Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

8

IT WAS THAT same year, 1938, that I became involved in one of the major episodes of my life, which was scheduled to last for twenty-eight years. That was Trans World Airlines.

TWA had started long before that, in the Twenties. It was the first company that ever had a transcontinental flight across the United States, advertising ‘coast to coast in forty-eight hours!’ You started off in New York, took trains to some point in the midwest and then a series of hops by air, slept at night – you only flew during the day – and got to Los Angeles in forty-eight hours.

It wasn’t TWA then. It was TAT, and they’d been formed from several airlines: Western Airlines, Standard Airlines, and an outfit called Maddux Airlines. They all got together under Paul Richter and Jack Frye. I knew Jack Frye from way back, and he was the man I really worked with. He became a good friend. He was one of the original Thirteen Black Cats, the first stunt pilots out in Hollywood.

TWA was the first airline to fly coast to coast without rail transport as part of the itinerary. It was just a few weeks after they started operations that they abandoned the railways. Jack Frye said, ‘We’re an airline and we’re going to fly all the way.’ And I don’t think it took them more than twenty-four hours then, still flying Fokkers.

The American aircraft industry in those days wasn’t what it is today. We had to go to Europe for a lot of our planes, which I felt right from the beginning was a mistake. I felt we had to lead. And we wound up leading until recently, when we found ourselves fast falling behind because of those politicians in Washington dragging their asses about the SST.

I had already flown once as a copilot, back in the early Thirties, for American Airways, the forerunner of American Airlines. They flew Curtis Condors, which were the first sleeper planes, and we also had the first stewardesses. I flew Los Angeles to Atlanta, Kansas City, and Cleveland.

Why did you take a relatively low-level job like that?

I wanted the experience. I had it in my mind even then that one day I was going to start an airline – I didn’t know I was going to buy one. I was dreaming then of Hughes Transoceanic Airlines. And I wanted to learn from the ground up. The one thing I had never done was fly a commercial airliner, so I took the job with American Airways, using the pseudonym Charles Howard. That’s because I didn’t want people gawking at me all the time and saying, ‘There goes Howard Hughes. Go up to the cockpit and have a look at the boy wonder.’

But I didn’t make a secret of it to my people. I told them I was taking a job as a copilot on an airline. This wasn’t like my trips to Ethiopia, or the time I went down to Lambarene to see Dr. Schweitzer, or my Cuban trips with Ernest Hemingway, or my trip to India. This was something that was known to the people who were close to me.

I flew only a very short time for American Airways, because I was a quick learner. I watched passengers’ reactions and I wrote it all down in my notebook. I had a new notebook by then and I made sure not to lose that one.

It hadn’t been my plan to buy into TWA, but I knew Jack Frye, who was president of the airline, and one day he called me and said, ‘Howard, I need twelve million dollars.’ A lot of stories have circulated since then about why Jack Frye needed this money, but none of them have ever told the truth. The truth is that the Board of Directors of TWA wanted to kick Jack out.

What had he done?

There’s always a guy ready to take over and reverse the pecking order. That’s all some people live for. I’ve been through that and I’m sure Jack was going through the same thing. I don’t know what he’d done or not done. But I knew Jack, and he was a good man.

He came to me and he said he could keep control if he could get hold of a block of stock that was being peddled around by Lehman Brothers, the banking house in New York City. TWA didn’t have much stock outstanding – less than a million shares – and Lehman Brothers had about 120,000 shares that were for sale. Jack figured if he picked up that block he’d have the controlling interest and they couldn’t boot his ass out of there. And so he came to me for twelve million.

I said, ‘Okay, Jack. It’s a small fortune, but the money is yours. The only thing I want is to run the show with you.’

He thought it over for about ten seconds, and then he agreed. I guess he figured for $12 million cash it was worth letting me in on my terms.

Then a funny thing happened. I had a lot on my mind: the war was looming on the horizon and I was developing the H-1, which was supposed to be the big Army pursuit plane, and then it went to the Japs. And we had troubles down at Houston with Toolco, and Henry Kaiser wanted me to go into the car business. What with one thing and another, after I made my arrangements with Jack, they slipped my mind.

Jack called Noah Dietrich one day and said, ‘I’m Jack Frye, and where’s my money? Where’s that check? Lehman Brothers hasn’t gotten the check!’

Noah said, ‘What’s this all about?’

Jack became annoyed, understandably. Noah said he’d have to talk to me about it, which he did. I remembered. I was mortified. ‘Shit, Noah,’ I said, ‘I’d forgotten the whole thing.’ Noah asked me how much I’d agreed to pay, and I said, ‘Ten dollars a share.’

‘The stock isn’t worth ten dollars a share,’ Noah said.

‘Noah, you have no vision. It’s worth more than ten dollars a share. That stock is going to be worth a hundred dollars a share in three years, if I run that airline.’

‘That’s not the point, Howard. I had a feeling from talking to this man Frye on the telephone that he’s in a tough spot, and he needs that money from you badly. If you hold out for a week or so, if we can spin him some story that Toolco has to approve the transaction’ – because the funds had to come from Toolco, since I didn’t have a dime of my own – ‘and you’ve gone off the deep end a bit, and the board of directors of Toolco says, ‘Okay, but we’ll only pay seven or eight dollars a share for it,’ you can get it for that price.’

‘Noah,’ I said, ‘that’s not the way to do business with friends.’

But he talked me into it. Maybe I wasn’t focused at the time. I said, ‘Noah, you handle it in your own inimitable way.’

I don’t buy that. You were the boss. It was your money, and you were the one who said yes or no.

Okay, I’m not trying to slough off all the responsibility for that tricky maneuvering. I knew what we were doing. Noah got back to Jack Frye and spun this yarn about the board of directors of Toolco having to approve the deal. I don’t know whether Jack fell for it, because if Jack had an ounce of brains in his head, he’d know that when I said, ‘Shit,’ the board would squat and strain.

Be that as it may, Noah was right, and very soon thereafter I got the stock for eight and a quarter a share.

Jack Frye was a little sore at me. He felt that I’d gone back on my word, and it bothered me because in a sense he was right, and I’ve always regretted that I let Noah talk me into that. It made bad feeling between me and Jack Frye to the point where I had to appoint Noah to the board of directors of TWA after I’d taken over. Not that Noah really had any say up there, but he was a spy for me. He never got along well with Jack, because Jack always blamed him for the change in the original buying price from ten to eight and a quarter.

Eventually, because Jack disliked Noah so much, I made Noah step down from his position. But I asked him to keep in touch with a few executives up at TWA who were friendly to me and were willing to give out inside information about what Jack was doing. We set up a system where they funneled information to Noah and he funneled it to me. I had my pipeline to the head office. You understand that at the time, even though I was principal stockholder in TWA, I didn’t have a position. I never had a title.

How was it possible for you to be principal stockholder if you only had $8 million worth of holdings?

I bought more. And of course by the end of the war I wasn’t just the principal stockholder – I was running the airline. When I had free time I devoted a great deal of it to studying their problems and making suggestions. Not to be immodest, in the 1940s I was the principal factor in the growth of TWA as the only competitor that could stand up to Pan American, the python of the American air carriers. Unquestionably, TWA was the most progressive airline in the United States. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll disagree with me on that. Among other things, I got Eero Saarinen to design our terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. I told him roughly what I wanted, what I thought a terminal of the future should look like, and I said, ‘Go do it. It’s your baby.’ It’s probably the most beautiful and functional airline terminal that’s ever been constructed.

Concerning this pipeline to the head office, why were you so suspicious of people?

I had reason to be. I was suspicious of Noah too. One of Noah’s secretaries was on my payroll at the time. I had to know what Noah was doing, because Noah had completely free rein, except on the decisions. He could have stolen me blind. There’s an old biblical saying: ‘Who will watch the watchers?’

It was also around this time, shortly after I bought into TWA, that I designed the plane that came to be known as the Constellation. It was the plane that, more than any other, changed the history of commercial aviation.

It made long-distance flights possible, in relative comfort, for large groups of people. Today that’s commonplace, but then it was a breakthrough.

Jack Frye helped me with the design, and Bob Gross was in on it too. That’s why Lockheed finally built it. Consolidated had turned us down, and then we went to Bob Gross at Lockheed. I got the idea for the plane when I was breaking the crosscountry record, Chicago to California, in the Northrop Gamma. I was so goddamn uncomfortable up there – the oxygen equipment wasn’t working, I was gasping for air, the hard pieces of the seat were jabbing into my spine – that I said to myself, ‘By God, when I finish this I’m going to design a plane that can carry people in comfort, nonstop from coast to coast.’

I really said that – it’s not a line from a movie script. I said it. I always talk to myself out loud. It’s not the habit of a lunatic, it’s the habit of a man who wants to remember what he thinks.

And that ship was the Connie. The most successful commercial piston-driven aircraft that ever flew. A radical departure from everything that went before.

In what way?

If you want to get technical, the fuselage had a curvilinear design that cut down the drag factor in an entirely new way. And it also worked as an airfoil. That had never been done before in an aircraft of that size. The Constellation carried a payload of 6,000 pounds and cruised at 250 knots. She was a very stable ship with a very soft ride. It went through a hell of a lot of changes after it was operational, got stretched and stretched until I thought, Jesus, soon you’ll be able to board the ship on the flight deck and walk aft and you’ll have walked from New York to Philadelphia. Bob Buck, who became TWA’s chief pilot, flew the first flight on regular passenger services. He said it was the finest aircraft he’d ever flown. And you know who else flew a Connie, one of the very early Connies, even before Bob Buck? Orville Wright. He took it up with me one day out of Miami. It was meant as a kind of tribute to him. I wanted to do something for him. He was a very old man then, on the way out, and I thought it would be nice for him. He flew it himself for over an hour.

While we’re on the subject, did you prefer piloting propeller planes like the Connie, or did you prefer jets?

A piston-driven aircraft is a delight to fly. A jet is a headache – far more complicated, a very mechanical operation, a power plant. A prop plane, especially the smaller ones, like the F-11 or the Sikorsky, the Lockheed Vegas or even a Northrop Gamma – that’s something you can feel. With a plane like that, you can dance. You can hardly love a jet but you certainly could – at least I could – love a prop plane, and I’m sure that most pilots who have flown both would agree with me.

Actually I loved all the planes I designed and flew, but never for very long. I was fickle. You could say I had a harem of planes if you want to talk about it that way. I didn’t actually get tired of them, but I always had at least three or four that were operational, and I used them all. Of course when I was building something from scratch, like the H-1 or the F-11, I put my heart and soul into it to the exclusion of everything else and to the exclusion of any other aircraft I was using at the time – so you could say those were very intense love affairs.

Anyway, on the first flight of the Connie, I broke the transcontinental record again, although it’s really a matter of absolutely no significance. The record has been broken a hundred times since then and it will be broken a hundred times more. I wasn’t setting out to break any record. I was just setting out to prove that the Constellation was a plane that could carry people in comfort from coast to coast, nonstop. And it did. But in the light of what we have today, in the light of what we’re going to have in future planes, in the history of aircraft, my record-breaking flights in the Constellation will be a footnote on page twenty-nine. My contributions to the industry were more basic than that.

You know, I almost didn’t make that first flight in the Connie. We were ready for takeoff from Burbank when two young women came running out in the lights of the field. It was late at night, about three o’clock in the morning. One of them was a girlfriend of mine named Fran Gallagher, a gorgeous dark-haired woman, really talented and passionate in bed. She’d brought a girlfriend along – I seem to remember that her name was Valerie, and she was another knockout. So I had a ladder lowered and went out, and got involved in conversation with Fran and her friend Valerie. Fran wanted to come along – she said, ‘If you let Valerie and me come on this flight and the three of us are alone in the cockpit, Howard, this will be the most memorable flight of your life.’

I was tempted, needless to say, but it was a proving flight and I didn’t want any noncontributing passengers aboard, even if they promised memorable fun and games. Still, I hesitated.

When I looked round, the ladder was up in the cockpit and the plane was taxiing down the field. I said, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Jack Frye was my copilot and he was at the controls. It was just a joke, he wanted me to get moving. And so I kissed Fran goodbye and waved to Valerie and ran after the plane. They stopped and put down the ladder and I climbed up, and we were off.

Didn’t you break the record again, in 1946, on a second flight with the Connie?

Yes, we broke the speed record that time too, but again it was the kind of record that would last until the next favorable tail wind. That was a publicity flight for the plane, more than anything. You could call it a VIP flight, in a way. Some senators were aboard, and Danny Kaye and his wife, and Linda Darnell. Poor Linda, I was fond of her, and we had some wild times together, but she came to a bad end. Burned to death, set herself on fire smoking in bed in a drunken stupor.

At one point I stepped out of the flight deck and went up to Linda and said, ‘Dig out that bottle of hooch you’ve got in your handbag.’

She gave it to me, and everybody watched me walk back carrying a bottle of bourbon. I heard afterwards they thought I’d finally gone off the deep end and was going to go up there and get plastered. But I needed it. One thing we’d forgotten on board was the methylated spirits to clean the windshield. I needed alcohol, and I knew Linda had it.

In 1946 I developed a radar system for the Connie, and that was a significant step forward in airline safety. It was the only radar for commercial aircraft that was worth a damn at the time, and I demonstrated it in 1947. It was the only device that gave the pilot a warning if he was too close to mountains or any other obstacle. It flashed a red light, and a warning horn sounded in the brainbox, the flight deck.

I demonstrated it near Mount Wilson, in California, because, as usual, there were skeptics who didn’t think it would work. I took a group of newspaper people up in a Connie, and I scared the holy hell out of them. They thought with a 500-foot warning, that only allowed a few seconds for the pilot to avoid whatever obstacle there was. But that wasn’t the case, since this was a radarscope that picked up the obstacle at ground level.

I flew them all around Mount Wilson and into those canyons around there. Naturally, the moment we got close to the mountains the red light went on and the horn started to sound. It was loud as hell – I’d had it amplified because I was too deaf to hear it at its normal pitch. I knew that part of the country pretty well, and I went up in the evening, just when it was getting dark, and each time the horn would sound and the light would flash on, I’d start a conversation with one of these guys and pretend I hadn’t heard the signal, which drove them out of their minds. I knew I still had thirty or forty seconds to get the ship out of danger, and I used pretty near every second of it. I proved my point. The newsboys weren’t skeptical anymore.

Of course I could handle that ship, the Connie, like no other pilot in the world except maybe Bob Buck. I offered to take the same gang through the Grand Canyon if they wanted more proof. But they didn’t take me up on it. They had to file their stories and change their pants first – they wet them on that flight.

You may have read that I was supposed to have lived in one of my Constellations, but that’s not quite true. It’s a fact that one of them was equipped for living, and I did spend an occasional night on board, but that’s all. Apart from that I had a lot of fun with my planes, and my friends did too. Cary Grant and I used to go to Mexico every once in a while, and there was one flight where our radio went on the blink and we were reported lost.

Cary and I were good friends then. I arranged his marriage to Betsy Drake. I don’t mean I was a matchmaker – I mean I arranged the wedding. I picked them up at the airfield in Culver City, in my Connie, very early in the morning. They had to hop over a wire fence and run out to the plane, and I took off and flew them to Arizona. We went there because Cary and Betsy wanted to avoid publicity. They were being hounded almost as much as I was.

This was Christmas day, 1949 – the day after my birthday. I landed in the desert at an abandoned Army airfield. It was an old strip, and it wasn’t built for something as big as a Connie. We came down right to the end of the runway and I almost overshot. I had to jam on the brakes hard to avoid running into a mess of cactus. I had arranged to have a car waiting to pick us up and we drove to the house of the local justice of the peace. I was Cary’s best man and I was so nervous I did everything ass backwards. First I stood next to Betsy, and then when the J.P. told me to move over to Cary’s side I did, but I stumbled and dropped the wedding ring and had to get down on my hands and knees to look for it under a sofa.

Anyway, despite my efforts, finally they got married. We drove back to the landing strip and by then it was pitch dark. I hadn’t realized we would have to take off at night – I had to hustle back into town and hire a couple of taxis to come out to the airport and shine their lights on the runway so I could see where I was going. We took off, and toward the end of the flight Betsy came up and sat with me in the cockpit for a while. I thought I’d give her a little charge, so I buzzed Wilshire Boulevard.

She turned white. She said, ‘My God, Howard, I’m not going to die on my wedding day, am I?’

I put the ship down at Culver City, they hopped back over the fence, and that was that.

Cary and I also went on a wild trip one time to Mexico – this was a couple of years before I arranged the gala wedding with Betsy. It was 1947, a few months after I’d cracked up the F-11. I was in a big hurry because I had a date down there with a woman.

Lana Turner?

No, sorry to disappoint you. This is someone you never heard of and I won’t mention her real name because… well, I’ll tell you this much. This incident happened in 1946. Not my flying to Mexico with Cary Grant to see her, but meeting her for the first time. It was one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened to me.

I was flying to San Francisco from New York on a United Airlines plane. (I sometimes flew with the opposition, just to see how well or how poorly they did things.) Anyhow, there I was in my seat, dog-tired from whatever I’d been working on, and there was this woman sitting in the seat next to me. Not a girl, you understand – a woman in her early thirties, well-dressed and beautiful. I’ve never been much on small talk so we didn’t say more than a few words to each other, just stuff like ‘Pardon me’ and so forth. But I did notice that she was exceptionally attractive, with unusual features, and lovely blue-green eyes. Startling eyes, very clear. After dark I fell into a kind of doze, and I swear I don’t know how this happened, but when I woke up we were holding hands.

Isn’t that incredible?

We talked, and one thing led to another. Nothing happened right away – not in San Francisco, because she was being met by her husband. We lost touch for a time, but then we made contact, and she agreed to meet me in Mexico that time. That’s why I was in such a rush – I hadn’t seen her since that crazy time on the flight to San Francisco.

You can’t give me her name?

No, she’s still married to the same man. He was in the consular service. He’s a very highpowered diplomat now, he has a very exalted rank, so I won’t tell you his name. Her first name was Helga.

Did she know who you were?

Not during the flight, but later I wanted to keep contact with her, so I had to tell her. What I liked about her was that it didn’t impress her one way or the other. She just said, ‘Oh, you’re the man who flew around the world.’ I gave her some flying lessons, as a matter of fact, once in Santa Fe.

Do you still see her?

The last time was years ago – well, some time after she met me in Acapulco. Later I’ll tell you more about her.