Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

7

IN 1938, WHEN I was thirty-two years old, I decided to fly around the world and break the round-the-world speed record while I was doing it.

That flight was far and away the most important I’d ever made, not in the sense that I cut Wiley Post’s previous record time, but that I showed that with proper organization and care it was possible to make this kind of flight a routine, which it is today.

I don’t mean to say that in 1938 it was a routine flight – no icebreaking flight ever is. The preparations were extensive. I don’t remember how many thousands of man-hours we put in to get the plane ready. She was called the New York World’s Fair 1939 and she was a Lockheed Lodestar, the model Fourteen.

At the outset I’d bought a D-1, made by Douglas; then I started fitting out a new model Sikorsky. But when Lockheed came out with their ship, which was the sturdiest and fastest transport around, I bought one of the first models, and I made the ship over from head to tail to fit my needs.

Actually I made Lockheed, too, with that flight. I’m not blowing my own horn, I’m just stating facts. Bob Gross admitted to me that it was always spoken about among the executives at Lockheed in later years: ‘When Howard Hughes flew our plane around the world, everyone suddenly knew who Lockheed was.’ And the stock went up five points that week.

The Model Fourteen later was modified and became the Hudson bomber that the British flew during the war. Lockheed sold them 3,000 planes before the war ended. The British also bought the New York World’s Fair 1939. That’s just an aside for the history books and the airplane buffs.

The planning and preparation for the flight were extensive. For one thing we had to put in oversized gas tanks, which caused problems. Going over the equipment lists took days. Every inch of space was used. We had a rifle, shotgun and revolver – protection against anything that might come along if we had a forced landing in Siberia, because I was told that the polar bears weren’t too friendly. We had a solar still to convert sea water to drinking water in case we were forced down at sea.

Loading the plane was an incredibly difficult job. We were overweight, of course, but we used something called a Librascope, a relatively new invention which computed the weight of everything in the various cargo compartments and the hull and then told you the location of the center of gravity, the center of balance. If it wasn’t at the optimum flight point you could shift cargo, which is what we did ten or twelve times before we got it right. The wingloading was enormous, the most I’d ever heard of, about fifty pounds per square foot. That scared me, and rightly so.

We also used an entirely new system of radio communications, and tested it effectively for the first time in aeronautical history. We could send and receive on twenty-five wavelengths and the aerial, which was adjustable, gave us a tremendously powerful beam. I arranged to beam from Siberia all the way to Hermosa Beach, California. I had Dave Evans and Charlie Perrine, radio director for the flight, set up in a house on the beach operating a short-wave radio station, and I hit them all the way from Yakutsk in Siberia, nearly 5,000 miles away. Nobody made much of a fuss about that at the time, because they preferred to concentrate on the circus aspects which were considered more newsworthy, but that radio transmission was a fantastic step forward in the communications world.

We ate nothing but sandwiches, mostly ham, during the flight itself. I wanted the men to get the most nourishment possible out of those sandwiches, so in New York I tested twenty different kinds of bread until I found the one I wanted. That was Pechter’s Jewish rye bread.

But we had trouble the moment we took off. All that extra load we were carrying – mostly the gasoline in the wing tanks – made the takeoffs the most hazardous parts of the flight. We took off on Sunday evening, July 10, 1938, from Floyd Bennett Field, and I couldn’t get the ship off the ground. I used up all the runway and still I couldn’t get her off. I kept going, into the dirt, and one of the struts snapped – one of the wheel braces. I could feel it go, but there was nothing to do about it then, because the next second we were airborne.

Everything went well after that. We got to Paris in one piece, and on schedule. I had to go through the usual crap at the airport, shaking hands with the ambassador and a bunch of goddamn dignitaries. For a while it looked as though we weren’t going to leave Paris because of the damaged wheel braces, but the Embassy turned up with an Army man named Cook, one of those handy types like myself that only seem to flourish in America, and he fixed the damn thing and we took off again with a minimum of delay. Then we went over Germany, flying at 16,000 feet for a while, which was the regulation altitude prescribed by the Nazi government. What happened then has never been told, because I was honor-bound not to discuss it, but I feel certain enough time has passed.

Shortly before leaving New York City I had a visit from General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. He asked me to take aerial photographs of parts of Germany that were on my course, or could be on my course with a little adjustment. Specifically, he was looking for aircraft and arms plants in the western Ruhr and in Silesia, and large troop concentrations on the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia. We didn’t have anything like a U-2 then, and any aerial photo reconnaissance had to be done at very low altitudes and of course on a relatively clear day.

The Germans, when we went over, instantly got us on the radio and told us to get the hell out of their airspace. They were building up, and they thought we might be taking pictures. We denied it vigorously, and in the newspapers it was denied vigorously, by me and several other people connected with the project, that anything like that had been in mind. Of course that was exactly what we were trying to do. We came down as low as we could over the critical areas, but we couldn’t break through the cloud cover. It was socked in right from the Black Forest to the Polish border. We were flying pretty low, hoping for a hole, and any minute I expected to see some of those Messerschmitt fighters coming right up at us.

Did any of the men with you on the plane know what you were doing?

If they’d used their heads they might have figured it out, because the camera was covered but mounted. One of them asked me about it, and I said it was to photograph polar bears in Siberia for the National Geographic. He believed me. Not all of those guys were terribly bright when it came to thinking about other things than their job.

We went on to Moscow. A lot of bigwigs were there at the airport, including the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, on leave from Washington. I gave him the baseball scores and the American League standings – he was a Yankee fan, which was a safe bet in those days. The Model Fourteen had the red Lockheed star on the fuselage, and some of the Russian soldiers standing around the field thought this was a Communist plane making the trip. They got all excited – whoops, the Americans are Communists too!

One thing I appreciated about the Russians: we didn’t have to pay any bills at their airports. It was all on the house. They asked me to keep that quiet – they didn’t want an invasion of pilots figuring the government would pick up the tab. We refueled, and had to turn down some caviar which would have made us overweight.

And off we went to Omsk, in Siberia. They had lousy gasoline, very low octane, but we were prepared for that with a load of ethyl to boost it. That was only a minor inconvenience. But then the runway went uphill at Omsk and I didn’t think we were going to get off. It’s bad enough trying to take off on the level, on a good runway with the load we were carrying, but to take off uphill – well, it was like a landing strip in Ethiopia that I used many years later in a DC-3.

Leaving Omsk we were lucky again. I’d better qualify this by explaining that I don’t believe in luck – it’s a phrase that’s applied after the fact. If a man prepares well, and is aware of all possibilities and mulls them over in his mind, and takes the necessary precautions to deal with emergencies – if a man does all that, and is ready to grasp opportunities, those opportunities come to him and people call that good luck. It’s not good luck. It’s the sum total of a man’s preparations for any given situation. A poor workman finds fault with his tools, and only a hypocrite says, ‘I had good luck.’ A man stands up, thumps his chest and says, ‘Me, I did it.’

The phrase ‘bad luck’ is really another way of saying that a man wasn’t prepared, he didn’t know how to deal with the inevitable difficulties that came his way.

But, as I found out flying around the world in 1938, there are certain exceptions, like when we ran into ten thousand-foot mountains that were marked as six thousand feet on the map. So it was fortunate that we reached them during daylight, because our schedule was messed up by the delays in Paris and Omsk. If we had reached these peaks at night, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. The wolves would have picked my bones clean on some mountaintop in Siberia.

Then we went on to Fairbanks, Alaska. That was an awful hop, foul weather all the way so that the plane was mushing, but we made it. We headed on toward Winnipeg, where the weather was so lousy that we skipped it, stopped in Minneapolis, and then, from there, back to New York – three and a half days after we’d started out.

I was beat. I just couldn’t face that mob. After the parade there was supposed to be a reception at City Hall, organized by Grover Whalen, the official greeter and hand-shaker for New York City.

You can imagine that I was in no mood for such shenanigans after a round-the-world flight – and besides, I had a date. At the time I was very friendly with Katharine Hepburn. Her family up in Connecticut thought I was an odd duck because I once landed a plane on their beach up in Old Saybrook, but nevertheless there were rumors that Katharine and I were going to get married. It wasn’t true, we just saw a lot of each other. We had a fine friendship and I had seen Katharine before I left, and I wanted to see Katharine when I got back. Simple as that. I didn’t want to see these guys in top hats and tails.

I drove down to the party with Whalen and Mayor LaGuardia and a big motorcycle escort. Fiorello LaGuardia was a funny little guy and I liked him. But our friendship was nipped in the bud. I hadn’t shaved in three days and, what’s more, I hadn’t bathed in three days. I stank like a polecat. I could see people backing off from me every now and then when they got a whiff of what was coming out from under my armpits.

So I slipped the word to Whalen that before the festivities began, I wouldn’t mind taking a bath. Whalen said, ‘Okay, certainly, anything you want, Howard.’

They found an office at City Hall that had a bathtub, and I lowered myself into the bath and, by God, it felt marvelous. It was like the first fresh egg after you’ve been at sea for a week. Suddenly I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to go back in there. Kate’s waiting for me. The hell with these ass-kissing politicians.’

So I got out of the bathtub and put on, unfortunately, the same dirty clothes I’d been wearing when I got off the plane, and slipped out the back door.

Maybe it was a bit rude of me to leave that way, but I guess I figured they would understand. I was wrong. What happened afterwards I got straight from the horse’s mouth, because Grover Whalen told me.

Mayor LaGuardia said, ‘Well, where is Mr. Hughes? Where is our hero?’

Grover went to look for me, and I wasn’t there. They searched the building. No Howard Hughes.

Now LaGuardia was mayor of New York City when you were a boy, and you probably heard him reading the comics over the radio on Sunday morning. But LaGuardia’s general language in private was unprintable. He had one of the foulest mouths I’d ever heard, and some of it I didn’t even understand, because he spoke Italian a lot. His language was almost as bad as mine when I get riled up.

So LaGuardia started to rant and curse me in front of everybody, and then he pulled what I consider one of the dirtiest tricks that’s ever been pulled on me – and there have been some lulus. First he called in the newspaper people and told them I had slipped out. Meanwhile some cop had phoned Whalen and told him that he’d tailed me from City Hall. He’d seen me slip out and thought it was his job to know where I was going, to protect me from the mob, and he’d followed me and knew where I was. I was at Katharine Hepburn’s place on the East Side in the Forties. I took a taxi up there and the cab driver didn’t know who I was, he thought I was a bum, and I could see he was worried I wouldn’t be able to pay him.

This cop gave his report to Whalen, and Whalen gave it to LaGuardia, and then LaGuardia said to the press, ‘Gentlemen, I’ll tell you where that Texas son of a bitch has gone’ – or words to that effect in English and Italian.

I was up there in the sack with Kate, in her apartment, and the next thing we knew there was a pounding on the door. I said, ‘My God, they’ve found us!’

Neither of us wanted publicity, and that would have been the worst kind. Then I really might have had to marry her, which I think is what she wanted.

I piled all the furniture in the living room against the front door – the sofa, the chairs, the dining room table – because they would have gotten an axe, a battering ram, anything they could get their hands on, to get in there and find us. I whispered to Kate, ‘Don’t say a word. Even in bed. No groans or moans of passion, sweetheart.’

We had a great time, in total silence. It felt a little perverted, in its way.

And after an hour or so they gave up and went away.

What did this affair with Katharine Hepburn mean to you at the time?

Words like ‘affair’ don’t always fit such relationships. Katharine and I were close friends. I saw her on and off in ’36 and ’37. We went sailing together, and flying, and I cared for her. I wanted to make a movie with her around that time, do the life of Amelia Earhart, whom I knew pretty well. It didn’t work out. I was too busy and so was Katharine.

Once I did her what I think was a great favor. She was doing well, but she hadn’t saved her nickels and dimes and she wanted to star in a film called The Philadelphia Story. She needed money to buy the property and I loaned it to her. She owned most of the rights when the movie was made, and she cleared a tidy sum.

I’ve been accused many times in my life of being a tight-fisted man, a man who can lose a million dollars and not care but won’t give his best friend a hundred-dollar loan or even a cookie, according to Noah Dietrich. There’s no truth to that. Katharine could have asked me for anything and I would have given it to her without any questions.

But I’ll give you an example of real cheapness. I was supposed to get a special Congressional medal for that flight around the world. Some miserable senatorial son of a bitch said this was a good chance to practice economy, and they wouldn’t vote the funds, all five or six hundred dollars of it, for that medal. Meanwhile they were pissing away millions on WPA projects, helping guys who in many cases should have gone out and helped themselves. It’s not that I gave a damn about the medal – hell, I never kept a single one that I got.

You skipped over Katharine Hepburn a bit too quickly. Why did she appeal to you?

She appealed to me because she was very bright and a lot of fun, and, I thought, extremely attractive. Now someone can say that about almost every woman. That’s what you think about any woman you care for, isn’t it? These things are chemistry. She was very independent, very strong-minded. She didn’t drink. Very clean woman – bathed two or three times a day when she could, and always said I was divine.

‘Howard, you’re dee-vine.’ I kind of liked that. And I can tell you one other thing: I loved her voice. A lot of people didn’t, but I did. I could hear her. I didn’t always have to say, ‘What? What?’

She was what I call a thoroughbred. And she was very strong-minded about her privacy. All these were admirable qualities, and then there was the chemistry, which I can’t define.

When did you start seeing her?

I suppose it was in 1936. She was in a play on tour, not on Broadway, and I hopped around quite a bit to see her. I saw that play five times, by the way, and it was terrible – it was Jane Eyre. I told Kate the critics would boil the play in oil and even though she was great, she’d get scalded too. And she took my advice, and bowed out. But the newsboys were after us everywhere we went on this tour, and that took the bloom off it a little bit.

This, of course, was before Spencer Tracy. Leland Hayward was the man in her life before I came along, but he and I got along pretty well. We once carried Katharine from room to room lying on a sofa. She was lying on the sofa, and we were carrying her. It was a joke, just for fun, and I can’t quite remember why we did that, except Katharine said it was ‘dee-vine.’

When did it break up between you and Katharine?

Just gradually. We stayed friends. She met Tracy when the war began, and then there wasn’t much contact between us after she got herself mixed up with that guy Henry Wallace, the one who’d been Vice-President under Roosevelt and then ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket. She made a campaign speech for him in the Hollywood Bowl, and I thought that was an error of taste. All right, are you satisfied? You know, there are times when I think you’re Hedda Hopper in disguise.

I’ll change the subject. When you got back from the flight around the world, didn’t you go to visit Herbert Bayard Swope, the publisher of the New York World?

Yes, because I had a hundred-dollar bet with him. He said I’d never make it around the globe in less than a hundred hours, and I was positive I would. Swope was a pain in the ass, a very lordly man, but I sort of liked him. He was living out on Long Island and I borrowed an Aeronca K. This was a few days after I arrived in New York. I wanted to try out some Edo floats and I flew out, landed right in front of his house in the Hamptons and said, ‘Pay up.’ He had a big party going. He always had big parties going, and I was dressed, I vaguely remember, in the usual way – dirty old pants and greasy shirt. I didn’t want to embarrass his guests, so we just went into the kitchen and he paid me the hundred dollars, and I had a glass of milk and then I took off again.

Did you know Charles Lindbergh?

Lindy and I flew the Stratoliner together in Seattle. I didn’t like him much, and I’ll tell you why. I’m not taking anything away from his achievements – I’m talking about him as a man. Lindbergh was out for publicity. He was vain and egotistical, and he was greedy. When he flew to Paris one of the first things he did before he made the trip was to arrange stories and articles to be written about it. He made something close to a hundred thousand dollars out of that. Now I feel, and I felt then, that it was not my privilege to capitalize, to make profit out of a trip like this. That was not its purpose.

But you had the money.

Yes, I had the money, but you can always use a little extra pocket money, can’t you? On the other hand, to give credit where it’s due, after Lindbergh made that flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, he pulled some of the same stunts that I pulled. When he got back to New York City, Whalen and all those guys gave him the treatment. They took him to the Ziegfeld Follies one night. During the intermission Lindy said he had to go to the toilet, and he vanished right out of the theater. When he told me that story, I had a sympathy for the man which I hadn’t had before. Because he couldn’t take it, either. He wanted the notoriety, but when the chips were down he was a flier. The way to do things was to get up there and fly, do what you had to do, and take your satisfaction in private – which unfortunately, he didn’t do all the time, and I did.

One more thing happened after I got back from the flight around the world, and I consider it important. There was a round of parties and celebrations in various cities. I flew the Model Fourteen down to Houston and there was a big flap for me there. All my father’s people – his people, my people – were out at the airport. I mean Toolco employees, rank-and-file workers, and they had signs that said WELCOME HOWARD, CONGRATULATIONS HOWARD, YOU DID IT HOWARD.

All that fuss in New York didn’t mean too much to me, but it meant something to me that Toolco people were out there, and that they liked me. Because it never occurred to me before that they liked me. That reception in Houston touched me very deeply. It’s one of my fondest memories.