Chapter 4: Howard Hughes: The Mixed Legacy Howard Hughes was one of the most fascinating and bizarre men of the 20th century. He is remembered as a movie mogul, a record-setting pilot, an aviation innovator, an entrepreneurial businessman, a playboy who dated Hollywood starlets and a behind-the-scenes political manipulator who had an indirect role in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. He was often described as the richest man in the world. But while Hughes no doubt would have preferred to be remembered for his movies or his flying exploits, he is best known for his reclusive and eccentric habits later in life, for his intense phobias about people and germs, for his drug addictions and for the tragic story of how he died in 1976. His deteriorating mental and physical health, kept secret by his inner circle of lieutenants, lawyers and nursemaids, began to leak into the public arena during Hughes' four-year residence on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas from 1966-70. It is this relatively brief period of Hughes' very full life that has most fascinated journalists, biographers and the public. The intense secrecy surrounding Hughes during this time, the mystery, accounts for much of this. But it's also because Hughes, though in declining health and confined to one hotel, was extremely active in business and political affairs during this period. Using the telephone and handwritten memos, Hughes commanded his empire, paying particular attention to the new fiefdom he was building in Las Vegas. Hughes added another line to his biographical summary: casino owner. He went on a buying spree, picking up casinos, airports, ranches, mining claims and choice land parcels in Las Vegas and across Nevada, revealing to his close associates that he intended to take over this burgeoning little city in the desert. Robert Maheu, who was Hughes' chief aide during most of the time he stayed in Las Vegas, wrote, "He wanted to become King of the Strip." Hughes was well on his way to becoming just that when, his anxieties getting the best of him, he abruptly left Las Vegas in 1970. While Hughes continued to own and operate his Las Vegas holdings for six more years until his death, making decisions from his new farflung lodgings in the Bahamas, London and Acapulco, he gave up his grand dreams for Las Vegas. He had described extensive plans for the city, sometimes privately to his aides, sometimes publicly. At the height of his Las Vegas machinations, he explained in a memo to Maheu what he envisioned for the city. Recalling the high-rolling Hollywood glamour of Las Vegas when he was a frequent visitor and part-time resident in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hughes wanted to give the city a new dose of class, as well as an environment conducive to his personal obsessions. "We can make a really super environmental "city of the future' here _ no smog, no contamination, efficient local government, where the taxpayers pay as little as possible, and get something for their money," Hughes wrote. Hughes announced plans for a $150 million "new super Sands" that would be the world's largest resort with 4,000 rooms. He envisioned one floor dedicated entirely to shops open 24 hours, another floor full of family recreation, including a bowling alley, a billiards room, an ice skating rink and rooms dedicated to games such as chess, bridge and table tennis. The resort also would have a state-of-the-art movie theater showing first-run films. "A resort so carefully planned and magnificently designed that any guest will simply have to make a supreme effort if he wants to be bored," Hughes wrote. Hughes also announced plans to build a giant airport in Las Vegas to accommodate the new supersonic jets. Rather than filtering his ideas through his lieutenants, Hughes took pen in hand and drafted his announcement to the public. He saw Las Vegas becoming the new hub for air travel in the Southwest, with high-speed trains running to Los Angeles, Phoenix and other cities. The idea received mixed reviews. While local officials praised the proposed $200 million investment, federal aviation officials considered it a bit pie-in-the-sky. They suggested that McCarran Field [now McCarran International Airport] was a perfectly suitable airport for Las Vegas. Hughes responded angrily with another personally crafted press release. Defending his vision of a regional airport, he made a prophetic statement: "I do not believe Las Vegas will remain dormant without future growth. There is no reason in the world why this city should not, in a reasonable number of years, be as large as, say, Houston, Texas, is today. If this sort of growth should take place, the present location of McCarran Field would be approximately comparable to having the airport for Los Angeles located on Wilshire Boulevard at Miracle Mile." Hughes never followed through on his ideas. Some of them were implausible and he rejected others. More significantly, his physical and mental health deteriorated rapidly in his final years. He bought hotel-casinos, airports and numerous tracts of land in and around the city, but he did not develop them much, if at all, after he acquired them. What's more, his vision for Las Vegas did not resemble the development that would become his greatest legacy. It's ironic that Hughes' largest contribution to Las Vegas (the Summerlin master-planned community) did not take shape until well after he died in 1976. And it's also interesting that a master-planned community never came up on his radar. While he talked of building airports and casinos, it's unlikely he would have entertained the mundane task of building cohesive neighborhoods, parks and shopping centers. And yet, although Hughes' direct involvement with Las Vegas was relatively brief, he left a huge imprint on the community, one that continues to be felt in a variety of forms to this day. Weird tales Hughes' strange behavior during his Las Vegas residency is well documented _ from the urine-filled mason jars to walking around with Kleenex boxes on his feet _ and much of it appears to actually have been true. A few of the best stories aren't as well-known: A year after buying the Desert Inn Hotel, Hughes canceled the annual Easter egg hunt held at the resort. The prospect of hundreds of tiny vandals rampaging through his property was too much to bear. Hughes sent a six-page memo to Maheu explaining his paranoia. "I am not eager to have a repetition, in the Desert Inn, of what happened at Juvenile Hall when the ever-lovin' little darlings tore the place apart," he wrote. In Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years, James Phelan relates the infamous Baskin-Robbins saga. Hughes' favorite ice cream was Baskin- Robbins banana nut. For months, he ate two scoops of it with every meal. His assistants kept large containers of it available at all times. When the supply ran low one time, aide Mell Stewart was sent to get more. "He came back with bleak news," Phelan reports. "The ice cream chain, which adds new varieties periodically and drops others, had discontinued the Hughes favorite. No more banana nut. The aides went into a panic." With the supply running out, the aides called Baskin-Robbins and asked the company to make some more. Company execs said it could be done, but the minimum order would be 350 gallons. Fearing Hughes' reaction to an announcement of no more banana nut, the aides agreed to the 350-gallon order. The ice cream was made in Los Angeles and trucked overnight to Las Vegas, where it was stored in the Desert Inn's kitchen freezer. According to Phelan, after the banana nut was served to Hughes the next day, he decided it was time for a change to French vanilla. "It took the Desert Inn almost a year to get rid of the stockpile of ice cream," Phelan writes. Stewart became known in the community for his generosity in giving away ice cream. Hughes' "Palace Guard," the handful of attendants with whom he interacted while in Las Vegas, as well as the administrators he entrusted with his most secretive assignments, were almost all Mormons. Although few of them had much business experience, Hughes trusted them above the executives who ran the day-to-day activities at his various companies. The extensive Mormon network was largely the handiwork of Hughes' top administrator, Bill Gay, who often advertised job openings on the Mormon Church's bulletin boards. In his memoir Fly on the Wall, longtime Las Vegas publicist Dick Odessky related a story he was told about Hughes in the early '50s. Hughes, who stayed for long periods at the Flamingo and eventually, with his staffers, occupied an entire wing, called the hotel's publicist, Abe Schiller, to his room. "Schiller found him in the sitting room holding a large pink blanket, one of the standard linens the Flamingo used on its beds," Odessky reports. Hughes asked Schiller to help him drape the blanket over the picture window in the suite's bedroom. "Hughes stepped back and admired his work," Odessky writes. "He then sat on the bed, turned on the lamp, picked up a book, and turned it in various directions to test the light for reading. Finally he gave the makeshift curtain his approval. "That's absolutely perfect, Abe. Now, I want the exact same blankets placed over every window in my rooms." It turned out there were 78 windows in the rooms Hughes had rented, all of which he expected to be covered exactly the same way. Hughes bought KLAS-TV Channel 8 mainly so he could control what movies were aired and when. He tinkered with other aspects of the station's programming as well, but the late-night movies were his passion. Hughes often stayed up late in his Desert Inn penthouse, and he wanted to see movies all through the night and only ones he liked, adventure flicks such as the submarine thriller Ice Station Zebra. Channel 8's late-night movie show was called the "Swinging Shift," and Hughes picked the movies, sometimes at the last minute, rendering the TV guide useless. Bob Stoldal, a Channel 8 reporter and anchor in the late '60s, does not recall Hughes doing much meddling with the local newscasts. "What he did do was, we'd get calls after the newscast at night, and someone would say that Mr. Hughes was watching and would like you to get more information on such and such a story. So we'd go get more information and read it into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The idea that you were reporting directly to Hughes was fascinating." One time, Stoldal recalls, an executive who reported directly to Hughes advised the fledgling newsman to smile more on the air. "Mr. Hughes thinks you frown too much," he said. Despite his too-serious countenance, Stoldal went on to become news director and a top executive at Channel 8. On a more serious note, Hughes was a blatant racist. As Citizen Hughes relates, at one point Hughes wanted very badly to buy the ABC television network. But he abruptly changed his mind after watching back-to-back episodes of "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game" _ both Chuck Barris-produced game shows. In a memo to Maheu, Hughes wrote: "I think all this attention directed toward violence on TV dramatic shows is certainly misplaced. These two game shows represent the largest single collection of poor taste I have ever seen." But Hughes wasn't merely commenting on the quality of the shows. He was incensed that the "Dating Game" episode featured interracial contestants. In an ironic twist, Hughes did not realize that a white woman selected to go on a date with a black man actually was a light-skinned African-American. The rioting that broke out in many cities in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. only steeled Hughes' racist resolve. In another memo to Maheu, he wrote: "I can summarize my attitude about employing more negroes very simply - I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else. I know this is not a very praiseworthy point of view, but I feel the negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it." Casino buying spree After Hughes settled into the Desert Inn's penthouse suite, he embarked on a Las Vegas buying spree that was the talk of the still-small city. He had a lot of money to spend. Hughes recently had sold his stock in TWA for $546,549,771, receiving a check that was believed at the time to be the single largest ever written. Hughes started with the hotel-casino in which he was living. Just a few weeks after he and his staff commandeered the entire eighth and ninth floors, Desert Inn officials started complaining that they wanted the rooms back for their high-rolling guests. The obvious answer was to buy the place. An intense negotiation ensued, with Hughes niggling over every dollar. The final purchase price was $13.25 million, and the deal closed on April 1, 1967. Maheu, Hughes' right-hand man and public face during his Las Vegas years, soon learned that the Desert Inn purchase was a huge tax benefit for the billionaire. In his memoir Next to Hughes, Maheu says Hughes quickly decided that he wanted to expand his burgeoning Las Vegas empire. "Howard wanted every casino in town," Maheu wrote. "He wanted to become King of the Strip. He was acting like the Howard of old." Licensing turned out to be no problem, although Hughes normally would be required to appear before the Nevada Gaming Commission before he could receive permission to operate a casino. But Nevada officials were so eager to have Hughes on their team - offering the state a degree of respectability to counter its mob reputation - that they awarded him licenses sight unseen. "He was not fingerprinted, interviewed or investigated," wrote Omar Garrison in Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. "Also waived was the usual requirement that a photograph taken within the past two years accompany the application form . . . Answers to questions contained in the applications were also few and far between. The only personal information given was what everybody already knew: Howard Hughes was 61; height, 6 feet 2 inches; weight, 150 pounds; eyes, brown; occupation: self-employed." One of Hughes' biggest backers at that time was Hank Greenspun, crusading publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun had known Hughes from the billionaire's early '50s forays into Las Vegas, and he became a go-to guy for Hughes subordinates. But Greenspun's primary value for Hughes was as a public relations vessel. Through his front-page column, Greenspun urged Las Vegans not to bother the reclusive Hughes. Later, he championed Hughes' effect in improving the city's image. Next on Hughes' agenda was the Sands, which he bought on August 1, 1967, for $14.6 million. The purchase particularly embittered crooner Frank Sinatra, who had been the uncrowned king of the Sands for years and once owned a piece of the hotel. He and Hughes had a history of enmity dating to when Sinatra starred in several movies for Hughes' RKO Pictures, and Hughes set out to put the singer in his place. After learning that his credit line at the casino had been suspended, an angry and drunk Sinatra drove a golf cart through a plate-glass window at the D.I. As Garrison tells it, "In a frenzy of frustration and anger, the manic troubadour shouted more curses and gutter phrases in the presence of lady patrons, threw chips in the face of a casino employee, and defied hotel security officers who tried to quiet him. He staggered into the Garden Room, the Sands' 24-hour restaurant. There he found [casino manager] Carl Cohen at his customary front table. Spluttering curses, Sinatra grasped Cohen's table and overturned it onto the casino manager." This was a mistake: Cohen was a large man of about 275 pounds. "With a single, well-aimed blow to the mouth, he sent the singer reeling backward onto the floor. When Sinatra picked himself up, he had a bloody nose and two missing front teeth." Sinatra promptly took his show to Caesars Palace. Hughes' next conquest was the Frontier, which he purchased on September 22, 1967, for $14 million. Once again, Hughes took over a casino that had a reputation for mob influence. Soon after, he purchased the smaller Castaways for $3 million. Then he snapped up another small property, the Silver Slipper, for $5.3 million. The spending spree would have continued with Hughes' purchase of the Stardust, but before that could happen the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division stepped in, raising concerns that Hughes' ownership of Las Vegas casinos was on the verge of monopoly. Rather than tangling with the feds, who conceivably could subpoena him to testify, Hughes decided to back out of the Stardust deal. Landmark fiasco But Hughes wasn't quite done. While the Justice Department nixed the Stardust deal, it was more amenable to Hughes' plan to purchase the bankrupt Landmark. Construction had begun on the hotel back in 1961 but it had never been finished. Hughes picked up the 31-story hotel, patterned after the Space Needle in Seattle, for $17.3 million. It appealed to him in part because it was just down the street from Kirk Kerkorian's International Hotel, which was under construction and promised to be the biggest, best resort in Las Vegas. Not to be outdone, Hughes proceeded to spend millions to finish the Landmark and prepare for an opening around the same time as Kerkorian in the summer of 1969. Hughes' obsessiveness about details led to verbal warfare with Maheu, who was in charge of making the Landmark opening party memorable. First, the two clashed over the timing of the opening. Hughes did not want to commit to a date, refusing to make a decision until just days before the actual opening. In a memo to Maheu, Hughes explained: "I would hate to see the Landmark open on the 1st of July and then watch the International open a few days later and make the Landmark opening look like small potatoes by comparison." Hughes' indecision put Maheu in an impossible situation in terms of planning a party and inviting guests. But it got worse. Hughes also wanted to approve the guest list, which was fine with Maheu as long as he actually agreed to put some people on the list. Instead, Hughes got bogged down in the philosophical underpinnings of why certain people should be invited and not others. Just days before the opening, he had approved just three people to be invited. What's more, Hughes refused to allow Maheu to order food for the party. In a memo to Hughes, Maheu expressed his dire frustration: "Howard, I really don't know what you are trying to do to me, but if your desire is to place me in a state of complete depression, you are succeeding." Maheu's tirade backfired on him. Rather than convincing Hughes of the urgency of making vital decisions about the opening party, it prompted him to take a step back from the subject. "I am sorry," Hughes wrote, "but I cannot give a go-ahead on the Landmark until the situation of disaccord which has developed between us is put in better condition." Hughes' absurd party planning continued even on July 1, the day he finally approved for the opening. With just hours to go, Hughes had signed off on only 44 invitees. Maheu, however, had surreptitiously invited 400 other people. At 5 p.m., two hours before the party, Hughes at last gave Maheu permission to order the food. In Next to Hughes, Maheu says the opening of the Landmark represented the peak of Hughes' power in Las Vegas. "He not only owned more hotel rooms and casinos than any other single individual in the history of the gambling mecca, he was also the state's largest employer, revered as the Pied Piper who had brought Las Vegas back to economic life." Behind the façade While Hughes was the most powerful individual in Nevada, his casinos weren't making him richer. In fact, they were losing money. Hughes' Nevada operations lost $700,000 in 1967, $3.2 million in 1968, $8.4 million in 1969 and $13 million in 1970. Different reasons have been cited for this poor record. Local observers noted that when Hughes bought a casino, he tended to hire people with no gaming experience to run it. Hughes blamed Maheu, whom he came to believe was stealing from him. Maheu blamed Hughes for buying properties "to boost his ego, rather than as sound business investments. He acted on impulse, rather than recommendation." Sergio Lalli, writing of Hughes in The Players: The Men Who Made Las Vegas, suggests that Hughes' casino purchases did not rid them of mob influence as conventional wisdom suggests. "Popular lore gives Hughes credit for chasing the mobsters out of town and for ushering in the era of corporations," Lalli writes. "He supposedly pioneered the way for reputable corporations by showing Wall Street that it was safe to run a legitimate casino business in Las Vegas. None of this is true, except by happenstance . . . While Hughes did bring an image of legitimacy to the gambling industry, it was only that, an image." Lalli writes that "it is too much to say that Hughes chased the mob out of town. Mobsters, as well as everyone else in Las Vegas, tried to take advantage of Hughes . . . Hughes had often boasted that he could buy any man or destroy any man, but Hughes was just as often exploited by those around him." The Desert Inn and the Sands "probably were plundered" by mob interests, Lalli contends. "Overnight they went from being two of the Strip's money-making jewels to fading has-beens. While the inexperienced Hughes executives wallowed in their big offices, the casino employees who had been there from the early days may have helped themselves to what they could. It must have been a free-for-all." When Hughes died in 1976, his gaming properties were sold. Today, only one of his six Strip casinos is still operating. The Sands was imploded in 1996 and the Venetian was built in its place. The Landmark was imploded in 1995 and the property became an overflow parking lot for the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Silver Slipper was torn down in 1988 to make room for a parking lot. The Castaways was closed in 1987 and demolished to clear a space for Steve Wynn's Mirage Hotel. The Desert Inn closed in 2000 and was demolished to make way for Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas resort. The one former Hughes casino standing is the Frontier, whose owner, Phil Ruffin, has announced plans to implode it and build a new resort in its place. While Hughes did not kick the mob out of Las Vegas, he did help usher in a new era of corporate ownership of casinos, and his presence gave the city a degree of legitimacy it did not enjoy before. In 1967 and 1969, the Nevada Legislature revised state laws to allow corporations to be licensed to operate casinos without having to conduct background checks on each and every shareholder. At the time, Governor Paul Laxalt said Hughes' investment in Las Vegas had given the city the "Good Housekeeping seal of approval." Despite what was happening behind closed doors, there was an element of truth to the sound bite. "Hughes' arrival brought respectability to a city overrun by organized crime," Maheu wrote. Germs and nuclear testing Years before his seclusion at the Desert Inn, Hughes had developed an irrational fear of germs. But his phobias went haywire during the four years he lived on the hotel's ninth floor. But while Hughes demanded that his aides follow explicitly written procedures to prevent exposing him to germs, his own actions contradicted the basics of cleanliness. "[Hughes] was surrounded only by filth and disorder," wrote Michael Drosnin in Citizen Hughes. "Mountains of old newspapers, brittle with age, spread in an ever-widening semicircle on the floor around his bed, creeped under the furniture, and spilled into the corners of his cramped fifteen-by-seventeen-foot room, mixed together haphazardly with other debris - rolls of blueprints, maps, TV Guides, aviation magazines, and various unidentifiable objects. "A narrow path had been cleared from his bed to the bathroom, then lined with paper towels, but the tide of trash overran even that, topped off by numberless wads of used Kleenex the billionaire wielded to wipe off everything within reach, then casually cast upon the accumulated rubbish. It was all united in a common thick layer of dust that settled in permanently over the years. The room was never cleaned." Hughes' obsession with contamination prompted a passionate campaign against nuclear testing. Hughes was a major defense contractor and supporter of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, not to mention a patriotic American and staunch anti-communist. But the proximity of the nuclear tests to Las Vegas, where he was investing $200 million, made him anxious and determined to use his influence to stop them. "The Atomic Energy Commission nuclear tests in Nevada infuriated and frightened him," wrote Phelan in Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years. "He saw them as a threatening two-edged sword. The tests would scare off tourists from his gambling resorts and they would pollute the air he breathed and seep their radioactivity through underground strata and poison the earth and water beneath Las Vegas." Hughes' campaign against nuclear testing reached its apex when the AEC announced plans to explode the largest atomic bomb in history - a 1.2-megaton hydrogen bomb code-named Boxcar - on April 26, 1968. Upon learning of the plan about two weeks before the scheduled test, Hughes dispatched Maheu to Washington to lobby for a postponement. "It became his greatest obsession," Drosnin wrote. "He would carry his battle through every level of government and finally into the White House, offering bribes to presidents and presidential candidates, trying, in fact, to buy the government of the United States, all in a desperate effort to stave off nuclear devastation." The colorful, hyperbolic language Hughes used to describe the devastation caused by the underground blasts could have come right out of a post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie. "If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated," Hughes wrote, "then in the fraction of a second following the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most ghastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible to imagine filled with poisonous gases and debris will have been created just beneath the surface in terrain that may one day be the site of a city like Las Vegas." Maheu lined up allies from the fields of politics and science to join Hughes' fight against the bomb but the Atomic Energy Commission was unimpressed, insisting that the show must go on in the interest of national defense. Even Nevada political leaders ultimately abandoned Hughes, preferring not to sacrifice the high-paying jobs the test site provided. So, with just hours remaining before the scheduled test, Hughes took his case to President Lyndon Johnson. He wrote a four-page letter to the president, seeking a 90-day postponement of the test - enough time, he said, to make his case for moving the tests somewhere else. "I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is only useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear waste material," he wrote. Although Hughes worried endlessly that Johnson would not get the letter in time, the president did, in fact, read it and took Hughes' 11th hour plea seriously. Johnson went so far as to withhold approval of the test while he consulted his advisers. When they unanimously supported proceeding with the test, Johnson gave the go-ahead. His failure to stop Boxcar did not deter Hughes. Rather, it convinced him that taking the high road did not work; that politicians needed to be paid off to do what he wanted. When presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey agreed to fight nuclear testing, he received $100,000 in campaign contributions from Hughes. After Richard Nixon won the presidency, Hughes sought to pay him $1 million to stop another large blast. Alas, nuclear testing continued in Nevada until 1992, when President George H.W. Bush declared a moratorium. Early years in Vegas Hughes had a long association with Las Vegas that dated more than 20 years before he sequestered himself at the Desert Inn. Probably his earliest visit to the city occurred in 1942 when he landed one of his experimental airplanes at the newly opened Sky Haven Airport (now North Las Vegas Airport). Florence Murphy, who, with her husband, Red, opened the airport on the fateful day December 7, 1941, recalled Hughes' first landing: "The first time he came in he called us from Los Angeles and told us he was coming in. He said he might come in after dark and so we should be sure to have some lights on the runway. We didn't have lights, so we got some automobiles parked at the terminal building and got them out beside the runway [with their lights shining on the runway]. He came in and landed." Hughes frequently landed there over the next few years, Murphy says, including one landing in which he ground-looped, damaging the wingtip. "He came into the office and said, 'Now, none of you saw that,'" she remembered. Murphy described Hughes as a "very nice fellow, very soft-spoken." She said he invited her and her husband to the old El Rancho Vegas for dinner a few times. "He'd invite a whole bunch of us, and he'd have a table ready for 12 or 15 of us. He'd come in and say you can have anything you want. He never did sit down to eat with us. He always had some business to take care of." Hughes had mechanics from Los Angeles at the Sky Haven Airport working on his plane around Christmastime, Murphy says. "They hadn't heard anything from him for a week, so we told the crew to go home for Christmas. They didn't want to because Mr. Hughes would be very mad if they did. They finally left and wouldn't you know it, he came in. He found them gone and fired them all. I told him it was my fault and he put them all back to work." In 1943, Hughes came to Southern Nevada to fly his beloved Sikorsky S-43 amphibious airplane. Hughes spent his nights in Las Vegas, taking in the burgeoning scene, and during the days he tested the Sikorsky at Lake Mead. "For hours at a stretch, he taxied the plane while speedboats loaded with cameramen trailed alongside shooting hundreds of feet of film of the Sikorsky's hull as it glided through the water," according to Empire. Hughes planned to sell the plane to the Army Corps of Engineers for use in transporting its employees to remote parts of the globe. But before the transaction could take place, the Civil Aeronautics Administration sent Charles Von Rosenberg to check out the aircraft. Hughes, who insisted on being involved in the process, brought him to Lake Mead. With Hughes at the controls, Von Rosenberg in the co-pilot's seat and three other men in the cabin, the plane took off from a small airstrip near Boulder City and soon was rumbling over the lake. As Hughes sought to land on the water, the plane started acting up. "The Sikorsky started settling in, displacing water, and picking up drag," according to Donald Barlett and James Steele in Empire. "It pitched forward slightly and became a little unstable, but that was normal during the first few seconds. It started to go left, but Hughes straightened it out. Then, without warning, the Sikorsky lunged forward on its nose and veered sharply right. Before Hughes could react, the plane turned in the water and began skipping sideways on the lake." As the giant airplane rocked and crashed at 80 miles per hour across the water, various pieces of the craft were ripped off. When the Sikorsky finally stopped, it began taking on water and the passengers scrambled to get out. Hughes and Von Rosenberg managed to escape the cockpit and climb into a rubber life raft. But two of the three men in the cabin, Richard Felt and William "Ceco" Cline, died in the accident. Hughes had the plane raised out of Lake Mead, hauled back to California and rebuilt. He ended up flying it again. Hughes was a frequent visitor to Las Vegas in the late 1940s. He filmed parts of a movie called Jet Pilot in Las Vegas in 1949. He stayed for long periods in Las Vegas hotels in the early '50s. "He liked the glamour and gaudiness of the town," according to Barlett and Steele. "He enjoyed prowling the city at night, cruising the casinos and hotels in search of attractive young women available for an evening's dalliance." In 1953, Hughes leased a five-room house near the Desert Inn, the so-called "Green House" (because it was painted green). Hughes hired people to come in and seal the windows and doors to prevent dreaded germs from contaminating the interior. After about a year there Hughes returned to California, but he insisted on keeping the house just as he had left it. He eventually bought the house, though he never returned to it. After he died in 1976, Hughes' aides opened the airtight house and found it just as he had left it in 1954. "The Green House contained an electric Westinghouse refrigerator - still running - two newspapers dated October 13, 1953, and April 4, 1954, keys to Room 186 at the Flamingo and Room 401 at the Hotel Miramar... some Sahara casino gambling chips" and other odds and ends of his previous eccentric existence there, Barlett and Steele wrote. The Green House still stands. KLAS Channel 8, which is next door, now uses it as a meeting space and for various special projects. Bob Stoldal worked at KLAS when Hughes owned it and when the house was opened after his death. He remembers that the Hughes people came in and burned all the clothes. "The closets were stuffed with clothes," Stoldal recalls. "Suit after suit after suit." After the Hughes people cleared out the house, some other curious folks entered to pick through the remaining bits of the billionaire's existence there. Clothes hangers, a toilet seat and other items have become prized pieces of memorabilia, Stoldal says. Stoldal, a history buff, has turned the Green House into something of a memorial to Hughes, with posters from his movies and other memorabilia on the walls and tables. Stoldal recently had several layers of paint scraped from the house's exterior to reveal the original green color. Incidentally, Stoldal swears that he once saw Hughes in Channel 8's offices. "It was a Saturday morning, and I'm walking down the hallway from the newsroom past the executive suites to the studio. This guy came around the corner in a dark blue double-breasted suit, with his hair pulled back, and I was kind of startled and said, 'Can I help you?' He said no and kept on walking through. He had sort of a bum look to him." Stoldal realizes that "there is not one shred of evidence that it was Howard Hughes." Most believe that Hughes never left his Desert Inn penthouse while he stayed in Las Vegas. "The logic just doesn't fit - except that I believe it was him," Stoldal says. Hughes' greatest legacy For all the business ventures Hughes was involved in during the '60s and '70s, his greatest legacy in Nevada is the result of a land deal he executed in the early '50s. Hughes wanted to expand the research laboratory facilities for his growing aircraft company, based in Culver City, California, and decided to do so outside Las Vegas. His top executives strongly objected to the plan because they didn't want to separate the company's operations, but Hughes pressed ahead, in part because he would pay lower taxes in Nevada. He managed to obtain 25,000 acres of federal land west of Las Vegas in exchange for 73,000 acres he owned scattered across Northern Nevada. It wasn't easy, though. The Interior Department initially opposed the land trade, arguing that it was lopsided in Hughes' favor. Hughes then hired attorney Clark Clifford, who had been an aide to President Harry Truman, to lobby for the swap. He also convinced the Air Force to support the deal, in the interest of national security. Under pressure, the Interior Department had a change of heart, and the trade was approved in 1952. Hughes never built any aircraft research facilities on the land, primarily because his executives so adamantly opposed his plans. The research laboratory eventually was built in Culver City, California, and "Husite," as the Southern Nevada acreage was known, lay dormant for more than 30 years. Several years after Hughes' death, Summa executives came up with an idea for the giant parcel: a master-planned community. They later dubbed it Summerlin, for Hughes' grandmother. More than a decade later, Summerlin was heralded as one of the nation's largest and most attractive planned communities, winning awards for high sales and quality planning. Summerlin is by far Hughes' greatest contribution to Las Vegas, and yet, amid all his varied interests, he never was known to express a desire to develop subdivisions or shopping centers. Unlike other rich men, Hughes never poured his money into mansions, usually preferring a darkened hotel room to a personal palace. The only reason he ever bothered with home buying was to please a woman. He designed and built numerous cutting-edge airplanes, but houses were of little interest. When Summerlin is finally completed several years from now, its population will exceed 150,000 - almost as many people as lived in the entire Las Vegas Valley when Hughes was perched atop the Desert Inn in the mid-'60s. Although Hughes was one of only a few who predicted Las Vegas would grow into the metropolis it is today, he never imagined the role he ultimately would play in making it happen.

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