“Although the doctors are not sure whether this is the contagious type or not, I consider it to be highly contagious,” explained the master physician. “Although we have had reason to put into effect a program of isolation before, I want this to be ten times as effective as any we have ever set up.
“With the present condition of my business affairs, if Jean, myself, or anyone else important in our organization were to acquire this disease, I just cannot even contemplate the seriousness of what the result may be.
“When Cary Grant got this disease in London some time back, he said that for six months he was totally and utterly unable to do anything other than just lie in bed and wish he was dead.
“I therefore want a system of isolation with respect to Cissy, the doctors attending her, nurses, or anyone in the past or future coming in contact with her, that is so effective and complete that anything we have done in the past will be nothing compared to it. I want this to go through the eighth or tenth generation, so to speak. Not only do I want this isolation to include personal contact, but also any items such as papers, clothing, flowers, TV sets, etc., that are transmitted to her, either direct or through the mails.
“Cut off every conceiveable channel of contact. Whether it be an object or thing, a letter or note, an invoice from a vendor, from the doctors at the hospital, no matter what it is it should not be permitted to come into our establishment. It will not be permitted to come into contact with any of our people, with any friends of our families, relatives or anyone else. See that absolutely no conceiveable avenue, channel or loophole is overlooked.
“I consider this the very most important item on the agenda, more important than our TWA crisis, our financial crisis, or any of our other problems.”
Contaminated women had always been a special problem. Once, years earlier, Hughes had burned all his clothes, everything he owned—suits, shirts, ties, socks, overcoats, even all his towels and rugs—after he heard a rumor that an actress he once dated had a venereal disease.
Now he didn’t have any clothes to burn, nor did he see any women. In fact, Hughes may well have gone into seclusion largely to escape his new wife. He began to withdraw almost as soon as they got married. Clearly he could not share his life, could not handle the intimacy. But it was more than that. Hughes actually seemed to be afraid of the woman he code-named “The Major.” The troubles he had in a simultaneous affair with a teen-age mistress, more fetchingly code-named “The Party,” suggests there was an even deeper reason.
All the while he courted Jean, Hughes was seeing his teen angel on the side. She was the last of the harem. Barely sixteen when he plucked her out of a local beauty contest, she remained on standby even after his marriage, stashed in a carefully decontaminated hideaway at Coldwater Canyon, under guard and under surveillance. Hughes brought her to his bungalows only once, to celebrate his fifty-third birthday on Christmas Eve 1958, his last extramarital fling.
It seems to have been less than a complete success. As months went by without another date, “The Party” cursed and browbeat Hughes unmercifully. The guards bugging her phone heard her tirades.
“You dirty old son of a bitch,” she screamed. “You never come to see me. I’ll bet you can’t even get it up anymore, you impotent old slob!”
Impotent. The playboy hero of The Carpetbaggers, known for his string of starlets, may have been driven into seclusion by his fear of women, as desperate to escape his wife—and hide his impotence—as to escape the germs and the blacks and all his other nameless terrors. Soon he would flee her forever, move to Las Vegas alone, and spend the rest of his life surrounded by male nursemaids.
But he would never find sanctuary from “contamination.”
In the past, Hughes himself had been the only victim of his fears. His ten-year battle against “contamination” had been waged within the confines of his blacked-out bedrooms. The fight had been to keep the outside world from getting in. A purely defensive struggle. Now he went on the offense. Now the same terrors that had driven him into seclusion also drove him to control the world outside.
He tried to decontaminate all Las Vegas, the fallen city he had come to purify. Its impure water quickly became an obsession.
“I maintain that you cannot build a resort of world-wide fame and lasting importance upon a basic foundation of pollution,” he declared. “Nevada must not offer its tourists water from a polluted, actually stinking lake.
“I say the question goes beyond the matter of purity vs. impurity, on a basis of technical analysis. I say the real question is whether a sophisticated, thoroughly pampered tourist, a tourist who has been exposed to the careful treatment accorded him in the major, highly refined resorts of the world, I repeat the question is whether this tourist is going to feel comfortable in the confidence that the water which he is drinking, and in which he is bathing, is the pure mountain spring water pictured in the Coor’s Beer advertisements, or whether, instead, he is going to have the uneasy, revolting feeling that the water he is forced to drink, the water used to make his drinks at the bar, and the water in which his food is cooked, that this water, in which he is also forced to bathe and wash his hands, that this water is, in truth, nothing more nor less than sewage, with the turds removed by a strainer so it can be pumped through a pipe.
“The name, quote Lake Mead Water unquote, means nothing more or less than sewage!”
Hughes was definitely one of those who had an “uneasy, revolting feeling.” He never let up in his battle to scuttle the state’s entire new eighty-million-dollar water system.
Indeed, all Las Vegas, all Nevada, finally all America fell victim to his endless runaway fears, as Hughes, from his penthouse, conducted search-and-destroy missions to protect himself from all imagined dangers. Among the prime targets were the state’s thirty thousand blacks.
It was still blacks who instilled the most terror. They seemed the visible embodiment of all the invisible threats.
The Great White Hope trauma made that clear. Blacks were potent, mocking his impotence. Blacks were dark, brown, like the poison he could not release from his own bowels, like the sewage in the water. Blacks were not merely dirty. They were Giant Germs.
They had to be kept in “isolation.”
Up in his penthouse, Hughes was seemingly safe from all outsiders, black or white. Yet even there he was constantly tormented by dark intruders. To make matters worse, they entered with the connivance of his own television station.
“Isn’t there any safe way to get rid of this TV academic program on ‘Black Heritage’ which CBS is carrying every morning?” wrote Hughes, in obvious distress.
“As you know, this program was commenced without my permission.
“Since then I have been forced to squirm under the intense displeasure of watching this program every morning—I have to watch and listen every morning while the only academic program on KLAS pours out such propaganda as: ‘Africa is the mother and the father of the world.’”
As with that other bane of his existence, “Sunrise Semester,” Hughes apparently never considered the simple expedient of switching off his set. Actually, he had finally escaped the dreaded harbinger of dawn. “Sunrise Semester” was, at long last, off the air. It had been replaced in the 6:30 A.M. time slot by “Black Heritage.” Squirming in displeasure, the billionaire fumed:
“Bob, if KLAS is to broadcast one single academic program and if this program is to be a study of history, why should not this be a program of U.S. history instead of a program of African history.