Max B. Hugh: A Biography

This book will go into literary history as the first unauthorized and uncensored biography published and paid for by the same man that is its subject. But that wouldn’t surprise you if you knew who we are talking about: the richest and most prolific philanthropist that History has known, so rich and generous that he was delighted to pay for his own public defamation and slander.

Weirder than Howard Hughes, meanest than J.P. Morgan, uglier than Bill Gates, more generous than the Medici and richer than all of them put together I am of course talking about Maximillian Benedict Hugh the richest man on Earth.

Now for first time this book will disclose every secret details of this magnificent tycoon’s incredible life and elucidate the details of his great legend for posterity. And free of charge in the last pages instead a boring bibliography you will find ten easy tricks to make money and a whole set of jokes about dwarfs.

Like many other billionaires that built their empires from nothing Max B. Hugh was born to life also with nothing. But then again, all we are born naked, nobody is born on a suit. It is a common misconception that rich babies are born in a suit complete with tie and little italian shoes. Little Maximillian’s family was by not means destitute but many accounts exaggerate regarding the extent of their wealth. It is not true for example that his father had an hangar for his private jet built under the swimming pool. It isn’t true either that his parents replaced the breakfast’s corn flakes with oysters. Pure nonsense. The poor child would have chipped his teeth trying to chew the shells, they do not soften with milk.

At the age of ten he was accepted in one most exclusive and elitist schools in the World only because his parents made a substantial donation to the school in the form of a giant heater only to discover later it wouldn’t pass through the boiler room door. Since his first days he was a diligent pupil that faced adversity and hardship with renewed strength although those never were in the study plan. Cursed by a family dog with a voracious appetite for homework papers his grades never achieved the prominence his parents were too disappointed to expect. Nevertheless, he persevered and graduated first of his class after his family had the rest of the alumni in his promotion replaced by sacks full of hay.

Too proud to ask his father for a job the young man sneaked in one of his father factories disguised as the manager and took over the place. Max B. Hugh recalls that period very well in a funny anecdote that illustrates the sort of problems he had to face:

“The beginnings weren’t easy. It took me three years to find out what the hell we did in there! It turned out to be a cement factory. Of course! It was then I understood all those lawsuits and outraged mothers complaining about babies with welded mouths. I was positive we produced powder milk!”

Sales increased after this shift of luck but for the ambitious Max B. Hugh that was only the beginning. It was the seventies and he knew the future was in computers. He decided to throw all his resources in finding out what computers were. I took him a decade but at the beginning of the eighties he could go to a cocktail party and explain to anybody who would listen what a computer was. At first he helped himself with his hands to do the explanation but when he managed to pronounce correctly the word “motherboard” he could achieve the same effect without hands.

It was during this period of his life that three tragic calamities took place in rapid succession and changed Maximillian’s life forever. Unfortunately he forgot one of them, so we will have to do with just two.

First his beloved parents died in a diving accident when a diver got caught in the propeller of their yacht and caused the ship to crash into a wave. He was devastated, unable to sleep for weeks he wandered the vast family homestead like a ghost looking for his father’s will. Out of despair he destroyed her mothers jewel box but kept the contents as a token of his everlasting devotion to her.

A few days later, having hardly recovered from his painful grief he was stricken by a calamity yet worse than the one he was trying to leave behind. He got married. One day without knowing how he found himself in a church besides a woman in a wheelchair dressed as a bride. She was the daughter of of his richest and fiercest competitor in the business of explaining what computers were.

Theirs was a short lived and unhappy marriage after he found out she was paralyzed from waist up. He married her believing her legs were paralyzed but in his weeding night he found out it was the torso and head that suffered paralysis and her arms could only achieve a sort of funny spastic jerks.

This is what happened in Max B. Hugh own words.

“First I though she was shy and didn’t talk to much. I liked that. And then when the wedding night came I understood what the damn wheelchair was for. The legs were pretty much alive but  they had to carry the torso around wherever they went. That is hard work. So they liked to take a rest. That’s why they carried the chair around! Oh boy! And what legs! They chased me around the penthouse wedding suite for hours.”

The chase ended in tragedy when the legs dived out the penthouse balcony to the pavement forty seven floors down dragging torso and head with them. Curiously enough the arms survived the fall and still amuse tourist with their spasms in a Tijuana house of freaks.

Devastated widowed Maximillian looked for consolation in work. But when he found out what work was all about he looked for consolations in drugs and debauchery.

“That was more my thing, you know. When you work it is all about responsibility and you get tired really fast.” He recalls.

He applied himself to his new goal with the same energy and dedication he never had to anything before and ended up in Peggy Nelson’s rehabilitation clinic for comatose celebrities. He did well there, but didn’t make too much friends among his catatonic fellow patients.

After a speedy period of rehabilitation that lasted only thirteen years he was declared suitable to reincorporate to productive society, something he never expected to hear from anybody before entering the clinic. The only achievement of his career and the one he is more proud of. Again in his own words:

“I couldn’t believe it. Before entering that place I couldn’t even drive by myself. I always had a chauffeur. When he wasn’t available I would pay some passerby to carry me home in his back. But now they said I was a productive member of society. That always puzzled me.”

That same day he drove home and removed teeth and skin from the radiator grill with his own hands and the help of pliers.

It was after this traumatic period of his life that Max B. Hugh began his career as philanthropist. He had inherited from his family a vast collection of paintings and sculptures but the collection of masterpieces was in a pitiful state. The sculptures were dusty but in mint condition. The paintings were a whole other story, they were all smeared because the illiterate manservant couldn’t read the instructions manuals and placed them in the gardens. Max B. Hugh tells the story in their own words.

” There was all those weird sculptures hanging from the walls. I didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t make to much sense to me all those marble people with missing limbs. It was hard to find a wall to lean over comfortably. Then, one day the postman showed up with a Caravaggio so smeared that it looked like a Turner watercolor. I though it was some sort of practical joke. I always though Caravaggio was a pizza joint. But then postman explained it to me. It was kind of funny.”

It was after this momentous event that he decided to devote his great wealth and resources to the preservation of Fine Arts. He established  the Hugh Foundation and named the postman chairman of the boards of directors. That is why to this day the foundation that carries his name is world known for the largest philatelic collection in existence.

Nearing his seventies Max B. Hugh was diagnosticed a malignant tumor in his eyebrows. The tumor was considered inoperable but in a more expensive hospital he managed to be declared too rich to die. The anguish and stress the erroneous diagnosis provoked in the ageing tycoon was for him to much to bear after a lifetime of bearing nothing. He fell in a deep depression. He began to develop strange manias an his social behavior became first erratic and later plain nuts.

He refused to ingest solid food and when the doctors brought him liquid food he refused that too on the grounds it tasted like hell and complained his medical team was incapable of producing a decent souffle. His physicians had to devise a method of gasification for his meals that were then siphoned with a pump connected to his stomach through his hear. It was a painstakingly slow and painful process but it helped him to survive for a period of twenty seven more years to pester everybody around him.

One morning he was found dead under the piano caressing the cat penis. It was a beffiting end for a great man whose only regret is not having been born before to have time to invent the wheel.