Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [87]
“When Cary Grant got this disease in London some time back, he said that for six months he was totally and utterly unable to do anything other than just lie in bed and wish he was dead.
“I therefore want a system of isolation with respect to Cissy, the doctors attending her, nurses, or anyone in the past or future coming in contact with her, that is so effective and complete that anything we have done in the past will be nothing compared to it. I want this to go through the eighth or tenth generation, so to speak. Not only do I want this isolation to include personal contact, but also any items such as papers, clothing, flowers, TV sets, etc., that are transmitted to her, either direct or through the mails.
“Cut off every conceiveable channel of contact. Whether it be an object or thing, a letter or note, an invoice from a vendor, from the doctors at the hospital, no matter what it is it should not be permitted to come into our establishment. It will not be permitted to come into contact with any of our people, with any friends of our families, relatives or anyone else. See that absolutely no conceiveable avenue, channel or loophole is overlooked.
“I consider this the very most important item on the agenda, more important than our TWA crisis, our financial crisis, or any of our other problems.”
Contaminated women had always been a special problem. Once, years earlier, Hughes had burned all his clothes, everything he owned—suits, shirts, ties, socks, overcoats, even all his towels and rugs—after he heard a rumor that an actress he once dated had a venereal disease.
Now he didn’t have any clothes to burn, nor did he see any women. In fact, Hughes may well have gone into seclusion largely to escape his new wife. He began to withdraw almost as soon as they got married. Clearly he could not share his life, could not handle the intimacy. But it was more than that. Hughes actually seemed to be afraid of the woman he code-named “The Major.” The troubles he had in a simultaneous affair with a teen-age mistress, more fetchingly code-named “The Party,” suggests there was an even deeper reason.
All the while he courted Jean, Hughes was seeing his teen angel on the side. She was the last of the harem. Barely sixteen when he plucked her out of a local beauty contest, she remained on standby even after his marriage, stashed in a carefully decontaminated hideaway at Coldwater Canyon, under guard and under surveillance. Hughes brought her to his bungalows only once, to celebrate his fifty-third birthday on Christmas Eve 1958, his last extramarital fling.
It seems to have been less than a complete success. As months went by without another date, “The Party” cursed and browbeat Hughes unmercifully. The guards bugging her phone heard her tirades.
“You dirty old son of a bitch,” she screamed. “You never come to see me. I’ll bet you can’t even get it up anymore, you impotent old slob!”
Impotent. The playboy hero of The Carpetbaggers, known for his string of starlets, may have been driven into seclusion by his fear of women, as desperate to escape his wife—and hide his impotence—as to escape the germs and the blacks and all his other nameless terrors. Soon he would flee her forever, move to Las Vegas alone, and spend the rest of his life surrounded by male nursemaids.
But he would never find sanctuary from “contamination.”
In the past, Hughes himself had been the only victim of his fears. His ten-year battle against “contamination” had been waged within the confines of his blacked-out bedrooms. The fight had been to keep the outside world from getting in. A purely defensive struggle. Now he went on the offense. Now the same terrors that had driven him into seclusion also drove him to control the world outside.
He tried to decontaminate all Las Vegas, the fallen city he had come to purify. Its impure water quickly became an obsession.
“I maintain that you cannot build a resort of world-wide fame and lasting