Hughes was enraged by Maheu’s doubts. “If you want our relationship to endure at all I besiege you not to adopt your present attitude,” he shot back.
“I deny that I have failed to implement our confidential gentleman’s agreement. I emphatically deny that I have broken our agreement in any way whatsoever. This is just one more in a long string of assumptions you have reached in your own suspicious mind. I contend that our agreement is 100% in full force and effect. If anybody violates our word of honor agreement, it will be you and not I.”
The phantom top job became a major battleground.
“Howard,” wrote Maheu, taking a tough stand, “the agreement that we discussed and in which both of us concurred, was that I would be in charge of all the divisions of the Hughes Tool Co. If you have changed your mind, it is as simple as telling me so.
“I have made it very clear that I have no intent of accepting any position in your company unless you are the only one to whom I am responsible, and unless it is in fact the top position. If we cannot reach that understanding, then I want to accept several directorships which have been offered to me for some time with very favorable stock options.
“I think we must also remember, Howard, that it was not I who ever asked for the top job under you, but it was always you who offered it.”
Maheu’s threatened infidelity, his open toying with side affairs, his constant “Dear John” letters, drove Hughes into a jealous frenzy.
“You say: ‘It was not I who ever asked for the top job, but you who offered it,’” Hughes replied.
“I think this is a fairly accurate appraisal of our relationship. In other words, it is always I who am forced to ask you to do this or that, and it is always I who must ask you to overlook something which has offended you.
“I dont see what you gain by this chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.
“Bob, the only thing I can say in summary is that you seem constantly to place me in a position where I must beg you not to leave or beg you not to work for somebody else or beg you not to make outside investments.
“I just wonder how you would like it and how long you would endure the type of insults that you administer to me daily.
“Suppose I were to hover on the brink of asking you for your resignation, and suppose I were to repeat this attitude over and over, how would you feel?
“I suppose you will answer this by saying you are explosive by nature. But Bob, I am just as easily disturbed as you are.”
Hughes was, in fact, more than disturbed. He brooded about Maheu’s constant bullying and threatened betrayal late into the night, carefully reviewing their entire relationship more in sadness than in anger, composing a heartfelt memo before deciding to let passions cool overnight.
“I have been working for the last three hours writing you a long message,” he informed Maheu. “I feel very intensely and very bitterly about what you intend to do.
“I think it is important enough to give it fresh consideration in the morning. So why dont you get a good night’s sleep and I will send you this message in the morning.”
At the crack of dawn, he hit his estranged helpmate with his pained letter of lost love:
“Bob, I feel worse than you have any idea about my instinctive realization that you do not intend to remain with me.
“Anyway, tragic as this is to me, I assure you I will have no bitterness about it if you will only try to do it in as considerate a manner as possible.
“On numerous occasions, I have endeavored to turn over a new leaf with you and tried to get to the bottom of the flaw in our relationship and correct it.
“Time and time again I have plead with you to help me find out what was bugging you and eliminate it so that we could have a really trusting relationship in both directions.
“You have always insisted that nothing was the matter and that I could rely on your remaining with me the rest of your life.
“Yet now you are doing something obviously intended as a severance of our relationship.
“I have sensed some frightening incident like this.
“You see, you have penetrated into my activities to an extent where practically every single phase of my life is dependent upon you. You have handled it this way and you have resented any contact I have with outsiders.
“This would be OK if you were likewise completely dependent on me. But this is not the case. By your skillful handling of things, the major part of my daily life seems to flow through Maheu Associates.
“You have carefully kept your firm alive. I told you on numerous occasions that the one thing I could not accept was a part time arrangement. I certainly have paid on a full time basis.
“It seems to me that, in your view, you are still Robert A. Maheu Associates, and I am just a client.”
Just a client. What a sad, brutal realization. He had allowed himself to be swept away, to fall for, become totally dependent on a man who considered him just another client.
Hughes’s deep insecurity about Maheu’s fidelity touched every aspect of their relationship. The phantom top job offer became a running battle, one of many in their ongoing battle for control, not so much over the empire as over each other. It would turn even the most trivial disputes into titanic emotional struggles.
Even a golf tournament.
It was no ordinary tournament, the one in dispute here. It was the Tournament of Champions, a Las Vegas institution that had long been a trademark of the Desert Inn. But no more. Hughes had ordered it out almost immediately upon buying the hotel in 1967, afraid that he would be contaminated by the hordes of spectators and, worse yet, spotted by the television cameras supposedly covering the golf match.
Maheu had tried to dissuade him. “What in the hell are you worried about?” he had asked. “I think we can control the scanning of cameras and increase the security so that you can be safe ‘in your castle’—which you damn right deserve. My only suggestion is that we make you a hero rather than the ‘prisoner of war.’ ”
Maheu had kept at him, but Hughes was adamant.
“I have been your whipping boy long enough,” he exploded, as the golf fight again aroused dangerous passions. “I dont intend to take any more abuse on this subject. I will not have the tournament at the Desert Inn because, to do so, would place me in the position of having refused to have it at the D.I. up to this time.”
So the golf tournament had been transferred to Moe Dalitz’s California resort, Rancho La Costa. In the years since, however, Hughes had grown increasingly worried that he would be blamed for the loss of this prestigious event. And now, in April 1969, Maheu was at La Costa on a do-or-die mission to bring the tournament back—not back to the Desert Inn, but back to Las Vegas.
The plan had been to close the deal and announce the coup on national television. But Maheu had failed in his mission to La Costa. Failed to recapture the golf match, and ruined the entire plot.
The plot against Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. Hughes had been scheming against them ever since the two top pros had refused to participate in the uprooted Tournament of Champions in early 1968. He saw it as a deliberate slap in the face and a grave peril.
“I think it would be the very worst public relations for these men to cancel out,” Hughes had written when the crisis began. “A lot of people may feel that this is the very first setback we have suffered. At best, you may be sure the newspaper writers will be very hostile about it and they will blame us in print all over the country.”
National disgrace. But it was more than that, more even than a good excuse to pick another fight with Maheu. Golf was a sensitive subject for Hughes. He had once dreamed of himself being a Nicklaus or Palmer, indeed had put it at the top of his list. While still in his early twenties, Hughes told Noah Dietrich: “My first objective is to become the world’s number one golfer. Second, the top aviator, and third I want to be the most famous movie producer. Then, I want you to make me the richest man in the world.” Only the golfing crown had eluded him. And now he was not willing to let Palmer and Nicklaus also slip away.