Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [75]
Once ready to reveal his “big secret” to the station manager, Hughes insisted on tight security: “Ask him to go to an office where it is quiet, private, and where he will not be interrupted. You dont have to mention my name—just say at the beginning, ‘I have a message for you and I am sure you will know whom it is from.’ ”
But before the secret plans could be executed, yet another blow was struck. The TV station, in violation of Hughes’s direct orders, inserted a commercial between two of the movies one night.
“Now we are 4 min. over because I did not anticipate the commercial between Call of the West and Oregon Trail,” Hughes fretted.
“Please explain to Stoddard, and ask if he doesn’t think we can drop the 4 + minutes needed from the end of Sunrise Semester instead of cutting one of the movies.”
The dreaded “Sunrise Semester” once again came full force into Hughes’s consciousness. “I want to discontinue ‘Semester’ completely, anyway,” he added, “as soon as it can be done without repercussions.” The program had been plaguing Hughes for months, and he had already ordered it cut back to half an hour. But his lawyers warned that KLAS would certainly run afoul of the FCC if the educational series was canceled outright.
“Sunrise Semester” was his nemesis. Hughes never said why he so detested the show. But it came on at 6:30 every morning, just as the “Swinging Shift” ended, and to Hughes it seemed to represent something deeply antipathetic. Nonetheless he watched it—he was probably the only person in Las Vegas who did—as if compelled. At one point KLAS tried to move the show back to six A.M., and Hughes successfully resisted the change. But he could not get it off the air.
So, alone in his darkened room, Hughes had to face the end of his all-night movies and watch “Sunrise Semester” presage a new dawn on his TV screen. It was a daily agony.
Just as the perfect television set had eluded him, so now Hughes had come to recognize that owning a TV station was not the answer either. What did it profit him if he couldn’t even get the movies he wanted and had to suffer “Sunrise Semester” as well? The quest must begin anew.
Locked in a struggle to control television itself—and thus to control his world—Hughes would have to reach still higher. He would need to buy an entire TV network.
“Do you realize I am going to be faced with making a $200,000,000 decision today?”
It was 6:30 Sunday morning, June 30, 1968. Howard Hughes squinted uneasily at the long string of zeros he had just scrawled on his yellow legal pad. He had not slept all weekend long, bedeviled by second thoughts and obsessed with last-minute details. The magnitude of the impending deal daunted even him.
Hughes was about to buy ABC.
No one had ever owned more than a small fraction of a major television network, but Hughes was determined to get a controlling interest. And to take it by surprise. He had been plotting the move for more than a year. ABC, then foundering in third place, far behind both CBS and NBC in the ratings and desperately short of cash, seemed the perfect target.
This time it was not late-night movies that interested the billionaire, but raw political power.
“I want to know confidentially and most accurately just how significant a position in the formulation of U.S. public opinion would be afforded us by the acquisition of ABC,” he wrote to Maheu. “Anyway, my attitude is very simple. My objective is the ABC News Service and what can be done with it.”
The ABC “Evening News” with Howard Hughes. Behind the scenes, of course. Even as he sought Maheu’s reassurance, the billionaire had no real doubts that one-man control of a national television network—albeit the weakest of the three—could give him tremendous clout.
“Maybe you remember that the Los Angeles Daily News, when it was still being published, was the most important news media by far, from the political standpoint, in the entire Sou. Calif, region,” wrote Hughes, spelling out his strategy. “This despite the fact that the Times, Examiner, and the Herald were all far