Local hotel marks 40 years since visit from Howard Hughes
Posted March 13, 2012 7:54 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – He was once the world’s most famous reclusive billionaire and for six months he made Vancouver his home.
Tomorrow marks 40 years since Howard Hughes holed himself up at what was then known as the Bayshore Inn.
A brilliant inventor and Hollywood playboy, by the time he arrived here on March 14, 1972, he was best known as a germaphobic hermit.
Westin Bayshore General Manager Marion Harper Treskin says the visit was cloaked in secrecy. “They arrived very early in the morning to obviously avoid any attention. Howard Hughes as well as his full entourage, which included his security staff, dietitians, personal housekeepers, and they basically took over the top two floors of the Tower Building.”
His attention to detail bordered on the obsessive, but Harper Treskin will only say he was a guest with a certain set of needs. “Whether or not he was germaphobic, I can’t say. But he obviously had some very high standards and specific things he wanted taken care of and that’s why he had his own team. Our housekeepers did not enter his room.”
The hotel is now offering its own version of the Howard Hughes experience.
“For the Howard Hughes suite package itself, you actually enter the hotel, hopefully quietly, head up to your room and have the ability to stay basically in your room for the entire time that you’re here,” explains Harper Treskin. “So you’ve got a hundred dollar food and beverage credit, so you can have a nice quiet dinner in your room, there’s a complimentary movie voucher for while you’re staying as well as a spa credit for a massage in your room and then a late check-out the next morning so you can hopefully sneak by all the papparazzi when you leave the hotel.”
Heritage Vancouver will also be conducting tours of the property and of the suite itself this spring.
Hughes died four years after his famous visit. He was 70.
