Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham

Author:Charles Higham [Higham, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sealed Rooms

Returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hughes moved into Bungalow 4, with Jean Peters in Bungalow 15. He was renting at least four bungalows in any given week. At one time, he moved to a suite in the Crescent Wing of the main building. He seldom went out. On one occasion, he was caught damaging hotel property: he was trying to cut down a fly-harboring bougainvillea bush with a pair of paper scissors. Even he could not get away with that, and no matter what he offered, the management would not let him have the beautiful bush dug up.

The nightmare continued. By mid-1958, Hughes was addicted to codeine (which he injected into his arm), Valium, and Demerol; he had fits of temper and emitted streams of meaningless words; he spurted his urine onto the bathroom door so that it trickled into his room; he extended his Kleenex obsession to Jean Peters. When she went to a theater or a movie, audience members would see her escort going through the astonishing ritual of cleaning the seat she sat on. Hughes began writing immense, complicated memoranda, in a surprisingly neat, schoolboyish hand, which, in essence, treated his employees like actors in a play of his composition, a play of such meaninglessness that even on the written evidence it is hard to believe.

One memo, dated October 13, 1958, was written to executive Kay Glenn, in a delirium of paranoia; accessible in the Hughes estate files in Houston, Texas, it shows, also, an obsession with controlling everything, every detail of his life, as though he were the God of a tiny world.

He forbade his aides to go into any area of his bungalow to which his man Johnny Holmes had exclusive access, no matter what circumstances might arise (presumably, that included earthquake—this was Los Angeles—or fire). It is extremely doubtful whether anybody on his staff obeyed these crazed instructions, at least on the rare occasions when he was neither vigilant, his eyes flickering rapidly round the room, nor sleeping. Hughes also insisted they not even fetch magazines, Kleenexes, or food; this meant that when he wanted any of these, or all three at once, only Holmes could get them—and Holmes was, of course, liable to want to sleep himself, or go out. No door to the storeroom could be opened even the tiniest fraction or for the very smallest amount of time. To confuse his addressee, Glenn, even more, he added at the end of the immense and hysterical document a requirement that the waiters (who were, after all, from the dangerous and contaminated outside world) be allowed to enter the sacred closets—an afterthought that made nonsense of everything that went before it. But, despite the character of the memo, which on the face of it seemed the work of a man out of his mind, it does not, on analysis, display insanity; rather, it resembles the words of the head teacher of a Victorian girls’ school, delivering instructions to the domestic staff.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.