Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [29]
His long disappearance had only increased it. Hidden from view, unseen for a decade, now known best of all for being unknown, Hughes had become the perfect vehicle for everyone’s fantasies.
If the popular image was still the fictional Hughes created by Harold Robbins in his 1961 best-selling novel The Carpetbaggers—the lone adventurer, the romantic hero, the appealingly eccentric tycoon—by now a darker, more sinister image was also beginning to take hold.
An aura of scandal had settled around him, his payoffs to politicians were rumored if not known, and he arrived in Las Vegas—“Sin City,” the center of Mob power—just as the James Bond movies reached a peak of popularity. In the lurid atmosphere of the late 1960s, some now imagined that Hughes was an evil genius with a master plan for world domination—Dr. No, Blofeld, and Goldfinger all rolled into one.
The vision was of an archvillain in his hidden domain, surrounded by war-room electronics and gleaming computer banks, his eyes fixed on a huge blinking map of the world, sitting at the controls of a sophisticated array of advanced technology, commanding vast private armies.
Instead, there was Hughes, naked in his bedroom, unwashed and disheveled, his hair halfway down his back, sprawled out on a paper-towel-insulated bed, staring at his overworked television, with no device more sophisticated than his Zenith Space Commander. Next door, his command center, a hotel living room, was manned by five Mormon nursemaids: former potato-chip salesmen, construction workers, and factory hands, lackeys with no special skills, not even shorthand, equipped only with one console telephone, an electric typewriter, and a four-drawer filing cabinet.
The real Mr. Big was surrounded only by filth and disorder. Mountains of old newspapers, brittle with age, spread in an ever-widening semicircle on the floor around his bed, creeped under the furniture, and spilled into the corners of his cramped fifteen-by-seventeen-foot room, mixed together haphazardly with other debris—rolls of blueprints, maps, TV Guides, aviation magazines, and various unidentifiable objects.
A narrow path had been cleared from his bed to the bathroom, then lined with paper towels, but the tide of trash overran even that, topped off by numberless wads of used Kleenex the billionaire wielded to wipe off everything within reach, then casually cast upon the accumulated rubbish. It was all united in a common thick layer of dust that settled in permanently over the years. The room was never cleaned. Hughes did not want his Mormon aides stirring things up or disturbing his junkpiles, which continued to grow unchecked.
Amid this incredible clutter, set apart in pristine splendor, stood stack after stack of neatly piled documents. They covered every available surface. Thousands of yellow legal-pad pages and white typewritten memos piled with absolute precision on the dresser, two night tables, and an overstuffed armchair, all within easy reach of Hughes on his bed. He compulsively stacked and restacked these papers, often for hours at a time, taking a sheaf and whacking them down to align one side, then another, endlessly repeating the process until not a page was a millimeter out of place. That was vital.
These special papers were the instruments of his power.
For the four years Howard Hughes made his Last Stand in Las Vegas, he commanded his empire by correspondence. It was the only time in his life that the world’s most secretive man regularly risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires.
Hughes himself emphasized that the handwritten memos were unique.
“My men will tell you I dont write five letters a year,” he wrote his new right-hand man, Robert Maheu, toward the beginning of their pen-pal relationship.
“I have been notorious through the years for conducting all of my business orally, usually by telephone. I am sure you have heard of this characteristic.
“When I started sending you long hand notes, my people protested long and