Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [69]
Hughes watched the display impassively. Women no longer interested him. But now something happened that definitely seemed to pique his interest. From offstage—“we’ve kept him isolated in a soundproof booth”—came the “young bachelor,” arriving to the rising laughter of the studio audience, finally let in on the big secret.
A small black child walked across the stage. Hughes stared at him in dismay.
The game-show host prattled on, enjoying the joke, never knowing the incredible impact that his secret would have on one viewer who had some secrets of his own, who at that very moment was deciding the fate of the TV announcer’s entire network.
A network of his own. The idea had become an obsession.
Hughes watched television compulsively, around the clock, tuning in everything from “Sunrise Semester” (which he detested) to the “Late Show” (which he loved). He watched until the stations shut down, and even then often left his set on, falling asleep to the pictureless hum, waking up to test patterns.
Television was not only his sole source of entertainment but also his chief source of information. Hughes literally monitored the world through TV. It was as if he had a closed-circuit system spying on the feared outside, and virtually all he knew of the alien planet beyond his bedroom was the flickering images on the video glass.
The TV, always on and always at top volume, was his constant companion. He frequently wrote memos seeking to manipulate national policy or making multimillion-dollar deals while sitcoms or B-movies boomed in the background, sometimes making momentous decisions based solely on a chance encounter with a news broadcast, a commercial, even a game show.
Memo after memo would begin, “I just saw something on TV …,” to be followed by an order, a complaint, or a plan of action.
Sometimes it was merely a suggestion that others tune in an especially good program: “Ask Maheu to look at 13 on his set. This is the finest color television transmission I have ever seen. This looks like an oil painting.… Some of these scenes look almost as if they were paintings taken from one of the best known museums.” (Not at all surprising, given the fact that Hughes was watching a special on Michelangelo.)
Other times it was to complain that he had to rely on television for his information: “Once more my nervous system is subjected to the strain of seeing a news item I am not prepared for … Bob, I must be the least informed executive in the whole damned country concerning his own business. I have to learn more from the news media than anyone I know in a comparable position.”
But once Hughes proposed selling a major segment of his empire—the Hughes Aircraft Company, one of the nation’s leading defense contractors—to a firm he knew only from a TV commercial: saw a broadcast today with some advertising for a company called AVCO, and it seemed to me that they are in just about every business under the sun except making toilet bowls. So, maybe AVCO would be a good prospect.”
And often the billionaire’s viewing habits would have consequences far beyond his own domain. Seeing the world through television brought it down to manageable size, and Hughes was intent on controlling the little people who paraded across his screen.
“I hear nothing but politics on TV,” he wrote Maheu with childlike petulance.
h”You are in charge of all political activities for my companies and me … yet I have had no single word from you as to which of the many political aspirants is someone we want in office and which is not.
“You promised