Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

17

AFTER THE WAR my whole life changed. I wanted it to change. After the Senate investigation, and my crash in the F-11, and after vindicating myself by flying the Hercules, I felt that the first part of my time on earth was over. I was in my early forties. I felt I had to get away. And so I went to Ethiopia.

The story of those trips is something I’ve told only to one person, and it’s an oddly emotional subject with me.

After I finally took the Hercules up and made her fly, I was no longer content in any way with the things that I had been doing. Until then I’d been climbing my father’s image, you might say. He had been up there in front of me, as a target – not just a target to attain, but a target to shoot down.

And I realized I had done it, I had shot him down. He wasn’t there anymore, looming up in front of me larger than life. It came to me that this was a kind of a ridiculous thing for a man of forty-three to still be battling with his father’s image. Then one day the image was no longer there for me. I had defeated him. I’d shot him down, as you put it.

But it left a hole in my life. What was I supposed to be doing? I owned TWA, one of the biggest airlines in the United States. Toolco was flourishing as never before, and I was a millionaire many times over. I’d known all the beautiful women in Hollywood and I could theoretically take my pick, so money and sex were no longer unattainable or even difficult objects. Money never really was, but it certainly wasn’t then.

Family life – well, that’s something else, and I’ll get to it later. What matters is that I realized I was a dissatisfied man, and that dissatisfaction took me, of all places, to Ethiopia.

Flying was still connected with it. I went the first time in 1946. TWA had a management agreement with Ethiopian Airlines, like the one pending with BWA in the Bahamas. More or less the same, but much more complicated, because we were dealing with a vastly more difficult set of problems. The most complicated piece of machinery those Ethiopians had ever seen was a sewing machine, much less an airplane.

In Ethiopia, up in those mountainous gorges cut by the Nile, I had the feeling that I was plunging back 2,000 years into time. I saw places that I’m positive hadn’t changed since the days of Christ. Almost the whole country is off the beaten track, and I remember standing on some mountaintop or even a few hundred yards off an airstrip, in the brush, and saying to myself, ‘It’s entirely possible that I’m the first human being who has ever stood on this particular spot of earth.’ That gave me an eerie feeling, very beautiful in some ways. Did I ever tell you, by the way, that I once pissed in the Coliseum in Rome? I don’t know why that occurs to me now, but I did.

I was in Rome on my way back from somewhere, probably Ethiopia – maybe that’s why I think of it now – and I stopped off for a day to see the city, which I hardly knew. I was in the Coliseum at night, not another soul there, and there was the grandeur that was Rome surrounding me on a lovely moonlit night. I was impressed, so I walked out into the center of the arena and had a piss in the moonlight. I said, ‘That’s in honor of you, Julius Caesar. Howard Hughes salutes you.’

Then I saw a guard walking over to me, and I decided I’d better leave. He didn’t stop me.

I wonder if any dollars grew there where you pissed.

Let’s get back to Ethiopia. TWA was supposed to set up and run Ethiopian Airlines until the natives could take over and run it themselves. There was no Ethiopian air service at all in 1946. I’ve been out there several times – it’s dramatic and savage and beautiful, and hell to travel. The standard mode of travel in Ethiopia was by mule, and the country was so cut by rifts that you could take a week to reach a village you could already see. Even when you landed at the airstrips, you could see the town a mile or so away, but it took an hour to hike up there. No roads, just dirt tracks. There’s a railroad running down the coast to the port of Djibouti, but that’s all. If ever a country needed air transport, it was Ethiopia.

We had one thing going for us, and that was a bunch of Italian airfields left over from the war. They were in terrible shape. But they were there. And so we – that is, TWA – signed a management agreement with the Emperor Haile Selassi and we went out there and started managing things.

I saw Selassi go by in his green Rolls-Royce one time. Everybody bobbed up and down like they do in Japan. But I never met him. When I went out there in 1948 I didn’t go as Howard Hughes. I didn’t want the treatment. I wanted anonymity as much as I ever wanted it, so I didn’t use my own name.

Strangely enough, I felt very uncertain of myself. I felt as if I hadn’t really done anything with my life. I had a kind of empty feeling, and I asked myself: where was Howard Hughes? I mean I knew where Howard Hughes was, but I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know the man underneath the labels. Who had accomplished all those things I’d done? And who was the I? And how would it get me through the rest of my life? How would I justify what remained of my existence on earth? What good would all my money do me, or anyone else? What had I accomplished that was more than an effort to honor my ego? What was the meaning of an individual life?

These may seem like cliches to you, out of some psychiatric handbook or some hippie’s ravings, but I was in my early forties, and maybe you understand that it’s a crucial time in a man’s life, a time when certain powers may be beginning to fail. I don’t mean just the crude sexual powers; I mean the powers of sustained energy, the confidence and the recklessness and the supreme ego of youth. Those are the powers that catapult you into manhood. They say that the first forty years supply the text, the next forty years is the commentary. Schopenhauer said that, not me.

Well, I couldn’t read my own text anymore. It was unfamiliar, almost in a foreign language. So how could I supply the commentary?

I felt I had a chance to become a new person, or to find the old person, the person who had been there all along, which I could never find back there in the USA, surrounded by people who were constantly wanting things from me, and from whom I wanted things constantly. I wanted to live in a world where I didn’t have to want and other people didn’t have to want with such a desperate quality. I would just have a challenge and a job to do, and in the quiet moments I could figure things out.

That’s why I went to Ethiopia the second time. The TWA operation out there was in charge of a man named Swede Golien, and I didn’t want to see Swede. He’s an old-time pilot – been flying since not long after the First World War. He was in the capital, Addis Ababa, so I ducked in and out of there as quickly as I could. I went out as an airport engineer from the home office. I just called a few of the guys on top in Kansas City, and said a man I was interested in, an engineer named Charles Maddox, was going out to Ethiopia for me personally. I would take care of his salary, don’t put him on the books, and no special treatment by the guys in Ethiopia.

And in early 1948 Charles Maddox, yours truly, went out to Ethiopia.

I spent a couple of days in Addis Ababa – filthy hole – and the first thing that hit me was the altitude. I’d been in Mexico and so I knew you had to take it easy for a while when you first go to a place that’s more than 6,000 feet high. But it was much higher in Ethiopia. One of the TWA engineers had a heart attack the second night he arrived when he picked up some fancy whore in Addis. He conked out right in the middle of humping her. You don’t do much humping at 9,000 feet, not even in the best of circumstances, unless you’ve been doing it all your life and know how to pace yourself. You need a heart of oak, lungs like leather, and a pecker of steel.

Did you…?

For God’s sake, no. They had every venereal disease known to man. It was out of the question in Ethiopia.

I headed inland. That was some of the hairiest flying I’ve ever done in my life. The downdrafts knocked you down a thousand feet before you could get control of the ship again. Murderous. They lost at least one or two planes that way.

Sometimes I was the pilot, sometimes a passenger. I don’t know which was worse. I got there just before the rains. The rainy season lasts from the middle of June to September, and it pours rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. I was there a little before the rains hit, and the flying looked possible.

The first time I flew it was up to a strip near a place called Dobi. I landed, and had a terrible scare. I saw several hundred people gathered on the edge of the strip, like a crowd at a drag race. ‘Christ,’ I said to myself, ‘they’re not giving me much room, but I suppose they’ll head for the hills when I drop my landing gear and put the nose up.’

But they didn’t. They just stayed there and watched. Orderly; they didn’t mill around or anything, but they didn’t give an inch of ground. They had more dumb faith than I’ve ever seen in my life. They were in awe of the planes, like those people in New Guinea who have the cargo cult, only not quite so maniac about it. They didn’t think the planes were gods who would one day drop down to provide bounty everlasting, but still they were in awe. You could see it in their faces. And it never occurred to them that if a crosswind hit you, you could veer and sheer off a few fuzzy heads with a wingtip.

The whole time the plane was there on the strip, which was a matter of some six or seven hours, from early morning until the middle of the afternoon, they just sat there, formed a big circle around the plane, a DC-3, got down on their haunches the way peasants do, and watched it. Men, women and children, just squatting there and watching that ship sitting in the dust. They had brought their lunches along too; it was a family affair. I thought this was wonderful. How simple people’s needs are, when their minds aren’t cluttered with all the garbage of modern-day life. I’m sure those people enjoyed staring at that DC-3, were moved by it – and it just sat there, completely inert – were more touched and thrilled than the average American is who sits like a chuckling moron in front of the boob tube and watches his favorite sitcom. They were certainly more at peace. And the Ethiopians didn’t have to watch any commercials.

I didn’t spend all the time out there working as an engineer. I did my share of that work, but for the first time in my life I took a good look at how other people, I mean people besides Americans, live – and you can go a long way before you find people as other as Ethiopians. They’re a warrior people, old Christians, and they had an innate dignity which you don’t find many places.

I don’t mean I got friendly with them. I tried, but they’re touchy, arrogant people – hard to talk to. And there was the problem of their hospitality. I’m a bit finicky about my food. I’m not talking about Ethiopia, I mean in the United States. I had a little silver rake, which I carried into restaurants and banquets – especially banquets, with their limp salad and fat green peas. If there’s anything I hate in the food world, it’s a fat green pea. So I’d take out my little rake and rake through the green peas, and the ones that slipped through the tines were edible. The rest was just trash to throw out with the salad, for the hogs. These days it’s different. Now you can get tiny peas. But I don’t like peas anymore.

What do you eat now?

I eat figs and fresh raspberries and other fruit – all organically grown. No artificial fertilizers for me. I’m under a doctor’s care and he prescribes rare beef for me, but I can’t take it. He’d like me to take it bloody, but I can’t get it down, so I have it well done. Boiled, cut into small pieces.

This was one of the troubles I had out in Ethiopia, in 1948, when I met this tribal chieftain. It was in the southern part of the country, and the tribal chieftain invited a few of us to have a meal with him. The first dish was all right, except that the spice they put over it, called wot, could burn the roof of your mouth off. But I got through that part. Then four men came out carrying a skinned cow. I wouldn’t call it a steer – it was a cow, raw – and they stopped in front of me, and I saw that I was supposed to choose a piece. I had the idea they were going to cook it. I pointed to a nice filet mignon. They whacked it off and dropped it down in front of me, plop, on the plate in front of me. I was supposed to eat it.

That was the end of any social contact, you might say. I said, as politely as I could, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

I was concerned that this might offend the chieftain, but I didn’t think it would offend him as much as if I’d eaten the raw meat and then vomited it all over his lap.

When I was out there I lived in the tin huts that were scattered all over the country, where our TWA men were living. They lived separately from the natives, and didn’t have much contact with them. I managed some contact because I went out to find it. I had nobody to report to. I was a free agent, so I could take off whenever I wanted to, which suited my purpose. l would be a passenger going down to Desi or Kobbo or some even more remote place, and I would disembark and spend two or three days there, living in whatever accommodations were available. Once I slept in a place that was the equivalent of a flophouse for the poor people of the town. And poor in Ethiopia means poor in a sense that’s hard to understand if you’ve never been out there. That’s poor at the low end of the poverty scale – utterly destitute.

Of course I couldn’t speak the language, but I could get by. It’s amazing how, in situations like these, men understand one another. I made it known that I wanted a bed, but there was no hotel in this town. I had my own bottled water with me, and some dried fruit. That was enough for me. I didn’t eat much, and I didn’t need much sleep, but I’d been up for a day and a half before this trip, and I had to get some sleep.

I was taken to a little shack with maybe half a dozen men sleeping in it. It was cold, a few degrees above freezing, so I couldn’t sleep outside. I came in late, just as it was getting dark. I was shown to a pallet on the floor.

One look at the men sleeping there and any sane man would have thought, ‘I won’t last the night, I’ll get my throat cut.’ The man in charge had a scar, looked like a knife wound, running down one side of his face. The scar was almost white, and in that black face it made him look positively evil. But the whole point of what I’m trying to tell you is: I wasn’t really worried. If my throat had been cut during the night, I would have accepted it. I wouldn’t have known, of course. What I mean is, for the first time in my life I was on my own, in strange circumstances, where the fact that I was Big Howard’s son, the billionaire Howard Hughes, wasn’t going to help me a bit. Nothing could help me. I had nobody I could turn to. If I had got in trouble and said to one of these TWA men, ‘Get me out of this, I’m Howard Hughes,’ he would have laughed in my face. And I couldn’t very well say it to the natives, could I?

I bedded myself down on this pallet. You know I’m a fastidious man, and I’m often amazed that I was able to do that. I’m even more amazed that it didn’t cure me of my fastidiousness. I lay there, and I thought, I’ll never sleep. Not that I was afraid – it was just damned uncomfortable, and it stank of goat hides and men who hadn’t washed in weeks. I thought, I’ll never sleep, and I lay down there in all that filth, and the next thing I knew it was a beautiful early morning and I woke up and I felt very well indeed because I’d put my trust in myself.

There was an old Coptic church on a hill nearby, a broken-down white wooden building with a domed roof. I went up there to look at it. I’m not a believer. A priest – a black, black man with a big beard and long robe – was standing out in front, and something came over me, and I went in. I don’t mean to suggest I had any mystical or religious experience, or anything like that. But I found a moment of peace such as I have rarely known in my life, in that quiet old church on the hill in Ethiopia. I didn’t pray. I wouldn’t have known who to pray to.

Just for a change of view, the first thing I did after leaving there was to get a flight back to Addis Ababa, where I moved into one of the best hotels. I showered, changed clothes, and played eighteen holes of golf at the Imperial Ethiopian Golf Club. I just had to get back to the flavor of western civilization after that sojourn with the fleas.

I went back to the States shortly after that. I didn’t want to stay away for too long at one time. I was getting involved in RKO and I had plans for TWA, and the usual financial troubles. When I think about that period now, it strikes me as amazing that I was able to juggle all these things at the same time, but I’ve done that all my life. The following year, however, I went back to Ethiopia. I still used the name Charles Maddox. On my previous trip I had stumbled across a leper clinic, and it really shook me to the depths of my being to see those deformed, suffering souls. It made me stop to think about a man who was close enough to touch them. This was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the great healer. He was in Africa then – he had a clinic down in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa. I didn’t stay long in Ethiopia that trip because I got some mild dysentery, not amoebic but damned uncomfortable – and I went back to California and had it looked after.

But on the flight back I started to think about Schweitzer. Here was a man who was universally respected. He was famous in any number of fields, and it seemed to me that we had something in common. He had reached the heights in his fields, and I had reached them in mine. I had gone right to the top of the heap, and so had he, and he had abandoned the whole show at an age not so much younger than mine. He became a doctor and he went down to Africa to serve humanity, but also, I’m convinced, to look for Albert Schweitzer.

Don’t get the wrong idea that I was placing myself on his level. We operated on different spheres, and his, I believed, were far more exalted than mine, but we did have this one thing in common. We were both in the middle years, men who had accomplished something of note, and yet we were lost and we were looking for something more. I thought: I’d like to talk to that man.

When I make up my mind to do something, I do it. When I was feeling better I flew back to Africa, to Cairo, and then down to Lambaréné. I took a canoe from there to Schweitzer’s clinic. The people who paddled the canoes were the most horrible collection of emaciated souls I’d ever seen. I’m sure some of them were lepers. I found out afterward there was a power boat I could have taken, but I didn’t see it around at the time, or my French wasn’t good enough to make myself understood and I had to get into this goddamn canoe.

I visited Schweitzer, and he reminded me of myself back in the States. Didn’t want to see any visitors.

I didn’t tell him who I was, because I doubt that it would have meant anything to him. The magic of the Hughes name didn’t penetrate to Lambaréné. But in any event I found it impossible to talk to Dr. Schweitzer. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with the man. He was totally brusque, indifferent to me and to any problems I may have had. I realized after a short time that this wasn’t personal – he acted this way toward everybody. He showed this Olympian detachment even toward the poor sick souls lying around in his clinic, which, incidently, was filthy. I don’t know what kind of doctor he was, but he sure as hell didn’t know much about ordinary hygiene. In that sense he might better have stayed in Germany and played the organ.

This place was a big establishment, not just a little clinic the way I imagined it would be. It was a compound, dozens of big buildings and lots of little barracks, like an army camp built in a swamp. The mosquitos nearly drove you crazy, and the heat, the humidity – well, it was hotter than Houston, and that’s saying something.

I don’t want to be too hard on Schweitzer. He looked awful, thin, and tired, and pale. I was there in the evening to see him. I was wandering about the compound, looking at the animals. There were a lot of African deer around, antelopes and other animals, and just before it got dark and I was supposed to go, I saw Dr. Schweitzer running around in a panic, shoving people into various huts and padlocking the doors. I asked myself, ‘My God, what’s happening?’ I thought for a minute there was a mad elephant on the loose, or a new leper had come to the clinic and there was something especially contagious about him.

I ran around myself, trying to find out what was going on, and it turned out that this was just his nightly routine. Schweitzer locked everything and everybody up because he was afraid they’d steal his medicines and his books and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. He wasn’t a very elevated soul. He certainly had no detachment.

I came back the next day and managed to talk to him. He pretended not to speak more than a few words of English, although I knew damn well that he did. I asked him a few questions, because I also knew he had built the clinic, all those buildings and huts, with his own two hands. I complimented him on that, and he said, ‘You can’t trust these people to do anything. If you want it so it won’t fall down, you have to do it yourself.’

That’s the sort of answer I’d expect from some redneck planter in Mississippi. It wasn’t what I expected from the great Dr. Schweitzer. You know, you can read all the Chinese philosophy in the world – he did, by the way, which is why I mention it – but if you come out of it with the feeling that you can’t trust anybody else to build a hut, and, more to the point, if you don’t choose to teach people how to do it, I don’t think you’ve learned very much.

That was about the extent of our conversation. The last time I saw him he vanished back into the depths of his clinic, padlocked his doors, and I got into the canoe and left – waved goodbye to a hippopotamus.

It was a long trip for a meeting that came to nothing. And since then I’ve taken a different attitude toward the famous seers and philosophers of this world. I’ve decided the best thing is to read what they have to say, but don’t meet them. They’re too human, or they’re not human enough. It’s disillusioning.

I want to stop a minute to draw breath and give some perspective. I talked once about the time I was in my late twenties and I went into flying. I felt then that I was not a man in the full sense of the word.

When I got back from Ethiopia and French Equatorial Africa, I was forty-four years old. But I was a man in a lamentable state of bewilderment. I had made a great deal more of my life than if I had just stepped on my father’s shoulders – I had made more money than he had, I had accomplished more, and he was no longer a challenge. Having done that, I had nothing to do. I was lost. I had contempt for my world and I felt that there had to be something else, and this is what I went to Ethiopia to find. I didn’t find it. I certainly didn’t find it when I went down to see the good doctor.

I was in search – drowning in a sea of impressions, all of them new and strange. And moreover I came back that last time with an even worse case of dysentery – it never quite leaves your system.

Verne Mason, my doctor, put me in a private clinic, but while he was checking me out he said, ‘I’d better have a closer look,’ and he did a proctoscopy.

They stick a pipe up your ass and shine a light through it, and look to see if anything is growing in there that shouldn’t. He found polyps. They were benign, but it was better to take them out, Verne said, because they often turned malignant, if left to grow. Now this may strike you as fairly insignificant, and it was. But more even than my bad crash in the F-11, and more even than other close shaves I’ve had crashing in Lake Mead and during the war in England, this gave me a feeling of mortality. My body, which I’d always taken for granted, was betraying me.

One of the fools who wrote one of my so-called biographies quoted some other fool as saying, ‘Howard Hughes isn’t going to die in bed or as the result of a plane crash. He’s going to die at the hands of a woman with a .38.’ Time magazine printed that originally – it must have sounded colorful.

That’s a lot of baloney. Howard Hughes is going to die, as most men die, because the machinery of his body is breaking down and betraying him.

The first realization of this was overwhelming. More than most men I had retained a feeling of immortality until quite late in my life, partly because I’d gone through so many crashes and come through them where others couldn’t. But more than that it’s something inexplicable, something innate. I had talked to some of these young fellows over in England who had lost this feeling very young. Every time it came time to go out on a mission, they’d get a haunted look in their eyes, and you knew they were aware they might die. They didn’t have that feeling of immortality, of inviolability, that young men usually have – which is of course what makes wars possible, because you can’t get an army made up of men who know they’re probably going to die. You’ve got to get it made up of kids who can face the horrors feeling that it’s going to happen to someone else, not to them.

This youthful belief in immortality is a wonderful thing, but you can cut your throat with it if you’re careless. And it’s a terrible thing when you lose it and first become aware of death, perched on your shoulder… waiting. I first became aware after that simple operation. From then on I was aware of my heart pumping, of the digestive process taking place, of the glands secreting their vital fluids. I became as death-haunted as any man could be. It’s colored my every action, every thought, in ways I don’t fully understand. It’s not as if I’m planning to leave some noble monument for posterity. I’m a dying man – we’re all dying men and women – but I’m more so than many others are.

Didn’t you investigate the possibility of the deep-freezing of bodies, of going into suspended animation?

I’d heard about the cryogenic process, and I checked it out to see if there was anything in it, which there wasn’t. The state of the medical art is a long way from being able to accomplish that. I wasn’t looking for immortality, you understand. But I thought if I had another ten years of life coming to me, I’d prefer to live them in a later century than this one. I’ve had enough of this one.

Anyway, the dysentery cleared up, and I had this minor operation. But my physical condition in general was rotten. All the accidents, and all the illnesses – I’ve had pneumonia three or four times, and my lungs were weak – had taken their toll, and I felt fragile.

I went off to hide for awhile on the Pacific coast of Mexico, in a little fishing village called Zihuatanejo, still as Charles Maddox. I loafed around in a hammock under a palapa, careful of what I ate, read some books, thought about the past and the future, and at the end of that time – it was a couple of weeks – I knew what I had to do, which was very simple.

Be active. Bury myself in work.

I felt this was the only salvation, and so that’s what I did. I not only plunged back into TWA and Toolco and Hughes Aircraft, but I bought RKO and went back to the film-making business. It was a way of avoiding a confrontation with the things in life that I didn’t understand and thought I could never understand.

It turned out to be a terrible mistake.