But it was too late. There was no reply. Once more, just silence from the penthouse.
Hughes was, in fact, ill. Not quite so ill as he claimed to Maheu and not silent because of his sickness, but he did have a mild case of pneumonia and a slight touch of anemia, enough to add an eerie wheeze and an extra pallor to his already extreme condition, enough to prevent his planned escape.
He was in no shape to travel. He needed a quick cure. He called in his local physician but would not allow the doctor to perform any examination, to run any tests, even to touch him. Several months earlier, experiencing an irregular heartbeat, Hughes had reluctantly submitted to an EKG and the doctor got some electrode paste on his beard. Hughes was so shocked by the contamination that he snapped right back into his regular rhythm.
This time, he was taking no chances. Besides, he had already diagnosed his problem and decided on the remedy. What the billionaire wanted was blood—more of that same pure Mormon blood he had received two years earlier.
The transfusions were completely unnecessary. His blood count was close to normal. But Hughes was insistent. “It made me feel so much better last time,” he told his doctor. “I want some more.”
And sure enough, that last shot of pure Mormon blood did the trick. Right after the transfusion, Hughes finally made good his escape. For the first time in four years, he left his blacked-out bedroom—and moved into a second, identical bedroom in the same suite.
He might have stayed there forever had events outside the penthouse not forced him to flee.
Maheu, suddenly realizing that his rivals were conspiring against him, launched a bold counterattack that brought the hidden power struggle to a head. Early in November, he fired off a telegram to Chester Davis, discharging the billionaire’s chief counsel from the TWA case.
Hughes himself had granted Maheu full authority over that litigation shortly after he was hit with the default judgment.
“You have the ball on the TWA situation,” he had written, eager to be rid of the hot potato. “It is my understanding that I turned the entire TWA matter over to you lock, stock, and barrel, a long time ago.
“Also, the decision as to what to do about legal representation is up to you. If I am to hold you responsible for the overall outcome, I must give you complete authority to decide which law firm you want to handle each phase of it.”
Now, however, when Maheu tried to exercise that power he instead hastened his own downfall. Chester Davis refused to step aside, and the Hughes Tool Company board of directors, controlled by Davis’s ally Holliday, revoked Maheu’s authority over TWA.
Outflanked, Maheu appealed the decision to Hughes. He hand-delivered a memo to the penthouse, pleading that the billionaire back his play. He received no reply. In fact, Maheu’s message got no further than the Mormons. On Bill Gay’s orders, they withheld it from Hughes. The palace coup was now in full force.
Unaware that his appeal had been intercepted, feeling himself cruelly abandoned, Maheu sent a second memo to Hughes. This one the Mormons delivered.
“I sometimes think that perhaps the time has come for you either to walk down the nine flights of stairs, or more conveniently utilize the elevator, so as to face the world yourself once and for all,” wrote Maheu, daring the recluse to leave his sanctuary. “Perhaps then you might have at least one more ounce of sympathy for someone else who is constantly facing it in your behalf, and who is about ready to go to bed one more evening finding himself on a damned lonely island.”
It was about to get a lot lonelier. Two days later, on November 14, Hughes told his aides he was ready to sign the proxy he had proposed back in August, the one that would give Gay, Davis, and Holliday authority over his Nevada empire. Davis had it all prepared. He sent the proxy by telecopier to the Mormons, who brought it in to their boss. The billionaire reached up from the Barcalounger he had installed in his new bedroom, put the proxy on a stack of legal pads, and signed Maheu’s death warrant. But he was not yet ready to order the execution.
First Hughes wanted to get out of town. Not even the nerve gas scared him as much as a final showdown with the hot-tempered Frenchman.
On Thanksgiving Eve, November 25, 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, as Maheu had suggested, but instead snuck down a rear fire escape. Rather, he was carried down, a grand invalid held aloft by his loyal Mormons, as they slowly descended nine 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 six-foot-four-inch near-skeleton weighing just over one hundred pounds, his scraggly beard reaching down past his sunken chest, his yellowed gray hair, uncut all 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 all the world flying records. Hughes had insisted on that hat. He might be fleeing his kingdom like a thief in the night, an inglorious end to his grand adventure, but that old hat was a sign that he still had the Right Stuff.
Now, however, he took flight down a fire escape, was slipped into a waiting unmarked van, and finally was 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. Hughes had escaped from one self-made prison and locked himself in another, without anyone being the wiser.
It took Maheu a full week to discover that Hughes had disappeared. It took him twenty-four hours to turn it into the most sensational “missing persons” case the world had ever seen.
“HOWARD HUGHES VANISHES! MYSTERY BAFFLES CLOSE ASSOCIATES” read the screaming banner headline in the Las Vegas Sun. Maheu had leaked the story to his pal Hank Greenspun, and Greenspun suggested that the billionaire had been kidnapped, drugged, “spirited away,” was perhaps even dead.
When the story reached Hughes in his Bahamas bedroom, he was enraged. He immediately released the proxy that stripped Maheu of all power and fired off one final memo dissolving their partnership. It went not to Maheu but to his rival Chester Davis.
“You can tell Maheu for me that I had not fully determined in my mind to withdraw all support from his position until he started playing this cat and mouse game for his own selfish benefit,” wrote Hughes.
“In other words, Maheu does not believe for one second that I am dead, disabled, or any of the other wild accusations he has been making….
“Consequently, when he started claiming that my messages were not genuine and that I had been abducted, and all the other wild charges.
“When he demanded entrance to my apartment (to look for foul play, no less!)
“In other words, when this entire TV writer’s dream started unfolding, it soon became obvious that Maheu had no concern about the truth in this matter.
“He knew full well where I was,” Hughes continued. “I have been planning this trip for more than a year, and I had discussed it with him many times.
“So it became clear that Maheu had decided to milk his relationship with me and my companies to the last possible dollar.
“It was only at this point, that I decided the case against Maheu had been fully and conclusively proven.
“Up to this time, in spite of the massive array of evidence, I would gladly have listened to his side of the issue.