Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [28]
“I hope this is the start of the road back,” Hughes concluded, seeming out of his confusion to have drawn new strength, a new determination to put things right.
Then, inexplicably, he scrawled four more words—“cut your head off”—and underlined it with an angry slash.
It now stood out plainly: “cut your head off.”
The rage was unmistakable. But whose head was Hughes after? His wife’s? Or his own? He may not have been entirely sure himself. But the notes he made on the train ride to Boston give the best picture of Hughes’s state of mind as he began his quest.
It was, of course, unthinkable to send the handwritten message to Jean Peters. And not merely because of its shocking postscript. Hughes never sent his wife a letter in his own hand. Much too risky.
Instead, he summoned one of his attendants in the next railroad car, and from his notes dictated a message for the Mormon to memorize and recite to his wife. The courier left the train at the first stop, San Bernardino, and drove back to Bel Air to deliver the farewell. It was a more controlled, simpler message that the Mormon gave Jean. Something to the effect that Hughes loved her dearly and looked forward to the day they would be back together.
One thing Hughes definitely did not want mentioned was his destination. That was a secret. Even from his wife.
Anyhow, Boston was just a stopover. It was not the end of the line. Hughes had traveled three thousand miles just to decide where he really wanted to go.
At four A.M. on Sunday, November 27, 1966, Thanksgiving weekend, a locomotive hauling just two private railroad cars pulled into an obscure desert junction on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Howard Hughes had come back across America to make his Last Stand. He had found his new mission. He would make Nevada his kingdom, and use his half-billion-dollar windfall to create a world he could control completely. He had stopped running, but he had not stopped hiding.
Hughes emerged from his ten-year retreat defiantly determined to exercise his full power while remaining a total recluse.
Now, in the predawn blackness of the Nevada desert, he began to take charge. It was only a few short steps from his railroad car to the waiting van. He could have walked. Instead, like an Oriental pasha—or a spoiled child—he demanded to be carried the few steps on a stretcher.
The curtained van whisked Hughes to his new hideout, the Desert Inn Hotel, a gaudy gambling emporium smack in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the most garish, most public place in the universe. It was certainly no Hole-in-the-Wall, no Walden Pond, but it was somehow just right.
The Wizard of Oz had come to the Emerald City.
At the Desert Inn, the entire top floor was reserved and waiting. His aides snuck Hughes upstairs during the early morning lull, carried him down the hall, and parked the stretcher in a bedroom of a suite picked at random. There was another bedroom in the same suite and six more empty suites on the vacant penthouse floor, but Hughes had no interest in checking them out. He stayed put in the room first picked blindly—and never emerged for the next four years.
Indeed, he rarely left his bed. And yet, in these four years Hughes had his greatest impact on the nation, making his unseen presence felt in corporate boardrooms, in political back rooms, even in the Oval Office of the White House.
He was now more than a billionaire, with $750 million cash on hand and other assets worth at least as much. Fortune magazine would soon name him the richest man in America. And he had power even beyond his vast wealth. He was the sole owner of the Hughes Tool Company, with its monopoly on the device needed to drill all oil wells. He was sole trustee of the Hughes Aircraft Company, a top-ten defense contractor with strong CIA ties, manufacturer of all spy satellites that circled the globe and of the first spacecraft that landed on