Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [70]
“It seems to me that we should have had by now a hand picked candidate in every one of these races—someone who would be loyal to us.”
Whether he was watching a political campaign, an assassination, or the war in Vietnam, it was always with both the dispassionate remove of a man long inured to the fate of characters in TV dramas and the intense involvement of a contestant on “Let’s Make a Deal.”
“Did you see CBS News at 11:00 PM just completed?” he wrote Maheu one evening. “If not, please get a summary of the portion devoted to helicopters in Vietnam. More helicopters are being used than was ever contemplated and more helicopters are being lost than was estimated. CBS went on to say, over and over again, that this is a helicopter war.…
“Bob, for you to have your Whitehouse relationship, while, at the same time, our Aircraft Division sits empty-handed with the best helicopter design in the world—the whole situation is just the damndest enigma I ever heard of.
“Cant you do something about it?”
Yet for all his efforts to control the world through television, Hughes himself was ultimately held in thrall by the machine. He was as trapped in its beam as in his penthouse prison, the true dimensions of his cell not the fifteen-by-seventeen-foot confines of the hotel room but the nineteen-inch diagonal of the TV screen.
Television was his other narcotic. Hughes needed it to blunt the pain of both his paranoid visions and his true conditions. Certainly his most central and deadening addiction, after money and power, was not the codeine he injected into his arms, legs, and groin, but the TV he shot into his brain in quantities sufficient to overwhelm even a well-balanced mind. Hughes clung to his TV set like an addict to his spike. Although he usually had several sets in reserve, the need to send one out for repair was almost more than he could bear:
“Let the TV man see if he can repair the Sylvania that just left my room, but only in compliance with the following:
“I dont want it placed anywhere near the number one Sylvania machine, and I want the TV man not to be working anywhere near or in the vicinity of the no. 1 machine.
“In other words, I dont want the man to be even within”—he started to write “twenty or thirty” then crossed it out—“40 or 50 feet of the no. 1 machine, because I dont want even the remotest, tiniest possibility of the TV man swinging an arm around, or backing up without realizing how close he is, and coming into contact with the no. 1 machine.
“If it should turn out to be impossible to repair the machine without taking it to his shop, then I will be willing for the TV man to take it (the no. 2 machine), provided he does not pass anywhere near the no. 1 machine, and provided the no. 1 machine is not touched in any slightest way and remains here in the hall or across the hall.
“In other words, provided the no. 1 machine is not disturbed in any way whatsoever, either by the TV man, the watchman, or any one else whomsoever.”
Hughes’s seeming reverence for the “no. 1 machine” would not last. Never fully satisfied, he was constantly changing sets, always wanting a sharper picture, better color, higher audio, and, especially, more remote control. With more money than anyone in the country, perhaps in the world, perhaps in all history, Hughes wanted no personal possessions, no luxuries, no worldly goods, nothing but a really good color TV. And still the perfect set eluded him. At times there was a veritable showroom of discarded RCAs, Zeniths, and Sylvanias—fallen idols gathering dust in and around his room. And still he’d send his aides in search of the ideal television.
“Lets get a brand-new very latest type portable,” Hughes instructed the Mormons in one of an endless series of memos. “When we have a really perfect result lets get rid of all the miscellaneous sets we have here and across the hall. Leaving only 2 of the very latest. Lets see if we can get a set with remote contrast or brightness. I am forever wanting this. Also I understand they have an auto fine tuning