Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [155]
There was something strangely off-key about the entire place. A thirty-one-story haunted house, it had stood empty for eight years until Hughes bought it for $17.3 million from its bankrupt owners. With an air-conditioning system that never really worked and a constantly malfunctioning glass-walled elevator that crawled uncertainly up an outside wall of the tower, the Landmark had a permanent air of impending catastrophe. It seemed more like the setting for a disaster movie than the stage for a grand party.
But to Robert Maheu it looked beautiful in the spring of 1969.
“Howard, if you ever decide to leave the Penthouse, you will be flabbergasted at the sight from the top of this bubble,” he wrote, so carried away with his enthusiasm that he actually sought to lure Hughes from his lair. “It is magnificent during the day and unbelievably beautiful after dark. You get the feeling that this edifice was constructed at the very dead center of the valley, and that all the mountains surrounding the valley are in equidistant position.”
It was an uncharacteristic burst of poetic sentiment. However, within weeks, this beautiful vision had degenerated into an ugly brawl, one that would last for months.
“Instead of you and I clawing each others’ eyes out over the Landmark,” Hughes wrote Maheu as the planning for the grand party began to strain their marriage, “why dont you collaborate with me in endeavoring to find a formula for the opening that will satisfy both of us.”
Like all their big fights, this one was over something trivial, but in this case both the triviality and the fight were taken to operatic extremes. Perhaps the very notion of an “opening” was frightening to Hughes, a man whose life was devoted to keeping things closed. This would be his first party since arriving in Las Vegas, indeed the first since he had drifted into seclusion more than a decade ago. And while Hughes himself would not, of course, be at the party, still he was in some sense going public.
But there was more to this particular opening. It was Hughes going mano-a-mano with his arch-rival Kirk Kerkorian. Right across the street from the Landmark stood Kerkorian’s International, the biggest hotel in Las Vegas, taller than the Landmark, and it was scheduled to open the same week in July. The key issue was which day to hold the opening, whether to throw their party before or after Kerkorian’s. What Hughes wanted was a real blast that would blow Kerkorian right out of the water.
“The public can definitely be persuaded to believe that the opening of the Landmark will be the greatest event since the Last Supper,” wrote Hughes.
“On the other hand, to actually accomplish a fantastic opening of a brand-new hotel-casino with all of its complexities and all the things that may go wrong on opening night—that is something far more difficult.
“And, it only takes one incident in which one stupid dealer accidently insults just one of the many, many newspaper writers which you and I will no doubt decide should be brought out here from New York, Washington, London, Paris, etc., and then the fat will be in the fire.
“So, I say it is possible to control what people will expect the Landmark to be,” he concluded, “but I feel it is impossible to control with any certainty the outcome of the actual opening night.”
Quite a dilemma. Hughes, however, had a solution. He would not approve any date for the opening.
“Re the date of the opening, why dont you leave that open,” he told Maheu. “If the show and all other elements shape up very rapidly, fine, but I urge that a July 1st date not be committed any further in any publicity or word of mouth. I just dont want it to be embarrassing if the opening should be a little later.
“With my reputation for unreliability in the keeping of engagements, I dont want this event announced until the date is absolutely firmly established.”
Maheu was concerned.