Oddlet: Howard Hughes · 1 min read
Aug 26, 2026
The Man Who Bought the Hotel So He Wouldn't Have to Leave
What does a billionaire do when the hotel manager tries to evict him from the suite he refuses to leave?
Howard Hughes set a landplane speed record of 352 mph in 1935, flew the Spruce Goose twenty-five feet above Long Beach harbor in 1947, and produced Scarface. By Thanksgiving Day 1966 he was a 6'4" man in a darkened ninth-floor suite of the Desert Inn, refusing to come out.
The manager, Moe Dalitz, tried to evict him. Hughes bought the hotel for $13.2 million. Over the next year he bought the Sands, the Castaways, and the Frontier for roughly $60 million more. He stayed four years and never left the suite.
He wore Kleenex boxes on his feet. He communicated only by handwritten memos on yellow legal pads, delivered by aides, mostly LDS, called the Mormon Mafia, who were required to wash their hands four distinct and separate times. One memo, on how to open a can of peaches, ran to nine steps and included a section titled "Fallout Rules While Around Can."
His favorite ice cream was Baskin-Robbins banana-nut. Baskin-Robbins discontinued it. The aides pressed the company until it produced a special batch of 350 gallons and trucked it to the Desert Inn.
The day it arrived, Hughes announced he now preferred French vanilla.
The hotel spent close to a year giving the banana-nut away.
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- Wikipedia: Howard Hughes — Comprehensive sourced biography covering birth/death dates, aviation records, RKO acquisition, XF-11 crash, OCD behaviors, Mormon Mafia, Las Vegas/Bahamas/Acapulco timeline, and details of death.
- Britannica: Howard Hughes — Encyclopedic overview of Hughes's career: Hughes Tool Company inheritance, Hollywood productions, aviation milestones, and final reclusive years.
- OCD-UK: Howard Hughes — Detailed clinical account of Hughes's OCD rituals: tissue boxes on feet, scrubbing cans to bare metal, layered handwashing, burning clothing after illness exposure, nude isolation in darkened rooms, untrimmed nails and hair.
- APA Monitor: 'Hughes's germ phobia revealed in psychological autopsy' — Reports Dr. Raymond D. Fowler's six-year psychological autopsy; sources the canned-peach protocol, tissue-box footwear, nude darkened-room isolation.
- HISTORY.com: 'Business magnate Howard Hughes dies' — Confirms April 5, 1976 death date and circumstances of the Learjet flight from Acapulco, death from kidney failure.
- Wikipedia: Hughes XF-11
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