Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [222]
The Mormons remained suspicious. As their bedridden boss declined in the summer of 1975, they pressed him repeatedly to show them the will, to update it, or to write a new one.
“We have a little time,” replied Hughes. He promised to compose an entirely new will. Soon. But he never would. A man who could not part with his fingernails clearly could not part with his fortune. And Hughes also must have realized that signing a will would be like signing his own death warrant. The nonexistent last testament was his last hold on power.
“We have to get down to it,” he nonetheless said, “because I want to fly before I’m seventy.”
Hughes, who had not been out of bed since he broke his hip two years earlier, was determined to fly again by his seventieth birthday. He had brought in a former Lockheed executive, Jack Real, made him a member of his entourage, and now spent hours alone with him talking about airplanes.
The Mormons were not pleased. When Hughes asked to see Jack, they told him Real was away. They withheld his messages. They changed the locks on the doors. And finally, on February 10, 1976, they took Hughes off to Mexico.
They told him that the drug supply was drying up in the Bahamas, that they had to go to Acapulco to assure a steady flow of narcotics. It was a lie. The codeine came from a pharmaceuticals firm in New York. But Hughes did not know that. He only knew that he had to have his daily fix.
Saturday, April 3, 1976. Howard Hughes lay motionless in his latest blacked-out bedroom, a luxurious penthouse suite atop the Acapulco Princess Hotel, delirious, dehydrated, starving.
He reached out one spindly arm to a Kleenex box on his bedside night table, withdrew a hypodermic syringe hidden under the flap, and jabbed the needle into his shrunken right bicep. The effort exhausted him. He could not depress the plunger, could not shoot the codeine into his wasted body.
The syringe dangled from his arm, then fell to the floor. Hughes summoned an aide to complete the injection. The Mormon refused. He called for a doctor, who arrived moments later and gave him his shot.
Hughes had been comatose most of the past week. When awake, he refused to eat. His weight had dropped to ninety-four pounds. His six-foot-four-inch frame had shrunk three inches. His brittle bones showed plainly through his parchmentlike skin. His left shoulder was bruised and swollen. He had a gaping wound on the side of his head where he had sheared off an old tumor a few weeks earlier when he fell out of bed. He had four broken needle points embedded in his right arm, another in his left. And inside, his atrophied kidneys, destroyed by a quarter-century of drug abuse, were killing him.
His speech had become incoherent. That Saturday he mumbled repeatedly about an “insurance policy,” but none of his aides knew what he was talking about. By the next day he could no longer talk at all. He just lay in bed, staring blankly ahead, his face and neck twitching uncontrollably. Sunday afternoon he slipped into a coma. Still, his aides and doctors kept him hidden, afraid to take him to a hospital. Instead, that night one of the Mormons gave his unconscious boss his third haircut in ten years, while another soaked his hands and feet, then clipped his long nails.
Finally, at eleven o’clock on Monday morning, they lifted a still comatose Hughes out of bed, placed him on a stretcher, loaded him into a waiting ambulance, and rushed him to a private jet. As they carried Hughes aboard, his lips moved slightly, but he made no audible sound.
There were no last words, no “Rosebud.” He lay silent on the plane under a bright yellow sheet pulled up to his chin, and at 1:27 P.M. on April 5, 1976, Howard Hughes died three thousand feet in the air, half an hour away from his old hometown, Houston.
His death was front-page news around the world, but he attracted none of the standard public eulogies routinely accorded the famous, the wealthy, and the powerful. Not even his ex-wife, Jean Peters, said much. Just “I’m saddened,” that was all, and there were no other