Excerpt taken from The Players : The Men Who Made Las Vegas edited by Jack Sheehan:
The story of Howard Hughes in Las Vegas is largely the account of an indomitable mind trapped in a worn-out body…
Hughes suffered from a menagerie of phobias, manias, obsessions, delusions, and an inordinate fear of germs. To insulate himself from germs, he shunned handshakes and opened doorknobs with a Kleenex tissue. His eating utensils were wrapped in Kleenex. His imitation-leather recliner was blanketed with paper towels, as were his bed sheets. And yet, he very seldom bathed and never brushed his teeth. While in Las Vegas, he went through a period when he would splash rubbing alcohol on his body in a monotonous ritual of purification. He had a litany of phobias: bacteria, dust, sewage, rats, flies, dirty fingernails, atomic radiation, and the circus at Jay Sarno’s Circus Circus casino.
"The aspect of the Circus that has me disturbed is the popcorn, peanuts and kids side of it," Hughes wrote in a six-page memo to Robert Maheu, the man who ran Hughes’s Nevada operations. "And also the Carnival Freaks and Animal side of it. In other words, the poor, dirty, shoddy side of Circus life. The dirt floor, sawdust, and elephants. The part of the Circus that is associated with the poor boys in town. The part of the Circus that is associated with the common poor man.
"It is the above aspect of a circus that I feel are all out of place on the Las Vegas Strip. After all, the Strip is supposed to be synonymous with a good looking female all dressed up in a very expensive diamond studded evening gown and driving up to a multi-million dollar hotel in a Rolls Royce. No, you tell me what, in that picture, is compatible with a circus in its normal raiment, exuding its normal atmosphere and its normal smell?"
Does anyone like the circus?
