“Bob,” he wrote, “this uncertainty, distrust, and these accusations are bringing my entire operation to a halt and tearing me apart inside.
“I am not trying any further to debate who is right and who is wrong.
“Kuldell left me, Dietrich left me, Ramo and Wooldrich, Frank Waters and Arditto all left me, so lets say the incompatibility is probably on my side.[6]
“Anyway, right or wrong, I know one thing, and that is that this situation must be resolved and now.”
Time and again Hughes tried to get to the root of his problems with Maheu, endlessly examining and analyzing, always talking about their “relationship.”
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE: Act II
“Bob—I am afraid I have lost the magic touch with which we used to find accord and harmony in almost everything we did.
“Somehow I cannot seem to reach you the way I used to.
“When I say I cannot seem to establish the relationship we used to have, you say I am imagining things.”
“We shall never solve the problem of the ‘relationship we used to have’ unless we both try.
“It sure as hell doesn’t help when I have to spend half of my time explaining off situations which did not exist in the first place.”
“I agree it takes two to quarrel. It also takes an effort on the part of both parties to maintain a compatible relationship. However, I think in all fairness that I worry more and give more attention to this problem than you do. I suppose this is normal since I am bottled up here and my whole life is one of correspondence.”
“You know, Howard, I do not envy in the least the lonesomeness which you must experience in the penthouse. Perhaps our relationship would instantaneously become a better one if I could hope that you might not envy the constant clobbering to which I am exposed from the penthouse.”
“I used to be able to communicate with you and not be frightened for fear that each word I spoke or wrote might be the one that would cause you to get angry with me and wind up with my stomach tied up in knots. Please, Bob, let us go back to the environment of friendship that used to exist between us. That is all I ask.”
“As to our relationship, Howard, I am afraid that I will always have a reasonably short fuse.
“I realize that many times things I say are illustrative of a short-tempered Frenchman, to which I plead guilty, but you must never, please, feel that you cannot bounce back and flip me on my ass.
“Perhaps even more important is that I sincerely believe, and hope you concur, that two dear friends should never go to sleep without all problems between them during the day having been resolved.”
“Lets make a fresh start and bury all past differences.
“I know you are not completely satisfied with my conduct, in so far as it relates to you, and I can submit a list of quite a few items of grievance I wish, at the proper time, to take up with you.
“However, in spite of these short-comings, I am ready, if you are, to make a real, true, maximum effort, an all-out attempt to reconcile our differences.
“I want to turn over a new leaf with you.”
They kissed and made up a thousand times, turned over a new leaf and started fresh every other day, but still the fights continued. Hughes was beside himself.
“I only hope you utilize your strategic powers of psychiatric suggestion as effectively on our opponents as you do upon me,” he pleaded with his underling.
“I dont know why I am always placed in the position of being neglectful, irresponsible, ungrateful, and generally unworthy in the day to day progress of my relationship with you, Bob.
“It is almost like some massive chess game in which you seem never to miss an opportunity to place me at a disadvantage whenever the chance presents itself.”
For a while it did look as though Maheu had the billionaire checkmated, using his emotional hold over Hughes to gain ever greater power, the volatile Frenchman whose hot-tempered outbursts had Hughes cowed, the Jesuit manipulator whose Svengali-like powers had Hughes under his spell.
Hughes, in his desperation to win Maheu’s heart, now offered his regent the keys to the kingdom and a palace to go with it.
“I am prepared to give you the highest order of responsibility and authority in the Hughes Tool Company,” he declared. “By that I mean you will outrank all other executives of the company, and you will have only me to contend with.
“If I place you in this position of authority over the entire worldwide activities of the company, not just the Nevada Division, but the entire Hughes Tool Company, if you assume this position of authority, then, more than ever, I must have a clean-cut understanding with you as to what my position in this picture is going to be.
“You will simply have to realize and to accept one basic fact, Bob, and that is that, as long as I am alive and able to do so, I intend to retain the final authority for myself.
“Now I dont think this is so damned bad from your standpoint.
“Anyway, you are stuck with me.”
At the time, that did not seem too high a price to pay. Especially given the $600,000 French Colonial mansion Hughes built for Maheu just off the third fairway of the Desert Inn golf course. Jealous rivals called it “Little Caesar’s Palace.” A modified plantation house with a touch of Las Vegas-style splendor, the mansion had two tennis courts, an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, a patio shielded from the evening chill by an invisible warm-air curtain, a private screening room, parquet flooring, and twin curved stairways that could have come out of Tara. But most important of all, it had a direct telephone line to Hughes in his penthouse hideout half a mile away.
Anyone who had seen the two men talking—Maheu in a custom-made suit flashing gold-and-diamond RAM cufflinks, seated at a big polished desk in the paneled office of his new mansion, Hughes sprawled out naked on his paper-towel-insulated bed in a cramped, filthy, darkened room surrounded by debris—would have assumed that Maheu was the billionaire, and wondered why he was engaged in marathon conversation with an obviously deranged derelict.
While Hughes lay huddled in his somber seclusion, Maheu flashed through Las Vegas with flamboyant relish, flew about the country in a private Hughes jet, entertained royally on his oceangoing yacht, hobnobbed with movie stars and astronauts and Mafia dons, dropped in for state dinners at the White House, and played tennis with Nevada’s governor.
Now, to top it off, he had been offered overall command of Hughes’s entire empire. Everything was going according to plan.
Or so it seemed. But if Maheu looked and lived like the billionaire, Hughes in fact still was. And as he had warned Maheu when he dangled before him the keys to the kingdom, “You are stuck with me.”
The battle for control was not over. It had hardly begun. No sooner had Hughes promised Maheu full command than he was gripped by a growing paranoid fear that Maheu would take over completely. He never exactly withdrew the offer, but neither did he ever actually give Maheu the job. Instead he suggested a “trial arrangement,” an “informal gentlemens’ understanding,” a “word of honor agreement” they would for the moment just keep to themselves.
Maheu was perplexed. “Howard, as to the over-all informal authority, what good does it do unless the officers of your company are so notified?” he asked. “They certainly have no reason for taking my word on a matter of such significance.”
6
Robert C. Kuldell, general manager of Hughes Tool Company when Hughes inherited it, fired in 1938; Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, top scientists at Hughes Aircraft who quit in 1953 and founded TRW, Inc.; Frank Waters and James Arditto, Hughes’s political lawyers who both quit and filed suit against Hughes in 1961.