5
Fear and Loathing
The Bogeyman. Right there in his room.
A huge gargoyle of a blackamoor, horribly greased and dripping filth, a savage threatening unspeakable crimes, had violated his sanctum sanctorum, slipping past the locked doors, the armed sentry, and the phalanx of Mormons through the one unguarded opening.
Howard Hughes, sick with fear and revulsion, cried out in the night to Maheu.
“I hate to disturb you this late,” he wrote in a shaken scrawl, “but I just saw something on TV that litterally and actually physically made me nauseated and I still am!
“I saw a show on NBC in which the biggest ugliest negro you ever saw in your life was covered—litterally covered from head to foot with vaseline almost ¼ of an inch thick. It made you sick just to look at this man.
“Bob, the producers must have deliberately tried to make this man as repulsive as possible. Anyway, he walked over next to an immaculately dressed white woman—sort of an English noblewoman type.
“Well, when this repulsive gob of grease came close to this clean carefully dressed white woman, all I could think was ‘Jesus, don’t let that woman touch him.’”
But it was too late. Not even Hughes could protect the purity of white womanhood from the potent forces of blackness.
“So, after a minute or two of talk this man grabbed this woman, opened his mouth as wide as possible and kissed this woman in a way that would have been cut out of any movie even if the people involved had both been of the same race.”
His Mandingo complex fully aroused, the outraged Texan was ready to call out a lynch mob. But no, the crime could not be punished.
“Bob, this show seems to be the presentation of the Broadway version of the Oscar, so I imagine the scene I described was a scene taken at random from the winning play….
“I was all for making a protest to some congressional committee over this,” continued Hughes, “but now that I see it is the Tony awards, I feel it is even more shocking, but I suppose one should approach it with caution.”
Another great white hope unfulfilled. The “repulsive gob of grease” was, in fact, James Earl Jones playing prizefighter Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, a segment of which was televised in the awards presentation. That realization did nothing to still the billionaire’s sense of outrage.
“Bob,” he concluded, “I dont care if this was the re-enactment of the Last Supper, that first scene is going to cause some comment.”
Of all of Hughes’s phobias and obsessions, few were more virulent than his fear and loathing of blacks. His was a classic racism straight out of plantation melodrama, often expressed in terms so outrageous that it seems a parody. But he was deadly serious, and his bigotry had very real consequences. He did, after all, own the plantation.
Hughes himself attributed his prejudice and paranoia to a traumatic event in his youth. “I was born and lived my first 20 years in Houston, Texas,” he explained. “I lived right in the middle of one race riot in which the negroes committed attrocities to equal any in Vietnam.”
In fact, when Hughes was only eleven there had been a dramatic explosion of black rage in his rigidly segregated hometown. On the night of August 23, 1917, more than one hundred soldiers from an all-black infantry battalion stationed near the city seized rifles and marched on Houston to avenge the beating of a black officer by white policemen. Sixteen whites were killed in the three-hour uprising. The Houston riot was a milestone in America’s ongoing and, until then, rather one-sided race war—the first in which more whites were killed than blacks.
Undoubtedly that night did have a real impact on young Howard. However, now, half a century later, the well-guarded recluse was besieged not by armed mobs but by phantoms of his own creation. Consumed by a nameless dread, he projected his fears onto a variety of unseen enemies. Sometimes they paraded before him in blackface—a minstrel show of his subconscious mind.
Actually, it was his terror of blacks that had driven Hughes to take a first decisive step into total seclusion. After their marriage, Hughes and Jean Peters lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, seeing each other only for marathon movie-watching trysts at night. They met each evening for their own “Late-Late Show” at Goldwyn Studios until Hughes discovered that his screening room there had been used to show rushes of Porgy and Bess to its all-black cast. He never set foot in that theater again.
Nor did he ever again invite Jean to watch movies. Instead, Hughes moved alone to Nosseck’s Projection Studio on Sunset Boulevard, set up house there, kept his new location secret from his wife, and told her he was in the hospital with an “undiagnosed disease.” It was half-true. For it was in the three months Hughes spent alone at Nosseck’s that things first turned really weird.
At first he spent his time talking to bankers and lawyers about the TWA crisis, all the while compulsively cleaning the telephone with Kleenex or endlessly arranging and rearranging a half-dozen Kleenex boxes into various geometric designs. For several weeks he wore the same white shirt and tan slacks. Then one day he stripped off his rancid clothes, went about naked, stopped talking to bankers and lawyers, and ordered his aides to maintain strict silence.
Finally, Hughes issued a blanket decree: “Don’t try to get me for anything. Wait until I call you. I don’t want any messages handed to me.”
Now he was set. He remained at the studio in silent seclusion until the late summer of 1958, when he suddenly moved back to his bungalow—and there had a complete nervous breakdown.
It probably would have happened even without Porgy and Bess. Blacks may have precipitated the move that cut him off from his wife and left him alone with his madness, but blacks were not the real threat. The real threat was “contamination.”
It was not merely the purity of white womanhood that obsessed Hughes, it was the purity of his entire world. And that purity was endangered not merely by big ugly blacks but by innumerable other forms of “contamination.”
The most dangerous was invisible. Germs.
Hughes set up bivouac in five pink bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and from his headquarters, bungalow 4, commanded his troops in the germ-warfare campaign.
With germs, as with blacks, there had been childhood traumas. Both his parents had died suddenly, unexpectedly, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was eighteen. But his long-standing terror of bacteria was by now irrational. And it dominated his entire life.
Hughes cut off all human contact—everyone was a dangerous carrier—except for his clean-living elite Mormon guard. And even they had to follow stringent rules designed to prevent the “backflow of germs.”
The few who dealt with him personally, or handled anything he was to handle, first had to engage in a thirty-minute purification ritual called “processing”—“wash four distinct and separate times, using lots of lather each time from individual bars of soap”—and then don white cotton gloves.
Even that was not sufficient. Finally, Hughes demanded that everything his Mormons delivered to him with their gloved processed hands also had to be wrapped in Kleenex or Scott paper towels, “insulation” to protect him from “contamination.”
But he was hardly yet safe from the invisible threat. Seated naked in a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his darkened bungalow, its windows sealed shut with masking tape, the billionaire began to dictate a complete “Procedures Manual,” a series of meticulously detailed memos codifying such rules as the number of layers of tissues required in handling particular items, such as the clothes he now almost never wore.