Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

20

RKO JUST WASN’T working out as an investment, so I put it up on the block. I’d had it for more than half a dozen years and it was time to cut my losses. In some ways I’d made a mistake – I’d bought the wrong studio. I should have bought Columbia Pictures. I tried to at one point, right after I bought RKO. I don’t mean that I would have bailed out of RKO. I would have kept them both. Columbia was just up the street – very convenient.

And then in 1956 I bought about a quarter of a million shares in Twentieth Century Fox. But that was because I got a tip right from Spyros Skouras himself, and he was the head of the studio. He knew the stock was going up, so for me it was a straight plunge – in and out.

We’d done some business together, but more than that – this is usually the case – I had something he wanted. It was a Greek artifact from Turkey, a figurine of a warrior, and I’d been told that it dated from the time of Alexander the Great. It was given to me many years ago by Estelle Sharp, Walter Sharp’s widow.

Spyros saw it a few times and he had his heart set on it. Anything Greek, he loved. He wanted this statue but I didn’t want to sell it. For me it was something from the old days, from my youth in Houston. But when this thing came up with the Fox stock, Skouras tipped me to a fat profit. And then he said, ‘If you want to show your appreciation, Howard, as I’m sure you do, you can sell me that little Greek soldier.’

I said, ‘Jesus, take it. If you want it that badly, it’s yours.’ I don’t know what the statue was worth, but it damn sure wasn’t worth the two-million-plus I made on the stock. So I was happy to do Spyros a favor.

RKO, however, brought me one thing more than anything else, and that was lawsuits. I’ve been in court plenty, but I’ve never experienced anything like the barrage of subpoenas that came at me from my involvement with RKO. I was sued by the stockholders – that was the biggest suit, but it came last – and before that the first major suit came from Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger.

I don’t like lawyers, I never have, and I don’t trust them. The last man on earth I trust is my own lawyer. I know that probably sounds odd to you, but I can tell you – watch out. You just have to think about how these people can get the goods on you with this ‘privileged information’ crap. They’ve done things behind by back, time after time, by misrepresenting my wishes – and worse. They’re in business to make money and I don’t kid myself about that. I call them vultures.

Didn’t Gail Ganley sue you, too?

For half a million dollars. Her father put her up to it. Her father stood there outside of my offices on Romaine Street and was taking photographs of the girl. We had her under contract, but I gave orders that she should not be allowed into Romaine Street. She would break up the place. She threatened mayhem, and she was capable of it.

I gave orders that when she came round to pick up her paycheck she shouldn’t be allowed in the building. The money was lowered out of a window on a string to her, in a basket. She had to sign a receipt and that would be attached to the basket and pulled up to the people who were lowering the money. And her father came round to take photographs of that, as if it meant anything, as if it proved that I had cheated her in some way.

Don’t you think that was a strange way of paying the girl?

She got paid, didn’t she? It was cash was coming down, it wasn’t spaghetti. I couldn’t send her a check. She didn’t believe in checks. She was a redneck country girl. And a lousy lay, I might add. Tore up my back with her fingernails and made a lot of loud noise, to the point where the people at the next bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, some English businessman and his wife, complained. She never saw shoes before I set her up with a contract. Finally I had to settle with her, but for a small amount of money, around a hundred thousand dollars.

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think $100,000 is a small amount of money. The value of money is directly proportional to the intelligence of the man who has got it. I’ll give you my formula. E=MC squared – with apologies to Mr. Einstein. Ego equals Money times Confidence squared.

But in any case the settlement was a small amount of money compared to what Ganley was asking.

The actress Ann Sheridan sued me too, and we were friends, and had been lovers. I can’t even remember what she sued me for, or why, but I liked her, and so I said, ‘Ann, withdraw the lawsuit, or your lawyer will take most of what I give you, and I’ll give you a private payment of cash. I’ll give you every penny you’re asking, because I like you.’

To finish up with the lawsuits, the big one came from the RKO stockholders. That was a lulu. They started pretty early on, around 1951, mostly because the stock had gone down to around three dollars a share. Nobody wants to admit they’ve made an error of investment judgment, and so they often try to pin it on management, which in this case was me.

You can do things right for forty years, you can have the golden touch, but the moment you do one thing wrong, or even if it just looks like you’ve done one thing wrong, they’re lying in ambush to get you. The hammers are always cocked. I wasn’t even an officer of the company, you understand. I had no official position at RKO. I just ran the studio. I made the major decisions. That’s what control means.

I didn’t take the suit too seriously. I was so used to being sued that it was like another bowl of Rice Krispies for me – I expected a new lawsuit on my breakfast table every morning or evening, depending on when I ate breakfast.

But eventually it got a little too serious – it got up to about $40 million worth of different lawsuits from different stockholders, and it was also getting annoying. I was used to having my name smudged, but I didn’t like to have it colored black-and-blue the way these people were doing. They sued me for mismanagement, driving the studio toward bankruptcy, and also for putting actresses on the studio payroll for my own personal sexual pleasure, which, if you’ve listened to anything I’ve been saying to you, you’ll know is horseshit.

First of all there was a fuss about Gina Lollabrigida. In 1947 she entered a beauty contest and was chosen Miss Rome. I saw a picture of her in a bikini and, as I think I told you before, I invited her to Hollywood for a screen test. I sent a TWA plane to Rome to fly her over. My people met her at the airport, bundled her in a car, and put her in a hotel room in Malibu. She said she was locked up there, but that was nonsense. She received English lessons, saw a slew of RKO films, and rehearsed for her screen test. Later she claimed that she was badgered by lawyers who wanted her to sign a contract written in English that she couldn’t understand. And she said that for six weeks I came by at one o’clock in the morning, hired the hotel orchestra and danced with her for several hours in the hotel’s ballroom. Well, why not? I thought I was being romantic. She was great in bed, when she was in the mood.

After six weeks of this she signed a contract and flew back to Italy, where she stayed. I never put her in a picture because she was too temperamental. The stockholders sued me for wasting all that money on her.

Then they said I’d signed Merle Oberon to a fat contract, $125,000 a year for six years, and never used her in a picture. That was true. I’d made a mistake. No mistakes are allowed. And there was a ballerina, Zizi Jeanmaire, a French girl, who I wanted in a picture about ballet. I hired the troupe as well, the Ballet de Paris, and the stockholders thought that was extravagant.

Was there any justification to these lawsuits? What part of all these accusations was accurate? I don’t know. Half the time I didn’t know where half these people were or what they were doing, and the other half of the time half of them didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. I didn’t know who was responsible and nobody else did, either. All I knew was that I wanted these stockholders’ lawsuits off my back. That was accomplished, in the end, very easily. I simply bought all the stock. If the stockholders sold all their stock and weren’t stockholders anymore, there would be no more stockholders’ suits. I’d be the only stockholder.

I certainly wasn’t going to sue myself.

And they sold it all to you?

Of course they did. If you appeal to people’s greed you can’t lose. The stock was selling at three dollars a share, and I made a tender offer at six. Noah suggested five, but I said, ‘Come on, let’s give them six, because then each little guy will say to himself, ‘Yippee, I’m doubling my money overnight!’ and psychologically that’s better than him just thinking he’s making seventy percent.’ I owned about 25% of the stock then – I think there were about four million shares outstanding, and I had well over a million. It cost me $16 million and it saved me forty million in stockholders’ suits, not to mention the legal fees. But the public gobbled it up like pigs at a trough.

You were buying a company on the edge of bankruptcy. I understand that you got rid of the lawsuits, but what else did you have then except a white elephant?

I had a beautiful tax loss, a carryback, a tax credit I could have used any way I wanted to. Toolco and the Aircraft Division were making money hand over fist. I had the physical assets of the studio – the lot, the sound stages, the equipment, a corporate shell. They were valuable. And I had a backlog of movies I could dump into the television market for ten or fifteen million dollars if I wanted to hang on and wait for the right bid.

I had plenty – but you’re right, it was a white elephant and I was tired of feeding it gold peanuts. I wanted to get out. So I put her up on the block, one fat old white elephant for sale. Well, pretty soon some syndicate boys came along with an offer. What’s commonly known as Cosa Nostra, Mafia, Organized Crime – you name it. Gangsters. Their money is as good as anybody else’s. Well, it’s as green as anybody else’s.

I accepted their offer of roughly seven and a half million dollars. But I couldn’t go through with that sale. The newspapers got hold of the background information on these syndicate guys, the spotlight turned on them and things got too hot. They had made a down payment of a million and a half. It was generally thought that they left this behind when they got out. But I’m sure you know nobody leaves behind a million and a half dollars without a good fight, and that was the case here. These guys were not the kind of guys to get out and just shrug their shoulders, and I was not about to expose myself to retaliation and revenge. I had enough enemies in my life without taking on the Mafia.

So I quietly and immediately paid these people back their down payment. And in some ways that was one of the best investments I have ever made. Because later, when I bought into Las Vegas, those men were invaluable. They opened doors for me, they gave me contacts I could never have had any other way.

After the deal with the syndicate boys fell through, I still wanted to get rid of RKO, but I was goddamnned if I was going to take a thumping on it. Things diddled and fiddled off and on for a number of years, during which I was involved with many other things. Toolco was in trouble. TWA was in bigger trouble. I had to spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and sleepless nights dealing with TWA – I poured the sweat of my life into that airline. I had a big break with Noah Dietrich. But I still had to make time to get that albatross off my neck. That’s what RKO turned into – first a white elephant, then an albatross.

Finally Manny Fox put in a bid for the company. I knew he had it on his mind, but one or two things had put him off, and then one day I was driving him to Los Angeles International Airport. He was going off to Europe. Without warning, he made me an offer on the way. He offered me twenty-two million and that was enough so that my foot went down on the brake without even thinking about it, and we nearly went up on the sidewalk with a big screeching of tires. He was all shaken up.

We pulled up in front of a luncheonette and I jumped out of the car and ran inside and called the airport to cancel his reservation. Fox didn’t know I’d done it until I came back to the car and said, ‘I canceled your reservation on the plane.’ He couldn’t understand why I did that in such a hurry, and I said, ‘Well, you just offered me $22 million. We’ve got to talk.’

He said, ‘But you nearly killed us there! You nearly broke my neck just to save the price of an air ticket!’

‘Manny,’ I said, ‘watch out for the pennies and the dollars look after themselves. The twenty-two million is just cash in the bush, but the $500 air ticket is a bird in the hand.’

But that deal fell through, too. Eventually I sold RKO to General Tire. They wanted to be one of those big conglomerates. More than that, they wanted our film library for television. And more than that, I’m positive that some of those executives up at General Tire wanted to hump the film stars. That, as you realize, is the main reason why all those guys running the conglomerates have bought the various movie studios. They’re rarely money-making operations. They may be tax write-offs in some instances, but as far as business goes, they’re year-round headaches and crapshoots. But they give these guys access to the starlets. It’s a free call-girl service.

I exempt myself from that group. With me it was more a matter of availability. The movie stars just happened to be where I was. And it’s not true, not in all cases. I was attracted to a woman physically because – well, it’s no secret that I used to have an eye for a well-turned calf. I’m a leg man. Some men like breasts, but that never meant anything to me. Others go for behinds. I myself have always liked legs and wrists. There’s something about a nice slim wrist that really appealed to me.

Being out there in Hollywood I inevitably met beautiful women, either in the movies or trying to get into the movies. Every one of them wanted to get me into bed. Not that I was such a beautiful specimen, or a sexual maniac – I was anything but that. But I was Howard Hughes, the famous billionaire eccentric who’d been seen with beautiful women all over. They didn’t realize that in most cases that’s all there was to it. But there were exceptions, and one of them was considered to be one of the world’s great beauties – Hedy Lamarr.

You’re always trying to dig up dirt – I’ll give you a little dirt. I’d put Hedy up in one of my rented cottages in Bel Air. I had her under contract at the time. The problem was that in my opinion she was a lousy actress. She may have been a decent actress when she started out, but she had become passé. Her acting technique didn’t measure up. And I couldn’t really find anything for her, so I just kept her in the bungalow.

I used to visit her every now and then, and spend the night with her. Beautiful woman – smooth skin, white like talcum powder. Lovely accent when she spoke English. But she was a very peculiar girl. For example, she was caught for shoplifting a few years ago in Los Angeles. And she stole me blind in that house. By the time I got her out of there the silverware was missing, and a few precious knickknacks – an ivory elephant, for instance, with a broken trunk, a present somebody once gave me. And my favorite golf ball. She didn’t only take things of value – she was a kleptomaniac.

She also had some peculiar sexual notions, which I wouldn’t go along with. She was A.C.-D.C, and she had a certain perversion which – let’s say only a behind man could have gone for it. I refused. I’d just as soon stick my pecker in a wet loaf of bread.

These interviews leave me washed out. Why don’t you talk for a while? Tell me about your life, about your pleasures and your mistakes. You must have some good stories to tell – you’ve led a full life for a comparatively young man.

I’ve told you a lot, here and there.

Tell me some more. See how it feels.

What’s the matter with you tonight?

I’m all in a turmoil inside. Got a cat sewed up in my gut. I’m sorry to be getting at you that way. The point is that I haven’t told the whole truth a number of times. I’ve been thinking about this. I told you on two occasions what I thought you wanted to hear instead of what I knew to be the truth. Maybe it’s your fault, because you seem to expect a certain macho attitude from me.

I guess I’ve also told you a lot of things that I didn’t intend to tell you. But it’s just so difficult for any man to sit down and tell the whole truth about himself. There’s too much that galls. Especially the unpalatable truths that we all have to face. And mine, I assure you, are as unpalatable as anybody else’s.

You’re referring to something that happened with Hedy Lamarr?

No, just other personal things we’ve talked about, I felt a sense of shame, because I’ve been trying to impress you in some way. This is what I meant when I said it was your fault, because you seem to be so interested in sex – you believe that sex motivates people far more than I believe it does. And I don’t understand why I should feel I have to impress you, or anybody.

Just the other day I asked myself why I was doing this. Because it’s going to be published? It will be published only if I allow it to be.

Nevertheless, it’s depressing to recount all this and see your life being swallowed up by a tape recorder. It seems to me, as I’ve spoken to you, the life I’m talking about could be viewed as an unbroken record of things half accomplished, gestures made for God knows what reason. And I mean particularly on the very personal level, and at this stage of my life that’s all that really interests me. Someone very close to me once told me that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. I’m examining my life now, and I don’t like it – and even an examined life, in this case, sometimes seems as if it was not worth living. I feel it all the time these days, and that’s the reason for my being glum, since you asked.

In what ways do you feel you’ve failed?

The simplest thing I can say is: I haven’t measured up to my own image of what a man should be. That image was based on my father. I suppose every man-child grows up with that idea in mind – that he’s got to outdo his father, and I was no exception.

You told me you’d licked that father-image when you took the Hercules off the water.

I licked it in the sense of physical challenge. I outdid my father. I’ll put it to you this way. I know it’s common to every man, but I only live in my own skin. Your problems don’t interest me. That’s probably a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Maybe most men feel that way, and won’t admit it. I do admit it. My own problems are what concern me. If you have insights into them, good for you, but it doesn’t help me, because it’s me who’s got to have those insights. And the insights have to be comforting, not unpleasant.

So many times in my life I’ve had flashes of understanding – flashes that gave me tremendous hope, and made me think, ‘Yes! Now I see what I have to do.’ It may have been something that someone said to me, or just a moment when I had some communion, some osmosis with whatever is going on around us, whatever spirits are in the air – the Great Spirit the Indians talk about – and those flashes really elevated me.

And then day-to-day existence wipes them out, and a week after you’ve had that wonderful moment, you stop, and you look, and you say, ‘Shit, I’m doing exactly the same things I was doing before. No better.’ New Year’s resolutions.

I’m on the wheel of life. That phrase, when I read it, made not much sense to me. But I understand it now. I understand something else, even more depressing, which is that people don’t change. More hundreds of times than I care to remember, I’ve said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never do that again’ – only to find myself doing exactly that, whatever it may have been, within hours sometimes. How do you escape from that? What’s the answer? Do you know?

I don’t know the answer. I have the same problem and so does almost everybody I know. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve got myself into a situation where I behaved badly, mostly out of cowardice, because I was afraid to hurt someone, and therefore hurt that person twice as badly by being dishonest. When the mess and shouting were over, I swore to myself I’d never do it again. And yet I did precisely the same thing again.

Well, this may sound callous, but that’s encouraging. It means I’m not alone in this way, as I sometimes thought I was.

The problem is that the learning process is such a slow one that we don’t have enough time. And it’s not even a matter of willingness to change. It’s a matter of ability. I think that the mold we’re cast in goes back to our genes and from then on we’re in the hands of destiny.

I’ve been in a state of depression, and the reasons for that are still with me. And those reasons were – to be blunt – the one or two lies I told you earlier. One in particular. You remember I told you about how I fixed up the Gotha and flew north and broke down on the beach near Monterrey?

Yes. You and Frank Clarke, when you were shooting Hell’s Angels in 1928.

I’ve been thinking about that story and it’s made me squirm. Because, although we did fly up north and did come down near Monterrey, and we did spend the night in Tortilla Flat, with those two girls – for my part, nothing happened.

The four of us were there. Frank was a little drunk and I was sober, but Frank had to screw them both. I couldn’t do anything with mine and she despised me for it, and I despised myself for it.

Howard, all men have bouts of impotence, and the fact that you didn’t tell me the truth about it is common.

Well, I meant this to be an honest revelation of myself – to set the record straight once and for all, so that when I die there will be someone left behind who’s recognizably Howard Hughes, not the figment of some hack’s imagination.

If that’s the only lie you’ve told, it’s not bad at all.

There are more. You asked me once if my father interested himself in my sex education. I don’t remember what I told you, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. Because that’s a sore that’s been festering in me all these years. It’s nothing terrible, nothing I’m ashamed of. And if I tell it, it may make you understand how crude my father was, and what a sad man. And yet also how he loved me, in his way. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word. This goes back a ways…

My father had a little cabin on the coast between Houston and Galveston. Closer to Galveston. He used it as a kind of base of operations for fishing – or that’s what he told my mother.

He used to go down often there for weekends, and of course I knew what he was doing down there. Jesse Jones was down there a couple of times too, and not with his wife. I don’t care about that – that didn’t horrify me in any way. That was just something that my father did, and I considered it his business, not mine. He was a man – I’m really not trying to criticize my father – he was a man with too much energy. He needed too many things. He needed other women, and he never hesitated to go out to get them. He didn’t go out of his way to hide it from me, and I guess for the most part I accepted it.

That’s what this little cabin was used for. On these fishing weekends he and his cronies would have two or three girls along to spice up the party.

Once they’d run out of booze, and I had to deliver it. This is when I was about fifteen years old. I drove down on a Saturday night. They were playing Red Dog and the girls were sitting around. I intended to turn around and go right back to Houston, but my father said, ‘Stick around, Sonny. Bring me luck.’

So I hung around. When the card game ended I wanted to go, but my father insisted that I drink whisky with him. I think that may have put me off drinking for the rest of my life. I had a few drinks. Most of the men disappeared, went off somewhere. This one man, Hastings, had another cabin nearby. The girl my father was with seemed old to me at the time, but I don’t suppose she was more than twenty-two.

The girl’s name was Colette. It didn’t really fit her. She looked like a Jane or a Mary – do you know what I mean?

My father took me off in a corner. He said, ‘I’ve had too much to drink. I’m going to sleep it off. You stay with Colette and take care of her. I think she’s tired, so show her the spare bedroom.’ He wasn’t crude, although the purpose was obvious.

I was certainly willing. I’m not trying to pretend that I protested, or anything. I got very excited by the whole idea.

I was a virgin, and Colette was a very pretty girl. Long, dark hair, lovely body, and green eyes. I went off with her into the bedroom and she threw off her clothes and then undressed me. Now I’m not trying to tell you some heart-throb of a story that I was impotent and couldn’t hump her. I could, and it was no problem. I enjoyed it. I was fifteen years old and my brains were in my prick. At least that night they were.

I jumped on that girl and away we went. I know she liked it, and when I finished I was lying there on top of her, getting my breath back. Then I realized there was someone else in the room. I turned around. Daddy was standing in the doorway, leaning against the door with a little sweet smile on his face, proud. He’d come in during the action and I hadn’t noticed. He’d been watching, to see how well I did it, and whether I would do it.

I don’t know if the point of it makes any sense to you, but for a long time, every time I was in bed with a woman, I was looking around to see if my father was watching me. I felt he was always there in the corner, leaning against the door, looking at me, and judging.

That time in the cabin near Galveston, did he say anything to you?

He was drunk, and he slapped me on the back, and he said something about me being a chip off the old block. He wasn’t unpleasant to me, wasn’t dirty or anything. He didn’t laugh at me, but I can’t begin to tell you how ashamed I felt. To think he was there the whole time, watching me! If I have any dominant picture in my mind of my father, it’s that moment.

I try so often to recall him in other situations, but he’s always standing there in the door, watching me on top of that girl. For a long time in my life it was a very unnerving thing to remember.

Poor Daddy. He had so much going for him. You know, I don’t think he was an unhappy man. I’m sure he was happier than I was, I mean happier than I am as a man or happier than I was at his age. I’ve lived a lot longer than he did, and that’s a miracle of sorts.

I don’t know why I say, ‘Poor Daddy.’ I suppose if he could see me now he’d say, ‘Poor Sonny.’

You’ve spent time in Texas, so you know the way they speak. I worked hard for a long time to get rid of that southern accent. But what I wanted to say is this, about his name. I told you they called him Big Howard, which pleased him no end, because the way they talked down there, it came out Big Hard. You see?

Yes, I do see. It never occurred to me.

As an adolescent, it was made quite clear to me. His friends made a point of saying it that way, and leering at me in case I didn’t get the point.

It bothered me. And yet, as I said, he wasn’t an unhappy man. Far from it. And people loved him. They don’t love me.