Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

10

AFTER THE CONSTELLATION, the next thing I tackled was The Outlaw. It’s not a major event in my life, but I want to give my version of what happened, since there’s been so much nonsense written about it.

I say it’s not a major event in my life, but you may have noticed by now that whenever I’ve tackled anything I’ve gone into it heart and soul, and I haven’t always kept a sense of proportion. I’ve devoted as much time to unimportant projects as I have to things of more substance.

It’s only in retrospect, however, that I consider The Outlaw to be an unimportant project. At the time I thought I was breaking new ground, as I did with Hell’s Angels. I had that in mind from the very beginning, and that’s why I searched as hard as I did for someone like Jane Russell and chose her to be my star. And once I found her I meant to see that her assets stayed in the public eye.

I hadn’t made a motion picture in many years, but I had a yen to break down some of the puritan barriers that I felt had been holding back the American cinema. Today, of course, all the barriers have been broken, and what I did seems quixotic, but if you place it in the perspective of the history of the cinema, you’ll see that it was a major breakthrough.

The story I selected was a version of the old Billy the Kid saga. I got a very fine director, Howard Hawks, but he didn’t work out very well – he got sore because he thought we were shooting in Arizona on location, and one day he arrived at the set and everyone was gone. I’d ordered them back to Hollywood to the sound stage, but Hawks hadn’t got the message. I still respect his work very much, and in fact he worked for me later at RKO.

So I took over The Outlaw. I directed it. You don’t have to be a genius to direct a movie. You don’t even have to be terribly artistic. You just need the common sense to listen to the technical people around you – they usually know what they’re doing – and at the same time you have to let them know you’re the boss.

I budgeted the picture very low, at a quarter of a million dollars. I had trouble immediately because Noah Dietrich got together with Hawks and said, ‘It can’t be done for a quarter of a million. It’s going to cost half a million, and knowing Howard that figure will probably be closer to two million.’

He was wrong. It cost nearly four million. I have a tendency, when I plunge into something, to forget the costs. In my view, the costs are not important – it’s the finished product that matters and, maybe even more important, what you learn in the course of getting to the finished product.

I started shooting, and what interested me, as always, was the opportunity to educate myself at the same time as I was making the movie. I always did that, and still do. You can never stop learning. There isn’t a day passes in my life that I don’t learn something. I try to learn one fact a day, or think about one new idea.

One of the things that particularly interested me in The Outlaw was the background music, which was done by Victor Young. I got terribly involved in it.

In those days we didn’t have the kind of magnetic sound track that they have now. We had what was called an optical track. You could literally see the sound track, and you could fool around with it – by putting masking tape on certain positions of the track you could block it off, raise and lower the volume, do what else you pleased. The technicians on this picture were not everything that I’d wanted them to be, so I took over and did the sound track myself. It took me, I would say, three or four weeks, working ten or twelve hours a day on it, and, mind you, not only was I half-deaf but I was doing other things at the time. By then it was wartime and I was building the Hercules and the D-2.

As everyone knows, we had a great deal of trouble getting a release for The Outlaw, and it wasn’t until 1946 that the picture was released. It premiered in San Francisco at the Geary Theatre. I went up there, stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, and I wasn’t feeling well. I had a bout of pneumonia, and I decided I couldn’t make the premiere. Besides, I didn’t want to go out into the crowds and deal with all that horseshit.

I stayed in my room that night, and I could hear that sound track in my head the whole time, and I suddenly realized something was wrong. So I got on the pipe to my film editor, Walter Reynolds, who was also up there in San Francisco. I can’t give you the exact hour and minute, but the point I’m trying to make is that the picture had already started, the audience was in their seats, Jane’s tits were on the screen, and I said to Walter, ‘Get the hell over here in a hurry and bring Reel Three to my hotel room.’

He arrived in a terrible state. He had the jitters, because the reels ran about twenty minutes. At the Geary they were halfway through the first reel, and without the third, the premiere couldn’t go on.

But I said, ‘Something’s wrong, Walter, and I want to make a cut.’

‘Howard, you can’t make a cut up here. You have no equipment, and I’ve got to bring that reel back to the theatre within fifteen minutes.’

I’ve learned in my life not to let other people’s panics panic me. I said calmly, ‘Take it out of the can, Walter, and give it to me.’

‘You don’t have any film rods,’ he said. ‘You have no cutting equipment – and how are you going to hear the sound track?’

All my life I’ve improvised, right up to now, when I put my own leaded glass screen in front of the TV set to cut out the gamma rays.

So I ran the film over a fountain pen – you have to have something to run it over in order to count the frames – and while I was doing it I had the musical score in my head. I’ve told you that as a child I played the saxophone and the ukulele. I hummed the music, and I moved the film, and I found the exact spot where I wanted to make a cut and where I didn’t want any music in the background. I wanted that silence to create a certain effect, a mood which you can get sometimes by silence. I’ve thought a great deal about the nature of silence. As I’ve grown older, silence has become much more precious to me – in fact, there are times when I am grateful for my deafness.

Walter had been sensible enough to bring a splicer. I cut twelve feet of film and he ran back to the Geary Theatre carrying Reel Three. Of course, it’s an art in itself, to cut twelve feet out of a finished film. But what astonished Walter was that I’d been able to cut the twelve feet of film and there was no awkward jump in the sound track, because I had it in my head and I knew that we moved from a C sharp to another C sharp chord.

He came to me next day and said, ‘Howard, that was an absolutely perfect cut.’ He was impressed. Deep down I was a little impressed too, but I just said, ‘Sure, Walter. What did you expect?’

Julie Furthman wrote the screenplay, but I wrote a good part of it too, and Joe Breen, the front man for the Hays Office, also made some contributions. This is hardly believable, but so help me, it’s true. There’s a scene in the movie where Jane Russell, Doc Holliday’s girlfriend, climbs into bed with Jack Buetel, who played Billy the Kid. Billy’s been wounded and has to be kept warm.

Walter Huston, who played Doc Holliday, comes back and finds them in the sack. Doc is pretty annoyed at this hanky-panky and threatens to gun Billy down. And Billy, who had loaned Doc his horse, reminds him of the fact, and says, ‘A fair exchange is no robbery.’ That was Julie Furthman’s line and I didn’t think it was clear, just a touch too highbrow, and I changed it to, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’

That made Joe Breen’s hair stand on end. He’d already seen the rough-cut of the picture and he was yelling about the showing of Jane’s tits and the fact that everybody was climbing into bed with everyone else. It all boiled down finally to covering Jane’s cleavage here and there and eliminating that one line, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’

I said in disgust, ‘Okay, Mr. Breen, you want to change it, go ahead. Just give me another line in its place.’

He said, ‘Well, how about “tit for tat”?’

I couldn’t believe my ears, but I very grudgingly said, ‘Okay.’ When this got back to Will Hays, Breen’s boss, his hair stood on end. Finally he said, ‘Look, Hughes, you cut that one line out, “tit for tat,” and put in something else, and we’ll give the film the production seal.’

I said, ‘How about, “You borrowed my horse, I borrowed your girl”?’ – which of course was my original line.

Will Hays said, ‘Yes, anything, I’m sick of this argument, I’m getting ulcers.’ And that’s how it stood at the end.

That was the first time I used Russell Birdwell as publicity agent. I knew that this picture needed a tremendous publicity campaign and Bird, which is what we called him, had been the publicity man for Gone with the Wind. I didn’t know him personally, but in those days when I wanted to meet a man I didn’t necessarily call him on the telephone and say, ‘I’d like to meet you. Please come over.’ I liked to meet people in more subtle ways.

I arranged to be out one night with Norma Shearer and I knew that Russell Birdwell would be at a certain night club. So I sat down with Norma and Myron Selznick at a table and listened to Birdwell talk to them. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t know who I was. He must have thought I was just another hanger-on, because by then I wasn’t paying attention to the way I dressed – I would wear a shirt until the collar frayed, socks till they’d stand up by themselves and walk out of the room. If people didn’t like the smell of my feet, they could go somewhere else and smell some other millionaire’s feet.

I hired Bird because Jane was unknown. Some agent had given me a photograph of her – she was nobody, not even an actress. She was a receptionist for some dentist out in the San Fernando Valley. She wanted to be an actress, but so did everybody in Hollywood. She had great cleavage, that was her principal asset.

I never gave screen tests – I didn’t believe in them. I wanted one thing: a still photograph with no makeup, because if a woman has got It, and you know what I mean by It, that certain star quality will come through. A woman in the morning, after you’ve spent the night with her and all the makeup has worn off, if she’s not beautiful then, you don’t want to have anything to do with her. Take my advice – that’s the acid test. And that was my method to find out whether or not these girls had It.

However, I did not spend the night with Jane Russell, I can assure you of that, even though she made it known to me that she was willing. I tend to favor a more slender woman. And at that time I was prettily heavily involved with Ava Gardner. You couldn’t exactly call Ava slender, but her proportions were a great deal more pleasing to my eye than Jane Russell’s. Ava was young then – she hadn’t bloomed yet. At the time I was seeing her, she couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It was just at the beginning of her career. But kid or not, slender or not, Ava was tough and she packed a mean wallop. She slugged me once with a bronze statue. I’m lucky to be here talking about it, and Ava’s lucky she isn’t behind bars for manslaughter.

It was around 1942, when she was getting a divorce from Mickey Rooney. Ava and I had been seeing one another off and on when she was breaking up with Rooney. But when I went with a woman, she went with me only, and I wasn’t about to share her with somebody else – I’d had my fill of that in the past and I knew the risks involved. Ava is a hell of a woman, probably one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. Sexual as hell. And certainly sexual enough for Mickey, because he screwed her from time to time at her place when I wasn’t there. He was a little guy but they say he was hung like a donkey. That’s not true of me, not at all.

I have ways to learn things, and once I found out this was happening, I confronted Ava with it and gave her a piece of my mind. In fact, I lost my temper and threatened to slap her across the chops.

But I reckoned without that gypsy temperament. I was on my way out, and she picked up a bronze statuette and let me have it behind the ear. I hit the carpet and was out like a light. They told me later she was leaning over me with blood in her eye, ready to plant that bronze statuette six inches into my skull, when her maid heard the yelling and stopped her. That would have polished me off for good. The colored maid saved my life.

Wait a second… I’m not sure that stories like this have a place in my book.

I think they do. It’s not all high finance and breaking airspeed records.

Well, all right. I was the injured party.

Was there any talk of marriage between you and Ava Gardner?

The usual talk. She shot her mouth off to the newsboys every now and then. I knew her for a long time, you know, but I usually made it a point to see her when she was between husbands. When she split up with Sinatra she sent me an SOS and I got her out of Las Vegas, because she thought the little bastard was going to kill her. She was hysterical. I sent a plane to Las Vegas and had her flown down to Cuba, and I arranged for a bodyguard for her, to protect her from Sinatra and his ratpack Mafia friends. It was the least I could do for her, to give her some peace of mind.

You were still friendly with her, even after she’d tried to brain you?

I didn’t turn my back on her again, you can be damn sure of that. But she came back weeping and said she was sorry, she didn’t know what had gotten into her.

To get back to Jane Russell – I made a contract with her years later, well after The Outlaw was done, and I still pay that girl a thousand dollars a week. I give her credit, she’s learned to act, but when I hired her for The Outlaw she couldn’t act worth a damn. But Jane had what I was looking for, so I signed her to a contract. She was bright, and I liked that. I hired this other unknown young actor, Jack Buetel, who was a jerk. Then I turned Russell Birdwell loose to build them up. I didn’t have the time for that kind of thing. I was involved in the HK-1 by then, and the D-2.

Of course the best bit of publicity that Bird had was a fluke, and that was when a Japanese submarine fired at Jane Russell on the beach near Santa Barbara. This happened during that long period between the time we finished The Outlaw and the time it was released, because the goddamn Hays office wouldn’t go for it at first. One day Jane went up the coast to take some publicity shots, and a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired a shot at some oil rigs, but fortunately Jane was in the way, or nearby.

Also fortunately, there was a man there taking publicity shots. He snapped photographs of Jane holding the shell fragments and looking very frightened. And that hit all the papers: front page. That made Jane Russell. (Now that’s an example of what’s called good luck, but if the photographer hadn’t been quick enough to take the photographs there wouldn’t have been any good luck.) We were off and away because Jane Russell was a target for the Japs. It would have been a bad break, of course, if one of these shells had nipped off a chunk of her natural endowments, but in that sense we were lucky, and so was she.

Then the Hays Office refused to give its seal of approval to the picture. We fought them on and off from 1941 to 1946. Jake Erlich, my lawyer, went into a courtroom with a bust of Venus de Milo, who as you know doesn’t wear a brassiere. The whole time that Jake conducted the case he had that bust sitting there in the courtroom, just to impress the people with the fact that the Greeks weren’t ashamed of the bare facts, and why the hell are we? And then the Motion Picture Producer’s Association got into the act and banned the film. I wound up suing them in 1948 for $5 million on the grounds that they were breaking the antitrust laws – boycott in restraint of trade.

Despite the fact that it was wartime and I was involved in far more serious endeavors, I had a showdown with these creeps in New York in 1944. We plastered the office with blow-ups, photographs of great female film stars of past and present, all of whom showed considerable amount of cleavage in their bosom. I hired a professor of mathematics from Columbia University. He came up there with his slide rule and calipers and measured the various amounts of cleavage and the amount of flesh that was showing, and he proved to the satisfaction of these people from the Hays Office and the Producers’ Association that, proportionately speaking, Miss Russell showed less of her natural endowments than the overwhelming majority of the great film stars of the past.

The point I was really making was that there should be no censorship at all, because it’s in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And time proved me right, for better or for worse. You look at movies that have been made years ago, and if you know the cuts that have been made you say to yourself, ‘Now why in hell did they ever cut that?’ Let’s say I had a much longer view than these shortsighted idiots who are out there to protect the morals of America’s children. Look what’s happened to the morals of America’s children. You think the Hays Office or the Breen Office could do anything to stop that? That’s a runaway freight train.

Didn’t you design a special bra for Jane Russell during the shooting of the pictures?

That was a simple problem in mechanical engineering – how to prop up two falling monuments. She was tied to a tree and I wanted those things sticking out like cannons.

I’ve tackled bigger problems than that in my life, although I guess I’ve rarely tackled bigger breasts. I told my engineers how it should be done, sketched it out, and the boys did it for me. That received a lot of publicity. I can’t understand why people make such fuss over petty stories like that. I certainly considered it a trivial achievement. That wasn’t the design of my life – lifting up Jane Russell’s breasts. I had started work on the flying boat. That was important. That was something I believed in, even though it led to one of the biggest disasters of my life.