Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [44]
He had not spoken to Cook for a decade, had once actually fired him, and often saw his legal advice as condescending and contemptuous personal assaults: “Raymond! If you would treat me as something other than a cross-breed between an escaped lunatic and a child, you would be surprised how much better we would get along!”
He had never met Pat Hyland, had not seen Raymond Holliday since the late 1950s, and was now so estranged from them—the only real businessmen in his empire—that he relied on lower-echelon informants to keep tabs on both the Hughes Tool Company and the Hughes Aircraft Company.
“My men, upon whom I rely for all of my factual data concerning the entire Culver City operation, do not include Pat Hyland,” the billionaire told Maheu. “Hyland has become completely unpredictable lately. I have no confidence in him.
“My confidantes inside the H.A.C. and H.T.Co. organizations put their very lives in jeopardy with some of the disclosures they make to me, and if they thought this information went to anybody—no matter whom—they would not continue to inform.”
Of all his ministers-in-exile, none was more completely banished or more taken by surprise than the chief Mormon, Bill Gay. The heir apparent after Hughes’s split with Dietrich, Gay had created the palace guard and gained in power as Hughes withdrew into seclusion. Once the field commander of the germ-warfare campaign, he suddenly became the most prominent casualty of that war when his wife fell ill in the late 1950s and Gay was banned as a dangerous carrier. Now he was frozen out completely.
Hughes never told Gay why, but he poured out his bitterness to Maheu. It was Gay who was responsible for looking after Jean Peters, and it was therefore obviously Gay who was responsible for the failure of his marriage:
“Bill’s total indifference and laxity to my pleas for help in the domestic area, voiced urgently to him, week by week throughout the past 7 to 8 years, have resulted in a complete, I am afraid irrevocable loss of my wife.
“I am sorry, but I blame Bill completely for this unnecessary debacle.
“And this is only the beginning. If I compiled here a complete list of the actions or omissions in which I feel he has failed to perform his duty to me and to the company, it would fill several pages.
“I feel he has let me down—utterly, totally, completely.”
Alone in his penthouse, estranged from all his key men, cut off even from his wife, scarred by a long string of past divorces—from his first wife,* from his first right-hand man Dietrich, from all his original executives and operatives—Hughes was now desperate to make a success of his new but already terribly troubled marriage to Maheu.
“Bob,” he wrote, “this uncertainty, distrust, and these accusations are bringing my entire operation to a halt and tearing me apart inside.
“I am not trying any further to debate who is right and who is wrong.
“Kuldell left me, Dietrich left me, Ramo and Wooldrich, Frank Waters and Arditto all left me, so lets say the incompatibility is probably on my side.*
“Anyway, right or wrong, I know one thing, and that is that this situation must be resolved and now.”
Time and again Hughes tried to get to the root of his problems with Maheu, endlessly examining and analyzing, always talking about their “relationship.”
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Act II
“Bob—I am afraid I have lost the magic touch with which we used to find accord and harmony in almost everything we did.
“Somehow I cannot seem to reach you the way I used to.
“When I say I cannot seem to establish the relationship we used to have, you say I am imagining things.”
“We shall never solve the problem of the ‘relationship we used to have’ unless we both try.
“It sure as hell doesn’t help when I have to spend half of my time explaining off situations which did not exist in the first place.”
“I agree it takes two to quarrel. It also takes an effort on the part of both