Monday, April 24, 2006

From the E-Mailbag...

About eleven seconds after I posted the previous item, Del Williams wrote...

What was the name of the movie Howard Hughes liked to watch over and over when he was living in Vegas? I remember there was one that was his favorite but I can't for the life of me recall what it was.

It was Ice Station Zebra, the 1968 movie that starred Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. According to one report, Hughes would run it at least three times a week and would occasionally get on a kick of watching his 16mm print over and over, back to back, several times a day. He had a Graflex projector with an add-on sound system that allowed him to crank the volume up to almost deafening levels because of his poor hearing. He had a whole library of films that he ran over and over including The Sting and the James Bond films that starred Sean Connery. It is not known if he had any particular reaction to Diamonds Are Forever, which was set in Vegas and featured Jimmy Dean as a Hughes-like billionaire.

The story I love about Hughes' movie watching is that he got hooked on the late night movies being run on KLAS, which was the local CBS affiliate. Just as he'd ordered his staff to have Swanson change the contents of their TV dinners, he sometimes told them to call the station and have them run a particular movie he wanted to see. To make it easier for this to happen, he soon bought the station...and thereafter, he didn't need the 16mm projector much. He'd have his crew phone the station and tell them what movie Mr. Hughes wanted to see next...and that's what would be broadcast to all of Vegas without advance announcement or commercial interruption. Once in a while, he got bored with a movie and he'd have them stop a film in the middle and start a different one. This is very similar to what NBC recently did with Celebrity Cooking Showdown.

One of the technicians who worked at the station later told the story of getting a call late one night informing him that Mr. Hughes wanted to see an episode of Sugarfoot, the old western series starring Will Hutchins. The technician replied that he'd be glad to thread one up but the station didn't have any reels of Sugarfoot in its library. The voice on the other end of the line said, "We'll get you one." A few hours later, a print of Sugarfoot arrived. It had been flown in from Los Angeles by one of the airlines that Hughes owned, probably on an otherwise-empty plane since there were then no scheduled LAX-LAS flights after Midnight. Back before the VCR was popular, home video could be kind of expensive.

• Posted at 2:28 AM · LINK

I Scream, You Scream...

From someone named Jason comes this message that I had to share with you all...

As an ex-employee of Ben and Jerry's (I was a former tour guide at the original factory in Waterbury), I can tell you why Vermonty Python is only available in pints: variety. In order to have the most flavors available at a given time, Ben and Jerry's makes some flavors pint exclusives, like Karamel Sutra and Vermonty Python, and some flavors scoop shop exclusives, like Bananas on the Rum. This way, they can keep making some of the less popular flavors that are on the cusp of going to the Flavor Graveyard™. Another reason is convenience. Vanilla Caramel Fudge is only available in pints because it was such a mess in the scoop shops (yes I also worked in a scoop shop, I was almost a lifer) due to the fact that the fudge and caramel pooled to the bottom of the 2.5 gallon tub, leaving a tasty, goopy soup. Hope that sheds some light on the subject.

It does...and it reminds me that I've never told my favorite Howard Hughes story here. It goes back to the period when Hughes was living on the top floor of the Desert Inn in Vegas. That's the hotel that tried to evict him so he bought the place.

Hughes was living in a darkened bedroom with coverings over all the windows. He would spend all day either fiddling with paperwork that never meant anything or watching television. A small, well-paid staff would wait on him, which usually amounted to bringing him fast food or TV dinners. Hughes would see a commercial for Arby's roast beef sandwiches and he'd say, "I want to eat that," so his handlers would fetch him Arby's for all his meals for a week or two. Then he'd see an ad for Swanson's TV dinners and he'd say, "Get me that," and that would be his meal of choice for a few weeks...and so on.

There was a brief crisis when Hughes tried the Swanson's entrees. He preferred the turkey over the chicken, but the turkey came with peach cobbler, which Hughes didn't like. He liked the apple cobbler included in the chicken dinners...so he ordered his staff to call Swanson's and tell them to switch the cobblers. The "Mormon Mafia" (as his employees were called) pretended to do this but what they'd really do is buy one of each dinner and swap the dessert when they served Mr. Hughes his Swanson's turkey dinner.

That's how one of the world's richest men dined for years — Arby's, KFC, Bird's Eye, etc. In the meantime, all the folks who waited on him were feasting at the most expensive Vegas restaurants...on expense accounts.

But that's not the story I wanted to tell. The one I want to tell — and as far as I know, it's true — began one day when Hughes saw a commercial for Baskin-Robbins and decided to try some ice cream. An employee was dispatched to the local 31 Flavors to bring back 31 scoops — one of each current variety. Hughes sampled them all and chose Banana Nut as his favorite. Thereafter, no matter what he had as a meal, he'd be served a scoop of Banana Nut for dessert.

This went on until one day when a staffer noticed their supply was running low. A runner was sent to buy more but he reported back that Baskin-Robbins had rotated the flavor off its current list. Someone called the ice cream manufacturer and asked when it would be back. The answer was, "Some time next year." None of Hughes' employees wanted to go in and tell the old man that they couldn't bring him the Banana Nut ice cream he loved...so they asked the company if they could make up a special batch for Mr. Hughes. The Baskin-Robbins people said they'd be glad to, but the minimum order was a thousand gallons.

Again, no one wanted to bring bad news to the billionaire...so they ordered the thousand gallons. They also rented refrigerated trucks to transport the order from the Baskin-Robbins plant in Southern California to Vegas, and ordered the kitchen manager at the Desert Inn to find space in their refrigerators for a thousand gallons of ice cream. This required several days of work and the purchase and installation of several new freezers.

The caravan of trucks arrived just in time. The day it all got there was the day they served Mr. Hughes the last remaining scoop of Banana Nut ice cream from the old supply. He finished it off and announced, "That was great but it's time for a change. From now on, I want French Vanilla."

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

What we have here is a clip from The Tonight Show for January 23, 1974. Johnny Carson's guests that night included Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, Maria Muldaur, Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman and Jim Henson...and this is Henson's spot with Kermit the Frog. You can see a bit of Benny at the end.

It's really world-class puppeteering. Henson was not a ventriloquist but he manipulated Kermit so well and gave him so much personality that you never really notice that Jim's lips are moving. (Although I always suspected that he grew the beard and mustache, which he did not have when he first began appearing on television, because they helped hide his mouth.) It's also quite charming that Kermit forgets the lyrics to his signature song...

• Posted at 12:22 AM · LINK