My mother attracted oddballs, creeps, and weirdoes. While we lived in Henderson, Nevada, she had a few boyfriends. One of them, a skydiver, Mom loved him, and I liked him too, but he turned out to be married with a family in Utah.

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.”

— Samuel Johnson

Another boyfriend wore a crumpled black bowler and a vest dotted with pins and medallions designating him member of “The Bum’s Club.” Baffling to me as I tried to imagine a bunch of grown men organized and meeting in a club for bums. I called him “Creepsville,” but not to his face. I disliked this shrunken little man because I thought he was intellectually inferior, and ugly. Eventually, he moved on when my mom started referring to him as Creepsville too.

One night Mom came home with a stranger. Mom had picked me up at the babysitter, a neighbor in the next building. Then Mom settled me on the couch, or what we called a couch. Actually, it was a twin bed frame with a ticking mattress, covered with a spread, pushed against the wall with pillows for back cushions. That’s where Mom had slept before Renée died. Mom was always moving this make-shift couch, trying to redecorate, working around the one piece of furniture she loved––a low, four-foot square, high-gloss black coffee table that looked like it belonged in a Geisha house. She had saved and made layaway payments to buy this treasured piece secondhand.

Watching this stranger walk into our apartment, I soon fell back asleep. Before the sun was up, the stranger walked out of the bedroom Mom and I shared. He was naked. I had never seen a naked man.

Once my cousin Joe danced “naked as a jaybird” in the woods behind his house. We kids thought Joe was hysterical until his dad, my uncle, showed up with his belt drawn like a horsewhip. Joe didn’t have a stitch to come between him and the beating he got.

Startled, I watched as this naked man walked into the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom, the doors between the two rooms at a 90-degree angle. When he came out of the bathroom, his backside toward me, he peered into the room where my mother lay sleeping. He repeated this a few times and I wondered each time I saw the bathroom door open, Is he sick?

Then he came to where I was. He sat down at the other end of the couch. I had curled myself into a fetal ball, both hands tucked under my chin, trying to pretend I was asleep. He touched my feet.

“Why don’t you come down here and lay your head in my lap?” I shook my head. No!

He tried to make me think he wanted to comfort me, and I just shook all over––that thing I do when I’m terrified. Whether he heard something or feared I would cry out, at last he got up, went back into the bedroom and came out fully dressed when my mom did.

I never saw him again. I never knew his name. I never told anyone.

I feared telling my mom about the incident. After I was grown, probably around the time I had to give a deposition to her attorney about her second husband’s attempted molestation when I was a teenager, I told her about the naked man. Mom was appalled to think she would have brought someone like that into our home, insisting that she never did bring home a stranger.

After probing her memories, she recalled a man she knew from the police department. “I would have killed him if I had known.”

Instinct and fear, even as a young child, had made me keep my mouth shut, too afraid and praying nothing like that would ever happen again.

Any romantic thoughts I had were about boys, not men. Movies, movie magazines, and television fueled these fantasies of whatever I thought was love. Curled up on the top bunk of the bed Mom and I shared after Renée died, I would read teen fan magazines our neighbor’s teenage daughter passed on to me when I was still in elementary school. These stories filled my mind with more faulty romantic images.

When mom took me to the movies, she never discussed what we watched together nor seized an opportunity to talk about sex. Sandra Dee went from playing wholesome teen Gidget with her boyfriend Moon Doggie, played by James Darren, to a pregnant teen Molly Jorgenson, her boyfriend played by teen idol Troy Donahue in the movie A Summer Place, which my mom took me to see at the drive-in. Baffled by screen images that raised questions I didn’t know how to ask, much less who to ask, my picture of romantic love was disfigured.

Around the same time that naked man made his appearance, Mom answered an ad via a Post Office box for a job requiring secretarial duties and to her, appealing prospects for change. A driver collected Mom in the middle of the night and delivered her back to our tiny apartment hours later, just after dawn.

That man seeking a personal secretary met her at the door to his Las Vegas hotel suite waving a book. His first words, “It’s against the law to even have this book.”

No surprise to me, my mother warmed to him. My mother thrived on conspiracy, secrets, and suspicious activity, especially resistance to the government. After several hours spent with the man and his wife, the interview concluded with breakfast in their suite.

Mom woke me when she got home, had me sit, as usual (a sounding board?) while she repeated what happened, as much for herself as to me. Thrust into early adulthood by the deaths of my sister and my dad, often I was all she had for verbal processing. The job for which she was being considered involved working for this mysterious employer, a man, she later learned, who had at this time rented an entire floor of the Desert Inn Hotel.

That morning, Mom sat, shaking her head as she smoked cigarettes and sipped her Coors. She stared not at me, but at an angle, as if consulting someone else. Brooding, she started pulling on her hair, working to isolate a single strand near the crown of her head before pulling it out, a process that could take an hour.

She kept repeating, “Don’t tell anyone about this,” and each time I wondered who could I tell and why would anyone care? My mother didn’t know how hard I worked to hide what happened at home, living with sadness that could be felt about her drinking and dodging the traps set to catch me in a lie. Yet these moments when she sought my presence made me feel important to her. A trusted confidante. A big girl. Almost a friend.

“His wife,” she said. “She’s how I knew right away who he was. She was Vernon’s favorite actress.”

Mom had mentioned before how Vernon thought my mom looked like Jean Peters, same coloring and size. The mysterious man may have thought so too.

Howard Hughes was married to Jean Peters from 1957 until 1971. Although they lived apart much of that time, they were together during Mom’s interview. In 1946, Jean Peters had won the Miss Ohio State pageant, which led her to sign a 7-year movie contract and move to Hollywood. Hughes and Peters met at a boating party to Catalina. When Jean Peters died in 2000, she had maintained her refusal to talk about their marriage, even though Howard Hughes had died in 1976.

Once Mom realized who he was, nothing about the situation struck her as odd, much less scary. Howard Hughes confirmed his identity to her.

A kindred rebel spirit, she said they got along well. In hindsight, she pieced together that this interview took place during Hughes’ early survey of Las Vegas, before he bought up considerable property in Vegas.

He must have been looking for a secretary, someone unknown, yet a highly qualified person, someone who lived locally and knew Las Vegas. Had he already checked her references?

Regarding secrets, what did he know about her past? Could my mom have succeeded in the position he had in mind? She excelled at keeping secrets. A professional asset.

My mom’s perfectionism would have appealed to such a finicky employer. Describing various duties, to him secrecy and loyalty were paramount. These concerns surfaced again whenever she repeated the story years afterward. Even then, she insisted, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Could Howard Hughes have guessed how well suited my mother would have been to work for him? She had a tendency to read conspiracy behind every headline and media blip and financial move.

I can’t remember whether this interview took place after she left the Las Vegas police department or during the time she worked for the County Clerk. It was before she went to work for Senator Brown as his personal secretary. The whole situation remains intriguing, imagining the hours my mom spent with both Howard Hughes and his wife Jean.

That early morning after her interview, I watched my mom hesitate, ponder possibilities as she spoke about it. Replaying this conversation, reliving the hours spent in the mysterious stranger’s hotel room, it always struck me as remarkable that my mother continued to hide her close encounter with one of the most famous men of the 20th Century.

And I could never figure out why.

Up close and personal, I watched my mom’s confidence erode as secrets she felt she had to hide (her maiden name, marriage to her first cousin, being raped at age 17––to name a few), these secrets buried her beneath shame. She had so much potential.

From the distance of years that followed, I read a lot about Howard Hughes because I knew my mom had met him. From newspapers, magazine articles, and movies, I attributed Howard Hughes’s gradual descent and self-destruction to his inordinate fear and secrecy and paranoia. While conceding that no one’s digression can be traced to a single cause, Howard Hughes’ life from meteoritic, world-wide fame to fearful recluse remains a cautionary tale.

Howard Hughes is buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, TX [1]

The Hughes family gravesite––In response to hearing this story about my mom, our son took my husband and me to see Glenwood Cemetery, located near where he lived at the time.

Reasonable as it was for my mom to hope for better opportunities, to reach out, to take risks, back then, this job may have seemed like a runway of opportunity stretched before her. And I remind myself to think of my mother in those cultural circumstances, widowed at age 29.

What I could not have known is how few professional opportunities opened for women at that time. Working for Howard Hughes, Mom might have flown anywhere––far, far away––even though she continued to insist, “I hate flying.”