Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes
THE tale was Rashomon in a James Bondian world, an intricate fantasy of scramblers on telephones and double identities, of 5 a.m. rendezvous in wigs and false beards, of exotic island fastnesses that pulse with secret electronics and the glint of fortunes in transit. Its protagonist could only be Howard Hughes, 67, the archetypal, anchoritic billionaire brooding over one of the world's great pools of wealth. He has always been an elusive, somehow haunted presence, sending out his commands from a bewildering entombment in desert or tropical hotels. Obsessively shy, devoted to intrigue, suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, Hughes last week had begun an emergence that was at least as strange as his radical withdrawal from the public world more than a decade ago.
What brought him forth was a controversy that had been building since the announcement on Dec. 7 that McGraw-Hill would publish The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, and LIFE would print excerpts from it. In one of the oddest consultations since those of the Cumaean sibyl, Hughes (or a man purporting to be him) spoke from Paradise Island for 2 hours with reporters arrayed before a telephone amplifier in a California hotel. The disembodied voice denied any knowledge of the book or its author. Later Hughes' agents sought an injunction to prevent its publication.
The battle is potentially much larger than a quarrel over a rich eccentric's privacy, a manuscript's authenticity, or the authorization to print it. Directly or indirectly, the controversy could conceivably endanger a sizable part of Hughes' wealth--including $300 million tied up in his Nevada properties, $145 million in a lawsuit against Hughes by TWA, and $50 million in a suit by the former head of his Nevada operations, Robert Maheu. These stakes could affect the future of the entire Hughes empire, which encompasses more than 50,000 jobs and a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion.
The casus belli is a manuscript compiled by an expatriate American novelist and biographer named Clifford Irving, 41, who lives on the small Balearic island of Ibiza, off Spain's Mediterranean coast. Irving claims that the book is a first-person account of Hughes' life, based on at least 100 hours of interviews with Hughes. The publishers agree with him that the manuscript's authenticity is beyond question. The book, says TIME Inc. President James Shepley, "goes into elaborate detail about the personal and business life of Howard Hughes. It talks about the details of his relationships with women. It talks about the dealings of the Hughes Tool Co. and TWA, about Hughes' relationships with the Presidents of the U.S." Others who have seen it find no less than devastating the defiant candor with which Hughes, almost as if he were talking to an analyst, exposes the personal and business relationships of his CinemaScope career. And no one who has read the manuscript so far doubts its genuineness.
Fallen Short. Over the years, novelists and moviemakers have fictionalized the Hughes saga, but apparently their fantasies have always fallen short of the facts. Various people have besieged him with requests that he write his story or help them tell it. By his account, Clifford Irving is the man who gained Hughes' confidence and won the prize.
The son of New York Cartoonist Jay Irving, who drew the comic strip Pottsy, Clifford has written four novels (including The Losers and The Thirty-Eighth Floor). Fake!, published by McGraw-Hill two years ago, is the story of Hungarian Art Forger Elmyr de Hory, who made a minor fortune counterfeiting drawings and oils that he sold as the works of Picasso, Matisse and other modern masters.
Double Life. Irving says the project began for him in late November 1970, when he mailed a complimentary copy of Fake!, along with a brief covering note, to "Howard Hughes, c/o Desert Inn, Las Vegas, Nev." His associates insist no package thus addressed could have reached him, since his aides, at his request, shield him from most outside communications; moreover all mail is logged in on arrival, and his aides claim to have found no entry for the book. But according to Irving, Hughes replied with a longhand thank-you note in which he mentioned Irving's father and complimented Irving on treating a rather odd figure, De Hory, "with great consideration and sympathy." Irving took the hint, and an exchange of letters followed. When Irving suggested writing a book about Hughes, Hughes asked how he would proceed and enclosed the name and general-delivery address of an intermediary to whom Irving should reply.
Next, says Irving, he received a series of telephone calls directly from Hughes. In the months that followed, Irving and Hughes met numerous times. Nervous about "leading a double life," Irving made a habit of mailing a postcard to his publishers at McGraw-Hill from the cities where the encounters took place. On one occasion, Hughes' intermediary arranged an airline flight for Irving; instead of being able to pick up the ticket at the airport, he found that the ticket had merely been ordered. He had to pay for it himself. Says Irving: "That seemed like something Hughes would do."
Series of Tapings. Irving says the first meeting occurred, characteristically for Hughes, in the front seat of a car in a parking lot at 7 a.m. Hughes looked to be in good health, with modishly long gray hair and a mustache--but not the Vandyke beard he had worn for years. (Associates who claim to have seen Hughes recently say that he is still--or once again --wearing the beard.) The next day, amid similarly elaborate precautions, the two met again. In the course of the eleven-hour session, Hughes left the room frequently.
Weeks later, in another city outside the U.S., Irving checked into a hotel to await instructions. A man named George called at 5 a.m. and directed Irving to a car parked several blocks away. Irving slipped into the driver's seat beside Hughes, who was wearing a wig. With Irving driving and Hughes navigating, the writer says, they motored through a forest, where Hughes finally got down to preliminary contract talk. At a second meeting in the same city, Irving says, he began insisting that he would have to get to work and start making tape recordings of their conversations.
Why did Hughes agree to talk to Irving at all? Says Irving: "The man is in the last decade of his life. He believes he has been maligned, lied about. He has received a bad press. As he said himself, he 'wanted to restore the balance.' " He had a message to convey, Irving suggests, perhaps an elusive one. "But one thing he said sticks in my mind," continued Irving. " 'Your personal privacy is all you've got.' He means privacy of opinion, candor. He's also a firm believer in the necessity of being eccentric. He says eccentricity is just the world's way of describing honesty. Everyone would be deemed eccentric if he had the power and the wealth to do what he wants."
Irving and Hughes soon began their real working sessions in Irving's hotel room on Nassau. Hughes regularly arrived at Irving's room at 4 a.m. Irving had to roust his wife up and get her out of the room before Hughes would enter. Over the next eight to ten days, according to Irving, he conducted five long taping sessions of up to four hours each.
Later came another intensive series of tapings, Irving says, which lasted ten to twelve days. All of these were in Irving's motel on the fringes of a city in the U.S. During this period, Hughes prodded Irving to change his rental car every day. Hughes refused to meet Irving's wife, but by chance he did encounter Richard Susskind, a researcher Irving had hired. "Would you like a prune?" Hughes asked. "Yes," said Susskind, "if it is an organic prune."
More tapings followed, although they were not continuous, since Hughes often rambled and was sometimes irritated by the recorder. "Turn that goddam thing off," he once told Irving. "It's driving me crazy." Up to this point, Hughes had been appropriating the tapes at the end of each session and providing Irving with transcriptions later. But since the copies were poor, Irving pleaded to be allowed to transcribe the tapes himself. Hughes agreed, on condition that the tapes never leave the guarded room where they were working. According to McGraw-Hill's Vice President for General Books Albert Leventhal: "Irving was never without a guard, and they took all his materials away when he finished typing."
Strictly Secret. At another session, the two men came to what Irving calls a "tentative but full agreement" that the project would culminate in an autobiography, to be published by McGraw-Hill, that would take the form of a book-length interview.
Nearly a year ago, Irving informed McGraw-Hill of his contract with Hughes. In late March, two contracts were signed--one between McGraw-Hill and Irving, the other between Irving and Hughes. Hughes insisted that the entire project be kept strictly secret.* Last spring McGraw-Hill approached LIFE Managing Editor Ralph Graves, who signed a contract for an option on the first magazine and newspaper serial rights.
For security purposes, McGraw-Hill and LIFE named the enterprise Project Octavio. When LIFE received the transcripts, two editors closeted themselves in a suite in Manhattan's Elysee Hotel and then spent the better part of two days poring over them. Only three LIFE editors and a handful of McGraw-Hill executives knew about the project. Once work began on the actual publication, the book publishers locked away first the transcripts and later the galleys in a vault every night. For fear of theft or bombing, they declined to say whether the vault was in the McGraw-Hill Building. The measures may seem melodramatic, but Irving claims that two men showed up on Ibiza, hinting of murder and demanding information from his wife.
Meanwhile Irving and Hughes continued their tapings. Hughes told Irving that none of his associates knew about their meetings or about the book. He warned Irving to be careful that no one Xeroxed the manuscript: if Irving so much as went to the men's room while showing the book to publishers, Hughes said, his hosts would Xerox 200 pages "before he got his fly zipped up." Of his own interviews, Hughes said: "I don't want you to twist any of this--this is Howard Hoghes, warts and all. That's the way I want the world to see him."
Irving says that his last meetings with Hughes took place in an American city late last fall. Hughes' physical condition had been deteriorating steadily over the months, Irving said. At those meetings, Hughes lay in bed, wheezing heavily and frequently waving Irving out of the room. Had Hughes read the manuscript? The weak reply: "As much as I could." That was the morning of Dec. 7, the day that McGraw-Hill announced the book in New York. Hughes signed the typed, finished version of a preface to the book. When Irving sought another meeting four days later, Hughes' intermediary was "in a flap" and said he could not arrange it. Irving never saw Hughes again.
No Fangs a Lot.
Irving's version of how the book was assembled was almost instantly challenged. The McGraw-Hill and LIFE announcement of the book brought a denial of its authenticity from Hughes Tool Co. representatives in California. On Dec. 14, the company's general counsel, Chester Davis, appeared in Time Inc.'s New York offices and put through a telephone call to a man purporting to be Hughes. The man spoke with Frank McCulloch, New York bureau chief for the Time-Life News Service. McCulloch, the last reporter to interview Hughes face-to-face--in 1958--believes that it was Hughes on the telephone. Their conversation was off the record, at Hughes' insistence, but McCulloch said that Hughes denied any knowledge of the book or of Irving. Three weeks later, with McGraw-Hill and LIFE insisting on the manuscript's authenticity, Hughes' public relations counselor, Richard Hannah, arranged an extraordinary "press conference" in a Los Angeles hotel. Seven newspaper, wire-service and television reporters, all selected because they had once known Hughes, sat confronting microphones, cameras and a small telephone-amplifying box, which broadcast what was said to be Hughes' voice. For 2 hrs. the reporters questioned the voice. All of them afterward agreed that the occasionally quavering Texas drawl, the verbal mannerisms and the sometimes rambling descriptions of aviation minutiae could only have come from Hughes. Their judgment was later corroborated by Noah Dietrich, who had worked for Hughes and been his intimate for 32 years before they parted in 1957.
Hughes said that he was speaking from Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Among many other subjects, he discussed a report that he had turned into a troglodytic creature with waist-length beard and eight-inch fingernails. Said Hughes: "Why, hell, how could I write my name if I had fingernails?" Each reporter had prepared test questions to establish Hughes' identity, and Hughes was often vague and uncertain in his answers. Hughes was adamant, however, about the manuscript. "This must go down in history," he said. "I don't remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn turned out to be ... I don't know Irving. I never saw him. I never even heard of him until a matter of days ago when this thing first came to my attention."
On at least one point, a lapse in memory seemed especially odd. Hughes did not remember that retired U.S. Army Air Force Lieut. General Harold L. George had ever worked for him. Yet George had been a ranking executive of Hughes Aircraft Co. for several years until, with a group of prominent scientists and technologists, he departed the company following a spectacular blowup in 1953.
There are other inconsistencies and discrepancies. Clifford Irving's story is troubling on a number of points. Could Hughes, who by many accounts is almost hermetically sealed in his Paradise Island eyrie, have traveled to the mainland and to other places outside the U.S. for meetings with Irving over a period of nine months without the knowledge of his aides or of immigration officials? Irving replies: "Hughes is a flitter."
In order to leave the Britannia Beach Hotel, Hughes would probably have had to use the emergency stairs from his suites on the ninth floor, since the only elevators are in the center of the hotel. He could then have walked to the rear parking lot, where a Ford truck converted into an ambulance is always parked. Then he would have had to drive across the high, humpbacked Paradise Island bridge, which forms a narrow bottleneck between Paradise and the island of New Providence. On the return trip, he would have had to pass through a $2 toll gate. Leaving the island by boat would have been easier; he would probably have walked out the back of the Britannia to the beach on the ocean side of the island. The beach is unlighted, and a small boat standing beyond the shallows could have taken him off. Escape by air seems unlikely, since the hotel roof is not large enough to accommodate a helicopter. One landing on the lawn would amount to a five-alarm fire, for there are no helicopters regularly on the island.
Irving argues that the voice at the telephone press conference could not belong to Hughes, because Hughes could not withstand 2 hrs. of interviewing with only a few two-minute breaks. How, then, did Hughes find the stamina for his long sessions with Irving, quite aside from the tiring travel involved in getting to their rendezvous? (One answer: Irving says that Hughes was weak and ill only at the end of their months together.)
Other Scenarios. Hughes' life is so implausible and secretive that it invites extravagantly ingenious speculation. In the face of the certitude that someone is lying, these scenarios have been suggested:
THEORY I: TOTAL HOAX. Clifford Irving invented the entire autobiography. To do so, however, Irving would have to be a near genius of a writer. He would also have had to forge a body of documents, among them the Hughes letter to Irving acknowledging receipt of his book Fake!; four handwritten letters, including the nine-page letter to the McGraw-Hill president; and checks-made out to Hughes for $700,000 as payment for the book, endorsed by Hughes and cleared through a Zurich banking house called Credit Suisse. Irving would also have had to forge Hughes' handwriting in the extensive pencil editing that Hughes did in the margins of the original transcript. McGraw-Hill's Leventhal says that Hughes made several hundred corrections, ranging from punctuation to the rewriting of short passages. Sometimes Hughes directed Irving to rewrite a passage with a margin note such as "You've got this all screwed up."
Some observers nonetheless suspect forgery. Handwriting analysis will undoubtedly be the focus of the case; Hughes' lawyers may ask for an Internal Revenue Service investigation, saying that he never received McGraw-Hill checks. The noted New York handwriting experts Osborn Associates have verified that the handwriting on those documents matches samples of Hughes' handwriting dating back to 1936. At that time, Hughes was booked in a Los Angeles police station, where his fingerprints and signature were recorded after his car struck and killed a pedestrian (the charges were dropped). The present handwriting is also said to match Hughes' signatures on a 1938 pilot's log and a Government security clearance issued during World War II. In addition, it matches the longhand in a letter, written in 1970, directing that Robert Maheu be fired as head of the Hughes properties in Nevada. Says Paul A. Osborn of Osborn Associates: "The evidence that all of the writing submitted was done by one individual is, in our opinion, irresistible, unanswerable and overwhelming."
In addition to their holographic evidence, McGraw-Hill and LIFE also base their case for authenticity on the internal character of their manuscript, which is offhand, conversational, outspoken, frequently salty. It deals intricately and at considerable length with airplane design and performance. There are glints of characteristic Hughes wit. He scoffed at Richard Nixon's Checkers speech, for example: "I always thought he must have had an onion hidden in his handkerchief." Such details would have been extremely difficult for Irving to fake. Indeed, the Hughes camp seemed ready to base its case less on the authenticity of the book than on whether or not it was authorized.
THEORY II: PARTIAL HOAX. Irving came up with authentic Hughes material, but did not obtain it in the way that he said he did. How else could he have got it?
THEORY II, VARIATION A. The man he met was not Howard Hughes but a talented impersonator in the service of Hughes' enemies, who had their own business reasons for inspiring an "autobiography." Hughes is known to keep extensive records of his conversations --all his personal aides are trained court reporters. Is it possible that the basic manuscript was among a truckload of documents that were removed from the Las Vegas office of Robert Maheu at the time Hughes fired him and slipped away to the Bahamas?
The theoretical motive: to use the "autobiography" to discredit Hughes with Nevada authorities, causing his gambling licenses to be withdrawn and thus ruining his $300 million Nevada empire. The Nevada gambling commission has for months been trying to induce Hughes to appear before it and answer questions about who controls his Las Vegas enterprises. If the "autobiography" suggested that he had traveled to various cities to give interviews to Irving, the commission might demand to know why Hughes has declined to come to Nevada. Already, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan has said: "If he had time to travel throughout the Western Hemisphere, he certainly should be able to talk to officials in the state where his business is." In his telephone press conference, Hughes said that his health was "tolerable"--or "probably better than I deserve"--thereby undermining the assumption that he is not well enough to appear in Nevada.
What would his enemies have to gain if Hughes lost the Nevada licenses? Some might want to buy up the casinos. Some might want simple revenge. They might also hope that the book would reveal details that would damage Hughes' appeal to the Supreme Court for reversal of a $145 million judgment won against him for alleged mismanagement of TWA. In addition, Robert Maheu has filed a $50 million suit against Hughes; he contends that Hughes had no right to fire him because they had a lifetime "verbal contract." If the book mentioned such a contract, Maheu would at least have firm evidence in court.
THEORY II, VARIATION B. One of the "Mormon Mafia"--the secretary-nurse-assistants who attend Hughes round the clock--decided to cash in on the intimate association by selling Irving an accumulated background of Hughes' autobiographical transcripts. According to this theory, aides totally familiar with Hughes' handwriting could have forged the documents.
Actually, of the six, only four are Mormons--Howard Eckersly, George Francom, Levar Myler and Kay Glenn, who functions as paymaster and general manager of the group. John Holmes is a Roman Catholic, and Roy Crawford is a Presbyterian who is married to a Mormon.
Hughes has had a longtime affinity for Mormons; they are generally nondrinkers, nonsmokers and rigidly honest about money. Despite such probity, three of Hughes' men--Eckersly, Myler and Francom--have been linked to a stock swindle involving a defunct Canadian company called Pan American Mines, Ltd. Hughes, however, is an extraordinarily watchful man; it is said that he changes his own bedsheets lest a maid steal the notes he has been making on the telephone. In this version, Irving would have had to be duped by a man impersonating Hughes--or else he would have had to invent the entire story of his meetings, in collusion with the purveyors of the transcripts. On balance, both scenarios seriously stretch belief.
THEORY III. Hughes did provide Irving with some or all of the autobiographical material, either meeting personally with him, as Irving claimed, or sending him written transcripts. According to this theory, Hughes acted without the knowledge of legal advisers, talking with a sometimes brutal frankness about his life. Then, when McGraw-Hill announced the book, Hughes' shocked lawyers and associates persuaded him that the book would be disastrous to his business affairs. Somehow he had to get out of it. One way open was total repudiation.
Noah Dietrich, who is preparing a book of his own about Hughes--he sold it to Fawcett Publications for a $40,000 advance in the rising Hughes literary market just after the controversy broke--subscribes to the third theory. "He is a very devious man." says Dietrich, who was Hughes' chief executive officer for three decades and helped build his financial empire. "He went off on one of those ego binges of his. He was inviting libel and slander suits that could jeopardize millions of dollars in litigation. He's going to lay this off on some poor little innocent staff member."
McGraw-Hill and LIFE accept Theory III: the autobiography is the work of Howard Hughes, was duly authorized by him and he is now attempting to repudiate his contracts agreeing to its publication.
Knocked Cold. The material for several autobiographies is there in the dazzlingly erratic trajectories and the odd bleaknesses of Howard Hughes' Iife. Orphaned at 19. Hughes was a grave and skinny Texas boy with an inheritance of half a million dollars and control of his father's Hughes Tool Co.. which owned the patent on a conical drill bit that helped open up the oilfields. Hughes married a young Texas aristocrat, Ella Rice, and headed for Hollywood. A gangling Texas prodigy, he broke into moviemaking by producing a flop or two and then, with a combination of gambler's profligacy and an obsessive genius for detail, started turning out hits (Hell's Angels, Scarface, The Outlaw) and stars (Jean Harlow. Pat O'Brien. Jane Russell).
Hughes and Ella were divorced in 1929, and over the years he was seen with such beauties as Billie Dove, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers and Ida Lupino. He installed Ava Gardner in a house shortly after she was divorced from Mickey Rooney. Soon after, it became apparent that Hughes was not devoting much attention to her, and Rooney began stopping by. Hughes confronted Ava and slapped her. She retaliated by hitting him over the head with a copper-based ashtray, knocking him cold. He was taken to a hospital, where his agents managed to have the injuries officially listed as stomach trouble.
Hughes had a habit of setting up starlets in lavish houses around Hollywood. Generally he slept with each only once, but continued to pay her rent thereafter. Once he was convinced he had contracted a venereal disease from a movie actress. He called Noah Dietrich in the Houston headquarters of Hughes Tool and ordered him to Los Angeles on "an emergency" errand. There, Dietrich was instructed to go to an empty apartment and pick up a laundry bag containing Hughes' clothing; he was to burn it in a vacant lot. Dietrich simply donated the clothes to charity.
Over the years. Hughes developed a fetish about cleanliness, a phobia about germs. Talking with Mike Wallace on CBS News' 60 Minutes, Irving recalled how Hughes classified people he came in contact with, rating them from A to D--filthy, moderately dirty, dirty and moderately clean. He noted that Hughes in talking with him about Katharine Hepburn particularly liked the fact that "she was a very clean woman who used to bathe three or four times a day."
He developed multiple lives, often cramming several into one day. He has always had a preternatural disregard for sleep. From the movies, he turned to aviation, where, despite having had no formal training, he proved to be something of a genius at aviation design and engineering. In 1935 he introduced the H1, the first plane with flush rivets to reduce drag, and was honored as the nation's outstanding airman by President Roosevelt. He set transcontinental speed records, then in 1937 flew a refitted Lockheed transport round the world in three days 19 hours, halving Wiley Post's old record.
During World War II, Hughes designed a 200-ton, eight-engine plywood flying boat, nicknamed the Spruce Goose, that was meant to transport 700 men. The conception was perhaps too grandiose for the times--the plane was only 11 ft. shorter than a 747. After the war, Maine's Senator Owen Brewster demanded to know why Hughes had spent $18 million in Government funds and produced no flyable planes. Thereupon Hughes flew his monstrosity for a mile at 70 ft. over Los Angeles Harbor, the only time it was ever in the air. Today, at an annual rental of $46,000, the plane is hangared under guard on the Long Beach waterfront, a monument to Hughes' lifelong reluctance to admit failure--and his tendency to remember slights, real or fancied.
Into Nevada. Hughes was seriously injured in three plane crashes, the last and worst in 1946, when he was test-piloting the twin-engine XF11. One of its huge, counterrotating propellers froze. He brought the plane to a crash landing next to a Los Angeles country club. His chest was crushed and doctors doubted that he would live. The aftereffects of those crashes have been blamed for his later reclusiveness. He first grew a mustache while recovering from the XF-11 crash because the burns he had suffered made shaving painful. For all his feats. Hughes is regarded as a second-rate flyer by some pilots who have shared a cockpit with him.
In 1948 Hughes gained control of RKO Pictures. Despite heavy losses--$15 million in one year --he managed to sell out at a profit. At times, his management of TWA was also less than inspired. After long hesitation, he plunged into ordering jets on all sides, and without fully realizing it ran up commitments of close to $500 million. Noah Dietrich recalls in his book that when he remonstrated with Hughes and pointed out that the board of Hughes Tool had to be consulted, Hughes replied: "That's no problem; just tell those stooges to give their approval." He lost control of TWA in 1961, and after a lawsuit was later ordered to pay the company $136 million--with $9 million subsequently added for interest --on the grounds of mismanagement and breach of antitrust laws. That is one of the suits still hanging over him.
Hughes sold his shares of TWA in 1966, receiving $546 million for them. It was then that he began his inroads into Nevada, buying up five Las Vegas hotels, a casino in Las Vegas and another in Reno. He also acquired a TV station, a Las Vegas air terminal, thousands of acres of real estate, and a regional airline, now Hughes Airwest. Meantime, thanks in part to the fact that he left them alone under competent management, Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft, an electronics and satellite company, were thriving.
While he was still in high school, Hughes remarked: "I suppose I am not like other men. Most of them like to study people. I am not so interested in people as I should be, I guess. What I am tremendously interested in is science, the earth and the minerals that come with it."
The truth is that even before he became a recluse, he was never very good with people, uneasy with other men and unable to make lasting friendships, awkward and uncomfortable with women despite the beauties he squired in public, sometimes generous but often thoughtless of those who worked for him. Dietrich was paid $500,000 a year, but taxes took a huge chunk of that. Dietrich persistently badgered Hughes for part ownership. Hughes stalled for years. Finally, in 1957, Dietrich decided to take his first full, uninterrupted vacation, an African safari with his son. He returned to find a new lock on his office door. Dietrich demanded of Hughes: "Howard, is this all our years of being together has meant to you?"
"Well, if that's the way you want to to look at it," said Hughes. Dietrich walked toward the door, wondering if that was indeed the end. He heard Hughes call: "Noah?" "Yes?" Pause.
Anticipation. "You forgot your hat."
Bong-Bong. Hughes would of course notice a hat left behind. Afraid of being mugged, he fostered the myth that he never carried any money, when in fact he sometimes kept in the lining of his fedora a cache of several thousand dollars. At times, his trousers were weighted down with dimes and quarters, because he so frequently conducted his business from phone booths. "When you talked to him," says one friend, "it was 'clank-clank, bongbong' every few minutes. It sounded like the bells of St. Mary's."
For longer calls, Hughes used a private line--with good reason. TWA Vice President Robert Rummel, a former close associate, remembers business phone conversations that lasted nine or ten hours: "Once in a while we would take a ten-minute break."
Hughes is notoriously stingy, fearful of being a soft touch, but he understands the political uses of money. The Irving manuscript tells Hughes' version of his famous $205,000 loan to the brother of then Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956. Dietrich, who handled the matter for Hughes, has his own account in his book. After Hughes had approved the loan, Dietrich went to see Nixon and warned him that if the loan "becomes public information, it could mean the end of your political career--and I don't believe it can be kept quiet." According to Dietrich, Nixon replied: "I have to put my relatives ahead of my career."
For a man whose money has allowed him to design any life he chose, Hughes obviously picked an odd and joyless one. He always seemed both inwardly distracted by little leftover Calvinist furies and propelled headlong by a kind of ricocheting genius. He loved flying, but his pilot's license lapsed in 1960, and it is doubtful if he has flown much, if at all, since then. In his telephone press conference, he said rather wistfully that he wanted to fly again. His second marriage, to Actress Jean Peters, ended, like his first, in divorce. He has no children.
Into Seclusion. Hughes' first attempt at full-time seclusion came during the early '60s, when he rented a house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles and disappeared into it. Once, a friend came to visit his wife. When no one answered the bell, she walked in and sat down. Presently Jean appeared and the kaffeeklatsch began. But the guest noticed that Jean seemed oddly nervous, and finally realized what she was looking at--a pair of skinny bare feet showing from behind a pair of draperies. "Jean, do you think I should go?" the guest asked. "I guess you'd better," said Jean, glancing uncomfortably at the feet.
Hughes' reclusiveness has never been satisfactorily explained, though he makes a manful attempt to do so in Irving's manuscript. It obviously goes beyond an ordinary desire for privacy, beyond his shyness and his fear of being involved in litigation. There may be a partly justified paranoia about business enemies--and the press, for that matter--intruding upon his sanctum. Last year a group of men, including Robert Maheu's son Peter, were evicted by security guards from the Britannia Beach Hotel, where they were allegedly trying to bug Hughes' suite from the one below.
Hughes' present sanctuary at the Britannia, like his old penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, is something from a James Bond movie set. Hughes occupies the western end of the Britannia's ninth floor, attended 24 hours a day by the Mormon Mafia. His suite is decorated with the usual hotel furniture, plus a humming array of several hundred thousand dollars worth of electronic equipment, including a radio-telephone hookup to the U.S. mainland and telephone scramblers to prevent his phone conversations from being bugged. The roof bristles with antennas. At night all eleven of Hughes' balconies are awash with harsh floodlights. Closed-circuit TV cameras lean out from the building's walls, scanning for intruders. Uniformed guards watch the elevators. Recently the hotel applied fresh paint to all of its fire doors on the emergency stairwell--except on the ninth floor; apparently workmen were not allowed there.
Medium Rare. As he always has, Hughes works whenever he chooses, generally very late at night. According to one source in his organization, he watches television frequently (he has erected a 45-ft. TV mast atop the hotel), is particularly interested in news shows. He also reads newspapers "from important cities," keeps up with technological and scientific journals, and has movies screened.
Hughes dresses in a white shirt with no tie, slacks and loafers, and wears his hair just above collar length, slightly longer than in the past. He eats only two meals a day, although with his hours it may never be clear which meal is breakfast and which is dinner. He favors salads, fresh vegetables and lean meats. He drinks only milk and fruit juices.
Hans Schenk, a Swiss chef who once worked for Hughes, describes the invariable menu: two 20-oz. sirloin-strip steaks with all fat removed, boiled peas, carrots and green beans, followed by vanilla ice cream and cake. A Hughes aide would appear in the kitchen and watch to make sure that Schenk scrubbed his hands and fingernails. "I would cook his steak with a stop watch," Schenk recalls. "He wanted it medium rare, eight or nine minutes of the grill. He'd notice if it was a minute overdone." If Hughes was on the phone when dinner was served and the meal cooled, it was thrown into the garbage and another was prepared.
Richard Hannah, the harassed Los Angeles public relations man who has become Hughes' chief spokesman to the outer world, believes that with the controversy over Irving's book Hughes will now begin emerging from his seclusion. Hughes indicated as much during his press conference, suggesting that he would allow pictures of himself and even face-to-face confrontations with reporters. But it may be a while yet.
To Go Public. This week the New York State Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether or not to grant a temporary injunction forbidding publication of Irving's book and the LIFE excerpts. The suit was brought on behalf of Rosemont Enterprises, a Hughes company that claims exclusive rights to all his autobiographical material. If the court refuses to stop publication, Hughes may of course sue later, charging invasion of privacy and "fictionalization of material." Presumably, however, such suits would oblige Hughes to testify in court.
That at least would prove he exists. For today, Howard Hughes is surrounded by such mystification that some entertain the ultimate theory: he is dead, a phantom evoked and impersonated by a band of conspirators in order to keep his holdings together. If nothing else, this conjecture is an index of how the invisible and difficult man stirs fantasies.
Perhaps, having talked out his life to the brink of print, he has once more been overcome by a sudden affliction of shyness, and he trembles in the gusts of exposure that simply the announcement of the book has sent through his sanctuary. It must be very hard for an authentic mystery to go public, and the spectacle may merit some sympathy. For all his trophies, his scrapbooks, his power, his billions, Howard Hughes, says Clifford Irving --and the judgment has the ring of truth--"is a very vulnerable man."
* Originally, Hughes demanded that no publicity be given the project until 30 days after the final manuscript had been received and approved. But word seeped out that Robert Eaton, a sometime Hollywood novelist and sixth husband of Lana Turner, was about to publish a book on Hughes. In a handwritten, nine-page letter dated Nov. 17, 1971, Hughes told McGraw-Hill Book Co. President Harold McGraw Jr. that he had nothing to do with Eaton's project and that it was now all right to announce Irving's book. A version of Eaton's work on Hughes is being published by the Ladies' Home Journal this week.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.