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"Well, if that's the way you want to to look at it," said Hughes. Dietrich walked toward the door, wondering if that was indeed the end. He heard Hughes call: "Noah?" "Yes?" Pause.
Anticipation. "You forgot your hat."
Bong-Bong. Hughes would of course notice a hat left behind. Afraid of being mugged, he fostered the myth that he never carried any money, when in fact he sometimes kept in the lining of his fedora a cache of several thousand dollars. At times, his trousers were weighted down with dimes and quarters, because he so frequently conducted his business from phone booths. "When you talked to him," says one friend, "it was 'clank-clank, bongbong' every few minutes. It sounded like the bells of St. Mary's."
For longer calls, Hughes used a private line—with good reason. TWA Vice President Robert Rummel, a former close associate, remembers business phone conversations that lasted nine or ten hours: "Once in a while we would take a ten-minute break."
Hughes is notoriously stingy, fearful of being a soft touch, but he understands the political uses of money. The Irving manuscript tells Hughes' version of his famous $205,000 loan to the brother of then Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956. Dietrich, who handled the matter for Hughes, has his own account in his book. After Hughes had approved the loan, Dietrich went to see Nixon and warned him that if the loan "becomes public information, it could mean the end of your political career—and I don't believe it can be kept quiet." According to Dietrich, Nixon replied: "I have to put my relatives ahead of my career."
For a man whose money has allowed him to design any life he chose, Hughes obviously picked an odd and joyless one. He always seemed both inwardly distracted by little leftover Calvinist furies and propelled headlong by a kind of ricocheting genius. He loved flying, but his pilot's license lapsed in 1960, and it is doubtful if he has flown much, if at all, since then. In his telephone press conference, he said rather wistfully that he wanted to fly again. His second marriage, to Actress Jean Peters, ended, like his first, in divorce. He has no children.
Into Seclusion. Hughes' first attempt at full-time seclusion came during the early '60s, when he rented a house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles and disappeared into it. Once, a friend came to visit his wife. When no one answered the bell, she walked in and sat down. Presently Jean appeared and the kaffeeklatsch began. But the guest noticed that Jean seemed oddly nervous, and finally realized what she was looking at—a pair of skinny bare feet showing from behind a pair of draperies. "Jean, do you think I should go?" the guest asked. "I guess you'd better," said Jean, glancing uncomfortably at the feet.
Hughes' reclusiveness has never been satisfactorily explained, though he makes a manful attempt to do so in Irving's manuscript. It obviously goes beyond an ordinary desire for privacy, beyond his shyness and his fear of