Among my various and sundry oddball interests, I am fascinated by the life and legend of Howard Hughes. His biography is, in my humble estimation, a quintessentially American tragedy, the story of a guy who possessed all the superficial trappings that everyone thinks will make them happy — wealth, fame, power, sex appeal — but who ended up as a miserable and pathetic wreck of a human being. The very trait that made him so successful in his various pursuits — his obsessiveness — was also his ultimate downfall.<\/p>\n
Although this isn’t the period of Howard’s life that most interests me, even I have to admit that there is something compelling about the stories of his years spent hiding from the world in Las Vegas hotel rooms. Partly, it’s the lure of voyeurism, the shameful tendency we all have to want to gawk at the carnival freaks. But I think it’s also partly because many of these stories are, well, charming<\/i> — Howard’s often child-like behavior and low-brow tastes humanize the icon of wealth and evoke our sympathies, rather than merely our pity or disgust.<\/p>\n Mark Evanier<\/a>, who is something of a sage when it comes to the old, pre-Disneyfied Vegas, related a number of these stories on his blog a couple weeks ago. They’re all worth a look if you’re in need of something to occupy your attention on this Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n I’ve heard the first one<\/a>, which tells of the ends to which Howard’s staff goes in order to keep the boss supplied with his favorite ice-cream flavor, before. It’s recounted in a several sources, but it feels apocryphal to me, considering that it all seems to flow toward an inevitable punchline. Still, it is a funny punchline, and Evanier is good at telling it.<\/p>\n Evanier also details <\/a> what an immensely wealthy man had to do in order to see his favorite movie on television in the days before VHS, and then he wraps up with kind of a catch-all entry<\/a> that covers Howard’s connection to the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever<\/i>, and a little more about what it was like to live in Howard’s Vegas.<\/p>\n Yep, a fascinating guy, that Howard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Among my various and sundry oddball interests, I am fascinated by the life and legend of Howard Hughes. His biography is, in my humble estimation, a quintessentially American tragedy, the story of a guy who possessed all the superficial trappings that everyone thinks will make them happy — wealth, fame, power, sex appeal — but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esoterica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI think most people today, certainly most younger people, know Howard only as the guy that Leo<\/a> played in that one movie<\/a> (which I quite liked, by the way). There was a time, however, when his name was one of the best-known in the world, first for his astounding personal wealth, then for his achievements, then, sadly, for his deepening mental problems and truly bizarre final years as a reclusive germophobe. It was this image of Howard Hughes with which I first became acquainted, thanks to my mother’s interest in the Melvin Dummar<\/a> trial when I was a child. And I think it is this image of Howard that is lodged most firmly in our popular culture; even folks who don’t recognize Howard’s name laugh when Mr. Burns becomes a parody of Howard<\/a> on The Simpsons<\/i>, because they have heard whispered tales of some insane billionaire who really did let his personal hygiene go to hell while his underlings ran the empire.<\/p>\n