Posted on 09/08/2001 5:02:31 PM PDT by Pokey78
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HE journeyed into madness in darkened, fetid hotel rooms, naked but for a piece of linen covering his groin. Yet Howard Hughes, the reclusive American billionaire, continued to arrange business deals, court starlets and write detailed memos to his staff on how he expected to be treated.
"The man serving HRH [Howard Robard Hughes] first unfolds the tablecloth and spreads it on the eating table with HRH's help," said one memo. "He then hands HRH the sterile knife and fork . . . HRH accepts all those items by holding a Kleenex and putting them on the table himself."
Hughes, who boasted that he could buy any man or destroy him, found staff who were willing to carry out his orders unquestioningly.
While the billionaire's eccentric behaviour is well known, Richard Hack, the author of Hughes: the Private Diaries, Memos and Letters, which is published in America this week, has drawn on newly uncovered personal letters, sealed court testimony and interviews to reveal the extent of his manipulative and paranoid behaviour.
Orphaned at 19, Hughes was used to getting his own way. He inherited his father's tool company, which manufactured highly profitable oil drill bits, and used his fortune to finance a career as a Hollywood film producer and aviator. His compulsive attention to detail helped him to build his business empire but it degenerated into mental disorder.
According to Hack, "Hughes wrote memos dictating the correct procedure to lift a toilet seat, hang a towel, enter a room, answer a telephone, take a message and dozens of other tasks, including a four-page memo on the art of speaking without moving one's lips".
Ava Gardner, the film star, told Hughes she would not marry him because he stank. Despite his obsession with germs, occasioned by two early bouts of syphilis, he lived in squalor surrounded by piles of newspapers and hypodermic syringes, used to inject himself with drugs. He spent hours in the bathroom, where he would urinate against the wall.
In the midst of his decline, he still considered himself a playboy. The man who, in his prime, had bedded Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, bought up naive starlets, installed them in hotels and pretended he would help their careers. He made meticulous notes of their heights, chest sizes and preferences for flowers, chocolate or ice cream.
His delight in detail was such that he instructed his drivers to prevent any unnecessary jarring of the women's breasts: "The speed of the car should not exceed 35mph at any time. When crossing any bump, dip, ditch or railroad track, the speed should be reduced to such a minimum speed that the car can move over the uneven part of the road with no violent motion that would tend to disturb the position of the party (2mph has been suggested)."
Nearly 30 years of his life were spent in a rented bungalow in the grounds of the Beverly Hills hotel, where the maître d' of the lounge restaurant still remembers serving him. Wendy Schnee, communications director of the hotel, said: "Hughes was the only long-term guest we ever had who paid us a day rate. Our room service attendants used to leave his meals at the base of a tree outside his bungalow."
Hughes was not a great lover. Bette Davis claimed he had a limp libido and he confessed to Cary Grant, one of his few close friends, that he was "eager but lazy". This did not prevent him from pursuing women energetically and he usually had several girlfriends on the go.
In 1957 he married the actress Jean Peters, who had been dating him on and off for a decade, but only when he was afraid he was going be declared insane and stripped of his business. Desperate to be perceived as normal, he had proposed to another actress first.
It was not the first time he had deceived her. On one new year's eve, he invited her to dinner in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills hotel, offered her a Cartier bracelet, pretended to take a phone call and went to join another actress in a nearby lounge. He then pulled the same stunt again and moved on to a teenage lover who was waiting for him in a bungalow.
After their marriage Peters longed for a home of her own, but found herself sharing his lunatic life at the Beverly Hills hotel. She was confined to a separate bungalow, where she spent her days knitting and sewing, and her telephone calls to him often went unanswered. Schnee says Hughes rented three bungalows so there was no shortage of room to install his mistresses. "Once Jean Peters realised he had other bungalows, that was a terminating factor in their relationship."
Peters has rarely spoken publicly about her marriage to Hughes, but she agreed to talk to Hack in the late 1980s. From this and interviews with some of Hughes's closest aides, he has assembled details of their final days together in the 1960s.
Under pressure from creditors, Hughes had been forced to sell his stock in the TWA airline and was told he would have to leave California if he wanted to avoid paying millions in capital gains tax. Although he had scarcely stirred from his bed for years, he decided to move to Boston.
Peters had not spoken to him for a fortnight, but she had seen the removal preparations and packed her own bags. She noticed a limousine pull up for her husband, watched him step in and waited for him at least to turn and say goodbye. He never did. When she finally learnt that he had moved to Boston, she went to his hotel room there and announced at the door that she was leaving him (his fear of germs meant that he did not allow her cross the threshold).
He begged her to stay married, but she had made up her mind. Hack writes that as she headed down the hall, she could hear a faint chorus of "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop". It was the tune Hughes liked to hum when he injected himself with drugs.
Hughes died 10 years later in 1976. By then his 6ft 2in frame weighed only 90lb and he was covered in bedsores. Yet throughout this time he managed with the help of aides who never saw him to build up a hotel business in Las Vegas and supply the CIA with specialist hardware for spies.
One of his last memos to his staff suggests he was losing his grip: "If you knew how unhappy it makes me when you are completely cold and unfriendly as you were tonight, I really don't think you would turn on the punishment outlet quite all the way. So all I ask is that you merely take into account the fact that my life is not quite the total 'bed of roses' that I sometimes get the impression you think it is."
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