Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [83]
The “beautiful white girl” whose race-mixing Roman rendezvous so outraged Hughes was, in reality, a light-skinned black.
5 Fear and Loathing
The Bogeyman. Right there in his room.
A huge gargoyle of a blackamoor, horribly greased and dripping filth, a savage threatening unspeakable crimes, had violated his sanctum sanctorum, slipping past the locked doors, the armed sentry, and the phalanx of Mormons through the one unguarded opening.
Howard Hughes, sick with fear and revulsion, cried out in the night to Maheu.
“I hate to disturb you this late,” he wrote in a shaken scrawl, “but I just saw something on TV that litterally and actually physically made me nauseated and I still am!
“I saw a show on NBC in which the biggest ugliest negro you ever saw in your life was covered—litterally covered from head to foot with vaseline almost ¼ of an inch thick. It made you sick just to look at this man.
“Bob, the producers must have deliberately tried to make this man as repulsive as possible. Anyway, he walked over next to an immaculately dressed white woman—sort of an English noblewoman type.
“Well, when this repulsive gob of grease came close to this clean carefully dressed white woman, all I could think was ‘Jesus, don’t let that woman touch him.’ ”
But it was too late. Not even Hughes could protect the purity of white womanhood from the potent forces of blackness.
“So, after a minute or two of talk this man grabbed this woman, opened his mouth as wide as possible and kissed this woman in a way that would have been cut out of any movie even if the people involved had both been of the same race.”
His Mandingo complex fully aroused, the outraged Texan was ready to call out a lynch mob. But no, the crime could not be punished.
“Bob, this show seems to be the presentation of the Broadway version of the Oscar, so I imagine the scene I described was a scene taken at random from the winning play.…
“I was all for making a protest to some congressional committee over this,” continued Hughes, “but now that I see it is the Tony awards, I feel it is even more shocking, but I suppose one should approach it with caution.”
Another great white hope unfulfilled. The “repulsive gob of grease” was, in fact, James Earl Jones playing prizefighter Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, a segment of which was televised in the awards presentation. That realization did nothing to still the billionaire’s sense of outrage.
“Bob,” he concluded, “I dont care if this was the re-enactment of the Last Supper, that first scene is going to cause some comment.”
Of all of Hughes’s phobias and obsessions, few were more virulent than his fear and loathing of blacks. His was a classic racism straight out of plantation melodrama, often expressed in terms so outrageous that it seems a parody. But he was deadly serious, and his bigotry had very real consequences. He did, after all, own the plantation.
Hughes himself attributed his prejudice and paranoia to a traumatic event in his youth. “I was born and lived my first 20 years in Houston, Texas,” he explained. “I lived right in the middle of one race riot in which the negroes committed attrocities to equal any in Vietnam.”
In fact, when Hughes was only eleven there had been a dramatic explosion of black rage in his rigidly segregated hometown. On the night of August 23, 1917, more than one hundred soldiers from an all-black infantry battalion stationed near the city seized rifles and marched on Houston to avenge the beating of a black officer by white policemen. Sixteen whites were killed in the three-hour uprising. The Houston riot was a milestone in America’s ongoing and, until then, rather one-sided race war—the first in which more whites were killed than blacks.
Undoubtedly that night did have a real impact on young Howard. However, now, half a century later, the well-guarded recluse was besieged not by armed mobs but by phantoms of his own creation. Consumed by a nameless dread, he projected his fears onto