“I know you are not completely satisfied with my conduct, in so far as it relates to you, and I can submit a list of quite a few items of grievance I wish, at the proper time, to take up with you.
“However, in spite of these short-comings, I am ready, if you are, to make a real, true, maximum effort, an all-out attempt to reconcile our differences.
“I want to turn over a new leaf with you.”
They kissed and made up a thousand times, turned over a new leaf and started fresh every other day, but still the fights continued. Hughes was beside himself.
“I only hope you utilize your strategic powers of psychiatric suggestion as effectively on our opponents as you do upon me,” he pleaded with his underling.
“I dont know why I am always placed in the position of being neglectful, irresponsible, ungrateful, and generally unworthy in the day to day progress of my relationship with you, Bob.
“It is almost like some massive chess game in which you seem never to miss an opportunity to place me at a disadvantage whenever the chance presents itself.”
For a while it did look as though Maheu had the billionaire checkmated, using his emotional hold over Hughes to gain ever greater power, the volatile Frenchman whose hot-tempered outbursts had Hughes cowed, the Jesuit manipulator whose Svengali-like powers had Hughes under his spell.
Hughes, in his desperation to win Maheu’s heart, now offered his regent the keys to the kingdom and a palace to go with it.
“I am prepared to give you the highest order of responsibility and authority in the Hughes Tool Company,” he declared. “By that I mean you will outrank all other executives of the company, and you will have only me to contend with.
“If I place you in this position of authority over the entire worldwide activities of the company, not just the Nevada Division, but the entire Hughes Tool Company, if you assume this position of authority, then, more than ever, I must have a clean-cut understanding with you as to what my position in this picture is going to be.
“You will simply have to realize and to accept one basic fact, Bob, and that is that, as long as I am alive and able to do so, I intend to retain the final authority for myself.
“Now I dont think this is so damned bad from your standpoint.
“Anyway, you are stuck with me.”
At the time, that did not seem too high a price to pay. Especially given the $600,000 French Colonial mansion Hughes built for Maheu just off the third fairway of the Desert Inn golf course. Jealous rivals called it “Little Caesar’s Palace.” A modified plantation house with a touch of Las Vegas-style splendor, the mansion had two tennis courts, an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a patio shielded from the evening chill by an invisible warm-air curtain, a private screening room, parquet flooring, and twin curved stairways that could have come out of Tara. But most important of all, it had a direct telephone line to Hughes in his penthouse hideout half a mile away.
Anyone who had seen the two men talking—Maheu in a custom-made suit flashing gold-and-diamond RAM cufflinks, seated at a big polished desk in the paneled office of his new mansion, Hughes sprawled out naked on his paper-towel-insulated bed in a cramped, filthy, darkened room surrounded by debris—would have assumed that Maheu was the billionaire, and wondered why he was engaged in marathon conversation with an obviously deranged derelict.
While Hughes lay huddled in his somber seclusion, Maheu flashed through Las Vegas with flamboyant relish, flew about the country in a private Hughes jet, entertained royally on his oceangoing yacht, hobnobbed with movie stars and astronauts and Mafia dons, dropped in for state dinners at the White House, and played tennis with Nevada’s governor.
Now, to top it off, he had been offered overall command of Hughes’s entire empire. Everything was going according to plan.
Or so it seemed. But if Maheu looked and lived like the billionaire, Hughes in fact still was. And as he had warned Maheu when he dangled before him the keys to the kingdom, “You are stuck with me.”
The battle for control was not over. It had hardly begun. No sooner had Hughes promised Maheu full command than he was gripped by a growing paranoid fear that Maheu would take over completely. He never exactly withdrew the offer, but neither did he ever actually give Maheu the job. Instead he suggested a “trial arrangement,” an “informal gentlemens’ understanding,” a “word of honor agreement” they would for the moment just keep to themselves.
Maheu was perplexed. “Howard, as to the over-all informal authority, what good does it do unless the officers of your company are so notified?” he asked. “They certainly have no reason for taking my word on a matter of such significance.”
Hughes was enraged by Maheu’s doubts. “If you want our relationship to endure at all I besiege you not to adopt your present attitude,” he shot back.
“I deny that I have failed to implement our confidential gentleman’s agreement. I emphatically deny that I have broken our agreement in any way whatsoever. This is just one more in a long string of assumptions you have reached in your own suspicious mind. I contend that our agreement is 100% in full force and effect. If anybody violates our word of honor agreement, it will be you and not I.”
The phantom top job became a major battleground.
“Howard,” wrote Maheu, taking a tough stand, “the agreement that we discussed and in which both of us concurred, was that I would be in charge of all the divisions of the Hughes Tool Co. If you have changed your mind, it is as simple as telling me so.
“I have made it very clear that I have no intent of accepting any position in your company unless you are the only one to whom I am responsible, and unless it is in fact the top position. If we cannot reach that understanding, then I want to accept several directorships which have been offered to me for some time with very favorable stock options.
“I think we must also remember, Howard, that it was not I who ever asked for the top job under you, but it was always you who offered it.”
Maheu’s threatened infidelity, his open toying with side affairs, his constant “Dear John” letters, drove Hughes into a jealous frenzy.
“You say: ‘It was not I who ever asked for the top job, but you who offered it,’ ” Hughes replied.
“I think this is a fairly accurate appraisal of our relationship. In other words, it is always I who am forced to ask you to do this or that, and it is always I who must ask you to overlook something which has offended you.
“I dont see what you gain by this chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.
“Bob, the only thing I can say in summary is that you seem constantly to place me in a position where I must beg you not to leave or beg you not to work for somebody else or beg you not to make outside investments.
“I just wonder how you would like it and how long you would endure the type of insults that you administer to me daily.
“Suppose I were to hover on the brink of asking you for your resignation, and suppose I were to repeat this attitude over and over, how would you feel?
“I suppose you will answer this by saying you are explosive by nature. But Bob, I am just as easily disturbed as you are.”
Hughes was, in fact, more than disturbed. He brooded about Maheu’s constant bullying and threatened betrayal late into the night, carefully reviewing their entire relationship more in sadness than in anger, composing a heartfelt memo before deciding to let passions cool overnight.
“I have been working for the last three hours writing you a long message,” he informed Maheu. “I feel very intensely and very bitterly about what you intend to do.
“I think it is important enough to give it fresh consideration in the morning. So why dont you get a good night’s sleep and I will send you this message in the morning.”
At the crack of dawn, he hit his estranged helpmate with his pained letter of lost love:
“Bob, I feel worse than you have any idea about my instinctive realization that you do not intend to remain with me.
“Anyway, tragic as t
his is to me, I assure you I will have no bitterness about it if you will only try to do it in as considerate a manner as possible.
“On numerous occasions, I have endeavored to turn over a new leaf with you and tried to get to the bottom of the flaw in our relationship and correct it.
“Time and time again I have plead with you to help me find out what was bugging you and eliminate it so that we could have a really trusting relationship in both directions.
“You have always insisted that nothing was the matter and that I could rely on your remaining with me the rest of your life.
“Yet now you are doing something obviously intended as a severance of our relationship.
“I have sensed some frightening incident like this.
“You see, you have penetrated into my activities to an extent where practically every single phase of my life is dependent upon you. You have handled it this way and you have resented any contact I have with outsiders.
“This would be OK if you were likewise completely dependent on me. But this is not the case. By your skillful handling of things, the major part of my daily life seems to flow through Maheu Associates.
“You have carefully kept your firm alive. I told you on numerous occasions that the one thing I could not accept was a part time arrangement. I certainly have paid on a full time basis.
“It seems to me that, in your view, you are still Robert A. Maheu Associates, and I am just a client.”
Just a client. What a sad, brutal realization. He had allowed himself to be swept away, to fall for, become totally dependent on a man who considered him just another client.
Hughes’s deep insecurity about Maheu’s fidelity touched every aspect of their relationship. The phantom top job offer became a running battle, one of many in their ongoing battle for control, not so much over the empire as over each other. It would turn even the most trivial disputes into titanic emotional struggles.
Even a golf tournament.
It was no ordinary tournament, the one in dispute here. It was the Tournament of Champions, a Las Vegas institution that had long been a trademark of the Desert Inn. But no more. Hughes had ordered it out almost immediately upon buying the hotel in 1967, afraid that he would be contaminated by the hordes of spectators and, worse yet, spotted by the television cameras supposedly covering the golf match.
Maheu had tried to dissuade him. “What in the hell are you worried about?” he had asked. “I think we can control the scanning of cameras and increase the security so that you can be safe ‘in your castle’—which you damn right deserve. My only suggestion is that we make you a hero rather than the ‘prisoner of war.’ ”
Maheu had kept at him, but Hughes was adamant.
“I have been your whipping boy long enough,” he exploded, as the golf fight again aroused dangerous passions. “I dont intend to take any more abuse on this subject. I will not have the tournament at the Desert Inn because, to do so, would place me in the position of having refused to have it at the D.I. up to this time.”
So the golf tournament had been transferred to Moe Dalitz’s California resort, Rancho La Costa. In the years since, however, Hughes had grown increasingly worried that he would be blamed for the loss of this prestigious event. And now, in April 1969, Maheu was at La Costa on a do-or-die mission to bring the tournament back—not back to the Desert Inn, but back to Las Vegas.
The plan had been to close the deal and announce the coup on national television. But Maheu had failed in his mission to La Costa. Failed to recapture the golf match, and ruined the entire plot.
The plot against Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. Hughes had been scheming against them ever since the two top pros had refused to participate in the uprooted Tournament of Champions in early 1968. He saw it as a deliberate slap in the face and a grave peril.
“I think it would be the very worst public relations for these men to cancel out,” Hughes had written when the crisis began. “A lot of people may feel that this is the very first setback we have suffered. At best, you may be sure the newspaper writers will be very hostile about it and they will blame us in print all over the country.”
National disgrace. But it was more than that, more even than a good excuse to pick another fight with Maheu. Golf was a sensitive subject for Hughes. He had once dreamed of himself being a Nicklaus or Palmer, indeed had put it at the top of his list. While still in his early twenties, Hughes told Noah Dietrich: “My first objective is to become the world’s number one golfer. Second, the top aviator, and third I want to be the most famous movie producer. Then, I want you to make me the richest man in the world.” Only the golfing crown had eluded him. And now he was not willing to let Palmer and Nicklaus also slip away.
At first he plotted to snare them both. “It will be considered by everybody here that this is a terrible insult to me personally,” wrote Hughes. “I had already come to the conclusion that some kind of a special deal will have to be made with N. and P. So I have decided to offer the two players a contract to appear in a feature motion picture.”
After more brooding, Hughes changed his mind. He would make only one of them a star.
“Re: golf,” he wrote, “I am willing to forget Nicklaus, but I am not willing to forget Palmer. I insist we take steps, more than ever, to insure Palmer’s participation.
“Now, look, Bob, I am going to get Palmer some way, so why not save us both a lot of grief and help me with it,” he cajoled Maheu, who kept pressing him to bring the tournament back to the Desert Inn. “I am not willing to move it back here. I am not going to be pressured into it by Nicklaus’s refusal.
“I am willing to talk movies to Palmer. In some ways it would be easier to handle than with the two Prima Donnas in one film. Since we are only shooting for one player, I think a short subject (about ½ hour) should be enough. I very definitely do not think we should tell him it will be a short subject, but I also do not feel we should tell him it will be a full length motion picture.”
The more he brooded, however, the less willing Hughes became to offer Palmer even a short subject. Why make either Nicklaus or Palmer a star, when instead he could make it hot for both of them?
“I have just worked out a plan for doing without Nicklaus permanently—as to Palmer, I dont know,” wrote the billionaire, unveiling his latest scheme.
“I want to consider opening a massive book on the P.G.A. Golf Tour and certain other selected sporting events. I want our book to become the bible in determining odds. That is the key to the deal. I want our book to be the last word in determining the odds on any player, and thus the determining factor in the standing of that player in his sport.”
The plot to entice Nicklaus and Palmer had evolved into a plot to destroy them. Not content to fix the odds, Hughes decided to really fix their wagons. He would find a new man and make him a star.
“Ever since Nicklaus’ and Palmer’s rejection of our invitation, I have taken a sacred vow to find another golfer and groom him to supplant and far exceed these two. I have been determined to shove these two bastards into the background. Well, I have watched every bit of golf news avidly, and with my intimate knowledge of the game, I have settled on Casper as our man.”
Billy Casper was a real comer. Hughes would build him up, leave Nicklaus and Palmer far behind, and win by proxy the golfing crown that had eluded him in his youth.
“Now, I read some encouraging news,” he continued with vindictive glee. “Nicklaus and Palmer are at the low-point of an all-time record slump that started exactly 8 months ago—about when they gave us the brush. So, my reaction to that is: it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!”
But there was no time to gloat. Hughes had bigger fish to fry. He planned to make himself the global impresario of golf, just take over the entire sport.
“It is my desire to establish Las Vegas as the Golf Capitol of the World,” he declared. “I am prepared to put up purses that will far exceed anything yet—$500,000 and even $1,000,000 tournaments!”
&nb
sp; But the first crucial step in the whole grand scheme was to bring the Tournament of Champions back to Las Vegas. And Maheu had failed in his mission to La Costa.
“I told you it was mandatory to announce, no later than the conclusion of play today, that the tournament would be returned to Las Vegas,” complained Hughes, hammering away at his henchman long-distance.
“I said if this was not done the public here would turn against me in force.
“So, here we are Bob, the first bitterness that has existed between us in a long time, and I dont want it to happen again.”
Maheu absorbed the diatribe over a telephone that seemed glued to his ear. Hughes had kept him on the line almost the entire day, as always unable to bear his absence or his freedom. Maheu had missed the golf match, he had missed the awards ceremony, he had missed the big postgame gala. All he had seen of La Costa was the inside of a phone booth. Now he exploded. He had been busting his ass trying to put the big deal together while Hughes just sat back watching the tournament on television, and if Hughes had others more qualified to handle it, he was more than welcome to give them this plum.
Well, it had taken long enough, but Hughes finally had Maheu exactly where he wanted him. Boiling in a phone booth. The grandiose golf schemes no longer mattered. It was once more time to discuss their relationship.
“Quote more qualified than I unquote,” wrote Hughes. “This is a well-worn phrase in your vocabulary, Bob, you have used it often.
“I dont know anybody more qualified than you are, Bob, but I sure as hell know some people who are easier to get along with than you are. It is a fact, Bob, that I have never in my entire life tried as conscientiously, as hard, or as dilligently to get along with anybody as I have with you.
“When I first started writing my messages to you, it was for one reason only. I was afraid that, on the telephone at one time or another, I was going to lose my temper. So I started writing messages to you in order that I could read them over word by word and pick out any slight details I felt you might consider offensive.
Citizen Hughes Page 11
