Hughes was in a jealous rage. He wanted to know just what Maheu was doing down in Miami, and he wanted him back in Los Angeles immediately. Now Maheu really had a problem. The Castro plot was the most closely held secret in CIA history, known to no more than a dozen people directly involved, perhaps not including the president of the United States. Maheu asked the CIA if he could tell Hughes. The answer from Langley—sure, go right ahead. Apparently without a second thought.
Maheu hurried down to a phone booth—not on orders from the Agency, but from Hughes, who always insisted on stringent security measures—and told the billionaire that he was on a top-secret mission to “dispose of Castro in connection with a pending invasion of Cuba.”
Hughes received the news sitting naked on a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, a pink napkin on his lap for the sake of modesty, surrounded by mountains of dirty Kleenex. The thirteenth person made privy to the assassination plot. He took it all in over the phone held to his hearing-aid box, then told Maheu to fly right back to Los Angeles. Immediately. He promised to keep him there no more than forty-eight hours, then let him return to his mission in Miami.
But the Castro murder would have to be his final fling. After that, the billionaire expected absolute fidelity.
Maheu returned from the Cuban debacle just in time to take on his most critical mission for Hughes. He was now the man in charge of the most important thing in the billionaire’s life—keeping him hidden. Hughes had become the object of an intense manhunt. His battle with the bankers over TWA had exploded into an all-out war. An army of process servers was trying to slap him with a subpoena, trying to force him out of hiding and haul him into court. It was Maheu’s job to keep them at bay.
He brought all the black arts of his clandestine world into play, deploying doubles, creating false trails, renting hideaways in Mexico and Canada, making TWA think Hughes was here, there, and everywhere, while the billionaire just lay on his bed in Bel Air.
Maheu himself moved out to Los Angeles, leaving his other clients behind in Washington. Now Robert A. Maheu Associates had only one client: Howard Hughes. The one-time private eye was not only in charge of secrecy but also secret money. He emerged as the billionaire’s top bagman, a position heralded by his attendance as Hughes’s representative at the 1961 Kennedy inaugural, where he flew in with a planeload of Hollywood stars and purchased four boxes at $10,000 apiece.
It was a key role, but their relationship was still one-sided. Hughes continued to play the field, while Maheu remained monogamous. For all his new power, he was still just the house dick, a glorified gumshoe, certainly no rival to the top executives in the empire. The long courtship might never have achieved real intimacy had it not been for the billionaire’s sudden move to Las Vegas in 1966.
Robert Maheu was waiting out in the Nevada desert at four A.M. when Howard Hughes arrived. He had handled security for the big move and averted a major crisis when the train fell behind schedule, threatening to bring the recluse to his secret rendezvous point in broad daylight. Maheu commandeered a private locomotive and got Hughes into town before dawn.
But he missed his last chance to see his phantom boss.
Out in the dark silent desert, Maheu again heard the cracked, reedy voice he had come to know so well, heard it barking commands, giving detailed instructions about the delicate transfer from the train to the van, knew that any second he would finally get to see the hidden man whose bidding he had done for a dozen years, his eyes straining against the darkness to catch sight of the figure he had fleetingly glimpsed just once ten years earlier, the mystery man no one had seen since, the phantom billionaire.
But, just as Hughes was about to emerge, just as the first vague outlines of his image began to materialize at the door of the train, Maheu suddenly spotted two points of light in the distance, the headlights of a car approaching the remote railroad junction. He was so intent on shielding Hughes from strangers, he had been drawn so far into Hughes’s secret world, that he missed the one moment he could see Hughes himself.
Again, at the Desert Inn, the vigilant bodyguard turned away at a critical instant, and by the time he turned back Hughes had vanished forever into his penthouse.
All Las Vegas, all the world, thought that Maheu was dealing with Hughes personally, saw him go up the elevator to the secret ninth floor, assumed that he was seeing its sole occupant, but in fact they never had and never would meet face-to-face. Maheu never got closer to Hughes than the adjoining room and had no more idea of what he looked like or how he lived than the rest of the world outside. Hughes, for his part, had never seen Maheu at all.
Yet, within months, the two men would exchange solemn vows and enter into a bizarre marriage.
It was Moe Dalitz who finally brought them together. The hatchet-faced proprietor of the Desert Inn, a senior member of organized crime, was running a gambling emporium, not a retreat. He wanted to rent the penthouse to high rollers, and he wanted Hughes out by Christmas. When the recluse failed to budge, Dalitz threatened to march upstairs and drag him out into the street if he was not gone by New Year’s Eve.
Once more Maheu came to the rescue. He persuaded one of his former clients, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, to call Dalitz, a key recipient of union pension-fund loans, and prevail upon the mobster to grant Hughes a reprieve. That bold move only bought a few weeks, however. Dalitz was adamant. Hughes had to go.
Faced with eviction, the billionaire decided to become his own landlord: he would buy the hotel.
Again, Maheu’s connections proved handy. He arranged the big deal through his erstwhile partner in the Castro plot, the Mafia’s ambassador to Las Vegas, John Roselli. Dalitz and his three principal partners from the Cleveland Mob were ready, indeed eager to sell. All of them were in hot water with the Feds. Everything seemed set, but neither Maheu nor the mobsters was prepared for Hughes’s favorite pastime, negotiating endlessly at odd hours, haggling like a hostile pawnbroker over every nickel and dime. The deal changed daily, the bargaining dragged on for months.
Maheu went up and down the Desert Inn elevator like a yo-yo, meeting with the Dalitz group downstairs, winning another concession, only to be presented with new demands from the penthouse. Five times the mobsters cut their price before Hughes finally gave his approval and Maheu shook hands on the deal.
Then Hughes suddenly spotted an item that displeased him: a fifteen-thousand-dollar quibble on a thirteen-and-a-quarter-million-dollar deal.
Maheu went back up to the penthouse, sat down in the adjoining room, and furiously scrawled a letter of resignation.
“Howard,” he wrote, “you have finally succeeded in insulting my intelligence. You have also compromised so many of my friends and contacts that I find it impossible to continue working for you.
“I am leaving for Los Angeles in the morning.
“As I have told you repeatedly, you have nothing to fear from me except that I intend to charge you my going rate through March 14, 1967.
“I wish you a lot of luck, including the very remote possibility that you may be lucky enough to select a successor who will have equal loyalty.
“In sincere friendship, Bob.”
Within minutes Hughes sent word from his lair. He would go ahead with the deal as agreed, without the fifteen-thousand-dollar discount. And he begged Maheu to stay in Las Vegas at least long enough to receive a phone call the next morning.
Precisely at eight A.M. the phone rang in Maheu’s hotel room. For the next two hours Hughes proceeded to cajole him, to beg him never to threaten to leave again, to become his right-hand man forever, to accept a half-million-dollar base salary, to be his one and only, to be faithful to him alone. They exchanged vows. It was virtually a formal marriage ceremony—“till death do us part.” Hughes said they would spend the rest of their lives together and made Maheu promise never to leave him.