Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [208]
But Hughes had not merely been watching movies while his specter drove Nixon to Watergate. He had been through quite a few adventures of his own on his way to this new blacked-out bedroom.
Back in February he had been forced to flee Paradise Island when Bahamian immigration authorities raided his penthouse. It was another fallout of the Clifford Irving affair. The publicity triggered an official inquiry and, rather than face it, Hughes left by the fire escape while the local lawmen pounded on his door.
The escape, however, led to the first revelation of his bizarre appearance. The skipper of a yacht chartered to smuggle Hughes off the island got a good look at his strange cargo and some weeks later told his tale to the press.
It was not that the billionaire had hair down past his shoulders or that he was wearing only a bathrobe that struck the captain as weird. It was his toenails. “They were so long they curled up,” he told a Miami newspaper. “Never seen anything like that in my life. I had to look twice. Craziest thing I ever saw.”
Hughes next took refuge in Nicaragua, under the personal protection of the country’s dictator, General Anastasio Somoza. After his narrow escape from the Bahamas, however, Hughes was taking no chances. He decided to offer the general a friendly bribe.
“I think that while Somoza is being so decent to me in the face of all this bad publicity,” wrote Hughes, “something might happen tomorrow to change all this.
“The Central and South American people are very emotional and changeable. So before this happens, I think I should make a present to Somoza.
“I suggest a really desirable automobile. We should find out whether he likes to drive himself and would prefer a sports car, or a very elaborate limousine with a bar and telephone and TV set, and the very last word in accessories.
“Also, I want to be damn sure he (Somoza) is told loud and clear that this was my personal idea because I appreciate the considerate treatment he has shown me.”
Somoza, however, had a bigger reward in mind. He asked Hughes to bail out his country’s bankrupt airline, which the general himself happened to own. Hughes bought 25 percent of the stock. The dictator was not satisfied. He offered his guest an interest in his plywood factory, his pharmaceuticals company, and some choice local real estate.
Less than a month after his arrival, Hughes decided to leave Nicaragua, before Somoza tried to sell him anything else. But on the way out he made an extraordinary decision. He would break fifteen years of isolation and meet with his host.
Preparations for the big meeting began two days in advance. Hughes watched a movie, Mirage, then called in an aide to create his own illusion. For the first time in years he had one of the Mormons cut his hair, trim his beard, and pare those toenails. After four hours of grooming, he even took a shower.
It was a new man who welcomed Somoza and U.S. Ambassador Turner Shelton aboard his Gulfstream jet at 10:45 P.M. on March 13, greeting both with a firm handshake. They chatted until midnight, and when his guests left, Hughes shook hands again.
Hughes, his public image restored, flew off to Vancouver and arrived in broad daylight. Now quite bold, even reckless, he sauntered through the hotel lobby in his bathrobe, and once up in his penthouse paused at the window to watch a seaplane land in the harbor.
The Mormons were not pleased. They quickly hustled Hughes into his new blacked-out bedroom, warning of spies with telephoto lenses—“we know that we are presently being surveilled”—and their boss passively reverted to a life of hiding, of movies, and of drugs.
While the White House burglars plotted the break-in back in Washington, Hughes lay in a stupor watching Diamonds Are Forever, a James Bond movie about a reclusive billionaire held prisoner in his Las Vegas penthouse, his empire run by an evil imposter. And Hughes was still in that darkened