Vegas swashbuckler named Barney “Moe” Dalitz, who had been a friend of another Vegas buccaneer (actually, a stone-cold killer) named Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had built the Flamingo Hotel with Mafia money and was murdered by his gangster pals when the return on their investment wasn’t what he had promised. Dalitz was very concerned about Hughes and his Mormon squad taking up so much of his hotel, especially with Christmas and the lucrative holiday season approaching. A deal was struck between Dalitz and Hughes. The billionaire could take over the top floor of the hotel for himself and one a few floors below for his staff, but they all had to be out on December 1. Hughes moved in and found it very much to his liking, so when December 1 came and went, he and his posse were still there.
Dalitz was beside himself with frustration. Hughes and Team Mormon were costing him money. With the holidays coming up, it was intolerable to have his hotel filled with Mormons who didn’t drink or gamble. Dalitz tried everything in his power to move Hughes out of the hotel, which really irritated the tycoon. So, flush with the TWA sale cash, Hughes simply bought the Desert Inn and moved Dalitz out. At the time this action was deemed very eccentric, but the best was yet to come. Once Hughes owned the hotel, he sealed of his floor from public access and had a security checkpoint mounted at the elevators to make sure no one tried to get onto his floor. He installed a movie screen and a projector with a full theatre sound system in his penthouse, and during his time there, he became obsessed with the Rock Hudson movie Ice Station Zebra. Hughes watched the film over and over at all hours of the night at full volume, causing other guests to complain that their windows were rattling and that booming sounds were disturbing their sleep.
Next door to the Desert Inn at the time was another hotel called the Silver Slipper, which boasted a giant neon slipper sign out front. Hughes became obsessed with that giant neon slipper so close to his hotel. He was afraid it was too big and would one day collapse and fall onto his hotel, so he bought the Silver Slipper in order to do something about the sign. Hughes went on to purchase four Las Vegas hotels and casinos before he was through, often simply because he could, not for any rational investment purpose.
Howard Hughes was now a creature of whim but on a grand scale. When he tired of Las Vegas, he went on an eccentric world tour of hotel living that took him and his Mormon crew first to Britannia Beach Hotel on the Bahamas’ Paradise Island. However, the stay there wasn’t as long as Hughes desired because of visa problems with a number of his entourage. It was underreported how many people were in the group, causing Bahamian authorities to raise questions. Rather than go through any kind of scrutiny, Hughes simply selected another hotel and moved on.
The billionaire next set his sights on Canada, but his original idea of relocating at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal soured when John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved in and wrote and recorded their iconic anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance” during their famous bed-in. Ideologically, that scene didn’t sit well with Hughes, since Hughes Aircraft made huge profits supplying the U.S. armed forces with planes and helicopters for use in the Vietnam War.
Hughes settled on Vancouver, British Columbia, and took over a good portion of the Bayshore Hotel at the entrance to Stanley Park. From there Hughes and his team headed to the Ritz-Carlton in Boston on the edge of Boston Common. Hughes was in Boston to establish a medical centre in his name because he believed all the best medical minds were currently in that city. Once that was done, Hughes returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel because he needed to conclude some business, including details surrounding his impending divorce from Jean Peters. When that was accomplished, the Hughes team flew to Acapulco. Hughes took up residence on the penthouse floor of the Fairmont Princess Hotel, where John Wayne and Lana Turner had also lived for a while.
While in Mexico, Hughes, an avid and voracious reader, got it into his head that the next emerging place worthy of investing in was Nicaragua. He agreed with what President Anastasio Somoza was doing in the region and liked that the United States had friendly relations with the country. So he and his squad moved to the splendid Inter-Continental near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, a beautiful structure built to resemble a pre-Colombian temple. In December 1972, while Hughes and his entourage were in Managua, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake rocked the region and did extensive damage to the city. Somoza instantly had Hughes and his people moved into a wing of his presidential palace until he could arrange to relocate (and so Hughes would still consider investing in his country). Within a few days Hughes and his Mormons were on their way to the Xanadu Princess Hotel in Freeport in the Bahamas, and yes, he did buy that hotel, as well, before moving in.
The Xanadu Princess was the last hotel Hughes lived in. He died a few years later on April 5, 1976. The details of his demise are sketchy at best. He lived his life so reclusively, so mysteriously, that the circumstances of his death can only be narrowed to two scenarios. One is that he was flying from his penthouse at the Fairmont Princess in Acapulco to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, for treatment of a kidney ailment. The other scenario has him dying while headed back to his home in the Xanadu Princess in Freeport from Houston after treatment for a kidney ailment.
A number of Hughes’s biographers have speculated on why Hughes chose to reside in hotels for many years. The general consensus comes down to his desire to live in a controlled, convenient environment where he could be in absolute seclusion if he wished but still be surrounded by a support structure that was always there and could always be counted on.
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Another person I met who had an interest in Howard Hughes and was a long-time hotel resident was actor/filmmaker Warren Beatty, who tried for years to make a movie about Hughes but could never quite pull it together. For just over ten years Beatty chose to live in the old, iconic Beverly Wilshire Hotel that is almost right across the street from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The actor was at loose ends in the early to mid-1960s, he was a Hollywood Lothario more famous for who he was dating than as an actor, he had been in a string of flops, and he had a bad reputation among directors and producers in town. Then a script landed in his lap, and he thought the best way to get it done was to produce it himself. The problem with his scheme, though, was that it was still the time of the studio system. To make a film at Warner Bros., for instance, you had to get the approval of Jack Warner himself. Actors usually didn’t produce movies, especially pretty-boy ones.
Beatty returned from Europe where he had been shooting on location. He didn’t have a place to live, so he checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a suite on the penthouse floor. However, his suite wasn’t as grandiose as the penthouse might indicate. He had a two-room suite, a large living room, and a bedroom divided with sliding French doors. What made the penthouse floor attractive was that the suites came with a large terrace off both the bedroom and the living room. Beatty checked into the hotel because it was a favourite haunt of his. (The Boulevard Restaurant and Boulevard Lounge were great spots to be seen having meetings in the old Hollywood.) It wasn’t his initial intention to remain there for more than ten years, but the comfort and the convenience became something he grew used to very quickly. “I can say I didn’t intend to live in the hotel that long, but since I wasn’t really actively thinking of an alternative, I must have been just fine with the arrangement,” Beatty told me. He lived in the Beverly Wilshire from age 28 through 39.
On May 9, 1998, I sat down with Beatty in a huge suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. It was one of those warm, fragrant Southern California days that capture the very essence of why so many people drift out there and never leave. The interview was being shot for television, so Beatty asked for a good deal of control as to how it would be staged. He wasn’t comfortable doing television interviews, but he was proud of his most recent film, the political satire Bulworth, and was prepared to bite this particular bullet. When I entered the suite, he worked with the lighting people to arrange how the room was lit. The illumination was quite soft and gave him an almost gauzy look on screen. Beatty was still a handsome man, so I thought the vanity lighting was unnecessary. He was comfortably dressed in corduroy pants and a thin sweater and seemed extraordinarily talkative, especially when the subject of hotels came up. I mentioned my fascination for hotels to him and asked him about
