Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [35]
The Mormons were his little polygamous family, all the family Hughes had left now, and he needed to keep them around. He was cut off from everyone else. Even his wife.
He would never see Jean Peters again. They spoke almost every day on the telephone and each time had the same conversation. Hughes kept trying to persuade Jean to move to Las Vegas, to live in one of the two mansions he had bought for her—one a $600,000 palatial estate in town, the other a five-hundred-acre ranch nearby—telling her that life would be perfect in Nevada, that she would love the clean air. And Jean kept agreeing to come, if Hughes would just leave his penthouse and move into their new home first.
It was a standoff. Hughes could not leave his hideout, could not share his life. He wanted his wife close by, under his control, but he could no longer actually live with her. Instead, he secretly bought a “surveillance house” across the street from her home in Beverly Hills and kept his wife under watch while each night he tried to persuade her to come to Las Vegas.
In his own way, he seemed to love her, and the nightly phone calls were important. Sometimes he fretted that she would not be in or refuse to talk when he called at some predawn hour.
“Please call Mrs. and ask her if it will be convenient for me to call tonight and ask her what is the latest that would be convenient,” he scribbled to his Mormons one Christmas Eve.
“Remind her this is my birthday.”
And when he had his wife on the phone again, he would once more beg her to join him and assure her that he would soon emerge from his seclusion. “He said that he felt himself to be like someone on a track being pursued by the engines,” Jean later recalled. “It was almost his mania to get everything settled and then start to build his dream world.”
But, in fact, there was no room in his “dream world” for Jean, no room for anyone else at all. Certainly no room for a rival. What Hughes dreamed of was a world in which only he existed, and often he wrote out entire scripts for his henchmen to follow in dealing with threats to his solipsist vision, such as the sudden arrival in Las Vegas of another multimillionaire.
“Now, I think No. 1 on the list for this year is Mr. K-1,” wrote Hughes in 1967, hatching a plot to dispose of his new rival, Kirk Kerkorian, who had just announced plans to build the biggest hotel-casino in town.
“I want your idea of how he would react if you were to see him and say something like this:
“ ‘Kirk, I have just had a long talk with Howard.
“ ‘I dont have to tell you that when he sold his interest in TWA, he picked up the largest check that any single individual ever carried out of Wall St. Since that time he has moved very slowly. He has made investments in Las Vegas, but nothing else.
“ ‘Now, Kirk, what this is all leading up to is that I just see you two friends of mine embarking on a course that can only lead to a disastrous collision.
“ ‘Howard wants to buy your land and persuade you not to build this hotel. I think his friendship (and he has very few friends) is yours for the asking, and I think it would be worth so much more to you that there would be no comparison.
“ ‘The way he figures it, if he had had even the most remote idea that you were planning to do this, he would have located somewhere else. I know for a fact that he made an all-out study to see if it would be possible to relocate now, but you see he just could not dispose of his property here without wrecking the economy of the entire state.’ ”
It was Kerkorian who would have to get out. Howard Hughes had to be alone in his kingdom, his power unchallenged and absolute.
But locked in his room with all his grand schemes, with all his great fears, with his absolute need for absolute power, Hughes needed a go-between, one trusted man who could take the visions he scrawled in his memos and make them a reality in the dangerous world outside.
And the billionaire had found that man—his new remote-control instrument—Robert Aime Maheu.
They would make the Big Movie together,