Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [84]
Actually, it was his terror of blacks that had driven Hughes to take a first decisive step into total seclusion. After their marriage, Hughes and Jean Peters lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing each other only for marathon movie-watching trysts at night. They met each evening for their own “Late-Late Show” at Goldwyn Studios until Hughes discovered that his screening room there had been used to show rushes of Porgy and Bess to its all-black cast. He never set foot in that theater again.
Nor did he ever again invite Jean to watch movies. Instead, Hughes moved alone to Nosseck’s Projection Studio on Sunset Boulevard, set up house there, kept his new location secret from his wife, and told her he was in the hospital with an “undiagnosed disease.” It was half-true. For it was in the three months Hughes spent alone at Nosseck’s that things first turned really weird.
At first he spent his time talking to bankers and lawyers about the TWA crisis, all the while compulsively cleaning the telephone with Kleenex or endlessly arranging and rearranging a half-dozen Kleenex boxes into various geometric designs. For several weeks he wore the same white shirt and tan slacks. Then one day he stripped off his rancid clothes, went about naked, stopped talking to bankers and lawyers, and ordered his aides to maintain strict silence.
Finally, Hughes issued a blanket decree: “Don’t try to get me for anything. Wait until I call you. I don’t want any messages handed to me.”
Now he was set. He remained at the studio in silent seclusion until the late summer of 1958, when he suddenly moved back to his bungalow—and there had a complete nervous breakdown.
It probably would have happened even without Porgy and Bess. Blacks may have precipitated the move that cut him off from his wife and left him alone with his madness, but blacks were not the real threat. The real threat was “contamination.”
It was not merely the purity of white womanhood that obsessed Hughes, it was the purity of his entire world. And that purity was endangered not merely by big ugly blacks but by innumerable other forms of “contamination.”
The most dangerous was invisible. Germs.
Hughes set up bivouac in five pink bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and from his headquarters, bungalow 4, commanded his troops in the germ-warfare campaign.
With germs, as with blacks, there had been childhood traumas. Both his parents had died suddenly, unexpectedly, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was eighteen. But his long-standing terror of bacteria was by now irrational. And it dominated his entire life.
Hughes cut off all human contact—everyone was a dangerous carrier—except for his clean-living elite Mormon guard. And even they had to follow stringent rules designed to prevent the “backflow of germs.”
The few who dealt with him personally, or handled anything he was to handle, first had to engage in a thirty-minute purification ritual called “processing”—“wash four distinct and separate times, using lots of lather each time from individual bars of soap”—and then don white cotton gloves.
Even that was not sufficient. Finally, Hughes demanded that everything his Mormons delivered to him with their gloved processed hands also had to be wrapped in Kleenex or Scott paper towels, “insulation” to protect him from “contamination.”
But he was hardly yet safe from the invisible threat. Seated naked in a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his darkened bungalow, its windows sealed shut with masking tape, the billionaire began to dictate a complete “Procedures Manual,” a series of meticulously detailed memos codifying such rules as the number of layers of tissues required in handling particular items, such as the clothes he now almost never wore.
“Mr. Hughes would like you to bring a box of shirts, a box of trousers and a box of shoes,” began one typical “Operating Memorandum” titled “Taking Clothing to HRH.”