Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

I

HOWARD HUGHES AND I first met in Hollywood on the set of The Outlaw, which would place the date as circa 1940. My father, Jay Irving, was a cartoonist for Collier’s. He also had a mild interest in the birth of the television industry, as did Hughes, and they were casual friends. As a result, one morning my father and I were invited to visit the sound stage at RKO. I can remember sneaking briefs looks at Jane Russell’s breasts – I was only nine years old and other events remain blurred. Although my father later lost touch with Hughes, he had fond memories of him as ‘a shy and considerate man,’ a phrase I’ve heard echoed by others who knew him in those early years.

I grew up and became a novelist, and after a time made my home on Ibiza, one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. I described it in an Esquire article as ‘the Saint-Germain-des Pres of the Mediterranean, a lovely island, warm and swinging in summer, bearable in winter, cheap in any season.’ A strange place too, full of borderline lunatics and dropouts from contemporary life. They prepared me for appreciating Howard Hughes, the quintessential dropout.

In 1969 I published my first nonfiction book, Fake!, the true tale of an expatriate Hungarian art forger named Elmyr De Hory. My father gave me a list of ‘well-connected’ friends to whom I should send copies; he badgered me, as fathers do, and I took the line of least resistance and faithlessly promised, as sons do. He died in June of 1970 and shortly afterward, feeling remorseful about unfulfilled promises I had made him, I mailed copies of the book to a few people on the list. Howard Hughes was among them. I included a note reminding Mr. Hughes where and when we had met, and then I forgot about it.

Five months passed before I received an undated letter on yellow lined legal paper, the kind you can buy in any office supply store. The scrawled handwriting was firm extended well over the ruled left-hand margin the way a schoolboy might write if he were getting down toward the end of the pad. It said:

I speculated for a while if this could be a practical joke. Howard Hughes was reputed to be a billionaire, and if I had been asked what kind of stationary billionaires would use, I wouldn’t have answered, ‘Yellow legal paper.’ But if it was a joke there was no foreseeable barb to it, so I began to think about what Hughes seemed to be saying between the lines. I drafted a reply, saying, in effect: ‘Dear Mr. Hughes, I’d like to write an authorized biography of you. If this idea horrifies you, I apologize. If not, let’s talk about it. You certainly deserve a more definitive immortality than the one that’s being forged for you these days by the media.’

I read this to my wife, who instantly advised: ‘Don’t send it. You’re in the middle of a novel and your publishers expect you to deliver on time. Don’t get sidetracked.’

‘Nobody really knows what kind of man Howard Hughes is. That intrigues me.’

‘Anyone who intrigues you,’ she warned, ‘is bound to be some kind of nut.’

But I mailed the letter the following day, and an answer arrived several weeks later, again scrawled on yellow legal paper. My reading between the lines had been accurate. Hughes wrote, in part:

It’s important to understand that I lived in the boondocks, both mentally and physically; I knew very little about Howard Hughes’ life and the legends that surrounded it. At the time, January 1971, I didn’t know that Hughes hadn’t been interviewed or photographed since 1957, and not a single person was able or willing to testify that they had seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. I knew only that he had reportedly left Las Vegas for the Bahamas and that there was some sort of internecine warfare going on in his business empire. I knew the customary phrases used to describe him: ‘bashful billionaire,’ ‘dedicated recluse,’ ‘phantom eccentric’ – ad nauseam. I didn’t know that one syndicated columnist, quoting ‘absolutely authoritative sources,’ had depicted Hughes as ‘an emaciated invalid with white hair down to his shoulders, shaggy eyebrows… a basket case who has flashes of his old brilliance but spends most of his time in a catatonic stupor,’ or that a witness before a Miami grand jury had stated that ‘the tycoon weighs 97 pounds, has long hair gray hair and a beard, and has fingernails and toenails eight inches long.’

Armed with ignorance and naivete – obviously among my chief assets in this instance – I wrote back and outlined my proposal for the biography.

Then the telephone calls began. The voice at the other end of the line was polite, thin and slightly nasal, bucked sometimes by what I later learned was an amplifier. He said: ‘Look, for Chrissake, let’s make this on a first-name basis or we’ll never get anywhere. Please call me Howard.’

Hughes, as he relates in his autobiography, prefers to place his calls at three or four o’clock in the morning when his mind is clear and the man at the other end of the line may still be bleary with sleep. I have no telephone at home, because home is a 400-year-old peasant farmhouse in the country; the telephone is in my studio, which perches on a rock jutting into the Mediterranean behind the walled town of Ibiza. I was only in the studio during the day, theoretically with an alert mind. If Hughes called at 3 a.m. the phone would buzz in the dark of an empty room – I was home in bed. He had his revenge later.

Our transatlantic conversations pirouetted round the subject of the book, we talked about life in Spain, a new house I was building, my novels (which he was starting to read, one by one) and I realized, after I’d made a mistake in relating a personal tale and been quickly corrected by him, that he had a dossier on me: it wasn’t a detail you could pick from book jackets or any Author’s Who’s Who. We were still just disembodied voices spinning toward each other by satellite and getting regularly cut off by Spanish operators. I had read by now that he couldn’t abide smoking and didn’t drink and had a reportedly puritanical morality. I smoked two packs of black tobacco a day; liked my wine at dinner and my cognac afterward; and morally, for better or for worse, had my feet planted pretty firmly planted in the 1960s and their aftermath.

‘We’d better meet,’ he said, ‘to see if we get along. How about next week?’

‘Sure. Where?’

‘Fly to New York. Stay at the Buckingham Hotel. I’ll get in touch with you.’

‘Hang on a minute, Howard. You have a reputation for leaving people stranded.’

‘I swear I’ll call you as soon as you arrive.’

In early February I flew to New York, checked into the Buckingham on 57th Street, crawled into bed weary from the long flight, and at two o’clock in the morning he called, bright as a robin, welcoming me to his time zone. He asked if I minded more travel to meet him. I said I’d expected that, and he instructed me to stop off at American Express later that day; flight reservations had been made for me. I assumed Nassau but I would have believed Timbuktu. The ticket was waiting when I arrived; I had to take off at seven o’clock the following morning, and I was routed through New Orleans and Mexico City to Oaxaca, a town in southern Mexico.

‘This is paid for, isn’t it?’

‘No, sir,’ the clerk said, puzzled. ‘That’s $316.36. Cash or credit card?’

I paid and left, but I didn’t like that at all.

By now I had told my publishers about the venture, and they were excited but wary. Beverly Loo, the Executive Editor at McGraw-Hill, said, ‘You’ll never get as far as this Oaxaca place. That’s not the way Howard Hughes does things. He’ll have you bumped off the plane at New Orleans or Mexico City, and then you’ll be blindfolded and taken to the Bahamas or Las Vegas.’

In New Orleans airport the following morning I waited to be tapped on the shoulder by an unsmiling courier and then whisked off to an unmarked Lear jet or a 200-foot yacht anchored in the Delta. Nothing happened. In Mexico City I waited for the man again. He didn’t arrive. I flew to Oaxaca, checked into the designated hotel and began the next stage of waiting. I slept badly, hung around the hotel until early afternoon and then hired a taxi and visited the Zapotec ruin of Mitla, where I bought a king-sized serape. I was beginning to think it might be my only souvenir of the trip; there were no messages for me at the hotel when I got back. It occurred to me that I had come a long way and spent a fair amount of money to meet a man who had a reputation for keeping people ‘on the hook’ – as it was called in the multi-leveled ranks of the Hughes organization – for weeks on end, after which they would either be dismissed with some compensation or given a yearly retainer to sit around in some other place for the regal tap on the shoulder that might come or not. I had a wife and two small children waiting for me at home five thousand miles away, I was in a godforsaken town in southern Mexico waiting for a ‘phantom eccentric’ and a ‘bashful billionaire.’ How much of a phantom, and how bashful, could he be?

I was awakened by the jingle of the bedside telephone, which I snatched in the darkness and jammed to my ear. A voice said, ‘Mr. Irving? This is Pedro.’

‘Not good enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Pedro.’

‘I’m a friend of Octavio’s.’

I began to realize this was an elaborate and diabolical practical joke, I was already checking over in my mind the list of friends who might be responsible. ‘Pedro,’ I said slowly in Spanish, so he couldn’t possibly mistake the mood – ‘it’s four o’clock in the morning and I don’t want to play games. I’m glad you’ve got a friend named Octavio, but I don’t know what’s going on and I’d be grateful if you’d enlighten me before I hang up.’

He said cheerfully. ‘Octavio is the man you’ve come to see. Can you be ready in two hours?’

At dawn I was outside the hotel when a Volkswagen coasted up to the gate. Pedro was a slim, brown-faced Mexican of about thirty, with a neat mustache. We drove out of Oaxaca and into the countryside, past a small Indio village and then up a narrow paved road in steep spirals that circled an oddly-shaped mountain. The mountainside was lumpy with rough little cubes and pyramids overgrown by seared vegetation: this was Monte Alban, the once-sacred haven of the Zapotec kings who had ruled southern Mexico before the Aztecs came to conquer. The ruins overlooked the three green valleys of Oaxaca. The early morning air was fresh and cool, and the stepped temple buildings were brushed by puffs of clouds that seemed to touch the sky. There was a feeling at Monte Alban of being very close to a child’s idea of a finite and fixed heaven.

Pedro pulled up in a leveled-out space, a sort of dirt parking lot, behind the sunken stone ball court. He indicated another car, the only other car, about thirty yards away. I got out and walked over, scuffing at the dust, opened the door – and slid in next to Howard Hughes.

No eight-inch fingernails, no white hair touching his shoulders or white beard hanging to his belt. The last photograph of him I had seen had been taken in 1957. He looked simply like the same man grown older and thinner; the dark eyes and brows, the mustache, the sweptback hair now gray rather than black. He wore a cheap shortsleeved shirt of nondescript color, a tan cardigan with a button missing, creaseless brown slacks and a pair of loafers into which his socks somehow always managed to slip and vanish, so that when he crossed his legs there was a gap of bony white shin between the sliding sock and trouser cuff.

Aside from the mountaintop setting, it was a completely undramatic and anticlimactic meeting; the ‘phantom tycoon’ was a 65-year-old human being. We said all the polite and obvious things, we talked about Mexico, and then took a brief walk in the sunshine to the steps of one the temples. ‘Great place,’ Hughes said. ‘Beautiful,’ I agreed.

He said, uncomfortably, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Same time, but we’ll go somewhere else.’

I had been nervous and so had Hughes, I realized; and I said so. ‘Yeah… well, maybe,’ he said. ‘Thank you for taking the time, anyway.’

Pedro picked me up at six o’clock the next morning and drove me to the airport. He was a pilot as well as chauffeur and we flew in a private single-engine Cessna to Juchitan on the Isthmus of Mexico. We would dip down into the valleys between the sheer slopes of scarred mountains until a village of a dozen mud huts appeared abruptly under the starboard wing, and he would shout gleefully, ‘Look at those people! That is the stone age!’ I said, ‘Fantastic… amazing… ‘and then asked him please to gain some altitude so that we wouldn’t join them, forever, in their mountain fastness.

We landed in Juchitan, and Hughes and I met in a sparsely furnished room in a small hotel in the nearby town of Tehuantepec. He had a jug with him – ‘This place has the best orange juice in Mexico,’ he explained. He drank six cupfuls from paper cups that he took from his briefcase. I don’t know what test I had passed, but the mood had changed completely; he was expansive, and I was relaxed. We talked until early in the evening, the conversations and negotiations punctuated by his vanishing, from time to time, out the door and apparently to another room. The rules were set for the writing of what was then meant to be an authorized biography: we would tape a series of interviews, which he would transcribe, and I would work with them and whatever material I could unearth on my own. ‘None of my people know about this,’ he said, ‘and I want it to stay that way. So you’ll have to do this research that you’re talking about on your own. Don’t come running to me for help. Don’t use my name. And don’t talk about it, and tell your publishers not to talk. If it gets out to the press what we’re doing, the whole goddamnn thing’s off.’

Hughes vanished again and Pedro appeared, bearing an envelope containing $750 in cash to cover my expenses on the trip. ‘Señor Octavio asked me to apologize to you,’ he said. ‘He had to leave. I’ll fly you back to Oaxaca.’

The next day I flew back to New York, gave a report to my publishers, and then went home to Ibiza.

The next meeting, arranged by telephone, took place some weeks later in Puerto Rico. I flew from Madrid to San Juan and checked into the agreed hotel. Hughes telephoned at three o’clock in the morning and asked me to come down to the lobby, where a driver met me and led me through the darkness to an old Chevrolet parked at the curb. He did the familiar disappearing act and I slid behind the wheel next to Hughes, who was wearing, it seemed to me, the same clothes he had worn in Mexico the month before: styleless shirt, baggy trousers and cheap cloth windbreaker. In the interim, however, he had grown a startlingly full head of dark brown hair. ‘Well, goddamnit, it’s a wig. Cost me $9.95 in the five-and-dime. I have three or four of them and a few beards, too. I can’t afford to be recognized – you have no idea the risk I take in meeting you this way. It’s not that there’s always somebody out to subpoena me, although that’s bad enough. It’s worse.’

He wouldn’t elaborate. He suggested we drive while we talk, and pointed out the route past San Juan Airport and up into the Puerto Rican tropical rainforest. We reached the summit of vegetation just as dawn was breaking, and he said, ‘Stop here.’ After a while a woman materialized out of the undergrowth, carrying a basket full of bananas. Following Hughes’ request, I got out of the car and bought a dozen. He put on a pair of white cotton gloves and we began to peel and eat them. They were short, fat, sweet bananas. ‘These are the best bananas in the world,’ he said, and to prove it he ate four. ‘In America they’re made of plastic.’

After the banana feast we got down to talking business and procedure. Long after the sun rose and the lush greenery of the rainforest glittered with golden light, we checked off the last clause in the agreement and signed several necessary copies, resting the pages on Hughes’ briefcase against the dashboard of the Chevrolet. ‘Good,’ he said, smiling broadly for the first time since I had met him. ‘I hate these goddamn business details. Now we can get to work. You go back to Spain. I’ll call you when I’m ready to start.’

That was the prelude. I was full of contradictory impressions, and on the plane flying up to New York, I took out a spiral notebook and began making notes on some of the conversations. They sum up, better than any recollection, the tenor of what was said and the feelings I had then about what he had allowed himself to reveal; and so I reproduce them verbatim.

H: ‘The things that every man wants the most are the easiest to get. Money, fame, and women. That’s what happened to me. And so you get them – and what then? There’s that old gypsy curse: “May your dreams come true.”’

He knew Hemingway, apparently in Cuba. At first Hem. didn’t know who HH was – just another hanger-on. ‘Hem liked the fact that I knew something about planes. I had a private plane (where and when?) and I took Hem. up for a ride. He said, ‘You’re a hot pilot’… A year or so later when I saw him again I told him who I was. He said, ‘Well, you son of a bitch.’ He seemed to be impressed, and unfortunately that changed our relationship. Of course he gave me his word that he wouldn’t let on to anyone else who I was, and as far as I know he kept it.’

H., on women briefly: ‘They wear you out trying to get ideas across to them. Then later, when you give up trying, they hate you for it. Like Ava [Gardner] and Lana [Turner]. They want too much. I didn’t have that much to give.’ I n reference to my own private past life he said, ‘You really find individual women so different?’

I said, ‘I sure do,’ and he made no comment; but he obviously disagreed.

H: (about me) ‘You’re an outsider, of a sort – a kind of cultivated maverick. Putting aside judgments as to the harm you’ve done, because by your own admission you’re a selfish son of a bitch, that’s probably why I get along with you. I have to like any man who goes his own way, as long as he doesn’t step on my toes.’

I feel strongly his consciousness of death as a powerful factor in his life. To describe him, at this junction: alone but not necessarily lonely; careful but not cautious; straightforward but not simple; intelligent but not intellectual; fussy but not really phobic; frail but making no obvious demands for his frailty; desperately curious about anything he doesn’t know about; eccentric but not crazy; anxious to communicate but doubly anxious not to be misunderstood.

Most men flatter themselves that they live in their own world, but in fact they care a hell of a lot what the world-at-large thinks of them. Hughes, it would seem, for the most part has no time for self-flattery and less for caring about the world’s opinion. Maugham said that money is the sixth sense which enables us to make the best of the other five. Maugham said it; Hughes may have lived it.

II

The book – at that time still an authorized biography – was codenamed ‘Project Octavio’ by the few privileged executives at McGraw-Hill and Life magazine (which had immediately bought first-serial rights) aware of its existence. Hughes had insisted on absolute secrecy and this was spelled out unequivocally in the various contracts. A breach of that secrecy gave him the opportunity to withdraw. ‘None of my people know I’m doing this,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t want them to know. If it leaks to the press and you’re asked, you’ve got to deny everything.’ The proscriptions extended into all areas, including this introduction, which will account for the fact that certain place names and dates have either been changed or omitted. The tape-recorded interviews would be transcribed and typed under Hughes’ direction – that is to say, by some trusted lower-echelon associate – and my copy of the transcripts was to remain in my possession at all times. When it was read by the publishers, our agreements stipulated that I was to be physically present. ‘They can come up and read it in your hotel room,’ Hughes counseled. ‘Don’t go to their offices. You’ll go out to take a leak and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you zip up your fly. I’m counting on you,’ he said.

We were so unalike. He was nearly thirty years older than I, bred in the Texas oilfields, orphaned young, a college dropout. I came from a middle-class Jewish home in Manhattan and had loafed through a bucolic university education at Cornell. In 1951 when Hughes was ferreting Communists out of the film industry in Hollywood, I was marching with Paul Robeson at Union Square and writing angry letters to The Nation. This gave a good base for conflict and we used it when we had to. He was a billionaire twice over; I still couldn’t qualify for an American Express card and Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times had called me ‘America’s best worst-selling novelist,’ which was a nice compliment but didn’t pay the rent. Hughes had lived almost all his life in America; I had taken off at the age of twenty-two and become, without design but nonetheless firmly, an expatriate. His world of adventure had taken place in moviemaking, flying, high finance; I had bummed my way around four continents, worked in steel mills and wheat harvests, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, married several times and written six books. He had designed and built one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world; I had nearly failed high school physics and had trouble splicing two wires together. I had three children, Hughes had none.

There were similarities too, that helped in oblique ways. Hughes had been an only child; so had I. The world of an only child is a special one and the male who moves from it into adulthood carries a heritage of ego, selfishness, self-sufficency and loneliness. This we shared. And we were both tall – Hughes nearly six foot three and I an inch taller. Tall men instinctively understand each other’s physical stance, the still-living memory of adolescent awkwardness, the vulnerability. There was also the fact that Hughes, who has been sued in court possibly more times than any living man, discovered one day that my publishers and I were being sued for libel and defamation of character as a result of my last published book. The damages claimed, worldwide, came to more than $160 million. ‘You know,’ he said to me, gravely, ‘I’ve never been sued for that much in my whole life. That’s really something. I’m sorry for you, but I’m impressed. That tops me by – let’s see – by $23 million.’

‘Yes, but you lost the lawsuit, Howard, and you’ve got that kind of money. I won’t lose because what I wrote was true and I can prove it. And if I lose, I haven’t got $160 million.’ He hadn’t listened. ‘That’s really something,’ he repeated, and I realized he had a new respect for me; he was mildly envious.

The interviews began in the Bahamas. Most of them took place in my hotel room. The air-conditioning had to be turned off, the windows closed, and my wife, who was traveling with me then, had to disappear half an hour before the appropriate time. This meant that she saw a great deal of the nightlife in Nassau and once, at four o’clock in the morning, had to wrap herself in a hotel blanket and doze in a deck chair on the beach until the sun woke her. Her enthusiasm for the project was increasingly dim.

Hughes was a talker and rambler, but I wanted more than facts and anecdotes: I wanted the man. ‘You ask some tough questions,’ he said, and after a while he began to call me ‘Mr. Why,’ because ‘Why?’ on my part became a refrain, until I was almost as tired of hearing myself say it as he was. We clocked about nine hours of actual taping time during the ten days I spent in the Bahamas, but that represented more than twenty hours spent together. He would wave his hand at the tape recorder. ‘Shut it off… I can’t stand that damn thing… ‘and he would vanish to the bathroom, carrying his leather briefcase.

Coming back he would drop into his easy chair; I would switch on, we would talk again; after five minutes he would jiggle his hand again at the machine and after I had switched off he would say, ‘It’s not going good. This isn’t the way I thought it would be. Can’t you find out some of these details for yourself? I thought you were an experienced reporter.’

The next meeting took place in June. I was better prepared this time. I had taken a crash course in the known life of Howard Hughes, largely due to the efforts of a man named Richard Suskind, whom I had hired as a researcher. I had known Dick Suskind for ten years on the island of Ibiza; he was a writer and a scholar, the author of books on the Crusades, Richard the Lion-Heart, the battle of Belleau Wood and the history of Anarchism. He knew how to dig into files, libraries and periodical indexes. At the time, still thinking that the Hughes book would be a definitive biography and therefore a two-year project of interviewing, researching, cross-referencing, writing and editing, I needed help. Suskind began scouring the United States in April and came back with a glum face. ‘There’s practically nothing,’ he said, ‘and most of it repetitious, hearsay, stuff in gossip columns.’ Newspaper files had been stripped, court records were mostly unavailable, whole editions of magazines with articles on Hughes had been bought out and vanished from the public domain. The few unathorized biographies were useless, trading on business analyses in Fortune, parroting back the flamboyant stories that from time to time appeared in the national press, expanding New York Times’ accounts of Hughes’ exploits in the air and in Hollywood back in the ‘30s. I read everything and realized immediately from what I had learned in the Bahamas that the public man was a myth bordering on a lie. His time as a bush pilot in Ethiopia, his meetings with Schweitzer and Hemingway, weren’t mentioned anywhere; his so-called seclusion in Las Vegas was accepted as gospel. Howard Hughes had neatly outfoxed the world for more than thirty years.

When we met for the second series of interviews the mood was markedly different. Again they took place in my hotel or motel room. The fact that it was a second meeting, a reaffirmation of mutual purpose, was a powerfully positive factor. On a simpler level, we were glad to see each other again and said so. But as soon as the tape recorder was in position and I reached for the start button, Hughes snapped out at me. He had read and brought with him the transcript of the Bahama interviews. ‘You baited and bullied me,’ he accused. ‘You led me into saying things I didn’t mean to say. You kept interrupting and contradicting me. That’s got to stop.’

We argued, and finally I said, ‘Okay, if I’ve done that I was unaware of it, and I apologize. I certainly won’t do it now. All I ask from you is the truth.’

‘That’s what I’m going to give you,’ he said sharply. ‘No more pussyfooting around.’ He had clearly made up his mind to something.

In the course of the next weeks he opened up; but it was a hard, painful flowering. Think how hard it is for any man to speak and tap at the truths of his own experience with a blind man’s cane: because in that world of self-revelation we are all equally blind, or else we lie and wear masks we’ve collected throughout the years – collected, tested and saved for such occasions. But he tried from the beginning to get it right, get it straight, without the benefit of mask or mummery. He would start to speak, stop, then say, ‘No, that’s bullshit. Scrub that, don’t transcribe it. Let me start again.’ And he would do it again, and if he didn’t get it right he would frown and say, ‘We’ll come back to that. Remind me, will you, please?’ He wasn’t aiming to polish his words but to plumb his memory better; not so much to be analytically deep, but more to strike the mark as though he were an archer taking aim at a far target and not so sure his hand was steady or his sight good enough anymore to isolate it from the background. He was archer and target both; and that was why it hurt, more so when he struck the mark. A hard flowering, I said, and one that had to be respected. Again and again he came to our meetings in a fractious mood, skittery and prudent and startled like a virgin when the instrument of violation makes contact. He was violated by his own momentum to shatter that hymen of superficial memory, common to us all, stretched tightly across the past. We scrapped and argued all the way, then and later, because it was easy for him to confuse my pressuring him with his own need to get to the root and gut of things. Random exchanges taken from the transcribed interviews, verbatim – and not included in the text of the autobiography – will give an idea.

H: …I have to protect myself from myself. Do you understand?

C: Yeah, I understand. I think.

H: You think – well, never mind. That’s the way I am and I don’t give a goddamn what you think, or anyone else. Don’t be offended. I’m just being frank.

H: It’s a sexually dirty story, and she’s still a famous actress, so I’m not sure I want it included in the book. I’ve given you enough dirt already. Let’s just say… this puts me in an awkward light, that’s the trouble.

C: Well, you can tell it and then we’ll—

H: Now don’t nag me and then sulk. My God, I’d hate to be married to you. [And then he told me the story.]

There were lighter moments too. The following dialogue took place during the first taping of the June sessions; to understand the references you have to know that Hughes for many years wore tennis sneakers instead of shoes. He gives the true reason in the text of his autobiography, but for nearly two decades the habit made him the butt of jokes and reinforced the image of his eccentricity.

He was discussing the beginning of his commitment to build a flying boat, the Spruce Goose or HK-1, at the time when Henry Kaiser was his partner:

H: And so Henry and I set up this little paper corporation. We put up a few thousand dollars apiece. Henry was very useful to me, not only because of his know-how but because he got along with those guys in Washington. They already had me on their shitlist… Wait a minute. I’m burning up with curiosity and I have to ask you. Is that supposed to be a joke, or what?

C: No, I have to wear them. It’s an old pair of tennis sneakers that my wife cut down for me. I have a sore here on the top of both feet from the sandals I wore in Nassau. The sandals I was wearing were new, and the strap opened the skin. Remember I was wearing a bandage? When I got back to Ibiza it was infected and I couldn’t even wear shoes – the pressure kept making the infection worse.

H: You’ve got to be careful with something like that.

C: My wife convinced me it needed air, and so she cut down these sneakers and I’ve been wearing them ever since, everywhere I go. See?

H: No, no, that’s all right. Don’t come closer.

C: Why did you think I was wearing them?

H: I thought it might be a joke. Some kind of private way of making fun of me.

The second batch of interviews were by far the most productive and covered the most ground in terms of time and depth. Hughes backtracked now and then to re-tell stories of the early years he felt he had not satisfactorily covered during the first sessions. He sometimes referred to notes, which I rarely had the opportunity to see, and we would often discuss in advance the territory we wanted to cover during a sitting. This time too I was better prepared, having plowed through all the available material on his business life: the machinations at RKO, Hughes Tool, Hughes Aircraft and TWA. Dick Suskind had joined me for part of the trip, backstopping me with information and going over my notes after each session to see what might have been omitted by Hughes and what questions I might ask in the next session to fill in those gaps. His presence was invaluable to me; but at one moment it caused a near-disaster.

Howard, who was invariably late, had arranged to contact me at an out-of-the-way motel near Palm Springs, California. ‘I’ll be there between ten o’clock and midnight,’ he said. Suskind and I were sitting in my motel at about 9:30 p.m., playing chess, when there was a knock on the door. ‘It can’t be him,’ I said, and opened the door. The scene was memorable. Suskind, who eats organic food, lifts tons of weights each day at whatever gymnasium is available, stands 6’3’ tall, weighs 280 pounds and looks like a veteran NFC offensive tackle, is obviously not the sort of man who can pretend to be a waiter delivering an ice bucket. Hughes knew of his existence but had said he didn’t want to meet him.

The three of us stood awkwardly by the door. Finally I said: ‘This is Dick Suskind. He’s doing some research for me, uh, on the project…’

Howard stood for a moment, then said quietly, ‘Well, I suppose you know who I am.’

It was Suskind’s moment to claim ignorance and make a swift getaway, but he missed the signal. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Hughes.’ He started to extend his hand, then drew it back quickly; he’d remembered my telling him Hughes was not a keen handshaker.

The man stood for a few agonizing seconds – agonizing for me, in any case. I can see now that we must have looked like three miscast characters in an Oscar Wilde drawing-room comedy; we had all forgotten our lines and a hush had fallen over the theatre. He finally reached deeper into his pocket. His right hand came out with a cellophane bag, which he pushed toward Suskind. ‘Have a prune,’ he said.

Dick took and examined a prune. ‘That’s an organic prune, isn’t it?’

‘Correct,’ Howard said. ‘The other kind are poison.’

For three or four minutes they discussed the merits of various organic fruits and vegetables and the superiority of natural vitamins over the chemically-processed kind. When the subject was exhausted, Dick said he had to go. The door closed behind him.

‘I’m sorry, Howard,’ I said immediately. ‘You told me ten o’clock. We’d just had dinner and we were sitting around playing chess –’

He waved his hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. Bright guy, very clear-thinking. Doesn’t smoke, I noticed – I had a good look at his fingertips. Good man to have around as a bodyguard. You may need one. Let’s get to work.’

The final session of interviews occurred on the East Coast of Florida during the months of August and September. I was staying in a motel bungalow on the beach and Howard was staying in a private home some twenty miles to the north. In June he had given me the typed transcripts of the Bahama interviews and I had spent six weeks checking out the details and correcting some names and dates. Howard refused to identify the transcriber-typist, except to refer to him good-humoredly as ‘The Abominable Snowman.’

‘I can understand why you call him that.’ I said. ‘He must have typed with all four paws.’ Whoever it was, he could neither type or spell. There were four notations in nearly three hundred pages to the effect that ‘tape broke; sorry; part missing.’ The phrase ‘unclear’ had replaced a dozen names and phrases, and the overlaps that naturally occur when two men are speaking were usually omitted. In general the manuscript was a mess. I said, ‘Howard, it won’t do. You’ve either got to find someone else or you’ve got to let me do it.’

He eventually decided there was no one else he trusted other than The Abominable Snowman, but he admitted the Snowman was incompetent. So I was awarded the job. It was coolie-labor, brutally boring. By the second week in Florida I was sick of hearing Howard’s voice repeating the same phrases – to catch a muttered monologue or a sharp exclamation the tape had sometimes to be run backwards and forward half a dozen times – and even sicker of hearing my own badgering and apologetic questions. Between transcribing and wrapping up the interviews I was virtually self-imprisoned in the bungalow. Now and then I would step out and swim some laps in the pool under the sulky September sky or drive over to Route 1 to work up a sweat banging golf balls on the driving range, but during those weeks I had no time to learn the first name of a single Floridian other than the maid. Moreover, for the first time I had the precious tapes in my possession, which made Hughes uneasy. ‘If you see a man with a cane hanging around outside the bungalow,’ he said, ‘don’t jump on him. He’s there for your protection. (He meant, of course, for the protection of the tapes.) If there’s anyone else hanging around who doesn’t have a cane, tell your bodyguard to jump him or call the security guard. But get it straight – if he’s carrying a cane, he’s okay.’

‘This is Florida, Howard. There are thousands of people who walk with canes.’

‘Not men under thirty five years of age.’

In September we reached what ultimately proved the major decision about the book: the switch in character from authorized biography to autobiography. Howard, at the onset of the project, had wanted a biography because he felt that the outside objectivity would balance what otherwise might have been called by unfriendly critics an apologia; he was always meant to retain control and final approval or the text, but my authorship would obviously set up a system of checks and balances. However, when I read the mounting pages of transcript, I realized that the same objectivity, and more, had been achieved through dialogue and argument. I felt that what he had achieved was an honest and dramatic personal statement. Given a minimum amount of editing and re-shaping, it would be a viable concept in autobiography. To tamper with it might be a historical crime. I made the suggestion to my publishers, who were enthusiastic about the change to an autobiography but less so when I used the words ‘book-length interview.’ It was a form, someone remarked, that never had much luck in the marketplace. But they agreed to read it before they came to a decision.

Howard agreed instantly to the change. He had said what he had wanted to say. ‘It’s my autobiography,’ he said, ‘and I’m damned if I’ll have you or anyone else monkeying around with my words. I’m not a writer, I’m a talker – at least I’ve been a talker for the last six months. You go up to New York and tell them that’s how I feel.’

We met once more on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and then I flew to New York, lugging two copies of the thousand-page transcript. As per our secrecy agreements they were read by the various publishers in a five-day marathon session in the living room of my suite at the Hotel Elysée, while I sat around emptying ashtrays and ordering pots of coffee. I heard no one cough, I saw no one’s attention begin to flag. The opinion was unanimous. The book-length ‘interview’ worked.

Go with the book as is, they said.

I flew south once again for a wrap-up interview, and Howard drafted what became the Preface to this book. Then I left for Europe. A copy of the transcript had been placed in escrow in a safe deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank in case I crashed en-route. But I reached Ibiza safely, doffed my capped to my wife, chucked my children under the chin, and went back to work, because there remained the massive job of editing and organizing the transcripts. Since certain significant discussions had taken place while the tape recorder was not running, Howard agreed to let me work from the many notes I had taken and weave these into the manuscripts at the appropriate places, provided that I reproduced his words with reasonable accuracy. This I did, and he checked them out at a later date, approving or disapproving, changing them or letting them stand; but such interpolations form a minuscule part of the manuscript.

To keep the flow of the narrative and also remove a certain inanity from the dialogue, I also eliminated as many of my questions as possible. For example, in the midst of a monologue about his tenure as boss of RKO, if I interrupted to ask, ‘When did such-and-such incident take place?’ and he replied, ‘The summer of 1949,’ I deleted my question and put into his mouth the words: ‘This took place in the summer of 1949.’ Similar questions such as, ‘But how did you feel when so-and-so left you?’ have been deleted, since usually the reply encompassed the intent of the question and rendered the latter gratuitous. Certain personal exchanges have also been omitted; but I have retained many of them because they give the character of the man and triggered some unusual exclamations and opinions. Nothing has been added that Howard didn’t say or that I didn’t say. All the footnotes (and the Appendix) are my own responsibility; I hope the reader will keep in mind that Hughes in his Preface remarks that he doesn’t agree with all my commentary.

The major editing was done in the interests of a reasonable chronology and clarity. A human life is as much thematic as it is chromographic and any man relating his own history tends naturally to wander through time and space. One thought sparks another: the telling of a tale that took place in 1930 in Hollywood may remind him, for whatever reason, of something that happened in Las Vegas in 1965. This was certainly the case with Hughes – in this instance I’m referring to kidnapping attempts – and I made little effort during the interviews to check the free flow of anecdote and recollection. But in the final editing I shifted some things around to achieve a more chronological narrative.

However, there was a quality of mounting and cumulative revelation in the original interviews which I had decided was an integral part of the way Howard Hughes had told his life story, and to sacrifice that for the sake of chronology would have meant missing the point of the whole exercise. Hughes on several occasions told stories and later corrected them, or deliberately left a gap which he filled in when the mood suited him. In these instances the method again revealed the man, and I have not tampered with the way he worked his way round to nailing down the truth as he saw it. He says in his Preface, ‘I believe the reader will see I have tried very hard to tell the truth,’ and the revelatory and corrective passages in the text constitute a proof which I had no right to destroy.

When the cutting and pasting was done and the book had reached a near-final form, I found a number of anecdotes, conversations and lengthy statements of opinion that seemed to have no obvious historiographic slot in the narrative. They took place at various times and referred to different periods; some of them were in response to stories I had heard about Howard which I retold to him, so that they were more dialogue than narrative and would lose their meaning if the form were bastardized. Rather than omit these bits and pieces, I pulled them together into a section called INTERLUDE: CONVERSATIONS AND OPINIONS, which follows Part III of the book. The arrangement of the book into four parts, by the way, is my responsibility and does not necessarily conform to the three major interview sessions. The breaks in the text, however – the unnumbered chaptering and the spaces separated by three asterisks (***) – generally represent either a separate night-session of talk or a switching-off of the tape recorder.

As for other omissions from the orginal verbatim transcript, they have been made only for legal purposes – to avoid libel and unwarranted defamation of character – or because Hughes for some reason specifically requested it. But the latter instances are very few.

III

SOME FINAL APPRAISAL on my part may seem obligatory, but I am going to duck it. Howard Hughes can speak for himself, so for the moment I will leave the field to the critics and historians. One thing I know: the real Hughes will care very little what they say. I only hope that by telling as much as I have told I have not cheapened in any way the flesh, bones and heart of this book, which lie in Howard’s words and not in my own. He said toward the end, ‘This has been one of the most extraordinary events in my life. Talking with you has been an adventure. It’s cleared the air for me. I don’t regret it for a minute.’

I have related my part of the tale in the interests of clearing up the mystery of how the autobiography came to be and dispelling the inevitable gossip concerning authenticity. But when the book is read the importance of the mystery will vanish, as will the gossip. Howard Hughes may become a mythic figure in American history, but the myths surrounding him will be laid to rest.

Just as the dry business articles dealing with Hughes have undoubtedly prepared the reader poorly for the man who reveals himself in these pages, so my correspondence with him a year ago prepared me poorly for the human being I met. I expected a certain stiltedness, a stiffness of manner. Instead I found a warmth and dry humor, as well as an acuteness of insight into American manners and ethics, which brought me up short again and again. Several times, at the end of the talk session, I found myself musing about the America that Howard Hughes had revealed to me in the course of our conversatiion, an America I was only aware of second- or third-hand. I knew little of high finance or of the interplay between business and politics – things that were of everyday familiarity to Hughes. But he never condescended to me, and I think the reason was that he was too anxious to explain and reflect. No one, after meeting him or reading his autobiography, could call him innocent; and yet there was about him, in the interstices between his stubbornness, his pride, his selfishness and cynicism, his eccentricity, his arrogance and sadness, a quality of innocence that may be uniquely American. He was a Texas boy, the ‘Sonny’ of his childhood who had suddenly awakened from a dream to find himself with two billion dollars and the consequent paradox that he was both slave and free man. In some ways he was like the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, looking in from the outside at a world of money and opulence, finding it unsatisfactory, and dreaming, in the end, of ‘that fresh green breast of the New World that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes’ and was no more. Howard had his dreams too.

One afternoon in Florida toward the end of the many interview sessions that form the basis of his memoirs, he telephoned me. I was transcribing the tapes; I was tired and a little fed up. We had been wrangling for several days about something – the subject is unimportant – and there was no question but that our personal relationship had momentarily suffered. He was sniping at me and I was sniping back. After a 48-hour break he called and said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ I told him I didn’t have any plans. ‘Well, I thought I’d come down and visit you,’ he said, ‘if you weren’t busy. Not to do any more interviewing. I just thought maybe we could sit around and talk… you know, about this and that. Like friends do. No discussions about my sex life and business deals. No arguments. We’ll just chat.’ He asked hesitantly, ‘Would that be okay?’

I replied that it would be a pleasure and he said he would be driven down by his driver between seven-thirty and eight. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘is your television set working?’ I said it was, and he arrived a few minutes before eight o’clock. I had turned off the air-conditioner, which was required for Howard’s visits even though the temperature was in the 80s, and the fridge was stocked with beer for me and Poland Springs mineral water for him. I stubbed out my last cigarette when I heard his tap on the door, dumped the ashtray in the wastebasket and sprayed the room quickly with Lysol disinfectant to kill the odor.

Howard sat down in an easy chair and stretched out his long legs beside his briefcase. He always carried an oversized battered brown leather briefcase filled with various papers, graham crackers, packages of Kleenex, ballpoint pens, sanitary paper cups and paper toilet-seat covers. If he ever blew his nose he went immediately to the bathroom and flushed the Kleenex down the toilet. He wore the usual getup of sport shirt, cardigan, rumpled slacks and loafers. Without preamble, he said, ‘You like baseball, don’t you? Let’s turn on the TV. There’s a good ball game on. Giants against the Dodgers.’

I had been a Dodger fan in my youth, before they deserted Brooklyn for Los Angeles and before I deserted New York’s West End Avenue for Ibiza, so I said, ‘Sure.’ I switched on the TV and Willie Mays’ grave smile filled the screen in a pre-game interview. The Dodgers were challenging the Giants for the Western division pennant in the National League. Mays explained the situation and Howard listened intently, straining forward to hear although the volume was turned up high enough to back me into a corner on a couch on the far side of the room. Howard turned to me and said, ‘Let’s put a bet on the game. I always like to root for one team or the other, and a little bet makes it easier.’ I asked him which team he wanted. No, he explained, that was up to me.

‘Okay, I’ll take the Dodgers – for old time’s sake.’

Howard smiled; the Giants were favored. Then the terrifying thought hit me: what did ‘a little bet’ mean to Howard Hughes?

‘How much?’ I asked.

He thought for a minute. ‘Well, let’s make it interesting. Let’s bet a dollar.’

We settled back to watch, all nine innings, and the Dodgers beat the Giants, 4 to 2. Howard stuck it out, muttered against the inanity of the commercials, and from time to time when Mays was at bat or taking a long lead off first he would say, ‘Watch him carefully. He’s a professional. It’s a pleasure to watch anything he does.’ He even commented on the way Willie swung his bat in the on deck circle. ‘The rest of those guys, he remarked, ‘are just black and white trash. All those black players,’ he explained, ‘have really made the grade in sports since I was a kid. The white man threw them a bone so he wouldn’t have to throw them any meat and potatoes.’

It was almost eleven o’clock when the game was over. I switched off the set and sat down for the chat between friends that Hughes had suggested when he called. I could see he was tired, though, and a little ill at ease. He kept drinking mineral water and clearing his throat. Finally I told him a few tales about how I’d sailed the Atlantic in a three-masted schooner with five other people who’d also never sailed an ocean-going yacht before, and then at eleven-thirty he yawned and said he’d better be on his way, he had some work to do where he was staying – something to do with a few million shares of stock of some company he was trying to buy or sell, I don’t remember which.

I said, ‘What about the dollar you owe me for the bet?’

Howard blushed. He explained that he didn’t have any cash with him – no small bills. He had ‘a large bill’ sewn into the lining of his trousers, but it would be hard to get at. He would pay me the next time we met, he promised.

I took him to the door, from which point he would skulk his way through the darkness to the parking lot of the motel where his driver waited in a five-year-old Chevrolet, and there he turned to me and said, ‘That was a pleasant evening, wasn’t it? Did you enjoy yourself?’

I told him I had, and he said, with a smile on his ravaged face, ‘I’m glad we didn’t argue. I’m not such a bad guy after all, am I?’

‘No, you’re not a bad guy, and I never thought you were.’ Not wishing to be stickily sentimental, I had to add: ‘And you’ll be an even better guy in my eyes when you pay me that dollar you lost. Remember, I’m not the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and that’s not a $40 million dollar loan. A bet is a debt of honor.’

He said brightly, ‘Good. I’m glad we’ve patched it up. A good evening of talk between friends will always do that. Let’s meet tomorrow night and get on with the work. I’ve still got a lot more to tell you about my life.’

A couple of weeks later, after one or two reminders, he paid the dollar to me on Paradise Island, and he told me a lot more about his life. And now that it’s all over I vouch for his conclusion. He’s not such a bad guy after all. What follows is the story of his remarkable life, in his own words.