Hughesworld: The Strange Life and Death of an American Legend

Copyright © 2013 Arelo C. Sederberg.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6921-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6922-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012924195

iUniverse rev. date: 1/18/2013

Contents

One April 5, the Final Death

I. Crazy World

II. Mere Millionaire

III. Rotting Fish

Two A Monarch Unmourned

I. Moment of Silence

II. The Stakes

III. Fumbling in Acapulco

IV. Home the Native Son

V. Manana

VI. Big Howard

Three Treasure Hunt

I. Knowledge of This Death

II. Wills, Wills, Wills

III. Dreaded Disease

IV. Heirs, Heirs, Heirs

V. HRH Jr., the Second

VI. Phantom of the Courtroom

VII. Creative Writing

VIII. A Cousin Reports

Four Cracks in the Wall

I. The Ostrich Defense

II. Prodigal Sons

III. Desperate Wives

Five High Flyer

I. Fastest Man Alive

II. Around the World

III. The Goose and XF-11

Six The Sacking of RAM

I. Showdown at Sundown

II. Buying Nixon

III. Hughes and Watergate

IV. ‘I Fear Bodily Harm’

V. Nerve Gas

VI. The Greek

IV. Crusading Editor

Seven Con Man of the Year

I. The Announcement

II. Howard Speaks

III. The Great Flimflam

IV. End of the Affair

V. Guest of a Dictator

Eight Glow, Little Glomar

I. Break-ins

II. Bit Players

III. The Perfect Con

IV. Pulp Fiction

V. Dreadful Sorry

VI. Sidelights

Nine Melvin and Howard

I. Bum in the Desert

II. Pinocchio’s Nose

III. The Return of Ventura

IV. Worms and Zombies

V. Dummar Redux

Ten Blood on the Floor

I. Seeds of Discontent

II. Toil and Trouble

III. Lost Will and Testament

IV. Man Without a Country

V. Disorder and Early Sorrow

Eleven Ghost in a Fog

I. Editor in Chief

II. Little Deal

III. The Legacy

Acknowledgements and Bibliography

About the Author

By Arelo C. Sederberg

Novels

A Collection for J.L.

Casino

The Power Players

The Kingmakers

Zora

Hollywood Graffiti

Lanterns in the Dawn

Scarlet Summer

The Sleepwalkers Below the Hill

So Long a Life

The Girl Who Saved Baseball

Stockholm

Non-fiction

The Dynamite Conspiracy

The Stock Market Investment Club Handbook

Hughesworld

Literary Criticism

Murder Most Foul: Violence in the Classics

Short Stories and Novellas

Dead Night on the Beat and Other Stories

Country Music and Other Stories

One

April 5, the Final Death

Howard Hughes was the only man ever who had to die to prove that he was alive.

—Walter Kane, director of entertainment, Hughes Las Vegas hotel-casinos.

There is no position, however false in its universality, which is not true of some particular man.

—Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

After the first death, there is no other.

—Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

I. Crazy World

In placid Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb known for its Santa Anita thoroughbred racetrack and jagged smog-obscured San Gabriel Mountains, 12-year-old Tommy Christopher burned a hard-earned dollar bill the day Howard R. Hughes Jr. died. It was April 5, 1976. I learned of this symbolic cremation from my young son James, who witnessed the ceremony. It might seem a curious tribute to the enigmatic 70-year-old recluse, yet it was revealing. It indicated that his fame penetrated deeply and widely and the overriding impression of him was his fabulous wealth. And indeed he was rich. He had, unlike young Tommy, money to burn; his fortune ranged from two to ten billion, depending upon how it was accounted. But if the Hughes mystique were based on wealth alone it would not have been a mystique. Mere money could not have sustained the strange Hughesian phenomenon that blazed across the globe for a half-century.

His life as recorded in numerous biographies and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles was part real and part conjecture, colored by myths he created, deliberately or not. Hughes was a chameleon, several persons in one. He was a bold pilot who set speed and distance records and survived four crashes, each one taking something from him, a little death. He was an avant-garde, censor-defying moviemaker and a businessman of underestimated deal-making and promotional skills, if unconventional. At various times he owned an international airline, a leading defense contractor, a dominant oil well drilling bit supplier, a major civilian-military helicopter producer, a movie studio, seven Nevada casinos, scores of personal airplanes, and thousands of acres of prime land in four states.

He was a battler. With calculated tenacity he waged wars against Wall Street, the U.S. Congress, regulatory authorities, and the courts. He also was a political fixer, tax dodger, racial bigot, playboy, womanizer, and a germ-phobic phantom ridden by bizarre eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. In his final years he lay secluded in shuttered hotel suites, drug-consumed and perhaps mad, occasionally lucid but often in a macabre limbo. The descent became total before he realized it and when he tried to escape it was too late. It was as if he had assigned himself to a living death; he was caught, a victim of a prison he had created. At the end he was a grotesque skeletal rag, shrunken and dehydrated, bleeding from open sores. No King Lear, no Oedipus Rex lived a life so soaring that was destined to fall so tragically.

Celebrities flash on stage and are gone like exploding stars but Hughes’ fame endured and grew over five decades. What explains this longevity? Not his wealth, not his motion picture achievements, not his acumen as a financier or skills as a pilot. His aircraft speed and distance records were revolutionary for the era but by the time of his death they had been reduced to footnotes in aviation history. Nor was his extraordinary fame based on achievements in aircraft design, despite his sometimes awesome conceptions for speed and size. He had an uncommon ability to infuse the knowledge, training and intelligence from others into himself, even the complex intricacies of large airplanes. He envisioned. Others built.

But even if he had been an inventive genius and his contributions to movies, aviation, and industry were extraordinary and lasting, the long-sustained interest in him would not have been so intense. His fame rested primarily on myth that stemmed from a shadow land. It was his secrecy. It was Hughesworld—alien, unreal, borderline dementia. A credo of reporters, and perhaps a quirk of human nature, is that which is unavailable becomes the avidly pursued. Thus, what was Howard Hughes swelled and took on a life of its own, becoming the stuff of legend. He was an unsolved mystery, real yet fabled. A mythic image of him held sway. If a cameraman lucky enough to grab a Howard Hughes photo were to offer the prize at auction, tabloids such as National Enquirer would have bid a hundred thousand or more. That was four year’s pay for a news photographer then. The ultimate, an interview, would have brought lasting fame to the reporter, somewhat like the lawman who hunted down and killed Billy the Kid.

To a small band of newsmen, the Hughes Watchers, he was an obsession. They were not going to let him go merely because he had died. And in some ways he had made sure that they wouldn’t.

I had been in public relations for Hughes interests for six years and was his sole press spokesman on that April 5 day. This is not a boast; it’s an admission, a confession. PR has been called the art of creative lying, a definition I wouldn’t dispute. It is an artifice practiced daily, adroitly and shrewdly, in the White House and in Congress. In government it’s called spin, a form of gamesmanship, the art of winning without actually cheating. In corporations it is practiced no differently. Within the ethereal realm of Hughesworld, PR was the art of creative lying while balanced on a high wire above Niagara Falls. You had to explain what was happening to a sophisticated and eager press without revealing anything. Either you knew and couldn’t say or you didn’t know and wouldn’t admit it. At the same time you tried to maintain credibility with reporters all over the world.

The Boss, the Man, the Stockholder—sobriquets used at his companies (Mr. Hughes seemed too formal; Howard too familiar)—was an elusive will-o’-the-wisp, strangely present but unseen. He sprang from no mold, nor did he follow or leave one. I would like to see an accurate story of my life printed because I think I have had experiences that could be helpful to others, he said. That is true. Some aspects of his life, such as his vision, could be considered role models. The opposite, that his life was an example of how not to live, also is true.

He was a curious blend of contradictions—an entrepreneurial businessman whose procrastinations and meddling almost ruined several large companies, a world-famous pilot whose foolhardiness in the cockpit caused deadly crashes, a breathless lover of beautiful women who failed in his every relationship with them. Hughesworld was topsy-turvy, upside down and inside out, one that spurned the physics and psychology and cultures that are considered normal. It was comedy and stark tragedy enacted simultaneously behind a dark curtain. Some of key players in the drama seemed blithely unaware of it; others, closer to Hughes, knew better.

What do you think of my crazy world? Frank William (Bill) Gay, who had hired me, asked a few months after I had joined the group.

Well, it’s my world too now, I answered.

It was. And indeed it was crazy. It also was intoxicating.

Gay, 56 when Hughes died, crew cut, ascetic, tall, imperiously thin, a devout Mormon, was executive vice president of Summa Corp., a holding company for Hughes interests—six Las Vegas hotel-casinos, a casino in Reno, a television station, airport, a large ranch, a helicopter division, regional airline, thousands of acres of prime raw land, and a miscellany of smaller concerns. Gay’s main office was in the Los Angeles area—Encino, a tidy enclave known as the Beverly Hills of the San Fernando Valley. His door was unmarked, his telephone unlisted.

The title of president was held open in case Hughes decided to assume it. This also had been the arrangement at Hughes Tool Co., the Houston-based concern founded by Howard Hughes Sr. and once wholly owned by Howard Jr. Toolco, the world’s largest manufacturer of oil well drilling bits, sold its main business in a 1973 stock offering and Summa was created as an umbrella company for the other Hughes holdings at the time.

At a New York lunch with the late Mike Wallace, who was optimistic enough to think Hughes might sit for his quizzing on CBS’ Sixty Minutes, he said, I think you took the job because you wanted to find out what you couldn’t find out as a reporter. Initially that was true. I had left the Los Angeles Times in part to find out more about him and those in his troupe. But the mystique had overwhelmed me. I had become one of them. If you live in an odd secret world you tend to become odd and secret yourself. Often it was a gumshoe, dark lantern, and false mustache existence. You used pay phones when you had sensitive material to discuss because you just knew that your office or home phones were bugged. Usually you spoke quietly, in tones a wiretap might not detect. Hughes wrote memos on lined, legal-sized yellow stationery, so you did that too. Often you pretended to know more than you did. It was an occult game—puzzling and unpredictable, sometimes wacky and unproductive but usually exciting.

II. Mere Millionaire

Despite my role as sole press spokesman for Hughes I was not directly employed by him or any of his companies. Technically I was on the payroll of Carl Byoir & Associates, an international public relations firm (now out of business). But I worked directly for and with Hughes executives. It was no different from being employed by them except that my home desk was a few miles from theirs. They provided offices for me in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and paid for secretaries and file clerks. I reported to Gay. If I erred, I faced his reprimand, not from someone at Byoir; if I wanted a raise, I appealed to Gay, not Byoir. My conferences were with Gay and other Hughes executives. My memos were addressed to Gay or to Hughes.

This arrangement, outside counsel hired to handle all press relations, might seem like an idiosyncrasy of a peculiar organization, but it had a purpose. It shielded Hughes and his executives from media annoyances and distanced them, at least in theory, from responsibility for what I might blab. And blab I sometimes did, although my bosses weren’t pleased when the results gibbered in headlines. They loved no comment responses, even firmer stonewalling if possible. Chester Davis, the hardball Summa general counsel, once told me in deadpan seriousness: Your ‘no comment’ is too strong. He didn’t elucidate but he probably meant that no comment tended to confirm; to his legal mind, I don’t know was a better response.

Hiring from the outside was not unusual for Hughes companies. Davis, a partner in the New York law firm of Davis & Cox, was himself an outlier, not an employee. Howard Hughes was a client of his firm. Nevertheless Davis rose to a powerful position in the Hughes corporate spectrum. Hughes’ Las Vegas chief, Bob Maheu, also held a high executive post although he was never an employee. He worked through his Robert E. Maheu & Associates, which allowed him the fringe benefit of owning several other concerns during the years he served Hughes.

It was a nice day, that April 5th, with a crisp sun and a hint of breeze, and I was tempted to skip work, maybe corrupt son James by ditching his school and going to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm. But duty won out and I headed to the office, which was on the fifth floor of the Hilton building in downtown Los Angeles. My space was in back down a long hall, a quiet private place where you could talk freely on the phone without being overheard (you hoped). It was about 10 a.m. when I strolled in.

My secretary, Marge, was waiting like a schoolteacher, hands on hips. They’ve been calling for you, she said. They sound damn anxious.

They meant the Hughes people. This was before the tyranny of cell phones, so I couldn’t be reached on the road. When you were away from your business or home you were supposed to leave a contact number with the around-the-clock switchboard at the famed 7000 Romaine St. Hughes building in Hollywood. This office had been central during Hughes’ motion picture days but by 1976 it housed only a few yesteryear executives now as somnolent and inactive as the records and Hughes paraphernalia stored in its basement. The message center was an anachronism too but it remained operative every minute of every day of every year, as Hughes had directed at its inception decades ago. It remained because no one had ordered a change.

They’re calling again, Marge said, pointing to my phone.

It was Doris Williams, an executive secretary at the Hughes Encino headquarters. I could hear her anxious breathing.

Please come out here now, she said.

Her voice was sharp, almost shrill. It usually was soft.

All right, I said.

Don’t stop on the way.

All right, I won’t.

Thank you, she said. Everyone at Hughes’ offices said thank you before hanging up a telephone. It was their signature, an aspect of corporate culture. The culture also dictated that secretaries be efficient, quiet, and inconspicuous. They dressed modestly and above all observed a code of silence about what they did or heard. The Encino office was at 17000 Ventura Blvd., on the second and third floors above a savings and loan association. There were no Hughes markings or uniformed guards. It had the look of an ordinary business, an extension of the savings and loan or something mundane like a bank clearing house or an accounting office. To enter you picked up an inconspicuous phone and got buzzed in if you were an employee or an invited guest. You took a rickety elevator upstairs. When you got off you saw rows of offices with closed doors strung along a horseshoe corridor like prison cells.

It was not posh, although there were some fine appointments such as the judicious use of onyx, silk curtains, and inlaid parquet. When there were hints that an enemy was nearing the premises, an invisible alarm travelled from office to office and the place seemed to seal and sink like a submarine. The most troubling enemy was the process server. About sixty unresolved lawsuits against Hughes were on file; sums demanded exceeded his liquid assets. His deep pockets and aberrant habits invited litigation, especially his willingness to suffer a default judgment rather than appear in court.

Hughes was vaguely aware of 17000 Ventura as a small space above a bank, but he thought his senior executives headquartered in Nevada, a tax-liberal bastion of free enterprise and the thrust of his recent business ventures. He had been an expatriate since Thanksgiving Eve of 1970, when he’d slipped out of Las Vegas to take up hotel residence at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. On February 15, 1972 he and a retinue of aides moved to Managua, Nicaragua. Less than a month later, on March 13, he went to Vancouver, Canada. He returned to Managua on August 29. His second stay there ended abruptly when a devastating earthquake struck on December 24 (Hughes’ birthday). The group scurried to London. Hughes left England almost exactly a year later and again settled in the Bahamas, this time at a different place, Freeport on Grand Bahamas Island. It was his longest expatriate stay, lasting until February 10, 1976 when he moved to Acapulco.

I was called to three of the five places where Hughes moved during his wandering phase—Vancouver, London, Managua—missing the two I wanted most to see, the Bahamas and Acapulco. Reporters and photographers invaded wherever he went, agitating like hungry mice, and my job was to calm them. Usually that meant anesthetizing them with good liquor, swapping yarns, and telling lies. I’d been close enough to Hughes to hear his motion picture projector blasting out, I’d carried out his instructions through his aides, I’d spoken to him on the phone, I’d sent him memos, I’d seen his shifting shadow on the wall. But I had never met or spoken to him face to face. I represented a poltergeist, an unseen overlord.

So did others. Executives much farther up on the corporate ladder than I had never seen him. This included Bob Maheu. All of Las Vegas thought that he saw Hughes regularly, a perception Maheu did not discourage, when in truth he’d had but a fleeting glimpse of a man on a stretcher being carried from the train that brought him to town. It was 4 a.m., November 27, 1966. Over the next four years, until Maheu was abruptly fired, they communicated only by memo and telephone.

I had been to 17000 so many times that my Ford seemed to know the way, like a faithful old horse. Sometimes it was to attend long meetings, often fruitless and meaningless. I’d been there on a month-long assignment to write a detailed report tying the varied Hughes enterprises together and had returned for another month to research a Hughes biography, a project that was squelched after I suggested that to be credible it might be necessary to include some material about his peculiarities. I’d even tried to be erudite, quoting Cromwell’s remark that he wished to be painted as he was, with all roughness, pimples, and warts. That fell flat and the project was tabled for now, an expression Gay often used to end a discussion.

Now I parked, identified myself on the phone, and heard the faint sound of the admitting buzzer. Often when entering here I felt like James Bond approaching his mentor, Q. It helped to play games. A lawyer, Frank Morse, appeared and silently motioned me down the hall. We went to a small office. He closed the door. Morse was drawn, curt, and grim.

He said, Howard Hughes is dead. His voice was almost a whisper.

Yes, I know, I said.

I hadn’t known, although it had crossed my mind. The atmosphere at 17000 was even quieter than usual and Doris’ voice on the phone had been strained, hints that something big had happened. I faked it because in PR you’re supposed to know what’s going on before others do, despite the fact that all too often, as the old saying goes, you are last to know and first to go.

Write a biography of Hughes, Morse said, for release to the press.

That is exactly what he said and I think he meant it. One of the richest and most famous men in the world had died and they wanted a biography written now as the press gathered and soon would be closing in.

Morse left. I lighted a cigarette. Smoking wasn’t against their rules but many Hughes executives were Mormons who frowned on destructive habits. We do not encourage smoking, a secretary at Encino had told me, speaking with the gravity of a librarian banning Huckleberry Finn. There were no ashtrays in the little office, nor did it have an outside window.

Gay had no missionary zeal to save anyone from deadly addictions. When he’d hired me, he said, I’m a Mormon but I don’t expect my people to be like me. Sometimes we’re a little too much. He meant being scrupulously abstinent, like an adult Boy Scout. Hughes liked Mormons, considering them hardworking, trustworthy, and loyal. Two of his three personal physicians and five of his six personal aides were members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, giving rise to press descriptions of the Mormon Mafia or Mormon Palace Guard.

I sat staring at an electric typewriter—this was before office computers—and blank white paper. There is a saying at newspapers that writing is easy, a simple process of sitting down and staring at the paper until blood begins to ooze from your forehead. I had never felt at home here and despite my tenure they didn’t trust me totally. It wasn’t easy to win trust and respect from people whose instincts are shadowy and suspicious.

It was especially difficult since my background was in newspapers and I was closely connected to reporters and editors. Hughes executives regarded media with suspicion and loathing. The press was their enemy, a swarm of prying wretches who staggered to typewriters half-drunk and banged out imaginative doggerel all day, crooked cigarette stubs dangling from their mouths. This cliché image of hard-driving editors and anything-for-the-story reporters had been depicted in an early Hughes movie, The Front Page, and it seemed to set the tone.

To them I was still a newsman. Perhaps even worse, I had published two books while on the Hughes watch and they wondered, with some justification, how I could do that without stealing time from them.

Until recently I’d been shielded by another PR consultant for Hughes, Richard Hannah, but he had died a few months earlier. Dick Hannah was the stereotype of the PR man, especially the Hughes PR man—natty, tailored suits, a felt hat with a feather, thin sincere ties, mustached (like Hughes), a night worker (like Hughes), clean and germ-fearing almost to compulsive levels (like Hughes, but not as neurotic about it). Dick’s genius was his ability to talk at length to reporters and say virtually nothing. But now he was gone. He had been a chain smoker since high school and finally it got to him—stroke, congestive heart failure.

Recently Gay had brought in another PR man, the formidable Robert Bennett. A Mormon bishop and son of a former senator, Wallace F. Bennett of Utah, Bob was tall and imposing, a force to reckon with. He towered in a doorway like a gangling Ichabod Crane, but an Ichabod with big city sophistication and a fine mind. Bennett had been Hughes’ Washington representative. His PR firm, Robert B. Mullen & Associates, had provided cover for CIA operatives and Bennett had been close to Watergate conspirators Charles Colson, G. Gordon Libby and E. Howard Hunt. Rumors flowed that he’d been the Deep Throat informer who had whispered damning information about Richard Nixon to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Although he firmly denied it, he couldn’t shake the notoriety. Perhaps he secretly enjoyed the attention. He advanced a theory that Deep Throat was a career agency employee. Those people get around, know a lot, he’d say. The theory was credible, but Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt Jr., deputy director of the FBI. Bennett, following his father, later was elected to the U.S. Senate from Utah.

The door opened and Gay strolled in.

How are you coming along here? he asked.

You mean with the biography?

Well…with what you’re doing.

I’m trying to work up a biographical sketch. But I think we should go with something much simpler.

Yes, yes, he said.

In the past I’d urged him to let me prepare biographical information on Hughes and now I reminded him of that—perhaps an inappropriate time to bring it up—and he said, I know, I know. Well, do your best.

He was cordial, as always, but also tense. Of course he was tense. His boss was dead and the future suddenly was uncertain. Gay had dropped out of college to work for Hughes at the Romaine St. office three decades earlier and he had known no other boss. He was not always a favorite, but few Hughes executives escaped his doghouse at one time or another and many had fallen by the wayside. They had been waltzed to the mountaintop, as Bob Maheu put it, only to be thrown back down. Surely that described the rise and fall of Maheu. But Gay was a survivor. Although occasionally excoriated and once banished by Hughes, he remained in charge—working secretly and speaking softly, as if he suspected that listening devices were planted nearby. His eyes often showed a twinkle of humor, perhaps at the absurdity of life, his life. Now the twinkle was subdued.

With a shrug and a little smile, he turned and walked away, leaving me to my own devices.

When you’re handled a task like writing a biography of a world-famous mystery man in an hour or less, it’s best to nod and try. I had nothing in front of me, yet there was something to draw from. The in-house Hughes biography hadn’t ended with my aborted effort but had proceeded as a whitewash job, a tome on Hughes’ accomplishments—his breakthrough motion pictures, astonishing flights, extraordinary aircraft design genius, and unparalleled business acumen. It had stemmed from an off-hand comment by Hughes that he would like to have his story told and the manuscript, hurried and incomplete, was similar to those produced by many companies about their founders—in other words, reverent and irrelevant. Writers and publishers had been scouted but the writers spurned it and the publishers, wary of authorized biographies, were barely lukewarm. So job had been turned over to veteran PR man Bill Utley, who had worked at Hughes Aircraft. What he produced was too personal, anecdotes about the time I played football with Howard Hughes in a hotel lobby and Hughes turning down a press release Utley had written with the comment, You didn’t write that. A good writer wrote that. Worse, there were some suggestions that Hughes was quaint or at least mildly eccentric. This terrorized the Hughes officials who had set the project into motion and it was promptly tabled.

Utley had slipped me a draft of his manuscript and it was filed at my Los Angeles office. I called Marge and asked her to send it by messenger, pronto. As saccharine as it was, it might contain something of use.

Marge was in full alarm. The phone’s been ringing like mad! Everybody’s calling. L. A. Times, New York Times, AP, Chicago Tribune."

Jesus, it was out.

Well, try to stall them, I said.

What’s happened?

I can’t tell you now. I’ll tell you as soon as I can. Stall them.

But I knew they couldn’t be stalled. The press had a whiff of it and the momentum would grow to tsunami force. I called Bill Gay and told him this. He did what businessmen do, calling a meeting.

I had an idea. Before I joined the others at the meeting, I scribbled some words on the legal-sized yellow pad they had provided. In college I’d read an article in a journalism text that listed the ten best leads on news stories. One example was from the Chicago Tribune in the 1930s: John Dillinger is dead. That told it all, which is what lead sentence should do. It doesn’t need clever embellishment when the subject is compelling. The event carries the story.

So I wrote: Howard Hughes is dead… I scratched that out and wrote: Billionaire industrialist and aviation pioneer Howard Robard Hughes is dead. He died at (time, which I didn’t have yet) at (place, which I assumed was the Princess Hotel in Acapulco, Mexico, his last known residence, but I wasn’t positive and as it turned out it was wrong). I added a final sentence: Mr. Hughes was the son of Allene Gano Hughes and Howard Hughes Sr., founder of Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas." If they wanted to embellish that, it could be quickly done.

There was a flurry in the hall. A secretary peeked in, beckoned me to follow, and scurried ahead of me toward the meeting room. It seemed as if every telephone on the floor was ringing. This was an unlisted number—and for security reasons occasionally changed—but apparently the press was on to it, suggesting that hordes of reporters soon could be crossing our moat and besieging the gates, an invasion that was horrifying to Hughes executives.

It wasn’t really a meeting. It was more like a huddle without a quarterback. Everyone was nervous, confused. Before we assembled I showed my two-sentence effort to Gay. He read it slowly, studying it.

Then he said, This is good. This is very good. We’ve been a low-key company and with the death of our stockholder we will continue to be a low- key company. He filled in the time and place of death. He died en route to Houston, he said. Put that in.

He was on an airplane?

Yes, on an airplane. Put that in. He died on an airplane. I like that. Oh, yes. Change the ‘billionaire’ to ‘millionaire.’

I didn’t question. It was their statement. They could word it as they pleased. I made the changes. It came out like this:

Millionaire industrialist and aviation pioneer Howard Robard Hughes Jr. is dead. Mr. Hughes died at 1:27 p.m., Central Standard Time, while in flight to Houston International Airport. He most recently had been a visitor in Acapulco, Mexico. Mr. Hughes was 70. He was born Dec. 24, 1905, in Houston, son of Howard R. Hughes Sr. and Allene Gano.

That was the only statement issued on the death of Howard Hughes.

The top Summa executives were assembled—Gay, lawyer Frank Morse, Nadine Henley, once Howard Hughes’ secretary and now a key executive, and Kay Glenn, a detail man who arranged Hughes’ moves and supervised the aides. Kay had been up all night and looked it. Nadine Henley seemed stunned and unresponsive, unusual for her.

Hughes had been dead for about three hours.

Gay’s assistant, Rand Clark, passed by quietly and slipped copies of our little press release in front of everyone. Rand was the brother of Homer Clark, one of the doctors who traveled with Hughes. He was as thin and athletic as his brother Homer was beefy and phlegmatic. Rand was an extraordinary tennis player, a game Gay loved as much as Hughes had loved golf at another time now long ago. Two secretaries were there, Doris Williams and Kay Hanson. Doris was Nadine’s secretary and Kay was secretary to Rae Hopper, an aeronautical engineer who had worked on many of Hughes’ aviation projects, including the eight-engine Hercules flying boat, the Spruce Goose. Bob Bennett was out of town. Chester Davis was in New York. Gay, Henley and Davis were the Big Three of Summa.

The meeting was quiet. They stared at the release, as if it could not be true because it was unthinkable. Everything seemed unreal, quietness in slow motion. This was an inner world, a sanctum sanctorum whose members adhered to secrecy vows like a holy rites. The outside was far distant. But the phones were still ringing. Secretaries answered and politely stalled.

Everyone seemed to be stalling. Hughes was dead. They needed more time for it to sink in. They were weary, in shock, almost lifeless.

Nadine, who had just quit smoking, lighted up and puffed like a sailor. Except for the cigarette, she reminded me of my schoolteachers from the long-ago past—short, overweight, a bun of shining white hair, smooth face with rosy skin, bright steel eyes that could twinkle with amusement or harden and stare with the blue coldness of a drill sergeant.

I said, I think we should send this out now. No one said anything. We should put it out, right? I persisted, a little less directly, gingerly. I pointed out that they, meaning the press, were on to it. They had been clever enough to get the unlisted phone number. The ringing phones were not going to stop. They knew where we were. Soon they would be knocking on our doors.

We have to notify his relatives first, Nadine said. We’re still trying to reach his relatives.

I knew about Hughes’ aunt, Annette Gano of Houston, and of a cousin or two. As it turned out, he had many more relatives than any of us, with the possible exception of Nadine, realized.

Phones shrieked outside in the hall and offices and here in the meeting room. Each time one went off they all looked at me, as if I were to blame for the incursions. These executives were veterans, especially Gay, Henley and Glenn, and knew no other world than that of Howard Hughes. He had been the dominant force in their adult lives and although they held little love for him they depended on him as a bulwark. Now that support was gone.

Briefly we discussed which news outlets were to be given the confirmation first. I opted for Associated Press and United Press International, followed by the television networks and the Los Angeles Times. But Nadine wanted it to be CBS. Hughes owned a CBS-affiliated television station in Las Vegas. About an hour later and more than four hours after the death, they granted permission to issue the confirmation. As much as anything else, it was the result of exhaustion and frayed nerves.

There were four telephones in the meeting room, each with six push buttons. Over the next two hours not a minute passed when I wasn’t speaking on one line or another. I answered perhaps a hundred calls. They came from all over the world—Australia, England, Japan, Germany, Italy.

Kay Glenn answered some. So did Rand Clark and the secretaries. They read the statement. That was all. Then they hung up and reached for another jangling phone. We were pushing and sliding phones over desks and tables. I spoke briefly to reporters I knew, telling them only that Hughes was dead. Of course they wanted more but there wasn’t much more to say.

When a lull finally came I went to Gay’s office. He was seated behind his desk, a modest one in small sparse office with a credenza and a few scattered chairs. Getting there was a journey down a long hallway through two separate double doors. There were no windows. He was isolated from the outside world, not unlike the hotel suite isolation of Hughes.

I suggested that perhaps we should give the press something more about the death. After all, this was one of the biggest stories of the year.

Give them what? he asked tiredly.

Well, the cause of death, for one thing. They’ll be asking about that. If we know the cause of death, I think we should tell them before they get it from somebody else and maybe get it wrong.

Yes, yes, they will get it wrong, he said.

He went into his thinking pose, his head forward and his eyes downcast. Gay and I got along well. His phone and office always were open to me. I liked him. I couldn’t say the same for Chester, who had a sandpaper personality and a lightning temper. I liked Nadine too but I couldn’t quite puzzle her out. She had a distant quality, perhaps a reflection of Hughes.

Gay leaned back, sighed and asked his secretary to contact Wilbur Thain, the physician who had been with Hughes on the death flight to Houston. Thain, one of four doctors who attended Hughes on a rotating basis, was Gay’s brother-in-law. He was a Mormon who would take a drink or two and we had made the rounds in London and Vancouver, two cities where Hughes had stayed during the expatriate years, his final phase.

On the phone Gay said, Oh, no, don’t let them cut him up.

He put the phone down and quietly told me that Hughes had died of a stroke, a cerebral vascular accident. Gay said he had no objection to my saying that but he was cautious and wanted me to clear it first with the lawyer Chester Davis. We reached him in New York.

Go ahead, put it out, Chester said. I don’t care.

All right, I said. Is there anything else you want to say?

There’s nothing more we can do or say, is there? Chester said. Just go home and get some sleep.

That seemed like a good idea.

Chester sounded a little relieved, I said to Gay.

He shrugged. As I got up to leave, he said: Thanks for calming us.

Oh, I think everyone was pretty calm.

That wasn’t true. They had been in a disorganized flutter. Their enemy the press had come too close, buzzing on the phones and circling the fortress like a swarm of Stuka dive bombers.

But now it was quiet. It had sagged into repose. Significantly, there seemed to be little or no remorse.

I had passed a test and felt comfortable with them perhaps for the first time. They were smiling at me. Even Chester wasn’t growling. With Chester the lack of a growl was a compliment, a pat on the back.

It was a triumph, yet there was something hollow about it. I had said, Don’t be concerned about the press. I’ll handle the press. It was a PR lie. No one can handle the press. A big story takes on a life of its own. And this was a big story that would get much bigger. It would be like trying to calm a typhoon from a rowboat.

The momentum to come was one factor. Another was that we had handled the death badly. It had taken far too long to confirm it. That was unforgivable and perpetuated the reputation that everything Hughesian, even his death, remained haughtily private. It was PR in the shadows—don’t tell, or tell sketchily, haltingly, half-baked, and let the press mix its own stew. Then complain when it doesn’t come out the way they liked.

Their fear and detestation of media certainly had not changed. Burn them! Chester Davis had snapped when I’d shown him catalogs and scrapbooks of press clippings about Hughes that we had assembled. This same Chester Davis, granting a rare interview, said to Wallace Turner of the New York Times, That’s bullshit and you can quote me! when questioned about some darkish deed in Hughes’ past. When Turner said, But Mr. Davis, we can’t print ‘bullshit’ in a family newspaper, Davis snapped: Why not? You do it every day.

It was their attitude, their corporate policy—damn the press, our business is ours, not theirs or anyone’s—and it hurt them. They could be discourteous, haughty, and disdainful, even if they did say thank you before hanging up the phone.

It was almost 9 p.m. The Hughes manuscript had arrived but I hadn’t opened the package. I picked it up and walked slowly down the long hallway to the elevator. It had been an exhausting experience, an adrenaline trip.

As I passed Bill Gay’s office I heard him say to his secretary: Get me Kathryn Grayson.

III. Rotting Fish

Grayson, a major MGM singing star of the era, had been precariously close to marrying Hughes when their relationship crashed. There are varied versions of the breakup, as always in traumatic Hollywood events, but one stands out. Grayson, who believed in spiritualism, suffered a haunting premonition on the eve of her wedding to Hughes. She was sure something terrible was to happen and told him that she couldn’t get married right away. Soon after, her nephew Timmy drowned. Despite the omen Grayson remained engaged to Hughes until an evening in January of 1957 when she came home to find him waiting. He began to rant, insisting they get married immediately. It ended in a spat, with Hughes slapping her. Grayson headed to New York on a singing tour. She never saw him again.

It has been suggested that Hughes acted impetuously because he suffered morbid fears that his then right-hand man, Noah Dietrich, was scheming to have him declared legally incompetent and put away. A married man could not be sent to an asylum without the consent of his wife. Whether this is credible or incredible (interchangeable words in Hughesworld, especially in Hughes-Hollywood) Grayson certainly was a part of Hughes’ past. She shared that billing with many other female stars, including Katharine Hepburn, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Jean Peters (who married him), and Terry Moore (who claimed she did).

Not long after Hughes died, Grayson said on television that good friends of mine at Summa had assured her that no facts were withheld about the death, but she was not convinced she had been told the truth. She said Hughes had sent her letters that didn’t reach her. Instead, she charged, the letters had been shredded at Romaine Street. I think they were cries for help, Grayson said.

A phalanx of reporters waited for me outside my Los Angeles office but thinned after it was understood that I had no more to say, on or off the record. Hell, I didn’t know anything more. My name had been given out at the Houston hospital where Hughes’ body had been taken, adding to the calls. I had a six-page list to answer. Marge had gone home and so had the part-time night secretary, Diana Melendez. I had called in Diana for emergency relief, but it turned out to be unnecessary. The phones were quieter now.

I ended up brainstorming into the morning with the leading Hughes Watcher of them all, James Phelan, a freelance writer from Long Beach who had the instincts and stealth of a panther. Like Grayson, Phelan had premonitions. The brainstorming was primarily on his part.

How did he die? he asked.

I looked at a paper on which I’d scribbled: Cerebral vascular accident. I said, A stroke.

He died immediately after a stroke?

I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

I think there’s a smell of rotting fish about it.

Why do you say that?

Call it instinct or a hunch.

You don’t know that.

I know I don’t know.

Well, you’re off base.

I might be. But I don’t think so.

He just died, that’s all.

Who was with him when he died?

I’m not sure.

Well, I did know that Wilbur Thain, the doctor, had been on the airplane. He had pronounced Hughes dead. One of his aides, John Holmes, also had been on the plane. I could tell Phelan that, but I didn’t. Revealing information led to more questions, especially with a bulldog like him.

Did they tell you to say that it was a stroke?

They didn’t tell me to say anything.

Don’t they always tell you what to say?

No.

They told you to say nothing, is that right?

I don’t know any more now, Jim. I might know more tomorrow.

He was starting to piss me off. I had fought some rounds with Jim before yet I respected him as a reporter and I liked him. But he could be a pill. Also, he was on the enemy’s list at Hughes headquarters, a distinction shared with a few other snoopers from the press. The best reporters were highest on the list, an honor role in reverse. This list was not formal, as it had been with President Nixon and, I’ve heard, with William Randolph Hearst (his shit list), but it was understood. Hughes felt that he had the privilege of snooping—in his movie days he’d retained private eyes to spy on girlfriends—but he didn’t like anyone peering back through the keyhole.

Now I repeated to Phelan: I’ve told you all I know.

He looked at me, his face pinched and one eye closed, the way he did when he was about to drill. They don’t tell you the truth. They never will tell you the truth. They lie and they order you to lie.

Nobody tells me to lie, I said, a statement that in itself was a lie.

Well, we’ll get at the truth.

Be my guest, Jim.

Something’s wrong, he said. I can’t pin it yet but I feel it.

It went on like that. He talked, I listened. It was a mistake to dismiss Jim Phelan because of his appearance—craggy red face and stubby gray beard he often scratched, rough hands, sometimes-bloodshot eyes that cut through you. You think of Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster playing Old Scratch, the devil, or Huston in The Treasure of Sierra Madre playing a craggy, eccentric but wise old gold miner. Phelan was like that—wry, wiry, smart, sly, seeking, knowing. He was always dressed for combat.

Finally he left. It was two in the morning when I scratched out a note for Marge saying I’d be late the next day and locked up for the night. On the street the city was still, darkened, and warm. Chester Davis had been right. Go home, get some sleep. It was like saying, Forget about it.

That was not possible. The Hughes life story had ended but his afterlife story was just beginning. He had been in deep shadows, a spectral presence that for a decade had shifted from one hotel suite to another in five countries, furtive, mysterious, seen only by a few trusted aides who were as secretive as he. Because he fled and dodged, he had been hounded; obsessive himself, he was targeted by obsessive seekers. It would not end because he had died. Instead, it would expand enormously. His associates who lived far from their employer in the real world of germs, city lights and noise also were afflicted with the bunker syndrome, as if they honored his lifestyle by imitating it. They too had secrets. It would take time, court actions, and digging by reporters like Phelan to crack the hard stone wall of secrecy. In retrospect the pattern of revelation that was to play out seemed inevitable, almost as if Hughes had mischievously planned it that way.

Two

A Monarch Unmourned

It’s all about as curious as can be, said the Gryphon.

Curiouser and curiouser! cried Alice.

—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.

"Howard Hughes was just a rich old man who died. I know the press

wants it to seem some other way, but that is the truth of it."

—John Holmes, personal aide to Hughes for twenty-five years.

"He was a virtual prisoner of those he had trusted to protect him.

The bad guys around him appeared to be mastering their own master."

—Jack Real, friend and confidant to Hughes.

I. Moment of Silence

The next morning the headline blared: STROKE KILLS HOWARD HUGHES. Trouble was, it wasn’t true. An autopsy in Houston—they did cut him up, despite Gay’s plea—showed that he had died of chronic renal failure. Dr. Jack L. Titus, the hospital’s chief pathologist, explained to the press: Renal means kidney, two of them. Chronic means a long time. Failure means that they don’t work well. The kidneys have the responsibility of getting rid of waste products the body makes and they come out in urine. When they don’t function well, the waste products accumulate and unless something is done about it, the patient dies.

Reporters sniped at me, saying I had followed orders from Bill Gay or Chester Davis and faked the cause of death to cover up the real reason, that his caretakers neglected or abused Hughes, leading to his death. It took months to convince hardheads like Jim Phelan that stroke as the cause of death had been a quick and mistaken diagnosis from a Hughes doctor. Perhaps he was never convinced. Or perhaps doubts lingered in my own mind. Did they say he had died of a stroke when they believed there would be no autopsy and the diagnosis would be sustained? Were they fearful of nefarious discoveries that would be evident in an autopsy?

Anonymity followed Hughes to his grave. He had entered the Methodist Hospital in Houston under the alias of John T. Conover. The corpse, assigned to the George H. Lewis & Son funeral home, was removed under the designation N-76-92. On April 7 he was buried beside his parents at Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery. The service was quick, sparse and emotionless. It lasted six minutes. Sixteen people attended. The Very Rev. Robert Gibson, dean of Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church that listed Hughes as a member, read from the funeral prayer book: We brought nothing into this world. It is certain we can take nothing out. In my father’s house there are many mansions. Remember thy servant Howard, O Lord, give him eternal rest and peace in thy heavenly kingdom.

Flowers arrived from all parts of the country. Jim Lessard of Fullerton, California, who had never seen Hughes, sent a huge airplane-shaped wreath. The casket was seamless copper with a silver-colored exterior. It cost $8,125. The famous man, one of the world’s richest and perhaps its most mysterious, was buried for $15,728, including $3,532 paid to a guard. It seemed like an insignificant end, but it was Hughesian—low profile, secret, and fast. As the people left, the sun came out and sparkled on the morning dew. The next day guard G.W. Barringer said about two hundred sightseers had cruised by the grave.

In Las Vegas public address systems of the Hughes-owned casinos asked patrons to pause for a moment of silence in memory of a dear friend and great American, Howard Hughes. After the pause slot machines again whirred, roulette wheels turned, cards were dealt, dice skimmed across felt tables. It might have been the first time when every gambling mechanism in any active Las Vegas casino was stilled for a full minute. It caused a classic slip by United Press, which noted that gambling ceased for a monetary tribute to the billionaire recluse. Of course the writer meant momentary.

It was as if a ghost had passed, leaving a chill behind. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, an anonymous little man at Gatsby’s funeral removes his owl-eyed glasses, wipes them inside and out, and says: The poor son-of-a-bitch. That could have been said of Hughes.

Nevada officials issued statements lauding him for outstanding contributions to the state, using language similar that on man-of-the-year plaques. Noah Dietrich, 85, Hughes’ longtime chief executive who had been abruptly fired in May of 1957, said: No comment. I’m in litigation and my lawyers say I can’t talk. His ex-wife Jean Peters said, I’m saddened.

Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the Nicaraguan dictator who had chatted informally with Hughes on a private plane at the Managua airport in 1972, said he was very charming and had a mind like a bear trap.

Psychologist Joyce Brothers offered an armchair analysis: Studies of recluses show that almost all are misers and are as ungenerous with their emotions as with their money. To them the world is an unpleasant, hostile jungle. The recluse lives in fear.

Jack Zevely, a former sales vice president at Convair, a commercial jet aircraft manufacturer that Hughes supported when he controlled Trans World Airlines, said Howard would call him on Christmas Eve, so lonely he’d practically cry on the phone. In fact, one time my wife thought he was crying. But Carl Babberger, one of the five Hughes Aircraft engineers in 1939, recalled no such emotions. He said Hughes had a precise mechanical mind and was never personal. Those who worked for him and were faithful would qualify as confidants, but it would have taken some sort of Jesus type to love him as a friend.

Gary G. Reich, who years ago had been his chef, commented on Hughes’ idiosyncrasies: He sent me a four-page memo on how to pick a can of peaches from the shelf, how to open it, and which peach to select. Rev. Dale C. Rogers, a Norman, Oklahoma Episcopal priest whose father had worked for Hughes, spoke of his germ phobia: Before he visited, he’d have the room fumigated. After shaking hands he’d carefully wash his.

Hollywood stories flooded out, mostly old tales with twists or embellishments. Olivia DeHaviland had said: He called me once and said, ‘This is Howard Hughes. Louella Parsons wrote that we’re engaged, so I think we ought to meet.’ Lana Turner monogrammed her linens H.H. in anticipation of marriage and Hughes jilted her with the comment: Well, marry Huntington Hartford. Jane Russell was silent publicly except to say he was not a pal of mine but she didn’t refute the tale of the time she was blindfolded in a car when going to meet the man to sign a contract. Ginger Rogers said: I think the sad part about his existence is that he was a loner and I think that loners are very unhappy people.

Dore Schary, head of RKO studios in 1948, arrived one morning to find the place in an uproar. Hughes had brought the movie mill from financier Floyd Odlum. The new boss told Schary that he could proceed unheeded but of course he interfered, stirring friction. They met to discuss the matter at a house Hughes rented from actor Cary Grant. Schary entered a big room furnished with two chairs and a sofa. Hughes appeared and asked: Where did you get your shoes? How much did they cost? Are they comfortable? Schary promptly resigned. Later, while at MGM, he was invited to lunch with Hughes at his aircraft plant. He was directed to huge room furnished with a bridge table and two wooden chairs. Hughes sat silently during the meal and finally asked, Do you think I was right or wrong on my ads for Stromboli? It was a movie Hughes had privately financed, filmed in Italy, directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Ingrid Bergman. The star and the director, married to others, were having an affair and soon gossip columnists were headlining Ingrid’s pregnancy by Roberto. This gave Hughes an opening for publicity—posters showing an erupting volcano, plainly a phallic image. Schary was blunt. Howard, I think the ads are vulgar. Hughes eventually withdrew them. Schary summed up Hughes: Strange, mystical, blessed with courage, cursed with loneliness.

Frank McCulloch, a veteran Time magazine Hughes Watcher, recycled his story about a jet airplane ride with Hughes. At 2:30 a.m. late in 1958 he was picked up by a driver on a Los Angeles street corner and taken to a dark corner of the airport, where Howard, Jean Peters, and a Boeing 707 were waiting. With Hughes at the controls, McCulloch was given a five-hour flight, swept up as if kidnapped by aliens. Hughes’ landing approach was so steep that we lost a flap and it was a miracle that mayhem did not follow, for the flap bounced and skittered along jam-packed Century Boulevard. McCulloch was not given a reason for the flight but he surmised that Hughes wanted to show off the new plane he was buying for his TWA.

Every chitchat dot-dot-dot gossip columnist had a Hughes tale to tell. Hearst Hollywood writer James Bacon claimed that Howard had called him more than a hundred times over a two-week period. The last call was from Acapulco. The recluse said he yearned to be in Las Vegas…

Vegas entertainment writer Ralph Pearl said that once upon a time he’d raced across the parking lot of the Flamingo Hotel to catch Hughes and ask if he could confirm rumors that he was planning to locate an aircraft plant nearby. No truth to that. It would be impractical as hell to have several thousand employees working for me in a gambling town, Hughes said before he got into a black Mercedes…

Earl Wilson of New York said Hughes offered to fly him from Los Angeles to San Diego after he found out that Wilson was interviewing Ingrid Bergman, once Hughes’ passion; Hughes, Wilson said (correctly) like to impress his ladies by piloting them to faraway places…

Vernon Scott of United Press wrote about a Hughes meeting with industrialist Henry Kaiser who was seeking money for his post-war Kaiser car, a rendezvous that took place in the wee hours of the morning at a San Francisco hotel. After Kaiser talked for two hours Hughes dismissed the idea with an offhand comment: I already built a car once. That was true. A steam car project was aborted when it proved dangerous…

Shirley Elder of Detroit said Hughes ordered a drink at the Red Rooster, a Las Vegas saloon, and left it on the bar to go into the men’s room. Almost an hour later he returned and asked proprietor Grace Hayes: How does my shirt look? She said it looked fine. Good, Hughes said. Then I think I’ll buy the company that made it. He’d bought a shirt guaranteed to drip dry in forty-five minutes and had drenched it and waited to test the accuracy of the claim. Then he complained because Grace had removed his drink while he had been gone…

There is an early scene in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane of a boy on a sled, deliriously happy as he sails down a snowy hill. The boy becomes the ruthless newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane who mysteriously utters the word rosebud when he dies. This snow scene comes poignantly full circle when the sled’s name is revealed: Rosebud. Like Howard Robard Hughes, George Foster Kane achieved fame and fortune yet the boyhood sledding moments perhaps were the happiest of his life. And