Blood and Oranges
Page 31
Joe didn’t mind anyone getting onto dialectical ground. “Actions grow out of context,” he said. “Take revolutions, for example. The communist system may be flawed, but the capitalist system didn’t look so hot either in the thirties with half the country out of work. Then the war came along, and the communists were our allies. The enemy of your enemy, you know. What did Roosevelt say? ‘In times of trouble sometimes you must walk with the devil to get to the other side of the bridge.’”
“The only trouble with the capitalist system is government interference,” said Robby, avoiding the point. “That was true in the thirties as well.”
“I hope you didn’t learn that at Stanford.”
Robby smiled. “Actually I learned it at Exeter in Professor Farnsworth’s class. Our textbook was Atlas Shrugged.”
“Good God!” laughed Joe. “Ayn Rand at Exeter? I hope it was a science-fiction course.”
Lizzie always learned something in these sessions, little odds and ends, like the Roosevelt thing. Of course, Joe could have made it up, he was good at that, but it had the ring of truth. And of course Robby would check. The conversations between them were intense, but managed to stay civil. With her, things always got down to the personal level, which she hated. Robby knew his father wasn’t a Mull, but Lizzie had more to answer for—like the family, like boarding school, the Times, the Mull Foundation. Robby hated the foundation as much as he hated the Times, both unfairly, she thought. The Times was vastly improved under Otis Chandler. Even Joe conceded the point. It had taken her some time to understand her son’s resentments, which she resented herself. What right did he have to be resentful?
She’d had to endure his mockery over the outcome of the Chicago transportation trial. “I read about that,” he’d said at breakfast one morning. Joe was gone early leaving her alone at the table with her son, something that rarely went well. “So you work on this story for how long, six months? And the trial lasts for two months or something? And then, mirabile dictu, you get a guilty verdict and the jury fines the guilty corporations what—the stupendous sum of five thousand dollars each. As if they cared! And you call that a victory? When will you people learn? Don’t mess with the market system.”
You people! he’d said. God, how she’d wished Joe had been there! She wasn’t a polemicist, never had been. She’d said something pitiful about the injustice of five thousand dollar fines compared to the criminal damage done to the city, and Robby began quoting from Ayn Rand about the evils of government regulation. Afterward, she knew what she should have said: that governments are established to assure that markets work for everyone, not just for big corporations. She’d been too angry to think straight.
She told him about the foundation soon after he returned from the disastrous trip north with Cal. She’d been sitting with him in the garden and mentioned it innocently enough. He had a right to know what they were doing with the estate. His reaction astounded her. “So you and Aunt Maggie set up a foundation with your inheritance from Grandpa Eddie? Shouldn’t I have something to say about that?”
She’d never discussed money with Robby. The bank handled his school expenses and provided him with a generous allowance. And there he was challenging what she and Maggie were doing and asking if the money was his? What if I need that money to get started in business? he said. Isn’t that how Grandpa Eddie got started, with money left by his mother? She’d refused to talk any more about it. Got up and walked into the house.
“By the way,” said Joe, his imagination stimulated by alcohol and a good duel with his son, “I gather you haven’t heard anything from our friends at the Selective Service System. Setting up a lottery system is the damndest thing I’ve ever heard of. Either you have a draft or you don’t. Sounds too much like the Civil War when you could buy your way out of serving.”
“How can you buy your way out of a lottery?” said Lizzie. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Your number comes up or it doesn’t.”
“My point,” said Joe, “is that in a real war everybody goes.”
“So Vietnam isn’t a real war?” said Robby.
Joe took a sip of cabernet. “What do you think?”
Robby had thought about it all right, just as every boy of draft age in the sixties was thinking about it. You could hardly take a political course at Stanford or any university in the country where Vietnam didn’t come up. Students had deferments as long as they were in school, but the war started to heat up just as Robby’s class came close to graduation. Their future lives depended on the lottery.
“I guess I don’t have to ask what you think, Dad.”
“I asked first,” said Joe, smiling. “What would John Galt do? Would he go?”
Robby’s eyes widened, showing his surprise. “Don’t tell me you’ve read it.”
“Who is John Galt?” said Lizzie.
The men laughed. “A mysterious character in Atlas Shrugged,” said Joe. “Everyone runs around asking: ‘Who is John Galt?’”
“And so who is he?”
“He controls the world and has disappeared into the Rockies.”
“I don’t like governments telling me what to do,” said Robby.
“War is different isn’t it?” said Lizzie.
“Different if you’re attacked. Not if you’re the attacker.”
“Your number will be in the lottery,” said Joe. “The question is, what do you do if it comes up?”
“What business do we have keeping Vietnam from uniting?”
“You mean you wouldn’t go?” said Lizzie.
Robby examined his mother. People who saw them together saw no resemblance, no more than they saw between Joe and Robby. It was as if nature took the genes of both parents, shook them up and produced a cocktail that resembled neither. Robby had his mother’s thick hair, though it was darker. His eyes were blue, unlike anyone in the family but Cal, whose blue eyes came from his mother. He wished he had the Mulls’ good eyesight but had his father’s myopia. Both his parents were artistic, and he had none of it. He took himself for a throwback to Grandpa Eddie—smarter, shrewder, tougher.
“No. I won’t go.”
If Robby was looking for approval, he got none. His parents did not respond. Joe had been too old for the other war, the good one, but would have gone. A war lottery was something he couldn’t understand. Lizzie didn’t like the war either, but was patriotic enough to feel uncomfortable with her son’s answer.
♦ ♦ ♦
With no job offer he deemed worthy and growing Vietnam uncertainty, Robby had moved back into his boyhood bedroom in Brentwood. Lizzie had hoped Cal would ask him to move in with him in Westwood, where he’d returned from Angie’s house in Echo Park into the same apartment building on Tiverton she’d once shared with Maggie. But Robby and his godfather were no longer on speaking terms.
During two summers at Exeter and two more at Stanford, Robby had come home to work with Cal at the Sierra Club. He was more an intern than an employee, but earned a little money and enjoyed the work, which got him around Southern California. She’d been happy about it, happy that Robby and Cal were close. Part of it, she believed, was that Robby looked on Cal as the last male Mull, and Cal looked on Robby as the son he didn’t have. With their blue eyes, they even looked a little alike. Cal took his role as godfather seriously.
Between Robby’s junior and senior years at Stanford, Cal took him on a field trip to Northern California. Castle and Cooke, which owned much of Hawaii, had bought a swath of land in Sonoma County with the intention of building a residential development along ten miles of virgin coastline. At the time, only a hundred miles of California’s thirteen-hundred–mile coast were still accessible to the public, and the plan to shut off access to ten more miles at a place called Sea Ranch just north of Gualala was the last straw. The Sierra Club and other environmentalists formed the Coast Alliance to oppose the project.
The Sea Ranch hearings were tumultuous. Hundreds of protestors descended on Gualala, marching its narrow streets. These same people had been coming to the seashore for years, pitching tents, casting lines, some even brave enough to test the frigid waters. They would not be evicted from the coast without a fight. Neither would the Indians. So many protesters came out that the supervisors moved the hearings to Santa Rosa, the county seat. The hearings were front-page news across the state. Castle and Cooke won the battle, but lost the war. Sea Ranch launched the grass-roots movement that led to passage of the California Coastal Act, creating a public commission to take the coast out of the hands of developers and return it to the people.
It took some time for Lizzie to get the truth about the rupture. She sensed something was wrong when Robby didn’t come home after the hearings. Cal dropped him off at Stanford though it was still mid-summer. When neither Cal nor Robby would tell her what happened, she called Hal Kornheiser, the Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, who’d covered the Santa Rosa hearings. Hal checked the transcripts: Yes, a Robinson Morton of Los Angeles had taken the microphone to speak in favor of Sea Ranch, accusing the Sierra Club and its allies of interfering with private land rights in violation of the Fifth Amendment, quoting author Ayn Rand.
The incident poisoned relations between Robby and his godfather. Nor did it improve matters between Robby and his mother, stunned that under the auspices of the Sierra Club he would have spoken out in favor of the project, an act of blatant family treachery. It didn’t help that the Mull Foundation was one of the Sierra Club’s and Coast Alliance’s principal benefactors. If Sea Ranch was a watershed in California environmental history, it was also an aberration, for it took place along the desolate Northern California coast, where few people lived. The bloodiest battles to preserve the coastline were about to take place in Southern California, where the people lived. The primary focus of the war would be the property of Howard Hughes.
Chapter 42
“What the hell is the Summa Corporation?”
“If you don’t know, Mr. Hughes,” said Melvin Cobb into the phone, which was on loudspeaker, “you’d better find out. Summa is acting in your name and doing things you aren’t going to like. I’ll send you everything I have if you give me your address.”
“No, goddam it! Got to keep my address private. People on my trail.”
Maggie looked across to Cobb for a reaction, but he wore his usual encrypted look. Beyond him she glimpsed the Hughes runway and beyond that the cranes of the great dredging operation where the Mull oil wells had once stood, oily sand one day to become Marina del Rey, the world’s largest man-made small craft harbor. Howard had done all right on that deal. So had the Mulls. Then came Summa.
She’d been sitting in Cobb’s office speculating with him where Howard could possibly be when the call came. Where was he? Why was he calling? They hadn’t heard from him in months. She whispered not to let him hang up, that she’d like a word with him.
No one at Hughes Aircraft or Hughes Tool or Hughes Medical Institute or TWA had any idea where to find the increasingly elusive, increasingly paranoid billionaire. He had disappeared. His wife—Jean Peters had finally married him—lived in Bel Air and thought he was at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, which he owned along with just about every other resort hotel in the city. But calls to the Desert Inn, including hers, were not returned. Others said he was in Florida or Nicaragua or had permanently gone underground, like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, because he couldn’t stand dealing with the government and banks anymore, both of which he blamed for taking TWA. According to the press, both were on his trail with subpoenas.
“Maggie Heyward is here with me, Mr. Hughes. She’d like a word with you.”
“Maggie—my little Maggie.” Silence, then: “Heyward? Hell, that’s not her name.” More silence. “Hey, Cobb, do you remember that show with Gale Storm?”
“It was My Little Margie, Howard, Margie,” said Maggie. “And where the hell are you? Do you know what’s happening back here?”
“I’ll tell you where I am but don’t tell anyone, not even Cobb.” (Too deaf to hear the speaker, she thought). “I’m on Paradise Island. But not for long.”
She stared across at Cobb, who shook his head. “I’m sorry, Howard, I don’t know where Paradise Island is.”
“The Bahamas, and a hell of a lot better than Nassau. But don’t tell anyone.”
There was a laugh and a crack on the line. “Remind me who this is again.”
“It’s Maggie Heyward, Howard, damn it, Mull to you and you’ve got to get off your meds and get back here.” She waited for a response, but none came. “Summa is selling everything out from under you. I can’t stay here any longer. I’m gone unless you do something.”
“Don’t leave me now, Margie. You’re one of the few people I trust back there, you and Cobb—Cobb, you still there?”
“I’m here, Mr. Hughes.”
“And what about this so-called Howard Hughes memoir the newspapers are talking about,” she said. “It’s lying trash. Are you going to let that pass?”
“You tell them, Margie. That’s why I called. You call a press conference and tell them it is fraud, beginning to end, bogus, fake, garbage. I don’t know this guy Irving and never talked to him and we’ll sue the shit out of him and the publisher. McGraw-Hill, isn’t it? Do they think I’m so far gone I can’t defend myself?”
“Cary Grant already did the press conference and told them all that, Howard, but you have to do it yourself. People are going to believe it until you denounce it yourself. Live!”
“Cary Grant, best friend I ever had. I was best man when he married Betsy in that Arizona farmhouse. Introduced me to Kate, did you know that, Cobb?”
She looked up at Cobb who was shaking his head.
“They’re drugging you, aren’t they, Howard?”
“It’s the goddam pain,” he said. “Trying to keep it down.”
“People are stealing you blind, do you know that? Why did you let them sell Hughes Tool just when the Supreme Court was taking your side on TWA? Do you know how much money you lost on that sale?”
“When did the Supreme Court ever take my side?”
Cobb continued shaking his head. “He doesn’t even know about it,” he whispered.
“Look, the movie here’s starting,” he said, “The projector’s loaded. Have to go. Goldfinger. You seen it? How the hell are you, anyway, Margie? We had some good times together, didn’t we?”
“Howard. Before you go. You have to stop Summa.”
“Summa . . . Sum-ma . . . Sum-ma. Never heard of it . . . what the hell is it? Cobb. You still there, Cobb? Speak up.”
“I’m listening, Mr. Hughes.”
“What the hell is Summa? Don’t even know how to pronounce it.”
“It is your company, Mr. Hughes. The board set it up. It’s to be the parent of all your properties. I’ve seen the documents. You signed them.”
“Bullshit, I never signed anything with the name Summa on it. Anything set up should be called HRH for Howard Robard Hughes—and I have to sign off on it! Great initials, aren’t they, Cobb? Mean something else, you know.” He laughed. “My Dad had that in mind, you know. I’d say I lived up to it, wouldn’t you?”
Cobb dodged the question. “It looked like your signature.”
“Then it was forged. Where are my lawyers, anyway, where’s Schmidt, where’s Gay, where’s Bautzer?”
“They’re the ones doing it,” he whispered
to Maggie. “They’re not here, Mr. Hughes. If they’re not with you then they’re downtown.”
“Romaine Street?”
“That’s my guess. Hughes Productions.”
“Check with them. Whatever it is, don’t call it Summa. Any parent company should be the HRH Corporation. And send me the documents!”
“We don’t have your address, Mr. Hughes.”
Silence. Then: “I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. Hughes,” he said, loudly. “The board, you know . . .”
“Howard, before you go,” said Maggie, panicking slightly. “You are my dear friend. You hired me, you introduced me to Terry, you came to my wedding . . .”
“I remember.”
“This Summa thing is bad, Howard. The land—your land—the land Melvin Cobb and I are sitting on right now—they’re taking it. The Times published drawings. Playa Vista, they call it. They’re acting in your name but you would hate it. Melvin can send you the drawings. Ugly gray concrete buildings running on for miles—faceless, colorless, concrete tenements! Communist, Howard, communist! Like East Berlin. They can’t do that. We have a commitment from you, a contract.”
She waited for an answer, but none came.
“Somebody cut the line,” said Cobb. “I don’t think it was Howard.”
She didn’t know what to make of her life anymore, but it couldn’t go on like it was. When you’re young, decisions make themselves. She knew it wasn’t so, that like any other young woman she’d had to make decisions, but at the time they seemed inevitable, something growing naturally out of the situation: the break with Harold, the trip to Europe, Arnaud, marriage, Howard, flying, the WASPs, Terry—one thing leading naturally to another, life on autopilot. Turn fifty and no more autopilot. You’re back at the controls, and God help you if you drift. Drift means spin and spin means wreck.