Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [47]
“I just wonder how you would like it and how long you would endure the type of insults that you administer to me daily.
“Suppose I were to hover on the brink of asking you for your resignation, and suppose I were to repeat this attitude over and over, how would you feel?
“I suppose you will answer this by saying you are explosive by nature. But Bob, I am just as easily disturbed as you are.”
Hughes was, in fact, more than disturbed. He brooded about Maheu’s constant bullying and threatened betrayal late into the night, carefully reviewing their entire relationship more in sadness than in anger, composing a heartfelt memo before deciding to let passions cool overnight.
“I have been working for the last three hours writing you a long message,” he informed Maheu. “I feel very intensely and very bitterly about what you intend to do.
“I think it is important enough to give it fresh consideration in the morning. So why dont you get a good night’s sleep and I will send you this message in the morning.”
At the crack of dawn, he hit his estranged helpmate with his pained letter of lost love:
“Bob, I feel worse than you have any idea about my instinctive realization that you do not intend to remain with me.
“Anyway, tragic as this is to me, I assure you I will have no bitterness about it if you will only try to do it in as considerate a manner as possible.
“On numerous occasions, I have endeavored to turn over a new leaf with you and tried to get to the bottom of the flaw in our relationship and correct it.
“Time and time again I have plead with you to help me find out what was bugging you and eliminate it so that we could have a really trusting relationship in both directions.
“You have always insisted that nothing was the matter and that I could rely on your remaining with me the rest of your life.
“Yet now you are doing something obviously intended as a severance of our relationship.
“I have sensed some frightening incident like this.
“You see, you have penetrated into my activities to an extent where practically every single phase of my life is dependent upon you. You have handled it this way and you have resented any contact I have with outsiders.
“This would be OK if you were likewise completely dependent on me. But this is not the case. By your skillful handling of things, the major part of my daily life seems to flow through Maheu Associates.
“You have carefully kept your firm alive. I told you on numerous occasions that the one thing I could not accept was a part time arrangement. I certainly have paid on a full time basis.
“It seems to me that, in your view, you are still Robert A. Maheu Associates, and I am just a client.”
Just a client. What a sad, brutal realization. He had allowed himself to be swept away, to fall for, become totally dependent on a man who considered him just another client.
Hughes’s deep insecurity about Maheu’s fidelity touched every aspect of their relationship. The phantom top job offer became a running battle, one of many in their ongoing battle for control, not so much over the empire as over each other. It would turn even the most trivial disputes into titanic emotional struggles.
Even a golf tournament.
It was no ordinary tournament, the one in dispute here. It was the Tournament of Champions, a Las Vegas institution that had long been a trademark of the Desert Inn. But no more. Hughes had ordered it out almost immediately upon buying the hotel in 1967, afraid that he would be contaminated by the hordes of spectators and, worse yet, spotted by the television cameras supposedly covering the golf match.
Maheu had tried to dissuade him. “What in the hell are you worried about?” he had asked. “I think we can control the scanning of cameras and increase the security so that you can be safe ‘in your castle’—which you damn right deserve. My only suggestion is that we make you a hero rather than the ‘prisoner of war.’ ”
Maheu had kept at him, but Hughes was adamant.
“I have been your whipping