Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [234]
The “beautiful white girl” who won “The Dating Game” was a black actress named Alice Jubert. The child who chose her was the six-year-old son of “Mission: Impossible” star John Copage.
5 Fear and Loathing
The Tony Awards show was broadcast Sunday, April 20, 1969. The Great White Hope was named best play; its star, James Earl Jones, was named best actor; and the woman who played his white mistress, Jane Alexander, was named best supporting actress.
My account of the August 23, 1917, Houston race riot was drawn from contemporaneous press accounts and Robert V. Haynes’s A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Louisiana State University Press, 1976).
Jean Peters described her postmarriage relationship with Hughes in deposition and court testimony, and one of his personal aides provided further details in an interview. Another aide, Ron Kistler, who served Hughes at Goldwyn Studios and lived with him for three months at Nosseck’s in 1958, recounted the Porgy and Bess episode in a sworn deposition and also gave testimony on Hughes’s strange behavior at the projection studio.
“He arrived wearing a white shirt, tan gabardine slacks, and brown shoes,” recalled Kistler. “Those were the clothes he wore all the time he was at Nosseck’s until finally the clothes got so filthy and foul-smelling that he took them off. Then he became a nudist.… He had a lot of telephone talks with Jean Peters. He told her he was in a hospital undergoing treatment for a disease the doctors couldn’t diagnose.”
Hughes’s no-messages decree is transcribed in a Romaine Street log dated August 13, 1958. His breakdown at the Beverly Hills Hotel was described by Kistler in his deposition, and by another aide in an interview.
All of the “germ warfare” memos quoted are from “Operating Memoranda” compiled in a loose-leaf binder entitled “Manual of Instructions/Office Procedures,” and also referred to as the “Romaine Street Procedures Manual.”
The incident in which Hughes burned his clothes was recounted by Noah Dietrich in an interview. His relationship with “The Party” was described by Kistler; by the chief of his harem guard, Jeff Chouinard; and by an operative working for Chouinard who tapped her telephone on Hughes’s orders. The wireman recalled the teen-age mistress calling Hughes an “impotent old slob,” and Chouinard quotes her in his book (written with Richard Mathison) His Weird and Wanton Ways (Morrow, 1977, p. 153). Despite his playboy image, Hughes had always been shy with women, and a large number of his most famous affairs seem never to have been consummated, at least according to the accounts of several Hollywood actresses who later wrote about their relationships with him. Jean Peters has never discussed the intimate details of their marriage, but it is clear from her court testimony and from interviews with his aides that Hughes had not shared a bed with his wife for five years before he moved alone to Las Vegas.
Of the four Nevada state senators who voted to kill the fair-housing bill, at least two received Hughes money from the Silver Slipper slush fund—James Slattery got $2,500 and James Gibson got $1,500. In a memo to Hughes, Maheu claimed a connection: “I do not claim one iota of credit for the foresight you had when you instructed me to make political contributions to ‘worthy’ public servants.… When I mentioned that Bell had been successful in killing the fair housing bill, please believe me that I had no intent to delete any of the credit which is due to your foresight. Without ‘our friends’ we would not have had a prayer.”
Bell, who described himself as a close personal friend of Laxalt’s, refused in an interview to comment on Maheu’s report that Laxalt “delivered to Tom