Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

18

I DECIDED TO go back into the movie business. I had some new ideas. I had learned that if you do something well and then stay away from it for many years – provided that you work on something else during those years of absence – you can go back to the original work and find that the accumulated experience of the intervening time is a tremendous plus. You don’t pick up where you left off. You pick up far ahead of where you left off. Your mental muscles are tougher and the problems that might have given you headaches ten or twenty years previously are problems that you can often solve, after all those years, with a snap of the fingers.

This time I wanted to go into the movie business on a large scale. I had the money, I felt I had the know-how. All I needed was the venue. It wasn’t a true creative urge and it wasn’t a calculated business decision. It was simpler than that. I liked making movies. It was a business I already knew well, and it was a business that I thought, if I got hold of the right people, could run itself.

I looked around. I had done some business previously with Floyd Odlum, who was the head of the Atlas Corporation, which had the controlling interest in RKO. Floyd had turned out a number of films that made a lot of money, but he was ready to get rid of RKO by then, partly because he had slow years in 1946 and ’47. I thought the big years were still to come.

I guess I hadn’t learned as much as I thought, because that goddamn company gave me nothing but headaches. RKO was a peanut-sized business compared to Toolco, compared to Hughes Aircraft and TWA, but it wasn’t as anonymous, at the time, as those other companies, and I wanted to put my own stamp on it, run it my own way. In 1948 I bought Odlum’s controlling interest in RKO for about $10 million, and got into trouble right away with the people in there who were running the show. We didn’t see eye to eye. The weight of the money counts, and out they went.

Peter Rathvon had been president of the company under Odlum, and I kept him on for a while. Dore Schary was head of production. Schary, of course, was an enormously talented and experienced man. He was a little too radical for my tastes, but I wasn’t running a political party, I was running a movie business, so I explained to him he could pretty much make the kind of films he wanted to. He was a shrewd man, because one of the first things he told me was that a man in my position, as rich as I was, who had bought a film studio and had previous film experience, would certainly want to run it, and he didn’t want to be in the position of being number two man. I assured him that he would be at least on a level with me.

This didn’t hold up, though, because he got off on the wrong foot with me right away. He was making a film called Battleground, which he figured was going to set the pace in Hollywood for war films. He figured there was going to be a big run of them, and I disagreed.

I said, ‘The timing is wrong. The public is fed up with war.’ I was fed up with it, so I figured the public was – that was my mistake, to assume the mass thinks as I do – and I told him to stop production on it. What I didn’t realize, and what I know now, is that the public loves blood and violence more than anything, even more than sex, and blood and violence is always a moneymaker, because the mass of people are sick.

That was one item of disagreement. The other one was that he was trying to make a star out of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that one I was right on. I didn’t see star quality there, and it wasn’t there. Schary and I came to loggerheads over these two things.

He said, ‘Howard, you’re trying to make a messenger boy out of me.’

So I said, ‘Quit.’ And he did.

I was wrong about Battleground. He bought the property from me, took it with him to MGM and made a mint out of it. It was the biggest hit of 1949, as I recall.

Then I buckled down and lopped off some heads, cut off a lot of fat, fired about 700 people who were totally unnecessary. That’s when Peter Rathvon quit. This was also the time I got into that terrible wrangle with Paul Jarrico. As usual it was only one incident of many – Jarrico was one screenwriter out of fifty or sixty who was blacklisted by the movie industry, and I was only one producer out of fifty who was wielding the axe and doing the blacklisting of left-wing people, but I was Howard Hughes and that meant headlines on page one.

This was during the McCarthy era, which in retrospect I view as one of the more shameful periods of American political life. But at that time it was a kind of mass purge and mass hysteria, and I got sucked up by it.

Everyone in Hollywood was bleating about Communist domination of the industry. I had no use for communism as a workable philosophy, and I thought for the most part that the Communists I knew were misguided idealists who were all messed up emotionally and got starry-eyed and wobbly-kneed and simply lost every ounce of their common sense when they talked about the glorious life in the Soviet Union.

I think I was right in the long run, and the simplemindedness of their thinking was proved to me when the same people who swore there couldn’t possibly be such things as slave labor camps in Siberia – their argument, if you recall, was that it was theoretically incompatible with a Marxist workers’ state, and if it was theoretically impossible it had to be impossible in practice as well, and it was just another lie coming out of Wall Street – it was these same people who quit the party and dived like lemmings back into the liberal and capitalist ranks when Khrushchev made his famous speech denouncing Stalin.

They knew, I think – because most of them were superficially intelligent men and women – that they were being intellectually dishonest. What they didn’t know was that they were emotionally unstable, and they were just waiting for a chance to bail out with what they could call honor. Khrushchev’s speech gave them their chance, and they took it. It’s like a pilot who’s flying an experimental plane he’s claimed is the best in the world. The nuts and bolts start to fly off and the plane loses altitude, but he can’t and won’t give up. Then the engine drops out and he says, ‘Thank God,’ and bails out. It happens all the time in politics and marriage. And it’s happening now in Vietnam.

Anyway, at that time, in the fifties, when I fired Paul Jarrico, I was head over heels in the fight against so-called Communist domination of the film industry. Jarrico, I’m convinced, was not a member of the Communist party, not a card-carrying member. He couldn’t be; this guy was on a salary of $2,500 a week from the studio, which put him pretty clearly in the capitalist class. He was what they called a fellow traveler.

When he went up before that committee in Washington, he took the Fifth Amendment. The one thing that really got my goat, one thing that made me boil over, was a man who wouldn’t stand up for his principles. Now if the man was a Communist or even if the man was only a sympathizer, he should have stood up there and said, ‘Yes, this is what I am, I believe such-and-such, and I’ll take the consequences for it.’ For not saying that, I couldn’t respect him, and I couldn’t respect any of those guys who looked the other way and ducked out and avoided the responsibility. I didn’t like those Reds who went to prison, they were hardly my friends and idols, but I had respect for them insofar as they said, ‘Yes, that’s who I am and that’s what I stand for. You want to throw me behind bars for my beliefs, okay, my conscience is clear and I’m an honest man.’

Of course, far worse than someone like Jarrico, was a man like Elia Kazan, the film director, who went before the witch-hunting committee in Washington and snitched on all his friends. His excuse was that the committee already knew they were Communist; other snitches had named them. All the more reason not to give the names, since they weren’t needed. The committee’s purpose was to intimidate and humiliate, and Kazan bent over and spread his cheeks in order to insure his career. Arthur Miller, who wrote Death of a Salesman, refused to testify. He survived. Kazan was a great film director and a creepy human being.

After all these years, do you regret the role you played in the witch-hunt?

The answer to that isn’t a simple one. If it has to be ‘yes or no’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I do regret it.’ But that would be a fundamental dishonesty on my part, because it would be too easy a way of skating out of something. I can’t deny that I did what I did – I even went so far as to try and get the RKO Theaters Corporation to ban the showing of Limelight, because I considered Charlie Chaplin a pinko and a man who’d run away to Europe rather than stay at home and fight for what he believed in, whether it was right or wrong.

But I refuse to talk in terms of ‘if I had it all to do over again,’ because that’s equivalent to saying, ‘If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.’ I did what I did because I was the man that I was. If I had done anything else I would have been a hypocrite and a coward and then I really would regret it now.

In other words, I don’t regret what I did but I do wish that I had been a different kind of man, the kind of man who would not have done those things. That’s also, I suppose, a kind of shadowy statement, but it’s the best I can give, because I realize now that I was swept along with the mob and that’s always demeaning to the soul and damaging to the man as a whole.

But it’s even more damaging to go against your own nature. Sometimes you have to plunge in headfirst and wallow in the trough of your own stupidity just in order to climb out and take a bath and feel your own clean skin again.

As far as the anticommunist battle went, it was a battle, and in battle you fight with whatever weapons you’ve got and with whatever allies you can find. I was obsessed; I admit it. I’m not proud of it. I gave a talk before the American Legion at that time. Not that I was a great backer of the American Legion, I want to make clear. They’re a bunch of warmongers, as I realized later on. It’s simply, as I said, that you had strange bedfellows in those days. Must have been a good talk, though, because it was put in the Congressional Record by Richard Nixon.

He was then a senator from California. I had a letter from him, and we met around that time for lunch, rather quietly, because Nixon was sowing the seeds then for the future. And I was sowing mine. I didn’t like him. A mealy-mouthed guy. But he was ambitious, and slick, and, I thought, just mediocre enough to make it. So I filed him away for future reference. I figured his time would come, and I would make use of him.

One other important thing happened when I owned RKO, although at the time I didn’t see its huge significance, that it would cloud my entire future.

Henry Luce was the man who owned Time, Life, and Fortune. A publishing mogul, energetic, conservative, very powerful. His wife was Clare Boothe Luce. In her time she’d written a couple of decent plays but then she got herself elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Connecticut, so that will give you a good idea of her ideological bent. She spent part of each year in Hollywood throwing lavish parties for producers, because she wanted them to produce movies she wrote.

I never went to those parties, of course, but Liz Taylor brought her once to my bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet me, and I bumped into her a couple of times on the beach in Santa Monica. I used to go for long walks on the beach and so did Clare Luce. So we were on cordial terms.

One day on the beach she collared me and bled my ear about a script called Pilate’s Wife. I may have said we’d be interested in producing it if it was good, and she told me that René Clair wanted to direct it. She let it leak to the newspapers that the movie was going to be made by me and RKO. I paid no attention to that. Finally she turned up at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a draft of the screenplay. She left it there with a note that said, ‘I’ll be back in exactly a week, dear Howard, and we’ll discuss who can play Jesus and who can play Mary Magdalene.’

I read it. It was pap, Sunday school stuff for children. It was absolutely non-producible in the form she’d written it, and when she showed up a week later she asked me if I had any ideas for improving the plot and the characterization. She thought of course the answer would be no, and she was right – it was impossible to improve the plot and characterization in the script, because they didn’t exist.

But I couldn’t say that to her. She showed up, and we discussed the script in the lobby at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I tried to be diplomatic, I tried to point out to her why I thought it wasn’t right for RKO. Diplomacy, I guess, isn’t my strong suit, but in any case it’s not easy to be diplomatic with somebody who thinks she’s a female apostle, the most brilliant thinker and writer of our time. When I finally said for about the third time that RKO was going to pass, she claimed I’d humiliated her because she’d told Variety and about three dozen top actors that I was going to make her biblical horror. I said, ‘Well, you jumped the gun, Clare.’

Right there, in the lobby, she stamped her feet, spat like a cornered cat, and swore that she and all her husband’s magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune, would hound me for the rest of my days. Clare Luce was a vengeful woman. That was not an idle threat.