Slouching Towards Bethlehem (7 page)

Not long ago I spent some time with Michael Laski, down at the Workers’ International Bookstore in Watts, the West Coast headquarters of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.). We sat at a kitchen table beneath the hammer-and-sickle flag and the portraits of Marx, Engels, Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, and Stalin (Mao in the favored center position), and we discussed the revolution necessary to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Actually I was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary. He had with him a small red book of Mao’s poems, and as he talked he squared it on the table, aligned it with the table edge first vertically and then horizontally. To understand who Michael Laski is you must have a feeling for that kind of compulsion. One does not think of him eating, or in bed. He has nothing in common with the passionate personalities who tend to turn up on the New Left. Michael Laski scorns deviationist reformers. He believes with Mao that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, a point he insists upon with blazing and self-defeating candor. His place in the geography of the American Left is, in short, an almost impossibly lonely and quixotic one, unpopular, unpragmatic. He believes that there are “workers” in the United States, and that, when the time comes, they will “arise,” not in anarchy but in conscious concert, and he also believes that “the ruling class” is self-conscious, and possessed of demonic powers. He is in all ways an idealist.

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest “depression,” did venture that it might have been “depressing” for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them. Michael Laski, you see, did not feel as close to me as I did to him. “I talk to you at all,” he said, “only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services. Basically you want to conduct the same probe the F. B. I, would carry out if they could put us in a chair.” He paused and tapped the small red book with his fingernails. “And yet,” he said finally, “there’s a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence.”

Still, he was not going to discuss with me what he called “the underground apparatus” of the C. P. U. S. A. (M. -L.), any more than he would tell me how many members constituted the cadre. “Obviously I’m not going to give you that kind of information,” he said. “We know as a matter of course that we’ll be outlawed.” The Workers’ International Bookstore, however, was “an open facility,” and I was free to look around. I leafed through some of the Uterature out of Peking
(Vice-Premier Chen
Yi Answers
Questions Put by Correspondents)
,
Hanoi
(President Ho Chi Minh Answers President L
.
B
.
Johnson)
,
and Tirana, Albania
(The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito
’
s Policy and the Undeniable Truth)
,
and I tried to hum, from a North Vietnamese song book, “When the Party Needs Us Our Hearts Are Filled with Hatred.” The literature was in the front of the store, along with a cash register and the kitchen table; in back, behind a plywood partition, were a few cots and the press and mimeograph machine on which the Central Committee prints its “political organ,”
People
’
s Voice
,
and its “theoretical organ,”
Red Flag
.
“There’s a cadre assigned to this facility in order to guarantee the security,” Michael Laski said when I mentioned the cots. “They have a small arsenal in back, a couple of shotguns and a number of other items.”

So much security may seem curious when one considers what the members of the cadre actually do, which is, aside from selling the
People
’
s Voice
and trying to set up People’s Armed Defense Groups, largely a matter of perfecting their own ideology, searching out “errors” and “mistakes” in one another’s attitudes. “What we do may seem a waste of time to some people,” Michael Laski said suddenly. “Not having any ideology yourself, you might wonder what the Party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the Party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination.”

But of course that was offering a great deal. The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered. Let me tell you about another day at the Workers’ International Bookstore. The Marxist-Leninists had been out selling the
People
’
s Voice
,
and now Michael Laski and three other members of the cadre were going over the proceeds, a ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners.

“Mr. —
Comrade
—Simmons—what was the total income?” Michael Laski asked.

“Nine dollars and ninety-one cents.”

“Over what period of time?”

“Four hours.”

“What was the total number of papers sold?”

“Seventy-five.”

“And the average per hour?”

“Nineteen.”

“The average contribution?”

“Thirteen and a half cents.”

“The largest contribution?”

“Sixty cents.”

“The smallest?”

“Four cents.”

“It was not a very good day, Comrade Simmons. Can you explain?”

“It’s always bad the day before welfare and unemployment checks arrive.”

“Very good, Comrade Simmons.”

You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

1967

seven thousand romaine
Street is in that part of Los Angeles familiar to admirers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset Boulevard, a middle-class slum of “model studios” and warehouses and two-family bungalows. Because Paramount and Columbia and Desilu and the Samuel Goldwyn studios are nearby, many of the people who live around here have some tenuous connection with the motion-picture industry. They once processed fan photographs, say, or knew Jean Harlow’s manicurist. 7000 Romaine looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped
art moderne
detailing, the windows now either boarded or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads
welcome
.

Actually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. That the Hughes “communications center” should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world—involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-tool subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, and an electronics and missile operation—run by a man whose
modus operandi
most closely resembles that of a character in
The Big Sleep
.

As it happens, I live not far from 7000 Romaine, and I make a point of driving past it every now and then, I suppose in the same spirit that Arthurian scholars visit the Cornish coast. I am interested in the folklore of Howard Hughes, in the way people react to him, in the terms they use when they talk about him. Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago I lunched with an old friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the other guests was a well-married woman in her thirties who had once been a Hughes contract starlet, and another was a costume designer who had worked on a lot of Hughes pictures and who still receives a weekly salary from 7000 Romaine, on the understanding that he work for no one else. He has done nothing but cash that weekly check for some years now. They sat there in the sun, the one-time starlet and the sometime costume designer for a man whose public appearances are now somewhat less frequent than those of The Shadow, and they talked about him. They wondered how he was and why he was devoting 1967 to buying up Las Vegas.

“You can’t tell me it’s like they say, that he bought the Desert Inn just because the high rollers were coming in and they wouldn’t let him keep the penthouse,” the ex-starlet mused, fingering a diamond as big as the Ritz. “It must be part of some larger mission.”

The phrase was exactly right. Anyone who skims the financial press knows that Hughes never has business “transactions,” or “negotiations”; he has “missions.” His central mission, as
Fortune
once put it in a series of love letters, has always been “to preserve his power as the proprietor of the largest pool of industrial wealth still under the absolute control of a single individual.” Nor does Hughes have business “associates”; he has only “adversaries.” When the adversaries “appear to be” threatening his absolute control, Hughes “might or might not” take action. It is such phrases as “appear to be” and “might or might not,” peculiar to business reportage involving Hughes, that suggested the special mood of a Hughes mission. And here is what the action might or might not be: Hughes might warn, at the critical moment, “You’re holding a gun to my head.” If there is one thing Hughes dislikes, it is a gun to his head (generally this means a request for an appearance, or a discussion of policy), and at least one president of T. W. A. , a company which, as Hughes ran it, bore an operational similarity only to the government of Honduras, departed on this note.

The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal. There is the one about the barber, Eddie Alexander, who was paid handsomely to remain on “day and night standby” in case Hughes wanted a haircut. “Just checking, Eddie,” Hughes once said when he called Alexander at two in the morning. “Just wanted to see if you were standing by.” There was the time Convair wanted to sell Hughes 340 transports and Hughes insisted that, to insure “secrecy,” the mission be discussed only between midnight and dawn, by flashlight, in the Palm Springs Municipal Dump. There was the evening when both Hughes and Greg Bautzer, then his lawyer, went incommunicado while, in the conference room of the Chemical Bank in New York, the money men waited to lendT. W. A. $165 million. There they were, $165 million in hand, the men from two of the country’s biggest insurance companies and nine of its most powerful banks, all waiting, and it was 7 p. m. of the last day the deal could be made and the bankers found themselves talking by phone not to Hughes, not even to Bautzer, but to Bautzer s wife, the movie star Dana Wynter. “I hope he takes it in pennies,” a Wall Street broker said when Hughes, six years later, sold T. W. A. for $546 million, “and drops it on his toes.”

Then there are the more recent stories. Howard Hughes is en route to Boston aboard the Super Chief with the Bel Air Patrol riding shotgun. Howard Hughes is in Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Howard Hughes commandeers the fifth floor of the Boston Ritz. Howard Hughes is or is not buying 37½
percent of Columbia Pictures through the Swiss Banque de Paris. Howard Hughes is ill. Howard Hughes is dead. No, Howard Hughes is in Las Vegas. Howard Hughes pays $13 million for the Desert Inn. $15 million for the Sands. Gives the State of Nevada $6 million for a medical school. Negotiates for ranches, Alamo Airways, the North Las Vegas Air Terminal, more ranches, the rest of the Strip. By July of 1967 Howard Hughes is the largest single landholder in Clark Country, Nevada. “Howard likes Las Vegas,” an acquaintance of Hughes’s once explained, “because he likes to be able to find a restaurant open in case he wants a sandwich.”

Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the
Titanic: how the mighty are fallen
.
Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe:
the beautiful and damned
.
And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another. A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.” “I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation....Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.” Officially we admire men who exemplify those ideas. We admire the Adlai Stevenson character, the rational man, the enlightened man, the man not dependent upon the potentially psychopathic mode of action. Among rich men, we officially admire Paul Mellon, a socially responsible inheritor in the European mold. There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.