Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [25]
Hughes was in pain. Physical pain. Mental pain. Deep, unrelenting pain. Many of his teeth were rotting black stumps, some just dangling loose from his puffy, whitened, pus-filled gums. A tumor was beginning to emerge from the side of his head, a reddened lump protruding through sparse strands of gray hair. He had bedsores festering all down his back, some so severe that eventually one shoulder blade—the bare bone—would poke through his parchmentlike skin. And then there were the needle marks. The telltale tracks ran the full length of both his thin arms, scarred his thighs, and clustered horribly around his groin.
Howard Hughes was an addict. A billionaire junkie. He was shooting up massive amounts of codeine, routinely “skin-popping” more than twenty grains daily, sometimes three or four times that much, regularly taking doses thought lethal. He had been hooked for two decades, ever since a 1946 plane crash, when his doctor prescribed morphine to ease the pain of what everyone thought would be his final hours. As he instead recovered, the doctors substituted codeine, and through the years Hughes demanded ever-larger doses, finally setting up a byzantine illegal supply operation, getting prescriptions filled under assumed names at various Los Angeles drugstores.
Often now he would awaken in the terrors of withdrawal and begin his day by reaching down to the black metal box by his bedside where he kept his stash and his unsterilized hypodermic needle. Immediately mixing a fix, he would dissolve several white tablets in his pure bottled Poland Spring water, then jab the spike into his wasted body. Sometimes he prolonged the ritual by “double-pumping,” injecting half the white fluid, then drawing it back up into the syringe with his blood, letting the needle dangle for a moment before he shot the full load back into his system. Then he would relax, and in the first warm flush of relief and satisfaction now and then softly sing a little jingle to himself, a little scat bebop routine he remembered from the old days. “Hey-bop-a-ree bop. Hey-bop-a-ree-bop.” And finally maybe even a quiet chuckle.
There were other drugs, and the codeine was not the worst of them. Hughes was also gobbling massive quantities of tranquilizers, up to two hundred milligrams of Valium and Librium at a single shot, ten times the normal dose. Blue bombers. And when he wasn’t shooting codeine, he was swallowing fistfuls of Empirin #4, a prescription compound containing codeine, aspirin, caffeine, and a synthetic pain-killer called phenacetin. It was not the codeine but the phenacetin that was doing the real damage, ravaging his already shrunken kidneys. Eventually it would kill him.
Already he had the smell of death around him. He rarely washed. He never brushed his teeth. Most of the time, instead of walking to the bathroom, he stayed in bed and urinated into a wide-necked mason jar, insisting that the filled jars be kept and stored in his bedroom closet. Moving his bowels was a far more complex operation. He was chronically, terminally constipated and routinely spent a large part of his day, often five or ten hours at a time, sitting on the toilet without results, despite huge doses of powerful laxatives. In the end, he usually gave it up and had to once again submit to the humiliation of an enema administered by one of his nursemaids.
So there he was, sprawled naked on his unmade bed. Mr. Big. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, his was the true but hidden face of power in America. All the inner corruption made visible. And like that portrait, Howard Hughes too had to be locked away, concealed from public view.
No one knew what he looked like. No one knew how he lived. No one—not the man in the street, not the businessmen or politicians who dealt with him, not the presidents who treated him as an equal, not even his own top executives—had the slightest inkling of what Howard Hughes