Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

26

I’VE ALREADY TOLD you about the beginning of my involvement with TWA. But it was a three-act drama, and now I’m going to tell you Act Two. I had dozens of lawyers and advisers on this case who were milking me dry, telling me: ‘Don’t do this, Howard,’ or, ‘If you do that, Howard, the jig is up.’ Night and day they nagged at me. I felt like one of those experimental rats that keeps getting new charges of electricity shoved up his ass no matter which part of the cage he moves to: ‘Let’s see how long he can stand it, before he goes nuts.’

This all started in 1954, although the real crisis came later and lasted six years, from 1957 to 1963. If I hadn’t loved that airline so much, I would have walked out and said, ‘Let it go down the drain.’ It took ten years off my life. What it did to my marriage and my personal effort to get my head clear, can’t be measured in years or any other form of measurement. Of course in the end I have no one else but myself to blame for allowing it to happen, but you never see that when you’re in the thick of battle.

The man I got to replace Jack Frye was Ralph Damon, who at that time ran American Airlines. He’d done good things with American, but they weren’t going anyplace then and TWA was. So I made it known to him that I was interested in his meeting with me, with a view to his becoming president of TWA. This has to be done carefully, because it’s not considered good form to go around propositioning the president of one airline to take over the presidency of another. Damon had to sneak away from his offices, and I had to take extreme security precautions at the time. As a result, Damon sat in a hotel room for four days in Beverly Hills waiting for me. I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t know when he was supposed to arrive, and he knew even less about my whereabouts. When I didn’t show up he got annoyed. I don’t remember who he was in touch with then, but he told them he never wanted to hear from me again.

Of course that wasn’t true. We arranged another meeting, this time in Houston. I checked into the Rice Hotel under another name. But I forgot to tell Ralph Damon the details. So he checked into another hotel in Houston and we spent two days without either of us knowing the other was there or how to get in touch.

I was there in my room catching up on my sleep. You know, I can go up to forty-eight hours without sleep, but then every now and then I need a long stretch in bed, a good hard bed with a board. I can sleep for twenty-four hours. It doesn’t happen often, but it happened then, and while it was happening Ralph Damon was running all over Houston like a chicken with its head cut off, and finally he left.

He said a second time, ‘I never want to see that fucking Howard Hughes again.’

The point, of course, was that he had never seen me.

I never did get to meet him. Eventually I got Noah to arrange things, because Noah operated in a more conventional manner. Noah offered him the job and we signed him up for five years.

Ralph Damon was a fine president. He was able to act on my decisions as few other men have. TWA was the first airline to come up with the idea of the two-class service. That was my idea. I got hold of Ralph on the phone and I said, ‘People are snobbish. If we divide that plane into two sections, quite a few passengers are going to pay a lot more money just to ride forward in the first class section separated from the cattle in the back, and the people in the back are going to feel they’ve got a bargain. It’s a win-win situation. Sales will go up.’

Ralph grasped the concept, and did it. That put TWA on the map again as a pioneer. And that’s become the standard system for airline passenger traffic.

But I tried to stay away from Damon because he was an excitable man. I heard once, and I have no reason to doubt it, that after a telephone conversation we’d had, he cried himself to sleep. I felt terrible about that, because I don’t think I said anything to hurt his feelings. Maybe he had difficulty that time in interpreting my suggestions.

Unfortunately, he died while he was still president of TWA. Some people say that I drove him to his grave. It wasn’t true. He had cancer of the intestines.

Did you have more TWA stock, at this point, than the original stock you’d bought?

I had been buying the stock all along. I’m a heavy plunger. I believe in putting all my eggs in one basket and watching them hatch.

The situation after the war was as follows. All the airlines were running piston aircraft, but the jet age was just over the horizon and you had to be blind not to see it. They thought the propjet, the turboprop, would bridge the gap for a while, but that was a mistake. The gap narrowed too quickly. In the early 1950s all the airplane manufacturers – Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed, Martin, and the Convair Division of General Dynamics – were scrambling to get jets into production. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. And all the airlines were trying to make up their minds which manufacturers to buy from.

A conversion like this meant huge loans, many hundreds of millions of dollars. The ones who were really licking their chops were the banks. You don’t just say overnight, ‘Okay, scrap the piston planes and buy the jets.’ Not only was it a tremendous financial investment, but it involved retraining programs of pilots, mechanics, personnel of all types, changeover of hangar facilities and ground facilities. It was not something anyone plunged into. You could have been jumping off the diving board into an empty pool.

But anyone with a half a brain knew that the pool was filling up and the plunge had to be taken. I flatter myself that I’ve got half a brain. I went shopping. I decided right away that Boeing and Convair were going to make the planes to fit my needs.

Again, that decision was not so simple, because it’s not like buying a vacuum cleaner from a salesman who comes in and says, ‘See? This is our vacuum cleaner. Try it out. If you like it, buy it.’ Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the planes didn’t yet exist. And if we were going to buy a jet from Boeing, we had to tell Boeing precisely what our needs would be. To give you an example, each plane has a different seating potential. These planes were mocked up in the initial stages so that you could have a bank of three on the starboard side and a bank of two on the port side, or similar combinations. Dozens of other configurations had to be specifically arranged between the manufacturer and the airline.

With my attention to details, and you know what I’m talking about because you’ve read my memo about Jane Russell’s brassiere, I think I drove those airplane guys up the wall. But they let me do it. The men are who run American business receive annual salaries that run into the tens of millions of dollars. And yet if their companies prosper, it’s usually in spite of them, not because of them.

In 1955 I decided to buy jets from Jack Zevely, the boss at Convair. I was late making up my mind, but I finally did make it up. However, Jack thought I was a bit peculiar because of the way we started negotiations. I didn’t want the other airlines to know which planes TWA was going to buy. Moreover, I wasn’t sure that I was going to buy them at all. Beyond that, I wanted to keep the other manufacturers, like Boeing and Douglas, on the hook a little bit – so everything had to be done with the utmost secrecy.

I conducted my negotiations with Jack where I usually conduct my negotiations. I would instruct him to meet me in a specific remote area. One time we met at Indio in the California desert and then I drove him to a spot adjacent to the municipal garbage dump in Palm Springs. It was a hot night. Jack kept saying, ‘Open the windows, Howard.’

I said, ‘No, let’s keep the windows closed so we can talk privately.’

‘It’s stifling,’ Jack complained.

I finally opened them, with great reluctance, and then he realized we were next to the municipal garbage dump. The stink came through the windows of the car, and he yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, Howard, close the windows!’

TWA didn’t buy those jets from Convair, which disappointed Jack a great deal, because there had been protracted negotiations. The problem was that Ralph Damon had already made arrangements to buy another plane from Douglas Aircraft, and I had to back him up. He’d put his signature on paper – all I’d done was talk to a man a few times in a car. I chewed Ralph out for acting without my final approval, and I guess that’s the time he cried himself to sleep. I called him a few nasty names. I thought he was a big boy and could take it, but I guess he couldn’t.

I felt bad about breaking off the negotiations with Convair. They had plans to build a long-range jet, so I went to them and said, ‘I want a dozen.’ But they were slow. God, they were slow. Actually I worked with Jack Zevely on the design, and Jack has made statements since then that he never could have designed that plane without me. As it turned out, unfortunately, he couldn’t sell that one to me, either, because the planning took so long that by the time we’d finished it, the prototype of the Boeing 707 was in the air, the Dash-80, and the Douglas DC-8 hard on its heels, and Convair was out in the cold. Boeing and Douglas had made better planes.

Convair blamed me for this. But Jack Zevely didn’t have to do what I said. Any time he wanted to, Jack could have frozen the design and put that ship on the production line. He didn’t have to listen to me – I wasn’t God.

I started negotiating at one point with Lockheed, with Bob Gross. But he knew me too well and once I started making too many demands he turned the tables on me. One night at around 10 P.M. my private telephone rang. For once I happened to be asleep. I woke up quickly, alarmed, because no one who had that number would have called me at that hour unless it was on a terribly important matter. I grabbed the receiver and croaked, ‘Hello? What’s the matter?’

A voice said, ‘Knock, knock.’

I was too befuddled to say anything except, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Howard.’

I recognized Bob Gross’s voice, but I thought I might be wrong, and I was still dazed, so I said: ‘Howard who?’

Bob Gross said, ‘Howard you like to go fuck yourself, you goddamn maniac!’

Then he hung up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep – so he had his revenge for all those nights I’d driven him around the Nevada desert.

Meanwhile the Convair management was running around in circles. They abandoned the long-range jet and decided to go for something in-between, an intermediate. I still felt bad about what had happened, so I called Jack Zevely and found out what he was doing. I said, ‘I have complete faith in you and Convair, and I want the first thirty medium-range planes that roll off the line. ‘And let’s paint them gold, not silver.’ My engineers had developed a process to anodize aluminum so that it looked like gold, blazed in the sun, wouldn’t pit or tarnish. I offered it to the Convair people at no charge and they were delighted.

They came up with the CV-880. But it was supposed to be a medium-range aircraft, and it turned out to be a long-range jet, which meant it had to compete with the DC-8 and the 707, planes that were already operational. The 707 was a tremendous success right from the word go. Not as fast as Douglas’s plane, but handled nicely, a sturdy aircraft. She had problems, of course. Landing was one of them – they’d built the engine pods a little too close to the ground to keep them away from the fuel tanks in the wings, and on a crosswind landing you had trouble banking her, you could knock off a pod on the runway. And they’d yaw a lot if the damper wasn’t functioning one hundred percent.

You see, the Convair people, from the very beginning, had made a mistake in the negotiations with me. When I go in to negotiate with a man, or a company, I assume from the beginning that everybody’s out for his own interests, and from the beginning you’ve got to lean on the other guy. If he’s worth his salt he’s going to try and lean on you, and you have to get in the first push. So I started leaning on Convair from the beginning, and I leaned, and I leaned, and they fell right over without a whimper. They weren’t donkeys, they were lapdogs.

I had a great deal of faith in the plane we were going to develop, the 880. I didn’t want my competition using it – Pan Am and American and United. So Convair and I reached an understanding that they wouldn’t sell the 880 to anybody except TWA and airlines such as Delta who flew other routes and weren’t in competition with TWA. Now that, you must admit – to agree to a restrictive condition like that – was pretty dumb of them.

There was a time limit, of course. But by the time the time limit was up, United and American had committed themselves to planes from Boeing and Douglas, and Convair wound up holding the bag – the empty bag. They blamed me, but all I did was negotiate powerfully. If they had negotiated powerfully against me, we would have come to some more reasonable arrangement.

I knew Jack Zevely was under a lot of pressure, especially during these design sessions with me. He wasn’t used to staying up all night. Moreover, I had an advantage in that I absolutely controlled my company. For all practical purposes I owned TWA, whereas Zevely and all these guys I dealt with were representing a bunch of stockholders and had to watch their step.

But I tried to do everything I could for the man. Once, after we’d been talking half the night, I said, ‘What you need is a little pick-me-up, Jack, and I’m going to take you to the movies.’ I arranged a private midnight showing of a new film at RKO – Jet Pilot. I got Janet Leigh to come down, and Janet sat next to him during the show and cuddled up to him. He fell sound asleep.

Jack Zevely made a very unkind remark afterwards. He said the 880 was not named after the eighty-eight seats it was supposed to have, but for the ‘880 ridiculous goddamnned conferences’ he’d had with Howard Hughes.

I hadn’t picked up these 880s yet, because the changes hadn’t been made that I had insisted on. I decided I didn’t want the planes. They hadn’t styled them exactly the way I wanted them, but I said to myself, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to give these guys a break.’ And they’d come up with a new plane by then, the Convair 990, so I said, ‘All right, give me a dozen of those.’

And you got those?

No. I had to cancel that order too. By then I’d bought Boeing 707s. And I didn’t have any more spare cash. You see, to start this financing program after the war, we needed $500 million. That’s big money. I called Noah Dietrich one day and said, ‘Noah, where the hell am I going to get this $500 million?’

‘What $500 million?’ he asked.

‘Pay attention to your job,’ I said. ‘Get out the files and look and see what the goddamn TWA’s committed itself to.’

He called me back two days later and said, ‘Howard, where are we going to get the $500 million to buy these airplanes?’ That was Noah.

Toolco had a hundred million in cash, profits from the expansion program that we had gone into recently. But that left us four hundred million short. Noah wanted a bond issue, because he wasn’t sure that Toolco’s profits would continue in the same way. The bond issue was meant to be a sort of insurance against the possibility of profits dropping off down at Houston. But he wanted not only a bond issue guaranteed by Hughes Tool, but a bond issue with a conversion clause – meaning that the bondholders could convert at a given point into common stock or preferred stock, whichever the hell it was. This meant in effect that they could take part of Toolco away from me, and I wasn’t having any of that. I said, ‘No dice.’

We worked out some sort of compromise, because we had to come up with the money. I got Fred Brandi of Dillon Read in New York to start the ball rolling – you need a syndicate, you understand, to float an issue of that size. Fred went ahead, and then the details filtered back to me and I realized I could lose my ownership of Toolco this way. That’s what everybody wanted in the long run – they wanted to take Toolco away from me.

I called Fred and said, ‘Forget it. Kill it.’

My father always said, ‘Watch out for partners.’ And what could be worse than being partners with several thousand greedy stockholders? They never care about the company, they just care about the price of the stock.

It was then that Noah Dietrich committed the most irresponsible act of his business life. I was buried up to my neck in the problem of trying to find $400 million, and he went off on a vacation to shoot a goddamn elephant in Africa. He said he was going on safari, but I have a feeling he just wanted to hide out down there. He said I had been so indecisive in the buying of the new jets that he couldn’t stand it, and I wasn’t taking his advice now, and he was going.

Don’t you think it’s true that you had been indecisive?

Because I kept changing my mind? That’s not indecision. That was just an intelligent reaction to changing circumstances. The Convair people promised me they could do certain things and then when it turned out they couldn’t do them, I backed away. Then they came up with a new set of promises, and dropped the ball there too. I knew what I wanted and they couldn’t deliver.

Noah, however, called it indecision, and told me I was being irrational in the matter of raising the money for TWA, and he elected to flee. I did everything I could to stop him, not out of selfish reasons, except insofar as the company was in trouble and I needed Noah. I offered him six months’ vacation if he’d just wait until the troubles were over, but he wanted his three weeks in Tanganyika. I telephoned him at Kennedy Airport in New York – had him paged. I pleaded with him. I got down on my knees – I didn’t literally get down on my knees, because I was on the telephone – but verbally I got down on my knees. I said, ‘Noah, please don’t go. I need you.’

‘Goodbye, Howard,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you in three weeks.’

By the time the great white hunter got back I’d come up with an interim solution. For one thing, I stalled, and while I did that, TWA began to do better, so that it turned out we didn’t need that much cash at all. I squeezed what I could out of Toolco and Equitable Life and the Bank of America and Irving Trust – maybe $30 million. I got it by means of short-term 90-day notes guaranteed by Toolco.

An incident happened there that seemed minor at the time, but if I’d had my thinking cap on I would have realized that it was a portent of the future. These 90-day notes were renewable, and the second or third time I wanted to renew them – this was a $12 million loan from Equitable Life – they balked.

How much did TWA owe by that time?

It wasn’t so much a question of how much TWA owed, it was a question of our long-term commitments for jets. That, at the time, amounted to around $300 million. I wanted the loan to be renewed and the guys up at Equitable got a little stuffy and said, ‘Give us the details on your long-term financing.’ In other words, they wanted to know specifically how I planned to find the rest of the three hundred million. I said, more or less, ‘It’s none of your business. Do you want to lend me the twelve million or don’t you?’

‘Well, sure,’ they said, ‘we know you’re good for it, or at least Toolco’s good for it, but we’d like to have some guarantee for the future, and for our stockholders.’

This was just doubletalk. Then they got around to the point.

You remember that back in 1948 I loaned TWA $10 million which I eventually converted into stock, and that’s how I first got control of the airline. Equitable Life had been mixed up in that, in the sense that they had also loaned TWA $40 million. They were my principal creditor, and one of the conditions they put on my conversion rights was that if TWA defaulted on its payments to Equitable, then my stock would be put into a voting trust controlled by them.

They brought this up again in 1958 when I wanted to renew the ninety-day notes. ‘Sure, Howard,’ they said, ‘we’ll give you the money, but if you don’t complete the long-term financing within a set period of time, let’s think about that voting trust possibility.’

This was said by a man named Oates, who ran Equitable. I got the drift, and I said, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Oates. I’ve decided I don’t need your $12 million anymore. You’ll have it back within a week.’

I dug into the till at Toolco and came up with the twelve million, plus interest, and paid them back. They said at the time I was gun-shy, and they were right. They didn’t exactly stick a gun in my ribs, but I could see it bulging in the holster under their collective armpit, so I paid them back.

What I didn’t realize then was that when the real tussle came they wouldn’t just whip out a .38 caliber automatic, they’d come at me with bazookas and Sherman tanks, and if I ducked behind a wall to hide there’d be ten guys in gray suits and sincere ties waiting for me with switchblade knives. And I also didn’t realize that these bankers and insurance company presidents were a gang. I made the mistake of assuming they operated semi-independently.

I bypassed Equitable and went to Ben Sessel at Irving Trust and borrowed $26 million from them. That was another major mistake, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

Meanwhile I got another estimate of what Toolco was worth. I got it from Merrill Lynch and a couple of those other brokerage houses I was always using to find out where I stood. ‘Fifty million,’ they said. The way they came up with their figure was based on a formula – a price-earnings ratio. In this case they’d figured the company was worth about fourteen times net earnings. Now, this meant that if you can raise the earnings, then the value of the company is that much higher. For every million dollars more that the company could earn each year, it would be worth fourteen million more in its stock price.

So in the middle of May 1957, I decided I wanted Noah to go down to Houston again and work with Toolco, because I was sure we could get more money out of Toolco, boost its earnings and therefore boost its potential sales price. I asked Noah to stop by my bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel so that we could discuss it.

I had started to grow long hair and a beard around that time. I hadn’t seen Noah for a month or two and when he came in the door he said, ‘Howard, you look like a gorilla.’

‘Noah,’ I replied, ‘if your knowledge of finance matched your knowledge of zoology, you’d be a poor man. A gorilla may have long hair, but as far as I know no member of the species has ever been able to grow a gray beard.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘you look like a Neanderthal.’

‘The way I look,’ I told him, ‘is none of your goddamn business.’

This still had me annoyed when we got down to business, and then Noah said he didn’t want to go to Houston. He said he was comfortable in California and he saw no reason for it.

‘Hell, there’s a damn good reason for it,’ I said. ‘We need more earnings because we need a higher valuation.’

He told me he needed to discuss it with his wife, that she was tired of his running off on errands so often. The next day he called me and said, ‘I’ll go, but on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

He wanted more money. Half a million a year plus expenses wasn’t enough for him. He had been nagging me for years for a piece of the company, stock options, and some way that his income could be capital gains. He was greedy, that’s common enough. Each time he would nag me I would eventually throw some bone his way to make him happy.

He sprang this to me on the telephone. I said, ‘You get the hell over here.’ I was furious. He was trying to hold a club over my head.

I was still at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But by the time he got there I decided I didn’t want to see him.

When he called me from the house phone in the lobby I told him to get to a public phone, which infuriated him. He insisted on coming out to the bungalow.

‘Noah,’ I said, ‘there’s absolutely no need for you to come out. I don’t want to hear any more remarks about my gorilla-like or Neanderthal-like appearance, and we can talk more easily on the telephone. Just get to a more private public telephone. Any hotel employee can listen in on a house phone.’

I moved him around to a couple more telephones until finally he was at one that I considered safe. By then he was nearly out of his mind with fury.

‘What kind of raise do you want?’ I asked.

What he wanted was profit-sharing and a capital gains agreement – a slice of the apple pie.

‘Noah, we’ve discussed this before and I said no. I’ve made you a rich man. Now you’re pushing me.’

And then he said something which instantly severed both our personal relationship and our business relationship. He made a speech to me about how I had been promising him this arrangement for years. That was not true. He wound up by saying that he had finally come to the conclusion that I had no integrity and he didn’t trust me. He wanted to send his lawyer to talk to my lawyer, and he wanted a decision within forty-eight hours.

‘Noah, you’re insulting me, and you’re trying to hold a gun to my head. Nobody does that. You’re fired. If you’re in this hotel five minutes from now, I’ll have the management throw you out onto Sunset Boulevard. If that happens, be careful. There’s a lot of traffic.’ And I hung up.

I called my people at Romaine Street and had the locks changed on his door and on his desk.

But you had such a long relationship with him – he’d worked with you for over thirty years. Didn’t it pain you to lose a man who was in many ways closer to you than most people?

He was never really close to me. At least I wasn’t close to him. And by then, not at all. There are other men who I’ve met more briefly, men with whom I’ve lost contact, or who have died, whose passing from my life I’ve mourned far more deeply than Noah Dietrich. He viewed me the way a stockholder views a stock he owns. He didn’t care about me, he cared about wringing as much profit as he could out of me. He pushed me too far.

And you didn’t miss him after that, as a business adviser?

I missed him all the time. I got into a lot of trouble because he wasn’t there to keep me in check with his narrow and conservative bookkeeper’s mind. I realize that all too well. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I drew it, and I took the consequences.

Who were you close to at that time?

Mostly Jean, my wife.

I’m glad you brought up her name. You’ve steadfastly avoided the subject of your second marriage to Jean Peters. Don’t you think it’s time you talked about it?

No, but I also think you’ll make my life more miserable than it is now if I keep on successfully dodging the marriage to Jean, so I’m willing to deal with it – up to a point.

Do you remember Groucho Marx’s famous remark when he was invited to join the Beverly Hills Country Club? He said, ‘I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.’ That’s my feeling about marriage to me. I can’t truly fathom how a woman in her right mind would want to do it. I’m not good husband material. I’m too fixed in my ways. I’m generous, and when I get involved with a woman I take a great interest in her, but there’s too much else on my mind for me to satisfy a woman’s needs. And I do have my quirks.

Having said that, let me also say that Jean is one of the most delightful and loyal human beings on the planet. And she’s intelligent. Which makes me wonder why she married me. But she did, and that’s a fact. Why I married her is of course easier to understand. I was lonely, and tired of messing around with all those Hollywood beauties who were pursuing their careers nonstop and, no matter how fond of me they professed to be, basically out for what they could get. Jean wasn’t like that. She was a caring person. And I cared for her. I really loved her, respected her, and wanted the best for her. She reminded me a great deal of my first wife, Ella. Make of that what you will.

I thought, if I marry Jean, that will bring stability and common sense to my life. I won’t worry so much about things like TWA and Hughes Aircraft – I’ll go for walks in the country and watch a movie and sit down to dinner at dinnertime like a normal man with his normal wife. I’ll have someone to care for me when I’m old and crippled, as I knew was inevitable after all the plane crashes I’d had and the damage I’d done to my body. If you damage the body, you also damage the mind. Mind and body are one. I thought Jean might stop me from losing my mind.

I proposed to her after many years of seeing her off and on, and she accepted. She loved me. She’d been married once before, to a businessman named Stuart Cramer III, but that didn’t work out, and the funny thing is that after he and Jean were divorced Cramer married my old girlfriend Terry Moore. Maybe there’s only a limited pool of women for every man and vice versa. These things are mysteries.

Jean and I were married in Tonopah, Nevada by a local justice of the peace, using other names to avoid publicity. That’s legal in Nevada. We flew down there in January 1957 in one of my Connies and the whole thing didn’t take more than three hours.

Where did you go on a honeymoon?

Right back to the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was too involved in the TWA horror to have a proper honeymoon. We didn’t even live together at first, mostly because my living habits were so outrageous that Jean wouldn’t stand for them. I intended to change them, and I told her so, but not just yet. We lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel and we could see each other whenever we liked, but at least she didn’t have to listen to me doing business on the telephone at three o’clock in the morning and raiding the fridge at five o’clock for a bowl of French vanilla ice cream, which was my favorite.

I had five bungalows rented there at the hotel. One for Jean, one for me, one for business staff, one for cooks and waiters, and one for storage of my ice cream supply, cases of Poland Springs mineral water, plenty of Kleenex and soft toilet paper, and a few cartons of white athletic socks. I can’t stand the idea of running out of socks or soft toilet paper so I always keep a large supply handy.

We didn’t really lead a normal life, that was the problem. When I wanted to divert myself from business I’d go over to the Goldwyn Studios with Jean and screen a few movies. I could watch two or three in a row but she would inevitably fall asleep. Then at one point I got tired of the facilities Goldwyn offered me so I found a producer named Marty Nosseck who was willing to let me screen movies in his private screening room on Sunset Boulevard. Actually, I moved in there.

Into the screening room?

Yes, Marty Nosseck was very understanding about that, and I paid him well. My needs were few. I had a bed moved in and a supply of Kleenex and toilet paper, and a few telephones, and that’s where I conducted the TWA negotiations. I had a room there for my aides and my projectionists. I lived in the screening room for about three months.

What about Jean?

It was hard on her. Finally she put her foot down. She reminded me of all the promises I’d made her, especially that we would have a house where we could live together as man and wife. So on my fifty-fifth birthday, in 1960, I gave up the screening room and we moved into a house on an estate near Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County. Jean wanted me to buy it, of course, but I said, ‘Let’s try it out first and see how things to.’ I was a little frightened by the whole idea.

There was trouble right away. Not only couldn’t I give up my nocturnal business habits, and my eating habits, and my quite considerable and realistic precautions against germs and harmful bacteria, but we had a problem with her cat.

You were able to live in a house with a cat?

I love animals. They’re a lot cleaner than human beings. And a cat particularly is a clean animal. Jean loved her cat, which was a spayed female called Sweetness, gray and white and very friendly-looking. I often stroked her fur, which was like mink, and tickled her under the chin, and she purred a lot when I paid attention to her. I guess I was very fond of that animal.

And then one day it vanished. Just vanished. Didn’t come home that night as it always did. I thought it might have been kidnapped but Jean said that was ridiculous. Nevertheless, she was deeply upset, and I went out of my mind trying to locate that cat. I had my entire staff combing the neighboring estates and all of Rancho Santa Fe, and I hired a team of local rent-a-cops to supplement them, including four men on horseback and a helicopter. I told my people,

‘This is not the Everglades, this is not New York City with its dense population. This is a civilized bucolic area free of predators. Find that goddamn cat!’

And did they find her?

No, but she wandered in on her own a couple of nights later, a little the worse for wear – a cut on her nose and a patch of fur missing. Jean wept for joy.

That, however, was the end of our sojourn in Rancho Santa Fe. I knew the cat could go off again to meet with whatever cat she’d been hanging out with the time she vanished, and the plumbing in the house was lousy, so we moved back to Los Angeles where I rented a place in Bel Air. It was a large house and Jean and Sweetness lived in a separate part of it, although she – Jean, not Sweetness – visited me at least twice a day. I wasn’t feeling well at this time. I was taking codeine for pain and Valium to calm my nerves. I was under tremendous pressure.