Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [229]
Hughes’s physical condition at this time has been well established in voluminous court testimony and prior accounts but was verified in specific and in greater detail through extensive interviews with two of his Mormon attendants and one physician, Dr. Harold Feikes, who examined Hughes at least twenty times from 1968 through 1970.
The account of Hughes’s codeine addiction and his use of other drugs is based on a 1978 report of the Drug Enforcement Administration, medical records, court testimony from his aides and physicians, and interviews with two of the Mormons who witnessed Hughes preparing and injecting his fix on numerous occasions.
My newsreel-like account of Hughes’s early public exploits is based on my viewing of the actual newsreels, on contemporaneous press reports, on interviews with persons involved, and, in the case of the Senate hearings, on the hearings record. The 1957 crisis triggered by the TWA battle, the loss of Dietrich, and his marriage were recounted by aides in interviews and court testimony and by Dietrich in several interviews.
The notes Hughes made for his message to Jean Peters on his train trip to Boston is the only extant handwritten memo to his wife. Peters has testified that she never received a letter from Hughes, and while he often wrote messages for his aides to read to her, all others but this were destroyed on his standing orders to shred and burn all personal memos. The aide who recited a version of this farewell message to Jean recounted the event in a later deposition.
Hughes’s arrival in Nevada was detailed in interviews with two aides who were present, one of whom wheeled Hughes’s stretcher into the Desert Inn bedroom. “I was with him when we went up to the ninth floor and actually put him in that room so I could look around and see if there might be a room he’d like better,” recalled the aide. “But he didn’t want to be bothered with moving around any further, so he just stayed in the first room I picked by chance.”
The estimate of Hughes’s net worth on his arrival in Las Vegas is based on the 1966 U.S. corporate income-tax return filed by Hughes Tool Company, which reports total assets of $759,956,441, including cash and securities of $609.4 million. That does not include almost $100 million of his TWA windfall, eventually paid as a capital-gains tax, nor does it include Hughes’s personal bank accounts and other holdings, most notably all the stock of the Hughes Aircraft Company. It is impossible to state with any precision the true worth of his empire, because most of it was in privately held stock never put on the open market and in real estate and other assets never appraised. Fortune magazine put his total worth at $1,373,000,000 in 1968, while Hughes himself in a 1969 memo claimed his empire was worth “more than two billion dollars.”
The description of Hughes’s penthouse suite is based on interviews with two of his Mormon aides, as is the description of Hughes surrounded by his memos. “They were maybe the neatest stacks of papers in the world,” commented one.
All of Hughes’s aides confirmed either in interviews or court testimony that the four years Hughes spent in Las Vegas was the only time in his life that he regularly risked writing down his orders. While he sometimes wrote longhand memos before and after Las Vegas, he almost always dictated his messages instead, and destroyed most of what little he did write as soon as the business in question was concluded. In his earlier years, Hughes handled most matters by telephone, and only in his Las Vegas years did Hughes ever send handwritten memos to anyone.
The description of Hughes reading his memos is based on accounts from his Mormons. While thoroughly grounded in fact—Hughes did regularly root through his old papers in exactly the manner described—in this one instance I have re-created a typical scene and used it to present a selection of memos obviously not read by Hughes on any one occasion.
Hughes’s relationship with his Mormon aides was recounted by all of them in interviews and depositions. His relationship