He might have stayed there forever had events outside the penthouse not forced him to flee.
Maheu, suddenly realizing that his rivals were conspiring against him, launched a bold counterattack that brought the hidden power struggle to a head. Early in November, he fired off a telegram to Chester Davis, discharging the billionaire’s chief counsel from the TWA case.
Hughes himself had granted Maheu full authority over that litigation shortly after he was hit with the default judgment.
“You have the ball on the TWA situation,” he had written, eager to be rid of the hot potato. “It is my understanding that I turned the entire TWA matter over to you lock, stock, and barrel, a long time ago.
“Also, the decision as to what to do about legal representation is up to you. If I am to hold you responsible for the overall outcome, I must give you complete authority to decide which law firm you want to handle each phase of it.”
Now, however, when Maheu tried to exercise that power he instead hastened his own downfall. Chester Davis refused to step aside, and the Hughes Tool Company board of directors, controlled by Davis’s ally Holliday, revoked Maheu’s authority over TWA.
Outflanked, Maheu appealed the decision to Hughes. He hand-delivered a memo to the penthouse, pleading that the billionaire back his play. He received no reply. In fact, Maheu’s message got no further than the Mormons. On Bill Gay’s orders, they withheld it from Hughes. The palace coup was now in full force.
Unaware that his appeal had been intercepted, feeling himself cruelly abandoned, Maheu sent a second memo to Hughes. This one the Mormons delivered.
“I sometimes think that perhaps the time has come for you either to walk down the nine flights of stairs, or more conveniently utilize the elevator, so as to face the world yourself once and for all,” wrote Maheu, daring the recluse to leave his sanctuary. “Perhaps then you might have at least one more ounce of sympathy for someone else who is constantly facing it in your behalf, and who is about ready to go to bed one more evening finding himself on a damned lonely island.”
It was about to get a lot lonelier. Two days later, on November 14, Hughes told his aides he was ready to sign the proxy he had proposed back in August, the one that would give Gay, Davis, and Holliday authority over his Nevada empire. Davis had it all prepared. He sent the proxy by telecopier to the Mormons, who brought it in to their boss. The billionaire reached up from the Barcalounger he had installed in his new bedroom, put the proxy on a stack of legal pads, and signed Maheu’s death warrant. But he was not yet ready to order the execution.
First Hughes wanted to get out of town. Not even the nerve gas scared him as much as a final showdown with the hot-tempered Frenchman.
On Thanksgiving Eve, November 25, 1970, almost four years to the day from his arrival in Las Vegas, Howard Hughes made his Great Escape.
He did not walk down the stairs or take the elevator, as Maheu had suggested, but instead snuck down a rear fire escape. Rather, he was carried down, a grand invalid held aloft by his loyal Mormons, as they slowly descended nine narrow flights.
The billionaire lay on a stretcher, dressed for the first time since he arrived, again in blue pajamas, his arms and legs poking out bone-thin, a six-foot-four-inch near-skeleton weighing just over one hundred pounds, his scraggly beard reaching down past his sunken chest, his yellowed gray hair, uncut all four years, nearly two feet long—rakishly topped by a snap-brim brown fedora. It was the kind he had worn in his daredevil youth, when he was breaking all the world flying records. Hughes had insisted on that hat. He might be fleeing his kingdom like a thief in the night, an inglorious end to his grand adventure, but that old hat was a sign that he still had the Right Stuff.
Now, however, he took flight down a fire escape, was slipped into a waiting unmarked van, and finally was carried aboard a private jet while his pilots, as ordered, walked off into the darkness. The plane flew its unidentified passenger directly to the Bahamas.
Early the next morning, Hughes was safely ensconced in another blacked-out bedroom of another ninth-floor penthouse in the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island.
His big getaway was a great success. Hughes had escaped from one self-made prison and locked himself in another, without anyone being the wiser.
It took Maheu a full week to discover that Hughes had disappeared. It took him twenty-four hours to turn it into the most sensational “missing persons” case the world had ever seen.
“HOWARD HUGHES VANISHES! MYSTERY BAFFLES CLOSE ASSOCIATES” read the screaming banner headline in the Las Vegas Sun. Maheu had leaked the story to his pal Hank Greenspun, and Greenspun suggested that the billionaire had been kidnapped, drugged, “spirited away,” was perhaps even dead.
When the story reached Hughes in his Bahamas bedroom, he was enraged. He immediately released the proxy that stripped Maheu of all power and fired off one final memo dissolving their partnership. It went not to Maheu but to his rival Chester Davis.
“You can tell Maheu for me that I had not fully determined in my mind to withdraw all support from his position until he started playing this cat and mouse game for his own selfish benefit,” wrote Hughes.
“In other words, Maheu does not believe for one second that I am dead, disabled, or any of the other wild accusations he has been making.…
“Consequently, when he started claiming that my messages were not genuine and that I had been abducted, and all the other wild charges.
“When he demanded entrance to my apartment (to look for foul play, no less!)
“In other words, when this entire TV writer’s dream started unfolding, it soon became obvious that Maheu had no concern about the truth in this matter.
“He knew full well where I was,” Hughes continued. “I have been planning this trip for more than a year, and I had discussed it with him many times.
“So it became clear that Maheu had decided to milk his relationship with me and my companies to the last possible dollar.
“It was only at this point, that I decided the case against Maheu had been fully and conclusively proven.
“Up to this time, in spite of the massive array of evidence, I would gladly have listened to his side of the issue.
“It was his shocking conduct since my departure that left me feeling all efforts to explain away these actions would be totally without purpose.
“And, if his conduct since my departure consisted of a mass of lies, then I must assume that, in hundreds of other instances wherein his contentions were in direct conflict with other of my associates who had been with me for years and years of honest, loyal service, I repeat, if he has been lying since my departure, then I must assume that he was lying in these many, many other situations wherein I was forced to choose between accepting Maheu’s contentions or the equally impassioned and, so far as I could tell, equally genuine and truthful claims of other of my associates whom I have learned to trust.
“Up to this time,” Hughes concluded, “I simply had no way to know who was telling the truth, and who was not.
“But Maheu’s actions since my departure have made this entire situation very clear.”
Not long after, John Ehrlichman encountered Bebe Rebozo coming down the stairway from the president’s private quarters inside the White House. They spoke in hushed tones about the strange doings in Las Vegas and the Bahamas. Rebozo wondered aloud whether his pal Richard Danner would survive the big shake-up. His real fear remained unspoken: Would Richard Nixon?
Epilogue I
Watergate
“This is for Haldeman,” said Richard Nixon, speaking into his dictaphone aboard Air Force One. The president had just emerged from a ten-day retreat at San Clemente, plotting his reelection campaign and brooding alone with Bebe Rebozo, and now he was flying to the University of Nebraska to “forge an alliance of the generations.” But his mind was elsewhere, fixated on another alliance. One he had to destroy, before it destroyed him.
“It would seem that the time is approachin
g when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes,” declared Nixon, going on the attack, dictating his message to Haldeman. “Bebe has some information on this, although it is, of course, not solid. But there is no question that one of Hughes’s people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for ‘services rendered’ in the past. Perhaps Colson should check on this.”
It was January 14, 1971. Just six weeks had passed since Howard Hughes made his great escape, and the ugly aftermath of the Hughes-Maheu split had Nixon in mortal terror.
It was not the money O’Brien got from Hughes that really obsessed him. It was his own Hughes money. The hot hundred grand hidden away in Bebe Rebozo’s safe-deposit box. Throughout his presidency Nixon had heard that tell-tale heart beating, had grown increasingly fearful that others could also hear it, that soon they would discover the $100,000 payoff his pal Danner had delivered to his pal Rebozo, that again he would be ruined by an ugly Hughes scandal, that it would cost him the White House as it had once before.
Nixon never got over that 1960 defeat. His narrow loss to JFK still haunted him, and he still blamed that loss on the Hughes “loan” scandal—the never-repaid $205,000 his brother had received from the billionaire. Yet Nixon had taken more Hughes money. A cursed bundle of hundred-dollar bills. And now, with the Hughes empire split by a bitter power struggle, Nixon was certain his terrible guilty secret was about to come spilling out.
That very morning, before leaving the western White House, the president had seen a Los Angeles Times report that Maheu planned to subpoena his former boss for a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit. Even if the recluse himself failed to appear, secret Hughes memos impounded by the Nevada court were likely to surface. Indeed, the dreaded Jack Anderson already claimed to have seen some.
The more Nixon brooded, the more terrified he grew, and the more he focused on Larry O’Brien. He was getting away with it. The hated leader of the Kennedy gang, the man who had beaten him in 1960 by exploiting the Hughes loan scandal, was himself getting $15,000 a month from the billionaire while he served as unpaid chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon wanted revenge. He wanted to unmask O’Brien as a secret Hughes lobbyist. He wanted to make O’Brien pay as he had paid.
But now, aboard Air Force One, the president was gripped by a darker thought. The terrible fear that O’Brien knew—that he had somehow learned from his hidden masters all about the secret Hughes cash in Bebe’s little tin box.
Nixon could not tell that to Haldeman. He could not say to his chief of staff, “My God, O’Brien must know! We’ve got to find out what he’s found out. We’ve got to get him before he gets me.” Nixon could not say that because Haldeman himself didn’t know. None of the president’s men knew. Only Rebozo shared that secret. So, instead, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get O’Brien.
“We’re going to nail O’Brien on this, one way or the other,” the president told him back in Washington the next day. He called Haldeman into the Oval Office and said, “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it, Bob. We’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes—and just what he’s doing for the money.”
It was the beginning of a desperate covert campaign. One that would end with Richard Nixon’s burglars caught looking for Howard Hughes’s secrets inside Larry O’Brien’s office—at the Watergate.
Down in the Bahamas, Hughes was oblivious to the high-stakes intrigue he had unwittingly inspired back in Washington. Indeed, he was oblivious to everything outside his new blacked-out bedroom.
He was finally safe. As safe as a prisoner in solitary confinement, with two armed guards on the penthouse floor of his Paradise Island retreat, one at the elevator, the other behind a locked partition, himself sealed off from Hughes by a second locked partition, but keeping watch on the rest of the hotel through closed-circuit TV cameras, while a third guard patrolled the roof with a vicious attack dog.
But Hughes was no longer entirely his own prisoner. With Maheu out of the picture, his Mormon attendants were firmly in control, determined to keep their boss bedridden and befuddled.
Hughes was completely cut off from the world, thousands of miles from all citadels of his empire, now run by virtual strangers. No longer was he sending secret handwritten memos in sealed envelopes to a trusted regent; indeed he rarely wrote any memos at all. The Mormons controlled all lines of communication. Hughes dictated his messages to them and received all replies through them. And he knew only what they wished him to know.
He no longer read newspapers. He had even stopped watching television. The reception was so bad on his island retreat that he gave up TV after one futile day. To bring a clear picture into his bedroom, he toyed for a few weeks with the idea of using one of the thirty satellites his empire had circling the globe, but soon abandoned that too.
Instead he watched movies, turning his penthouse into a darkened theater of the absurd, screening one film after another, or the same one several times in a row, not infrequently ten or twenty times, and a few real favorites more than a hundred times. Movie soundtracks blared constantly, as his television once had. But unlike TV, the movies told him nothing of the real world beyond.
Caught up in his celluloid fantasies, Hughes spent his days reclining naked on a paper-towel-insulated lounge chair and rarely left his Barcalounger even to sleep. His bedsores got so bad that they required surgery, which Hughes forced his doctor to perform in the hotel room. But one shoulder blade—the bare bone—kept tearing through the parchmentlike skin of his emaciated body, an open sore five inches long continually rubbed raw by his hard Naugahyde lounge chair.
“We should bring in a softer chair,” one of his Mormons solicitously advised, “and you should put forth your very best effort to get out of the chair as much as possible—at least do your sleeping in bed. Dr. Chaffin told me that as long as you persist in spending nearly all your time in the chair, you could expect a recurrence. He said I should take your chair and push it off the balcony.”
Hughes, however, refused to budge. And his Mormons catered to his whims, kept their prisoner happy. They showed him his movies, they gave him his enemas, and they brought him his codeine.
Hughes was shooting up more than ever now—an incredible fifty to sixty grains of codeine a day, more than twice what he had used in Las Vegas. From time to time his doctors tried to lower the dose.
“The heavy usage of the item,” they warned, had affected him “to the extent that you are not in any condition, either physically or mentally, in any 24 hour period to enjoy the day or make any business decisions.”
It hardly mattered. Hughes rarely did any real business anymore. Indeed, he rarely did anything at all. His life had fallen into a pattern, one that would change little over the rest of his life, and one that his Mormons carefully chronicled, at his orders keeping a minute-by-minute account of the activities of a man who did virtually nothing.
One day ran into another, with Hughes moving from “chair” to “B/R”—from Barcalounger to bathroom—and back again, his movements meticulously recorded:
SUNDAY 6:55 AM Asleep.
11:15 AM Awake, B/R.
11:35 AM Chair, screening “SITUATION HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS” (completed all but last 5 min. reel 3)
1:30 PM 10 C [10 grains codeine]
1:50 PM B/R.
2:10 PM Chair, resumed screening “THE KILLERS”
3:30 PM Food: Chicken only.
4:20 PM Finished eating.
Finished “SITUATION HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS”
Screening “DO NOT DISTURB” (OK to return)
6:45 PM B/R.
7:00 PM Chair.
7:45 PM Screening “DEATH OF A GUN-FIGHTER” (1 reel only)
8:25 PM B/R.
8:45 PM Chair.
9:00 PM Screening “THE KILLERS”
9:35 PM Chicken and dessert. Completed “THE KILLERS”
11:25 PM B/R.
11:50 PM Bed. Changed bandages. Not asleep.
Occasionally Hugh
es had important instructions inscribed in the logs: “Carry the pillow by the bottom seam” or “HRH says not to get any more Italian westerns” or “John must somehow acquire additional #4’s” (the Empirin compound containing codeine) or “Hereafter when he asks for his pills, take him the entire bottle (not some on a kleenex)” or, more sadly, “He doesn’t want to be permitted to sleep in the bathroom anymore.”
Suddenly, after three months locked inside his Bahamas bedroom, Howard Hughes decided to break loose, set sail, move his command post to a yacht.
“I dont know how many more summers I have left,” wrote the rapidly failing sixty-five-year-old recluse, “but I dont intend to spend all of them holed up in a hotel room on a barcalounger.
“The choice of boats available in the Miami area now is at its peak. Also, several of the preferred boats are in Europe, and if I should select one of these, I may decide to spend the summer in the Mediterranean area.”
Hughes was definitely feeling expansive—he could almost feel the sea breezes already—but his Mormons soon took the wind out of his sails. Their prisoner could not be allowed to escape.
“In connection with the possible plan to move onto a boat, there is an aspect of security which should be considered,” the nursemaids warned, raising the specter of Robert Maheu.
The deposed henchman had not been idle. He was still fighting fiercely to recover his lost power and had even sent a crew commanded by his son to spy on Hughes down in the Bahamas. The mission had not gone well. Maheu’s gang was routed by a rival cloak-and-dagger outfit—Intertel—the private intelligence agency working for Hughes but reporting to the Mormons.
“Eleven persons were arrested in the rooms directly below us with wiretapping and other apparatus,” the Mormons belatedly informed Hughes. “They had among other things a Peter Maheu check for $10,000 and vouchers from the Frontier.
“All this is bad enough, but the FBI feels that this was very likely not just a case of wiretapping. Based on the number and type of people involved, they think it was more likely an aborted kidnapping attempt.
Citizen Hughes Page 44