“We should bring in a softer chair,” one of his Mormons solicitously advised, “and you should put forth your very best effort to get out of the chair as much as possible—at least do your sleeping in bed. Dr. Chaffin told me that as long as you persist in spending nearly all your time in the chair, you could expect a recurrence. He said I should take your chair and push it off the balcony.”
Hughes, however, refused to budge. And his Mormons catered to his whims, kept their prisoner happy. They showed him his movies, they gave him his enemas, and they brought him his codeine.
Hughes was shooting up more than ever now—an incredible fifty to sixty grains of codeine a day, more than twice what he had used in Las Vegas. From time to time his doctors tried to lower the dose.
“The heavy usage of the item,” they warned, had affected him “to the extent that you are not in any condition, either physically or mentally, in any 24 hour period to enjoy the day or make any business decisions.”
It hardly mattered. Hughes rarely did any real business anymore. Indeed, he rarely did anything at all. His life had fallen into a pattern, one that would change little over the rest of his life, and one that his Mormons carefully chronicled, at his orders keeping a minute-by-minute account of the activities of a man who did virtually nothing.
One day ran into another, with Hughes moving from “chair” to “B/R”—from Barcalounger to bathroom—and back again, his movements meticulously recorded:
SUNDAY 6:55 AM Asleep.
11:15 AM Awake, B/R.
11:35 AM Chair, screening “SITUATION HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS” (completed all but last 5 min. reel 3)
1:30 PM 10 C [10 grains codeine]
1:50 PM B/R.
2:10 PM Chair, resumed screening “THE KILLERS”
3:30 PM Food: Chicken only.
4:20 PM Finished eating.
Finished “SITUATION HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS”
Screening “DO NOT DISTURB” (OK to return)
6:45 PM B/R.
7:00 PM Chair.
7:45 PM Screening “DEATH OF A GUN-FIGHTER” (1 reel only)
8:25 PM B/R.
8:45 PM Chair.
9:00 PM Screening “THE KILLERS”
9:35 PM Chicken and dessert. Completed “THE KILLERS”
11:25 PM B/R.
11:50 PM Bed. Changed bandages. Not asleep.
Occasionally Hughes had important instructions inscribed in the logs: “Carry the pillow by the bottom seam” or “HRH says not to get any more Italian westerns” or “John must somehow acquire additional #4’s” (the Empirin compound containing codeine) or “Hereafter when he asks for his pills, take him the entire bottle (not some on a kleenex)” or, more sadly, “He doesn’t want to be permitted to sleep in the bathroom anymore.”
Suddenly, after three months locked inside his Bahamas bedroom, Howard Hughes decided to break loose, set sail, move his command post to a yacht.
“I dont know how many more summers I have left,” wrote the rapidly failing sixty-five-year-old recluse, “but I dont intend to spend all of them holed up in a hotel room on a barcalounger.
“The choice of boats available in the Miami area now is at its peak. Also, several of the preferred boats are in Europe, and if I should select one of these, I may decide to spend the summer in the Mediterranean area.”
Hughes was definitely feeling expansive—he could almost feel the sea breezes already—but his Mormons soon took the wind out of his sails. Their prisoner could not be allowed to escape.
“In connection with the possible plan to move onto a boat, there is an aspect of security which should be considered,” the nursemaids warned, raising the specter of Robert Maheu.
The deposed henchman had not been idle. He was still fighting fiercely to recover his lost power and had even sent a crew commanded by his son to spy on Hughes down in the Bahamas. The mission had not gone well. Maheu’s gang was routed by a rival cloak-and-dagger outfit—Intertel—the private intelligence agency working for Hughes but reporting to the Mormons.
“Eleven persons were arrested in the rooms directly below us with wiretapping and other apparatus,” the Mormons belatedly informed Hughes. “They had among other things a Peter Maheu check for $10,000 and vouchers from the Frontier.
“All this is bad enough, but the FBI feels that this was very likely not just a case of wiretapping. Based on the number and type of people involved, they think it was more likely an aborted kidnapping attempt.
“If that is so, we really shouldn’t go onto a boat where we would be much more vulnerable than we are here, or elsewhere on land.”
The unwelcome reminder that the jilted Maheu was still on the loose—and still dangerous—quickly deflated Hughes’s yacht fantasy. He settled back into his Barcalounger, back to his movies and his codeine, and once more forgot about the world beyond his bedroom.
But the struggle for control of his empire—the battle between Maheu and the Mormons still raging back in Las Vegas—was steadily feeding Richard Nixon’s paranoia and steadily becoming intertwined with the covert activities the president was plotting from the White House.
Chuck Colson was excited. Nixon’s bullyboy had just heard some incredible news.
Larry O’Brien was out. He had been replaced by the Mormons with a fellow Mormon. Howard Hughes had a new man in Washington, Robert Foster Bennett. He was a solid Republican, and best of all Bob Bennett and Chuck Colson were old buddies.
“I’m sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes’s affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend,” crowed Colson, spreading the good word through the White House. “This move could signal quite a shift in terms of the politics and money that Hughes represents.”
Like the rest of Nixon’s gang, Colson was unaware that the president already had a private pipeline to the billionaire, that he wasn’t looking for a new way to get Hughes money but for some way to hide the cash already in hand.
And there was also a great deal Colson didn’t know about his pal Bob Bennett. Such as the fact that Bennett had another big client. The Central Intelligence Agency. An obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation until he was brought into the Hughes orbit by the Bahamas nerve-gas affair, Bennett had suddenly become the pivot for three powerful forces—Hughes, Nixon, and the CIA— and it would never be clear where his true loyalties lay. But the mysterious Mormon would never be far from the events that finally drove Nixon from office.
The president, however, remained fixated on O’Brien. His ouster changed nothing. Nixon still wanted him nailed. Haldeman had not assigned that mission to his rival Colson, as Nixon had suggested. Instead he had given the O’Brien hit to a new recruit, an ambitious young White House counsel, John Dean.
But Dean was getting nowhere. He called Bebe Rebozo, but Rebozo only repeated what he had already told Nixon. Nothing really solid. And the president’s pal added a disturbing note: “He [Rebozo] requested that if any action is taken with regard to Hughes that he be notified because of his familiarity with the delicacy of the relationships as a result of his own dealings with the Hughes people.”
Puzzled and a bit nervous, Dean turned to the White House gumshoe, Jack Caulfield. A former New York City police detective hired on to handle jobs too dirty to entrust to government agencies—wiretapping newsmen, spying on Teddy Kennedy, keeping watch over the president’s brother—Caulfield failed to find proof of the O’Brien-Hughes connection.