Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [32]
He was getting tired, but he could not sleep. He usually stayed up until dawn. His body flagged, but his mind reeled on, a runaway engine that could not stop and therefore had to find something, anything to work on, work over, work to death. He seemed to believe that he worked best at the outer limits of his endurance, pushing himself often for days without sleep, as if his mind, by feeding on his emaciated body, consuming it, gained some special power.
“I work around the clock, holidays mean very little to me, since I work just about all the time,” he explained.
“I have absolutely nothing but my work. When things dont go well, it can be very empty indeed.
“I do not indulge in sports, night clubs, or other recreational activities, and since, in fact, I do not do much of anything else at all, except my work, just what do you suggest I do, crawl off in a corner some place and die?”
That was, of course, pretty much what he had done. And quite often, Hughes was not really working at all. He was simply caught in a catatonic daze, playing with his long hair, pulling it up over the top of his head, then letting it fall, or stacking and restacking his memos. When he was working, it was often furious but wasted motion. He would spin his wheels, digging himself deeper into a rut over some entirely trivial or totally imaginary matter. But he was always torturing himself, and at that he worked very hard.
Sometimes he’d reach into his stacks of memos and torture himself with memories. Here was one. A close encounter with grave danger only narrowly escaped. God, it was horrifying even to recall it! Still, he picked up the memo and went back in time.
It was the day Lyndon Johnson “abdicated,” and while Hughes had mentioned in passing something about picking a new president—“selecting one of the candidates and nursing him into the White House,” those were his words—he was instead fixated on a real crisis much closer to home.
All his enemies were conspiring against him.
“Please dont declare war upon me so early in the day,” Hughes had written in a plea to Robert Maheu. “I am well aware that this is not anything that is important to you, but merely something you were pressured into doing by certain groups here. I am speaking of the Easter Egg Hunt.”
The Easter Egg Hunt. There were plans—no, a plot!—to hold it at his hideout, the Desert Inn.
“I have been told, however, that although there are a number of people in Las Vegas who favor this event, there is a more powerful group who are dedicated to discrediting me and that this second group will stop at nothing.”
Not only was this “second group” so diabolical as to plot the hunt, but it was also about to launch a “gossip campaign” against him.
“The substance of this story (and it has already been fed to certain Hollywood columnists, who very fortunately are friends of mine from my motion picture days) the substance is that: I am ashamed for my sinful past (adventures with females, etc.) and I am having a backlash here, manafest in my extreme isolation from social contact, presumably for the purpose of putting temptation out of reach, and an intensive and very expensive campaign to reform the morals of Las Vegas. I am supposedly waiting to start a real all-out war against the normal customs of Las Vegas—such as: topless show girls, etc. etc., dirty jokes, dirty advertisements, etc.”
But that was not the real danger. No, the real danger was the egg hunt.
“Now, I am further informed, and this is what really has me worried, that this militant group plans to stage a really viscious all-out juvenile riot at our Easter party.
“I am not eager to have a repetition, in the D.I., of what happened at Juvenile Hall when the ever-lovin little darlings tore the place apart. I am sure your reply to that will be that, with our better-trained security force, such a thing just could not happen. However, my information is to the effect that our opponents hope we do set this riot down, because they feel they