This is the real “get dunner” I have been looking for!’
“Bob, you lead a very active life.
“You have a lot of people around you—your family, friends, and others.
“I have absolutely nothing but my work.
“When things dont go well, it can be very empty indeed.
“I would like to make a real effort to restore things to the way they used to be, and I promise to do my share.
“I cannot tell you how truly grateful I will be if you can find it in your heart to do likewise.”
It was a marriage that was not only always on the brink of collapse from internal tensions but also under constant attack from outside by rival courtiers. Maheu’s sudden rise to power, his new intimacy with Hughes, was a shock to other top executives in the empire. When Hughes eloped to Las Vegas he left several would-be brides at the altar, all of them now united in jealous hatred of Maheu.
It was a conspiracy of the once-betrothed. In Los Angeles, there was Bill Gay, who ran the Romaine Street command center and the Mormon palace guard. In Houston, there was Raymond Holliday, who controlled the purse strings as chief executive of the Hughes Tool Company. In Culver City, there was Pat Hyland, who ran the Hughes Aircraft Company. In New York, there was Chester Davis, who handled the TWA case and had parlayed it into an appointment as general counsel.
Maheu was vigilant in spotting potential threats to his new marriage. Yet for all his experience as a clandestine warrior, he never recognized the true dimensions of the conspiracy. He ignored his obvious rivals and fixated instead on Hughes’s lead attorney in Houston, Raymond Cook, who seemed to be gaining back-channel control over all the key power centers.
“I’ve had a bellyful of Cookie-Boy,” Maheu told Hughes.
“First of all—make no mistake about it—for many years Cook has been attempting to take over your entire empire—even at the exclusion of Howard Hughes.
“I met this ‘bum’ for the first time in 1954. In less than one hour, he was making derogatory statements about you that I could not believe.
“Dietrich can tell you about an approach Cook made in an attempt to put you out of circulation in 1957.
“As time progressed I became more and more aware of the necessity to protect you from these ‘demons.’ By these, I mean Cook and his crowd.
“I think it is only fair for me to remind you that at age 25 I received the highest award our country can give for setting up a counterintelligence system. When I was 27, I was given the prime responsibility for convincing the Germans that the invasion was going to take place in Southern France rather than Normandy.[4]
“Anyway, Howard—you have quite often told me that I was resented in certain circles of your organization because of my FBI background. The Cook group certainly has justification for resenting me. When I decided that to protect you to the fullest extent, the time had come to ‘penetrate’ the group, it was perhaps the most simple assignment we’ve ever undertaken. They are ‘weak’, they drink too much, and they talk too much. But more important, they are not loyal to you and to each other.
“Anyway, they are now engaged in an all out effort to discredit me and my people in your eyes. They somehow know that you were ill recently, and they are attempting to accomplish their ‘goal‘ before something happens to you.
“In the meantime, they are trying to assure themselves of receiving the first telephone call when this occurs so that Holliday and Cook can fly immediately to Las Vegas—seize all your papers and take over. The reason for moving in so many lawyers from Houston on a permanent basis is to be ready for the big day.
“Howard, I hate to be so brutal and lay it on so coldly but those are the facts.
“There is no doubt that Cook is behind all this and unfortunately Holliday is so weak that he cannot cope with the push from Cook.
“All of these stupid problems could be eradicated instantly by the choice of a strong man as your top guy—whether it be me or someone else.”
What Maheu failed to recognize was that the last thing Hughes wanted was a “strong man” as his “top guy.” Such a man could endanger the billionaire’s own power. In fact, Hughes wanted no one in overall authority, and far from seeking peace and order in his empire, he provoked and encouraged the internal power struggle, playing one top executive against another to keep them all offbalance.
And he feared Maheu most of all, as he confided to his counsel Chester Davis: “Chester, stated simply, with the explosiveness and unpredictability of my relationship with Bob, and with his well known characteristic of ‘given an inch, take a mile,’ I dont want to place him in a position which I may find, in the light of later scrutiny, has penetrated too far. In other words, Chester, I would not ever want to be faced with the problem of cutting Maheu back or reducing his authorities. He is, as you know, a very strong-willed individual.”
But if Hughes feared Maheu most it was only because he now depended on him so completely, largely because he neither liked nor trusted any of his other top executives.
He had not spoken to Cook for a decade, had once actually fired him, and often saw his legal advice as condescending and contemptuous personal assaults: “Raymond! If you would treat me as something other than a cross-breed between an escaped lunatic and a child, you would be surprised how much better we would get along!”
He had never met Pat Hyland, had not seen Raymond Holliday since the late 1950s, and was now so estranged from them—the only real businessmen in his empire—that he relied on lower-echelon informants to keep tabs on both the Hughes Tool Company and the Hughes Aircraft Company.
“My men, upon whom I rely for all of my factual data concerning the entire Culver City operation, do not include Pat Hyland,” the billionaire told Maheu. “Hyland has become completely unpredictable lately. I have no confidence in him.
“My confidantes inside the H.A.C. and H.T.Co. organizations put their very lives in jeopardy with some of the disclosures they make to me, and if they thought this information went to anybody—no matter whom—they would not continue to inform.”
Of all his ministers-in-exile, none was more completely banished or more taken by surprise than the chief Mormon, Bill Gay. The heir apparent after Hughes’s split with Dietrich, Gay had created the palace guard and gained in power as Hughes withdrew into seclusion. Once the field commander of the germ-warfare campaign, he suddenly became the most prominent casualty of that war when his wife fell ill in the late 1950s and Gay was banned as a dangerous carrier. Now he was frozen out completely.
Hughes never told Gay why, but he poured out his bitterness to Maheu. It was Gay who was responsible for looking after Jean Peters, and it was therefore obviously Gay who was responsible for the failure of his marriage:
“Bill’s total indifference and laxity to my pleas for help in the domestic area, voiced urgently to him, week by week throughout the past 7 to 8 years, have resulted in a complete, I am afraid irrevocable loss of my wife.
“I am sorry, but I blame Bill completely for this unnecessary debacle.
“And this is only the beginning. If I compiled here a complete list of the actions or omissions in which I feel he has failed to perform his duty to me and to the company, it would fill several pages.
“I feel he has let me down—utterly, totally, completely.”
Alone in his penthouse, estranged from all his key men, cut off even from his wife, scarred by a long string of past divorces—from his first wife,[5] from his first right-hand man Dietrich, from all his original executives and operatives—Hughes was now desperate to make a success of his new but already terribly troubled marriage to Maheu.
4
Maheu’s claim of a central role in D-Day is at least an exaggeration. While he did do counterintelligence work for the FBI during World War II, and he was handling a Vichy double-agent, there is no available evidence to support his boast of diverting the Nazis from Normandy.