Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Precisely at eight A.M. the phone rang in Maheu’s hotel room. For the next two hours Hughes proceeded to cajole him, to beg him never to threaten to leave again, to become his right-hand man forever, to accept a half-million-dollar base salary, to be his one and only, to be faithful to him alone. They exchanged vows. It was virtually a formal marriage ceremony—“till death do us part.” Hughes said they would spend the rest of their lives together and made Maheu promise never to leave him.

  Until now they had known each other only as disembodied voices on the telephone, but with their marriage began an incredibly intimate pen-pal relationship, a daily exchange of love letters and letters of lost love, interspersed with plans for multimillion-dollar deals and plots to buy the government of the United States. An epic domestic quarrel that soon had the newlyweds bickering like an old married couple and would ultimately disrupt the domestic affairs of the entire nation.

  SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Act I

  “I regret last night as much as I assume you do, perhaps I regret it more.

  “Anyway, I have only one desire now and that is my sincere wish that you and I, in deference to what I hope remains of our friendship, take steps best calculated to avoid any chance of a repetition.

  “To this end, Bob, and with the assurance of continued friendship, I want to ask that you place in my hands completely the resolution of such problems as may exist between us.”

  “First of all, I hope you understand that you do not have an exclusive to sleepless nights.

  “For some strange God damned reason which I’ll never comprehend, everyone seems to believe me except you. When I told you that I would be with you for the duration and that I would not leave you—that is precisely what I meant. I did not say and did not intend to say that I was leaving you.

  “The only conclusion I can reach is that you do not believe me and in reality perhaps you are sub-consciously trying to find a successor for me.

  “As I have told you repeatedly—I am committed to you but you are not to me.”

  “Well, Bob, I will be very happy to believe you about everything. I think a good starting point would be for you to affirm your original promise to stay with me permanently, and without the necessity of my getting down on my knees and begging you to do it.”

  “How in the world you can interpret my statement that I want to be with you in Las Vegas or wherever in hell you choose to go for the duration of our lives—as an act of hostility—I’ll never know.

  “You will never know how much it upsets me when I do something which disturbs you. I try so hard to please you and meet all of your demands.

  “Howard, please let me know immediately if you are satisfied that this horrible incident is over.”

  “Thanks very much, but no thanks!

  “I have just read your message which breathes hostility out of every line.

  “I dont think that relationships entered to at the point of a shotgun are any good.”

  Interspersed with the “love letters” were fights on the phone, back-and-forth calls late into the night, and first thing the next morning more memos recapitulating the phone fights, followed by handwritten notes fighting about the recapitulations.

  “I am returning your message for reference,” wrote Hughes. “At the top of page 2, the underlined portion puzzles me. The only time I mentioned anything that might be interpreted this way was very recently when I said that I got the feeling from you that you no longer had the same enthusiasm for this position that I had sensed at the start of our relationship.

  “Then I reminded you of the remark you made, which caught me by complete surprise, the remark that you had a deep instinctive feeling that we were headed on a collision course, and that perhaps we should be best advised to end it now in a friendly way. I never will forget this remark and the calmness with which you said it, because I was literally dumbfounded with surprise. Anyway, I reminded you of this and I said I wondered if you were having a return of these feelings. You said: ‘not in the least!’

  “So, Bob, I am sure you will agree that on no occasion have I suggested that we part on friendly or unfriendly terms. I would not dream of making a remark like that. As a matter of fact, I live in constant fear that some chance remark I may make will be misinterpreted by you, and that you will get angry as you did once before that I remember. The time you told me you were a volatile Frenchman and that you had to let off steam once in a while.

  “So, you see I would not dream of suggesting that you leave, because I would be afraid you would call my bluff and take me up on it.

  “I am afraid those are your lines in this drama,” concluded Hughes, “so please dont accuse me of stealing them.”

  “Howard,” Maheu wrote in reply, scrawling his response on the reverse side of the billionaire’s plea, “please let’s knock off this horrible exchange of negative notes because we have too many important things to accomplish in a short period of time.

  “I have no desire to leave and I would most certainly never think of taking advantage of your obvious desire not to get rid of me.

  “Seven years ago I promised you I would phase out from all other clients. This, I have done. For God’s sake, Howard, when will you realize that you are my only ‘boss’! I truly don’t know where in the hell I’d go or what I would do if you decided to ‘kiss me off.’

  “So—please—stop talking in terms of worry—because I would leave only if it were an accomodation to you. It may be difficult for you to believe this. I am sorry we do not have an opportunity to discuss these things in person. I could convince you of my dependency upon you in a matter of minutes.

  “Anyway—let’s forget who’s to blame for what and move forward.”

  It was never over that easily. Hughes needed the fights. He often seemed to court battle with Maheu, seeking to draw him closer, to get him more emotionally involved, to make their relationship more intimate, an intimacy that could be attained only through combat. It was hardly acceptable for Hughes to tell his only friend, “I love you, Bob.” So, instead there were the fights, and the inevitable postmortems.

  “I dont consider it an unavoidable occupational hazard that you and I have to be at each others’ throats like yesterday,” wrote Hughes in the cold light of a new day.

  “When we have an episode like that, I feel ashamed and disgusted with myself for my contribution to it. So even if you are able to brush it aside the next day and take it as a part of the game (which I admire), I am not able to do likewise.”

  Remorse mingled with bitterness, a true sense of loss with a terrible yearning for the golden old days of peace and harmony, that lost idyll of first love that never really existed.

  “Whenever I suggest that our relationship be altered or improved in some manner, you always say there is nothing wrong with it,” Hughes continued.

  “But I can’t buy this, Bob, I remember too clearly how it was when we first came to Nevada.

  “Every new project that came up seemed to move more quickly and successfully than anyone could have anticipated.

  “Also, you did not object to working at night.

  “But the thing that impressed me the most was the speed with which you functioned. Perhaps I am simply more impatient than most people.

  “This is probably why I started doing business by phone when most people were using the mail.

  “Anyway, when I first got to know you, I remember thinking to myself—

  This is the real “get dunner” I have been looking for!’

  “Bob, you lead a very active life.

  “You have a lot of people around you—your family, friends, and others.

  “I have absolutely nothing but my work.

  “When things dont go well, it can be very empty indeed.

  “I would like to make a real effort to restore things to the way they used to be, and I promise to do my share.

  “I cannot tell you how truly grateful I will be if you can find it in your heart to do likewise.”<
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  It was a marriage that was not only always on the brink of collapse from internal tensions but also under constant attack from outside by rival courtiers. Maheu’s sudden rise to power, his new intimacy with Hughes, was a shock to other top executives in the empire. When Hughes eloped to Las Vegas he left several would-be brides at the altar, all of them now united in jealous hatred of Maheu.

  It was a conspiracy of the once-betrothed. In Los Angeles, there was Bill Gay, who ran the Romaine Street command center and the Mormon palace guard. In Houston, there was Raymond Holliday, who controlled the purse strings as chief executive of the Hughes Tool Company. In Culver City, there was Pat Hyland, who ran the Hughes Aircraft Company. In New York, there was Chester Davis, who handled the TWA case and had parlayed it into an appointment as general counsel.

  Maheu was vigilant in spotting potential threats to his new marriage. Yet for all his experience as a clandestine warrior, he never recognized the true dimensions of the conspiracy. He ignored his obvious rivals and fixated instead on Hughes’s lead attorney in Houston, Raymond Cook, who seemed to be gaining back-channel control over all the key power centers.

  “I’ve had a bellyful of Cookie-Boy,” Maheu told Hughes.

  “First of all—make no mistake about it—for many years Cook has been attempting to take over your entire empire—even at the exclusion of Howard Hughes.

  “I met this ‘bum’ for the first time in 1954. In less than one hour, he was making derogatory statements about you that I could not believe.

  “Dietrich can tell you about an approach Cook made in an attempt to put you out of circulation in 1957.

  “As time progressed I became more and more aware of the necessity to protect you from these ‘demons.’ By these, I mean Cook and his crowd.

  “I think it is only fair for me to remind you that at age 25 I received the highest award our country can give for setting up a counterintelligence system. When I was 27, I was given the prime responsibility for convincing the Germans that the invasion was going to take place in Southern France rather than Normandy.*

  “Anyway, Howard—you have quite often told me that I was resented in certain circles of your organization because of my FBI background. The Cook group certainly has justification for resenting me. When I decided that to protect you to the fullest extent, the time had come to ‘penetrate’ the group, it was perhaps the most simple assignment we’ve ever undertaken. They are ‘weak’, they drink too much, and they talk too much. But more important, they are not loyal to you and to each other.

  “Anyway, they are now engaged in an all out effort to discredit me and my people in your eyes. They somehow know that you were ill recently, and they are attempting to accomplish their ‘goal‘ before something happens to you.

  “In the meantime, they are trying to assure themselves of receiving the first telephone call when this occurs so that Holliday and Cook can fly immediately to Las Vegas—seize all your papers and take over. The reason for moving in so many lawyers from Houston on a permanent basis is to be ready for the big day.

  “Howard, I hate to be so brutal and lay it on so coldly but those are the facts.

  “There is no doubt that Cook is behind all this and unfortunately Holliday is so weak that he cannot cope with the push from Cook.

  “All of these stupid problems could be eradicated instantly by the choice of a strong man as your top guy—whether it be me or someone else.”

  What Maheu failed to recognize was that the last thing Hughes wanted was a “strong man” as his “top guy.” Such a man could endanger the billionaire’s own power. In fact, Hughes wanted no one in overall authority, and far from seeking peace and order in his empire, he provoked and encouraged the internal power struggle, playing one top executive against another to keep them all offbalance.

  And he feared Maheu most of all, as he confided to his counsel Chester Davis: “Chester, stated simply, with the explosiveness and unpredictability of my relationship with Bob, and with his well known characteristic of ‘given an inch, take a mile,’ I dont want to place him in a position which I may find, in the light of later scrutiny, has penetrated too far. In other words, Chester, I would not ever want to be faced with the problem of cutting Maheu back or reducing his authorities. He is, as you know, a very strong-willed individual.”

  But if Hughes feared Maheu most it was only because he now depended on him so completely, largely because he neither liked nor trusted any of his other top executives.

  He had not spoken to Cook for a decade, had once actually fired him, and often saw his legal advice as condescending and contemptuous personal assaults: “Raymond! If you would treat me as something other than a cross-breed between an escaped lunatic and a child, you would be surprised how much better we would get along!”

  He had never met Pat Hyland, had not seen Raymond Holliday since the late 1950s, and was now so estranged from them—the only real businessmen in his empire—that he relied on lower-echelon informants to keep tabs on both the Hughes Tool Company and the Hughes Aircraft Company.

  “My men, upon whom I rely for all of my factual data concerning the entire Culver City operation, do not include Pat Hyland,” the billionaire told Maheu. “Hyland has become completely unpredictable lately. I have no confidence in him.

  “My confidantes inside the H.A.C. and H.T.Co. organizations put their very lives in jeopardy with some of the disclosures they make to me, and if they thought this information went to anybody—no matter whom—they would not continue to inform.”

  Of all his ministers-in-exile, none was more completely banished or more taken by surprise than the chief Mormon, Bill Gay. The heir apparent after Hughes’s split with Dietrich, Gay had created the palace guard and gained in power as Hughes withdrew into seclusion. Once the field commander of the germ-warfare campaign, he suddenly became the most prominent casualty of that war when his wife fell ill in the late 1950s and Gay was banned as a dangerous carrier. Now he was frozen out completely.

  Hughes never told Gay why, but he poured out his bitterness to Maheu. It was Gay who was responsible for looking after Jean Peters, and it was therefore obviously Gay who was responsible for the failure of his marriage:

  “Bill’s total indifference and laxity to my pleas for help in the domestic area, voiced urgently to him, week by week throughout the past 7 to 8 years, have resulted in a complete, I am afraid irrevocable loss of my wife.

  “I am sorry, but I blame Bill completely for this unnecessary debacle.

  “And this is only the beginning. If I compiled here a complete list of the actions or omissions in which I feel he has failed to perform his duty to me and to the company, it would fill several pages.

  “I feel he has let me down—utterly, totally, completely.”

  Alone in his penthouse, estranged from all his key men, cut off even from his wife, scarred by a long string of past divorces—from his first wife,* from his first right-hand man Dietrich, from all his original executives and operatives—Hughes was now desperate to make a success of his new but already terribly troubled marriage to Maheu.

  “Bob,” he wrote, “this uncertainty, distrust, and these accusations are bringing my entire operation to a halt and tearing me apart inside.

  “I am not trying any further to debate who is right and who is wrong.

  “Kuldell left me, Dietrich left me, Ramo and Wooldrich, Frank Waters and Arditto all left me, so lets say the incompatibility is probably on my side.*

  “Anyway, right or wrong, I know one thing, and that is that this situation must be resolved and now.”

  Time and again Hughes tried to get to the root of his problems with Maheu, endlessly examining and analyzing, always talking about their “relationship.”

  SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Act II

  “Bob—I am afraid I have lost the magic touch with which we used to find accord and harmony in almost everything we did.

  “Somehow I cannot seem to reach you the way I used to.

 
“When I say I cannot seem to establish the relationship we used to have, you say I am imagining things.”

  “We shall never solve the problem of the ‘relationship we used to have’ unless we both try.

  “It sure as hell doesn’t help when I have to spend half of my time explaining off situations which did not exist in the first place.”

  “I agree it takes two to quarrel. It also takes an effort on the part of both parties to maintain a compatible relationship. However, I think in all fairness that I worry more and give more attention to this problem than you do. I suppose this is normal since I am bottled up here and my whole life is one of correspondence.”

  “You know, Howard, I do not envy in the least the lonesomeness which you must experience in the penthouse. Perhaps our relationship would instantaneously become a better one if I could hope that you might not envy the constant clobbering to which I am exposed from the penthouse.”

  “I used to be able to communicate with you and not be frightened for fear that each word I spoke or wrote might be the one that would cause you to get angry with me and wind up with my stomach tied up in knots. Please, Bob, let us go back to the environment of friendship that used to exist between us. That is all I ask.”

  “As to our relationship, Howard, I am afraid that I will always have a reasonably short fuse.

  “I realize that many times things I say are illustrative of a short-tempered Frenchman, to which I plead guilty, but you must never, please, feel that you cannot bounce back and flip me on my ass.

  “Perhaps even more important is that I sincerely believe, and hope you concur, that two dear friends should never go to sleep without all problems between them during the day having been resolved.”

  “Lets make a fresh start and bury all past differences.