Howard Hughes in Las Vegas

28 May 2026 · 49 min · 26 chapters

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In short

Howard Hughes’ reclusive years in Las Vegas, his mental illness and germophobia, and how his business moves reshaped the city.

Guest backgrounds

Josh and Chuck (Stuff You Should Know hosts) discuss the episode; no external guests are interviewed in the transcript.

Key claims

  • Hughes’ opioid addiction followed a plane crash; by the mid-1950s he was fully dependent and stopped appearing publicly after 1961.
  • In Las Vegas (starting 1966), he effectively lived on the Desert Inn’s ninth floor for about four years, with windows covered and minimal housekeeping.
  • He showed OCD-like behaviors: extreme sterilization routines (e.g., detailed steps for opening peaches), bottled water, and reportedly saving urine in bottles.
  • He bought multiple mob-linked casinos/hotels (Desert Inn, Sands, Castaways, Silver Slipper, Landmark, Frontier) and tried to make Vegas “respectable” and “smogless.”
  • He faced antitrust action that blocked him from buying a seventh casino.

Notable examples

  • Baskin-Robbins banana ripple ice cream ordered in 200-gallon increments.
  • Arthur Ashe’s 1968 Desert Inn Invitational: Hughes tried to cancel due to Ashe being African-American; Ashe won.
  • Hughes bought the Landmark to outdo Kirk Kerkorian’s International Hotel.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Shoutout to Friends and Podcasts

0:04 to 0:27

The hosts give a shoutout to their friends Ben and Adam and discuss their new venture.

“Hey folks, owning a home means one thing.”

Shoutout to Friends and Podcasts

1:56 to 4:17

The hosts give a shoutout to their friends Ben and Adam and discuss their new venture.

“I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know.”

Introduction to Howard Hughes

4:17 to 5:48

A brief introduction to Howard Hughes and his significance in Las Vegas.

“Well, also huge thanks to our sponsor of the episode, Cheesecake Factory.”

Hughes' Background and Wealth

5:48 to 7:37

Explore Howard Hughes' background, family wealth, and early interests.

“In 1905, and he came from an oil family, but not like a Getty oil family.”

Hughes' Decline and Addiction

7:37 to 9:09

Discussion on Hughes' addiction and decline in public life due to opioid dependence.

“and opioid addiction, which was really put him down for the count.”

Mental Illness and Isolation

9:09 to 10:29

Examining Hughes' mental health issues and his withdrawal from public life.

“Like all of the risk factors that could make somebody just completely twisted, like he had all of those just coming together.”

Hughes' Arrival in Las Vegas

10:29 to 12:28

Detailing Hughes' move to Las Vegas and his plans for the future.

“So he'd been sort of eyeing Vegas for a while.”

Life in the Desert Inn

12:28 to 14:00

Describing Hughes' life in the Desert Inn and his eccentric habits.

“Like, I mean, he had the whole ninth floor to himself, right?”

Howard Hughes and His Ice Cream Obsession

14:00 to 18:20

Learn about Howard Hughes' quirky obsession with banana ripple ice cream and his peculiar behavior surrounding food.

“It was Baskin-Robbins banana ripple ice cream.”

The Mysterious Ninth Floor

18:20 to 18:58

Discover the peculiarities of Howard Hughes' life on the ninth floor and the unique challenges he faced.

“On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.”
Show all 26 chapters

The Mysterious Ninth Floor

19:04 to 20:16

Discover the peculiarities of Howard Hughes' life on the ninth floor and the unique challenges he faced.

“Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., Member FINRA, and SIPC.”

Hughes' Dependence on His Staff

20:20 to 24:40

Understand how Howard Hughes relied on his staff and the unique relationship he had with them.

“I think we set the stage pretty well of what's going on there on the ninth floor of the hotel there in Las Vegas.”

Howard Hughes and Theatre

24:40 to 28:00

Delve into Howard Hughes' obsession with film and how he influenced local television.

“He was obsessed with movies, and he would watch certain films.”

Howard Hughes and Hotel Management

28:00 to 29:28

Learn about Howard Hughes' unconventional decision to buy a hotel he was staying in.

“Well, I looked it up real quick because I always like to shout out the author.”

Hughes' Vision for Las Vegas

29:28 to 30:56

Discover Hughes' ambitions to transform Las Vegas into a respectable city.

“And then once he got into the hotel and casino business, he was like, wait a minute.”

Controversial Proposals by Hughes

30:56 to 32:41

Explore the various proposals Howard Hughes made for Las Vegas and their implications.

“He ended up buying six hotels from 1966 to 1968, hotel casinos, I should say.”

Hughes' Troubling Legacy

32:41 to 35:56

Examine the darker aspects of Howard Hughes' personality and actions.

“Like, you're not supposed to be able to buy a casino that easily.”

Hughes vs. Competitors

35:56 to 38:06

Understand how Howard Hughes reacted to competition in the Las Vegas hotel market.

“A lot of it was from his upbringing, but that still doesn't excuse a lot of the stuff he did or the views he held.”

Hughes vs. Competitors

38:12 to 38:25

Understand how Howard Hughes reacted to competition in the Las Vegas hotel market.

“Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC.”

Hughes' Influence on Las Vegas

39:59 to 42:05

Delve into Howard Hughes' lasting impact on the Las Vegas landscape and culture.

“So Howard Hughes, at the time when he still hasn't left his hotel room and he's changing the face of Las Vegas.”

The Grand Opening of the Landmark Hotel

42:05 to 46:56

Learn about Howard Hughes' controversial ownership and the opening of the Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas.

“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.”

Hughes' Departure from Las Vegas

46:56 to 48:12

Explore the reasons behind Hughes' departure from Las Vegas and the circumstances surrounding it.

“He died on April 5th, 1976 on a plane flight from Mexico to Houston.”

Hughes' Health and Death

48:12 to 50:30

Discuss the events leading up to Howard Hughes' death, including his health struggles and financial issues.

“know, and then it's like checking into an airport.”

The Legacy of Howard Hughes

50:30 to 53:59

Understand Hughes' impact on Las Vegas and the gambling industry, as well as his lasting legacy.

“court depositions, personal letters that he wrote back and forth with his mother, phone call logs, pilot logs.”

Listener Mail Segment

53:59 to 55:17

Hear listener feedback regarding myths and cultural references related to Howard Hughes and kangaroos.

“Arrival was also directed by Denis Villeneuve.”

Listener Mail Segment

56:00 to 56:43

Hear listener feedback regarding myths and cultural references related to Howard Hughes and kangaroos.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

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1:45Josh Clark:Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:54Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Rootin' Tootin' Wild West Mobbed Up Vegas Spectacular.

2:06Josh Clark:That's right. Before we get going, though, we want to very quickly just say our friends Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica, who we talk about a lot, genuine friends of ours, of the Greatest Generation podcast, they have done a very brave thing and got out on their own and left the MaxFun network which is always kind of a scary thing and they are looking for people to support them they're loyal fans to support them with Amir at entry level$6 a month for an ad free version of not only The Greatest Generation but my favorite two podcasts that they do the Factory Seconds podcast where they one by one eat their way through the Cheesecake Factory menu and the Santa Monica Mountains podcast, their rewatch of Baywatch.

2:55That's just, those guys are just a delight. As people, as podcasters, all of that. So where would they go? Where would somebody go and be like, take my$6 and then some?

3:06Josh Clark:They are going, Adam is sending everyone to greatest.supercast.com and, you know, support these guys, support independent artists. It's like I said, it's a very sort of brave thing to do to go out on your own these days and try and be an indie artist in any creative realm. So we love Ben. We love Adam. I love those podcasts. And so I signed up, obviously, because I still got to get my, I'm eventually going to be a guest on Factory Seconds. They keep promising me. Nice. I'm a bit of a heel so far because at one point I said that the Cheesecake Factory just, I assume they did like bagged food like every other big chain like that.

3:44Josh Clark:And I was wrong. And they have not stopped making fun of me since then about that. Is it from scratch there? Oh, they cook all that stuff, even like their sauces, dude. Wow. No, I had no idea. I'll have to send them that gift certificate we got for Jerry for Cheesecake Factory that she was like, I don't want this. She wouldn't take it. So we're going to have to give it to them. They'll put it to good use. All right. So thanks for letting a shout out these guys. And now on to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. Yeah. Well, also huge thanks to our sponsor of the episode, Cheesecake Factory. Oh, man, that'd be great.

4:22Josh Clark:I don't see why they don't sponsor Ben and Adam because 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 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 Howard Hughes. Oh, are you asking me? I have not, no. Yeah, it's a great movie, obviously. It's Scorsese. But they cover a bit of Howard Hughes' stint in Vegas, probably about 10 or 15 minutes of the movie there, with Leo, obviously, playing Howard Hughes, holed up in his hotel room.

5:11Josh Clark:And when I say holed up, I mean holed up. Yeah, naked as a jaybird. Naked as a jaybird. You get to see Leo's butt. Well, he does a helicopter at one point, I hear. Oh, God. 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, dark place in basically every sense of the word 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 Getty oil family.

5:58Josh Clark: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 fly. Yeah, and he did both. He founded Hughes Aircraft Company and then he also bought a bunch of shares in Transworld Airlines so that he controlled that company.

6:38and he bought controlling shares in RKO Studios. So he started producing movies. He started building airplanes and he very quickly became one of the most famous people in the United States, if not the world, because he was dashing. He had a great mustache. I believe he was six foot four. He knew how to attract like starlets in Hollywood. He went to all the right events. He was like a proto Tom Ford. Yeah, for sure.

7:36Josh Clark:bad shape, partially because of the plane 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? Did I see Dope Sick? No, I never saw that. That's the one with Michael Keaton, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never saw that. It's great. 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.

8:16And 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.

9:04And 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

9:23twisted, like he had all of those just coming together.

9:27Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You know, the germophobia is something we're going to talk a lot about, but that was a big part of what kind of crippled him. He was, it wasn't the kind of germophobia where he was worried about cleaning himself because as we will see when he was in Vegas, he would bathe once a year and, you know, grew his fingernails very famously out. Not grew them out, but they grew out. It wasn't something he was working on. But he just quit taking care of himself, and all hygiene went out the window. But he was afraid of everything else getting him sick. He was afraid of the water being dirty.

10:02Josh Clark:He drank only bottled water. I mean, we'll get through sort of the nitpicky details as we go. But like you said, Public Eye drops out in 61, moves to Vegas. Well, didn't move initially. went to Vegas in 1966. And not because he had any interest in casinos or anything. He went because he heard about it being a great tax shelter. And he had sold a ton of stock, I guess all of his stock, in TWA that year and had a big tax bill. So he'd been sort of eyeing Vegas for a while. He'd been investing in the state throughout the 40s and the 50s. I think he did a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management, which got him about 40 square miles, which was the most land that anybody had at the time in Clark County and didn't do anything with it for a while.

10:52Josh Clark: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 and the engineers to leave California from Hughes Aircraft. Yeah. Like you, the person like the tourists going out to Vegas at the time were probably not in danger and you probably be treated well out there. But it was a really exotic, risky place like in the mind of the American public because it was so thoroughly mopped up.

11:28It just was not a place that people go. And those of us around today, it's hard to conceive of Vegas being like the opposite of a tourist place. Like it's you're just a very specific kind of person would go to Vegas and most people would avoid it entirely.

11:48Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, that was it was Sin City back then. And now it's Sin City with a sheen over it. For sure. A sheen of Jell-O. So Hughes arrives in Vegas. Like I hinted at earlier, he did not go there to move initially. He went there for what 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 Sands? Yeah, the Desert Inn. Yeah, the desert in hotel and casino and decided to stay there forever, basically.

12:28He did. Like, I mean, he had the whole ninth floor to himself, right?

12:32Josh Clark: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 warren or a little cubbyhole for him and all of the mental illness that he was suffering. If you know about Howard Hughes and you know about his mental illness, this is where all of the legends, some of which seem to be totally true, all came from. Yeah. Yeah, he, you know, blacked out the windows with curtains, apparently never once opened them at all, right? Yeah, there's a legend that he, the housekeepers, when they finally came in after he left, that they found the drapes were rotted because they'd just been in the same place the entire time.

13:25Josh Clark:Yeah, he didn't allow housekeeping in, I think, one time while he was there for what ended up being, what, like four years. He was suffering from anemia and malnutrition. He was 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 this 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.

14:13And then Baskin-Robbins, I guess, didn't know this, and they discontinued the banana ripple ice cream. And so Howard Hughes had to start ordering it, special order, I think, in 200-gallon increments. Like Baskin-Robbins was like, sure, we'll make you a special order. But you have to order 200 gallons of it at a time.

14:33Josh Clark:And so he said, fine. As we'll see when you're, like you said, the sort of combination of wealth and this, you know, unfortunate mental illness meant that he could kind of get anything done that he wanted. Right. And that was a recurring theme while he was in Vegas. And this was one of them. So he bought, you know, the 200 gallons and very soon after apparently was like, you know, I like French vanilla the most. And so apparently the hotel was then stuck with that 200 gallons that they took about a year to get rid of, which, by the way, way too long to keep that ice cream in the freezer. For sure.

15:04So, yeah, that is a really good example of that. So, of course, like you said, he's becoming malnourished, anemic. And he also was, like, posthumously, basically everybody who knows the story is like he clearly had some form of OCD. Even if it wasn't like that was the main, you know, mental illness he had, it was certainly a comorbidity. and that is evidenced by the minute directions he instructed his staff to use to do everyday things. Like very famously, he wrote 12 steps to opening a can of peaches and putting it in the bowl that it would be served in.

15:47Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. He, you know, like you have to get the label off. You have to scrub the can on the outside until it was down to the bare metal. You had to then wash the can on the outside again, pour the contents into the bowl without touching the can to the bowl. Apparently the secretaries who typed things up had to use gloves just to type things that would go to him. Tissues were a very big thing. The amount of instruction on tissues and have this many tissues to open this door and have this many tissues to handle this thing that you give to me. And in the movie, in the aviator, in that part, You know, there's just tissue boxes everywhere.

16:26Josh Clark: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 wore tissue boxes on his feet. And there's a picture of the only picture I know of of Howard Hughes in that hotel room. There may be more than one, but the only one I could find is a picture of long, gray-bearded, gray-haired, and fingernailed Howard Hughes sitting there. with tissue boxes on his feet for shoes. I didn't know that that existed. Okay, well, that confirms that. Wow, that's great, man, that you found that. Because that was a semi-confirmed legend from what I could find.

17:10And the best explanation I could find why you would wear Kleenex boxes on your feet is that to him, like you said, he used tons of tissue because they were sterile. So, of course, the boxes that the tissues came in would be sterile as well. So rather than walking around in bare feet or whatever, he was basically using tissue boxes as disposable sterile slippers.

17:32Josh Clark:Yeah, and I just want to caveat that by saying the picture looks real to me. So I hope it's not one of those things where, like, dude, you fell for the Howard Hughes picture. That's a deep cut, though, man. If you're making deep fakes today, you're probably not super familiar with Howard Hughes. So to go back and make that is, I mean, hats off to that guy, really. I mean, or 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 going to come back and talk a little bit about who was there helping Howard Hughes on the ninth floor of that hotel right after this.

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20:35All right, we're back.

20:37Josh Clark:I think we set the stage pretty well of what's going on there on the ninth floor of the hotel there in Las Vegas. But we need to tell you how, you know, you need a lot of help there to live this way. And he had all the money in the world to do that. So he had a right-hand man named Robert Mayhew who 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.

21:14Josh Clark: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 you said through the door. He would get them in notes or memos, which I think you mentioned as well, but they were carried for him by a group of six men known as the Mormon Mafia because five of the six were Mormon because Howard Hughes is like, well, they're not allowed to drink, not allowed to smoke or gamble or anything like that.

22:01I'll just hire Mormons so I don't have to worry about my closest employees being, you know, suspect or untrustworthy.

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22:07Josh Clark:Yeah. And I guess this 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, you know, 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 wads of tissues, of course. but they would inject him with his morphine, although he tended to do that more often himself.

22:43They 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 get his hearing aid out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, Howard Hughes would not go into that bathroom for a while and end up just like peeing on the carpet and covering it with tissues because, again, nothing wrong with his germs, but he couldn't bear to go into the bathroom for a while after somebody had been in there.

23:31Yeah. He also saved his own urine and peed in bottles.

23:36Josh Clark:I think that one has been confirmed, at least confirmed enough for Martin Scorsese to have Leo DiCaprio peeing in bottles and saving his own urine. And confirmed enough for Matt Groening. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned that he could, he had a reputation for sort of like, I'm surprised he didn't buy Baskin Robbins when he wanted that ice cream. But I guess he didn't need to since they made it for him. But he had a habit of doing that. One great example is when he would just sit around, like you said, naked and watch television and watch movies. And when he found out that there weren't like good movies showing in Las Vegas on the local TV at the time, he bought a local TV station and reportedly like programmed the lineup himself.

24:23Josh Clark: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 fighter pilots. He also loved Ice Station Zebra. Have you ever seen that movie? I've heard of it, but I've never seen it.

24:57Josh Clark:No. Howard Hughes saw it a lot, though, right? 150 times, they say. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it's about like, it's a Cold War movie where the U.S. 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. I have no idea what I've seen the most. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I definitely don't have a count, but if I had to guess, it would be probably either like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Spinal Tap or maybe Blazing Saddles. All good ones to watch over and over again.

25:43I genuinely don't know. I'll have to think about that. I'll blurt it out later. But you did bring up something I wanted to mention. Do you remember when I was like, you should never let a person write, direct, and star in a show? 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 Onyx, the Fortuitous, and the Talisman of Souls. Did you ever watch that?

26:06Josh Clark:No, I don't even remember that, Rick. Okay, well, go watch it. It's on Prime. And this guy named Andrew Bowser wrote, directed, and stars in it. And it is just a lovely little movie. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely worth watching. And if his character annoys 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 blurt out, you know, back to the future at some point or something like that. Yeah. I hope it's a good one. I do too. Well, it doesn't have to be. I'm going to be like, the remains of the day. Wait, was that Scorsese?

26:44Josh Clark:No, no, no. That was Merchant Ivory. Yeah, I think so. I was thinking of the other one set in High Society of New York. What did Scorsese did? With Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. The Age of Innocence? The 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. Oh, I know, I know. Oh, God, what is it? I know. It's probably Tide. One is Gleaming the Cube. Oh, wow. Or Days and Confused. Two different summers in my life. Every day I would get up and start my day watching Gleaming the Cube, and then several years later, I would start my day watching Dazed and Confused.

27:31So those two are probably the ones I've seen the most.

27:34Josh Clark:I have seen Dazed and Confused a lot as well. And so I will recommend to you, boy, this is going to go long today. That's okay. The Oral History of Dazed and Confused is a really one of the better books that I read last year. Oh, okay. It's called All Right, All Right, All Right. The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Days and Confused by Melissa Mares from 2020. And if you like Days and Confused, you will love this book. Do you have that book in front of you or you just have all that memorized? Well, I looked it up real quick because I always like to shout out the author. But next time I see you, I'll loan it to you.

28:08Josh Clark:It's great. Okay, thanks. You can just have it. All right. So where we were was outside Howard Hughes' hotel room because we need to talk about a little bit about what's going on in Vegas at the time. what's happening in that hotel is the hotel management is getting pretty upset because like I said he's supposed to be there a week and a half he keeps staying he keeps staying he's paying for all this stuff but they're still like hey listen man you've taken the entire floor of our hotel and we need this at one point I think Jimmy Hoffa himself made a polite quote unquote request that he be allowed to stay because he's you know he's got a lot of influence Howard Hughes, obviously.

28:45Josh Clark:But management finally was like, listen, we're going to physically throw you out of here. We need this floor for New Year's Eve. And Mayhew, his right-hand man, said, hey, listen, man, if you want a place to sleep, you damn well better buy the hotel. So again, Hughes was 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.

29:23He 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. Buy the hotel. That genuinely happened. Yeah.

29:39Josh Clark:And then once he got into the hotel and casino business, he was like, wait a minute. Casino earnings are taxed at a lower rate than these lousy stocks I've got. And he said, so you know what? I'm going to legitimately get involved in the casino and hotel business and literally try and make it a legitimate thing. Like he had a vision of Las Vegas to be, I think he said, as respectable as the New York Stock Exchange. He wanted to make it not a mob town that only kind of the seedy people would go to gamble. So he's the first one to have that real vision. And in 1967, started buying up hotels and casinos.

30:21Yeah. And again, like this was a time where the FBI essentially had like they were camped out in these hotels and casinos because they were conducting so many investigations all the time. Yeah. So this was a, it was a gamble, if you'll forgive the pun, unintentional, for him to buy this stuff because he did start to buy it in the eye of like changing the entire city. And that was not a given. We know it worked out in retrospect, but he didn't know that at the time. So it was kind of risky him doing that. Plus also he had to deal with the mob. He ended up buying six hotels from 1966 to 1968, hotel casinos, I should say.

31:02and almost all of them were from the mob, if not all of them.

31:05Josh Clark:Yeah, he bought the one he was in, the Desert Inn. He bought the Sands, he bought Castaways, the Silver Slipper, the Landmark, and the Frontier. And not only did he have a vision for Vegas as sort of a legitimate town where people and corporations could do business and 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, because again, he was a germaphobe. So he had this vision of a smogless city with an efficient government where it was like taxpayers didn't have to get fleeced. And like he like sort of as a utopia almost.

31:41Yeah. Let's talk about that city of the future. Some of the stuff he wanted to do to Vegas and Nevada to kind of create that city of the future. Sure. 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 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.

32:25Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. He had a sort of list of things that he proposed but never really got done. And, like, he had a ton of influence. Like, he got this casino without having to appear before the Gaming Commission or anything like that to get licensed. Like, that's how much pull he had. 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.

33:00Josh Clark:So that went away and really opened the door. So all this to say he had a ton of pull and could really get things done, but he has a laundry list of things he wanted to get done that they all were just sort of like, yeah, we'll look into that. 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.

33:42It's kind of, I could see that being a 1960s 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 realigned any streets. I don't, I could not find out why. Do you have a guess?

34:07Josh Clark: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 dirty. And once he found out that Lake Mead fed water into a system where, you know, kind of like it's very common today where wastewater is treated and fed back into the system, he was like, no, no, no, you need to get rid of that.

34:47Josh Clark: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. Yeah. And by the way, if everyone is horrified that I booed outlying rock festivals and not keeping things segregated, 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 opened 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.

35:29Very sympathetic in the sense that he had one of the worst documented cases of mental illness of any kind of public figure of all time. So I 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 views he held.

36:08Josh Clark:In September of 1968, here's another example. He had, it was going to be the first annual Desert Inn Invitational Tennis Tournament. Yeah. Like a very big high profile tournament. And he tried to cancel it because he found out that Arthur Ashe, an African-American, was going to be competing. And he was worried about his, you know, black fans coming to his casino to watch. So Mayhew was like, listen, man, we can't cancel this thing. It'll be all right. In a little bit of sweet victory, Arthur Ashe ended up winning the singles title of that tournament, which is pretty awesome. And he but he was stopped sort of right there as far as his casino empire goes.

36:46Josh Clark:I think at the six that he bought because he tried to buy another one and got the initial sort of A-OK. But then the Fed stepped in and said, you know what, this you're on your way to getting Monopoly on Las Vegas gambling. So they filed an antitrust lawsuit against him and he was never able to get that seventh casino. So he's kind of locked in with the six. Right. They said, go to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back after this.

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40:13Okay, 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 city. He's giving it an actual bright future. Just his involvement, the fact that America is now starting to associate Las Vegas with this beloved figure, Howard Hughes, who they remembered him before he started to decline. So that was everyone's image. They were just like, that guy is just reclusive now. They had no idea what was going on with Howard Hughes at the time.

40:57So this very respected person was now associated with Las Vegas, which is great. That actually attracted other respected businessmen who decided to kind of follow in Hughes' footsteps or rival him, if you were looking at it from Howard Hughes' perspective. And the first one was Kirk Kerkorian. He was a billionaire who built the International Hotel in, I think, 1968. And Howard Hughes was not happy about that at all.

41:30Josh Clark:No, he tried to stop it because it was going to be the largest hotel, not only in Vegas, but the largest hotel in the world. And the first big sort of giant resort in Vegas. And Hughes was like, I got to stop this thing. So he got kind of consumed with halting its progress to no avail. So eventually when the International Hotel was like, all right, we got a big grand opening night 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.

42:19Yeah, 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 and Casino, which had been built just a couple of years before. But I think they had stopped just short of completing it. So he came in and bought it. The reason he bought the Landmark is because it was 31 stories. And Kirk Kerkorian's International Hotel was going to be 30 stories. So right off the bat, that attracted Hughes. And then he had the grand opening the day before Kirk Kerkorian's. just as petty as you can be. Kerkorian had the upper hand, though.

43:00Like, 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.

43:18Josh Clark:Yeah, that couldn't figure out how they allowed him to buy that when they had just stopped them from purchasing the 7th. But the only guess I have is that this thing was in such bad shape, they were like, well, at least if Hughes buys it, it'll not be a blight. I think it's also possible he bought it right before he went to go buy the Stardust. Oh, okay. Because they were both in 1968, and the feds objected sometime in 1968, 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.

43:55Josh Clark:It's not like he moved in and the mob moved out. They basically just had people working on the inside at Hughes' casinos and were fleecing him. You know, everyone's always on the take and skimming from the top 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.

44:32And 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 Xanadu Beach Resort and basically did the same thing. Camped out there, outstayed his welcome and bought that place next.

45:14Josh Clark: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 are she'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 is known to have left his room three times in the four years he was there and they were all for like business meetings, and those are basically the times that he shaved and washed and cut his hair and cut his fingernails, and, like, that was it.

46:08I don't know. Maybe one was to go see Ava Gardner, but, I mean, we're talking Hollywood here, you know?

46:14Josh Clark:Yeah. It's always just weird, though, when there's a biopic that just strays so far, but it was toward the end of the movie, so maybe Scorsese was like, having him go to the Bahamas and doing the same thing is not a good ending. That's right. We need to give him like a magical cricket in his wishes to become a real boy. Oh, man, those are two pretty good Scorseses. Who knew? I didn't know. Did I just do a good Scorsese? I was just doing you doing Scorsese. Well, I think we both did a pretty good one. And that means, you know, one day when we stop doing this show, maybe we have a second act as a co-Scorsese on stage bit.

46:50Well, that's a good one.

46:51Josh Clark:Scorsese v. Scorsese starring Josh and Chuck. That's right. We just talk 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, Mayhew was let go. and his holding company, remember that 40 square miles I talked about where he was going to put Hughes Aviation? That is now Summerlin, a planned community just outside Vegas. Yeah? Yeah. And also, like, I think a lot of people are like, yeah, Howard Hughes got rid of the mob in Vegas, and that's just not the case.

47:42Like, 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 these casinos. We say that because it, you know, it essentially was, but his corporation, Sumo Holding Corporation, was the one actually buying them. So that opened the door to other corporations buying casinos, like tearing them down, building brand new casinos that Ace Rothstein basically said it was like Disneyland at the end of casino.

48:23know, and then it's like checking into an airport. That all started thanks to Howard Hughes.

48:31Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. As far as like, you know, the postmortem on what he had going on in his life and his autopsy, he weighed 93 pounds at the time of death and apparently had enough codeine in his system. They said to stop five beating hearts. And even though it was kidney failure, technically, neglect is kind of what the doctors talked about. He didn't have a will. The very famous movie I know we talked about before on the show, Melvin and Howard, about supposedly Howard Hughes, played by Jason Robards. I think Howard Hughes' middle name was Robard. It's a really good movie, a little indie from the 1980s, I think.

49:14Josh Clark: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 dollars 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 estate, but a group of them hired an attorney who hired Raymond Fowler, who at the time was the head of the American Psychological Association. Oh, yeah. to conduct a psychological autopsy, they called it, on Howard Hughes to basically determine his mental competence toward the end of his life.

49:55And this gave the world, again, people were just like, wait, he weighed how much? How long was his hair when he died? What was going on when he died? Like all that news started to come out. This gave the world like an actual psychological profile. You're not supposed to you're not supposed to diagnose anybody, any patient that you've not actually interviewed or taken care of yourself. But Fowler basically did as good a job as you possibly could in in, you know, creating a psychological sketch of somebody just from the research he did.

50:29Josh Clark:Yeah, tons of research, like obviously interviewing staff and reading newspaper documents, court depositions, personal letters that he wrote back and forth with his mother, phone call logs, pilot logs. And, you know, where we ended up was he most certainly had OCD. I think everyone kind of agrees on that. His germophobia, they think, may have stemmed from his childhood. Apparently his mother was a germaphobe and constantly worried about little Howard getting sick from polio. And so she was checking him every day for signs of polio. And they think, yeah, it probably stemmed from that childhood with his mom.

51:11For sure. There's also like, I mean, just the intense loathing he had of germs and 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, you know, his mother's influence, who seemed to have been a hypochondriac 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.

51:54Josh Clark:Yeah, I know the Aviator covered it in, you know, 12 minutes or so, but I think there's an entire film of the Vegas years to be made. I was looking for a documentary on it, and I could find basically nothing. I was really surprised. Yeah, that is surprising. I thought American Experience would have done it or something, but no, nothing. Huh. So, yeah, we just had to make all this stuff up. Well, I wonder if one reason there's not a documentary is just because there's so little, there's zero footage. and I think that one photo, so it's just a lot of talking and Ken Burns-style photos of mobsters, I guess.

52:30Josh Clark: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 after our Scorsese bit. Yes, there you go. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, build a time machine and go pound on his door until he lets you in. But bring a bunch of Kleenex, and it's time for listener mail. That's right. This is a bit of a myth busted from our Aussie friends, although this Benjamin here is from Albuquerque. But we did get other emails from Aussies, so apologies for not reading one from the native land.

53:08Josh Clark:But guys, in the kangaroo episode, Josh mentioned, and I was on board too, 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. I 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 Forrest Whitaker in relation to the misunderstandings that may happen when communicating with the aliens. In the next scene, Jeremy Renner tells her that he's surprised to hear the story, to which she says it's not true, but it illustrates my point.

53:44Josh Clark:I'm not a learned linguist myself, so I can't provide any more information about it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that has possibly multiple times, happened possibly multiple times throughout history. Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned the film Enemy at the end of the episode, because Arrival was also directed by Denis Villeneuve. It's a phenomenal film that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it. Yeah, it is. Yeah, but you recommended it, and 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.

54:16Yeah, it is I've seen that a couple of times. It's great.

54:18Josh Clark:Well, we didn't get that from Arrival, but we definitely got people that wrote in and said that was a myth about the origins of the kangaroo name. Right. And hopefully Arrival got it from the fact that it's a myth and the myth didn't arise from Arrival. Right. Because that means that we got duped by Arrival. And we 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 to all of our Aussie listeners who set us straight. We appreciate it. And if you want to get in touch with us like all of our Aussie listeners did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

55:00Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

55:16Change comes fast. So wouldn't it be nice if one thing stayed the same? Like the price of your Wi-Fi. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, you're guaranteed five years of the most reliable, fiber-powered Wi-Fi with no annual contracts and our best equipment. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi and stream your favorite podcast on iHeartRadio. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity. Imagine that. Restrictions apply. Select plans only. Not available in all areas. Use a fiber coaxial cable. You know that pile of clothes you've been meaning to deal with? Yeah, same.

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56:26You can check it out at Trashy.io. Plus, with Trashy Unlimited, you can get unlimited bags for just$48 your first year. An easy at-home clean-out system, so you can stay on top of it all year long. Clean out, donate, earn rewards. Head to Trashy.io to get started today. Looking for something new? Try fencing, the Olympic and Paralympic sport that mixes speed, strategy, and fun. It's like chess meets cardio. Quick feet, quick decisions, and a satisfying beep when you score a point. Kids, teens, and adults can start anytime. No experience needed, and many clubs have loner gear. Coaches teach fundamentals and safety from day one.

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From the publisher

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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