The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Hughes died without friends or family, his sordid decline eked out in hotel rooms, the windows shrouded with blackout material. Often he would sit naked, a hotel napkin covering his genitals, watching movies over and over again. He was rumored to have watched Ice Station Zebra, the 1968 Alistair MacLean spy thriller starring Rock Hudson, more than 150 times. No one knows what it was in the film that piqued his interest. When Hughes was chronically constipated and dehydrated in his final months, his assistant John Holmes would arrive every three days to deliver brown paper bags containing almond Hershey bars, homogenized milk, and unsalted pecans to his bedside. These had to be handed over in silence, the bag held out at 45 degrees so that Hughes could reach inside and remove the items individually with a clean paper tissue for each one. According to one biographer, Richard Hack, the chocolate was “cut into half-inch squares, each square chewed individually and completely, followed by a swallow of milk.” Hughes weighed less than one hundred pounds when he died. His appearance was so changed through neglect and malnutrition that the FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify him.

  As falls from grace go, Hughes’s has a mythic quality to it. Few men have ever enjoyed so much money and fame; few have ended in such a complete rejection of the world. What was it that first sent Hughes over the edge in 1947? There are clues in his childhood: His mother, Allene, was always worried about germs, sending news clippings to the supervisor of young Howard’s summer camp advising caution when allowing so many boys to mix together because of the dangers of spreading polio. His grandmother Mimi was also fearful of dirt and refused to have any built-in cupboards in the house because they could not be moved outdoors to be “disinfected” by sunlight. And both his parents had died suddenly when Hughes was in his late teens.

  But there were two other specific events that took place just before his breakdown that may have contributed more directly to it. In July 1946 he was the pilot on the test flight of a spy plane called the XF-11 when mechanical failure brought the plane down on the edge of Beverly Hills. It collided with three houses and then exploded. Hughes was severely injured, puncturing a lung, breaking six ribs and his collarbone, and suffering extensive cuts and burns. The morphine used to treat a serious burn to his hand probably started his dependency on prescription drugs, and he remained in constant pain for the rest of his life.

  The second setback involved Hughes’s contribution to the war effort. Concerned at the loss of American troops and equipment through U-boat action in the Atlantic, he had secured the government contract to build a huge transport seaplane, big enough to carry 750 troops and two tanks. The eight-engined H-4 Hercules, or Spruce Goose, was the largest plane then built and remains the largest wooden airplane in history. Though the Spruce Goose’s size has since been beaten by the Russian Antonov An-225, its wingspan of 320 feet is still a world record. Like many of Hughes’s schemes, it went wildly over budget and was never delivered, the contract being canceled amid accusations of bribery. The prototype flew only once, in November 1947, a journey of about a mile at an altitude of 70 feet. Hughes was at the controls. The collapse of this project was a huge blow to his pride (and his pocket) and he kept the plane in a hangar in perfect condition at a cost of $1,000,000 a year until his death in 1976. He was not a man who was used to failure. As he reminded a reporter: “I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamit, I’m a billionaire.” Two weeks later, he withdrew to his screening room and began his long descent into oblivion.

  Howard Hughes’s descent into culinary lunacy feels a long way removed from the dietary eccentricities of Helena de Noailles or John Harvey Kellogg, or the weight-watching routines of Empress Elizabeth. Today when we call someone a glutton, we mean they eat too much. Of the lives in this chapter, only George Fordyce fits that description. But the original meaning of gluttony was much more subtle. The great medieval moralist St. Thomas Aquinas defined it as the sin of “inordinate desire.” As well as eating too much, he thought eating too soon, eating too eagerly, eating too expensively, and eating too fussily were all equally wrong. And we’re talking to an expert here. St. Tom himself was so fat he had to have a semicircle cut out of his dining table to accommodate his stomach. But where food is concerned we should not be too hasty in our judgments. As G. K. Chesterton said: “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Grin and Bear It

  Pieter Stuyvesant—General Antonio López de Santa Anna—Daniel Lambert—Florence Nightingale—Fernando Pessoa—Dawn Langley Simmons

  Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have.

  EDVARD MUNCH

  Ambition, fame, sex, gluttony: All these have the capacity to transform our lives for better or worse, and as we have seen, the struggle to control them can be the making of us. But there are some traumatic events over which we can have no possible control: the loss of a limb, the onset of blindness, an attack of mental illness. The human race fights a running battle against disease and injury. Most people who have ever lived (perhaps as many as 45 billion) died of malaria; plague and smallpox have killed more human beings than all wars and natural disasters put together. Even in affluent Britain and the United States today, one in ten adults is registered as disabled; over the age of fifty, this rises to one in two. A quarter of Americans suffer from some form of neurotic, psychotic, or addictive disorder, and the commonest illness treated by doctors in Britain is depression. Whether we find comfort in religion, consolation in philosophy, or simply adopt a stiff upper lip, learning how to deal with sudden physical misfortune is something we all, sooner or later, have to deal with.

  Posterity hasn’t been kind to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612–72), the last Dutch governor of what we now call New York. Ask an American what they know about him and they will probably tell you he had a wooden leg. The football team at New York’s Stuyvesant High School is still called the Peglegs, and grumpy, stubborn Peg Leg Pete is seen as, at best, a bit-part player in the long drama of the nation, an irrelevant prologue before the main act gets under way. In Washington Irving’s satirical Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809), Stuyvesant is described as “a tough, sturdy, valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor.” By 1938 this rather admiring portrait had given way to the repressive protofascist of the musical Knickerbocker’s Holiday by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson. In the one number from the show that’s become a classic, Stuyvesant’s character gets to sing the bittersweet “September Song.”

  Stuyvesant’s real life was more bitter than sweet. He came from Friesland in the flat northlands of the Netherlands, an area of devout peasants and grim-faced ultraconformity. His father was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church and Pieter’s obvious career path was to follow him there. But the young Stuyvesant rebelled, choosing to study philosophy rather than theology and getting himself kicked out of the university for sleeping with his landlord’s daughter. He immediately joined the Dutch West India Company as a clerk, rising quickly through the ranks, until he was appointed the director of the Caribbean colony of Curaçao in 1642, just before his thirtieth birthday.

  Stuyvesant was ambitious, single-minded, and charismatic, gathering a string of acolytes around him. The most dedicated of these was John Farret, a fellow West India Company employee and an accomplished painter and poet. For many years, the two men enjoyed a diverting correspondence conducted entirely in verse. Farret hero-worshipped Stuyvesant, referring to him as “Excellency” and “My Stuyvesant” and calling Stuyvesant’s own rather clunky verses “godlike.” These letters (which only came to light in the 1920s) have a faint flavor of homoeroticism about them, though there is no suggestion of any sexual liaison. They put a fresh slant on Stuyvesant’s dour and crusty image, rather like discovering Oliver Cromwell had an effeminate Royalist pen pal.

  Stuyvesant was two years into his Caribbean appointment when,
during an ill-advised expedition to recapture the island of St. Martin from the Spanish, his leg was blown off. He was flamboyantly planting the Dutch flag on a rampart that his troops had thrown up on the beach when a cannonball fired from the island’s fort shattered his right shin. That he lived to tell the tale indicates his considerable resilience. Dutch doctors were the most advanced in Europe and ingenious in devising new techniques of amputation, but none of these was easy or pleasant. Speed was of the essence. Fat and muscle had to be cut away to create a skin flap, and the bone sawn through as quickly as possible. Some surgeons could manage the whole procedure in less than a minute, but the survival rate was less than one in three.

  Whoever saved Stuyvesant did an excellent job, but the patient was delirious for several weeks afterward. He got back to his desk as soon as he could, his first act being a letter of apology to the directors of the company, regretting that his attack “did not succeed so well as had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg, it being removed by a rough ball.” He then dashed off a poetical note to Farret, who responded with his own attempt, “On the Off-Shot Leg of the Noble, Brave Heer Stuyvesant, Before the Island of St. Marten.” Even by Farret’s fulsome standards, the poem hit new heights of Stuyvesant idolatry: “The bullet hits his leg; the rebound touches my heart….”

  Despite his determination to carry on as normal, in the heat of the tropics Stuyvesant’s wound began to fester and he was reluctantly forced to return home to recuperate properly. His nursemaid was the plain but good-hearted spinster Judith Bayard, three years his senior and his brother-in-law’s sister. When he announced his intention to marry her, Farret goaded him by suggesting the marriage would never be consummated because Stuyvesant wasn’t up to the job. Stuyvesant’s verse in response was defiant, and the couple went on to have a pair of sons.

  Once better, Stuyvesant reported for duty at the West India Company’s offices in Amsterdam. He had an expensive state-of-the-art wooden leg, and a cheap spare one for emergencies. It was a scene from a seventeenth-century version of The Terminator—the wounded soldier returns, older, wiser, more focused, his false limb glinting with the silver nails used to reinforce it. Here was the complete company man. The directors were impressed. They gave Stuyvesant a new mission: to impose order on the unruly colony of New Netherland on the east coast of North America.

  As director-general of the settlement, based in the capital, New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant diligently looked after the company’s interests for the best part of sixteen years. He was a shrewd negotiator: tough, uncompromising, and fair, holding off threats from the Swedes and the Native Americans and even managing for a while to get the New Englanders to accept Dutch sovereignty. In the end, though, it all came to nothing. And because it is the victors who decide what history gets taught in school, very few people today have heard of New Netherland, and if they’ve heard of Pieter Stuyvesant at all, they know only that he was Dutch and had a wooden leg. This is most unfair.

  New Netherland was a colony of more than ten thousand people. Unlike most of Puritan New England, it wasn’t founded on religious grounds. It was primarily a trading center, infused with the liberal outlook that made the Netherlands the financial and intellectual powerhouse of the seventeenth century. As a result, it was a melting pot of nationalities and mixed marriages. New Amsterdam was to become New York, but its heart—and tongue—remains Dutch. Many words we consider uniquely American are in fact adopted from Dutch: boss for master, cookies, coleslaw, even Santa Claus. It was the Dutch who erected the defensive wall that became Wall Street; Stuyvesant’s farm or bouwerie is now The Bowery, one of the city’s most famous thoroughfares; even Broadway (built by Stuyvesant) is merely the English pronunciation of Breede weg. The homesteads of New Amsterdam—Nieuw Haarlem, Greenwyck, Breukelen, Bronck’s Plantation, Jonker’s Plantation—all survive in the names of modern New York’s neighborhoods and boroughs: Harlem, Greenwich Village, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Yonkers.

  This last was originally a sawmill on the Hudson River, named after its owner Jonkheer van der Donck. Adriaen van der Donck was a young lawyer and landowner and Jonkheer was his honorific title (it means “Young Gentleman,” roughly equivalent to the Honorable in English). He had studied at the University of Leiden, where complete religious freedom and lack of censorship were the order of the day, and he was steeped in the new learning of Galileo, Descartes, and Spinoza. Arriving in America in 1641, he immediately fell in love with the country: the landscape, plants, animals, and most of all, the languages and customs of the local Mohican and Mohawk tribes. Recognizing early on the importance of beavers to the fledging economy, he kept them as pets and studied every aspect of their life cycle. He saw New Netherland as a place of almost endless possibility, where laws and governance could be founded on the principles of peace and cooperation between peoples. In the passion he brought to his task of recording and mapping the colony, one can detect the first glimmering of the ideas that led to America’s independence more than a century later.

  Stuyvesant’s predecessor as director-general, Willem Kleft, had been very unpopular with the colonists. Against van der Donck’s peaceful principles, he had started a bloody Indian war that drained the colony’s resources and made outlying areas dangerous. Van der Donck used his oratorical skills to oppose Kleft and lobby for his replacement. When Stuyvesant arrived in 1647, van der Donck was appointed “President of the Commonality,” effectively Stuyvesant’s deputy. The two men at first got on well, but the new director-general was easier to admire than to like. Unlike Adriaen van der Donck, he was a deeply conservative man who had no time for anything other than the iron laws of God and their earthly manifestation, the Dutch West India Company. He was an autocrat, referring to his fellow citizens as “subjects” or “his children” and winning arguments not by subtle legal niceties, but by shouting, swearing, and stamping his wooden leg on the floor. The pain caused made him increasingly difficult to deal with. Intractable differences both of character and political aspiration made the relationship with his deputy untenable. Van der Donck was stripped of public office. In quick succession, he lost his job, his right to practice law, and his life. In a tragic irony, he was murdered in an Indian raid.

  What Stuyvesant lost was the colony. Ten years after van der Donck’s death, the Second Anglo-Dutch War broke out and four English warships sailed up the Hudson. The Dutch knew they had no chance: The West India Company either couldn’t or wouldn’t send troops to defend the colony properly. The battle-weary Stuyvesant stood bravely at his post as New Netherland’s leading citizens—including his son—pleaded with him to give in. “I would much rather be carried out dead,” he replied. When finally forced to accept the inevitable, he did so proudly, stumping out of Fort Amsterdam in full uniform with his Dutch troops behind him.

  It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Without his cussedness and intelligence, the colony might have fallen to the English much sooner. When it did, it was well established enough for most of the colonists—including Stuyvesant and his family—to segue peacefully into life as New Yorkers. Little is known of Pieter Stuyvesant’s private life, but he did have one passion, inspired by his years in Curaçao. He collected tropical birds, and by the time of his death in 1672 he had several large aviaries full of them. It’s an odd thought that this tight-lipped old moralist, with his black-and-white view of the world, saw out his days surrounded by loud squawks and splashes of brilliant color, on the farm that would one day become famous as the street of bums and drunks.

  It’s impossible to tell how much the loss of his leg changed Stuyvesant’s life. One of the central tenets of the modern approach to disability is that no one should be limited or defined by it. Stuyvesant, in his stoical Dutch way, would have assented to that. The career of another one-legged military man makes a dramatic contrast. General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876) holds the unique distinction of being the only person to become head of the same nation state on eleven separate occ
asions, once for less than a fortnight. From 1833 to 1855, Mexico was unstable even by Mexican standards: The presidency changed hands thirty-six times. To carve out a political career in these unpromising conditions, Santa Anna had to use anything he could to gather popular support, including the shameless exploitation of his missing appendage.

  He was born into a respected Mexican Spanish family in the port of Veracruz, and his initial loyalty was to the Spanish crown. He was an outstanding soldier but also a keen gambler, and as a young officer he was often in debt. During his first tour of duty in Texas he appropriated money from regimental funds, got caught, and was sent back to headquarters in Veracruz as punishment. This allowed him to indulge his other passion: women. His military duties were not demanding and he soon acquired a reputation for whoring and for dalliances with other men’s wives.