Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [50]
“And if the word I used before, the word ‘bitterness’ does not describe your feelings, it sure as hell describes mine.
“Incidently, what right have you to say I am sitting here comfortably watching TV while you suffer at some dancing function in La Costa?
“In other words, how—just how do you know I am comfortable? Maybe I am sitting here wracked with pain, how the hell do you know any different?
“I am sure that most unbiased people would certainly prefer to be dancing at La Costa, at the presentation ceremonies of the golf tournament, rather than confined to a bed watching TV—and most particularly, if the subject on TV is a critical unpleasant one.”
It just killed Hughes to see Maheu traipsing about, whether to La Costa or to Cape Canaveral.
If with the golf tournament Hughes took something trivial and made it seem momentous, with the Apollo space shots—the quest to land a man on the moon—Hughes took something truly momentous and made it seem trivial. Merely an excuse for another fight with Maheu. Once again, it was triggered by what Hughes saw as Maheu’s maddening wanderlust.
“I am not eager for you to attend the event at Canaveral,” wrote the billionaire, stifling his man’s dangerous urge to roam.
“I view this purely and simply as a situation where you have asked to do something which you personally want to do. And which will take you away from my orbit for a certain period of time, and then return you later with all of the attendant risks of illness, accident, airplane highjacking, airplane accident in the over crowded skies, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
“One thing is not a matter of risk or uncertainty, one thing is sure, it will sap a certain measure of your strength right at a time when you are the key man and the very fulcrum upon which my entire world depends.
“Bob, you are always asking me what happens to you if I die. Have you ever thought of what would be the outcome to me if something should happen to you?
“Bob, you are handling absolutely everything that is most important to me, and many of these matters, such as the $137,000,000 TWA judgement, are being handled by persons completely unknown to me and according to a strategy totally unknown to me.
“This is unavoidable, and I am not asking that it be any different. I only want you to know that, if anything should happen to you, I would not even know where to begin trying [to] pick up the pieces.
“So, please just bear that in mind when the time comes for you to leave for Florida.”
The space shots should have been moments of triumph and celebration. Hughes had played a key role in the historic quest. His empire had built the first spacecraft that landed on the moon, and the Hughes Surveyor sent back to earth the first close-ups of the moon’s surface via the Hughes Early Bird communications satellite, which would also broadcast the astronauts’ moon walks to the world. But it all brought no joy to the penthouse. Once more, as with the golf tournament, Hughes could not bear being confined to his bed, relegated to watching the big event on television, while Maheu was down at the launch, hobnobbing with the astronauts. After all, Hughes had once himself been hero of the skies. So space shots were always touchy.
Even on the day men walked on the moon. Especially then. Maheu did not try to escape Hughes’s orbit for the big one. Instead, he spent weeks personally producing a TV show celebrating Hughes as a space pioneer and planned to run it on the Las Vegas station Hughes owned right before the moon walk. But on the eve of the landing came word from Mission Control—abort! Suddenly, at the last possible moment, without explanation, Hughes canceled the show.
“You are the captain of the ship and I will follow your advice,” wrote the grounded Maheu, “but I cannot help but tell you that you are making the mistake of your life, which otherwise would have been the greatest thing that has happened since your arrival here. Cancelling the program at this late date will result in repercussions from which you will never recover.
“I might