Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Nor could he let go of his wife. He kept Jean a safe distance away in bungalow 19, out of the combat zone, and barely saw her at all for three years. Still, he kept her under tight control, and safe from all contamination.

  He tried to keep her from going anywhere, to trap her in her rooms, always finding reasons to delay her planned excursions. When he had to let her loose, his men always escorted her, following detailed written instructions in which Jean was often code-named “Major Bertrandez.”

  One such memo—“Handling Major Bertrandez for Theatre”—ordered: “If necessary to open the doors entering the threatre or closing the doors, do so with the feet, not the hands. If it is necessary or common procedure to enter the theatre with her to lower the seat for her, do so with kleenex.”

  Any sign that Jean was sick, that she had become contaminated, had to be reported immediately to Hughes, and she had to be prevented from seeing any doctors but his own, and never before he had been consulted:

  “If the situation is critical enough, then it is permissible to let a doctor call her on the telephone. Under no circumstances should she be allowed to go see a doctor either at an office, a hospital or any place else, until HRH has talked to her first.

  “The doctor will be cautioned to give her only such information that might be required for immediate relief of pain, or immediate medication, if required. This is to be done only if the immediate effect on the disease would be impaired by a delay. It is assumed that there will be some conversation over the telephone if all other efforts to delay EVERYTHING until HRH is available fail, but the doctor must be instructed, not told but instructed, to tell her nothing more than what medicine she should take to prevent further expansion of the ailment. The doctor should avoid giving her a diagnosis of any kind, or indicate the treatment required on an extended basis. Only the very immediate treatment should be offered.”

  Hughes himself would make the ultimate diagnosis and decide the course of treatment.

  “HRH could use the fact that there is to be further treatment, or the fact that she doesn’t know what the specific ailment is, as a basis of telling her something which might break her of the smoking habit, get her to eat more regularly, or any number of things that would be for her own good. This could not be accomplished if the doctor were to inform her completely.

  “After the first contact between the doctor and Mrs. Hughes, you’ll have to watch to see that she doesn’t get the doctor back. If the doctor is at home, his wife should be asked to answer the telephone and say that the doctor is out.

  “The doctor should report back the complete conversation between himself and Mrs. Hughes.”

  Even Jean’s friends and associates had to be watched. Any that fell ill had to be placed in “isolation.” When her former wardrobe mistress, Cissy Francombe, caught hepatitis, Hughes demanded a complete quarantine.

  “Although the doctors are not sure whether this is the contagious type or not, I consider it to be highly contagious,” explained the master physician. “Although we have had reason to put into effect a program of isolation before, I want this to be ten times as effective as any we have ever set up.

  “With the present condition of my business affairs, if Jean, myself, or anyone else important in our organization were to acquire this disease, I just cannot even contemplate the seriousness of what the result may be.

  “When Cary Grant got this disease in London some time back, he said that for six months he was totally and utterly unable to do anything other than just lie in bed and wish he was dead.

  “I therefore want a system of isolation with respect to Cissy, the doctors attending her, nurses, or anyone in the past or future coming in contact with her, that is so effective and complete that anything we have done in the past will be nothing compared to it. I want this to go through the eighth or tenth generation, so to speak. Not only do I want this isolation to include personal contact, but also any items such as papers, clothing, flowers, TV sets, etc., that are transmitted to her, either direct or through the mails.

  “Cut off every conceiveable channel of contact. Whether it be an object or thing, a letter or note, an invoice from a vendor, from the doctors at the hospital, no matter what it is it should not be permitted to come into our establishment. It will not be permitted to come into contact with any of our people, with any friends of our families, relatives or anyone else. See that absolutely no conceiveable avenue, channel or loophole is overlooked.

  “I consider this the very most important item on the agenda, more important than our TWA crisis, our financial crisis, or any of our other problems.”

  Contaminated women had always been a special problem. Once, years earlier, Hughes had burned all his clothes, everything he owned—suits, shirts, ties, socks, overcoats, even all his towels and rugs—after he heard a rumor that an actress he once dated had a venereal disease.

  Now he didn’t have any clothes to burn, nor did he see any women. In fact, Hughes may well have gone into seclusion largely to escape his new wife. He began to withdraw almost as soon as they got married. Clearly he could not share his life, could not handle the intimacy. But it was more than that. Hughes actually seemed to be afraid of the woman he code-named “The Major.” The troubles he had in a simultaneous affair with a teen-age mistress, more fetchingly code-named “The Party,” suggests there was an even deeper reason.

  All the while he courted Jean, Hughes was seeing his teen angel on the side. She was the last of the harem. Barely sixteen when he plucked her out of a local beauty contest, she remained on standby even after his marriage, stashed in a carefully decontaminated hideaway at Coldwater Canyon, under guard and under surveillance. Hughes brought her to his bungalows only once, to celebrate his fifty-third birthday on Christmas Eve 1958, his last extramarital fling.

  It seems to have been less than a complete success. As months went by without another date, “The Party” cursed and browbeat Hughes unmercifully. The guards bugging her phone heard her tirades.

  “You dirty old son of a bitch,” she screamed. “You never come to see me. I’ll bet you can’t even get it up anymore, you impotent old slob!”

  Impotent. The playboy hero of The Carpetbaggers, known for his string of starlets, may have been driven into seclusion by his fear of women, as desperate to escape his wife—and hide his impotence—as to escape the germs and the blacks and all his other nameless terrors. Soon he would flee her forever, move to Las Vegas alone, and spend the rest of his life surrounded by male nursemaids.

  But he would never find sanctuary from “contamination.”

  In the past, Hughes himself had been the only victim of his fears. His ten-year battle against “contamination” had been waged within the confines of his blacked-out bedrooms. The fight had been to keep the outside world from getting in. A purely defensive struggle. Now he went on the offense. Now the same terrors that had driven him into seclusion also drove him to control the world outside.

  He tried to decontaminate all Las Vegas, the fallen city he had come to purify. Its impure water quickly became an obsession.

  “I maintain that you cannot build a resort of world-wide fame and lasting importance upon a basic foundation of pollution,” he declared. “Nevada must not offer its tourists water from a polluted, actually stinking lake.

  “I say the question goes beyond the matter of purity vs. impurity, on a basis of technical analysis. I say the real question is whether a sophisticated, thoroughly pampered tourist, a tourist who has been exposed to the careful treatment accorded him in the major, highly refined resorts of the world, I repeat the question is whether this tourist is going to feel comfortable in the confidence that the water which he is drinking, and in which he is bathing, is the pure mountain spring water pictured in the Coor’s Beer advertisements, or whether, instead, he is going to have the uneasy, revolting feeling that the water he is forced to drink, the water used to make his drinks at the bar, and the water in which his food is cooked, that this water, in whic
h he is also forced to bathe and wash his hands, that this water is, in truth, nothing more nor less than sewage, with the turds removed by a strainer so it can be pumped through a pipe.

  “The name, quote Lake Mead Water unquote, means nothing more or less than sewage!”

  Hughes was definitely one of those who had an “uneasy, revolting feeling.” He never let up in his battle to scuttle the state’s entire new eighty-million-dollar water system.

  Indeed, all Las Vegas, all Nevada, finally all America fell victim to his endless runaway fears, as Hughes, from his penthouse, conducted search-and-destroy missions to protect himself from all imagined dangers. Among the prime targets were the state’s thirty thousand blacks.

  It was still blacks who instilled the most terror. They seemed the visible embodiment of all the invisible threats.

  The Great White Hope trauma made that clear. Blacks were potent, mocking his impotence. Blacks were dark, brown, like the poison he could not release from his own bowels, like the sewage in the water. Blacks were not merely dirty. They were Giant Germs.

  They had to be kept in “isolation.”

  Up in his penthouse, Hughes was seemingly safe from all outsiders, black or white. Yet even there he was constantly tormented by dark intruders. To make matters worse, they entered with the connivance of his own television station.

  “Isn’t there any safe way to get rid of this TV academic program on ‘Black Heritage’ which CBS is carrying every morning?” wrote Hughes, in obvious distress.

  “As you know, this program was commenced without my permission.

  “Since then I have been forced to squirm under the intense displeasure of watching this program every morning—I have to watch and listen every morning while the only academic program on KLAS pours out such propaganda as: ‘Africa is the mother and the father of the world.’ ”

  As with that other bane of his existence, “Sunrise Semester,” Hughes apparently never considered the simple expedient of switching off his set. Actually, he had finally escaped the dreaded harbinger of dawn. “Sunrise Semester” was, at long last, off the air. It had been replaced in the 6:30 A.M. time slot by “Black Heritage.” Squirming in displeasure, the billionaire fumed:

  “Bob, if KLAS is to broadcast one single academic program and if this program is to be a study of history, why should not this be a program of U.S. history instead of a program of African history.

  “If this is so, I cannot see why it should be necessary for a TV station to confine its academic programing to a policy of exclusive, sole negro representation.”

  Maheu sympathized, but warned that it might be dangerous to cancel the offensive show. “I, perhaps, am as vehement on this type of subtle propaganda as you are,” he wrote in reply, “but I think we must be expedient in not buying unnecessary problems at this time. Sheriff [Ralph] Lamb and D.A. [George] Franklin have confided to me that we could potentially have a real ‘hot summer’ in Las Vegas this year. My humble recommendation, Howard, would be that we let this particular program run out its time, so that we do not give the black community any opportunity whatsoever to concentrate on us to any degree.”

  Hughes was not satisfied. He wanted no trouble, but he didn’t want “Black Heritage” either. And he had a plan:

  “Bob, I am wondering if a solution might lie in ceasing all academic programing for the summer months.

  “After all, school is closed for the summer, and if the scholastic programing were abandoned, then maybe there would be less criticism for the abandonment of this particular program than if it were replaced by a white-oriented program.”

  While the two men continued, in a flurry of memos, to plot the demise of the TV show, Hughes received word of unexpected support: “Both the national and local NAACP has objected to the Black Heritage program. KLAS would like to cancel the show if they can get your approval.”

  That changed everything. Now Hughes was in no hurry to see the show go. It continued, in fact, until CBS pulled it off the air two months later.

  The reprieve for “Black Heritage” did not apply, however, to other KLAS programs. Even the “Big News” was segregated. When racial tensions flared in local schools, the station went so far as to refuse its parent network film of the disorders for national coverage.

  “It is the policy of KLAS to carry matters relating to the Afro problem which are favorable to Las Vegas and to play down that which is unfavorable,” the station manager assured his unseen boss. “In this connection, there is a colored deaf mute who is one of the basketball stars at the University of Nevada. This boy is one of very high character and does not engage to any extent in the integration rabble rousing which is occurring. Therefore, his accomplishments are of nationwide interest to those who see the true reason for the integration problems and certainly would be beneficial to Las Vegas.”

  Hughes was unimpressed. Even this “credit-to-his-race” was unacceptable. “We do not want any programs involving negroes,” came the reply from the penthouse. “If we have any other such programs, HRH wants to know of them.”

  Television was safe—for the moment at least—but Hughes was ever alert to new threats. Like Arthur Ashe.

  The black tennis star had been invited to play in a tournament at the Desert Inn. Actually asked to come. And Maheu had secretly arranged it. It was the Davis Cup championship, a prize attraction, a real plum for Las Vegas. The night before the tournament began, however, Hughes discovered the plot and demanded that the match be canceled. He didn’t want Ashe playing on his courts, fearing that he would lure “hordes of negroes” to his hideout.

  Maheu tried to soothe him. “Howard, I am positive we have nothing to worry about. Tennis is not a game that appeals to his people and I am willing to wager that there will be less than a handful of them in the audience. The proportion will be considerably less than we have in our showrooms when some of them are performing here.”

  Ashe was accepted—reluctantly—but not Muhammad Ali. There was talk of staging a championship bout in Las Vegas. It was the Great White Hope all over again. Jack Johnson might have sneaked into town under cover of the Tony Awards telecast, but Hughes was not about to put up with his brash, draft-dodging reincarnation, Ali. As usual, he sent Maheu into the ring.

  “Howard,” Maheu wrote, “you do not have to spend any time trying to convince me how right you are in your feelings pertaining to Clay. If it is possible, perhaps I feel more deeply about these matters than you.”

  Maheu scored in the first round: “I moved on the Clay-Frazier fight and scuttled it to a fair-thee-well insofar as Las Vegas and Nevada are concerned. I personally believe it is incredible that there are those who even entertain the idea of having this no good bastard gain any amount of publicity at the expense of the State.”

  Hughes was not content simply to block the fight. He wanted Ali—then facing charges for refusing to fight in Vietnam—put in jail. “We shall do everything in our power,” promised Maheu, “to assure that he ends up there.”

  The minstrel show was turning sour.

  It would have been funny. Or merely pathetic. An addled old man sealed off from the world, desperately manning the barricades against Ashe and Ali, against propaganda in the morning and phantoms in the night.

  But Hughes represented something very real and very ugly in America. Submerged fears. Hidden racism. Feelings no longer respectable to express but still pervasive. All across the country, ordinary people also cringed at shadows in the night. They too wanted blacks kept down or, at least, out of sight. George Wallace brought bigotry out of the closet, and they cheered him. Richard Nixon campaigned with code words like “law-and-order” and “crime in the streets,” and they elected him.

  And, all the while, America was burning.

  It had started in Watts in 1965—the year before Hughes arrived in Las Vegas—and now it swept through city after city. Riots. Arson. Looting. Summer terror.

  Then, at six P.M. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was
assassinated. One moment he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel, chatting with friends in the courtyard below. The next moment he was dead.

  Black America took to the streets. White America watched the war on television.

  And Howard Hughes saw all his fears come to life on the TV screen. It was the ultimate horror. Blacks were out of control. First in Washington, then in Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, finally in more than one hundred cities grief turned to outrage and outrage to violence, a swelling firestorm of unprecedented fury that lasted a full week and claimed forty-six lives.

  The images were overwhelming. Soldiers defending a nation from itself occupied charred ghettos, battling blacks on streets strewn with broken glass and stained with blood. Troops in full combat gear took up positions on the White House lawn. A machine-gun emplacement guarded the Capitol steps.

  Alone in his penthouse, Hughes too rushed to reinforce the barricades. With not a mention of the martyred civil rights leader, with not a note of sorrow, with not a sober second thought, he poured out a diatribe of racist angst on his bedside legal pad:

  “I have just finished watching CBS News on TV. The riots, looting, etc. in Washington, Chicago and other cities was terrible. I wonder how close we are to something like that here?”

  Memories of Houston 1917 mixed with frontline footage of America 1968, bringing on nightmare visions of a Las Vegas torn by racial turmoil. It only stiffened his resistance to change.

  “I know that is your responsibility and also your specialty,” Hughes continued, taking some comfort in Maheu’s FBI background, “but I also know there is tremendous pressure on the strip owners to adopt a more liberal attitude toward integration, open housing, and employment of more negroes.