Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [198]
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 Hughes 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