An aura of scandal had settled around him, his payoffs to politicians were rumored if not known, and he arrived in Las Vegas—“Sin City,” the center of Mob power—just as the James Bond movies reached a peak of popularity. In the lurid atmosphere of the late 1960s, some now imagined that Hughes was an evil genius with a master plan for world domination—Dr. No, Blofeld, and Goldfinger all rolled into one.
The vision was of an archvillain in his hidden domain, surrounded by war-room electronics and gleaming computer banks, his eyes fixed on a huge blinking map of the world, sitting at the controls of a sophisticated array of advanced technology, commanding vast private armies.
Instead, there was Hughes, naked in his bedroom, unwashed and disheveled, his hair halfway down his back, sprawled out on a paper-towel-insulated bed, staring at his overworked television, with no device more sophisticated than his Zenith Space Commander. Next door, his command center, a hotel living room, was manned by five Mormon nursemaids: former potato-chip salesmen, construction workers, and factory hands, lackeys with no special skills, not even shorthand, equipped only with one console telephone, an electric typewriter, and a four-drawer filing cabinet.
The real Mr. Big was surrounded only by filth and disorder. Mountains of old newspapers, brittle with age, spread in an ever-widening semicircle on the floor around his bed, creeped under the furniture, and spilled into the corners of his cramped fifteen-by-seventeen-foot room, mixed together haphazardly with other debris—rolls of blueprints, maps, TV Guides, aviation magazines, and various unidentifiable objects.
A narrow path had been cleared from his bed to the bathroom, then lined with paper towels, but the tide of trash overran even that, topped off by numberless wads of used Kleenex the billionaire wielded to wipe off everything within reach, then casually cast upon the accumulated rubbish. It was all united in a common thick layer of dust that settled in permanently over the years. The room was never cleaned. Hughes did not want his Mormon aides stirring things up or disturbing his junkpiles, which continued to grow unchecked.
Amid this incredible clutter, set apart in pristine splendor, stood stack after stack of neatly piled documents. They covered every available surface. Thousands of yellow legal-pad pages and white typewritten memos piled with absolute precision on the dresser, two night tables, and an overstuffed armchair, all within easy reach of Hughes on his bed. He compulsively stacked and restacked these papers, often for hours at a time, taking a sheaf and whacking them down to align one side, then another, endlessly repeating the process until not a page was a millimeter out of place. That was vital.
These special papers were the instruments of his power.
For the four years Howard Hughes made his Last Stand in Las Vegas, he commanded his empire by correspondence. It was the only time in his life that the world’s most secretive man regularly risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires.
Hughes himself emphasized that the handwritten memos were unique.
“My men will tell you I dont write five letters a year,” he wrote his new right-hand man, Robert Maheu, toward the beginning of their pen-pal relationship.
“I have been notorious through the years for conducting all of my business orally, usually by telephone. I am sure you have heard of this characteristic.
“When I started sending you long hand notes, my people protested long and loud,” Hughes continued, recalling how bitterly the Mormons had fought this sudden departure, not wanting to lose their role as his exclusive channel to the world outside.
“They wanted to retype my messages at least, and correct mistakes in composition, and spelling, etc.
“I said no, that there was not time, and that I would ask you to return the messages so they would not get out of my hands in that condition.
“Listen, Bob, in the Senate investigation of me, the material they dredged out of my own files was the only scrap of evidence that permitted them to get their foot in the door,” Hughes concluded, still enraged by that violation twenty years earlier, a triumph that had left him permanently scarred.
“I assure you I learned my lesson from that incident, and I watch what accumulates in the files very carefully.”
Yes, he had to retain absolute control of his secret papers—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my very innermost activities.”
His only real correspondent, Maheu, would have to return them. And Hughes would not even send copies to his other top executives, men he had not seen for a decade and no longer spoke to even by phone. Instead he had his Mormons read them the memos, so that these hallowed documents never left the penthouse.
He carefully trained these trusted attendants to be robot transmitters of his great secrets.
“I have thought of you,” he explained in an oft-repeated catechism, “as non-eavesdroppers, as impersonal, completely loyal, enforced listeners to secret, privileged transmissions—in the same posture as the telegraph operator used to be in, when he was forced to transmit all kinds of highly personal and confidential material.
“I remember when the difference between a small-town nonprofessional operator and a metropolitan, highly trained operator was easily recognizable, because the small-town operator would react to the message as if it were addressed to him, while the good operator would never bat an eye or react in any way, no matter how startling the text of the message might be.
“Your posture in the transmission of messages,” he added, “is as sacred and impersonal as an electronic machine.”
Secure that his secrets were safe with his robots, that his dispatches could not possibly fall into hostile hands, Hughes daily scrawled out his orders on reams of yellow legal-pad paper, scheming through sleepless nights to control a world he feared to face, unleashing a blizzard of memoranda, sometimes more than a hundred pages in a day.
And here they were, all neatly stacked around his bed, in precise piles that had multiplied and grown to perilous heights. Hughes reached out one spindly arm, grabbed a sheaf at random, and began riffling through his papers. The dark secrets of his life were casually mixed in with the dark secrets of America.
Alone in his dimly lit room, leaning back on a couple of pillows, Hughes reread a few memos, leafed through the pile and skimmed a few more, all the while unconsciously crossing his toes, one over the other, starting from the little toe and working his way in, an old habit that now caused his long toenails to click, a constant counterpoint to the sound of the papers he shuffled.
Hughes was oblivious to the discordant sounds, completely caught up in reading his memos. Here was one about bribing a president. There another about buying a new airline. Next a reminder to get more codeine—had it been done? A few pages later, a complaint about taxes. Here his comments on a TV show. Followed by something about buying the network. Hughes continued to rummage through his papers, reliving past terrors and triumphs, chewing over schemes he had hatched the day or the week or the year before.
Suddenly he stopped and stared intently. This was important, and it hadn’t been handled, at least not to his satisfaction. Hughes, who was obsessed with his image, realized it had been sullied badly—“your sponsor is far from the popular idol he once was,” he noted sadly to his Mormon aides.
But he had a plan, and here it was, a whole new way to present himself to the world:
“I want the Hughes activity to be presented to the public, in a massive new publicity and advertising campaign, as the only example of competitive enterprise still functioning and holding out against the onrushing hordes of corporate giants.