See if I can buy them, too. Many of you know that Howard Hughes lived as a recluse in the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas and owned several other hotels as well as television stations. Hughes wielded incredible power with his 12+ billion dollar fortune, buying whatever and sometime whomever he wanted.
While it is probably a fact that he tried to ‘buy the U.S. government’ when he reportedly instructed his staff to bribe both Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson with a million dollars, it’s also been said that he tried to obtain the same influence over regular Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s of our country.
How did he try to do this you ask? Hughes was a firm believer in the sanctity of marriage and when couples were married in Las Vegas, it’s said that he would offer the newlyweds obscene amounts of money in exchange for their ‘return of favors’ at some unknown time in the future. Very ‘Godfather-ish’ if you know what I mean.
If it is true, I can’t imagine what favors Hughes thought he might gain from every-day regular people when so many powerful people already owed him so much. It’d be great to hear from anyone who was actually made this type of offer but I strongly believe that this is a story that really belongs here in, the myth files.
Mr. Hughes even had John Wayne act in his movie the Conqueror. Then kept it hidden away so only he could view the film. The film was released after his death. Of the 220 people who worked on the movie in Utah in 1955, many contracted cancer and 46 died of including John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead (Sam’s mother in Bewitched), Susan Hayward and director Dick Powell. According to experts, only 30 people out of a group that size should have gotten cancer. Many attribute the staff’s cancer to radioactive fallout from atomic bomb test in Nevada.
