Points West Reruns, Episode 9 - September 23, 1967 / "The Howard Hughes underground"
(PW009)
Hopefully you, dear reader, know what’s going on. If not, turn back to the first episode.
Hark! It’s here!
The ninth of the forty-three installments of Points West was published in the September 23, 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Below is the cover, followed by the piece, “The Howard Hughes underground”, by Joan Didion.
If you haven’t the time to read the whole thing, here’s a standout sentence: “The stories are endless, and infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.”
“The Howard Hughes underground”
7000 Romaine Street is in that part of Los Angeles familiar to readers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset Boulevard, a middle-class slum of "model studios" and warehouses and two-family bungalows. Because Paramount and Columbia and Desilu and the Samuel Goldwyn studios are nearby, many of the people who live around here have some tenuous connection with the motion-picture industry. They once processed fan photographs, say, or knew Jean Harlow's manicurist. 7000 Romaine looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped art moderne detailing, the windows now either boarded or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads WELCOME.
Actually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. That the Hughes "communications center" should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one's suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world—involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-tool subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, and an electronics-and-missile operation-run by a man whose modus operandi closely resembles that of a character in The Big Sleep.
As it happens I live not far from 7000 Romaine, and I make a point of driving past it every now and then, I suppose in the same spirit that Arthurian scholars visit the Cornish coast. I am interested in the folklore of Howard Hughes, in the way people react to him, in the terms they use when they talk about him. Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I lunched with an old friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the other guests was a well-married woman in her 30's who had once been a Hughes contract starlet, and another was a costume designer who had worked on a lot of Hughes pictures and still receives a weekly salary from 7000 Romaine, on the understanding that he work for no one else. He has done nothing but cash that weekly check for some years now. They sat there in the sun, the onetime starlet and the sometime costume designer for a man whose public appearances are now somewhat less frequent than those of The Shadow, and they talked about him. They wondered how he was and why he was devoting 1967 to buying up Las Vegas.
"You can't tell me it's like they say, that he bought the Desert Inn just because the high rollers were coming in and they wouldn't let him keep the penthouse," the ex-starlet mused, fingering a diamond as big as the Ritz. "It must be part of some larger mission."
The phrase was exactly right. Anyone who skims the financial press knows that Howard Hughes never has business "transactions," or "negotiations"; he has "missions." His overall mission, as Fortune once put it in a series of love letters, has always been "to preserve his power as the proprietor of the largest pool of industrial wealth still under the absolute control of a single individual." Nor does Hughes have business "associates"; he has only "adversaries." When the adversaries "appear to be" threatening his absolute control, Hughes "might or might not" take action. It is such phrases as "appear to be" and "might or might not," peculiar to business reportage involving Hughes, that suggest the special mood of a Hughes mission. And here is what the action might or might not be: Hughes might warn, at the critical moment, "You're holding a gun to my head." If there is one thing Hughes dislikes, it is a gun to his head (generally this means a request for an appearance, or a discussion of policy), and at least one president of T.W.A., a company that, as Hughes ran it, bore an operational similarity to the government of Honduras, departed on this note.
The stories are endless, and infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal. There is the one about the barber, Eddie Alexander, who was paid handsomely (not unlike the costume designer with whom I was lunching) to remain on "day and night standby" in case Hughes wanted a haircut. "Just checking, Eddie," Hughes once said when he called Alexander at 2 A.M. "Just checking. Just wanted to see if you were standing by." There was the time Convair wanted to sell Hughes 340 transports and Hughes insisted that, to insure "secrecy," the mission be discussed only between midnight and dawn, by flashlight, in the Palm Springs Municipal Dump.
There was the evening when both Hughes and Greg Bautzer, then his lawyer, went incommunicado while, in the conference room of the Chemical Bank in New York, the money men waited to lend T.W.A. $165 million. There they were, the Metropolitan Life, the Equitable, the Irving Trust, the Bank of America, the Bankers Trust, the Mellon National Bank and Trust, the Morgan Guaranty, the First National Bank of Boston, the Security First National Bank of Los Angeles, the California Bank, the National Bank of Commerce of Houston, all waiting, and it was 7 P.M. of the last day the deal could be made, and the bankers were talking by phone not to Hughes, not even to Bautzer, but to Bautzer's wife, the movie star Dana Wynter.
"I hope he takes it in pennies,," a Wall Street broker said when Hughes, six years later, sold T.W.A. for $546 million, "and drops it on his toes."
Then there are the more recent stories. Howard Hughes is en route to Boston aboard the Super Chief with the Bel Air Patrol riding shotgun. Howard Hughes is in Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Howard Hughes commandeers the fifth floor of the Boston Ritz. Howard Hughes is or is not buying 37½ percent of Columbia Pictures through the Swiss Banque de Paris. Howard Hughes is ill. Howard Hughes is dead. Howard Hughes is in Las Vegas. Howard Hughes pays $13 million for the Desert Inn. $15 million for the Sands. Gives the State of Nevada $6 million for a medical school. Negotiates for ranches, Alamo Airways, the North Las Vegas Air Terminal, more ranches. By July of 1967 Howard Hughes is the largest single landholder in Clark County, Nev. "Howard likes Las Vegas," an acquaintance of Hughes's once explained, "because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich."
Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. Perhaps there has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without perceiving the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want; between what we officially admire and secretly desire; between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation that increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
Joan Didion