Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

5

IN THE LATE 1920s I was pretty well known, not only in Hollywood, but all throughout the United States, and a great many magazines and newspapers had nothing better to do than run stories about me. My personal habits and idiosyncrasies seemed to exert an amazing fascination on the American public, and I’ll never quite understand why – like my public image of the unshaven man in a rumpled suit and dirty sneakers.

Was that how you dressed in those early days?

Not at all. I was a fashion plate. I got all my clothes from Savile Row.

You mean you went to London?

London came to me. Twice a year my tailors would send over men with swatches of samples and I would tell them what I wanted. They had my measurements – I didn’t change much over the years and they’d go back and make a dozen suits at a time for me. My shoes were all bench-made on Jermyn Street in London.

Wearing sneakers came later, after it occurred to me that I really didn’t have to impress anybody. I also developed the worst case of athlete’s foot known to man, and sneakers are the only things I could wear with any comfort.

What about the stories they told about you not carrying cash?

Absolutely true. There are men out there that would knock you off for three dollars and fifty cents. I never carried money, not then or later, and I let it be known that I didn’t.

In my early years in Hollywood I decided to build up a bit of a reputation as an eccentric. I thought maybe it would protect me from robbers. I once gave both Ray Holliday and Noah Dietrich instructions what to do if they got ransom notes from a gang who claimed to have kidnapped me. I said, ‘Don’t pay a cent without my approval. If I think I’m in real danger of getting my throat slit, I’ll put down the amount to be paid on the ransom note, and I’ll sign it, and right down with my signature will be the letters P.D.Q. In that case, and in that case only, pay the ransom.’

Was that a code?

It meant ‘Pay Damn Quick.’ You’re laughing, but the United States is a violent country. I had a full-time bodyguard for a while, a former Texas Ranger. I figured they’re the best. I put him up in an apartment over the garage on Muirfield Road. He had his pocket picked of his first month’s salary. Then one day he was practicing quick draws in back of the house under the magnolia tree, and he shot himself in the foot.

Ella came to me and said, ‘Howard, this man is incompetent. You don’t need a bodyguard. You’re a young man. You’re tough, you’re able.’

I knew she was wrong, but since this guy was such a jerk I fired him and pretended to Ella that I was doing it for her sake. I was a better shot than the Ranger was, although hunting wasn’t in my catalog of interests.

My private life during the early Hollywood years was about on a par with my stock market experience and my steam car. In 1929, when I was still just twenty-three years old, Ella and I were divorced. She had actually left me during the filming of Hell’s Angels, because I was never around. I knew it was coming. I gave her a settlement of close to $1.5 million, and she went back to Texas.

What were the reasons for the marriage not working?

Ella wanted to live as a lady, which meant I had to live like her idea of a gentleman, and I’d discovered that I wasn’t interested in that kind of life. It paralleled my mother and father’s marriage. I got married at the age of nineteen because I thought it would make a man of me in the eyes of the world, and then one day I woke up to the fact that not only wasn’t it true, but that the world didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

I could give you a dozen reasons for my marriage and another dozen reasons for my first divorce, and eleven of them might be true, but none of them would be precisely true. The real reason I got married is because I wanted to get married the way a child wants something that catches his eye. He says, ‘I want it.’ He doesn’t know why. Human nature is to want and to not want. The reason I got divorced is because I didn’t want to be married any longer. What we want one season, we don’t want the next season, but usually we’re stuck with it and we haven’t got the courage or wherewithal to haul ourselves out of the hole or the rut. It’s as simple as that, except people don’t like simple reasons and simple answers. They want complicated answers. They’re easier to deal with.

I just didn’t want to be married anymore. Ella and I lived on different schedules. I’ve never been at ease socially. I was interested in pursuing my passions, and my passions were movie-making, flying, inventing—

And women?

Since I know you’ve done your homework, I’ll tell you that there was one other woman during that period who meant a great deal to me. She was an actress named Billie Dove. In fact she starred in one of my films, Age for Love. I’d met Billie while I was still married to Ella. The marriage was breaking up and I was ripe for a serious affair. Not a fling, like with Harlow. A love affair, with all the drama and thrill and potential for disaster that those words imply.

I fell in love the way only a young man can fall in love: to the point of lunacy. Shakespeare called love a form of madness and he knew what he was talking about. I was surrounded by hundreds of girls in Hollywood, all of them beautiful and almost all of them willing, but for a while I was blind to everyone except Billie Dove.

It happened at first sight, corny as you can get. I saw her in the studio cafeteria. I walked right up to her, which was definitely not my habit. I said, ‘Who are you?’ I was twenty-three years old. She was a very beautiful girl.

Falling in love isn’t something a man can help, and if he could explain it like you break down a chemical formula, then it wouldn’t be love. Billie wasn’t a sexy woman, the Yvonne de Carlo type. She was quiet, and underneath that quiet she was sexy as hell. Still waters run deep – sometimes too deep. I wasn’t proud that Billie could twist me round her little finger because of my physical desires.

If you were really in love, why did it break up?

Sanity and day-to-day living restore the balance. I’m not sure whether that’s for better or for worse.

In a way, the end of that affair was far more painful to me than my broken marriage. Billie was roaring along with her career, and at that time I was extricating myself from the movie business, and I knew I would be away from California a great deal. We drifted apart.

That still doesn’t make sense.

I’ll tell you the rest of it some other time. Anyway, the unfortunate aftermath of this was that I was hurt, and lonely for quite a while, despite the fact that I was surrounded by people. Some men can just shrug it off and go on to a second love affair, and a third and fourth, but I couldn’t. I tried one with Carole Lombard, but it didn’t work. I was always shy with girls and it took all my courage to speak to one of them for the first time. So you can see how bowled over I was by Billie when I saw her on the line at the studio cafeteria. I certainly didn’t have the so-called social graces – you could never have called me a charmer.

Why were you so shy?

As a boy I was as tall as I am now. I reached my full height, six foot three, by the time I was seventeen. I didn’t go in for sports except golf, and I felt awkward and gangling, conscious of my height, I wasn’t at ease in my skin. I’d trip over my own feet. I mean it literally. I don’t think I stood up straight until I was thirty years old. Until then I slouched and stooped because I didn’t want to seem too tall. I didn’t want people to have to look up at me, because I thought they resented that. I know that Noah Dietrich disliked me for being tall, and whenever he had the chance, when he felt his position was secure enough, he made fun of me a little bit – that I was gangling and thin and had a neck like a giraffe.

At one point I started going to a gym in Santa Monica. I went almost every day for a couple of weeks, worked out on the bicycle machine, tried to build my arms with weights, but eventually I began to suspect the place was full of homosexuals. They used to stand around flexing their muscles and admiring themselves in the mirrors.

One evening there was a power failure. I had just finished working out and was in the shower. The minute the lights flicked out there was so much shrieking and giggling coming from these guys around me that I fled, all lathered up with soap. I grabbed my clothes and got dressed and ran out into the street, dripping wet. I caught a cold. That was the end of my muscle-building period.

You never had any childhood homosexual experiences?

Are you kidding? When I was a boy in Texas, a fairy would have been run out of the state on a rail. When I went to Hollywood, I was just barely twenty. I wasn’t Errol Flynn or Rock Hudson, but I believe it’s fair to say I was considered handsome. Hollywood then, as now, was full of homosexuals. I don’t know why they latched onto me particularly, maybe just because my interest in women may have seemed halfhearted. I certainly did stand up a lot of girls. I made dates and didn’t keep them, and a lot of girls walked out on me because I didn’t spend enough time with them. Then too, although I was married, I didn’t see much of my wife, and maybe that looked funny to people.

Some years later, one time, Gina Lollabrigida walked out on me. This was typical. I’d brought her over from Italy to star in one of my pictures. Finally she came to my bungalow. I had a cramp and had to go to the john. I had magazines lying around in there. One of then was a technical journal about flying. I was sitting there, poking through it, and the next thing I knew it was an hour later and Gina was gone. She had walked out. I can’t blame her. She was hot to trot, and who the hell wants to hang around an hour while some guy vanishes to take a crap?

Spyros Skouras, the movie magnate, once said to me, ‘Howard, you really and truly like women? I’d heard you were a fag.’

It was a fact that I was being approached by men far more often than I should have been in normal circumstances. This was early in my career, when I was producing my first three or four pictures.

I went to a Hollywood party at Mary Pickford’s house, and I had to take a leak. I went into the bathroom and Ramon Navarro – he was a famous actor, a latin-lover type – stood there right behind me, chatting away to me. I was thinking about something else. I must have said, ‘Sure… yes… sure.’ When I buttoned up, he tried to grab me by the pecker.

I lost it. I popped him one on the jaw. Poor guy, he backed off and apologized, and after that he left me alone. So did everyone else who was that way inclined. The word got around that I was liable to react violently.

What about the stories that you employed a man to look for beautiful, interesting young women and make dates for you?

Sad to say, they’re true. I hadn’t the time. It wasn’t my nature to make quick contact. There was more than one man who did that for me. I had Pat DiCicco for a while, and then Walter Kane and Grady Reed, and then Johnny Meyer, and once there was a fellow called Bill Weston. But things didn’t work out well with Weston. He tried to blackmail me.

He was the former husband of some movie star, and he got me a date. She was a very sweet girl but she was only fifteen. Weston knew this and I didn’t, and you wouldn’t either if you looked at this girl. We spent the night together and in the morning she casually told me how old she was.

I put on my clothes in a hurry, called for a car, and said, ‘Nice to have met you. So long.’

Bill Weston came around soon after that, asking for a loan of $25,000. He said he had to make a down payment on a house and there would be other payments later, which made it clear to me that it wasn’t a loan and it wasn’t just $25,000.

I was taken aback and I said, ‘Bill, I have to think about this.’

I thought it over and talked it over with Noah. I called Weston the next day and said, ‘Meet me down at the railroad station at 7 P.M. sharp.’ When he arrived I was standing there beside the Twentieth Century Limited, which was due to pull out in fifteen minutes. I’d called him in his office, you see, and told him to come straight from the office. Meanwhile Noah had arranged for several of my people to go to his apartment and pack his clothes, and all his personal belongings, and those items were in a compartment in the train.

I handed him an envelope and said, ‘This is for you.’

In the envelope there was a ticket to Chicago. ‘That train leaves in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘Please get on it. Your luggage is inside. Don’t ever come back to California again, because if you do, something really bad, possibly even fatal, will happen to you.’

You didn’t give him any money at all?

Besides the train ticket there was $10,000 in cash in the envelope. My speech, of course, was pure bluff, but he bought it. He got on the train. I figured ten grand was cheap to get rid of him.

By making movies I’d realized my first ambition. Flying came next. But there were a lot of hurdles to get over. Recklessness was one of them, and I suppose I never cured myself of it until it was too late. I was a quick learner and a damned good pilot in more ways than one, and I took chances. I was young. I was invulnerable. I had my share of crashes, and in the end they ruined my health. My second crash, as I’ve mentioned, was in the Waco 9 during the filming of Hell’s Angels.

When was the first crash?

That took place in the same period, early in 1928, during the preparation for filming. Ruth Elder, a well known aviatrix, was flying with me. I met Ruth in one of the air meets, a Bendix Trophy Meet, and we developed a companionship rather than a love affair. In a sense, of all the women I’ve known, with one exception many years later, I was better friends with Ruth than anyone.

That time in 1928 I was flying a Sopwith Snipe, a World War I ex-combat plane, and Ruth was in an old Jenny. We were flying tandem from Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley where we’d been getting things ready for aerial combat scenes. I detoured a bit to fly over Los Angeles.

But my motor gave up and I came down unexpectedly – and hard – near Inglewood. I crawled out with a couple of cracked ribs, twisted ankle, broken collarbone, black and blue all over. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks.

As far as I know that crash has never been mentioned in anything that’s been written about you.

The things that have been written about me aren’t worth a fart in a windstorm. Nobody knows the facts. I’ve had four or five serious crack-ups in my life and maybe three or four others not so serious, and nobody paid the slightest attention to most of them. I’m not complaining. I didn’t take a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times and say, ‘Howard Hughes wishes to announce he’s cracked up another plane and is on his death bed.’

The worst accident, and the one I suffered most from physically, was the crash with the F-ll in Beverly Hills, which I’ll get to later. But there was one I felt worse about.

This was in 1943 on Lake Mead in Nevada. I was flying an amphibian, a big twin-engine experimental job, a Sikorsky S-43. Glen Odekirk was with me, and a man named Cline who was a CAA inspector from Santa Monica, and Charlie Von Rosenberg, my copilot, and a mechanic named Dick Felt.

I was coming in to land on Lake Mead. The water was like a mirror, not a ripple. The sun was glaring off it, blinding me, but still I set the plane down for a perfect landing. We touched down on the water. Then we picked up some drag. Maybe I’d come down a little more quickly than was normal, but it was eighty miles an hour and I’d done it before and never had any trouble. We picked up drag and then, without any warning, that Sikorsky veered off, put its nose down, and began skipping across the lake. The whole plane came apart, piece by piece. Each time we bounced it was like a separate crash. That ship weighed ten tons. Finally we stopped, still afloat.

I had cut open my head badly, and I was in shock – in fact, Charlie Von Rosenberg had to practically shove me out the pilot’s window. He saved my life. Some fishermen pulled us out, and everyone got clear except the CAA man, Cline. I hired navy divers and we hunted for him for a long time and couldn’t find him. He’s still down there at the bottom of Lake Mead.

When I recovered and found out what had happened I was very upset at this man dying that way. Von Rosenberg broke some bones in his back, but they patched him up in Boulder City. He had to wear a cast for a year. And the mechanic, Dick Felt, died from head injuries he’d suffered in the crash.

It was a bad crash. For a while I felt responsible, but they had federal investigation and ruled it an unavoidable accident; they said the plane had been incorrectly loaded by the ground crew and her center of gravity was out of whack. But that didn’t bring Cline and Felt back to life, and it didn’t make me feel any better about being at the controls.

The only other accident I had where someone got killed was an automobile accident in 1936. I’d been cited for speeding twice before that, once in the San Fernando Valley and once in Gilroy, California. That Rolls of mine was a beauty – it made you want to speed. But that night there weren’t any cars on the road, and I wasn’t endangering anybody even though I was driving fast. You feel safer in a Rolls or a Duesenberg doing ninety than you do in a Chevy doing fifty or sixty.

I was in the Hancock Park area, on my way back to the Ambassador. A car came at me from the side and forced me toward the curb. A department-store salesman, a sixty-year-old man named Gabe Meyer, didn’t see me and started to cross the street. I couldn’t possibly have stopped in time. I was speeding – how fast, I don’t know – and to this day I remember the crunch of the man’s body smashing into the front of the car.

I must have carried him on the hood of the car for twenty-five, thirty feet, and then he sailed through the air for another thirty or forty feet and smashed against the pavement. He was dead on first impact. It was a terrible mess. It was his fault. He darted out at the wrong time from a streetcar safety zone, gave me no chance whatever to stop – although that doesn’t make it any the easier to bear the burden of guilt.

I was with a society girl, the daughter of some rich Pasadena people, and I told her to leave, not to get involved, and I got my lawyer, Neil McCarthy, down there pronto. He was a good man and he did what had to be done.

I make no bones about it: I paid off the LAPD. If I hadn’t been Howard Hughes and a multimillionaire, I wouldn’t have got off so easily. American justice works that way. There’s never been a really rich man convicted of any serious crime except where embezzlement of big money is involved and other rich men are the victims. I don’t feel guilty about using my money and influence, because it was not my fault. The man literally darted out in front of me. I had no choice. The coroner’s jury acquitted me of negligence.

In 1933 I closed down Caddo Productions. I was a man of twenty-seven, and that’s an age, I think, when you first start feeling you’re a man.

I should qualify that. I felt a man in the sense that I had accomplished part of what I had set out to do. I had made movies – some good ones, some bad ones, but over-all I was not dissatisfied with what I had done. And of course I had made a lot of money. I was proud of the fact that I had stood up to a great many people much older than I was, much more experienced, who had looked at me with a certain disdain and didn’t think I could accomplish my goals.

But in other ways I was not a man and I knew it. I had a long uphill way to go before I reached maturity. I already had one broken marriage behind me, which pained me and made me feel inadequate. A broken marriage is a failure even if it’s a mistake from the word go, as mine was; it’s evidence of an emotional failure somewhere within you. I had also had a broken love affair, and it contributed to that feeling of uncertainty and failure.

There I was in my late twenties, and I had made a splash. I look back now on the age of the late twenties. You may not be a man yet, but you have a tremendous energy and a tremendous manly strength. You’re out of the first flush of youth but you still have all the power of your youth and a little of the experience that comes with age. Most men I know who ever accomplished anything were on the track of it by the time they were thirty or they never did a damn thing.

Toolco was growing steadily. I can’t say it was doing very well, because it was the Depression, but it was holding its own, and even in the years that it lost money there was enough cash flow so that basically I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to I could put my hands on ten or fifteen million dollars without straining the resources of Toolco. I was worth, all told, about sixty or seventy million. Not too shabby. I already had my base of operations on Romaine Street, I had Noah Dietrich handling things for me in California, I had Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose handling Toolco’s affairs in Houston, and I had a highly competent engineer and pilot ln Glen Odekirk, who was absolutely devoted to me, helping me in my flying ventures.

I had achieved a kind of superficial personal freedom. I had ordered my life so that I could do whatever I wanted to do without any strain.

I looked back eight years to the nineteen-year-old gawky kid standing in a Houston courtroom, listening to the judge say, ‘Okay, Sonny, go out and be an adult,’ and I realized I had done it. I had made mistakes in those eight years, but I had gained a great deal of self-assurance and I had a clearer idea of what I liked and didn’t like.

I avoided one big mistake. That’s the mistake of the young man who says, ‘All right, I’m going to go out and I’m going to make ten million dollars,’ and then suddenly at the age of thirty-five finds himself with his ambition realized and nothing else to do. He set his sights too low.

A lot of people said, ‘You’ve made a hell of a lot of money, Howard. Why don’t you spend some of it? Take a trip around the world. Play golf in Europe. Enjoy yourself.’

I couldn’t do that. Sometimes I went on a vacation aboard my yacht, but after a week, or a week away anywhere, I was restless. I was an active man, always have been an active man, can’t stand sitting on my tail for too long.

Even now, despite the physical condition I’m in, you have no idea how I fret at enforced inactivity. I know it’s absurd – a sick man of sixty-five can’t go out there and do. But I would love to.

But then I was in my late twenties. Okay, what next? I had maintained a continual interest in flying, right along through the movie-making period, and in 1934 I decided it was time to devote all my energies to it instead of working with my left hand.

I thought it out and made a decision.

I assembled a crew of friends, hired some other competent men, and we started building a plane of my own design with which I was going to make an attempt on the world speed record.