Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

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ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND I had met briefly in Hollywood when I was making movies. It was hardly more than an introduction at a party in some bungalow in that crazy place he was living, the Garden of Allah. But Hemingway impressed me, and I thought I would like to see him again. I felt the tremendous force of his personality more than even the power of his work, although I had read and admired his novels very deeply, especially The Sun Also Rises.

The occasion arose, just after the war, sometime in the winter of 1948, when I went out to look over Sun Valley, Idaho, with the idea in mind of buying it and making it into a popular resort area. I flew out there in my bomber, a converted B-25. I knew Ernest was there with his family and he was hunting, and so I found out where he was living. I did something wholly uncharacteristic. I marched right up to his door, and knocked on it. He opened it.

I hadn’t gone out to Sun Valley as Howard Hughes. Traveling under the name of Howard Hughes is the kiss of death. The people who owned Sun Valley would have jacked the price up fifty percent just on that knowledge alone. I was using the name Tom Garden. I knew a Tom Garden very briefly once. I met him out in Ethiopia in 1946. He was a young Englishman who wanted to go exploring in the Danakil part of the country. A lot of really savage tribes in that neck of the woods, and the emperor, or the court, or whoever gave such permissions, wouldn’t give it to him. But he went anyhow, and he was never heard of again.

I don’t want to convey any idea that I felt any kinship of any sort with this wanderer who vanished. But the story had impressed itself on me, so that was the name I gave to Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley when he opened the door.

I must say I was struck by his reception. I myself – well, the occasion would never arise where some stranger would come up and knock on my door. First of all, nobody knows where my door is. Second, if they do know, there’s a guard out there, a guard outside and a guard inside. It would certainly never occur to me to open the door myself.

But there Ernest came out to the door, looking like a middle-aged tramp, wearing beat-up corduroy trousers and a lumberjack shirt open nearly to the waist. Come to think of it, I was not a hell of a lot more respectable. It was winter and I had on a couple of old sweaters.

I introduced myself and Ernest said, ‘Come in and have a drink, Tom.’

I came in, excused myself from the drink because I don’t drink, and we talked for a while. He immediately showed an interest in who I was and why I was there. Understand, I passed myself off as a member of a real estate group in California that was interested in Sun Valley. I didn’t say that I personally, even as Tom Garden, was going to buy it, but I suppose no matter how you dress, the smell of money doesn’t leave your skin. And Ernest cottoned on very quickly to the idea that I was rich, and he was fascinated by rich people. He took a great interest in my proposal for the valley and the surrounding area, asked me all sorts of intelligent and perceptive questions about how I was going to go about it.

The extraordinary thing is that I’d been in his house no more than fifteen minutes, and I was sitting in an armchair and talking as freely and easily as I’d talked with any man in my whole life. Writers often give you this feeling – it may be genuine, it may be phoney – you tell me – but they give you the feeling they’re interested in you, and in what makes you tick.

But Ernest had that quality of making you feel immediately at home. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours. We talked about practical things mostly, more than about either of us personally. We talked about them in a very straightforward way that I wasn’t used to, except with pilots.

The thing is, at the time, I didn’t want anything from Ernest and he didn’t want anything from me. I had read a couple of his books, but I hadn’t dropped in to see him as a writer. It was more that I had in mind a certain image of Ernest Hemingway as a person who had gone through adventures and rough experiences, and he’d had a dangerous time of it and he’d come out of it whole, tough. Toughened, I mean. Not only did I respect him for that, but I was fascinated, and I wanted to know how and why.

We spent a couple of hours talking, and I invited him to take a spin with me in my B-25 next day, which he was delighted to do. The fact that I had my own bomber tickled him pink.

I told him I was doing a geographical survey on this flight. The purpose was just to get an over-all picture for myself of the valley and its potential. I flew around, in and out, through the canyons of Idaho. Ernest was in the co-pilot’s seat, and asked me a hell of a lot of questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it. That was a routine flight for me, so I could fly and answer his questions at the same time. He told me afterward that it was one of the most lucid and cogent explanations of flying that he’d ever heard.

And not only that – he couldn’t get over the fact that I could fly and look around and maneuver and at the same time maintain a running conversation with him about anything in the world. That really impressed him. I was so involved after a while, however, with what I was looking for, that I broke off the conversation and just concentrated on flying. The flight was a bit low, I suppose, and looking back on it now, dangerous. The wingtips were not too far from the canyon walls a couple of times. This was no Cessna 180, this was a B-25 bomber.

Ernest loved all that. On the way back he turned to me – there was a touch of awe in his voice – and he said, ‘Tom, you’re a hot pilot.’

‘You better believe it,’ I said. I wasn’t shy about my flying skills.

I left soon after that. We saw one another briefly the following day, and then I was off – had to go. But it was a rich encounter. Ernest wanted to write to me about something, as a matter of fact, but I knew I wouldn’t answer, and I didn’t want to create that sort of situation, and so I told him some story that we were moving offices, and as soon as I had an address I would write him. It was a lot easier for me to get in touch with him than for him to get in touch with me.

I didn’t see him again for nearly nine years. It wasn’t a matter of deliberate waiting. I was so embroiled in affairs, I had no chance. Sort of like a drowning man – I’d draw my head up out of the water and I could see Ernest along the shore from time to time, but I was sucked down again before I could even call out to him. And he was off on his own affairs in Europe, Africa, Key West, and Cuba.

Cuba, as a matter of fact, is where I saw him the second time.

When you met him that first time, how did you get along with him politically? Did you know he’d been involved in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side?

Except for that brief anticommunist phase of mine in Hollywood, I’ve never been a political person. I’ve only voted twice in my life, and that was for Franklin Roosevelt, and it was a long time ago. I’ve always made sure that I had members of both parties on my payroll, so that no matter who won, Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft didn’t lose.

During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, I was involved in my flights and designing airplanes and I was about as apolitical as you could get. Moreover, from what I could gather, politics was never Ernest’s major interest, either. Strictly secondary. I’ve always had the feeling he went to Spain because there was a war on and he wanted to see men in action. That turned him on. Naturally his sympathies were with the Loyalists rather than with the Fascist side, because he was that kind of man. He had a sense of justice and a love for common people.

But he also had an obsession with death and how men faced it. He asked me a great many questions in later years about my accidents, how I had felt about them, and I answered to the best of my ability. He was the only man I ever knew who was almost as banged up physically – broken bones, and wounds – as I was. I often wondered if he ever used that stuff I told him in any of his books, or whether there’s some unpublished novel of his that has quotes from me or some incident from my life in it, because later on his questions were endless, about how I felt in the various crashes, and how I felt when a plane was in trouble. Danger made him feel like a bigger person. That’s why he liked that ride in the B-25 so much.

Anyway, nine years later, in 1954, I was in Florida, where I had planned to build my own jet aircraft factory. I was already thinking of a short take-off and landing jet – the STOL – combined with an element of vertical take-off, what’s now called a VTOL. I was looking ahead to the future and intended to sell the first twenty-five planes to TWA – that is, to myself. Del Webb and I got together on it, but it fell through. And on the spur of the moment, that time in Palm Beach – I knew Ernest was in Cuba – I hopped over from Miami to Havana on a commercial flight.

First I went to the Floridita, that famous bar downtown, because I knew he spent a lot of time there, but he wasn’t there. It was empty at that hour of the afternoon.

So I took a taxi out to the finca. I didn’t remember the name of the finca, didn’t even know it was called a finca then. I just said to the cab driver, ‘Hemingway,’ and he said, ‘Ah, Papa!’

I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want Papa. I want Hemingway.’

He said, ‘Sí, sí, Papa, Papa!’ By then we were halfway there, and Papa turned out to be Ernest.

I was let in without any ceremony. The maid at the door didn’t even ask my name. Ernest was sitting around the pool half-naked with a few other people, and I hadn’t had time to change. I was still wearing a business suit. I had taken my tie off, stuffed it in my pocket. I walked up and Ernest was sitting there with his pot belly hanging out, and he peered at me over his glasses.

The first thing he said was, ‘Don’t stand there with the sun behind your back. I can’t make you out, and that makes me nervous. Move around this way.’

I did as I was told, so he could see me. He looked at me with a grim expression – like, ‘What’s this?’ And then suddenly his face broke into a big beautiful smile, and he said, ‘Goddamnit, Tom, it’s great to see you!’

I felt wonderful, that he’d recognized me after all those years and welcomed me so warmly.

Ernest had that quality of welcoming, which is so rare. The house was full of people, apart from his family. There was his wife – at least some little woman running around that I thought was his wife. And some adoring blonde girl, who as I recall, the wife didn’t like very much, no doubt because Ernest was humping her. A bunch of servants, too, and some children, his own and others. And some college kids from the United States. They’d come down there and thrust themselves upon him with their manuscripts, expecting that he’d help get them published. He read their work with great patience, and I remember that when one of them left he asked Ernest for money because he didn’t have the fare back home, and Ernest gave it to him. That’s the kind of man he was.

Did you keep masquerading as Tom Garden?

I was afraid to tell him my real name. It was such a good relationship that I didn’t want to run that risk. We sat around the house and just talked. Ernest wanted to know what I’d been doing all these years, and I made up a few stories that paralleled my life. The events may have been different but the general content was the same, so that I wasn’t lying to him in any meaningful way. I stayed almost the entire first day at his finca, and then he drove me back to my hotel in Havana, the Nacional.

The next day I was out there again with him, and on the third day we went fishing. I had taken Ernest up in my plane, and now he wanted to take me out on the fishing boat, to show me his specialty. I was not a sportsman; I played golf but I never went hunting, and I seldom fished anymore. I didn’t really know what to expect.

There were a couple of Cuban helpers, one who was steering and one serving drinks. Ernest knew by then that I didn’t drink, so he had a bottle of milk along in the ice chest for me. I think he drank tequila or daiquiris, and he had a couple of thermoses full of them, and each time he’d take a belt he’d say to his barman helper, ‘Get out the milk for Señor Jardin.’ And then he would crack up laughing. It broke him up, that I drank milk.

I was taken aback to begin with, when about fifteen minutes after we left the dock, there was Ernest at the helm of the boat, wearing a jock strap. Nothing else.

The fishing was poor. Ernest said it was the fault of the tankers that had been torpedoed there by German subs during the war: the garbage that had spewed out of them had killed off most of the big game fish. And he grumbled, and then it got hot, and he said his jock strap was itching, and he peeled it off.

He said, ‘Come on, Tom, you’re going to get prickly heat. Take off your clothes.’

I checked over in my mind what I remembered of Ernest’s sexual habits, and I figured it was safe enough, so I peeled down to my skivvies. I’ve always been a little shy about being naked with other men, or women for that matter. Many times when I used to play golf, in the locker rooms all the men would shower together, and I waited till they were out of there before I would shower. Crept into a corner of the locker room when I had to change my clothes. I’m sure it harks back to my childhood, being tall and awkward, but I could never put my finger on the exact reason.

After a while Ernest said, ‘Let’s go for a swim. Bareass, Tom.’

I peeled off my skivvies and we dove over the side into the Gulf, which was perfectly flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for me, because we were grown men – I was forty-eight years old, and Ernest was somewhat older – and there we were in the water, naked, and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a killer whale, or a swordfish, and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other – ‘Watch out, whale, here I come!’ Splash around like children.

And it was marvelous. It was a broiling hot day and we were two middle-aged men splashing around like kids in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

It gave me a curious view of Ernest. I saw something in him which I now know is a common element in many great men: the capacity to play, to remain in some respects childlike until they’re too old to do it. I haven’t got that capacity, sad to say – never did. It’s a naturalness that men have when they’re not ashamed of themselves and of what’s buried inside of them.

It was an absolutely fine day. I felt more relaxed with Ernest than I felt with men I had known all my life. We just took each other for granted, and I was terribly impressed. With myself, too. Mind you, I wasn’t conscious of this at the time. A lot of it came to me in thoughts afterward. But I was conscious of it to a certain extent, because I knew that this was not the way I usually behaved. And I was happy.

Then I made a bad mistake. We had such a good relationship growing up between us that I felt ashamed of myself for deceiving Ernest by calling myself Tom Garden. It suddenly seemed ignoble. And so I said to him, ‘I have to tell you something. My name isn’t Tom Garden.’

He took a gulp of his drink. ‘Then who the hell are you?’

I said, ‘My name is Howard Hughes.’

He looked at me for a minute, downed his drink, and said, ‘Goddamn! I should have guessed. That’s why you flew so well. I should have known it. Howard Hughes! Goddamn! I’ve always wanted to meet you, and here you are, bareass naked with me in the Caribbean!’

He kept on chuckling, and I was relieved at his reaction. I thought everything was going to be okay.

But it was a mistake to have told him. In subtle ways his attitude began to change almost at once. The first thing that happened is that he wanted to know all about me – that is to say, about Howard Hughes. He asked me a hell of a lot of questions. That’s when we got on to our long discussion about my crashes and wartime experiences, and that was all right – but then he started asking me the same sort of questions that reporters had asked me for years.

I had developed a habit, the moment these kinds of questions were posed to me, of instantly ducking into my shell and being brusque. And that’s what happened to me then. When we went back to the house I said to Ernest, ‘The one thing I beg of you is not to tell anyone else who I am, because that ruins everything for me. People treat me differently and I don’t like it.’ I wanted him to pick up the hint.

He said he understood. He wished that he could be anonymous sometimes, but his face was too well known, the big beard and everything. In retrospect I don’t believe him, but that’s what he said then.

But his attitude had changed. He had always been fascinated by rich people, and he confessed that to me, and he began to talk about money.

Money is not a subject that I’m shy about. Money’s played an important role in my life. I’m hardly alone in that: people will lie, beg, borrow, steal, do damn near anything for money. It’s played an exaggerated role in my life because I’ve had more of it than almost anybody else. If you’re a man seven feet tall, like ‘Wilt the Stilt’ Chamberlain, it’s bound to be important in your life that you’re taller than anyone else around. You stand out, and people are going to gawk at you. People have always gawked at me because I’ve had more money than they have. They treated me like a freak, which is one of the reasons I’ve always hid from them.

And so I didn’t want Ernest pumping me about how much money I had, how I got it, and what I was doing with it. But obviously I couldn’t avoid the subject altogether. He wouldn’t let me. And the more I talked – I guess when I talk, I talk about a million dollars as most men talk about a hundred – the more Ernest became almost deferential to me. He was awed by all this.

The worst thing that happened was that just before I left, he became aware that he had been deferential. Because he was a perceptive man and he was, I think, aware of his own attitudes as few men are. Once it dawned on him that he was being deferential – I may even have said something to him, not meaning to insult him, but said, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t pull that with me, that’s what I get from flunkies’ – he was ashamed.

He turned against me. He became surly and difficult. Although when I left, we had one very good moment. He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I don’t care whether you’re Tom or Howard, I’m just delighted to know you, and I want you to come back and I look forward to seeing your skinny ass again.’

And so everything was okay when I left.

Did you see him again?

I waited a long time. Much too long, in fact, because we had a good friendship, and if I had continued it I think I would have been the better for it. Ernest could have been the kind of friend I always needed. Different from me, although I don’t think that would have made a barrier.

But those were the years that I got so terribly involved and embroiled. ‘My son Howard the Billionaire is drowning!’ I was drowning in details and deals, and I was sucked down into that morass of suits and countersuits and financing – the whole horror story of TWA.

Did you and Ernest correspond with each other?

No, he didn’t write letters and I rarely do. I did go back, though, to see him about five or six years later. That was sometime in 1959, and the Cuban revolution had already been accomplished. And this time I went deliberately – I had no business in Florida.

I went straight to Cuba to see Ernest, because it was a time in my life when I was completely fed up with everything, and I had nothing but good memories of Ernest and the times we had spent together. I regretted that we’d been out of touch. I had read in the papers that Ernest was back in Cuba, and that was what prompted me to go. This was not meant to be a two-day visit, or a three-day visit, or anything. As happened again later, I was willing to burn my bridges behind me. I felt that Ernest and I had a great camaraderie, and there wasn’t much more I needed in life at that point other than one close friend. So when I went back it was with the idea that I would stay as long as I wanted to. It could have been for the rest of my life. I had no time limit in mind.

You were married to Jean Peters then, in 1959. You mean to say you and Jean would have moved down to Cuba?

I don’t know what would have happened. Things had started to go a little sour by then in my second marriage. In fact, long before then. But if I had stayed on in Cuba, and I was free to do so – all I had to do was throw over my entire industrial empire, so-called – I probably would have asked Jean to come out, give it a try to see if we could live together again.

When I arrived and went out to Ernest’s finca, it was a terrible disappointment. It threw me completely, because everything had changed. Ernest had become an old man. And I don’t mean just old physically, old in appearance – he always had that big white beard – but the vitality had gone out of him. And some of the intellectual honesty had gone out of him too. He was crotchety and difficult and he talked to me in an entirely new way.

The first day I was there, half our conversation had to do with Cuban cigars, because Castro had accomplished his revolution and Ernest was worried that Castro was nationalizing the cigar industry and the cigars would not be the same quality they were before. He said, ‘Howard, why don’t you buy the island from Fidel and go into the cigar business?’

He pursued that theme. I’d come to talk to Ernest about a possible total change in my life, and he kept saying, ‘The cigars won’t be the same if they’re not rolled on the thighs of nubile Cuban girls, and you can make a good deal with Castro, you can buy in for a hundred million, and what does that mean to a man in your position, Howard?’

I hadn’t come to discuss the quality of Cuban cigars. I was uncomfortable and a little impatient.

The second day was just as bad: I never got a chance to talk to Ernest alone. He got up late and he had a lot of visitors. We had a pickup of meal out at the finca and there were a bunch of Cuban army officers and political figures. He introduced me, thank God, as Tom Garden. He still respected my wish for privacy. But he and these officers and politicos chatted away furiously in Spanish all afternoon. Every once in a while Ernest would stop and throw a line or two of translation in my direction. I was bored.

By the time the afternoon was over, when they left, Ernest was drunk as a skunk. His head was falling on the table. I was embarrassed for him. This was a man who’d won the Nobel prize. I found it a pitiable thing to see a man of this power, this nobility of spirit, demeaned in this way. I didn’t want to see any more of it.

I left. I was at the Nacional in Havana. It was empty, I had the whole floor to myself – and I hadn’t rented the whole floor that time, as I did years later at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Matter of fact there was a parade while I was there and Castro himself came marching down the street. I watched it from my window.

I went back once more to see Ernest. It was even worse. I don’t know what had gotten into his head, but naturally he wanted to know all about what I’d been doing in the past years. I didn’t feel the machinations at Hughes Aircraft and troubles at TWA were the things that really would have fascinated him, but I gave him a brief rundown on it, and all he could do was criticize me, and harp on the fact that I was wasting my life on involvements with this kind of thing and the kind of people I had to deal with. Now I knew this. That’s precisely why I had come to see Ernest. I was like a man who had a crippled leg, and I had gone to the doctor to see if he could cure me, and all the doctor could say was, ‘Your leg is crippled, your leg is crippled.’ What I was looking for was the cure.

Ernest offered me no suggestions, only harped on the fact that I was too involved with these people. I would say, ‘Yes, I know that, but I want to become uninvolved, and how do I do it? And where do I go? How do I cut loose?’ I may not have put it in such childlike terms as that, but it was clear that I was there for help. And instead of helping me, Ernest tried to bully me.

When you bully me, I vanish. Usually I vanish physically, but sometimes I just vanish mentally and emotionally.

I crawled into my shell, and the more I did that, the more Ernest tried to pry open the cover and knock holes in me. He still had a lot of the old charm, he wasn’t unpleasant enough for me to pick up and walk out of his house, because every time he saw me getting really uncomfortable, he’d slap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh, shit, it’s good to see you, Howard, or Tom’ – he called me both names. People in Cuba thought my name was Tom Howard or Howard Tom. Ernest had kept his promise, I think it amused him that he was the only one who knew.

We didn’t go fishing this time. Ernest was in no condition for that. He was worried about whether the government was going to take over his farm and he didn’t even want to leave the house. He was worried about his health. I remember the doctor came out and took his blood pressure right there at the table.

But there was still some of the old Ernest left. We drove into Havana together, and the car broke down halfway. Ernest cursed up a storm and started a speech about ‘goddamn modern machinery,’ and got out to open the hood. But I could tell what the trouble was from the way the motor had sputtered. I told him, ‘You’re just out of gas,’ and that’s what it was. His gas gauge was broken.

This was where the old Ernest popped up out of that crotchetiness. There was a car parked nearby, not far from a house or a few houses. Ernest took a length of rubber tubing from the trunk. ‘Indispensable, Howard,’ he said. ‘Never travel without it.’ He siphoned a gallon or so of gas out of this other car, sucked it up with his mouth, which made me terribly nervous. I shudder to think of what fumes went down into Ernest’s lungs. And if the owner of the car had seen it he might have fired a shot at us.

Anyhow, we got to the city all right and filled the tank there.

It was a bad visit. It was a mistake. It colored the good memories of Ernest with an overlay of this unsuccessful meeting. What I most deeply regret is that I hadn’t known Ernest as a younger man, and that we hadn’t kept in touch. If I had known him during those years, let’s say even from 1946 up to 1959, that might have changed my entire life. But events intervened, and you don’t always see what’s the right course to follow, and we had lost touch.

I never saw him again. I was deeply saddened when I heard of his death, that he’d blown his brains out. Not that I object to suicide. I feel it’s every man’s right to put an end to his life when it’s become intolerable to him. But what preceded it – the sickness and the periods of insanity, the decline of a brilliant and fine man into a wretched shell – saddened me deeply.

What about you, in your life? Have you ever contemplated suicide?

I imagine every man has. The first serious time was when I broke up with Billie Dove. That was a totally demoralizing experience for me. The other times were flashes of despair. But I have to tell you one thing, and then you’ll understand a lot about my life, about these past years.

After my crash in the F-ll, when I was in the hospital and the doctors had just about given up on me, what saved my life was my will to live. And I’m not talking about an unconscious instinctive will to live, like the fox that bites off its foot in a trap – I mean a conscious repetition of my intense desire to go on living. I lay there in that hospital bed and I repeated it to myself time after time. ‘You’ve got to live. You’ve got to live.’ Not: ‘You’re going to live.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to live.’

That phrase burned itself into my mind, I had repeated it so often so that years later, when things were really bad and that flash of despair came to me, which I suppose is common to all men, it was always overpowered by an echo of what I had said to myself in that hospital bed: ‘You’ve got to live.’

The only time I thought seriously about doing away with myself, other after the breakup with Billie, was during my last marriage. It came then from a deep sense of shame at having failed – I don’t mean only in my marriage, but in my life. It was as if over the years, all the bad and wrong things I had done, the promises I had made and broken, welled to the top. I’m not just talking about promises where I said, ‘I’ll buy these planes from you’ and then I didn’t buy them. I’m talking about promises in human relationships, promises that are not given in words, but that you make by virtue of the obligations you take on. Time passes and you find you were unable to fulfil them because you’ve changed, the other person has changed, and life interferes. And yet, what it amounts to in the end is a mountain of lies and deceptions beyond your control. They pile up inside you – each one is a little hard stone that seems to grow. You feel the weight of them year after year as each one gets added to the pile, and there’s no way to get rid of them. You can’t vomit them out anymore because the weight is too great inside you.

And then I suppose a moment comes when you feel this interior heaviness at the mistakes you made, and these personal failures, so much so that you think you just can’t go on. Cancer of the memory, you can call it.

But I went on – for which, all things considered, I’m grateful. No man can be certain of this, of course, but I don’t believe I will ever commit suicide. I feel my spirit caged in this decaying carcass, yearning to get out. But I will do nothing to hasten that departure.

There’s a story I heard about you from a friend. It has to do with a man named Bob Balzer and a house you rented from him on Mulholland Drive.

In West Los Angeles. Yes, I remember that I had a house up there. But I never met Balzer in my life.

Correct. Your lawyer told Balzer you wanted to rent the house for a year. Balzer said he had just built it and wasn’t interested in renting it. Your lawyer said, ‘But Mr. Hughes will pay a year’s rent equal to the cost of the house.’ Balzer said, ‘Well… that offer is hard to resist.’

It was a beautiful house, unusually secluded – suited me perfectly. I told you I had several houses I was renting, a few bungalows and a couple of larger ones like this man Balzer’s place. What’s the point of this story?

Your lawyer met with Balzer at the Beverly Hills Hotel to sign the lease. Balzer said, ‘I’ll give you the keys tomorrow as soon as I’ve moved my things out, and then Mr. Hughes can move in.’ Your lawyer said, ‘Mr. Hughes has already moved in, and never mind the keys, the locks have been changed.’ Balzer turned pale and said, ‘What about my clothes?’ Your lawyer said, ‘Go buy a new wardrobe and send the bill to Mr. Hughes care of me.’ Balzer got furious, and charged up to the house. He knew a way over the garden wall and in through the back door. He climbed over, but two guards grabbed him and heaved him back over the wall. They said, ‘Mr. Howard Hughes is renting this house, we don’t care who you are, get out.’

They never would have revealed that I was leasing it.

Balzer knew who he’d leased it to. He went out, bought new clothes, and sent you the bill.

In which case the bill was paid. I’m terribly sorry that the poor man was thrown over the garden wall. I had no knowledge that such a thing had happened.

There’s a climax to this. A year later, a year to the minute that Balzer had rented it to you, he showed up at the front door with two bodyguards of his own, resolutely determined to get in and to throw you out on the dot. But the door was open, and his old locks had been reinstalled, and when he walked in, the house was empty. Not a soul there. He ran around, of course, inspecting for damage –

There was no damage. Whoever said that is lying.

Balzer didn’t find any damage. However, he walked into the bedroom, where he’d slept exactly one year ago, and the cufflinks that he’d worn the night before, a year ago, were on the dresser, and the same yellow striped sheets he’d slept in were still on the bed. Nobody had slept there. The liquor cabinet, the kitchen, the living room, all were untouched. You’d never used the house, never slept there in the entire year, and it cost you, according to my friend, about $200,000 to rent the place.

It’s not true – I did sleep there. People tell ridiculous stories about me. They exaggerate terribly. I slept there several times.

But the bed was untouched, they were the same sheets. Balzer’s shirt was still hanging on the back of a chair the way he’d left it a year ago.

I didn’t sleep in the man’s bedroom. I slept in the maid’s room. I don’t need sunken bathrooms and a suntan machine. The servant’s quarters were much more private and quite comfortable, and nearer the back gate. I slept there at least three or four times, maybe more. That’s a while ago – I don’t remember.

I was recently in Palm Springs to see my aunt. She knew you years ago. Her name is Beabe Hamilburg and her husband was Mitchell Hamilburg. Do you remember them?

He was a talent agent. And if I’m not mistaken, I met your father through Mitch.

That could be. Beabe told me a story that I wanted to check on. She said that you flew her and Mitch and the actress Mitzi Gaynor and Mitzi’s mother down to Las Vegas for a weekend.

When was this?

In the Fifties. She didn’t know where she was going and they had no clothes packed, and she said you kept her virtually a prisoner in the Frontier Hotel for a week.

Hardly a prisoner, since they had the best suite in the hotel and I made sure they had ample chips to gamble with. Besides, now that I’m recalling some details of this, they came down to Vegas inadequately equipped for a week, and I sent a big choice of clothes for them to pick over. And jewelry for your aunt. And they had a chauffeured limousine at their disposal.

But Beabe said she never saw you the whole time they were there. What was the purpose of your inviting them if you didn’t see them?

I saw them, I’m sure, but the purpose of the trip, as you probably guessed, was for me to get into Mitzi Gaynor’s pants.

Did you need Beabe and Mitch to hold your hand?

Maybe to hold Mitzi’s mother’s hand. I’ve always needed other people around. The point is that I didn’t want to spend that much time with Mitzi. It was an interlude, nothing more. I wanted Mitzi occupied when I wasn’t with her, because I had business down in Vegas at the same time. And if I’m not mistaken, your Uncle Mitchell was Mitzi’s representative at the time. He introduced me to Mitzi. Very wholesome girl. I needed chaperons, that’s another point to the way I did things. I had the mother along, as I’ve mentioned. Of course she knew what was going on. But I wasn’t interested in marriage. I’ve said many times since, and at that time I said, I wasn’t going to get married again until I was in my fifties. I had too many things to do.

During the war didn’t you have sunken gasoline tanks in the San Fernando Valley?

Why would I do a thing like that? That’s ridiculous. Who told you such a thing?

Gasoline was rationed and it was hard to get. I don’t remember who told me.

It’s not true. One tank, that’s all – one five-thousand-gallon tank. That’s reasonable, I think. I owned a lot of Chevrolets.

Over-population is the over-riding critical problem today and it’s going to become more so as time goes on. And I don’t see any workable man-made solution to this problem.

Do you think it’s a possible solution to populate outer space? Other planets, or satellites?

No, I think that’s quite hopeless. It cost us the better part of several billion dollars to send three guys to the moon. I know a fair amount about this, because my equipment, Hughes equipment, was used up there and was key to the project. It’s a losing battle. I know that guy, Armstrong, the astronaut, said, ‘One giant step for mankind.’ One step forward, two steps back, that’s about the size of it. Technology can’t solve this problem. It will be solved by nature, but not in a way that we’ll enjoy. New and virulent diseases can sweep away two thirds of humanity as they did in the time of the Black Death, before any solutions can be found and applied. I think that it’s a historical necessity that something of this sort will happen. The deck is stacked against humankind. The world is only able to hold a certain number of people and we’re fast approaching that limit. My vision of the world in a hundred years is one great big India. When I was out there I saw what could happen, and I know how horrible and frightening it is. And it could easily happen, even in the United States.

You don’t think it’s possible to colonize outer space, in any form?

Not for the next five to seven hundred years, that’s my estimate. But there certainly are observers from other planets down here, checking us out, putting us into the scheme of things. UFOs, most of them, are not optical illusions. I have a copy of the Air Force’s top-secret Blue Book that tells the true tale of the so-called flying saucers.

I’m sure there are, at the very least, hundreds of inhabited planets in our galaxy alone, not to mention how many thousands of other galaxies, and some of them have been inhabited for millions of years.

There is some doubt, at least in other people’s minds, that the beings on some of these other planets have evolved to a higher degree of civilization than we have. Man doesn’t want to believe it because for the most part he still thinks – not with his mind, but with his primitive instincts – that the earth is the center of the solar system and the solar system, our solar system, is the center of the universe. Never mind what he learns in school or what his common sense tells him – common sense is very much over-rated, it’s rarely the important factor in thinking and decisions. The average man still says, ‘the sun’s rising’ and ‘the sun’s going down,’ and whether he knows it or not, he believes it.

I’m not in any doubt that these advance beings have been visiting us at irregular intervals for the last five thousand years or more. Observation trips, reconnaissance trips. Probably feeding all the information, from the rules of our wars and what we eat and the sounds we make when we screw, into some extraterrestrial computer about the size of a TV set. And maybe the only thing that’s saved our bacon so far is that they still can’t figure out what makes us tick. Because if you computerize everything about mankind, the computer still wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Man is an insane animal. Hypocrisy and denial are his two outstanding attributes.

You once mentioned that Noah Dietrich had told a story about you regarding cookies. You said the story wasn’t true, but you never said what it was.

Noah Dietrich, now that he no longer works for me, has told story after story about our past business dealings where he’s twisted things around. Where I was the one who made the decision, he’s told other people, ‘I made it and Howard didn’t know what he was doing.’ Here’s an example of one of the things he did. The story itself is trivial, but I’ll tell it to you because you asked about it.

It was a long time ago, just after I had finished shooting Scarface. I was working with the cutting editor and hadn’t slept for two days. At one point we sent out for food, but when we finished eating this guy was still hungry. I had sent out for milk and cookies, which was enough to keep me going. This man hadn’t sent out for any dessert, and when I started to eat my cookies, he said, ‘Mr. Hughes, could I have one of your cookies?’ I gave him one. It’s true that I hesitated, because I didn’t want to start a precedent. Cookies were all I had to eat. These other people would go out and gorge themselves on hamburgers and french fries, while I drank milk and ate graham crackers. I kept them in the studio or the cutting room, wherever I happened to be working. But I gave him a cookie. Noah twisted this all around. He told somebody that I refused to give the man a cookie. That’s absolutely not true. I gave him a cookie.

The sequel to this incident was that for weeks afterward men would come up to me on the lot, whenever I went off to a corner to drink my milk and eat my cookies, and say, ‘Howard,’ or ‘Mr. Hughes, can I please have a cookie?’ They were kidding me. But I couldn’t very well refuse them, since I’d given this other man a cookie – so my cookie supply vanished before my eyes. I knew then that I was right in the first place, because if you give one man a cookie, you’ve got to give every man a cookie, and pretty soon you don’t have any cookies yourself. And you’re a poor man, cookiewise.

You may think that’s funny, and I can see the humor in it too. But when you’re hungry it’s not funny. Besides, it might have been hundred-dollar bills next. I didn’t want to get the reputation of being an easy touch.

Let me explain my personal theory on the structure of the universe. You know the structure of the atom, with a nucleus, protons and electrons revolving about it, and so on. It must have struck you that this is similar to our solar system. My theory is that there’s a possibility for life in some form not only in the various systems in what we call outer space but in systems within ourselves. In other words, each cell within our body is composed of many atoms. I’m putting this very simply so that you’ll understand. I know you’re not a scientist.

I believe that within ourselves, in any given cell, there are systems that are similar to the galaxies that we can observe in outer space, and that within, let’s say a cell that’s part of my pinky, there may be a universe, or what’s called a multiverse, and that perhaps in one of those miniature solar systems in my pinky there may be hundreds of planets supporting life in miniature – from our point of view. And right there, in my pinky, there may be a planet called X, but similar to our Earth in most details, in which two men are talking just as we’re talking today.

There’s no way we can investigate this. We’re not advanced to that point. But it seems to me perfectly logical. And if you follow it through, as I have, you can come up with an interesting theory about disease.

Let’s say that a nuclear device is detonated here on the planet Earth. That may be creating a cancer in the universe. It’s possible that cancer in ourselves, and other diseases, may be caused by wars, or natural disasters such as famine, in these other universes within ourselves. Suppose a famine strikes India or two African nations go to war on one of these tiny planets in your abdomen, and that famine or war spreads to other planets, the other systems in your abdomen – this may be the cause of ulcers, for all we know.

I’m sure this sounds far-fetched to you, but if you think about it for a while, you’ll realize that we don’t really know the nature of disease – we may know the physiological reasons, but we don’t know why it all happens, why the body decays. And if it’s possible that the cellular structure of the human body is a replica of the universe, a microcosm as opposed to a macrocosm, then it’s also possible that our own solar system may be an atom in some giant’s lungs. And when we detonate a nuclear device…

He coughs.

Or worse.

There’s something we’ve got to talk about, and we’ve slid over it somehow in these sessions. That’s your phobia about germs. I’m not trying to offend you, but on various occasions you’ve mentioned precautions you’ve taken against germs – although I must admit you haven’t taken any in my presence.

I dislike the word phobia. Anybody in his right mind would take the same precautions. And you’re quite wrong about my not taking precautions in your presence. We haven’t shaken hands very often, have we? Most men I wouldn’t shake hands with at all. The first thing I look at are someone’s nails. The man who doesn’t take scrupulous care of his nails probably doesn’t wash his hands often, either, and will probably just use soap.

What do you use?

I use antiseptic sprays both in my throat and on my hands, and in my living quarters. I also have ultra-violet ray machines. I take large quantities of vitamins, especially vitamin E. That’s one of the vitamins that have not been fully analyzed. However, it does tend to break up the quantities of foreign matter that coat the lungs. Heavy smokers like yourself, of course, are killing themselves, and vitamin E won’t help them, but it will attack the normal particles of dust and crap that you take in from the atmosphere and which stick to the mucous membranes.

I have emphysema, brought on by the smog in California, and the vitamin E reduces the need for oxygen in the system and makes it easier for me to breathe. I’ve taken other precautions over many years. For example, the properties inherent in simple white cotton gloves are not widely recognized. All the documents, memos, and so on, that came to me in past years were typed by secretaries wearing white gloves, so there were no oils and germs brought into my presence. I used to buy the gloves wholesale from an undertaker’s supply house.

Used to? The past tense?

I’ve modified my views somewhat, mainly because I’m not a well man and precautions of this sort are no longer of great significance. But there was a time, not long ago, when I was very careful about the people who came to visit me at any of my houses in California and Nevada. The places themselves were fully purified, the air cleaned and rendered antiseptic.

But that wasn’t enough. I had to open the door for these people. Now please don’t think I’m a maniac. I’ve been called a maniac enough times. I don’t like to think that’s your opinion. I don’t believe it is, but I don’t even want to see the suspicion on your face. A great many of the precautions I took were on doctor’s orders. And if not doctor’s orders, then doctor’s suggestions, because of the damage to my lungs, and my skin condition, and my anemia, and various other ailments.

You went a bit overboard on it, didn’t you?

I’m a man who always goes the whole hog. These places of mine in Vegas and L.A. were very well protected against germs. Nevertheless, people did come to see me, by invitation, and when I opened the door for them, I admitted untold billions of harmful bacteria.

To minimize this risk I had a little square chalked just in front of the door in exactly the right place. When someone came to visit me, I would make sure that the guard had him placed in the center of that square before I opened the door to admit him. In other words, that square was placed so that I could open the door the absolute minimum to allow him to come in. Once this happened with Charles Laughton came to see me. Laughton was a fat man, so I opened the door and it hit him in the belly. Knocked the wind right out of him. He went down to all fours. I had to help him up and apologize.

Why didn’t you use something similar to a decompression chamber?

Are you making fun of me, Clifford? As a matter of fact, I did that once. But people wouldn’t stand for it. That was in my bungalow in Las Vegas, years before I moved into the Desert Inn. I had a bungalow off the Strip, set well back into the desert. I also had a battery of ultra-violet ray machines set up in the entrance halls but people said it would give them cancer, and I finally had to drop it.

And you object to the word phobia?

There’s nothing phobic about a man taking care of his health. I’ve gotten through to the age of sixty-five, and for a man who’s suffered as much physical injury as I have, that’s a triumph. A man with my ailments who hadn’t cared for his body the way I have, and who let people push him around, would have been dead at the age of fifty.

I mentioned to you that the typists on Romaine Street end elsewhere wore white gloves, and so did the people who came on plane trips with me. But one pair of white gloves wasn’t enough, I realized, especially for these people on the trips. They used two pair.

At the same time?

Yes. One pair, the one on top, was discarded when they got into the plane, at the top of the gangway, and the second pair which they wore during the trip, discarded when they left. And this way I got some measure of precaution against the hordes of germs that surround us.

You mean everyone who flew with you had to go through this?

Not everyone. Only the ones I didn’t know well, and people who were obviously dirty. I had ratings for people, Class A, B, C and D. A file card had to be consulted by my people who would arrange the meetings.

I’m well aware that this attitude and my precautions leave me open to the charge of being insane. That accusation has been leveled at me for many years, and I’ll take this opportunity to refute it. I’m not insane, but I am eccentric. Eccentricity is often a sign of a superior intelligence. I’m not trying to say that I have a superior intelligence, because the truth is I don’t believe I do. My creative talents are limited to technical spheres. I’m a synthesizer, an enlightened opportunist. I’m a hard worker and I’m stubborn, and above all I’m a man of action. Any such man is eccentric by common standards.

Ridiculing eccentricity is the sign of an inferior intelligence. You told me about your wife’s father, how he ordered food in restaurants – two French fried potatoes and six string beans. Now that was really eccentric, and the waiters probably thought he was crazy. That’s why they were waiters and he was a rich industrialist. Does your wife think he was crazy?

She thinks he was a great man.

Exactly. My point – and I think it’s of the deepest importance that I spell this out for you – is that my eccentricities are intelligent safeguards against the uncommon dangers of life. Every man would behave in a so-called peculiar manner – not necessarily my manner, but his own peculiar manner – if he had the courage.

And the money.

Correct. The money to indulge his wishes and to tell other people to go to hell if they don’t like it. That explains in a nutshell why I’m odd. My oddness is the essence of my individuality, which I can afford to express whereas others can’t or are too frightened to do so. And so the ones who can’t express themselves look at someone like me – what they know of me – and they say, ‘He’s nuts.’

If you’re rich you can structure your life to suit your deepest personal tastes, without fear of the consequences. And any man’s personal tastes are – if he expresses them honestly – goddamn peculiar.

Artists are the closest, in this sense, to a man like myself. They have a highly developed sense of their own individuality and they don’t mind telling the world to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, and I don’t, either.

You were saying that you rated people from A to D in terms of cleanliness. What did the ratings mean?

Filthy, Dirty, Moderately Dirty, and Moderately Clean. Moderately Clean was Class A – that was the highest rating I would give.

How many people got Class A ratings in your system?

Very few. And there were other people, of course, who simply wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t wear the two sets of gloves. Too strong-minded.

Where do you rate me?

Look at your fingernails and make a guess.

When I started out in business, there were thousands of men far richer than I in this country. This proves, I believe, that it’s not true that the man with the most money always has the advantage. Not if he’s a poor business gambler. Then he’ll lose his shirt. You have to figure the odds, and when they’re in your favor you have to bet and bet hard. If you turn chicken, you’re going to lose. I’m sure these are not the high-sounding tales you read in the Madison Avenue magazines about how the mighty men in American industry make their deals. But take it from the horse’s mouth, that’s the way it happens.

The coming thing in modern American business is the computer. Supposedly no decisions are made until all the data has been fed into the IBM 3600 or the Control Data monster or whatever is being used. But I know how these CEOs operate, and that computer is there like a court jester in the olden days – it’s there to amuse the executives and to back up their gut-level decisions. Any businessman worth his salt makes his decision first, based on his gambler’s instinct, and then assembles the necessary data to support his decision. And now, sometimes, just to satisfy his stockholders, he gets the bright boys who run the computers to feed all the data in and… well, you know the phrase: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ I heard someone say that ten million monkeys, working nonstop on a problem for a thousand years, could not make the same major mistake that a computer could make in one tenth of a second. In many respects the purpose of the computer is public relations.

I don’t say that they’re not useful. My companies use them in all our operations, but we don’t use them to make decisions. Many of the finest businessmen I know had no more than high-school educations, and in many fields they were totally ignorant. They rose to the top of the business world because they were intelligent gamblers, able to act intuitively and swiftly, far more intelligently than any computer.

Do you think if you hadn’t inherited Toolco, you’d still be the billionaire that you are today?

Of course not. But I still would have become a pilot, and I would have turned my energies at some point toward aircraft design. I would have made a lot of money at it. That was built into my genetic makeup. I don’t know if I would have become a major figure – what I am now, in an odd sense – but I sure as hell would have created something of value.

I’m a creator, and I’m proud of it. I consider myself a man much maligned, a human being who has made a lot of big splashes but has missed the mark. My own fault. Life is a struggle, and the tools we’ve got are our muscles, our brains, our imaginations, our will to achieve something, and our ability to sniff out danger – that last is a sixth sense which we share with animals. If you don’t use those tools wisely, and you fail, you have no one else to blame. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ I know that quote well. And not only underlings, but overlings who have missed the mark. In the darker moments, that’s how I see myself. If this book has any value, I hope it will have the value of showing such a man. You can’t live your life over again, so you might as well learn from it and make an example of it for the people who come after you.