It was all too much. Instead of setting up house with his new wife, the young actress Jean Peters, Hughes retreated into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, stripped off his clothes, and began his descent into total seclusion—and madness.
Nothing mattered more now than the isolation. In fact, when it came to a choice between holding on to his beloved TWA and losing his absolute privacy by appearing in court, he gave up control of the airline.[3] No longer in control of it, he didn’t want it at all. In May 1966, he sold TWA.
For $546 million.
It was the biggest check ever to go to one man at one time, more money than the greatest of the old robber barons had amassed in their lifetimes. Now the big question was: What would he do with the incredible windfall?
Fortune magazine tried to puzzle out the phantom’s new “mission”: “A mystery now surrounds Hughes’s plans for the half-billion dollars he received. It is possible only to speculate about what he will do with it. He seems to have something big and surprising on his mind, and whatever it is, it doubtless was a major factor in his decision to sell. Has he some new kind of interest, cultivated in his own isolated world?”
Actually, the only “mission” Hughes had in mind was to find a new place to hide. He had to flee California, his home for four decades, to escape state taxes. So, in July 1966 he left his bedroom for the first time in five years and set out across America, a fugitive with half a billion dollars.
On the train trip to Boston, alone in his private railroad car Hughes scribbled some notes for a message to Jean Peters, trying to explain to his wife why he had left her behind at their home in Bel Air, trying to make her understand his “mission.”
“Originally I had no faintest thought of proceeding,” he wrote. “At the last minute you started wearing a long face. I said, ‘Why?’ You said because I would fail to complete the mission. I would goof out like last time.”
There had been an argument. Marital strife caused by the strain of Hughes’s maddening indecision, his constant alerts and endless delays, and perhaps the fact that they had shared a bed for less than a year of their ten-year marriage, that Jean had seen him only by appointment for the past five years.
“At the last minute I could not face the possibility of reverting to a telephone relationship,” Hughes continued. “So, I delayed. You let me know at once that the closeness and trust we had achieved was destroyed.
“So, I reinstated my plans—with your promise to trust and believe in me.
“Where did I do the wrong thing?” he asked, approaching the delicate question of leaving without her.
“The crux of the whole deal is that, if you come, we have no option or choice. From that point on, we are irrevocably committed to the place where we land. If I go alone—or if you go alone, either of us can look around—describe what we see—what is available—and where. Then, the die is not cast until the other arrives.”
It made perfect sense. He had to go alone. They had been over that several times.
“I had to go. I told everybody we were leaving. I dont want to fail. But I will not leave you upset”—he started to write “My Sweet Adorable One,” then crossed it out. Too effusive.
“Honey!” he continued, “I want to do what you want me to do. I am boxed into a corner. I have the distinct feeling you dont want me to go ahead with any of this. But if I stop now I feel this may not be what you want either. I will be quitting once more.
“I hope this is the start of the road back,” Hughes concluded, seeming out of his confusion to have drawn new strength, a new determination to put things right.
Then, inexplicably, he scrawled four more words—“cut your head off”—and underlined it with an angry slash.
It now stood out plainly: “cut your head off.”
The rage was unmistakable. But whose head was Hughes after? His wife’s? Or his own? He may not have been entirely sure himself. But the notes he made on the train ride to Boston give the best picture of Hughes’s state of mind as he began his quest.
It was, of course, unthinkable to send the handwritten message to Jean Peters. And not merely because of its shocking postscript. Hughes never sent his wife a letter in his own hand. Much too risky.
Instead, he summoned one of his attendants in the next railroad car, and from his notes dictated a message for the Mormon to memorize and recite to his wife. The courier left the train at the first stop, San Bernardino, and drove back to Bel Air to deliver the farewell. It was a more controlled, simpler message that the Mormon gave Jean. Something to the effect that Hughes loved her dearly and looked forward to the day they would be back together.
One thing Hughes definitely did not want mentioned was his destination. That was a secret. Even from his wife.
Anyhow, Boston was just a stopover. It was not the end of the line. Hughes had traveled three thousand miles just to decide where he really wanted to go.
At four A.M. on Sunday, November 27, 1966, Thanksgiving weekend, a locomotive hauling just two private railroad cars pulled into an obscure desert junction on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Howard Hughes had come back across America to make his Last Stand. He had found his new mission. He would make Nevada his kingdom, and use his half-billion-dollar windfall to create a world he could control completely. He had stopped running, but he had not stopped hiding.
Hughes emerged from his ten-year retreat defiantly determined to exercise his full power while remaining a total recluse.
Now, in the predawn blackness of the Nevada desert, he began to take charge. It was only a few short steps from his railroad car to the waiting van. He could have walked. Instead, like an Oriental pasha—or a spoiled child—he demanded to be carried the few steps on a stretcher.
The curtained van whisked Hughes to his new hideout, the Desert Inn Hotel, a gaudy gambling emporium smack in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the most garish, most public place in the universe. 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.
At the Desert Inn, the entire top floor was reserved and waiting. His aides snuck Hughes upstairs during the early morning lull, carried him down the hall, and parked the stretcher in a bedroom of a suite picked at random. There was another bedroom in the same suite and six more empty suites on the vacant penthouse floor, but Hughes had no interest in checking them out. He stayed put in the room first picked blindly—and never emerged for the next four years.
Indeed, he rarely left his bed. And yet, in these four years Hughes had his greatest impact on the nation, making his unseen presence felt in corporate boardrooms, in political back rooms, even in the Oval Office of the White House.
He was now more than a billionaire, with $750 million cash on hand and other assets worth at least as much. Fortune magazine would soon name him the richest man in America. And he had power even 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, a top-ten defense contractor with strong CIA ties, manufacturer of all spy satellites that circled the globe and of the first spacecraft that landed on the moon. And beyond his real power was the power of his myth.
His long disappearance had only increased it. Hidden from view, unseen for a decade, now known best of all for being unknown, Hughes had become the perfect vehicle for everyone’s fantasies.
If the popular image was still the fictional Hughes created by Harold Robbins in his 1961 best-selling novel The Carpetbaggers—the lone adventurer, the romantic hero, the appealingly eccentric tycoon—by now a darker, more sinister image was also beginning to take hold.
3
Hughes’s refusal to appear in court ultimately had a $137 million price tag. The bankers had filed suit in June 1961 after a battle for dominance that began when they imposed a voting trust over his TWA stock in December 1960. As part of the lawsuit, they demanded that Hughes appear for a deposition. His refusal led a federal judge to find him in default in May 1963, and more than five years later damages were set at $137 million, which with interest escalated to $145 million.