Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  Unfortunately, Hughes too was in something of a bind. With his Nevada business turning sour, the helicopter losses mounting, and a new TWA judgment for $137 million hanging over him, the besieged billionaire was no longer able to blithely consider a cash investment of $200 million.

  But he wanted ABC, and he wanted it badly.

  “We have got to dig up some money from somewhere,” he wrote Maheu. Perhaps the TWA case could yet be salvaged. Perhaps the disastrous helicopter enterprise could be unloaded. But, if not, Hughes was still determined to get his television network.

  Indeed, he wanted ABC so much he was willing to surrender his birthright. He would sell the Hughes Tool Company—the golden goose he had inherited, the foundation of his entire fortune—in order to control television once and for all.

  Then, just a week after announcing his final decision to “go on ABC,” Hughes suddenly changed his mind.

  It was Saturday night. His penthouse retreat was filled with the sound of raucous laughter. Not that Hughes was happy. The laughter was booming from his TV set, tuned to the network he had decided to buy.

  “Welcome back to The Dating Game’!” said the grinning host, his arm around the small black child standing beside him. “It’s time for Marc to choose a delightful gal to share a ‘dream date’ with his dad! All right, Marc. Who will it be? Bachelorette number one? Bachelorette number two? Or bachelorette number three?”

  The camera cut to the three starlets. The child considered his choice. “Sorry, there’s the signal,” announced the host. “That means ‘time’s up’!” The child picked bachelorette number two, the actress who loved to cook. She smiled for a close-up while the studio audience applauded.

  Hughes watched it all in grim silence. By the time the show was over, he knew he had made a terrible mistake.

  “That’s it for tonight,” declared the emcee, throwing a kiss. “Thank you, goodnight, and we hope you always get the date you want! Now make sure to stay tuned for ‘The Newlywed Game,’ next on ABC.”

  Hughes continued to stare at the screen. But as he watched the newlyweds bicker, his thoughts kept returning to the outrage he had just witnessed. He reached for his bedside legal pad.

  “I just got through watching ABC’s Dating Game and Newlywed Game,” he wrote, “and my only reaction is let’s forget all about ABC.

  “Bob, I think all this attention directed toward violence in TV dramatic shows is certainly misplaced. These two game shows represent the largest single collection of poor taste I have ever seen.”

  But it was more than mere poor taste that riled the recluse into his sudden about-face. It was the horrendous immorality—the shocking violation—he had witnessed on “The Dating Game.”

  “The first show—‘Dating Game’ consisted of a small negro child selecting, sight unseen, one of three girls (adult girls) to make a sexually embellished trip to Rome with his father.

  “Two of the girls were negro and one was a very beautiful and attractive white girl. The child chose the white girl, who then was introduced to the negro father of the child and informed that she (the white girl) was to make an all expense paid vacation trip to Rome on TWA.”

  Talk about adding insult to injury. Not only did they dare to arrange this sinful interracial assignation, but they were using—no, defiling, TWA—his airline—to boot.

  “Bob, the entire handling of the show was, in every way carried out in a manner best calculated to titilate and arouse the sexual response of the audience. The whole show was of such a marginal character, sex-wise, that, if it had been presented as a motion picture to the governing body of the movie industry, its acceptance would have been very uncertain at best.

  “But, let me explain that I make the above comment based upon the subject matter and the treatment of the show, without any consideration whatsoever of the racial issue.

  “Then, on top of the very marginal show of miserable taste, which I have attempted to describe above, they have to compound the abuse of any conceivable moral standard by arranging a sexual rendezvous between a beautiful white girl and a negro man in Rome, which may even be in violation of the law.

  “And all of this is done solely for one purpose: to shock and arouse the sexual response of the audience so as to obtain a higher rating from the TV polls for the benefit of the sponsors.

  “Please consider this entire affair most carefully, Bob, to see if it gives you any ideas.”

  The two-hundred-million-dollar ABC deal was dead.

  After months of frenzied effort, after all those sleepless nights, after plotting to collar a president and seize the balance of power, after planning to auction off the most profitable part of his empire, Howard Hughes had finally abandoned his grand quest for a national television network over a game show.

  It was the collision of pure kitsch with pure power, a twilight-zone encounter between low camp and high finance.

  Everything had come full circle. His struggle to control television, his dream of controlling the world through television, all came to nought because, in the end, Hughes was himself controlled by television.

  It was as if the billionaire had finally entered the TV set he watched so compulsively, passing through its screen like Alice through the looking glass, the real “mystery bachelor” stepping out of his offstage isolation booth to join “The Dating Game,” only to discover that his chosen “dream date”—ABC—was soiled merchandise.

  There was, however, one last twist, an irony that Hughes himself never discovered. Had he known, an entire network might well have fallen into his hands.

  The “beautiful white girl” whose race-mixing Roman rendezvous so outraged Hughes was, in reality, a light-skinned black.

  5 Fear and Loathing

  The Bogeyman. Right there in his room.

  A huge gargoyle of a blackamoor, horribly greased and dripping filth, a savage threatening unspeakable crimes, had violated his sanctum sanctorum, slipping past the locked doors, the armed sentry, and the phalanx of Mormons through the one unguarded opening.

  Howard Hughes, sick with fear and revulsion, cried out in the night to Maheu.

  “I hate to disturb you this late,” he wrote in a shaken scrawl, “but I just saw something on TV that litterally and actually physically made me nauseated and I still am!

  “I saw a show on NBC in which the biggest ugliest negro you ever saw in your life was covered—litterally covered from head to foot with vaseline almost ¼ of an inch thick. It made you sick just to look at this man.

  “Bob, the producers must have deliberately tried to make this man as repulsive as possible. Anyway, he walked over next to an immaculately dressed white woman—sort of an English noblewoman type.

  “Well, when this repulsive gob of grease came close to this clean carefully dressed white woman, all I could think was ‘Jesus, don’t let that woman touch him.’ ”

  But it was too late. Not even Hughes could protect the purity of white womanhood from the potent forces of blackness.

  “So, after a minute or two of talk this man grabbed this woman, opened his mouth as wide as possible and kissed this woman in a way that would have been cut out of any movie even if the people involved had both been of the same race.”

  His Mandingo complex fully aroused, the outraged Texan was ready to call out a lynch mob. But no, the crime could not be punished.

  “Bob, this show seems to be the presentation of the Broadway version of the Oscar, so I imagine the scene I described was a scene taken at random from the winning play.…

  “I was all for making a protest to some congressional committee over this,” continued Hughes, “but now that I see it is the Tony awards, I feel it is even more shocking, but I suppose one should approach it with caution.”

  Another great white hope unfulfilled. The “repulsive gob of grease” was, in fact, James Earl Jones playing prizefighter Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, a segment of which was televised in the awards presentation. That realization did nothing to
still the billionaire’s sense of outrage.

  “Bob,” he concluded, “I dont care if this was the re-enactment of the Last Supper, that first scene is going to cause some comment.”

  Of all of Hughes’s phobias and obsessions, few were more virulent than his fear and loathing of blacks. His was a classic racism straight out of plantation melodrama, often expressed in terms so outrageous that it seems a parody. But he was deadly serious, and his bigotry had very real consequences. He did, after all, own the plantation.

  Hughes himself attributed his prejudice and paranoia to a traumatic event in his youth. “I was born and lived my first 20 years in Houston, Texas,” he explained. “I lived right in the middle of one race riot in which the negroes committed attrocities to equal any in Vietnam.”

  In fact, when Hughes was only eleven there had been a dramatic explosion of black rage in his rigidly segregated hometown. On the night of August 23, 1917, more than one hundred soldiers from an all-black infantry battalion stationed near the city seized rifles and marched on Houston to avenge the beating of a black officer by white policemen. Sixteen whites were killed in the three-hour uprising. The Houston riot was a milestone in America’s ongoing and, until then, rather one-sided race war—the first in which more whites were killed than blacks.

  Undoubtedly that night did have a real impact on young Howard. However, now, half a century later, the well-guarded recluse was besieged not by armed mobs but by phantoms of his own creation. Consumed by a nameless dread, he projected his fears onto a variety of unseen enemies. Sometimes they paraded before him in blackface—a minstrel show of his subconscious mind.

  Actually, it was his terror of blacks that had driven Hughes to take a first decisive step into total seclusion. After their marriage, Hughes and Jean Peters lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing each other only for marathon movie-watching trysts at night. They met each evening for their own “Late-Late Show” at Goldwyn Studios until Hughes discovered that his screening room there had been used to show rushes of Porgy and Bess to its all-black cast. He never set foot in that theater again.

  Nor did he ever again invite Jean to watch movies. Instead, Hughes moved alone to Nosseck’s Projection Studio on Sunset Boulevard, set up house there, kept his new location secret from his wife, and told her he was in the hospital with an “undiagnosed disease.” It was half-true. For it was in the three months Hughes spent alone at Nosseck’s that things first turned really weird.

  At first he spent his time talking to bankers and lawyers about the TWA crisis, all the while compulsively cleaning the telephone with Kleenex or endlessly arranging and rearranging a half-dozen Kleenex boxes into various geometric designs. For several weeks he wore the same white shirt and tan slacks. Then one day he stripped off his rancid clothes, went about naked, stopped talking to bankers and lawyers, and ordered his aides to maintain strict silence.

  Finally, Hughes issued a blanket decree: “Don’t try to get me for anything. Wait until I call you. I don’t want any messages handed to me.”

  Now he was set. He remained at the studio in silent seclusion until the late summer of 1958, when he suddenly moved back to his bungalow—and there had a complete nervous breakdown.

  It probably would have happened even without Porgy and Bess. Blacks may have precipitated the move that cut him off from his wife and left him alone with his madness, but blacks were not the real threat. The real threat was “contamination.”

  It was not merely the purity of white womanhood that obsessed Hughes, it was the purity of his entire world. And that purity was endangered not merely by big ugly blacks but by innumerable other forms of “contamination.”

  The most dangerous was invisible. Germs.

  Hughes set up bivouac in five pink bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and from his headquarters, bungalow 4, commanded his troops in the germ-warfare campaign.

  With germs, as with blacks, there had been childhood traumas. Both his parents had died suddenly, unexpectedly, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was eighteen. But his long-standing terror of bacteria was by now irrational. And it dominated his entire life.

  Hughes cut off all human contact—everyone was a dangerous carrier—except for his clean-living elite Mormon guard. And even they had to follow stringent rules designed to prevent the “backflow of germs.”

  The few who dealt with him personally, or handled anything he was to handle, first had to engage in a thirty-minute purification ritual called “processing”—“wash four distinct and separate times, using lots of lather each time from individual bars of soap”—and then don white cotton gloves.

  Even that was not sufficient. Finally, Hughes demanded that everything his Mormons delivered to him with their gloved processed hands also had to be wrapped in Kleenex or Scott paper towels, “insulation” to protect him from “contamination.”

  But he was hardly yet safe from the invisible threat. Seated naked in a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his darkened bungalow, its windows sealed shut with masking tape, the billionaire began to dictate a complete “Procedures Manual,” a series of meticulously detailed memos codifying such rules as the number of layers of tissues required in handling particular items, such as the clothes he now almost never wore.

  “Mr. Hughes would like you to bring a box of shirts, a box of trousers and a box of shoes,” began one typical “Operating Memorandum” titled “Taking Clothing to HRH.”

  “He wants you to obtain a brand new knife, never used, to open a new box of kleenex using the knife to open the slot.

  “After the box is open you are to take the little tag and the first piece of kleenex and destroy them; then using two fingers of the left hand and two fingers of the right hand take each piece of kleenex out of the box and place it on an unopened newspaper and repeat this until approximately 50 sheets are neatly stacked. You then have a paddle for one hand. You are then to make another for the other hand, making a total of two paddles of kleenex to use in handling these three boxes.

  “Mr. Hughes wanted you to remember to keep your head at a 45 degree angle from the various things you would touch, such as the kleenex box itself, the knife, the kleenex paddles.

  “The thing to be careful of during the operation is not to breath upon the various items.”

  And that was nothing to the precautions Hughes ordered in removing his hearing-aid cord from the bathroom cabinet:

  “A. First use 6 or 8 thicknesses of Kleenex, pulled one at a time from the slot, in touching the doorknob to open the door to the bathroom.

  “B. The same sheaf of Kleenex may be employed to turn on the spigots so as to obtain a good force of warm water. This Kleenex is then to be disposed of.

  “C. A sheaf of 6 to 8 Kleenex is then to be used to open the cabinet containing the soap, and a fresh bar of soap that has never been opened is to be used. All Kleenex used up to this point is to be disposed of.

  “D. The hands are to be washed with extreme care, far more thoroughly than they have ever been washed before, taking great pains that the hands do not touch the sides of the bowl, the spigots, or anything in the process. Great care should also be exercised when setting the soap down.

  “E. A sheaf of 15 to 20 fresh Kleenex is then to be used to turn off the spigots and the Kleenex is then to be thrown away.”

  The really delicate part of the mission was yet to begin, removal of the hearing-aid cord, Step 2:

  “A. The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of 15 Kleenexes. (Great care is to be exercised in opening and closing the doors. They are not to be slammed or swung hastily so as to raise any dust, and yet exceeding care is to be exercised against letting insects in.)

  “B. Nothing inside the cabinet is to be touched—the inside of the doors, the top of the cabinet, the sides—no other objects inside the cabinet are to be touched in any way with the exception of the envelope to be removed.”

  The hearing-aid cord was carefully sea
led inside an envelope, but not even the envelope could be touched:

  “C. The envelope is to be removed using a minimum of 15 Kleenexes. If it is necessary to use both hands, then 15 Kleenexes are to be used for each hand. (It is to be understood that these 15 Kleenexes are to be sterile on both sides of each tissue with the exception of the very outermost edge of the tissue. The center of the tissue only should come into contact with the object being picked up.) If something is on top of the package to be removed, a sterile instrument is to be used to lift it off.”

  Hughes himself, of course, could never be touched. Not by naked or even gloved and scrubbed hands. On those rare occasions when contact was necessary, as with a wake-up ritual he devised, full insulation was required:

  “Call Roy and have him come up to the house and awaken HRH at 10:15 AM sharp if HRH is not awake by that time. With 8 thicknesses of Kleenex he is to pinch HRH’s toes until he awakens, increasing the pressure each time.”

  His Mormons, themselves reduced to sterile instruments, obediently followed every mad detail of their master’s hygienic rituals, never questioning their missions even as they waded through the filth and debris of his bedroom, picking their way through the piles of newspapers and dirty Kleenex, treading carefully so as not to stir up the dust.

  In terror of germs, Hughes lived in filth. Nothing that came from his own pure being, nothing in his own nimbus was “contamination.” Indeed, he was fully as desperate to keep everything inside his bedroom from escaping as he was to keep everything outside from getting in.

  He could not bear to part with anything that was his. Not his dust, not his junk, not his hair, not his fingernails, not his sweat, not his urine, not his feces. His hair and beard went uncut for years while highly paid barbers stood on standby; he stopped trimming his nails when he somehow “lost” his favorite clippers in the debris of his lair; soon he began to store his urine in capped jars kept first in his Bel Air garage and later in his Las Vegas bedroom; and he was so chronically constipated, so unable to let go of his bodily wastes, that he once spent twenty-six consecutive hours sitting on the toilet without results.