I Was Howard Hughes

by Steven Carter

  “That’s it,” she said and she scooted under the wheel and started the car.

  “No,” I said.

  She didn’t say another word. She just pulled out, tires screeching.

  After the car disappeared around the first curve going down the hill the quiet one moved up and jerked my arms behind my back and taped my wrists together. He taped my mouth. The talker put on glasses. He had papers again and he pointed his flashlight at them.

  “Mr. Hughes has had his chances,” he read, “but this was his last one. He could have avoided this if he had just expressed his love to Miss Gardner and left it at that, but no, he had to use this cross, once again, for his own selfish pleasure. Mr. Hughes has committed this blasphemy for the last time. He is one of the proud of the earth, but now his offending member is going to be cut off.”

  I wheeled and started running down the hill. After a few seconds, I heard heavy breathing behind me and then a fist to the back of the neck dropped me. I rolled down the hill; it was steep and with my hands tied behind my back it took me awhile to stop myself, but when I did and tried to get up again, a foot between my shoulder blades shoved me back down. A pillowcase or hood or something was thrown over my head.

  I was led back up the hill and put into the backseat of a car. They taped my ankles together. Then we rode for maybe twenty minutes, and when we stopped, they dragged me out of the car and into a building. I know we went through two doors because I heard them open and shut. I was laid on a bed and my feet and hands were untaped and the hood was removed. They untaped my mouth. Then they left the room. The door closed and the lock clicked. From my fall I had bad road burns on my chest, shoulders and stomach, these raw exposed patches of pink and red flesh. They hurt like hell and had asphalt grime dug into them.

  The room was painted white and had a white tile floor— everything was white. Over my bed was a light on a collapsible arm like the ones over a dentist’s chair. It was turned off. The bed was iron and painted white, and there were three windows in the room, all in a row on the far wall, the glass in them painted white. A white metal straightback chair sat at the foot of the bed and a white metal hospital-looking dresser was next to the door. There was nothing else in the room, no pictures, nothing.

  I was certain I was getting ready to either die or have my balls cut off. I started panicking. I got up and tried the windows but they were locked and I couldn’t figure out how. So I took a pillowcase from the bed and put it over my fist and punched at a pane of glass— they were big nine-pane windows— and the glass broke but didn’t shatter, and in the cracks between the shards of glass I saw wire mesh. I hit it again, wincing, gritting my teeth— anytime I moved my arms my burns stretched and hurt even worse— and this time some glass fell out but the mesh didn’t give. I realized I’d have to break the tic-tac-toe frame that held the panes. I got the chair and swung it into the window. More glass cracked, but the frame stayed intact. I hit the window again and again and eventually broke off enough wood to see that the frame was metal behind a wood veneer.

  I quit and laid down. The places where I’d broken the glass let some cool air into the room. I must have laid there for an hour. My burns were drying out and starting to itch and it was driving me crazy. Once I started crying but I stopped. I didn’t want to go out that way if I could help it.

  Finally the door opened and in walked Hughes himself. He was naked as a jaybird and carrying a white metal case. Son of a bitch really did look like me. It was uncanny. Like looking in a mirror.

  He walked to the window, tiptoeing around the broken glass, and examined what I’d done. Then he pulled the straightback chair over beside the bed and sat down. He laid the case on the bed and opened it and inside were medical instruments and supplies. “Are you in pain?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He took out a syringe and a dark glass bottle and started drawing its contents into the syringe. “This should help,” he said.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Just medicine,” he said.

  He motioned for me to roll onto my side and I did— I thought it possible he was giving me something that would kill me, but my burns were hurting so bad by that time, itching so much, I was ready to risk anything to make it stop. He yanked my pants down off my hip and gave me the shot. I could tell from the way it hit me it had morphine in it. My pain eased right away.

  He took gauze, a jar of sulfa, and forceps out of the case. “We’ve got to get you cleaned up so you don’t get infected,” he said. He positioned the spotlight over my chest and turned it on. It blinded me and I had to close my eyes. Then I felt the cold forceps in one of my burns, picking at a tiny pebble. He dropped it into a metal pan, ping.

  “Looks like it’s not too easy being me,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “But the pay’s pretty good, isn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded again.

  “So how’d you like Ava?” he said.

  I hesitated. I thought how I answered might mean life or death. I opened my eyes to see what kind of expression was on his face, to see if he looked angry, but I was immediately blinded by the spotlight so I shut my eyes again.

  “I said how did you like Ava?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Just okay?” he said and I felt the forceps dig into my flesh a little. I jerked away.

  “Is she okay, or is she better than okay?” he said.

  “Better,” I said.

  “Is that all? Just better?” he said.

  “More,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “The truth.”

  “When I saw her without her clothes on I was willing to do whatever I had to— anything— to be with her,” I said. “I didn’t care if I had to spend the rest of my life running from you. I know I messed up, but please don’t do what you said you would. Please.”

  He kept working. Ping. Ping.

  “You know, when I was a boy,” he said, “never in my wildest dreams would I have seen myself sitting here like I am right now.”

  That caught me off guard, so it took me a moment to answer.

  “Yeah, I guess the same goes for me,” I said.

  “How in hell did it happen?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Ping. Then I felt the forceps leave my flesh.

  “No use thinking about it,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  He started working on me again.

  “Tell me about Tucson,” he said.

  So I started telling him about the college girl. He laughed a lot and asked a few questions, but I must’ve passed out while I was talking because I don’t remember anything else until the next morning, when I woke up in Los Angeles City Hospital. No idea how I got there. First thing I did was grab between my legs— everything was there.

  When I checked out three days later, there was a locked satchel with my name on it in the patient-valuable safe and inside it was fifty thousand dollars. I ended up with close to sixty thousand dollars for two months’ work for Hughes.

  I blew it all, every penny, within a year.

  The Screening Room

  On December 24, 1957— Howard Hughes’s fifty-second birthday— he left the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel that he shared with his wife of eleven months, Jean Peters, and had an aide drive him to a small screening room owned by a friend. The screening room was the size of a three-car garage and was in disrepair, with flaking white paint and a scratchy sound system. Two days earlier, Hughes had had the theater seats removed and replaced with a cheap red vinyl recliner, a small table beside it and a tall lamp behind it. A telephone was on the floor.

  The night of his arrival Hughes sat down in the recliner with a bag of candy bars, stacked seven boxes of Kleenex on the table, and signaled for a film to start, Blood and Sand, a bullfighting melodrama starring his wife. He watched it three times in a row, tears running down his cheeks through most of the third showing. Then he signaled for Hitchcock�
��s Strangers on a Train to start. When that ended, he watched The Bridges at Toko-Ri with William Holden.

  Except to use the bathroom across the hall Hughes didn’t leave this screening room for five months. Movies ran anywhere from eight to twelve hours a day, and during his stay he watched 317 different ones. He never changed clothes, and instead went naked when the clothes he had on that first night grew too filthy and tattered to wear. He never bathed. He ate nothing but candy bars and Texas pecans, and drank only milk. He did not allow anyone to speak to him, but instead made aides write their messages on yellow legal pads; he answered the same way. He was obsessed with germs to a greater degree than ever before; however, he would often urinate against the wall rather than make use of the bathroom across the hall. Once, when he was asleep in his chair, aides started to clean the room because they could no longer bear the stench; Hughes awoke and in a rage stopped them. Paradoxically, though, he would not touch any surface unless his hand was protected by several layers of Kleenex, and upon awakening he would usually spend anywhere from one to four hours cleaning the telephone with Kleenex. He sometimes made as many as seventy-five phone calls a day. But he never called Jean Peters; instead, with a series of letters hand-delivered to her by his aides, he led her to believe he was in a hospital in a secret location because he had a highly contagious mystery disease no doctor could identify or cure.

  After Hughes left the screening room, he was never quite the same again. He almost never appeared in public and always conducted his business over the telephone or through proxies. The man of charm, ambition, and unparalleled accomplishment, was gone.

  Alton Reece’s second interview with Jean Peters

  My bus arrives at the Houston Greyhound station just after two A.M. The station is on an access road in an older, industrial section of the city, and I start walking down this road, lugging my duffel. The only traffic I meet is a yellow low rider that passes me slowly, blasting music with Spanish lyrics, breaking the late-night silence of the deserted smokestack-and-chain-link landscape. Finally I come to a motel, a mom-and-pop affair with a yellow neon sign that says MOTE — the lights for the L and the word SHOBE’S above it are burned out and they stand in dark silhouette against the starless city sky. The motel is three low one-story buildings arranged in a U. From the interior of the U I hear loud music and voices, a party. I find the entrance to the office at the end of the first building, a glass door with a collapsible metal gate pulled across it, beside it a glass-and-mesh window with a speaking grate and under it a revolving tray. There’s no light in the office, but I find an unmarked doorbell button and push it, which produces a muted buzz. No one appears. I push the buzzer again, and then again. Finally, a light comes on inside, and a moment later a young man appears, bleary-eyed, wearing a light blue jersey with 13 on it and blue gym shorts with white piping — he has an erection pushing at his shorts but he seems completely unself-conscious about it. He doesn’t ask what I want, but just stares at me sullenly. I ask what a room costs and he mumbles thirty-five plus tax. I tell him I only have thirty. He nods, and revolves the empty tray so I can put my money in the well. I drop the bills, he revolves the tray, then revolves it again and in the well there’s a key. Then he turns around and disappears through a doorway. A moment later, the light goes out.

  I find my room, check the bed linens, and take the fitted sheet off the mattress because it’s stained. Then I shower for the first time in three days, though there’s no soap provided, no towels. I lay naked on the bare, musty-smelling mattress until I dry off. There’s no air-conditioning, and when I check the television I find only two channels and these are wavy. Outside, the party sounds as if it’s spilling into the courtyard parking lot, voices in both English and Spanish, Southern rock music twenty years out of date, and some strange popping sounds I can’t identify. Finally, I fall into a hot, fitful sleep.

  I awaken early, unrested, drenched in sweat, with a slight headache. I take another shower, dry myself with the bedspread, then dress and leave.

  I don’t have a watch, but I know I walk at least an hour, until finally I reach a business district with office buildings and coffee stands. I see a bank clock that says it’s 8:17. I sit down on a bench near a coffee stand and a pay phone, and wait until the bank clock says it’s nine before I call Jean Peters on the pay phone and ask if it’s convenient for her to see me today, I have a couple of things I need to ask her about. After a moment’s hesitation, she says yes, but give her an hour, then, no, make it an hour and a half

  I use the last of my money for bus fare. The nearest bus stop to Jean Peters’s affluent neighborhood is still a twenty-minute walk away, and the route I have to take is a busy four-lane with no sidewalks and a very narrow shoulder. Each moment it seems as if I’ll be hit by oncoming traffic, and more than a few impatient drivers blow their horns when they have to swerve a bit to avoid me. By the time I reach the guardhouse at the gate to Jean Peters’s community my clothes are drenched in sweat. The guard steps out of his hut and brusquely asks what I want — it’s a different guard than last time, a young, bulky Samoan, his billed officer’s hat too small for him, perched on the crown of his head comically, like a beanie, looking as if the slightest breeze would knock it off. I tell him my name and who I’m there to see. He reaches into the door of the hut for a clipboard, examines the top page, then the page under it, and says, You’re supposed to be in a 1985 Ford station wagon. Well, I say, the last time I was. Yeah, then where is it? he says, smirking, obviously taking pleasure in the petty power he’s exercising. I start to argue with him, then remember that all I want is to get past him, so I smile and say I sold the car. That right? he says. Huh. Well, let me call Miss Peters and see what she thinks.

  It takes me another ten minutes to walk to Jean Peters’s condominium. H. L. Landry’s dark blue Cadillac is parked in her driveway. When I ring the bell, the door opens almost immediately. Jean Peters greets me, does a quick double take she tries to hide, then in her gracious way says it’s good to see me again. She’s walking without a cane now, though she still has a slight limp. H. L. Landry is in the living room watching television. He gets up from the couch and comes out to the hallway to shake my hand. Then Jean Peters and I go down the hall to the breakfast nook, and she reminds me that our original agreement about our interview is still in effect. I say there’s a small problem with that, the batteries in my recorder are dead. She asks what type I need, then goes into the kitchen and opens a drawer, rummages through it, and pulls out an unopened pack of triple A’s and brings it to the table. I thank her, load the batteries, and we begin the interview.

  AR: Boy, it’s really nice to be somewhere where it’s cool. It seems like I’ve been walking all morning.

  JP: Would you like some water?

  AR: If it’s not too much trouble.

  (She gets up and fills a glass of water at the refrigerator dispenser and brings it back to the table.)

  JP: There. Now, Alton, what did you want to see me about?

  AR: (I drink.) I have this letter. (I lean over and unzip my duffel and rummage until I find the letter, then hand it to her.) I believe you wrote that to Hughes when he disappeared at the end of nineteen-fifty-seven, when he went to the screening room in Hollywood for five months.

  JP: (Looking over the letter.) Yes, I wrote this.

  AR: If you want to keep it, you’re welcome to. I have a copy.

  JP: No, I have no use for it. (She pushes it back across the table.)

  AR: What I was hoping was that you might have some of the letters Hughes wrote to you during that time.

  JP: (She considers.) Well, I do have a lot of Howard’s correspondence, and there could be some letters from that time.

  I suppose I can check. He wrote me a lot during that period, but most of them were so painful to read I just threw them away. (She stares out the window a moment, then she shakes her head, pushes her chair away from the table and stands up.) If I do have any of those letters, though, you understa
nd that I can’t let you take them, don’t you? You’ll have to copy them. You can use my computer to type them, if you want.

  AR: That’s fine.

  (She starts down the hallway that leads into the back of the condo.)

  AR: Mrs. Peters?

  JP: (Stopping.) Yes?

  AR: DO you have an Internet connection?

  JP: Yes.

  AR: Would it be okay if I got on-line while you’re looking for those letters? I need to check my email. I’d really appreciate it.

  JP: Yes, all right. Come on.

  (I follow her down the hallway. There are four closed doors on the hallway, one at the end, two on one side and one on the other. She stops at the first door on the side that has two doors and opens it.)

  JP: It’s already on, all you have to do is turn on the monitor.

  Just click on the ISP icon. The password’s stored.

  AR: Thank you.

  (She leaves the door open when she leaves, and then heads back toward the kitchen. A moment later, she passes the doorway again going down the hall, and then H. L. Landry appears in the doorway of the room I’m in. He nods at me, then just stands in the doorway with his hands behind his back, watching me. I sit down at the computer, which is on an antique oak table positioned against the wall opposite the door. The table is cluttered, has papers scattered on it, knickknacks, framed photos, a green-shaded railroad lamp. I switch on the lamp, turn on the monitor, and use the mouse to start the connection. While I’m waiting for the connection to complete I glance at the papers on the desk, the knickknacks — there’s a little glass dome that (
  My email has 114 messages. There’s only one from my wife and it’s almost six weeks old; I count eight from my editor, three from my agent, nineteen from Lisa Trundle, two from my lawyer, three from the Hughes Archives, a total of twenty-seven from my three assistants. I open the message from my wife first and begin reading, but before I’m halfway through it I stop and hit Delete. Then I keep deleting unopened messages until the inbox is empty.)