Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [36]
“I spent the whole night writing the script. Every word—every move—every tear—every sigh. All the stage directions are carefully worked out. I could get $10,000 for a script as good as this at 20th Century Fox. So, I want to see what comes of it, but I am afraid I know what the last scene is right now, and I am afraid it is not you and me walking into the setting sun with the package under our arms.”
Still, it was quite a spectacle the two of them were about to put on.
*Paul Laxalt, then the obscure but very cooperative governor of Nevada, now a U.S. Senator who was Ronald Reagan’s campaign chairman and is perhaps the president’s closest friend.
*Hughes’s refusal to appear in court ultimately had a $137 million price tag. The bankers had filed suit in June 1961 after a battle for dominance that began when they imposed a voting trust over his TWA stock in December 1960. As part of the lawsuit, they demanded that Hughes appear for a deposition. His refusal led a federal judge to find him in default in May 1963, and more than five years later damages were set at $137 million, which with interest escalated to $145 million.
2 Bob and Howard
It was not love at first sight. The courtship had lasted twelve years, and they never really saw each other. In fact, in the beginning Robert Maheu did not even know that he was working for Howard Hughes.
Private-eye Maheu was sitting in his recently opened Washington office on a spring day in 1954, when his phone rang. It was a matrimonial case. Not his usual line. The sign on the door said ROBERT A. MAHEU ASSOCIATES. But there weren’t really any associates quite yet, and although the office was just a couple of blocks from the White House, it wasn’t all that grand. Desk, swivel chair, hat rack, and not much else. In fact, Maheu was sharing the space (and the telephone) with an accountant. Still, he was beginning to attract some very interesting cases. Like the guy now on the phone.
It was a local lawyer. Big firm. Had a job for Maheu on behalf of a client he wouldn’t name. Wanted all the dirt on one Stuart W. Cramer III, a real blueblood, son of a wealthy industrialist who played golf with Ike. The kid had just married a young Hollywood starlet. Name of Jean Peters. What the unnamed client wanted was a complete rundown, but mainly he wanted to know if this Cramer was mixed up with any of the intelligence agencies.
As Maheu had told the lawyer right off, he didn’t normally take matrimonial work. He was no ordinary private eye. But this case was actually right up his alley. Maheu was a very private eye—private enough to be getting a $500 monthly retainer from the CIA. Under-the-table money to handle jobs too dirty for the Agency to handle itself. Pimping for Jordan’s King Hussein. Producing a porn flick starring a look-alike of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Odd jobs like that.
So he took the Cramer case. It was not exactly that he needed the work, but it looked like a piece of cake for a man with his connections, and a few extra bucks wouldn’t hurt. In truth, Maheu was in a bit of a bind. Nearly $100,000 worth. That Dairy Dream strike-it-rich-quick scheme had really turned into a nightmare. Which was why he had gotten into this spy-for-hire racket in the first place.
Or, at least that’s the way Maheu would later tell it. After a dazzling career with the FBI, mainly counterintelligence work in World War II, he suddenly quit the Bureau in 1947 to take advantage of a big business opportunity. Dairy Dream. Exclusive U.S. rights to a new process for canning pure cream. A great success that suddenly turned sour with the terrible discovery that the cream had a very limited shelf life. The cost of retrieving it from supermarkets across the country was ruinous. Busted, Maheu went back to work for the government as chief of security at the Small Business Administration, but his take-home hardly covered the interest on his debt. So he became Robert A. Maheu Associates.
But