Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [54]
“Every time I make a suggestion to help you accomplish what I genuinely believe is your sincere desire, I get dropped on my head.
“I constantly beg for guidance. It just happens that I get none, but do receive an over-abundance of criticism. My oujai board is beginning to runneth over, because I am beginning to realize that when I dip my cup into the liquid fuel I am drinking from a seive I end up having nothing to taste.”
Maheu was losing his grip. Within a year, the erstwhile CIA tough guy had been driven to drink and was crying for mercy, his Machiavellian schemes seemingly forgotten as he was drawn further and further into an overwhelmingly intimate and terribly troubled relationship with Hughes.
Despite all the strains and bickering, they were still together, about to embark on a series of missions that would shake the country. But as they set off to buy America, both had to wonder—could this marriage be saved?
*Maheu’s claim of a central role in D-Day is at least an exaggeration. While he did do counterintelligence work for the FBI during World War II, and he was handling a Vichy double-agent, there is no available evidence to support his boast of diverting the Nazis from Normandy.
*Ella Rice, who Hughes married in 1925, and divorced in 1929.
*Robert C. Kuldell, general manager of Hughes Tool Company when Hughes inherited it, fired in 1938; Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, top scientists at Hughes Aircraft who quit in 1953 and founded TRW, Inc.; Frank Waters and James Arditto, Hughes’s political lawyers who both quit and filed suit against Hughes in 1961.
3 The Kingdom
Shortly after Thanksgiving 1967, Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt got a sudden chill—as if he had seen a ghost. The Ghost of Thanksgiving Past.
In the year since Howard Hughes had made his holiday-week pilgrimage to Las Vegas, Laxalt had been haunted by a hidden fear. Without once meeting him, the governor had granted Hughes nearly feudal rights, doing everything in his power to help the unseen billionaire become Nevada’s biggest private employer, its largest landowner, and king of its one industry, gambling.
Laxalt waived all the rules, placed Hughes above the law, and let him seize full control of four major casinos. No individual had ever before owned even one, but all were licensed at the governor’s command despite the billionaire’s refusal to submit a photograph, fingerprints, or the detailed personal and financial records required by Nevada law. Nobody even dared to suggest that Hughes make a personal appearance.
In addition to the casinos, the recluse now owned four resort hotels, most of the land on the Las Vegas Strip, a vast amount of other real estate, two airports, one airline, and a local television station. It all came to almost $100 million, an investment Hughes had to protect. He bought local politicians wholesale, imposing his will on officials from the courthouse to the statehouse, and seemed to have enormous influence over the silver-haired Republican governor.
Laxalt had allowed an invisible man to control Nevada more completely than anyone has ever controlled a sovereign state. And now he was haunted.
Hughes, on the other hand, was quite pleased. “I think Laxalt can be brought to a point where he will just about entrust his entire political future to his relationship with us,” wrote the phantom. “I think that is the way it should be and the way it can be.”
In fact, Hughes had promised to make the obliging governor president of the United States.
“I am ready to ride with this man to the end of the line, which I am targeting as the White House,” he declared. “I think we must convince him beyond a shadow of a doubt that I intend to back him with unlimited support right into the White House in 1972.”
Paul Laxalt for president! At the time it seemed just another bizarre notion hatched in the unreal world of the penthouse. But even as Laxalt nurtured his hidden relationship with Hughes, he was also developing a special relationship with the newly elected