God of Speed Page 15

  It was not the kind of loan I’d normally engage in; and I didn’t engage in loaning. But Dick was fresh in office, under Dwight D., and with such a huge winning margin it paid to be friendly. Generosity was the point. If one had the wherewithal to secure certainty in any of its guises or to increase the odds of outcomes, if one could make the future safer, better known, then one’s duty was to follow down that path. Dick Nixon per se was nothing to me; his bones were a highway.

  The point is, no male called Nixon was to be responsible if the loan defaulted. And Dick himself was the ultimate cleanskin, of course. We secured a place in Whittier as collateral, held under Hannah’s name. Donny had once run a gift shop on the site. Now it was a gas station, leased to Union Oil. By the waters of Babylon dat fossil fuel did flow.

  How indeed can we sing our song, in oh such a very strange land? Donny, of course, squandered the two hundred and fifty thousand about as quickly as is humanly possible, and in February came crying to us, through seven removes yet again, What am I to do, oh woe is me. I got Noah to set up a committee, informal of course, to see if we could save the Nixonburger chain. I wasn’t, you may not be surprised to hear, Jack, interested in saving the Nixonburger itself; I just wanted Brother Dick in as much compromise as possible. Little Brother Donny said words to the effect of, Trust me, there is a bright future, a big future involved in an ever-expanding network of franchises delivering to a growing customer base hamburgers of unwavering quality quickly and in a clean environment. Whoever gets in early, Donny assured us, will come to know untold riches. All this relayed to me by Noah.

  I said to Noah, Expanding my ass. Expanding delusional fantasy. The fact is the man owns three restaurants which are going under as we speak. I said, See what you can do to ward off the creditors. And get Bob Maheu to call the vice-president; let Dick Nixon know, loud and clear, what we’re doing for his family, for the continuance of its good name. Well, Maheu spoke to a Nixon aide. He was a very eloquent man, our Bob, despite his shortcomings.

  The message got through. On the First of March the IRS handed down its decision: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute was now a tax-exempt charitable organization. That’s why it’s the colossus it now is, Jack. All this helped me immeasurably in avoiding a few tax issues and some problems relating to Hughes Aircraft and a number of spurious, or rather, annoying, claims of mismanagement. Deus ex machina be praised. I tender all these as unrelated facts. By the end of 1957 Nixon’s, Inc. had collapsed and Nixonburgers, such a grand and glorious dream, with it. Donny got a job in middle management with Carnation Milk.

  How’s the Milkman, I would say to Noah. We had a good laugh over that.

  Eventually the Milkman filed for bankruptcy. I never saw the two hundred and fifty grand, never expected to, didn’t lose any sleep. For a while my gas station in Whittier chugged along just fine.

  Memo to Bob Maheu,

  June 6, 1968

  2.00 a.m.

  Bob—have been watching all day and night on Channel 8 the Bobby Kennedy news. I hate to be quick on the draw, but I see here an opportunity that may not happen again in a lifetime. I don’t aspire to be president, but I do want political strength.

  I have wanted this for a long time, but somehow it has always evaded me. I mean the kind of an organization where we would never have to worry about a jerky little thing like this antitrust problem—not in 100 years.

  And I mean the kind of set-up that, if we wanted to, could put Gov. Laxalt in the White House in 1972 or ’76.

  Anyway, it seems to me that the very people we need have just fallen smack into our hands. Also, if we approach them quickly and skillfully, they should be as anxious to find a haven with us as we are to obtain them …

  So, in consideration of my own nervous system, would you please move like lightning on this deal—first, to report to me whom you think we want, of Kennedy’s people, and secondly to contact such people with absolutely no delay the minute I confirm your recommendation. I repeat, the absolutely imperative nature of this mission requires the very ultimate in skill. If it is not so handled, and if this project should leak out, I am sure that I will be absolutely crucified by the press.

  However, I have confidence that you can handle this deal, and I think the potential, in manpower and in a political machine all built and operating, I think these potentials are just inestimable, and worth the risk—provided you move fast. Please move at once.

  9.00 a.m.

  All right, I need to clarify this further. I want us to hire Bob Kennedy’s entire organization—with certain exceptions, of course, I am not sure we want Salinger and a few others. However, here is an entire integrated group, used to getting things done over all obstacles. They are used to having that Kennedy money behind them and we can equal that. The group was trained by John Kennedy and his backers, and then moved over to RFK when John died.

  It is a natural for us. I am not looking for political favors from them. I expect you to pick our candidate and soon. I don’t want an alliance with the Kennedy group, I want to put them on the payroll.

  PLANETS FILLED WITH MEN

  I MUST ASK Jack whether he ever tried a Nixonburger. Because he’s missed his opportunity now!

  Where was I? I was working out how to tell him how this “Watergate” business fitted in. Because back then the Nixonburger loan cost Nixon the ’60 presidency, in that the IRS tax break I was granted while Nixon was VP, after we’d helped out his brother, saved me millions, and in that this news somehow became public in the ’60 election race and helped ruin Nixon’s chances. JFK the conquering hero, all hail. Not a thing I could do about Dick Nixon’s 1960 woes; it was nothing to do with me. Some crusading east coast journalists stirred the whole thing up.

  Years later, separate issue, after RFK was killed by Sirhan Sirhan, it struck me how close RFK had been to becoming president. The Kennedys had been a thorn in my side for decades. I’d been as big a contributor to them as to Nixon, of course, but they were a particularly hard nut to crack, and sometimes I felt I was pissing my money up against a wall. At least with Nixon, you knew the man had a price, and you pretty much knew what it was.

  So RFK was dead now. A terrible business. We must put a candidate in the White House who knows the facts of life, I said to Maheu. It did not seem too much, I thought, to hope to elect a president who would not only be deeply indebted to us but who would recognize his indebtedness. But I was ever at the mercy of the tidal forces, of life itself, pulling events this way and that.

  Maheu eventually brought us Larry O’Brien from the Kennedy camp. We put him on a retainer of fifteen thousand dollars a week to act as my consultant, not that I ever met him, of course. He was a seasoned warrior, a real old salt, who went back to the JFK campaigns. We called him The Navigator. What’s important always is to find the right place, and the right people, and then go ahead and buy what we want! The plan was to use his knowledge or at the very least compromise his integrity. (What did he think was going on for fifteen grand a week?) No, I’m joking. But word did come back to us via other conduits that Nixon was appalled by our snaffling O’Brien. Oh, we trembled in our boots.

  I could see Nixon’s point, though. O’Brien did know a lot about getting people elected. And back then, five long years ago, I’ll admit I was nurturing the idea—I’ve given it up now, and London is so pleasantly far away—of placing someone in the White House. Of course it was an added bonus, too, that O’Brien knew a lot about federal antitrust law, and I was juggling all sorts of tax issues in this era, as you know. All this scared Nixon so badly that he always wanted to get rid of O’Brien. As if Larry’s sole purpose on the planet was to bring Nixon to his knees. That was Nixon’s problem: he thought the whole world revolved around him. The reality was, we were merely shifting Larry O’Brien into private enterprise. Or rather, we decided it was time to begin viewing politics as being an efficiently functioning sub-branch of big business.

  But Nixon’s paranoia was at fever pitch. This is the p
oint I’m trying to get to, Jack. Eventually he ordered his burglars to break into O’Brien’s office in the Watergate Building, and bug phones, ransack files and search for dirt on the relationship between me and dear Larry, who I never even met or spoke to, as I said. The capacity of the government to spy on its citizens was a breach of the contract of trust we entered into by voting in a democracy; my god, the contract of trust we entered into by being born in the United States of America. My own paranoia was garden-variety in comparison to Nixon’s, and I believe I had a more valid claim to it, extending as it did back to ’47 and the Senate investigation into my deals with the military for the Hercules flying boat and the Constellation. What am I saying? In fact, by ’47 the FBI had been tailing my every move for four years—listening in on my phone conversations, even checking my sheets in hotels. You had to take it all with a grain of salt.

  Nixon could have learned a lesson from all this. But he was obsessed, he was irrational. He sent out his burglars in the middle of the night and got more than he bargained for. And now even the Brits are reading about it in the London Times.

  It tires me to talk about all this now, Jack. It seems so long ago. Myself, I don’t care for personal charisma. Politicians come and go; back then I just wanted to cover not only the bases but the possible permutations thereof. I’d come too far to let my guard drop, as small men do—and heaven knows the planet is filled enough with them.

  Another surprising thought, of course, when you think of planets filled with men, is that the entirety of everybody who has ever lived on this earth is still on it, or, more to the point, under it. When I think too much of that, this need for any one of us to get the upper hand on any other one seems mildly absurd. But I guess these days I’m more relaxed.

  Then again I might say to Jack, Sometimes my lower hand simply doesn’t know what my upper hand is doing!

  THE EARLY BIRD

  BUT MY EMPIRE always knows. I think of it as “electrospace”. In ’65 we put the Early Bird in orbit, twenty-three thousand miles straight up: the world’s first communications satellite. Hughes Electronics, thank you very much. My dream was a world in which everything was instantaneous—phone calls, television, ecstasy. We called it the Geosynchronous ComSat. Everything else flowed from that. From high in space my signals spread, packets of energy, photons and bleeps. Howard …Howard … Howard … everything trailed and echoed around the globe.

  And other globes too: on the Ocean of Storms, on the surface of the moon, the Hughes Surveyor 1 landed, in 1966. We sent the first photos back to earth. I was everywhere at once. My satellites kept going up. We photographed the communists; they couldn’t hide. Missile guidance systems: mine. Early-warning radar: mine. Antitank missiles: mine. Range, bearing and height data: a high-speed Hughes computer. Television coast to coast: carried to you on a Hughes cable system. The laser: Hughes Research Laboratory invented that, in 1961. I was everything, Jack, I was everywhere, for a while.

  Even the Hughes Aircraft Company, which eventually I let run itself, did good things, or so I am told. Globes within globes, networks beyond networks. The smallest globe was the drop of solution protruding from the tip of the needle. There was even a world in there.

  THE NATURE OF ACCIDENTS

  OH, THERE WERE so many worlds. Some were easier to manage than others. Certainly there were some unhappy endings. I never finished telling you, Jack, about pretty Yvonne Shubert. She certainly did some growing up and wising up in the couple of years that followed that overcommitted New Year’s Eve, 1955, when I still had my sea legs—and a taste for it all. It was the end of an era. I wasn’t to know it at the time, but she ended up being the last of the young ones—well, other than silly Jean Peters, but I’m not counting wives. It wasn’t all pretty, I’m the first to admit it now.

  Yvonne knew my men kept tabs on her movements, though I don’t imagine she would have known, at least not in the early days, that her phones were bugged. She practiced counter-surveillance and occasionally practiced it successfully, eluding some of my best men, getting herself out for nights on the town. I suppose now, lying in state, years away and galaxies away, I can understand. I was young once, too. I had kept her so isolated from her peers, that other choir of giggling girls, heads full of Photoplay and Hollywood. Away from the attentions of all those young and gormless, penniless men that young women seem so attracted to. I had kept her from a kind of growing up. She snuck out and searched for it in all the wrong places. Maybe there was something else she wanted, too: the body of a young buck. And I’m loath to admit it, but his stamina, too. Who knows? I was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. I was heading toward sixty! It is all such a frightening … It is all so fucking frightening.

  She snuck out and searched for it and found it. What can you do? I should have wished her all the best. I should have stood aside. I should have been decidedly European. I should have known my time had come, was coming. I should have found for her, at last, a role in a film, however small. I should not have strung her along, her or anyone else. I would have liked to have discovered how I fared on my own merits. But without the things that made me up I was nothing, I was no one. Without the money, without the fame. I just needed to curl up, I only wanted to curl up, to curl up in their arms, to bury my head in their soft breasts, and possibly, eventually, if all was safe, to weep. I just wanted, like all of us do, for my hair to be stroked.

  And Yvonne, perhaps, wanted only to grow, at something resembling the normal rate.

  I am assailed by headaches. It is no way to live.

  I am struggling to retell all their stories. I must give them their due. It is a paltry way to remember them. It is better than nothing. For this and all my other sins I am truly sorry, Jack.

  She snuck out and searched for it and found it. She found a young man called Johnny Rand, an ex-marine and a big-talker who thought he was a gangster. He was, in fact, a fool. All her conversations were bugged, of course. So we knew she liked him. We knew they talked and schemed. We knew she knew she was under surveillance. They talked about it in their bugged phone calls. He told her she was a prisoner. He spoke of looking after her, of harming me if necessary. She said, Be careful, I was very powerful, be careful even saying that. Howard could hurt you more than you could hurt him. Howard could hurt you more than you could know.

  I have a gun, he said.

  We knew they had plans to shake my men off. And they almost did. They changed cars three times. And where did they end up? At a firing range in Long Beach, where he wanted to test a gun he’d bought, and teach her how to shoot.

  And get this: he killed himself, in front of her. Such a strange coincidence. It was the darnedest thing.

  An accident at the shooting range. I am not making this up, Jack. His gun misfired; he turned it round to check the barrel; he shot himself in the head.

  Now I had told Maheu to look after this chap. To deal with him. If Maheu did it, I am proud of him. I’m not saying he did it; coroner said it was an accident. I’m just saying if Maheu somehow organized it, I am proud of him.

  Yvonne was hysterical, wound up in hospital. She’d had a bad run with hospitals. A couple of months earlier she’d found out she was pregnant. I knew I was the father; my operatives had accounted for her every movement for a couple of years now. After the operation, she went a little funny. Turned up in hysterics at my bungalow once or twice; it was out of order, but what can you do? She had been through some experiences, she was only seventeen. It’s after that she started getting stroppy and more reckless. She rubbed Johnny Rand in my face. She didn’t care what we knew.

  In any case, Maheu justice or universal justice, the situation sorted itself out.

  She was really the last of the women; it’s been me and the drugs and the darkness ever since.

  It’s been such a grand old passage of the years!

  BLUEPRINT FOR CHANGE

  BUT ALL THAT may be changing soon; the drugs and the darkness, I mean.

  I may have mentioned to
you, Jack, that Cary Grant has been in London this week, and leaving messages with my men. How simple things once were; in another time I would have picked up the phone and said, Hello there, Cary! Just like that. Let’s meet at the Hyde Park Corner. Let’s meet at the Trafalgar Monument! Let’s take a walk.

  Because I’d very much like to see him. And I want him to see me, but not quite in this state. The vanity of an old man, Jack. Get some pink back in my cheeks, is all I’m talking about.

  What would I need to do? Let’s think about this. Well, I’d need to slowly reduce off the Empirin. I’m sure I can do that. I’ll only have every second injection. That sounds achievable. That’s what I’ll do. Every time it’s time for an injection, I won’t have it, until it’s time for the next one. Let me work out the mathematics of it. There’s something exponentially decreasing in this. I could be stopped a lot faster than I think. Then I can catch up with everyone, for old times’ sake. Not just Cary, but Randolph Scott as well—but no, Randolph is dead, I think—in any case everyone who’s still alive. Perhaps Randolph is alive after all. My god, I have little idea of who’s dead. Sometimes I see it on the news. When Ginger Rogers died I didn’t cry, but I dreamed that night of her radiant cunt. Anyway, all the living can come over, including all the girls, heading toward their middle ages now, or else already old like me, heading to that apotheosis common to us all, the desiccation of species.

  Yes, exponentially decreasing. I’m sure this can be done! Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One step, one little step at a time. Every second injection henceforth no longer exists. It is only the potentiality of injection. How much discomfort can I bear? Well, it’s not as if I’m a weak man. At Fessenden School I was a wrestler, and I was substitute tight end. Over my shoulder I watched the football spiral toward me from out of the sky, perfection of arcing, my only touchdown, one touchdown per lifetime is enough. The twenty yard line becomes the ten, the ten the five, such glory looms. All these disguises of zero, of which the goal line is merely another. I was approaching zero knowledge. I was fourteen years old. No dream was impossible. A little discomfort is nothing. I’ve known loss of consciousness at thirty thousand feet. Been sleep-deprived for days on end, around the globe and otherwise. Broken bones and ruptured spleens. Frozen near to death in cockpits everywhere. Burned into my clothes beside the wreckage of my plane. Weathered goddamned Egyptian mosquito plagues at Camp Teedyuskung, and held out, despite knowing that my mother was panicked and fretting in a hotel nearby (ready to swoop me out of that place), despite knowing that the mosquito plague was the perfect excuse, despite knowing the grand treats she would shower upon me before our return to Houston, holding out simply because I knew I could do this and because I needed my mother to leave me alone, holding out because being away from her was not nearly as bad as she’d had me believe it would be and, goddammit, Camp Teedyuskung was the greatest fun I’d ever experienced. And there was nothing wrong with mud! How much discomfort can I bear? How much have you got?