Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [80]
But now Hughes was not at all certain he wanted to bail out. Everything was going his way. The stock had been tendered, the courts had backed him, and the FCC also seemed ready to approve his takeover. None of the commissioners even guessed at his true condition, or his true motives. All were ready to okay the acquisition. There was only one catch: Hughes would have to appear in person to claim the license.
It was the one thing he would not, could not do. Informed Monday night that the FCC would definitely demand his appearance, Hughes immediately capitulated. Ready to pay $200 million, he would not emerge from his blacked-out bedroom.
“I am just not up to that,” he explained.
Shortly after noon on July 16, 1968, a formal statement was issued. Hughes rejected the stock. And his bid to take over ABC—to have a network of his own—seemed to disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as it had been announced.
Hughes, however, had not abandoned his plans to control television. If he could not get one of the three existing networks without giving up his privacy, then he would create a new fourth network—a Hughes Network—and “chase ABC right out of business.”
“My desire for a voice—for media—has not changed in the least,” he emphasized from his ninth-floor retreat. “It seems to me that thru the alternatives of building a compact, wholly owned 4th Network, or a vast united complex of CATV systems, I might achieve the channel to the public at a lower price and with less bruises along the road.”
The idea was not new. It had been in the back of his mind for years and had even come up several times while the ABC deal was still in progress. In one moment of despair, he had considered settling for a state-wide network in Nevada.
“I am absolutely sure my plans to acquire ABC will not bear fruit, so I am more anxious than ever to build the strongest network here in Nevada that anybody ever conceived. I will be very content with a really strong network in Nevada. I will be very unhappy if this blows up in addition to ABC.”
But having come so close to a national outlet, Hughes could not now be content with a local system.
So he schemed to take over a major independent, like Storer or Metromedia, to string together every available cable TV station in the country, and to use the money that might have gone to ABC stockholders to make his new system a national contender.
Not long after walking away from ABC, Hughes actually did acquire a sports network, which he planned to augment with communications satellites his own company manufactured.
But soon he was finding the Hughes Sports Network as unsatisfactory as KLAS: “The broadcast looks like color television when it was first introduced twelve years ago. When something carries my name, as this network does, I dont propose to stand by and see these results.”
And neither HSN nor any fledgling network offered the immediate power he craved: “Let’s be realistic and admit that no such alternate could possibly be built up to the point of effectiveness in time to carry any weight in the forthcoming political contests—either primary or final.”
The 1968 elections came and went, and still Hughes had no national “voice,” no “channel to the public,” certainly no “balance of power.”
Maheu’s report that the new president was interested in his plans—“Nixon, through his friend [Rebozo], has suggested the creation of a 4th Network as a means of elevating the standard of all TV broadcasting”—briefly buoyed the billionaire’s spirits.
In the end, however, Hughes decided that a fourth network was not the answer.
“I dont say a fourth network cannot be built up,” he explained. “I just say it wont happen without the back breaking, heart breaking kind of effort that went into the creation of the other networks. Even with the best of luck, it will take years for any fourth network to