Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [126]
“For Christsake, Hubert,” he exploded, “this is my private-sector move!”
Humphrey groveled. “Larry, I’ve just got to have you,” he pleaded. “If I get them to agree to a delay, will that settle it?”
O’Brien relented. For the first time he told Humphrey the name of his new boss. It was a sickening final blow.
Now, at dawn on Friday, August 30, 1968, Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president of the United States, the man just nominated to be president, had to pick up his phone and call Robert Maheu, call the man who employed his son and had helped pick his running mate, call the man who had slipped him fifty grand in the backseat of a car, call and beg Maheu to allow O’Brien to remain his campaign manager.
Unknown to Humphrey until now, Larry O’Brien had already agreed to go to work for Howard Hughes.
9 Camelot
The old bastard.
That’s who Howard Hughes thought of now, that’s who he always thought of when he thought of the Kennedys. Not Jack. Not Bobby. Not Teddy. Not the glamorous sons but their cutthroat father. Old Joe. He was the real Kennedy, the one Hughes remembered. And despised.
“The Kennedy family and their money and influence have been a thorn that has been relentlessly shoved into my guts since the very beginning of my business activities,” wrote the billionaire, bursting with a grudge he had held for forty years.
Right from the start Joseph P. Kennedy had been there to plague him. They had arrived together in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, the Boston Irishman and the Texas WASP invading an infant industry created by immigrant Jews. They both figured to take over the town.
Hughes had come to make movies. Not yet twenty, full of romantic visions, the tall, handsome tycoon left Houston in 1925 and took his inheritance to the Dream Capital. There, amid the palm trees and pink stucco palaces, former furriers and ragmen, many just off the boat, were shaping America’s image of itself. But Hughes was the image they had created, and within a few years he was more than a top producer, he was a star.
Kennedy had come only to make money. He arrived less than a year after Hughes, at thirty-seven already an established, hard-bitten financier and in movieland strictly on business. “Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires,” he told an associate as he set out for California. “I could take the whole damn business away from them.”
He tried. Joe Kennedy was a ruthless operator, and he gave many men good reason to hate him. But what had he done to so irritate Hughes? It seemed to have something to do with RKO. Kennedy never made a movie of note, but he did found a movie studio, and Hughes seemed to hold that against him. “You see Joe Kennedy used to own the biggest part of RKO before I got into it,” he explained, suggesting that the studio was somehow behind the big grudge.
Twenty years later Hughes himself would buy RKO. But not from Kennedy. Joe was long gone from Hollywood, in and out in his usual style, a quick raid for a quick profit, gone before Hughes had made his first big movie, gone before Hughes was anything more than a rich kid. They never had any dealings over RKO, they never dealt with each other at all.
So why the grudge? In his three years in Hollywood, Kennedy probably never even met Hughes—“Howard was just a kid,” noted Joe’s mistress Gloria Swanson. “We didn’t move in the same circles”—and their paths would never cross again.
Joe moved on to banking, liquor, and land, always striking hard and fast, often skirting the law, building his fortune with whiskey deals that bordered on bootlegging and cynical stock-market manipulations, less a businessman than a predator on other men’s businesses, a bold buccaneer who continued milking Wall Street right up to the moment he was named first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, some said beyond. In short, a man much like Hughes himself would become, but less a romantic. He made many enemies, he crushed many rivals, he cheated his partners, but not once did he tangle with Hughes.
So what was the