Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [27]
He was about to lose TWA, the enterprise closest to his heart. It was Hughes versus the Bankers. He wanted a new fleet of jets and needed their money. They wanted control. He wouldn’t share it. At the peak of the crisis, the one man he trusted, the one man he needed, his right-hand man, Noah Dietrich, the gruff CPA who had run his business empire since 1925, his surrogate father, suddenly abandoned him. Almost simultaneously, Hughes found himself forced into a new partnership. He got married.
It was all too much. Instead of setting up house with his new wife, the young actress Jean Peters, Hughes retreated into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, stripped off his clothes, and began his descent into total seclusion—and madness.
Nothing mattered more now than the isolation. In fact, when it came to a choice between holding on to his beloved TWA and losing his absolute privacy by appearing in court, he gave up control of the airline.* No longer in control of it, he didn’t want it at all. In May 1966, he sold TWA.
For $546 million.
It was the biggest check ever to go to one man at one time, more money than the greatest of the old robber barons had amassed in their lifetimes. Now the big question was: What would he do with the incredible windfall?
Fortune magazine tried to puzzle out the phantom’s new “mission”: “A mystery now surrounds Hughes’s plans for the half-billion dollars he received. It is possible only to speculate about what he will do with it. He seems to have something big and surprising on his mind, and whatever it is, it doubtless was a major factor in his decision to sell. Has he some new kind of interest, cultivated in his own isolated world?”
Actually, the only “mission” Hughes had in mind was to find a new place to hide. He had to flee California, his home for four decades, to escape state taxes. So, in July 1966 he left his bedroom for the first time in five years and set out across America, a fugitive with half a billion dollars.
On the train trip to Boston, alone in his private railroad car Hughes scribbled some notes for a message to Jean Peters, trying to explain to his wife why he had left her behind at their home in Bel Air, trying to make her understand his “mission.”
“Originally I had no faintest thought of proceeding,” he wrote. “At the last minute you started wearing a long face. I said, ‘Why?’ You said because I would fail to complete the mission. I would goof out like last time.”
There had been an argument. Marital strife caused by the strain of Hughes’s maddening indecision, his constant alerts and endless delays, and perhaps the fact that they had shared a bed for less than a year of their ten-year marriage, that Jean had seen him only by appointment for the past five years.
“At the last minute I could not face the possibility of reverting to a telephone relationship,” Hughes continued. “So, I delayed. You let me know at once that the closeness and trust we had achieved was destroyed.
“So, I reinstated my plans—with your promise to trust and believe in me.
“Where did I do the wrong thing?” he asked, approaching the delicate question of leaving without her.
“The crux of the whole deal is that, if you come, we have no option or choice. From that point on, we are irrevocably committed to the place where we land. If I go alone—or if you go alone, either of us can look around—describe what we see—what is available—and where. Then, the die is not cast until the other arrives.”
It made perfect sense. He had to go alone. They had been over that several times.
“I had to go. I told everybody we were leaving. I dont want to fail. But I will not leave you upset”—he started to write “My Sweet Adorable One,” then crossed it out. Too effusive.
“Honey!” he continued, “I want to do what you want me to do. I am boxed into a corner.