The Mormons were his little polygamous family, all the family Hughes had left now, and he needed to keep them around. He was cut off from everyone else. Even his wife.
He would never see Jean Peters again. They spoke almost every day on the telephone and each time had the same conversation. Hughes kept trying to persuade Jean to move to Las Vegas, to live in one of the two mansions he had bought for her—one a $600,000 palatial estate in town, the other a five-hundred-acre ranch nearby—telling her that life would be perfect in Nevada, that she would love the clean air. And Jean kept agreeing to come, if Hughes would just leave his penthouse and move into their new home first.
It was a standoff. Hughes could not leave his hideout, could not share his life. He wanted his wife close by, under his control, but he could no longer actually live with her. Instead, he secretly bought a “surveillance house” across the street from her home in Beverly Hills and kept his wife under watch while each night he tried to persuade her to come to Las Vegas.
In his own way, he seemed to love her, and the nightly phone calls were important. Sometimes he fretted that she would not be in or refuse to talk when he called at some predawn hour.
“Please call Mrs. and ask her if it will be convenient for me to call tonight and ask her what is the latest that would be convenient,” he scribbled to his Mormons one Christmas Eve.
“Remind her this is my birthday.”
And when he had his wife on the phone again, he would once more beg her to join him and assure her that he would soon emerge from his seclusion. “He said that he felt himself to be like someone on a track being pursued by the engines,” Jean later recalled. “It was almost his mania to get everything settled and then start to build his dream world.”
But, in fact, there was no room in his “dream world” for Jean, no room for anyone else at all. Certainly no room for a rival. What Hughes dreamed of was a world in which only he existed, and often he wrote out entire scripts for his henchmen to follow in dealing with threats to his solipsist vision, such as the sudden arrival in Las Vegas of another multimillionaire.
“Now, I think No. 1 on the list for this year is Mr. K-1,” wrote Hughes in 1967, hatching a plot to dispose of his new rival, Kirk Kerkorian, who had just announced plans to build the biggest hotel-casino in town.
“I want your idea of how he would react if you were to see him and say something like this:
“‘Kirk, I have just had a long talk with Howard.
“‘I dont have to tell you that when he sold his interest in TWA, he picked up the largest check that any single individual ever carried out of Wall St. Since that time he has moved very slowly. He has made investments in Las Vegas, but nothing else.
“‘Now, Kirk, what this is all leading up to is that I just see you two friends of mine embarking on a course that can only lead to a disastrous collision.
“‘Howard wants to buy your land and persuade you not to build this hotel. I think his friendship (and he has very few friends) is yours for the asking, and I think it would be worth so much more to you that there would be no comparison.
“‘The way he figures it, if he had had even the most remote idea that you were planning to do this, he would have located somewhere else. I know for a fact that he made an all-out study to see if it would be possible to relocate now, but you see he just could not dispose of his property here without wrecking the economy of the entire state.’”
It was Kerkorian who would have to get out. Howard Hughes had to be alone in his kingdom, his power unchallenged and absolute.
But locked in his room with all his grand schemes, with all his great fears, with his absolute need for absolute power, Hughes needed a go-between, one trusted man who could take the visions he scrawled in his memos and make them a reality in the dangerous world outside.
And the billionaire had found that man—his new remote-control instrument—Robert Aime Maheu.
They would make the Big Movie together, Hughes producing, directing, and writing the screenplay, Maheu out on the stage playing Hughes to the world.
“I spent the whole night writing the script. Every word—every move—every tear—every sigh. All the stage directions are carefully worked out. I could get $10,000 for a script as good as this at 20th Century Fox. So, I want to see what comes of it, but I am afraid I know what the last scene is right now, and I am afraid it is not you and me walking into the setting sun with the package under our arms.”
Still, it was quite a spectacle the two of them were about to put on.
2
Bob and Howard
It was not love at first sight. The courtship had lasted twelve years, and they never really saw each other. In fact, in the beginning Robert Maheu did not even know that he was working for Howard Hughes.
Private-eye Maheu was sitting in his recently opened Washington office on a spring day in 1954, when his phone rang. It was a matrimonial case. Not his usual line. The sign on the door said ROBERT A. MAHEU ASSOCIATES. But there weren’t really any associates quite yet, and although the office was just a couple of blocks from the White House, it wasn’t all that grand. Desk, swivel chair, hat rack, and not much else. In fact, Maheu was sharing the space (and the telephone) with an accountant. Still, he was beginning to attract some very interesting cases. Like the guy now on the phone.
It was a local lawyer. Big firm. Had a job for Maheu on behalf of a client he wouldn’t name. Wanted all the dirt on one Stuart W. Cramer III, a real blueblood, son of a wealthy industrialist who played golf with Ike. The kid had just married a young Hollywood starlet. Name of Jean Peters. What the unnamed client wanted was a complete rundown, but mainly he wanted to know if this Cramer was mixed up with any of the intelligence agencies.
As Maheu had told the lawyer right off, he didn’t normally take matrimonial work. He was no ordinary private eye. But this case was actually right up his alley. Maheu was a very private eye—private enough to be getting a $500 monthly retainer from the CIA. Under-the-table money to handle jobs too dirty for the Agency to handle itself. Pimping for Jordan’s King Hussein. Producing a porn flick starring a look-alike of Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Odd jobs like that.
So he took the Cramer case. It was not exactly that he needed the work, but it looked like a piece of cake for a man with his connections, and a few extra bucks wouldn’t hurt. In truth, Maheu was in a bit of a bind. Nearly $100,000 worth. That Dairy Dream strike-it-rich-quick scheme had really turned into a nightmare. Which was why he had gotten into this spy-for-hire racket in the first place.
Or, at least that’s the way Maheu would later tell it. After a dazzling career with the FBI, mainly counterintelligence work in World War II, he suddenly quit the Bureau in 1947 to take advantage of a big business opportunity. Dairy Dream. Exclusive U.S. rights to a new process for canning pure cream. A great success that suddenly turned sour with the terrible discovery that the cream had a very limited shelf life. The cost of retrieving it from supermarkets across the country was ruinous. Busted, Maheu went back to work for the government as chief of security at the Small Business Administration, but his take-home hardly covered the interest on his debt. So he became Robert A. Maheu Associates.
But it is not at all clear if Maheu was a down-at-the-heels, feet-on-the-desk gumshoe trying to look big-time, or a big-time front for the CIA trying to look like a sleazy bankrupt shamus. The year he quit the FBI, 1947, was the same year the CIA got started, and Dairy Dream may have been only an unfortunate side venture. In any event, by the time he took the Cramer case Maheu was not only on the Company’s payroll, he was already deep into high-stakes international intrigue.