Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [195]
“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