Citizen Hughes

Part II

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 his right-hand man, Robert Maheu.

"I hate to disturb you this late," he wrote in a shaken scrawl, "but I just saw something on TV that laterally 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 1/4 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. While the helpless billionaire watched in horror, the gob of grease did his worst.

"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 Hughes 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 pro-test to some congressional committee over this," Hughes continued, "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 prize fighter Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, a segment of which was televised in the awards presentation. That realization did nothing to still Hughes's sense of transgression.

"However, 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."

•

Alone in his bedroom, besieged by phantoms of his own creation, Howard Hughes manned the barricades not merely against big ugly blacks but against the entire world outside. Consumed by a nameless dread, he projected his fears onto a variety of unseen enemies. Sometimes they paraded before him in blackface--a minstrel show of his subconscious mind--but, in the end, everything beyond his bedroom seemed a threat.

Ten years earlier, he had fled the world and gone into hiding. But he was not yet safe. And now the same terrors that had driven him into seclusion also drove him to control the world.

He plotted the entire campaign from his penthouse hide-out atop the Desert Inn, a gaudy gambling emporium smack in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the most garish, most public place on earth. It was certainly no Hole-in-the-Wall, no Walden Pond, but it was somehow just right.

The Wizard of Oz had come to the Emerald City.

Hughes had slipped into Las Vegas on Thanksgiving weekend in 1966 and never once emerged from his bedroom until he slipped out on Thanksgiving eve four years later.

Indeed, he rarely left his bed. And yet, in those four years, Hughes had his greatest impact on the nation, making his presence felt in corporate board rooms, in political back rooms, even in the Oval Office of the White House.

Hughes was at the height of his wealth and power, despite his invisibility. He was now a billionaire, with $750,000,000 in cash on hand and other assets worth at least that much. Fortune magazine would soon name him, along with J. Paul Getty, the richest man in America. And he had power beyond his vast wealth. He was the sole owner of the Hughes Tool Company, with its monopoly on the device needed to drill all oil wells. He was sole trustee of the Hughes Aircraft Company, atop-ten defense contractor with strong CIA ties, manufacturer of spy satellites and of the first U.S. spacecraft that landed on the moon. And beyond his real power was the power of his myth.

The vision was of an archvillain in his hidden domain, surrounded by war-room electronics and gleaming computer banks, his eyes fixed on a huge blinking map of the world, his fingers at the controls of an array of technology that commanded vast private armies.

In reality, there was Hughes, naked in his bedroom, unwashed and disheveled, his hair halfway down his back, sprawled on a bed insulated with paper towels, staring at his overworked television set with no device at hand more sophisticated than its remote-control unit. Next door, his command center was a hotel living room manned by five Mormon nursemaids--ex--potato-chip salesmen, construction workers and factory hands, lackeys with no special skills--equipped only with one console telephone, an electric typewriter and a four-drawer filing cabinet.

The real Mr. Big was surrounded only by filth and disorder. Mountains of newspapers, brittle with age, spread in a widening semicircle on the floor around his bed, creeping under the furniture and spilling into the corners of his 15'x17' room, mixing haphazardly with other debris.

A narrow path had been cleared from his bed to the bathroom, then lined with paper towels, but the tide of trash overran even that, topping it off with numberless wads of Kleenex the billionaire used to wipe off everything within reach, then casually cast upon the accumulated rubbish. The debris was covered with a thick layer of dust that had settled in over the years. The room was never once cleaned.

Amid this incredible clutter, set apart in pristine splendor, stood stack after stack of neatly piled documents. They covered every available surface. Thousands of yellow legal-pad pages and white typewritten memos piled with absolute precision on the dresser, two night tables and an overstuffed armchair, all within reach of Hughes on his bed. He compulsively stacked and restacked these papers, often for hours at a time, taking a sheaf and whacking it down to align one side after another, endlessly repeating the process until not a page was a millimeter out of place. That was vital.

Those special papers were the instruments of his power.

For the four years Hughes remained in Las Vegas, he commanded his empire by correspondence. It was the only time in his entire life that the world's most secretive man regularly risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears and desires, "the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my very innermost activities."

Secure that his secrets were safe with his Mormons, that his dispatches could not possibly fall into hostile hands, Hughes daily scrawled out orders on reams of yellow paper, unleashing a blizzard of memorandums, sometimes more than 100 pages in a single day, scheming through sleepless nights to control a world he feared to face.

But he had been spying on that world all the while--through television.

•

It was Saturday night. Date night. Howard Hughes, alone with his television set, stared blankly at the square of light.

"From Hollywood...the dating capital of the world...in color...it's The Dating Game!." A fanfare. Wild applause. A half-enclosed round stage turned, coming full circle to reveal the grinning host of the show. All teeth and double knits, he stepped off the revolving disk as the music swelled in crescendo.

"I feel I should have walked onstage with a Band-Aid across my mouth this evening, because we have so many secrets up our sleeve," announced the show's host, with a teasing pull at his cufflinks. "Why all the mystery?" he asked with a sinister chuckle. "That's a mystery, too!"

Hughes watched silently. The audience tittered, then roared, but the billionaire didn't smile. Neither the TV show nor the incongruity of his listening to its fatuous m.c. simper and smirk about secrets seemed to amuse him. (continued on page 254)Citizen Hughes(continued from page 179) "I can tell you that game one brings to our Dating Game stage one of television's brightest young actors," the announcer continued, bursting with the secret to which he alone was privy. But he was not yet ready to divulge it. Instead, leering, he introduced a "swinging threesome" of starlets "designed to gladden any young bachelor's heart." Once more the stage turned, this time to bring into view the mystery bachelor's three potential dates--"an actress who loves to cook," a dancer (who also loved to cook) and a Playboy Bunny.

Hughes watched the display impassively. Women no longer interested him. But now something happened that definitely piqued his interest. From offstage came the "young bachelor," arriving to the rising laughter of the studio audience, finally let in on the 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 was, in fact, at that very moment, in the spring of 1969, secretly deciding the fate of the TV announcer's entire network.

•

A network of his own--the idea had become an obsession. During his years in Nevada, Hughes watched television compulsively, around the clock, day in and day out, 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 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 manipulating national policy or making multimillion-dollar deals while sitcoms or B movies boomed in the background, sometimes making momentous decisions solely on the basis of 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.

Once, Hughes proposed selling a major segment of his empire, the Hughes Aircraft Company, to a firm he knew only from a TV commercial: "I 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 his viewing habits would have consequences far beyond his own domain. Seeing the world through television brought it down to a 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 to Maheu with childlike petulance.

"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.

"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.

"You promised I could pick the next governor."

Yet for all his efforts to control the world through television, Hughes himself was ultimately held in thrall by it. He was as trapped in its beam as in his penthouse prison, the true dimensions of his cell not the confines of the hotel room but the 19-inch diagonal of the TV screen.

Television was a narcotic. Hughes needed it to blunt the pain of both his paranoid visions and his actual condition. Certainly, his most 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 overdose and overwhelm even a well-balanced mind.

And, indeed, 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. Never fully satisfied, however, he was constantly changing sets, always wanting a sharper picture, better color, higher audio and, especially, more remote control.

With more money than anyone else in the country, perhaps in all history, Hughes wanted no personal possessions, no luxuries, 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 would send his aides in search of the ideal television.

"Lets get a brand-new very latest type portable," Hughes instructed the Mormons.

"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 adjustment now. They claimed the remote had more functions than any other.

"Lets really try to get the best.

"Before we close the deal," he added, in this as in all his business affairs retaining final authority, "I want to know the price and the discount."

Before long, Hughes would have what he wanted. But, as it turned out, the price was $3,650,000. And there was no discount.

Still, he should have been happy. KLAS-TV, the local CBS affiliate, was his new "number one machine." Hughes had been dickering to buy the station almost from the moment he arrived in Las Vegas, and now it was his.

Treating KLAS as if it were his private TV set, Hughes not only demanded final say on all programing decisions, personally selecting the late-night movies, but actually spent hours poring over lists detailing each episode of each series running on the station. And just as the perfect television set had eluded him, the billionaire soon came to recognize that owning a TV station was not the answer, either.

Locked in a struggle to control television itself--and, thus, to control his world--Hughes would have to reach still higher. He would need to buy an entire network.

"Do you realize I am going to be faced with making a $200,000,000 decision today?" he wrote.

It was 6:30 Sunday morning, June 30, 1968. Hughes squinted uneasily at the long string of zeros he had just scrawled on his yellow legal pad. He had not slept through the entire weekend, bedeviled by second thoughts and obsessed with last-minute details. The magnitude of the impending deal daunted even him.

Hughes was about to buy ABC.

No one had ever owned more than a small fraction of a major television network, but the man sprawled amid a mass of memos on his unmade bed was determined to take a controlling interest. And to take it by surprise. He had been plotting the move for more than a year. ABC, foundering in third place, far behind both CBS and NBC in the ratings and desperately short of cash, seemed the perfect target.

This time, it was not late-night movies that interested Hughes but raw political power.

"I want to know confidentially and most accurately just how significant a position in the formulation of U.S. public opinion would be afforded us by the acquisition of ABC," he wrote to Maheu. "Anyway, my attitude is very simple. My objective is the ABC News Service and what can be done with it."

The ABC Evening News with Howard Hughes--behind the scenes, of course. Even as he sought Maheu's reassurance, the billionaire had no real doubt that one-man control of a national television network could give him tremendous clout.

"Although ABC may be the weakest of the 3, if a really strong position could be achieved, permitting a predictable candidate attitude, this network might very likely turn out to be the balance of power."

The balance of power. With growing excitement, Hughes watched the price of ABC stock, saw it plummet, waited until it reached a record low. Then he pounced.

On Monday, July 1, 1968, just before the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange sounded, Hughes announced his take-over bid, catching both ABC and Wall Street by surprise. Within two weeks, 1,600,000 shares--more than a third of all the stock--had been tendered. A naked madman, eager to mold mass opinion and manipulate national politics, had just been offered the most powerful position in broadcast history.

There was only one catch--Hughes would have to appear in person before the FCC to claim his prize. It was the one thing he would not, could not do. On July 16, without explanation, Hughes rejected the stock. And his bid to take over ABC seemed to disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as it had been announced.

But his dream of owning a national network did not die.

"I have finally decided to go on ABC," Hughes exulted in late March of 1969, hardly able to contain himself. It was technological ecstasy. With a passion he could feel for nothing human, he now coveted the network he had so recently rejected.

Bob, what appeals to me about ABC is its tremendous mechanical machine. There is an ABC outlet in almost every city in the US that has a CBS or NBC station.

This tremendous giant of mechanical and technical perfection is just lying there going to waste. Being used daily for the transmission of the biggest pile of pure undiluted horse-shit that was ever assembled on one role of tape.

Bob, ABC can only go one way, and that is up. I promise you that a 7 year old child could do a better job of running it than is being done today. That is what intrigues me--this huge slumbering giant of technical perfection that needs only to be waked up to come to life.

Lost for a moment in his dream of arousing this genie, Hughes did not lose sight of the mission he had in mind for the "slumbering giant," an exercise of enormous political influence.

"Dont forget that every White house or congressional press conference will, by custom, require the issuance of an invitation to the ABC news correspondant in co equal position ..." he concluded. "And also a co equal position in reporting every election from now on--not after you build a network up, but right now."

The White House. Congress. Every election. A network of his own. Right now. With renewed and growing excitement, he again began to plot his take-over of ABC.

This time, he would not try to seize control. With the right approach, Hughes was certain he could now arrange a friendly business deal. And if ABC, still in dire financial straits, would go along quietly, so might the FCC. There was a new Administration. Richard Nixon wanted an "elevating" Hughes network, and now he could have one. Besides, some of the FCC commissioners were afraid that without an immediate infusion of capital, ABC, which had already been forced to cut back its programing, might actually go under.

Unfortunately, Hughes, too, was in something of a bind for cash, but he wanted ABC, and he wanted it badly. If need be, he decided, he would sell the Hughes Tool Company--the golden goose he had inherited, the foundation of his entire fortune--in order to control television once and for all.

Then, just a week after announcing his final decision to "go on ABC," Hughes suddenly changed his mind once again.

It was Saturday night. His penthouse retreat was filled with the sound of raucous laughter. Not that Hughes was happy. In fact, he was deeply upset.

The unwelcome laughter boomed from his TV set, tuned to the network he had decided to buy. But what Hughes now saw on ABC was clearly no cause for mirth. He watched in grim silence and growing dismay. By the time the show was over, he knew he had made a terrible mistake. He reached for his legal pad.

"I just got through watching ABC's Dating Game and Newlywed Game," wrote Hughes, "and my only reaction is let's forget all about ABC.

"Bob, I think all this attention directed toward violence in TV dramatic shows is certainly misplaced. These two game shows represent the largest single collection of poor taste I have ever seen."

But it was more than poor taste that riled the recluse into his sudden about-face. It was the horrendous violation he had witnessed on TV.

The first show--"Dating game" consisted of a small negro child selecting, sight unseen, one of three girls (adult girls) to make a sexually embellished trip to Rome with his father.

Two of the girls were negro and one was a very beautiful and attractive white girl. The child chose the white girl, who then was introduced to the negro father of the child and informed that she (the white girl) was to make an all expense paid vacation trip to Rome on TWA.

Bob, the entire handling of the show was, in every way carried out in a manner best calculated to titilate and arouse the sexual response of the audience. The whole show was of such a marginal character, sex-wise, that, if it had been presented as a motion picture to the governing body of the movie industry, its acceptance would have been very uncertain at best.

But, let me explain that I make the above comment based upon the subject matter and the treatment of the show, without any consideration whatsoever of the racial issue.

Then, on top of the very marginal show of miserable taste, which I have attempted to describe above, they have to compound the abuse of any conceivable moral standard by arranging a sexual rendezvous between a beautiful white girl and a negro man in Rome, which may even be in violation of the law.

And all of this is done solely for one purpose: to shock and arouse the sexual response of the audience so as to obtain a higher rating from the TV polls for the benefit of the sponsors.

Please consider this entire affair most carefully, Bob, to see if it gives you any ideas.

The $200,000,000 ABC deal was dead. After months of frenzied effort, after all the sleepless nights, after plotting to seize the balance of power, after planning to auction off the most profitable part of his empire, Howard Hughes had finally abandoned his grand quest for a national television network because of a game show.

It was the collision of pure kitsch with pure power, a twilight-zone encounter between low camp and high finance.

Everything had come full circle. Hughes's struggle to control television, his dream of controlling the world through television, all coming to nought because, in the end, he was himself controlled by television.

It was as if he had finally actually entered the TV set he watched so compulsively, passing through its screen like Alice through the looking glass, the real "mystery bachelor" stepping from his isolation booth to join The Dating Game. And only to discover that his chosen dream date--ABC--was soiled merchandise.

There was, moreover, one last twist, a fateful irony that Hughes never discovered. Had he but known, an entire network might well have fallen into his hands.

The "beautiful white girl" whose race-mixing Roman rendezvous had so outraged Hughes was, in reality, a light-skinned black.

•

Alone in his bedroom, surrounded by his memos, seeing the world only through television, Hughes had a separate reality--but also had the power to impose that reality on the world beyond.

Whether the object of his attention was of national importance (the buying of a television network) or entirely trivial(the changing of a street name in Las Vegas), he was equally intent that his will be done.

And the same meticulous attention to detail that he applied to taking over ABC or the White House, he also applied to the maddest of his midnight schemes.

"I once told you I was interested in acquiring one of the bookmaking establishments in town," he wrote to Maheu one evening, musing about his plan for a global Las Vegas with Hughes himself at the center, bookie to the world.

Well, I dont see any point of buying just one of these books....

It is my hope that the damndest book operation anyone ever conceived of can be developed.

Bob, are you aware that any of dozens of business men in this country can pick up the telephone and call their broker, either at his office, or at home, or even out at a restaurant, and say: "Charley, buy me 50,000 U.S. Steel at the market."

So, what I have in mind is a system of credit research, by which every man of substance, in the entirety of the U.S., will be catalogued and listed with all the truly significant information necessary to appraise his ability to pay and his integrity.

Bob, I want to see a development under which a wealthy man can phone from London to a certain phone number in Las Vegas and identify himself and place a bet on just about anything--a horse race at Hollywood Park, a track meet in Florida, a football game in New York, an election, at the state or national level, the passage or failure of some bill up for consideration by congress, just about anything.

Also, I want to see a development which will permit a man to phone from London and, after placing a bet on some event, such as mentioned above, to say "put $10,000 on the line at the Sands...."

In fact, when the man on the phone requests the bet, the clerk could hit one of those recording timers.... So, the exact instant of the bet would be recorded, and the clerk could say over the phone to the customer: "your bet is made, at 12:36:04." Then, a few seconds later, the clerk could say: "Your play occurred at 12:36:12--you won with a natural, eleven. Do you want to bet again?..."

There are many refinements of this deal that could be worked out as you go along.

Do you know why I think this kind of play would catch on? Because men, simply, by nature, like to show off. I can just see some minor league V.I.P. out to dinner with some very attractive young protagonist of the opposite sex, and he picks up the phone, brought to his table at twenty one, and he makes a five or ten thousand dollar bet over the phone. Then he turns to his girl and says: "Well, I just won ten thousand in Vegas--let's spend it."

Look how that would impress the female! She would reason that he must be a pretty wealthy and a pretty trustworthy man to be able to persuade the Las Vegas gambling fraternity to extend credit and take his bet orally, by phone, all the way across the country....

Now, Bob, I urge you not disclose anything--not even the slightest hint--of this play by phone concept.

Rereading his memo, squinting at his own scrawl, Hughes now wondered why his grand scheme had never gone anywhere. It all seemed to make such perfect sense, laid out so plainly in such meticulous detail. He made a mental note to get it back on track and, meanwhile, continued to rummage through his papers, grabbing another thick sheaf from the night table.

Hughes was getting tired, but he could not sleep. He usually stayed up until dawn. His body flagged, but his mind reeled on, a runaway engine that could not stop and therefore had to find something, anything, to work on, work over, work to death. He seemed to believe that he worked best at the outer limits of his endurance, often pushing himself for days at a time without sleep, as if his mind, by feeding on his emaciated body, consuming it, gained some special power.

I work around the clock, holidays mean very little to me, since I work just about all the time.

I have absolutely nothing but my work. When things dont go well, it can be very empty indeed....

I do not indulge in sports, night clubs, or other recreational activities, and, since, in fact, I do not do much of anything else at all, except my work, just what do you suggest I do, crawl off in a corner some place and die?

That was, of course, pretty much what he had done. And quite often, Hughes was not really working at all. He was simply caught in a catatonic daze, playing with his long hair, pulling it up over the top of his head, then letting it fall, or stacking and restacking his memos. When he was working, it was often furious but wasted motion, spinning his wheels, digging himself deeper into a rut on some entirely trivial or imaginary matter. But he was always torturing himself, and at that he worked very hard.

Sometimes, he would reach into his stacks of memos and torture himself with memories. Here was one. A close encounter with grave danger only narrowly escaped. God, it was horrifying even to recall it! Still, he picked up the memo and went back in time. It was the day Lyndon Johnson abdicated, and while Hughes had mentioned in passing something about picking a new President, he was instead fixated on a real crisis much closer to home.

All his enemies were conspiring against him.

"Please dont declare war upon me so early in the day," Hughes had written that morning in a plea to Maheu. "I am well aware that this is not anything that is important to you, but merely something you were pressured into doing by certain groups here. I am speaking of the Easter Egg Hunt."

Yes. The Easter Egg Hunt. There were plans--on, a plot!--to hold it at his hideout, the Desert Inn.

I have been told, however, that although there are a number of people in Las Vegas who favor this event, there is a more powerful group who are dedicated to discrediting me and that this second group will stop at nothing.

I am told that they intend to build a gossip campaign.... The substance of this story (and it has already been fed to certain Hollywood columnists, who very fortunately are friends of mine from my motion picture days) the substance is that: I am ashamed for my sinful past (adventures with females, etc.) and I am having a back-lash here, manafest in my extreme isolation from social contact, presumably for the purpose of putting temptation out of reach, and an intensive and very expensive campaign to reform the morals of Las Vegas.... I am supposedly waiting...to start a real all-out war against the normal customs of Las Vegas--such as: topless show girls etc. etc., dirty jokes, dirty advertisements etc.

Now, I am further informed, and this is what really has me worried, that this militant group plans to stage a really viscious all-out juvenile riot at our Easter party....

I am not eager to have a repetition, in the D.I., of what happened at Juvenile Hall when the ever-lovin little darlings tore the place apart. I am sure your reply to that will be that, with our better-trained security force, such a thing just could not happen. However, my information is to the effect that our opponents hope we do set this riot down, because they feel they can get more publicity if we do.

Hughes somehow escaped that dreaded event, but there were dangers everywhere. His was no ordinary paranoia. It had sweep and grandeur but could also focus its full intensity on the smallest incident. And while it encompassed virtually everything, it really zeroed in on all forms of "contamination."

Unwashed and living in filth, he was forever cleaning the space around him. Nothing obsessed him more than the purity of fluids, and he had discovered something shocking about the Las Vegas water supply. It was all set out in another anguished memo.

This water system will comprise the only water system in the world where the outlet of the sewage disposal plant plus tons of raw, untreated sewage flows right into a small, stagnant pool of water, and then flows right back out again, through a screen to remove the turds, and then into our homes to be consumed by us as drinking water, washing water, and water to cook with.

It is not so much the technical purity or impurity, it is the revolting, vomitous unattractiveness of the whole thing. It is sort of like serving an expensive New York Cut steak in one of our showrooms and having the waiter bring the steak into a customer in a beautiful plate, but, instead of the usual parsley and half a slice of lemon and the usual trimmings to make the steak attractive--instead of this, there is a small pile of soft shit right next to the steak. Now, maybe technically the shit does not touch the steak, but how much do you think the patron is going to enjoy eating the steak?

I think he would lose his appetite fast.

Hughes himself never had much of an appetite. He generally ate only once a day, at some odd predawn hour, and took forever to get down his meal, often requiring that a bowl of soup be reheated several times. Sometimes, he did not eat for days; other times, he subsisted for weeks on desserts alone. But he was very picky about the preparation of his food, especially about any possible contamination. His long-standing fear of bacteria was now out of control. It dominated his life.

Years before, Hughes had cut off all human contact--everyone except for his clean-living Mormon guards was seen as a dangerous carrier. And even they had to follow stringent rules designed to prevent what he called "the backflow of germs."

The few who dealt with him personally or handled anything he was to handle first had to engage in a 30-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.

Not even that was sufficient. Finally, Hughes demanded that everything his Mormons delivered to him with their processed and gloved hands also be wrapped in Kleenex or Scott paper towels.

But he was hardly yet safe from the invisible threat. The billionaire dictated 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."

He wants you to obtain a brand new knife, never used, to open a new box of Kleenex using the knife to open the slot.

After the box is open you are to take the little tag and the first piece of Kleenex and destroy them; then using two fingers of the left hand and two fingers of the right hand take each piece of Kleenex out of the box and place it on an unopened newspaper and repeat this until approximately 50 sheets are neatly stacked. You then have a paddle for one hand. You are then to make another for the other hand, making a total of two paddles of Kleenex to use in handling these three boxes.

Mr. Hughes wanted you to remember to keep your head at a 45 degree angle from the various things you would touch, such as the Kleenex box itself, the knife, the Kleenex paddles.

Hughes himself, of course, could never be touched--not by naked or even scrubbed-and-gloved hands. On the rare occasions when contact was necessary, as with a wake-up ritual he devised, full insulation was required:

"Call Roy and have him come up to the house and awaken HRH at 10:15 AM sharp if HRH is not awake by that time," he instructed. "With 8 thicknesses of Kleenex he is to pinch HRH's toes until he awakens, increasing the pressure each time."

This germ-warfare campaign had continued for a full decade before Hughes came to Nevada, and by now his elaborate rituals filled a thick and constantly updated loose-leaf binder that he kept in his penthouse.

But the battle was far from over.

•

In the past, Hughes himself had been the only victim of his fears. His entire ten-year battle against contamination had been waged within the confines of his blacked-out bedrooms. The fight had been to keep the world from getting in--a purely defensive struggle. Now he went on the offense. Now the same terrors that had driven him into seclusion drove him to control the world outside.

He tried to decontaminate all of Las Vegas; his obsession with its impure water quickly spread to every aspect of the city and its environment. Indeed, all of Nevada and, finally, all of America became the targets of his runaway fears. But even as he struggled to keep his environment pure, there was a new threat looming, far more menacing than all the others.

It was already well into the evening of a very bad day when Hughes finally reached for his afternoon newspaper, carefully extracting the middle copy from a pile of three, thus avoiding contamination from the two that were exposed.

Peering through his "peepstone," a battery-powered magnifying glass that illuminated the page, Hughes prepared to scrutinize the paper, his deep-sunk eyes narrowed to catch every threatening nuance hidden in small print.

The huge headline hit him without warning: "History mightiest a-blast near vegas" It leaped into focus through his lens and struck him with megaton force.

"This is the last straw," he scribbled in a rush of fear and anger.

"I just this minute read that they are going to shoot off the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated in the U.S. And right here at the Vegas Test Site."

It was April 16, 1968. And it was war.

"When we came here, you will remember it was a close decision between this area and one other," he wrote, reminding Maheu that he had almost gone to the Bahamas instead. "I finally chose this one, oddly enough to avoid the hurricanes. Well I promise you I did not come here to avoid hurricanes only to be molested by some stupid ass-holes making like earthquakes."

More threatening still was the unfelt, silent enemy--atomic radiation. Yet another form of contamination, it was all the more terrifying because, like bacteria, it was invisible. There was no way to ward off the deadly rays, no possible insulation. Kleenex and paper towels could protect Hughes from germs. Isolation, armed guards and loyal Mormons could protect him from people. But nothing could protect him from the radiation.

A feared threat and a hated rival, the bomb was also bad for business.

I have insisted from the start that any damage would be in the form of destruction to the attraction of this community as a peaceful paradise-like resort, at which people could get away from, and not be reminded of the gruesome, ever-present, over hanging threat of the ghastly image of the scarred and mutilated bodies which remained after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.

As I say, the future image of this area should, hopefully, represent a vacation resort of the very ultimate quality--not a military experimental testing ground for exterminating devices.

Ahead of his time, even prophetic in recognizing the dangers of nuclear experimentation, Hughes, however, was not opposed to nuclear weapons, nor was he really opposed to nuclear tests. He was opposed only to testing those weapons in his own neighborhood.

In fact, the bomb was merely the focus for all his diffused fears. It gathered the dread into a critical mass, then released it all in a chain reaction of rampant paranoia.

And under that strain, Howard Hughes became a Mad Prophet of Doom. He already looked the part: the long, straggly gray hair and beard, the deeply sunken eyes, the emaciated frame. Had he been a man of equal madness, lesser means and greater moral fervor, Hughes might have taken to the streets, become a sidewalk savior, waving a placard, carrying the message of impending devastation to the masses.

Instead, he remained in hiding and scrawled his apocalyptic visions on his bedside legal pad:

If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated, then, in the fraction of a second follow-ing the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most ghastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible to imagine filled with poisonous gases and debris will have been created just beneath the surface....

I say Nevada is no longer so desperate for mere existence that it has to accept and swallow with a smile poisonous, contaminated radio-active waste material more horrible than human excrement.

Lost for a moment in his nightmare, Hughes suddenly remembered an impending blast only ten days distant, and abruptly shifted his focus.

"Well," he concluded, once again the cold-eyed realist, "none of this is getting us any closer to stopping this shameful program. Now, how do we go about it?

"We must find a way to close them down."

Hughes would take his battle through every level of government and finally into the White House, trying to buy the nuclear cease-fire that no President--not even Richard Nixon--could sell him.

The bombing continued.

•

The Utopian dream that had brought Hughes to Las Vegas was crumbling, the dream that he could remake Nevada, indeed America, to his own perfect vision. It had been crumbling for years. Now, in September 1969, the Nixon bomb blasts destroyed it completely. His kingdom was no longer safe.

"Bob," wrote Hughes in the grip of nuclear terror, "my future plans are in a state of complete chaos, as a result of what is happening.

"I will want you to come here to Las Vegas to supervise a massive sale of practically all of my Nevada assets."

It was time to escape from the complications, the contamination, to flee Nevada, to find a new Eden.

Day after day, he tried to make good his getaway, but each step was terrifying. For three years, he had not left his blacked-out bedroom, had not once even looked out his window, and by now the entire world outside was a dangerous unknown. He could hardly bear to think about the perils, much less actually walk out into them.

He was afraid to go, afraid to stay.

For weeks on end, he found one reason after another to put off the trip, but he never let the planning or the alertness flag for a minute. Each day, he made a definite plan and a certain decision to leave the next day, or surely the day after, but there were so many important details to work out, so many dangers to consider.

"Only one feature of this trip causes me to hold off until Monday," he informed his Mormons after months of delay.

I want someone to make the trip from the D.I. to the point where the airplane will be parked here, and someone else to make the movement from an airplane to the door of the apartment at the destination, and both take along some kind of an air temperature measuring device, and both men to report maximum tempt, encountered during the entire transition process, and duration of any high temperature encountered.

Also, freedom from insects at destination without using spray.

Also, same measurement to be made in apartment at destination without our man spending any time therein other than the momentary period in the region just inside the front door necessary to measure temperature and check absence of insects.

"I definitely want to leave no later than Tuesday," added Hughes, quite confident now that he had scouted ahead for bugs and bad weather, "and prefer Monday in order to have a day of leeway in event of some unforeseen circumstances."

But the circumstances he had not foreseen always required more leeway than he had anticipated. And no wonder. The world outside often seemed like a vast conspiracy aimed at preventing his getaway.

"Please give this message careful consideration, as I am on the verge of making a decision concerning our departure," he wrote days later, ready to go but again sensing real danger.

"It seems to me the most important issue is the event scheduled for Wednesday. There is going to be a huge anti-Vietnam affair next week, and if the far left crowd should get wind of the fact I am in transit on this trip at that particular time, they might attempt some kind of public demonstration or protest, due to my symbolic representation of the military-industrial complex, etc.

"It seems to me it would be highly desirable for us to arrive before this affair," he continued, not at all eager to head into a mass of angry demonstrators.

"If we are en route, it could add to the problem should the press learn that I am on the way and where we are going. I can just visualize some bitter publicity by the leftist factions pointing to our destination and suggesting that it is a pleasure trip--which it is not, but I am sure they would use that approach.

"One thing is certain, I do not want a situation where the press is going to learn I am en route and descend on the train en masse at the end of the trip and insist on seeing me. This could develop to a point where they might demand to see me and really press the issue."

Trapped in his penthouse, trying to summon up the courage to make his daring getaway, Hughes could only picture himself trapped in his private railroad car, surrounded by swarming insects, angry antiwar demonstrators and hordes of reporters ready to expose him to the entire hostile world.

And it was hostile. He could see that even from his blacked-out bedroom, watching warily through his TV screen.

"Every news broadcast seems to suggest increasing fear over the risk of prominent Americans being molested while travelling," he noted with alarm.

"Today, for the first time, reference was made to the potential kidnapping and execution of tourists as well as diplomats.

"I know the easiest thing for you to do is to say to me, 'Well, lets play it safe and forget the trip.

"But this is not what I want," added Hughes, though he made no move to go.

"What I want is the very most careful and dilligent all-out effort to advise me of the extent of the risk and what can be done about it, and all this without discussing it with anyone whomsoever, and I mean this in the very strongest terms.

"The surest way to encourage somebody to dream up some wierd plot like this would be for even the slightest trace of a hint to leak out, suggesting that we have been talking about this or that I might be concerned."

Hughes was, of course, concerned. Yet even as he sat in bed compiling a catalog of the dangers outside his closed world, he continued just as feverishly to plan his escape from the dangers within.

By now, he had a vast array of getaway vehicles on stand-by. Chartered jets under guard at remote airfields. Private railroad cars pulling in to obscure junctions. Yachts being appraised at distant ports. Mobile homes being outfitted for cross-country travel. Fleets of unmarked cars and limousines and customized vans waiting for his go signal.

Train schedules and flight-condition reports, weather reports and road maps littered his bedroom. And his loyal Mormons stood on alert, packed to go ever since Hughes first decided to make his escape.

But the billionaire could not budge.

•

August 1970. Howard Hughes lay sprawled on his bed, watching the 11-o'clock news, when the utter desperation of his sorry situation suddenly crystallized on the TV screen, hitting him as it never had before.

Almost a year had passed since Hughes first planned his big getaway, month after month of frantic stop-and-go preparations, but at last he was actually ready. It was finally time to escape to paradise--Paradise Island, in the Bahamas.

Not one but two entire floors in two hotels were reserved, sealed, under guard and awaiting his arrival. Hughes was, in fact, about to close a deal to buy the whole enchanted island.

But now, late on the evening of Friday, August seventh, right there on his television, came the shocking news. Nerve gas! Sixty-six tons of lethal nerve gas, one ninth of the Pentagon's poisonous stockpile, 12,500 decomposing old M-55 rockets encased in concrete "coffins," all being loaded onto trains at Army depots in Kentucky and Alabama, trains headed for U.S. Navy ships in North Carolina, ships that would carry the thousands of leaking canisters south and dump the entire deadly cargo into the Atlantic Ocean, sink it all right off the coast of the Bahamas--just 150 miles from Paradise Island.

Hughes watched the incredible spectacle in stunned horror. What he saw was far beyond his worst paranoid vision.

Tons of GB and VX gas, gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands in minutes, gas so deadly that one ten-thousandth of an ounce could destroy the central nervous system, simply dissolve the enzymes that transmit nerve impulses, leave a man twitching horribly and choking for air until he finally just stopped breathing and died--all that gas was right now headed straight for his secret haven.

The one place fit for his exile was about to be irrevocably poisoned by another invisible plague. A plague fully as terrifying as atomic radiation--indeed, even more insidious, more threatening to a man obsessed with the purity of fluids.

Hughes grabbed his bedside legal pad and scrawled an urgent all-points bulletin to all his key aides and executives.

"Bob--

"Chester--

"Roy--

"George--

"John--

"& Bill Gay in Los Angeles--

"I want this to be an all, all-out effort beyond anything we have ever mounted before on anything, and putting aside all considerations of expense," wrote Hughes, mobilizing his Mormons and their leader, Bill Gay, calling in his chief counsel, Chester Davis, no longer willing to rely on Maheu alone, Maheu, who had failed to protect him from the bomb.

"I want you to hire one of those Washington or N.Y. public relations firms that specializes in single difficult emergency political problems such as this," Hughes continued, mapping out his antigas campaign....

"I want every available avenue of effort to be pursued, but I think the most effective is to persuade the Bahamian Govt. to lodge a really strong demand.

"I know they have already complained, but not to any-where near the extent that can be done.

"If we have even 1/10th the amount of influence with the Bahamian Govt. that you have assured me we have, then a really strong new complaint can be lodged and somehow a way must be found to publicize this to the high heavens.

"I assure you that if hundreds of TV stations all over the world starting right now during the weekend can be induced to start in ballyhooing this issue and playing up the black vs. white aspect of it, I think there is a real chance of success.

"Nixon, with his well-publicized attitude toward the black race, is a natural target for this kind of campaign," continued Hughes, now zeroing in on his unlikely nemesis, the ingrate he had so generously supported all these years, the man he had chosen to be President.

Nixon was calling down strikes on all his positions. Bombing him in Nevada. Gassing him in the Bahamas. Forcing him out of his kingdom. Now cutting off his escape route. It was time to strike back.

"I can just see a cartoon of the Bahama Islands with a carricature of a thick-lipped black boy, of the typical Calypso-singing-variety, and Mr. Nixon descending on him with his bulging container of nerve-gas," wrote Hughes, relishing his counterattack on the treacherous Commander in Chief.

"I am positive Nixon will be more responsive to a plea from another government, particularly a negro government, than he ever would be to pressures from within.

"I beg you to move like lightning on this. I am sure you agree that the most difficult problem we face is time."

•

Finally, three months later, on Thanksgiving eve 1970, almost four years to the day from his arrival in Las Vegas, Howard Hughes made his Great Escape.

He did not walk down the stairs or take the elevator but, instead, sneaked down a rear fire escape. Or, rather, he was carried down, a grand invalid held aloft by his loyal Mormons, as they slowly descended eight narrow flights.

The billionaire lay on a stretcher, dressed for the first time since he arrived, again in blue pajamas, his arms and legs poking out bone-thin, a 6'4" near skeleton weighing just over 100 pounds, his scraggly beard reaching down past a sunken chest, his yellowed-gray hair, uncut for four years, nearly two feet long--rakishly topped by a snap-brim brown fedora. It was the kind he had worn in his daredevil youth, when he was breaking world flying records.

Now, he instead took flight down the fire escape, was slipped into an unmarked van and finally carried aboard a private jet, while his pilots, as ordered, walked off into the darkness. The plane flew its unidentified passenger directly to the Bahamas.

Early the next morning, Hughes was safely ensconced in another blacked-out bedroom of another ninth-floor penthouse in the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island.

His big getaway was a great success. Howard Hughes had escaped, unseen, from one self-made prison and locked himself in another.

"Women no longer interested him. But now something happened that definitely piqued his interest."

A Note On Authenticity

On June 5, 1974, unknown burglars staged a break-in at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood--the supposedly impregnable headquarters of Howard Hughes. Before dawn, they had escaped with nearly 10,000 of the secret papers of the world's most secretive man. The stolen Hughes papers will be published this month in citizen Hughes, a book by Michael Drosnin, and are presented here in Playboy for the first time.

The authenticity of these documents was established by proof of their origins, confirmed by six years of research and also by a series of handwriting, typewriting and other tests performed by two of the nation's leading experts--Ordway Hilton, the man hired by the Hughes organization to prove Clifford Irving a fraud, and John J. Harris, the man hired by the Hughes estate to prove Melvin Dummar's "Mormon will" a forgery. Harris, who examined all of the Hughes memos published here, declared, "I am of the firm opinion that all the document I examined were written by Howard Hughes."