Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [46]
Anyone who had seen the two men talking—Maheu in a custom-made suit flashing gold-and-diamond RAM cufflinks, seated at a big polished desk in the paneled office of his new mansion, Hughes sprawled out naked on his paper-towel-insulated bed in a cramped, filthy, darkened room surrounded by debris—would have assumed that Maheu was the billionaire, and wondered why he was engaged in marathon conversation with an obviously deranged derelict.
While Hughes lay huddled in his somber seclusion, Maheu flashed through Las Vegas with flamboyant relish, flew about the country in a private Hughes jet, entertained royally on his oceangoing yacht, hobnobbed with movie stars and astronauts and Mafia dons, dropped in for state dinners at the White House, and played tennis with Nevada’s governor.
Now, to top it off, he had been offered overall command of Hughes’s entire empire. Everything was going according to plan.
Or so it seemed. But if Maheu looked and lived like the billionaire, Hughes in fact still was. And as he had warned Maheu when he dangled before him the keys to the kingdom, “You are stuck with me.”
The battle for control was not over. It had hardly begun. No sooner had Hughes promised Maheu full command than he was gripped by a growing paranoid fear that Maheu would take over completely. He never exactly withdrew the offer, but neither did he ever actually give Maheu the job. Instead he suggested a “trial arrangement,” an “informal gentlemens’ understanding,” a “word of honor agreement” they would for the moment just keep to themselves.
Maheu was perplexed. “Howard, as to the over-all informal authority, what good does it do unless the officers of your company are so notified?” he asked. “They certainly have no reason for taking my word on a matter of such significance.”
Hughes was enraged by Maheu’s doubts. “If you want our relationship to endure at all I besiege you not to adopt your present attitude,” he shot back.
“I deny that I have failed to implement our confidential gentleman’s agreement. I emphatically deny that I have broken our agreement in any way whatsoever. This is just one more in a long string of assumptions you have reached in your own suspicious mind. I contend that our agreement is 100% in full force and effect. If anybody violates our word of honor agreement, it will be you and not I.”
The phantom top job became a major battleground.
“Howard,” wrote Maheu, taking a tough stand, “the agreement that we discussed and in which both of us concurred, was that I would be in charge of all the divisions of the Hughes Tool Co. If you have changed your mind, it is as simple as telling me so.
“I have made it very clear that I have no intent of accepting any position in your company unless you are the only one to whom I am responsible, and unless it is in fact the top position. If we cannot reach that understanding, then I want to accept several directorships which have been offered to me for some time with very favorable stock options.
“I think we must also remember, Howard, that it was not I who ever asked for the top job under you, but it was always you who offered it.”
Maheu’s threatened infidelity, his open toying with side affairs, his constant “Dear John” letters, drove Hughes into a jealous frenzy.
“You say: ‘It was not I who ever asked for the top job, but you who offered it,’ ” Hughes replied.
“I think this is a fairly accurate appraisal of our relationship. In other words, it is always I who am forced to ask you to do this or that, and it is always I who must ask you to overlook something which has offended you.
“I dont see what you gain by this chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.
“Bob, the only thing I can say in summary is that you seem constantly to place me in a position where I must beg you not to leave