A COOL tropical breeze blew from the sea, gently swaying the palm trees and curtains in the open lobby. Dancers in Tiffany’s, the hotel’s lavish discotheque, were unlimbering, preparing to make a long night of it. In El Grotto, the swim bar just beyond the lobby, a dozen or so couples splashed about in the glowing pool, sipping drinks or quietly slipping through the cascading waterfall to the artificial cave that lay beyond it.
Twenty stories above, on the top floor of the Acapulco Princess Hotel, Chuck Waldron hunched over a desk, making entries in the day’s log. From the adjoining room, he heard Hughes call. Irritated, Waldron shoved the papers aside and went into the room. The old man was really being a nuisance tonight.
“Pour me some water,” Hughes said.1
Waldron took a bottle of water from the refrigerator in the adjoining room and poured a fresh glass. Hughes raised the glass slowly to his lips but did not drink. Waldron watched the old man set the glass on the night table and went back to his desk. It was his job to file memoranda, letters, reports, work schedules, and other communications. No one had assigned these tasks; they were just things he felt compelled to do. He usually found the desk strewn with papers when he reported for duty because none of the other men felt the same need. Waldron was fastidious; he liked everything in its place. Hughes called again and Waldron returned to the bedroom.
“Some water.”2
“You’ve got some,” Waldron told him.3 Four partly filled glasses stood on the nightstand next to the old man’s bed.
“Well, that’s warm now,” he complained feebly.4
Waldron took the glasses, emptied them, and poured Hughes another. Sitting down at his desk, once more he heard the high-pitched quavering voice.
Waldron was running out of patience. There had been no peace tonight. He must have poured thirty glasses of water, and the old man had barely touched any of them. He seemed to want Waldron in the room with him all the time.
“You don’t need any water,” Waldron called out in irritation and bent again to his work.5 Now Hughes fell quiet.
At 4 A.M., about halfway through his eight-hour shift, Waldron brought in a strawberry tart and a cup of milk and set them down on the tray in front of Hughes, who looked at the food impassively.
“I want you to eat it,” Waldron said.
“Not now.”
“No, I want you to eat it,” Waldron said firmly.
“Well, leave it and I’ll…” The voice trailed off in midsentence, as though Hughes could not put together what he wanted to say.6 In a little while, the old man ate a bite of the tart and took a sip of milk before sinking back onto the pillow behind him. Waldron returned to his desk.
Hughes now lay still. Outside it was dark, but inside the room day and night looked the same. Thick draperies were taped over the windows to seal out the light. The passage of time was marked only by the three shift changes in the next room as Hughes’s aides came and went. From his hospital bed at one end, Hughes could see a bench, a luggage rack, and two chairs near the center of the room, and a chest of drawers along one wall. To one side of the bed were a movie projector and an amplifier. On either side of him were heavy rectangular nightstands. Atop one was a small metal box. At the far end of the room, near the movie screen, he could see the door to the hotel hallway. It was boarded shut, secured by a two-by-four attached to metal brackets.
The old man must have felt terrible. His mouth and throat were dry. He had sores on his back, and the left side of his head hurt from the time he had fainted and fallen over onto the nightstand. He felt a constant urge to urinate. He was listless and sometimes lay motionless in the bed for hours. Now, lying in the dark, hovering near unconsciousness, he mustered the energy to move.
Reaching for the metal box on the nightstand, his hand fumbled inside it and pulled out a syringe filled with a pale white liquid—codeine. He called the needle his plaything and he longed for those moments when he could stick it in his arm, depress the plunger only part of the way to send a little of the liquid into his body, humming and singing to it as it dangled from his arm, then depress the plunger again, releasing the rest of the liquid while he sang over and over, “Hey bob a ree bop, hey bob a ree bop.”7 A few weeks before, when he was living in the Bahamas, he was told his needles would be taken away unless he moved to Mexico. He was told there was no more codeine in the Bahamas, but in Mexico there would be more codeine than ever before. The old man had agreed. Now he was silent as he took the syringe from the box. He only popped the needle into his arm and pushed.
Hughes had stopped eating. Every day they brought him food and every day he turned it away. It was not the first time he had refused to eat. They had seen him go without food for days at a time. Sometimes he simply stopped eating as a reaffirmation of his powerful will. But this time it had nothing to do with will.
About 7:30, Jim Rickard came on duty and Waldron spent a few minutes briefing him. Then he left and Rickard went into the bedroom and saw Hughes propped up, dozing. Hughes always slept that way, not liking to be in a supine position. He looked tired and worn, his long gray hair and beard unkempt and scraggly. Rickard could not remember a time when Hughes had slept as much as he was sleeping now. Perhaps he should let Los Angeles know how sick the old man was. It was not really Rickard’s place to say anything; he was the junior member of the group. But Hughes had not eaten any substantial food in nearly two weeks.8 Before his shift ended, Rickard put in the call to Los Angeles.
At 4 P.M., George Francom came on duty. It was his first shift back after two weeks of leave in St. George, Utah. Francom had never understood the reason for the sudden move to Mexico. It had made no sense to him to move a failing man from the Bahamas, where they had everything they needed, to Acapulco, where nothing seemed to work, where there were few supplies, and where none of them could even speak the language. No one had asked his opinion, of course. Acapulco was one headache after another. The electricity and air conditioning were inconstant. They had difficulty importing supplies. They had to change cooks. Hughes was upset by the slightest variation in routine, and these disruptions had made him moody and cantankerous.
He did not eat for the next three days. Francom did get him to drink a little milk, but that was all. Dr. Norman Crane, one of two personal physicians then on duty in the penthouse, went in to see him a few times, but other than recommending that Hughes should eat and drink more, there was no treatment. Growing steadily weaker, Hughes spent his days sleeping or lingering in a semiconscious state. In his rare wakeful moments, he was confused, disoriented, and often incoherent.
Jack Real, a Hughes executive and one of Hughes’s oldest associates, later said that he put in a telephone call to Logan, Utah, for Dr. Wilbur Thain, the physician who had overall responsibility for Hughes’s medical care. As Real recalled the conversation:
“I don’t want to play doctor, Wilbur, but your patient is dying,” Real said.
“Well, goddamn it, you are playing doctor and mind your own business,” Dr. Thain said.
“Wilbur, you need to get here,” Real repeated.
“I’ve got a party in the Bahamas and I’ll come over after that,” Dr. Thain said.9
Hughes’s decline was making all of them uneasy. They had wondered for years what would happen when he sank to this stage. Putting him in a hospital was not an appealing option, but in the past they had at least been close to good hospitals. Now they were hundreds of miles from one, and without an airplane. The organization had airplanes all over the world, yet none had been sent to Mexico. But whatever was done with the old man would not be decided by the men in the penthouse. They knew this was a decision for Los Angeles.
When Francom came on to relieve John Holmes at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon, April 3, 1976, Hughes was delirious. He spoke very slowly, each word a struggle, and put together the words only made gibberish. Hughes was trying to tell Francom something, but he could not make out what it was. Something about an insurance policy.10 Hughes kept repeating, “insurance policy, insurance policy.” Francom’s inability to understand frustrated the old man, and he called Holmes back into the bedroom. Then, as both stood next to the bed, Hughes launched into the same disjointed monologue, saying over and over something about an insurance policy. Holmes also failed to understand; he and Francom stared uncomprehendingly at each other as the old man mumbled on.
The doctors drew a blood sample from him that afternoon. They usually had to beg. He did not like to be touched. Now, in his weakness, he put up little resistance when they inserted the needle. The blood, and a urine specimen, were sent to a local laboratory. The results were mixed—“numerosos” red and white blood cells in the urine and slightly elevated levels of glucose, uric acid, and creatinine in the blood.11 None of these readings was especially serious. But the report also showed an exceptionally high urea level—104.5 milligrams—a strong indication that dehydration was becoming critical.12 A normal adult count ranges from 20 to 38 milligrams.
On Saturday evening, Francom came into the room and saw a hypodermic syringe dangling from Hughes’s arm. Hughes was now so feeble he could no longer insert the needle and depress the plunger. He had broken off half a dozen needles in both arms trying to give himself shots.13 When the syringe fell from his arm and dropped to the floor, Hughes motioned for Francom to give him the injection.14 Francom refused. Hughes was not in pain. What he needed, desperately, was fluids, not a fix. Francom called Dr. Crane. When Crane arrived, he put the syringe in Hughes’s arm and injected the codeine15 and Hughes dozed off. That night, one of the men spoke again to Los Angeles and gave a full report on the old man. There was still no decision on what to do, where to take him.
At midnight, when Waldron relieved Francom, Hughes was awake and delirious. Waldron had hoped to get the old man to do a little work that night. He took a document into the bedroom for him to sign. It was a proxy authorizing more people to draw checks on Hughes’s personal account. Hughes would not take it; he mumbled something about having other papers to sign. Waldron was puzzled. What other documents could Hughes be talking about? Waldron kept track of the papers and there was nothing else for him to sign except the proxy relating to his checking account. Hughes was now back to his litany about an insurance policy. Waldron thought he understood him to say it was a policy covering Waldron and his children, but there was no such insurance policy.
Hughes grew weaker during the night. By the next day he could no longer talk, and that afternoon he slipped into a coma. When Francom came on duty, Hughes was lying motionless in bed, staring blankly ahead, looking pale and wasted. Once in a while he would slowly close his eyes, then reopen them. Francom noticed something else he had never seen before. Hughes’s face and neck were twitching.
In the office next to the bedroom, calls were going back and forth to Los Angeles. Still no decision, but the men were told that Dr. Thain would be flying in the next day.
At midnight on Sunday, April 4, when Waldron reported for his shift, Francom told him that the old man was worse. During his shift, Francom had anxiously summoned another of Hughes’s personal physicians, Dr. Lawrence Chaffin, to the bedroom. Waldron looked in. Hughes was propped up in bed unconscious, his face and neck twitching uncontrollably. Dr. Chaffin sat at his bedside. Sometime after midnight Chaffin came out of the bedroom and asked Francom and Waldron to summon Dr. Thain to Acapulco at once.16 There was another flurry of telephone calls to Los Angeles. Thain was tracked down by phone an hour later. A small, private air ambulance had been hired from a Fort Lauderdale company. The plane would pick up Thain in a few hours and bring him to Mexico.
At dawn on Monday, April 5, Thain had not yet arrived, so Chaffin put in a hurried call to an Acapulco doctor, asking him to come to the Princess Hotel to examine a patient who was very ill.17 Dr. Victor Manuel Montemayor responded quickly, and by 5:45 A.M. he had ascended in the service elevator of the Princess to the penthouse and made his way first into Room 2008, then Room 2010, and finally Room 2012, the bedroom.
The man lying in the hospital bed appeared to be suffering from a seizure. When Dr. Montemayor pulled back the sheet to begin his examination, he was appalled at the body underneath, a long skeleton clad in wrinkled, wasted flesh. The sick man was tall, over six feet, but he weighed less than a hundred pounds. A tumor gaped open on the left side of his scalp. His forearms were splotchy with black, blue, and yellow marks. His left shoulder was bruised and swollen. Bedsores covered his back. Needle tracks ran up and down both arms and thighs. What Dr. Montemayor could not see was that enough codeine circulated inside the body to kill an ordinary man.
As he took the man’s blood pressure, felt his pulse, and listened to his heart, Dr. Montemayor could not understand why this patient was not in a hospital. Money could not be the reason. This was the most expensive suite in the most expensive hotel in Acapulco, yet this man was starving, dying of neglect like a beggar. The seizure, Montemayor soon diagnosed, was caused in part by the failure of the brain to receive enough blood—a condition made worse because the patient’s head was raised. After making his tests, Dr. Montemayor concluded that the man was suffering from severe dehydration and should be given oxygen and intravenous fluids immediately.18
Dr. Montemayor looked up from the bed and asked the two doctors why the man was not in a hospital. They answered that he was a very difficult patient who did not like hospitals. Looking down at the helpless, unconscious wreck before him, Dr. Montemayor was puzzled by the explanation.
“This man should be in a good hospital,” Montemayor told Chaffin. “As a friend, I’m telling you, don’t stay here in Mexico to find a hospital. Take him back to the States.”19 Packing his bag to leave, Montemayor took one last look at the old man on the bed, concluding that although seriously ill, the man need not die if he were taken immediately to a hospital and given proper care.20
In the office next to the bedroom, word came in—Los Angeles had decided. Hughes was to be taken to a hospital. Several locations had been considered: Salt Lake City, Miami, the Bahamas, even London. In the end, they had settled on Houston. The plane bringing Dr. Thain to Mexico was to carry Hughes back to the city of his birth, and the city he had avoided since the deaths of his parents fifty years before. One of the men in the office telephoned the Manzanaris Funeral Parlor in Acapulco and ordered an ambulance.
It was after 7 A.M. that Monday morning before Dr. Thain finally arrived. Instead of going immediately to see Hughes, Real said Dr. Thain moved into the office next to the bedroom and began rummaging through the filing cabinets, pulling out papers that had flowed between Acapulco and Los Angeles, feeding them into a shredder.21 To Jack Real, it seemed that Thain spent two hours destroying documents before he went in to examine Hughes.22 Then he wrote a prescription and asked one of the men to have it filled. When the medicine arrived a few minutes later, Thain used it to give Hughes several injections.23 As he was giving him the shots, he mentioned to the others in the bedroom that sometimes it took a while for the medicine to produce a reaction. As the minutes ticked by, Hughes showed no change. He lay in a trancelike state, oblivious to everything around him, breathing with great difficulty.
At 10:30, the men began preparing to take him to the plane. The hotel security chief was alerted to make the service elevator available and to clear the ground floor near the elevator doors of onlookers. An aide left for the airport to make sure the airplane was in the proper location and ready. Another went in search of carts sturdy enough to handle the oxygen tanks and other medical equipment.
At 11 A.M. they lifted Hughes out of bed, placed him on a stretcher, and carried him down the hall to the elevator, which took them straight to the lobby. The doors opened and they quickly carried him through a cordoned-off section and out the rear door into the parking lot. The ambulance driver leaped out to help load the old man and the equipment into the rear.
At the airport, far from the terminals bustling with tourists, a small white jet sat parked. The men got out of the car and lifted Hughes from the ambulance, carrying him up the steps of the plane. As they took Hughes aboard, his lips moved slightly. The oxygen tanks came next, but in the small cabin there was scant room for the cylinders; several minutes elapsed before the oxygen system was operating again. Dr. Thain, Dr. Chaffin, and Holmes went aboard, the door closed behind them, and the plane taxied into position at the end of the runway. At 11:30, the control tower gave clearance for takeoff and the jet moved smoothly forward.
It rose sharply over the face of the Sierra Madre del Sur, the rugged coastal range that defines Mexico’s southern coast, before passing the crest and leveling off. The pilot set a northeasterly course for Houston. The day was bright and clear, with good visibility and moderate winds. Below were Mexico’s jagged peaks, lush forests and valleys, and sun-bleached villages white against the green hills. It was a perfect day for flying, the kind of day when Howard Hughes had loved to be at the controls.
In the cabin, the old man’s pulse and heart grew weaker. His life signs were barely detectable. An hour out of Acapulco, where the foothills of the Sierra gave way to the flat, desertlike terrain of northern Mexico, Hughes’s breathing became more erratic. His chest rose and fell in forced gasps under the bright yellow blanket pulled up to his bearded chin. Then, at 1:27 P.M., his heart stopped. Behind the plane, glistening in the afternoon sun, was the wide, brown swirl of the Rio Grande. Howard Hughes had finally come home to Texas.