his passing. He died on April 5th, 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, a Mayhew was let go

“and his holding company, remember that 40 square miles”

I talked about where he was gonna put his aviation. - Mm-hmm. - That is now Somerlin, a plane community just outside Vegas. - Yeah.

And also, 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 casinos.

We'd say that because, you know, it essentially was, but his corporation, sum a holding corporation, was the one actually buying him. 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 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 93 pounds at the time of death. And apparently, he had an upcoding 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.

“And I think Howard Hughes's middle name was Robard.”

- Yeah. - That is a really good movie, little indie from the 1980s, I think. - Okay. - 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. - 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 of state.

But a group of them hired in attorney who hired Raymond Fowler, who at the time was the head of the American psychological associate, 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 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 diagnose anybody, any patient that you've not actually interviewed or taken care of yourself.

But Fowler basically did his good job as you possibly could in 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 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 germophob and constantly worried about little Howard getting sick

And so she was checking him every day for signs of polio and they think he had probably stemmed from that childhood with his mom. - For sure. There's also, like, I mean, just the intense loosing

he had of germs in 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 his mother's influence, who's been a hypocondriac herself, 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 12 minutes or so,

“but I think there's an entire film of the Vegas years to be made.”

- I was looking for a documentary on it

and I could find basically nothing.

I was really surprised. - Yeah, that is surprising. - American experience would have done it or something, but nothing. So yeah, we just had to make all this stuff up.

- Well, I wonder if one reason there's not a documentary is just 'cause there's so little there's zero footage and I think that one photo. So it's just, - Yeah, true. - A lot of talking,

can burn style photos of, like, mobsters, I guess. - Right. Just pan across the photo and everybody will be cool with it. - Yeah, you could make a movie, though. - Yeah, they did.

- Maybe we'll do that. - We'll do it. - We'll do it. - Yes, there you go. Are you got anything else?

- Okay, nothing else.

- Well, if you wanna 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 clean eggs and it's time for listener mail. (bell ringing) - That's right. This is a bit of a myth busted from our Aussie friends,

although this Benjamin here's from Albuquerque, so 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 two, so you're not taking the ball for this.

- Okay, good, thanks. - 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, the wittaker 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. It wouldn't be surprised to hear that has possibly multiple times, happened to possibly multiple times throughout history.

Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned the film enemy at the end of the episode because Arrival was also directed by Dini Bill and New. It's a phenomenal film that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it, but you recommended it

when we've both seen it, so take that Benjamin. - Yeah, no, I think he was talking about Arrival. - Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw Arrival too. - Yeah, it has got seen that a couple times, it's great. - Well, we didn't get that from Arrival,

but we definitely got people that wrote in and said that was a myth of the origin of the kangaroo name. - Right, and hopefully Arrival got it from it's a fact that it's a myth and the myth didn't arise from Arrival, right?

Because that means that we got to do by Arrival, and we'd like to think that we're better researchers than that. - I'd like to think so. - All right, well, who was that again? Benjamin.

- Thanks a lot, Benjamin. Sorry about that one, and thanks for setting us straight. And 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 stuff podcast at iheartradio.com. (upbeat music) - Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. (upbeat music)

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