Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [72]
“So, if it is too much of a problem for ch 8 engineering personnel, the Hughes Tool Company will send a team of technicians to Las Vegas from Culver City, and they will damn well have this station operating satisfactorily.”
But there were other problems not even the ultimate TV repairmen could solve, and Hughes grappled with them daily. Nothing escaped his attention. No detail was too small, as he had to contend now with distasteful commercials, then with “off-beat characters” delivering editorial opinion, even with “the programming slump which occurs from 6 to 6:30 AM.”
Treating KLAS as if it were his private TV set, Hughes not only demanded final say on all shows but actually spent hours poring over lists detailing each episode of each series running on the station. A flurry of memos followed:
“Please determine whether the black and white Lucy Show has been the regular scheduled program for the 12:00 o’clock to 12:30 time period.”
“Please ask Gray to ask Smith if it would not be better to use one of the remaining segments of ‘Hawaiian Eye’ instead of starting a new policy of running anything like ‘Run for Your Life’ which was in prime time only a week ago.”
“OK, by all means use ‘Hawaiian Eye.’ But please ask Smith to hold onto both segments of ‘Run for Your Life’ and ‘Man from Uncle’ as long as he can, as I want to explore the possibility of showing these before they are shipped.”
Time and again the beleaguered station manager had to await Hughes’s decision on proposed new programs, which were routinely rejected without explanation, always at the last possible minute. A memo pleading “the manager urgently requests an answer as to whether or not he can include the show ‘Playboy After Dark,’ ” would finally come back days later with Hughes’s scrawl:
“Absolutely NO.
“But I want it handled very carefully. I want no trouble with the Playboy people.”
Then there would be sudden outbursts from the penthouse, as when an enraged Hughes one evening discovered syndicated commentator Paul Harvey on the KLAS “Big News”:
“We have never editorialized before, and when we do, I expect every word to come to me first.
“Pull the Paul Harvey show off the air. You have 10 days to try to sell it to someone (try Channel 5 first) before pulling it, but if you can’t sell it then we will pull it anyway and pay for it. Maybe we could give someone the Merv Griffin show if they will take Paul Harvey.”
And there were equally sudden fears: “I just heard something about an 84 hour telethon,” wrote Hughes, dreading the marathon preemption. “I hope this is not planned for ch 8.”
Nothing, however, quite so upset the recluse as commercials. In what was probably his one demonstration of populist spirit, Hughes saw himself representing aggrieved TV viewers everywhere as he declared all-out war on offensive ads.
“What about eliminating the Adjusta-Bed cure-all commercials?” demanded the bed-ridden billionaire, not about to put up with any hucksters. “Also, even after eliminating the undesirable Adjusta-Bed commercials, you want the Adjusta-Bed commercials reduced to about 1/8 of the present number and spotted in occasionally between other commercials.
“When a hard-sell, constant repetition campaign of this type is used, it may well be all right for the advertiser, but it drives the audience crazy.”
His lawyers warned that he was “courting disaster by requiring the station manager to delete or ask customers to change commercials that do not violate the television code of ethics,” but Hughes, who had his own code, was relentless.
In quick order, he banned a slew of “shabby, unworthy, misleading, untrue, distorted and fraudulent” real-estate promotions, then spotted a particularly offensive “onion-slicing machine” commercial that led him to issue a general edict:
“There should be no more presentations of food in the studio or an announcer trying to talk with food in his mouth. Any commercials including food are to be taped outside of the studio and are to be presented with