Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  But Hughes was no longer listening. He reached over to a bedside night table, grabbed a long yellow legal pad, and, propping it up on his knees, scrawled a fevered memo to his chief of staff, Robert Maheu.

  “I hate to be quick on the draw,” wrote Hughes, “but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I dont aspire to be President, but I do want political strength.…

  “I have wanted this for a long time, but somehow it has always evaded me. I mean the kind of an organization so that we would never have to worry about a jerky little thing like this anti-trust problem—not in 100 years.

  “And I mean the kind of a set up that, if we wanted to, could put Gov. Laxalt in the White House in 1972 or 76.*

  “Anyway, it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands. Also, if we approach them quickly and skillfully, they should be as anxious to find a haven with us as we are to obtain them.…

  “So, in consideration of my own nervous system, will you please move like lightning on this deal—first, to report to me whom you think we want, of Kennedy’s people, and second to contact such people with absolutely no delay the minute I confirm your recommendation. I repeat, the absolutely imperative nature of this mission requires the very ultimate in skill. If it is not so handled, and if this project should leak out, I am sure that I will be absolutely crucified by the press.…

  “However, I have confidence that you can handle this deal, and I think the potential, in manpower and in a political machine all built and operating, I think these potentials are just inestimable, and worth the risk—provided you move fast. Please let me hear at once.”

  Hughes lifted his ball-point pen, read the memo over carefully, and signed it “Howard.” He slipped the two-page message into a large manila envelope, then snapped one long fingernail smartly against a brown paper bag hanging at his bedside as a depository for used Kleenex. It made a sharp noise, summoning from an adjoining room one of the five male attendants who served him in rotating shifts around the clock. The Mormon aide licked the flap, sealed the envelope, and carried it to an armed security guard stationed just outside, separated from the Hughes suite by a locked door that had been specially installed in the hotel hallway. The guard, in turn, took an elevator nine flights down, walked a few yards, and delivered Hughes’s memo to Robert Maheu at his home next door to the hotel.

  Maheu, an outwardly genial former FBI agent whose soft round features masked a toughness only hinted at by his cold black eyes, apparently failed to fully grasp the nature of his new mission. In a follow-up message later that morning, Hughes impatiently explained his orders while a presidential jet flew Kennedy’s body back to New York to lie in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where 150,000 people waited in a line stretching more than a mile for a glimpse of the coffin.

  “Bob,” wrote Hughes, “I thought you would understand. I want us to hire Bob Kennedy’s entire organization—with certain exceptions, of course, I am not sure we want Salinger and a few others. However, here is an entire integrated group, used to getting things done over all obstacles. They are used to having the Kennedy money behind them and we can equal that. This group was trained by John Kennedy and his backers, and then moved over to R.F.K. when John died.

  “It is a natural for us. I am not looking for political favors from them. I expect you to pick our candidate and soon. I repeat, I dont want an alliance with the Kennedy group, I want to put them on the payroll.”

  Maheu understood. And he delivered. Not the entire Kennedy team, but its leader, Bobby’s campaign manager, Larry O’Brien. Before the month was out, Maheu had made contact. A few days later, O’Brien—a central figure in American politics, a White House insider who had already directed two successful presidential campaigns and was about to take command of the Democratic party—was in Las Vegas talking terms. Soon he was “on the payroll.”

  Moving with the cold audacity of a grave robber, Hughes had switched O’Brien from Camelot to his own dark kingdom almost as effortlessly as he switched television channels. And he had done it without ever leaving his room. By remote control.

  To a nation of mourners focused on the public passion play, this hidden backstage drama would have seemed a blasphemy, its language alone an outrage. There was no hint of sorrow, no sign of any emotion, only a terrible urgency to close the “deal.” For two days Hughes had watched a tragedy and seen only an “opportunity.”

  He had also seen what the mourners missed. Power in America was not an Arthurian romance of martyred princes and loyal knights honor-bound to an ideal, but a marketplace where influence and allegiances were bought and sold.

  There was nothing unusual about the O’Brien transaction, except for its macabre backdrop. Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson—virtually every major political figure of the era, including even Bobby Kennedy himself—also had a Hughes connection, as did scores of lesser national leaders and local potentates. Hughes had appraised them all with the cool detachment of an investment analyst. “I have done this kind of business with him before,” he had said of Johnson. “So, he wears no awe-inspiring robe of virtue with me.” Humphrey was “a candidate who needs us and wants our help,” and thus “somebody we control sufficiently.” Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, “would get too much support from others,” but might win, “so lets cover our bets.” Only Nixon (“my man”) got the ultimate accolade: “he I know for sure knows the facts of life.”

  Camelot was a trifle. Howard Hughes had long ago set out to buy the government of the United States.

  “Try to determine who is the real, honest-to-God, bagman at the White House,” he once ordered his henchman Robert Maheu. “And please dont be frightened away by the enormity of the thought. Now, I dont know whom you have to approach, but there is somebody, take my word for it.”

  Hughes spoke the language of power stripped of all pretense. What set him apart, finally, more than his money, more than his megalomania, more even than his mystery, was his blunt buy-the-bastards approach. It was not that Hughes cynically bought politicians—others also went to market—but that he innocently demanded a bill of sale. All who did business with him knew that they had made not merely a deal, but had entered into a virtual Faustian pact.

  “I am determined to elect a President of our choosing this year, and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness,” the billionaire had declared earlier in 1968, preparing for an orderly transition of power. “Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life.”

  He ordered repeated payoffs to presidents, presidential candidates, senators, congressmen, and governors, caring nothing about party labels or political ideologies, not at all caught up in personal charisma or campaign rhetoric, guided only by his own golden rule: “find the right place, and the right people, and buy what we want.”

  When his agents approached the government on a businesslike basis, the payoffs often succeeded. But Hughes was driven by his fears and phobias to seek what even his money could not buy and no matter how much power he acquired, he was never satisfied.

  “I have given a full lifespan of service to this country, and taken very little for my personal pleasure or glorification,” complained the unappreciated patriot. “If I dont rate better than this shoddy treatment, it is pretty sad.”

  Citizen Hughes. He bought politicians but never voted. He railed bitterly against taxes but paid none at all for seventeen consecutive years. His empire produced strategic weapons of the nuclear age, but he fought atomic testing in his own backyard.

  Citizen Hughes. He tried to buy the government of the United States but instead helped bring it down.

  Neither Hughes nor anyone else could have known it at the time, but the long slide toward Watergate started with the memo he wrote the night that Bobby Kennedy died.

  That memo brought Larry O’Brien into the Hughes orbit,
and their relationship came to obsess Richard Nixon, who feared that the hated Kennedy gang would discover his own hidden dealings with the billionaire. For years it has been rumored that the Hughes-Nixon-O’Brien triangle triggered Watergate. New information disclosed in this book now makes it clear that Nixon inspired the break-in in a desperate effort to cover up his Hughes connection.

  Hughes had so carefully hedged his bets, had channeled so much secret cash to so many rival powers, that such a collision was inevitable.

  If others more sophisticated, less paranoid, managed to acquire more actual power, still it was Hughes who became the very symbol of hidden power, it was Hughes who brought down a president, and it was Hughes who forced the eternal question: Is there a Mr. Big?

  He was only trying to protect himself.

  There were dangers everywhere, and he was so vulnerable. The world was dealing with a façade. The real Howard Hughes lay hidden in a self-made prison, a naked old man in terrible pain and terminal terror, living like an inmate in the back ward of a mental institution, looking like a corpse laid out on a slab in the city morgue.

  He was a figure of gothic horror, something ready for or just risen from the grave. Emaciated, practically skeletal with only 120 pounds stretched out over his six-foot-four-inch frame, and hardly a speck of color about him anywhere, not even in his lips, he seemed not merely dead but already in decay. Only the long gray hair that trailed halfway down his back, the thin, scraggly beard that reached midway onto his sunken chest, and the hideously long nails that extended several inches in grotesque yellowed corkscrews from his fingers and toes seemed still to be growing, still showing signs of life. That, and his eyes. Sometimes they looked dead, blank. But other times they gleamed from their deep-sunk sockets with surprising, almost frightening intensity, fixed in a hard, searching, penetrating stare. Often, however, they seemed to stare in, not out.

  Hughes was in pain. Physical pain. Mental pain. Deep, unrelenting pain. Many of his teeth were rotting black stumps, some just dangling loose from his puffy, whitened, pus-filled gums. A tumor was beginning to emerge from the side of his head, a reddened lump protruding through sparse strands of gray hair. He had bedsores festering all down his back, some so severe that eventually one shoulder blade—the bare bone—would poke through his parchmentlike skin. And then there were the needle marks. The telltale tracks ran the full length of both his thin arms, scarred his thighs, and clustered horribly around his groin.

  Howard Hughes was an addict. A billionaire junkie. He was shooting up massive amounts of codeine, routinely “skin-popping” more than twenty grains daily, sometimes three or four times that much, regularly taking doses thought lethal. He had been hooked for two decades, ever since a 1946 plane crash, when his doctor prescribed morphine to ease the pain of what everyone thought would be his final hours. As he instead recovered, the doctors substituted codeine, and through the years Hughes demanded ever-larger doses, finally setting up a byzantine illegal supply operation, getting prescriptions filled under assumed names at various Los Angeles drugstores.

  Often now he would awaken in the terrors of withdrawal and begin his day by reaching down to the black metal box by his bedside where he kept his stash and his unsterilized hypodermic needle. Immediately mixing a fix, he would dissolve several white tablets in his pure bottled Poland Spring water, then jab the spike into his wasted body. Sometimes he prolonged the ritual by “double-pumping,” injecting half the white fluid, then drawing it back up into the syringe with his blood, letting the needle dangle for a moment before he shot the full load back into his system. Then he would relax, and in the first warm flush of relief and satisfaction now and then softly sing a little jingle to himself, a little scat bebop routine he remembered from the old days. “Hey-bop-a-ree bop. Hey-bop-a-ree-bop.” And finally maybe even a quiet chuckle.

  There were other drugs, and the codeine was not the worst of them. Hughes was also gobbling massive quantities of tranquilizers, up to two hundred milligrams of Valium and Librium at a single shot, ten times the normal dose. Blue bombers. And when he wasn’t shooting codeine, he was swallowing fistfuls of Empirin #4, a prescription compound containing codeine, aspirin, caffeine, and a synthetic pain-killer called phenacetin. It was not the codeine but the phenacetin that was doing the real damage, ravaging his already shrunken kidneys. Eventually it would kill him.

  Already he had the smell of death around him. He rarely washed. He never brushed his teeth. Most of the time, instead of walking to the bathroom, he stayed in bed and urinated into a wide-necked mason jar, insisting that the filled jars be kept and stored in his bedroom closet. Moving his bowels was a far more complex operation. He was chronically, terminally constipated and routinely spent a large part of his day, often five or ten hours at a time, sitting on the toilet without results, despite huge doses of powerful laxatives. In the end, he usually gave it up and had to once again submit to the humiliation of an enema administered by one of his nursemaids.

  So there he was, sprawled naked on his unmade bed. Mr. Big. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, his was the true but hidden face of power in America. All the inner corruption made visible. And like that portrait, Howard Hughes too had to be locked away, concealed from public view.

  No one knew what he looked like. No one knew how he lived. No one—not the man in the street, not the businessmen or politicians who dealt with him, not the presidents who treated him as an equal, not even his own top executives—had the slightest inkling of what Howard Hughes had become.

  No one had seen him for almost a decade.

  And like Dorian Gray himself, Hughes presented a public image that remained forever young, fixed in an earlier, more innocent time. The picture most people still had of Hughes was from his last public appearance. Vigorous and vital—if no longer Jimmy-Stewart boyish, still handsome, his dark hair slicked back and parted down the middle, a commanding presence, a tall supremely confident tycoon, looking a bit like a leading man from a 1940s movie, but far more rugged, more forceful, more dangerous, radiating power. In short, Hughes as he had appeared in his last newsreels.

  Indeed, his whole life seemed as if it had been played out in a dazzling series of newsreels.

  Orphaned a millionaire at age eighteen. Heir to an ever-expanding fortune based on a tiny drill bit his father had invented. Holder of an absolute monopoly on the device needed to extract from the ground virtually every drop of oil in the world. Sole owner of an enterprise that would pour out hundreds of millions of dollars!

  Hughes in Hollywood. The teen-age tycoon come to Tinseltown, using his sudden wealth to pursue his passions: movies, airplanes, and women. 1930: Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Not yet twenty-five, he leaps into national prominence with the most expensive movie in history, Hell’s Angels. Then a whole string of big hits: The Front Page, Scarface, The Outlaw. Hughes at his own openings, a seemingly endless succession of screen goddesses on his arm, including two he himself made into sex symbols. Jean Harlow, the Platinum Blonde. Jane Russell, the Buxom Bombshell. A fabulously rich, somewhat notorious playboy-producer high-stepping through the Great Depression!

  Hughes the Flying Ace. The daring young pilot in his leather flight jacket, a fedora tilted rakishly across his forehead. Standing beside racing planes he himself designed and built. Breaking all the records. 1935: a new land speed record. 1936: the cross-country record. 1937: a second transcontinental dash that breaks his own record. Capping it all, in 1938, a stunning around-the-world flight. Now an international hero, he comes home to ticker-tape parades down Broadway in New York and in Chicago, Los Angeles, and his old hometown, Houston. The toast of a country enraptured by men making history in the skies. A Lindbergh with uncounted millions!

  Then, suddenly, tragedy—and scandal. 1946: near death in a dramatic plane crash. Hughes, test-piloting an air force reconnaissance plane of his own design, loses control and smashes the sleek XF-11 into Beverly Hills. 1947: barely recovered, he’s unceremoniously hauled before a United Stat
es Senate investigating committee, accused of war-profiteering and political payoffs!

  Hughes on trial. Caught in the glare of the klieg lights. Charged with winning war contracts by plying Pentagon brass and the president’s son with bribes, booze, and broads. At the center of the controversy, a gigantic plywood seaplane—the “Spruce Goose.” Hughes’s Folly. An eighteen-million-dollar pile of lumber that’s never left the ground. Undaunted, Hughes faces down the senators. Stalks out of the hearing room with a daring promise: “If the flying boat fails to fly, I will leave the country and never come back!”

  Long Beach harbor. November 2, 1947. Hughes at the controls of the “Spruce Goose,” dwarfed by the outsized airplane, five stories tall, far bigger than anything ever flown. He says he will only taxi it on the water this time out, but the cameras are rolling anyway. And, suddenly, the amazing thing is aloft! Hughes gets it seventy feet up in the air, flies it a mile across the bay!

  That was his last newsreel. Indeed, Hughes was rarely seen in public again. His fame was at its peak. There was even a brief “Hughes-for-President” boom. But at the moment of his greatest triumph, he withdrew.

  It was the beginning of a long retreat, and of a sudden series of defeats. The now hidden Hughes seemed to be losing control of his empire, a piece at a time. All his hobbies had become big corporations: the movies, RKO; the shop where he built his racing planes, Hughes Aircraft; his love of flying, TWA. His toys had outgrown him. First he had to surrender direct control of the aircraft company after an ultimatum from the Pentagon. Then he was forced to sell RKO. Finally, in 1957, crisis.

  He was about to lose TWA, the enterprise closest to his heart. It was Hughes versus the Bankers. He wanted a new fleet of jets and needed their money. They wanted control. He wouldn’t share it. At the peak of the crisis, the one man he trusted, the one man he needed, his right-hand man, Noah Dietrich, the gruff CPA who had run his business empire since 1925, his surrogate father, suddenly abandoned him. Almost simultaneously, Hughes found himself forced into a new partnership. He got married.