Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. Not because home has changed so much, but because home’s not there anymore. So I came back to Las Vegas and the Desert Inn sooner than expected.
And the place was in a turmoil. Jerry Alberts had been kidnapped.
I couldn’t understand how this had happened. Jerry was under strict orders not to leave the ninth floor. Maybe, I thought, he got bored. Maybe he went out to see to some woman. No one knew. This, of course, was the thinking that was going on when I came back, when it was discovered that he had been kidnapped. You see, until then, Bill Gay and the Mormons thought I had been kidnapped. They had no way of knowing it was really Jerry. They only had the vaguest idea that I employed doubles. That was my private system of checks and balances.
What had happened was that about three days after I had left for Mexico, my people received a ransom note asking for a million dollars. This situation had never arisen before, but the men had their instructions. First they tried to establish contact with me in my apartment – an emergency signal – but there was no answer to it. The protocol then was to break in, and they discovered that I was missing.
Now I’ll jump ahead a little bit and tell you this from my point of view. I returned, as I said, considerably earlier than I had planned. I probably was away ten days in all. When I walked in, that is, when I established communication with my people again, their mouths hung open and they said, ‘But, Mr. Hughes, how did you escape?’
I misunderstood. I said, ‘How I left is none of your business – I’ve told you that before.’
They yelled: ‘But, Mr. Hughes, you’ve been kidnapped!’
I said, ‘Is that so? Tell me about it.’
The story came out about the ransom note.
But this was six days after they had received the note. I said, ‘Why haven’t you paid the ransom?’
You can believe there were some red faces. They had all sorts of excuses for that. First of all they weren’t sure it was me.
Did you still use the ‘Pay Damn Quick’ code?
Yes, and the note that was supposed to have come from me, accompanying the ransom letter – while it was a good forgery of my handwriting, nevertheless it didn’t have in it the letters ‘PDQ.’ That was one reason they gave. Also they said they were trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, to get some proof that they really had me.
I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, I could have had my throat slit by now.’
My point was that despite the code we had arranged, I wasn’t satisfied with the reaction I had got from my people, because for all they knew I might have been given drugs by these kidnappers and unable to remember what I was supposed to put down.
When I got back and explained that it was Jerry who had been kidnapped, each of these Mormons said to me: ‘I wanted to pay, Mr. Hughes, but not the other – not him.’
We were faced with an extraordinary situation. The kidnappers had Jerry, who they believed was Howard Hughes – at least that’s what we assumed, even though I realized that Jerry would have told them he was a double – and they were demanding a million dollars for the wrong man.
Someone said, ‘Don’t pay, Mr. Hughes. After a while they’re realize they have your double and they’ll let him go.’
‘They may not believe him,’ I said. ‘They may kill him if I don’t pay.’
You met and discussed all this with your people?
I didn’t meet them face to face. It was discussed on the telephone. But they knew damn well it was me, and they knew damn well I wasn’t calling from some place up near Reno, where the kidnappers were supposed to be. They knew I was right there on the ninth floor on the other side of the wall.
Finally we worked it out. These people, whoever they were, got in touch with us and were told they had the wrong man. They believed it finally, because Jerry had insisted, and although he was my double he didn’t look precisely like me – he had a little nervous tic which I don’t have, thank God – and his voice was quite different, much deeper than mine. I spoke to one of them on the telephone. They realized they’d made a mistake, but they said, ‘If you want this man back alive, it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars.’ Why they selected that sum, I don’t know, but they did.
It was paid in cash, twenties and hundreds left under a cactus bush outside of Reno. It was all done like a cheap Hollywood gangster thriller, and Jerry was delivered unharmed, a little bruised and dirty – he hadn’t bathed in a week – and apparently very grateful that I had saved his skin.
That was the end of it, except that a few weeks later, Jerry quit working for me. He quit under peculiar circumstances. He was being well paid for doing damn little, but he gave some excuse that his wife was sick and he felt he should be with her in the East. And then, before we had time to discuss whatever his real problem might really be, he was gone.
It came out shortly after that – not from me, I wasn’t the least bit suspicious – but from other people who did a little investigating – that Jerry was starting to live pretty high on the hog in the Virgin Islands. Then I realized what had happened. I can’t swear to it, but it looked like I’d been taken for $100,000. And if my people had been more diligent and more deeply concerned about me, I would have been taken for a cool million. There was no kidnapping mob, there was just Jerry and a confederate.
The funny thing is, I didn’t try to track him down. Once I got over my first annoyance at having been bilked, I found I had a secret admiration for the man. He had guts, and it was a clever scheme. I told Helga and she agreed. I saved most of my annoyance for my Mormon bodyguards who would have let me rot.
Finally I decided to leave Nevada. I was too old to be disillusioned. Call it a disenchantment.
A number of things caused it. The Atomic Energy Commission, for one. The AEC put out a brochure about their Nevada test site in which they called it ‘America’s Outdoor Nuclear Explosives Laboratory.’ They presented it like a handbill for tourists. Nevada is relatively uninhabited, so naturally it’s fair game.
The first stage came about when they fired off a hydrogen bomb underground at a place called Paute Mesa, no more than a hundred miles from Las Vegas. Windows broke downtown, people heard it within a hundred miles, and the shock waves were felt in Los Angeles. It clocked well above five on the Richter scale. I left, of course – I slipped away to a safer place.
The other big negatives were the slow collapse of America’s SST program and the fact that I lost the appeal on the original $137 million default judgment in the TWA litigation, which, with lawyers’ fees and interest, had climbed up in the lofty neighborhood of $250 million. The government said, ‘You’ve got to pay.’ And just as I said when the United States Senate demanded I bring Johnny Meyer back to Washington from St. Tropez, I said, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’
But before I left Nevada for good, I decided to take another trip. Not to Mexico this time. Not for pleasure. This time the trip was for a measure of enlightenment, and to save what was left of my life.
31
DURING THOSE YEARS in Las Vegas I had been involved in a lot of reading. And before that too. Not long after my last visit to Ernest Hemingway, I began reading other things besides novels. I’d always read casually for diversion, but then for the first time in my life I began to read in order to learn. And I don’t mean to learn engineering or anything like that. I got curious about Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I had found very little satisfaction finally in the way I’d grown up, with all the things all American kids are supposed to be proud of being able to do, to repair things and to build things, and to make money. These had become, for me, dry, mechanical operations with no deeper value than practicality. They didn’t answer any of the questions that were looming larger and larger for me.