Tracking a reclusive billionaire

 

As a reporter, how do you cover one of the world’s richest men if he lives just down the street but never comes out of his hotel?

That was my dilemma as the Associated Press correspondent in Las Vegas in 1968, while Howard Hughes lived there.

The once-dashing billionaire sneaked into town in 1966 and bought the Desert Inn hotel, where he ensconced himself in the top-floor penthouse.

After I took that job in 1968, I would often get a visit from a security guard delivering a one-sentence statement: “The Hughes Tool Co. today announced the purchase of the Frontier Hotel.” Period. I would write a 400-word story with background on the billionaire and the famous hotel. Easy! I loved it!

This famous man inherited wealth from his father, who owned a lucrative oil drilling business and later got richer himself in the airline industry. Before he became a recluse, Hughes made movies, hung out with attractive movie actresses and flew small airplanes himself.

Now in Las Vegas, somehow he had a screw loose. We learned later than he was terrified of germs and the people that carried them. Yet he lived a very unhealthy life, eating poorly and neglecting his own body. His personal staff consisted mostly of loyal Mormons sworn to secrecy.

His top aide, Robert Maheu, was a former FBI and  CIA agent who was once involved in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. I’m not sure if Maheu ever saw Hughes in person.

As a hypochondriac, Hughes especially hated the underground nuclear testing that went on only 70 miles from Las Vegas. He brought in leading scientists to tell us that the explosions might destroy Hoover Dam. One of them was Barry Commoner, a leading environmentalist, who I remember interviewing. But Hughes’ efforts failed, and the tests continued.

I was never able to get Maheu or anyone else on Hughes’ staff to talk about anything substantive, even off the record, Neither could any other news media, as far a I could tell.

As a curious reporter, I would love to get a look at this guy. You couldn’t possibly get into his penthouse, whose floor was blocked off on the elevator.

A writer at the Las Vegas Review-Journal convinced me that Hughes must come out of that penthouse secretly some time. How could anyone stay sequestered for two years? Let’s take turns waiting for him in the parking lot.

They reality set in: That wold seem awfully boring for us and time-consuming to our employers, who wanted news copy.

Did he ever come out? After Hughes’ death in 1976, several wills were found, including one that left much of his money to the Mormon church and a young man who supposedly picked him up in a car and saved his life while he was wandering around in the desert.

This man never got any money, but years later a pilot claimed that he picked Hughes up from Las Vegas and took him to some location in the desert, where he had disappeared.

I was starting to believe this story, until a later AP correspondent who covered the “Mormon will” trial, assured me that the will was a fake and the story untrue.

So he must not have ever come out. I’m glad we never staked out the hotel parking lot!