Howard Hughes: Business and Life

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was the reclusive billionaire, airline owner, aviator, government contractor, and film producer who would have a major impact on the future of Las Vegas after moving there in 1966. By the late 1960s, he owned six casinos on the Las Vegas Strip as well as other hotel-casinos and businesses around the state. Hughes was determined to rid Las Vegas of its ties to organized crime. His presence brought credibility to casino gambling as a business, and contributed to ushering in the era of corporate ownership of casinos. He also had a long-term influence on other aspects of Las Vegas' growth and development.

Exhibit gallery text by Jeff Burbank.

All photographs courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

For further information see Jeff Burbank's article on Howard Hughes.

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Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Dressed in casual wear of the day, Hughes lounged in a director’s chair beside a film crew on the set of an early film he produced in Hollywood, California, circa 1930. Hughes’s career as the producer of at least seven commercial films started in the late 1920s, with Everybody’s Acting in 1927, followed by Two Arabian Knights, a 1928 comedy with a young Boris Karloff, which won an Academy Award for best comedy direction. Hughes showed a knack for producing films that succeeded at the box office, including hits such as the 1930 picture Hell's Angels starring Jean Harlow and directed by James Whale, and the original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and released in 1932. His last film, The Outlaw, was released in 1943 and launched the career of actress Jane Russell.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Hughes during a happy moment at his desk, most likely at the Hughes Aircraft Company in Burbank, California, circa 1940.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

In 1940, Hughes met President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., the year after Hughes was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for his aviation achievements. By then, Hughes was an established worldwide celebrity. He had won the Harmon Trophy, an international award for aviation, in 1936 and again in 1938 for his record-breaking, round-the-world flight completed in just over three days in July of that year. In 1939 Hughes received the national Chanute Flight Award for aviation engineering.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Hughes, in a fedora and long coat, reviews a shooting script with screenwriter Jules Furthman on the set of Hughes's last film, The Outlaw. Hughes both produced and directed the 1941 Western, starring newcomer actress Jane Russell. The film, about the Old West character Billy the Kid, attracted attention from censors due to Russell’s sultry appearance, which Hughes exploited on screen and in movie posters. In fact, Hughes is said to have designed a special wired brassiere for Russell. The film was released briefly in 1941 and 1943 but was ordered withdrawn by censors. Hughes sought to exploit the controversy—and Russell as a sex symbol—for publicity. It would later become a smash hit when Twentieth-Century Fox put it into general release in 1946.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Hughes enjoyed a light moment in the 1940s with Noah Dietrich, the brilliant chief executive of Hughes's business empire. Dietrich was originally hired in 1925 to run the Hughes Tool Company after Hughes took control of the firm from his family at age nineteen. In 1947, Dietrich convinced Hughes that U.S. Senator Owen Brewster, who alleged that Hughes failed to make good on government defense contracts, had an ulterior motive. Dietrich insisted that Brewster was actually seeking to block Hughes’s Trans World Airlines and pass legislation permitting only rival airline Pan American Airways to offer international flights from the United States. Dietrich quit Hughes in 1957 in a dispute over a compensation agreement.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

On August 6, 1947, Hughes, flanked by aides Thomas Black (left) and Noah Dietrich (right), held documents while making a statement during a hearing in Washington, D.C. The hearing was held by the Senate War Investigating Committee and chaired by Sen. Owen Brewster, a Republican from Maine. Brewster, a staunch critic of Hughes, accused him of misspending $40 million in government money during World War II on Hughes’s H-4 Hercules flying boat and complained that the plane was never completed during the war. Hughes insisted that he spent millions of his own money on the project and claimed that the owner of Pan American Airways had lobbied the senator to embarrass Hughes to prevent Hughes’s airline, Trans World Airways, from obtaining federal approval to offer international commercial flights. The Senate committee never took action against Hughes.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Hughes sat in front of an opened file folder, holding a discussion in his office at the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1947, the year of his brief flight on the Hughes H-4 Hercules “Spruce Goose” aircraft and his creation of the company's helicopter manufacturing division.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

A portrait of a smiling Hughes, probably taken in the late 1940s, around the time he became the top shareholder in the RKO movie production studio in Los Angeles.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

This shot of a serious-looking Hughes, on August 17, 1954, sans his trademark mustache, was intended for company brochures printed for the Hughes Aircraft Company. It was one of the last photos he would pose for. Later that year, he bought out all other stockholders to become sole owner of the RKO film production company, which he then sold for a profit in 1955.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

The Hughes Executive Air Terminal as it appeared in the late 1960s. Hughes bought the airfield, on Las Vegas Boulevard South near Sunset Road, in 1967 from Alamo Airways owner George Crockett and converted it into an airport for private planes. The terminal is now a part of McCarran International Airport.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

The resort atmosphere of the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, bought by Hughes in 1967, is shown in this aerial photo from the early 1970s. By then, the Frontier had six tennis courts leading to its central pool area. In 1968, Hughes became the first Las Vegas hotel operator to install a computerized system to handle room reservations. Hughes’s company sold the Frontier to Margaret Elardi in the late 1980s.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

Robert “Bob” Maheu, posing for this color portrait in the 1970s, was a former FBI agent and contract investigator for the CIA whom Hughes appointed in 1966 to oversee the billionaire’s hotel-casino operations in Las Vegas. Maheu, Hughes’s trusted spokesman and legal representative with power of attorney, communicated with his boss almost entirely by phone and handwritten memos. Maheu claimed to have seen Hughes only twice in the four years he worked in Las Vegas, until Hughes fired him in 1970. Maheu died in 2008 at age ninety.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

In an extraordinary news conference on January 9, 1972, televised live with a panel of journalists at a Los Angeles hotel, a sixty-six-year-old Hughes called from the Bahamas to an amplified telephone (center) to denounce a planned autobiography, purportedly cowritten by him and novelist Clifford Irving, as a fake. The sensational book was to be published by McGraw-Hill with excerpts in LIFE magazine. But Hughes said that he had not even met Irving. “I never saw him. I never even heard of him until a matter of days ago when this first came to my attention.” Weeks later Irving confessed that the book was a hoax, was convicted on fraud charges, and served seventeen months in prison.

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Howard Hughes: Business and Life

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