Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  It was all too much. Instead of setting up house with his new wife, the young actress Jean Peters, Hughes retreated into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, stripped off his clothes, and began his descent into total seclusion—and madness.

  Nothing mattered more now than the isolation. In fact, when it came to a choice between holding on to his beloved TWA and losing his absolute privacy by appearing in court, he gave up control of the airline.* No longer in control of it, he didn’t want it at all. In May 1966, he sold TWA.

  For $546 million.

  It was the biggest check ever to go to one man at one time, more money than the greatest of the old robber barons had amassed in their lifetimes. Now the big question was: What would he do with the incredible windfall?

  Fortune magazine tried to puzzle out the phantom’s new “mission”: “A mystery now surrounds Hughes’s plans for the half-billion dollars he received. It is possible only to speculate about what he will do with it. He seems to have something big and surprising on his mind, and whatever it is, it doubtless was a major factor in his decision to sell. Has he some new kind of interest, cultivated in his own isolated world?”

  Actually, the only “mission” Hughes had in mind was to find a new place to hide. He had to flee California, his home for four decades, to escape state taxes. So, in July 1966 he left his bedroom for the first time in five years and set out across America, a fugitive with half a billion dollars.

  On the train trip to Boston, alone in his private railroad car Hughes scribbled some notes for a message to Jean Peters, trying to explain to his wife why he had left her behind at their home in Bel Air, trying to make her understand his “mission.”

  “Originally I had no faintest thought of proceeding,” he wrote. “At the last minute you started wearing a long face. I said, ‘Why?’ You said because I would fail to complete the mission. I would goof out like last time.”

  There had been an argument. Marital strife caused by the strain of Hughes’s maddening indecision, his constant alerts and endless delays, and perhaps the fact that they had shared a bed for less than a year of their ten-year marriage, that Jean had seen him only by appointment for the past five years.

  “At the last minute I could not face the possibility of reverting to a telephone relationship,” Hughes continued. “So, I delayed. You let me know at once that the closeness and trust we had achieved was destroyed.

  “So, I reinstated my plans—with your promise to trust and believe in me.

  “Where did I do the wrong thing?” he asked, approaching the delicate question of leaving without her.

  “The crux of the whole deal is that, if you come, we have no option or choice. From that point on, we are irrevocably committed to the place where we land. If I go alone—or if you go alone, either of us can look around—describe what we see—what is available—and where. Then, the die is not cast until the other arrives.”

  It made perfect sense. He had to go alone. They had been over that several times.

  “I had to go. I told everybody we were leaving. I dont want to fail. But I will not leave you upset”—he started to write “My Sweet Adorable One,” then crossed it out. Too effusive.

  “Honey!” he continued, “I want to do what you want me to do. I am boxed into a corner. I have the distinct feeling you dont want me to go ahead with any of this. But if I stop now I feel this may not be what you want either. I will be quitting once more.

  “I hope this is the start of the road back,” Hughes concluded, seeming out of his confusion to have drawn new strength, a new determination to put things right.

  Then, inexplicably, he scrawled four more words—“cut your head off”—and underlined it with an angry slash.

  It now stood out plainly: “cut your head off.”

  The rage was unmistakable. But whose head was Hughes after? His wife’s? Or his own? He may not have been entirely sure himself. But the notes he made on the train ride to Boston give the best picture of Hughes’s state of mind as he began his quest.

  It was, of course, unthinkable to send the handwritten message to Jean Peters. And not merely because of its shocking postscript. Hughes never sent his wife a letter in his own hand. Much too risky.

  Instead, he summoned one of his attendants in the next railroad car, and from his notes dictated a message for the Mormon to memorize and recite to his wife. The courier left the train at the first stop, San Bernardino, and drove back to Bel Air to deliver the farewell. It was a more controlled, simpler message that the Mormon gave Jean. Something to the effect that Hughes loved her dearly and looked forward to the day they would be back together.

  One thing Hughes definitely did not want mentioned was his destination. That was a secret. Even from his wife.

  Anyhow, Boston was just a stopover. It was not the end of the line. Hughes had traveled three thousand miles just to decide where he really wanted to go.

  At four A.M. on Sunday, November 27, 1966, Thanksgiving weekend, a locomotive hauling just two private railroad cars pulled into an obscure desert junction on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

  Howard Hughes had come back across America to make his Last Stand. He had found his new mission. He would make Nevada his kingdom, and use his half-billion-dollar windfall to create a world he could control completely. He had stopped running, but he had not stopped hiding.

  Hughes emerged from his ten-year retreat defiantly determined to exercise his full power while remaining a total recluse.

  Now, in the predawn blackness of the Nevada desert, he began to take charge. It was only a few short steps from his railroad car to the waiting van. He could have walked. Instead, like an Oriental pasha—or a spoiled child—he demanded to be carried the few steps on a stretcher.

  The curtained van whisked Hughes to his new hideout, the Desert Inn Hotel, a gaudy gambling emporium smack in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the most garish, most public place in the universe. It was certainly no Hole-in-the-Wall, no Walden Pond, but it was somehow just right.

  The Wizard of Oz had come to the Emerald City.

  At the Desert Inn, the entire top floor was reserved and waiting. His aides snuck Hughes upstairs during the early morning lull, carried him down the hall, and parked the stretcher in a bedroom of a suite picked at random. There was another bedroom in the same suite and six more empty suites on the vacant penthouse floor, but Hughes had no interest in checking them out. He stayed put in the room first picked blindly—and never emerged for the next four years.

  Indeed, he rarely left his bed. And yet, in these four years Hughes had his greatest impact on the nation, making his unseen presence felt in corporate boardrooms, in political back rooms, even in the Oval Office of the White House.

  He was now more than a billionaire, with $750 million cash on hand and other assets worth at least as much. Fortune magazine would soon name him the richest man in America. And he had power even beyond his vast wealth. He was the sole owner of the Hughes Tool Company, with its monopoly on the device needed to drill all oil wells. He was sole trustee of the Hughes Aircraft Company, a top-ten defense contractor with strong CIA ties, manufacturer of all spy satellites that circled the globe and of the first spacecraft that landed on the moon. And beyond his real power was the power of his myth.

  His long disappearance had only increased it. Hidden from view, unseen for a decade, now known best of all for being unknown, Hughes had become the perfect vehicle for everyone’s fantasies.

  If the popular image was still the fictional Hughes created by Harold Robbins in his 1961 best-selling novel The Carpetbaggers—the lone adventurer, the romantic hero, the appealingly eccentric tycoon—by now a darker, more sinister image was also beginning to take hold.

  An aura of scandal had settled around him, his payoffs to politicians were rumored if not known, and he arrived in Las Vegas—“Sin City,” the center of Mob power—just as the James Bond movies reached a peak of popularity. In the lurid atmosphere of the late 1960s, some now ima
gined that Hughes was an evil genius with a master plan for world domination—Dr. No, Blofeld, and Goldfinger all rolled into one.

  The vision was of an archvillain in his hidden domain, surrounded by war-room electronics and gleaming computer banks, his eyes fixed on a huge blinking map of the world, sitting at the controls of a sophisticated array of advanced technology, commanding vast private armies.

  Instead, there was Hughes, naked in his bedroom, unwashed and disheveled, his hair halfway down his back, sprawled out on a paper-towel-insulated bed, staring at his overworked television, with no device more sophisticated than his Zenith Space Commander. Next door, his command center, a hotel living room, was manned by five Mormon nursemaids: former potato-chip salesmen, construction workers, and factory hands, lackeys with no special skills, not even shorthand, equipped only with one console telephone, an electric typewriter, and a four-drawer filing cabinet.

  The real Mr. Big was surrounded only by filth and disorder. Mountains of old newspapers, brittle with age, spread in an ever-widening semicircle on the floor around his bed, creeped under the furniture, and spilled into the corners of his cramped fifteen-by-seventeen-foot room, mixed together haphazardly with other debris—rolls of blueprints, maps, TV Guides, aviation magazines, and various unidentifiable objects.

  A narrow path had been cleared from his bed to the bathroom, then lined with paper towels, but the tide of trash overran even that, topped off by numberless wads of used Kleenex the billionaire wielded to wipe off everything within reach, then casually cast upon the accumulated rubbish. It was all united in a common thick layer of dust that settled in permanently over the years. The room was never cleaned. Hughes did not want his Mormon aides stirring things up or disturbing his junkpiles, which continued to grow unchecked.

  Amid this incredible clutter, set apart in pristine splendor, stood stack after stack of neatly piled documents. They covered every available surface. Thousands of yellow legal-pad pages and white typewritten memos piled with absolute precision on the dresser, two night tables, and an overstuffed armchair, all within easy reach of Hughes on his bed. He compulsively stacked and restacked these papers, often for hours at a time, taking a sheaf and whacking them down to align one side, then another, endlessly repeating the process until not a page was a millimeter out of place. That was vital.

  These special papers were the instruments of his power.

  For the four years Howard Hughes made his Last Stand in Las Vegas, he commanded his empire by correspondence. It was the only time in his life that the world’s most secretive man regularly risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires.

  Hughes himself emphasized that the handwritten memos were unique.

  “My men will tell you I dont write five letters a year,” he wrote his new right-hand man, Robert Maheu, toward the beginning of their pen-pal relationship.

  “I have been notorious through the years for conducting all of my business orally, usually by telephone. I am sure you have heard of this characteristic.

  “When I started sending you long hand notes, my people protested long and loud,” Hughes continued, recalling how bitterly the Mormons had fought this sudden departure, not wanting to lose their role as his exclusive channel to the world outside.

  “They wanted to retype my messages at least, and correct mistakes in composition, and spelling, etc.

  “I said no, that there was not time, and that I would ask you to return the messages so they would not get out of my hands in that condition.

  “Listen, Bob, in the Senate investigation of me, the material they dredged out of my own files was the only scrap of evidence that permitted them to get their foot in the door,” Hughes concluded, still enraged by that violation twenty years earlier, a triumph that had left him permanently scarred.

  “I assure you I learned my lesson from that incident, and I watch what accumulates in the files very carefully.”

  Yes, he had to retain absolute control of his secret papers—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my very innermost activities.”

  His only real correspondent, Maheu, would have to return them. And Hughes would not even send copies to his other top executives, men he had not seen for a decade and no longer spoke to even by phone. Instead he had his Mormons read them the memos, so that these hallowed documents never left the penthouse.

  He carefully trained these trusted attendants to be robot transmitters of his great secrets.

  “I have thought of you,” he explained in an oft-repeated catechism, “as non-eavesdroppers, as impersonal, completely loyal, enforced listeners to secret, privileged transmissions—in the same posture as the telegraph operator used to be in, when he was forced to transmit all kinds of highly personal and confidential material.

  “I remember when the difference between a small-town nonprofessional operator and a metropolitan, highly trained operator was easily recognizable, because the small-town operator would react to the message as if it were addressed to him, while the good operator would never bat an eye or react in any way, no matter how startling the text of the message might be.

  “Your posture in the transmission of messages,” he added, “is as sacred and impersonal as an electronic machine.”

  Secure that his secrets were safe with his robots, that his dispatches could not possibly fall into hostile hands, Hughes daily scrawled out his orders on reams of yellow legal-pad paper, scheming through sleepless nights to control a world he feared to face, unleashing a blizzard of memoranda, sometimes more than a hundred pages in a day.

  And here they were, all neatly stacked around his bed, in precise piles that had multiplied and grown to perilous heights. Hughes reached out one spindly arm, grabbed a sheaf at random, and began riffling through his papers. The dark secrets of his life were casually mixed in with the dark secrets of America.

  Alone in his dimly lit room, leaning back on a couple of pillows, Hughes reread a few memos, leafed through the pile and skimmed a few more, all the while unconsciously crossing his toes, one over the other, starting from the little toe and working his way in, an old habit that now caused his long toenails to click, a constant counterpoint to the sound of the papers he shuffled.

  Hughes was oblivious to the discordant sounds, completely caught up in reading his memos. Here was one about bribing a president. There another about buying a new airline. Next a reminder to get more codeine—had it been done? A few pages later, a complaint about taxes. Here his comments on a TV show. Followed by something about buying the network. Hughes continued to rummage through his papers, reliving past terrors and triumphs, chewing over schemes he had hatched the day or the week or the year before.

  Suddenly he stopped and stared intently. This was important, and it hadn’t been handled, at least not to his satisfaction. Hughes, who was obsessed with his image, realized it had been sullied badly—“your sponsor is far from the popular idol he once was,” he noted sadly to his Mormon aides.

  But he had a plan, and here it was, a whole new way to present himself to the world:

  “I want the Hughes activity to be presented to the public, in a massive new publicity and advertising campaign, as the only example of competitive enterprise still functioning and holding out against the onrushing hordes of corporate giants.

  “In other words, the one ‘corner grocery store,’ proprietor-managed type of old fashioned business activity still holding out against the overpowering pressure of the new corporations with their executives, managers, stockholder intracacies of control, politics, proxy battles, institution ownership, etc. etc.—all of the interlocking cross currents and intrigue that go to make up the modern U.S. industrial giant—the corporation, the Establishment.”

  That was how he saw himself, as David, not Goliath, as the lone survivor of the American Dream. He had to get that message out to the world.

  Meanwhile, continuing to root through his documents, Hughes fished out another plan that had not quite gotten
off the ground. Just another “mom-and-pop” operation the proprietor of the last “corner grocery store” had in mind. A grandiose vision of a global Las Vegas, with Hughes at the center, bookie to the entire world:

  “I once told you I was interested in acquiring one of the book-making establishments in town,” he wrote his chief aide.

  “Well, I dont see any point in buying just one of these books. It is my hope that the damndest book operation anyone ever conceived of can be developed.

  “Are you aware that any of dozens of businessmen in the country can pick up the telephone and call their broker, either at his office or at home, or even out at a restaurant, and say: ‘Charley, buy me 50,000 U.S. Steel at the market.’

  “So, what I have in mind is a system of credit research by which every man of substance, in the entirety of the U.S., will be catalogued and listed with all the truly significant information necessary to appraise his ability to pay and his integrity.

  “I want to see a development under which a wealthy man can phone from London to a certain phone number in Las Vegas and identify himself and place a bet on just about anything—a horse race at Hollywood Park, a track meet in Florida, a football game in New York, an election, at the state or national level, the passage of some bill up in Congress—just about anything.

  “Also, I want to see a development which will permit a man to phone from London and, after placing a bet on some event, such as mentioned above, to say: ‘Put $10,000 on the line at the Sands.’

  “In fact, when the man on the phone requests the bet, the clerk could hit one of those recording timers, which would be heard over the phone. So, the exact instant of the bet would be recorded, and the clerk could say over the phone to the customer: ‘Your bet is made, at 12:36:04.’ Then, a few seconds later, the clerk could say: ‘Your play occurred at 12:36:12—you won with a natural, eleven. Do you want to bet again?’