Is there anyone still alive that might be aware of what Howard Hughes was up to (I’m supposing beginning in the mid-fifties) by quietly managing individual careers, Elvis perhaps being his first project?
HH became a life-long fan of mine, and although I never met him, he was ALWAYS THERE. I realized early-on that there was some kind of magic connected to the opportunities that were coming my way, but only recently began seeing these bits of ‘happenstance’ as a deliberate effort on the part of a person who was forever ‘BIGGER THAN LIFE.’
I know that his influence was present at The Hungry i and Purple Onion in San Francisco, and that my move to Los Angeles was orchestrated by him in 1955. He worked through Larry Tucker (the gifted writer that emerged later, i.e.'Bob And Carol And Ted and Alice'), guiding me to John Walsh’s 881 Club, where he saw EVERY SHOW I DID FOR WEEKS, then put me in Shreveport, LA, half a block from Elvis, for a month.
The ‘evidence’ became easier to identify later on.