Two years of cover-building, compressed by the author to their working scenes, and ending at Chester, Pennsylvania, on 4 November 1972, where the newspapers of the week corroborate him down to the band. Of the man in the title it is enough to say here that he appears nowhere in what follows, which is the point. —Ed.
The scheme wanted a temple, and the temple was already standing. At 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood, a block-long, two-story, windowless concrete building the color of an old bandage, built between the wars to store film, sat the communications heart of the Hughes empire, and from the summer of 1970 I was inside it on a Summa badge with a title I had written for myself: consultant, Ocean Mining Division.1 There was no Ocean Mining Division. There was me, a letterhead I had approved at a printer's on Cahuenga, and a budget with no visible bottom, which is the only kind the Agency issues when it is pretending to be a billionaire.
The place ran on Mormons. The proprietor had concluded years before that a man who won't touch coffee won't touch the till, and as corporate doctrine it beats most of what the business schools sell; they were courteous, pressed, punctual, and they moved his empire around the world on telephone calls and five-by-eight memoranda without one of them ever having seen him. Nobody had seen him. He had not been photographed since the fifties, signed nothing a court could love, and issued his wishes downward through two or three proxies the way weather comes down a mountain. I put my first memorandum in on a Thursday, proposing that the Hughes interests undertake the commercial mining of the deep ocean floor, and thirteen days later it came back down with APPROVED stamped on it in a proxy's hand.
"Did he read it?" I asked the proxy, a polished young man named Sorensen with a missionary's haircut.
"It was read."
"By him?"
"It was read," Sorensen said, without heat, the way you close a door you were never going to open. I asked, once, that first summer, when I might expect to meet the proprietor, and Sorensen considered the question seriously, as he considered everything, and said, "Never," in the tone other companies use for "Thursday."2
I want the reader to understand what I had been handed, because I had been twenty years explaining it to colonels and here it was built in concrete. In 1952 I taught a frightened officer that you kill a story by starving it of paper. A cover is the same religion recited backward: you sit down and write, with care, every page you intend the other man to find, and then you arrange for him to earn the finding of it. For the first time in my life I was being paid to generate paper, tons of it, and the vertigo took some getting used to, like a teetotaler hired to judge bourbon. I built the Ocean Mining Division the way a set dresser builds a parlor: letterhead, files, a program office in Long Beach with charts on the walls and core samples in the lobby; subscriptions, journal advertisements, recruiting notices for engineers we sometimes actually hired; and above all the circuit, the symposia and workshops where the ocean-mining faith got its liturgy. I underwrote a session at La Jolla that autumn where serious men with government beards talked nodule tonnages past one another for two days, and the proceedings went out to every library that asked, including two in Moscow, and I mailed those myself, first class, with a covering letter wishing our Soviet colleagues well in the great work of the seabed.3
It was at Romaine that I met the woman I will call Fay Brill, since renaming the people I mean to keep has been the one art I ever practiced honestly. She ran the day log in the communications office, mid-thirties, an ex-studio typist out of Metro who had watched that industry manufacture belief on a sound stage and found the Hughes method tidier. She had a switchboard voice, a filing cabinet the Attorney General would have wept over, and no visible awe of anything in the building, including me.
"Ocean Mining," she read, off my badge, the first morning. "We had an Aviation once. He's gone now."
"Gone where?"
"That would be a memo," she said, and plugged a call through, and that was the whole of my first conversation with the most restful woman I ever knew.
I took her to dinner at Musso's inside the month, and I will enter the motives in their true order, because one of them is creditable and I am owed the novelty: appetite first, tradecraft second. The tradecraft was simple; her office logged every call into that building, mine included, and a man likes to know how his traffic reads. The appetite was simpler. Over the chops she lied to me about her day, fluently and well, and I lied to her about mine, and each of us watched the other do it with open professional pleasure, and neither of us asked a single question all evening, which after twenty-five years of interrogation by dinner party I found as restful as a lake. We went on that way for four years. The reader will want to know how it ends, and the reader will have it, in its proper number, and not from me a page early.
I did ask her once, months along, strictly in the way of business, how my traffic read from her side of the board. "Boring," she said, with real approval, the way a nurse says stable, and I bought her a better dinner than usual on the strength of it, a mining consultant with boring traffic being the finest object my trade knows how to build.
Bunny got the cover, and here the government did my marriage its one service of the decade. The Agency had ruled that the mining venture itself was the tellable layer, and so, for the first time since 1945, the sentence I handed my wife across the candles was officially true. "A mining venture," I said. "For the Hughes people. Ships." And Bunny said, "How nice, darling. Will you want the grey suit in Los Angeles or is it all sheds?" and passed the beans, and received the first true thing I had told her in a quarter century exactly the way she had received every lie: serenely, with a household question attached. I had expected, I don't know, weather of some kind. I resented the lack of it for a week, and I decline to examine the resentment at this distance; it is one of two or three doors in this memoir I have found it wiser to paint shut.
The ship, meanwhile, was rising out of a shipyard at Chester, Pennsylvania, in the full view of God and the Delaware and a public highway, exactly as Parangosky had specified, and my job was to keep her boring. I gave the trade press tonnage figures and artist's conceptions. I gave the financial press a rumor of proprietary dredge technology, wrapped in enough lawyers that declining to elaborate looked like prudence instead of theater. I gave the Sunday men the proprietor himself, the recluse reaching down from his tower to scoop the wealth of the abyss, and they wrote it up like scripture, because a rumor about a man nobody can reach is the one kind of story every editor will run and no editor can check. The joke, which I did not make at the time to anybody, is that the reclusion was the entire engineering. Any of a dozen companies could have built the cover; only Hughes came with a proprietor whose silence was already famous, already legend, already doing the work of a thousand press releases by sitting in a dark room in another country being talked about.
On the fourth of November, 1972, they launched her. It was a grey, hard-lit day on the Delaware, bunting on the ways, a band with too much brass, and six hundred and eighteen feet of ship over us like a courthouse on its side. The christening party came down from New York and Philadelphia in good overcoats; there were senators' aides and bankers and mining men, and a table of press kits I had written myself, with a manganese nodule photographed on the cover like a soufflé.4 The sponsor swung the bottle, the hull went down the ways with that long slow roar that a crowd answers without deciding to, and the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the largest lie I ever fathered, sat in the river being cheered.
A man from the Chester paper asked me what she would do first, and I gave him sea trials, then the Pacific by way of Cape Horn, she being too broad in the beam for the Canal, and he wrote "too big for Panama" in his notebook with the satisfaction of a man who has his headline. I had built that satisfaction too; the Canal was the one dimension I had leaked on purpose, size being the only fact about a secret that improves it in the telling.
And then a wire-service man in a good overcoat and a bad liver, notebook already open, asked me the one question the whole apparatus could not survive: "Who did your assay work on the claim, and what's the grade running?"
There is a special taste to the arrival of the exact catastrophe you have imagined at four in the morning. The claim had no assay because the claim had no purpose; there was no answer on earth I could give that a competent desk could not unravel by Thursday. My mouth dried in the time it takes a flashbulb to die, and I was assembling the lawyer-wrapped nothing I keep for such moments when a man at my elbow answered for me. He was a trust officer from one of the Philadelphia houses, there because my own press kits had invited money to come and watch, and he said, comfortably, proprietarily: "Sudbury grade or better. Three and a half percent nickel equivalent across the claim. I've seen the figures."
He had seen the figures. I had written the figures, in March, in a hotel room in San Diego, out of a metallurgy text and thin air, for a workshop paper with no author's name on it.5 And here they came back to me at par, believed, bearing interest, in the mouth of a man who managed other families' money for a living and would repeat them on Monday to a room full of the same. The wire man wrote it down. That was the moment, on the cold pier with the band still working, that I understood what I had actually built. Every lie I had ever told in fifty years had needed me daily, the way a fire needs feeding. This one had crossed some line in the dark and begun to feed itself: it was out there recruiting its own witnesses, writing its own corroboration, believing itself on my behalf. A liar you can fire; a believer is a colleague, and I had just heard my first one, and it frightened me a good deal more than the question had. I found the champagne and drank a glass I had meant to only hold.
The building is as described: 7000 Romaine Street, Hollywood, a windowless two-story block built in 1930 for film storage and occupied for decades by the Hughes communications operation, through which the empire was run by memorandum and telephone. Summa Corporation itself was organized in 1972, when the tool company that had been the fortune's root was sold off; the author's badge would have said Hughes Tool before it said Summa, a correction he would regard as the reader's problem. —Ed.
Howard Hughes appears in no scene of this bundle, saw the ship named for his enterprise at no time in his life, and, so far as the record shows, was consulted about none of it beyond the consent of his proxies. The Editor has kept the author's title for this number because it is accurate to the operation: the name did all the work, and the man was not required. —Ed.
The cultivation is documented. The Agency's declassified history describes the feeding of the mining cover through viability studies, workshops, scientific meetings, and encouraged press; Soviet scientists attended more than one open session on seabed minerals in the period. The mailing to Moscow cannot be confirmed and is entirely in character, for the operation and for the author. —Ed.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was built by Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock at Chester, Pennsylvania, and launched on 4 November 1972; references giving 1973 date her completion and delivery, not the launch. At 618 feet she was too large for the Panama Canal and reached the Pacific in 1973 around South America. The bunting, the band, and the christening party are in the Philadelphia papers of the week. —Ed.
The press materials for the christening survive in the Summa files, and so does the workshop paper the author describes, grade figures included. Both are competent. Neither carries a name. —Ed.