“Under these circumstances, your statement that you intend to be here tomorrow evening for a social engagement, whether I like it or not, and even if it means a severance of our business relationship of twenty years standing, this comes as a pretty severe shock.
“Frankly this scares the hell out of me, Bob,” he concluded, despite his dark suspicions not yet ready to make the final break. “I am fearful that one of these disagreements we have may one day reach a dead end.”
If Hughes was afraid that his relationship with Maheu was coming to a dangerous dead end, the Mormon aides who encouraged those fears were afraid that Maheu would discover their whispering campaign.
“We hope you will consider our security as seriously as we consider yours,” the frightened attendants wrote their boss from the room next door. “The thing that really bothers us is that we gave you a confidential message about the organization that Bob has built up and you immediately pass the entire message on to Bob, and in even stronger language.
“Bob is a smart guy and would be able to figure out in a second where this information came from. They have things locked up real tight here and if they know where an open gate is, they will soon close it. We would just as soon remain personna grata with the entire organization. We will be more useful to you and it will be safer for us.
“You must remember that so long as you live we come under the mantle of your protection, but if anything should happen to you, we would be at the mercy of somebody,” added the conspiring nursemaids, less than sanguine about the long-term prospects of their bedridden boss.
“You have assured us that we have nothing to worry about, and we don’t—as long as you are healthy enough to function, but after that what?”
The atmosphere of double-dealing and dangerous intrigue grew more intense just one week later when Hughes discovered that Maheu had secretly slipped back into Nevada, and was hiding out at his country retreat in nearby Mt. Charleston. Far worse, he had used one of the loyal Mormons to deceive Hughes into thinking he was still in obedient exile.
Hughes flew into a jealous rage. Maheu had violated his harem, his polygamous immediate family, and Hughes was even more angered by the seduction than by Maheu’s defiant homecoming.
First he turned on the hapless Mormon.
“Roy,” he wrote, “there is no use of us fencing or manoeuvering about this any longer.
“For Maheu and his people to be evasive with me and cover up for one another is serious enough. But when this practice penetrates into my own, personal, most trusted staff, it is a great deal worse.
“Roy,” he continued, lecturing the faithless aide, “my relationship with you and your group must be on a basis of such complete trust that I do not ever have to pause, consider, reflect, or wonder—not even for a fraction of a second—not ever—and not about anything.
“If I cannot have this kind of ‘Stock Exchange’ trust with my own top echelon inner sanctum, how can I ever hope to have loyalty from more remote executives?”
Next Hughes turned on Maheu. His secret return, his penetration of the palace guard was final proof of his clandestine takeover.
“Re your whereabouts—I dont want to debate this until I get settled at my destination,” wrote Hughes, still frantically plotting his escape, now desperate to move his headquarters out from under Maheu before Maheu could steal the empire out from under him.
“I only hope everybody accords my forthcoming trip the same security and secrecy that was given your movement to Charleston Peak.
“Bob, I dont say you intentionally fail to inform me of things, I just say you have created such a spirit of loyalty to you and your group of people that it simply amounts to an ‘organization-within-an-organization.’
“I perhaps could live with this. You have said you must inspire loyalty to get the job done.
“But when my immediate, personal group of five very most trusted senior executives, men who have been with me for many, many years, who have been granted by me authority to place my signature to commitments involving hundreds of millions of dollars—I say when these men are so fearful of being in the posture of disclosing some scrap of information which might displease you—to the extent that I virtually had to cross-examine Roy and drive him into a corner to bring out the fact that you had returned, I feel this is going too far.
“Nobody wants to be in the unpleasant position of being an informer,” concluded Hughes, who was now constantly hearing whispered tales of Maheu’s treachery from the very Mormons he feared had been seduced, “but the conscious feeling of tension that my close friends and associates feel when the conversation touches on you or anything concerning you, is so evident that I cannot help but be aware of it.”
Now, more than ever, Hughes had to escape Las Vegas. He had to escape Maheu as well.
All this time, while his relationship with Maheu was falling apart and the tensions within his empire growing, Howard Hughes had been making urgent plans to bust out of his penthouse, getting conflicting advice from the rival courtiers and driving all of them crazy with his constant alerts and endless delays.
He was afraid to go, afraid to stay.
Day after day Hughes tried to make good his getaway, but each step was terrifying. For three years he had not left his blacked-out bedroom, had not once even looked out his window, and by now the entire world outside was a dangerous unknown. He could hardly bear to think about the perils, much less actually walk out into them.
Day after day Hughes found one reason after another to put off the trip, but never let the planning or the stand-by alert flag for a minute.
His greatest fear was of being seen. But the billionaire had a plan. He would announce that he had already left, then sneak out sometime later.
“I want to consider very seriously the immediate issuance of a brief statement announcing that I have forthcoming plans which will be announced in due course,” he wrote, “and that in the meantime I have left on a long overdue trip abroad in connection with certain interests I have overseas.”
Maheu was dubious.
“Howard, I am fearful that such a statement would cause your exit without being seen to be an impossibility. I can just visualize a 24 hour coverage of the Desert Inn by reporters, free-lance photographers and what have you. The logistics could be handled much more advantageously if such an announcement were made shortly after you have in fact departed.”
Despite his fears of Maheu, Hughes still depended on the ex-FBI and CIA agent for security, so even as he plotted to escape his protector he continued to rely on his expertise. Still, he would not easily give up his plan.
“It seems to me the go-but-not-be-detected deal would be more difficult to accomplish,” he reasoned, “because if your principal were seen, just for one second, getting out of an automobile, or such-like, the success of the project would be destroyed.
“On the situation we are discussing, nobody sees anybody except for one small group of highly trusted men.”
It was hard to argue against that. As long as Hughes remained in his lair, no outsider would see him. The plan, however, had one serious flaw. It would work only so long as Hughes stayed up in his penthouse.
“I guess a whole new plan is indicated,” he reluctantly conceded, and once more threw himself into the planning.
Each day he made a definite decision to leave the next day, or certainly the day after, but there were so many important details to work out, so many dangers to consider.
“Only one feature of this trip causes me to hold off until Monday,” he informed his Mormons after weeks of delay.
“I want someone to make the trip from the D.I. to the point where the airplane will be parked here, and someone else to make the movement from an airplane to the door of the apartment at the destination, and both take along some kind of an air temperature measuring device, and both men to report maximum temp. encountered during the entire transition process, and duration of any high temperature encountered.