There were even problems with his drug supply. Hughes was convinced that the Mormons were withholding his blue bombers.
“Of course no one wants you to take any but we don’t try to keep them away,” soothed an aide. “When you use words and phrases such as ‘putting you to sleep,’ ‘permitting you to go to sleep,’ etc. you imply that we have some kind of control over what you or your mind tells you to do.”
Actually, the Mormons were firmly in control. Sullen and resentful after fifteen years of servitude, forced to perform absurd and odious tasks, they pressed their dependent boss for ever greater salaries, and while each was paid more than $100,000 a year, they still often treated him with contempt.
“If you knew how much it disturbs me, and how unhappy it makes me when you are completely cold and unfriendly as you were tonight, I really dont think you would turn on the punishment outlet quite all the way,” Hughes pleaded in a note to a nursemaid.
“So, all I ask is that the next time you get ready to give me a really harsh expression of your views, you merely take into account the fact that my life is not quite the total ‘bed of roses’ that I sometimes get the impression you think it is.
“In fact, if we were to swap places in life, I would be willing to bet you would be asking me to permit you to re-swap back to the present position before the passage of the first week.”
Hughes had only one last hold over his nursemaids and executives—his will. He had been dangling it in front of them for years, repeatedly assuring them they were all well rewarded, but never letting anyone see it.
“I have had in existance for some time a holographic will,” he claimed. “It was carefully written seated at a desk, complying to all the rules governing such wills. It was all done under the supervision of my personal attorney Neil McCarthy, and I assure you no detail was overlooked. It is as binding as a band of steel.”
The aides were suspicious. McCarthy was long dead, and the will Hughes claimed to have written was supposedly drafted in the early 1940s, a decade before he assembled his strange crew of Mormons.
“I am sure you dont need this protection,” Hughes told them, “as everybody knows that the five of you have been my eyes, ears, and voice for the past five to ten years, so I am sure any one of you could get any exec, position you might care to seek, and with any number of companies to choose from.
“However, as added protection, I have written a codicil to my will which will be delivered to the B. of A. [Bank of America], my trustee in the administration of my will.”
The Mormons remained suspicious. As their bedridden boss declined in the summer of 1975, they pressed him repeatedly to show them the will, to update it, or to write a new one.
“We have a little time,” replied Hughes. He promised to compose an entirely new will. Soon. But he never would. A man who could not part with his fingernails clearly could not part with his fortune. And Hughes also must have realized that signing a will would be like signing his own death warrant. The nonexistent last testament was his last hold on power.
“We have to get down to it,” he nonetheless said, “because I want to fly before I’m seventy.”
Hughes, who had not been out of bed since he broke his hip two years earlier, was determined to fly again by his seventieth birthday. He had brought in a former Lockheed executive, Jack Real, made him a member of his entourage, and now spent hours alone with him talking about airplanes.
The Mormons were not pleased. When Hughes asked to see Jack, they told him Real was away. They withheld his messages. They changed the locks on the doors. And finally, on February 10, 1976, they took Hughes off to Mexico.
They told him that the drug supply was drying up in the Bahamas, that they had to go to Acapulco to assure a steady flow of narcotics. It was a lie. The codeine came from a pharmaceuticals firm in New York. But Hughes did not know that. He only knew that he had to have his daily fix.
Saturday, April 3, 1976. Howard Hughes lay motionless in his latest blacked-out bedroom, a luxurious penthouse suite atop the Acapulco Princess Hotel, delirious, dehydrated, starving.
He reached out one spindly arm to a Kleenex box on his bedside night table, withdrew a hypodermic syringe hidden under the flap, and jabbed the needle into his shrunken right bicep. The effort exhausted him. He could not depress the plunger, could not shoot the codeine into his wasted body.
The syringe dangled from his arm, then fell to the floor. Hughes summoned an aide to complete the injection. The Mormon refused. He called for a doctor, who arrived moments later and gave him his shot.
Hughes had been comatose most of the past week. When awake, he refused to eat. His weight had dropped to ninety-four pounds. His six-foot-four-inch frame had shrunk three inches. His brittle bones showed plainly through his parchmentlike skin. His left shoulder was bruised and swollen. He had a gaping wound on the side of his head where he had sheared off an old tumor a few weeks earlier when he fell out of bed. He had four broken needle points embedded in his right arm, another in his left. And inside, his atrophied kidneys, destroyed by a quarter-century of drug abuse, were killing him.
His speech had become incoherent. That Saturday he mumbled repeatedly about an “insurance policy,” but none of his aides knew what he was talking about. By the next day he could no longer talk at all. He just lay in bed, staring blankly ahead, his face and neck twitching uncontrollably. Sunday afternoon he slipped into a coma. Still, his aides and doctors kept him hidden, afraid to take him to a hospital. Instead, that night one of the Mormons gave his unconscious boss his third haircut in ten years, while another soaked his hands and feet, then clipped his long nails.
Finally, at eleven o’clock on Monday morning, they lifted a still comatose Hughes out of bed, placed him on a stretcher, loaded him into a waiting ambulance, and rushed him to a private jet. As they carried Hughes aboard, his lips moved slightly, but he made no audible sound.
There were no last words, no “Rosebud.” He lay silent on the plane under a bright yellow sheet pulled up to his chin, and at 1:27 P.M. on April 5, 1976, Howard Hughes died three thousand feet in the air, half an hour away from his old hometown, Houston.
His death was front-page news around the world, but he attracted none of the standard public eulogies routinely accorded the famous, the wealthy, and the powerful. Not even his ex-wife, Jean Peters, said much. Just “I’m saddened,” that was all, and there were no other loved ones to mourn him.
He was an American folk hero, a man who had lived first the dream then the nightmare—in that sense, perhaps the single most representative American of the twentieth century. But upon his death he had become so loathsome and scandalous a figure that no national leader noted his passing. None of the politicians he had funded said a word. Not Richard Nixon, not Hubert Humphrey, not Larry O’Brien, not even Paul Laxalt.
Only one powerful man stepped forward to praise him, a man who almost never spoke publicly, a man himself so secretive that his name had never appeared in print until just a year earlier, when he was ousted amid scandal from the lofty position he had held for three decades—chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. James Jesus Angleton.
It was entirely fitting that Angleton, the CIA’s purest product, the spook’s spook, should alone deliver his epitaph:
“Howard Hughes! Where his country’s interests were concerned, no man knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him.