Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

16

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE first round of the Senate investigations, I decided to test-fly the Hercules. It happened on a Sunday, I remember very clearly, because someone asked me if I’d gone to church to pray.

Nobody thought the flying boat would fly. I had said I’d leave the country if it didn’t.

We trucked the Hercules down from its various hangars to San Pedro, part by part on the highway. I had a dozen trucks moving the fuselage, the wings and the tail assembly. Took a day or two to get it down there – they had to disconnect the overhead power lines all along the route so she could pass under them. That cost me a pretty penny, but most of the mayors of those Southern California cities were already on my payroll, so it didn’t break me.

Huge crowds lined the highway: Barnum and Bailey had come to town. And when we got her down to Long Beach and tucked her away in the hangar; we still had a lot of work to do.

This was final assembly, and suddenly I realized the controls wouldn’t work. They were manual controls, and they weren’t powerful enough. This was an engineering oversight on my part. I’d considered the problem and I thought I’d licked it, but I was wrong. So I invented what was probably the first power-steering device, and installed it in the Hercules. That’s what I mean, you see, when I say her value as a laboratory was incalculable. I made no secret about how I’d done it, and that information was snapped up by all the aircraft and automobile manufacturers, and the car you’re driving today uses the same principle.

Eventually I was ready to test the ship on the water. She was winched from the graving dock, checked for leaks, and she was ready. Some newspaperman had the nerve to ask me if I was taking it down there to load it on a barge and dump it beyond the three-mile-limit. That’s a guy I almost hit. There was a big crowd there when I finally decided to have that test run. There was a Navy cruiser, excursion boats, hundreds of other boats and even some aircraft which I told to get out of the way.

I hadn’t planned to fly it. They wanted me to fly it. They wanted a show. ‘FLY IT, HOWARD HUGHES, OR LEAVE THE COUNTRY,’ one newspaper said in a headline.

I decided to take a few taxi runs on the water. I checked the engines. Dave Grant, one of my engineers, was with me, and a government observer, George Haldeman, and some reporter whose name I can’t remember. Matter of fact he was the only newspaperman who stayed with me on the ship.

I took her across San Pedro Bay and opened up all eight throttles – we were probably doing close to a hundred knots by then. There’s a certain feeling you have when you’re at the controls of an airplane, and that was no ordinary airplane. That was like being at the controls of the Queen Elizabeth, except she was skimming across the bay at a hundred knots. There was a feeling of power and accomplishment, because all this was happening, you realize, after I’d gotten back from Washington and had been through the fires of hell. A lot of people said I was testing the Hercules in order to get good publicity for myself, make myself a national hero before the second congressional session took place. But I’d cracked eggs over Brewster’s head the first time and I knew I could do it again. I knew he’d wind up smelling like a henhouse.

But you did get publicity, didn’t you? Wasn’t there a Hughes for President Club at that time?

A lot of them, all over the country. You don’t think I paid any attention to that, do you? Imagine me as President of the United States. The country would grow rich, we wouldn’t have any more national debt, the Dow would jump to the moon, the government would actually make a profit. How would politicians thrive? Someone would have to assassinate me.

But there were more serious offers – serious and ridiculous. Both the state chairman of the Republican Party and the state chairman of the Democratic Party in California came to me and asked me to run on their ticket for governor. I’ll bet I was the only man in history beside Eisenhower who was asked by both parties to run for the same office. I told them I had more serious things to do than be governor of California. That’s for guys like that overcooked ham, Reagan.

All right, let me go on – I want to tell you how I felt when I was at the controls of the Hercules. I did a couple of taxi runs, and then a third. And then I hadn’t planned it, but I said to myself, ‘She’s ready, she’s aching to go, and they’re all here for a show. I’ll pander to the vulgar curiosity of the mob this one time, and that’s the end.’

I eased back on the throttle. She never hesitated. She took off. We didn’t gain very much altitude, because the ship wasn’t ready for that yet. And I didn’t fly her very far, maybe a mile at the most, before I set her down. I wasn’t proving to myself that the ship could fly. I knew she would fly if I wanted her to. I was proving to myself that I didn’t care one way or the other what people felt. They wanted a show – I gave them one. I felt great. I felt a moment of exhilaration that comes only a few times in a lifetime.

And it meant I didn’t have to leave the country.

Of course I wanted to fly the plane again, in private, but not until we had ironed out a few kinks and I had run tests on her. Then the second round of the Senate investigations interfered and the whole goddamn thing was put off.

Then came the first of several incidents which I have never cleared up, in my mind, to my own satisfaction. I’m not accusing anyone specifically here, because I never could find a clue. I will tell you this. Sometime in 1948 or 1949 various executives of some of the top metal producing companies in this country – I mean Alcoa, Reynolds, and Kaiser – approached me. They wanted to see the Hercules. It had flown and they were full of praise for what a wonderful job I’d done, and they said they’d like to look at it. I took them at their word. You understand, the boat’s made of wood – of duramold – and I thought, they’ve seen the light.

They came, and I personally took them through the hangar, which by then I had leased from the City of Long Beach. They were impressed. And then they left.

We had excellent security on the HK-1 but nothing compared to the security that existed afterward or that exists now, because on the next inspection of that boat, we discovered broken ribs, smashed ribs, all throughout the after section and inside the tail assembly. A broken rib in a man is set by a doctor and that’s all there is to it, but any airplane of that size – remember the tail assembly alone was ten stories high – is another story. But once we found the broken ribs and the tail assembly, naturally we checked her from stem to stern. We found bent propellers as well, and a bent propeller is not something you can see unless you have a practiced eye. If I hadn’t spotted them and if I had flown the plane again, it would have been the end of Howard Hughes.

I don’t want you to infer from this that I suspected a plot against me personally. In this instance, no. In my view this was a plan to destroy the Hercules, and whereas I say my suspicions have never been confirmed, I strongly suspect these metals people who came to look her over, because the success of your wooden flying boat would have wiped out the metal industries’ role in airplane construction. But I couldn’t prove it, then or now, though I hired half a dozen ex-OSS guys to go through the files of Reynolds and those other companies.

It took years to fix the Hercules. While the guys working on her were competent, they couldn’t make an important move without consulting me. She was my baby, and in those years I was up to my neck in TWA, RKO, you name it.

Then it happened again.

I’d built this hangar, which is right on Long Beach Harbor, on land that I’d leased from the City of Long Beach. They wanted publicity at the time and I’d brought them a hell of a lot, with that ‘flying lumberyard,’ as they sometimes called it. So they met my demands. One of my principal demands was that nobody have access to that hangar, including city officials. That was written into the contract with the city. They swallowed that, but they didn’t like it.

One day the fire inspector showed up on a routine check and the guys at the hangar wouldn’t let him in. There was a big hullabaloo down at City Hall. They said the contract was illegal because the fire department didn’t have the right to get in to make their routine checks, and that was against whatever laws the city had made back in 1850 or whenever it got started. But I made it stick – I had a good lawyer out there.

After the metals people tried to wreck it, my security was really tight. They tried to get guys in to see the boat on the pretext of writing articles for magazines, but I viewed everyone as a potential saboteur, and I killed every story on it. I didn’t want any attention focused on it, because I knew the more it was played up in the newspapers, the more that Reynolds and Kaiser and Alcoa would panic, and the more efforts they might make to destroy the boat.

Some magazine, for example, was about to do a story on me and the Hercules. However, fortunately for me, the magazine was being sued for libel by a movie star I had under contract. We made a deal, sub rosa. The magazine agreed not to print the story, and my actress agreed to drop her libel suit. That kept things quiet for a while until, as I said, they tried it again.

This was in 1953, during the winter. Long Beach Harbor was protected – at least that part of Long Beach Harbor where my hangar was – by a dike, a cofferdam. And one day some barge came haring down, supposedly out of control, and broke through this cofferdam. Thousands of tons of crap, water, mud, garbage, poured right through, smashed the hangar, and smashed the Hercules. The tail, which we had managed to put into shape after the sabotage, was completely crushed. The wings were bent. The ailerons, the hull, the stabilizers – everything was crushed.

After an accident like that, did you think of abandoning the project?

Never. All I thought of at the time was: I’m not going to give in, they’re not going to get me. I wept. I don’t mean inside. I sat down in my car and I cried like a baby. Two business ventures have meant a great deal to me in my lifetime. One was the Hercules and the other was Trans World Airlines, which I always thought of privately as Hughes Transoceanic Airlines. Because I made it, I built it.

I dried my eyes with a Kleenex, left the car and went to see Noah. That’s when he showed his true colors. That son of a bitch looked across the table from me, cool as ice, and he said, ‘Howard, your problems are solved. You can junk that plane now and nobody will criticize you.’

‘Noah,’ I said, ‘you’re a small, mean, opportunistic worm, with no sensitivity and no understanding of what makes a man tick. If it’s the last thing I do in this world, that plane will be fixed. And it will fly again.’

Now I want to tell you something that I may not even have admitted to myself at the time. Deep down inside, in the depths of my heart, when I saw how the Hercules had been crushed by this avalanche, I thought, well, that’s fate – I wasn’t meant to complete this project. It was a dream, and it’s come to an end. No man can be successful in everything he tries. It passed through my mind that I would be wasting my money and my energies and my time, except that as a research project it could still have validity. But I saw jets coming and I doubted whether we’d ever put jet engines on the Hercules.

Noah Dietrich’s remarks changed that. Maybe it was just to spite Noah Dietrich that I went on.

In dollars the damage would have cost a million to fix. But it was not a question of the money. It was a question of the time, and of the blood that I and my people had poured into that ship.

The first thing I did was sue the city for $12 million. The barge didn’t belong to the city, but it was the city’s responsibility to keep barges away from that cofferdam. The barge company didn’t have a dime. Suing them would have made no sense at all.

I won the suit. Took me years, but I settled for half a million dollars.

Then you didn’t come out too well.

That’s the usual ratio. I didn’t expect to get the $12 million. I just wanted to let them know that I wasn’t going to take this lying down, and any future incidents would be dealt with severely. But then I almost got into trouble. The city was pissed off about the lawsuit. They sent a letter to me that said, ‘Mr. Hughes: your lease, when it expires, will not be renewed.’

That’s dirty pool. My suit was a legitimate one and they were threatening, illegitimately, to boot me out of there.

But I knew how to handle these kinds of situations. That’s something I learned from my father. I can fight as dirty as the next man if I’m being unjustly persecuted. I know when to be the lion. I sharpened my claws.

I have to give you a little historical picture of Long Beach. It’s the third largest city in California, and Long Beach Harbor has what’s called an oil pool, tideland oil, under its harbor, worth at that time about several hundred million dollars. The City of Long Beach wanted it and the state of California wanted it. Just before the time that the cofferdam broke and my hangar got flooded, the city and the state had come to a tentative compromise agreement, which they were fixing up in the state capital, Sacramento.

I had friends in Sacramento on my payroll – well-placed people. I got them on the telephone and I said, ‘Kick Long Beach in the ass.’ In other words, put the pressure on, throw a monkey wrench into the negotiations so that the city thinks that the state is going to get all the tideland oil.

The city fathers figured they were going to get some hundred million dollars over the years out of this pool of oil under their harbor, but things suddenly ground to a halt in Sacramento. As soon as Long Beach found out who was the guiding brain behind the breakdown in negotiations, they came crawling to me on their hands and knees.

‘Mr. Hughes, we didn’t mean to offend you.’

I said, ‘Well, you did offend me. And you better do something about it.’

They gave me a ten-year lease on the hangar. I called off my dogs in Sacramento and, eventually, as I told you, I settled my suit for half a million dollars.

They also tried to harass me, while all this was going on, by citing me for low flying. The Civil Aeronautics Authority was going to do it on the basis of a complaint by the Long Beach Police.

I was flying a PBY with Glen Odekirk. We’d been using it over Long Beach to check out, among other things, the possibility of that cofferdam breaking again, and they tried to say we were less than fifty feet from the beach. We may have been, and it may have been careless in their eyes, but it didn’t matter – I was able to prove that we were approaching a landing area, in this case the bay, and there was no minimum altitude specified in the city regulations for landings. So they couldn’t get me that way.

You’re probably wondering why, nearly twenty years later, I still keep the Hercules. I’ll explain it to you. Once all this damage had been repaired, the ship became for me, among other things, a laboratory. You told me you flew across the Atlantic on the Jumbo Jet, the Boeing 747. You thought it was great. Do you think that 747 would be in the air if the HK-1 hadn’t flown seventy feet off the ground in 1948? I doubt that very much. When that plane flew, it was of tremendous importance to the aviation industry.

The plane is the largest ever constructed, completed, and flown. It cannot be abandoned. It would be criminal to abandon it now, much less tear it apart. Would you tear down the Empire State Building? Let it go derelict? Some day, after my death, that ship is going to wind up on display either at a specially constructed housing, or at the Smithsonian Institute, because it’s a landmark in the history of aviation. And these shortsighted bastards who delight in destroying these sorts of monuments won’t get their hands on her. I’m keeping her in trust.

It’s costing you several hundred thousand dollars a year, isn’t it, to keep that plane in the hangar?

It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it. Besides, it’s tax-deductible.