Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

23

MY PRIVATE LIFE during those years was a swamp of complications. I was swimming as best you can when you’re in a swamp – from woman to woman, getting involved and then getting uninvolved, and it sapped a good deal of my energies. There’s no satisfaction in that way of life, and certainly no salvation.

I had an affair at that time with Terry Moore, the movie star. It started in 1950 and it lasted quite a while. It was interrupted when she married Glenn Davis. He was the West Point football star, the Mr. Outside of the combination that won all those games for Army. Mr. Inside was Doc Blanchard. Terry wasn’t really interested in Davis in spite of the fact that they got married. It was one of those harebrained things that happen, particularly in Hollywood. And later, when she came back to Los Angeles, we took up where we left off. That is, back in the sack, making whoopee.

Things worked between me and Terry. She had a straightforwardness which I appreciate. The problem was her husband, Glenn Davis. After she left him and came back to me, he arrived ranting at my bungalow in Malibu. When we opened the door he walked up to me and belted me on my ass without another word. I’m tall, but I was skinny – I wasn’t a football player – and he knocked me flat on my back. I walked around with a big black eye for days afterward.

He accused me of breaking up his marriage, which was a lot of horseshit, because the marriage was broken up long before that night. I didn’t bring Terry at gunpoint, she came to my bed all willing. So this obviously wasn’t my doing.

What other women did you know in those years?

There was Gene Tierney, the actress, a beautiful woman – that was another time I got hit. I met her at a party given by William Randolph Hearst; he was always giving big parties up at San Simeon and throwing women at me. Gene was married to Oleg Cassini, the designer, and one afternoon when I brought her home from a walk on the beach Cassini was hiding in the garage waiting for us. He leaped out and clipped me. I ran away. The next time I saw him was at a Hollywood party and he threatened to brain me with a cut-glass decanter. I had to hide in an upstairs bedroom and call for help. Ginger Rogers was another one, although I can’t remember who she was married to. At least he never jumped out at me. I stopped going to parties after the Cassini assault. It was too dangerous.

Did you get a kick out of involvement with married women?

The truth is, I didn’t hunt for them, they hunted me, and I guess during that period I enjoyed the company of attractive and witty women and I didn’t duck their attentions. Obviously none of them was in what I would call a good marriage. And in one sense it was safer than an involvement with a single woman who was looking for a husband – although as I’ve mentioned, there were physical risks.

Before Terry and Gene and Ginger, and after, I was involved with Lana Turner. A story went the rounds that Lana had her sheets embroidered H.H. because she thought I was going to marry her. I was supposed to have said, ‘Well, go marry Huntington Hartford.’ But that wasn’t true. I would never be so crude. I just told her, ‘In a pinch, you can always sell them to Huntington Hartford.’

There were plenty of women who were under the impression that I wanted to marry them, although I never said so or even hinted. For a while I was taking out some of these society girls, and they’d announce to the papers every other week that wedding bells were going to ring in the spring. That’s what they would say – really – that’s how their minds worked. ‘Wedding bells may ring in the spring for Howard and me.’ I’m talking about Gloria Baker and Tim Lansing and Meg Lindsay, and a few others. There was nothing really happening there. I suppose I did see Gloria Baker somewhat more than the others. I flew her once from New York to Los Angeles, and by the time that flight was over and she’d chewed my ear for fifteen hours I thought, God, I’d rather hear wedding bells in the spring with a female baboon than this girl’s voice every day of my life, and I ended the relationship right there at the airport.

Usually I let these girls think whatever they wanted to think. I never put anything in writing. My father once told me: ‘Do right, and fear no man. Don’t write, and fear no woman.’ That was wise advice and I followed it, especially the last part. You know, they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Howard, if we were married?’

And I would say, ‘Uh, uh, uh… yes, maybe… who knows?’ And if they ever got more serious than that I’d complain of an earache.

With Tim Lansing once, I had trouble with her parents. I had met her in Palm Springs and her parents came down to get her out. I think it was all a plot on her part to get me to marry her. They said she’d told them I’d told her I was going to marry her, and we’d even set a date.

I said, ‘I don’t remember it. You know I’m deaf. I obviously misunderstood.’

They didn’t pressure me any further. I don’t think they thought I was such a great catch. They thought I was a little crazy. That’s another reason why they’d come down to rescue their daughter.

What did it mean to you to have such a succession of quick affairs, on and off, as you put it?

My behavior was based on one of those fallacies that are common to most men’s lives. When you’re young, assuming you’re not a fairy, you think that women are essential to your life. You waste an awful lot of time wooing them or putting the make on them. This is a hangover from adolescence, I suppose, when you’re yearning for a girl and you can’t get one because you don’t know how. My adolescence, and yours too, probably – although maybe not the adolescence of the kids today.

But I went through that as a very young man, and then as a grown man, up to thirty-five or so, and then the physical thing, which had never been very big with me, tapered off. But the habit didn’t. The habit of seeing women, squiring them around, and the apparent need for feminine company. In those years when I had solved most of my problems with women, when I was supposedly a mature man, I still had this hangover from the earlier years, this habit of wanting women around, of wanting their company and treating them ultimately as sexual objects rather than as people who happened to be female.

I finally cured myself of it. With Terry and Lana and the others, I just saw them from time to time and went to bed with them rarely. It was reassuring to know they were there and that they liked me, but I didn’t do it out of deep need. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I’m sure it’s common to most men. Only most men never see what they’re doing. Fortunately I did, after a while.

And even then I made mistakes. Just about that time some actress I was going out with got pregnant. It’s probably the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten a woman pregnant, and I was using every possible precaution and so was she. But the superficial evidence pointed to the fact that it was my responsibility. Neither of us wanted the child and I didn’t want to get married to her. That was out of the question. And so I got in touch with Verne Mason and he took her over to a clinic in France for an abortion. They flew TWA, of course.

I suppose I’m a little bitter about it because I did feel that this girl was trying to trap me into marrying her. I don’t trust women – that’s a fact, sad to say – and I have trouble communicating with them. I have the disquieting notion that the female of our species is as foreign to the male as a lioness is to a bull moose. I’ve never understood women. I don’t even understand my own involvement with them, and my need for it. There are times when I felt that I was punishing myself – in all instances but one. If you knew what I’d been through, you’d understand.

Who’s this other person you talk about? I have a feeling there was someone else in your life besides your two wives.

You’re badgering me to death and I see you’ll never let up, so we better get this out of the way.

I’ve revealed more to you than I have to anybody for a long time. I’ve opened up these windows to my past – not only for you, but for myself. It’s strange. My original idea in this whole thing was to give you my ideas and views, to talk about the present, and I find myself going deeper and deeper instead into the past. Oddly enough, I see myself sometimes with your eyes. You have very hard eyes sometimes. Well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s been a very strange experience, this telling the story of my life. Not always so good for me, though. I think sometimes you take advantage of me, try to make me the donkey. You’ve picked that up. And I don’t guard against you, which I should do.

But we’re at a critical point. I don’t want to sound poetic, but I’m peering in at a window that I’ve kept locked for many years. So let’s open it.

I’ve told you about Billie Dove, the woman I loved in Hollywood in the early Thirties. Billie and I very likely would have married, and almost did, but for a horrible thing that happened, which I suppose, has colored my relationships with women ever since. What you call my ‘germ phobia’ may stem in great part from what happened to me with Billie Dove.

She gave me the clap.

At that time it was not a laughing matter. This was before penicillin, and I went through the agonies of the damned. I thought my pecker would fall off every time I took a piss. While that creature, who gave me her social disease, walked around as though nothing had happened. You have no idea what lengths I had gone to for this woman, what favors I had done her. She and her husband, Irving Willatt, were estranged, and I paid him $325,000 in cash, in thousand-dollar bills, to get out of her life, to open the way for us—

Now, wait a minute. Let’s start at the beginning.

Well, the beginning – what is the beginning? The classic movie plot. Boy meets girl, boy buys off husband, boy gets clap from girl, boy leaves girl. I don’t mean to be flippant – I’m not telling you this to provoke laughter. You’re leading me into that. This was a serious matter for me, and don’t be misled by my temporary jocularity.

I didn’t know where Billie got the clap. I never did find out. But it terrified me, as well as making me sick. First of all I had to undergo a nasty period of treatment. This was in Hollywood, in 1931. I was twenty-five years old, a man with a limited sexual experience. I was in love, and I took sex very seriously. I still had the deepest idealism regarding women. Billie shattered that, and it was a long time before I entertained serious thoughts about a woman again.

Billie and I would certainly have been married if it weren’t for my getting sick that way. That terrified me. When I learned what I had, I went through my house – we were practically living together on Muirfield Road – and I gathered all my clothes, everything I owned, even including the towels and the rugs from the bathroom floor, and I packed it all into burlap bags, like mail bags, and I gave them all to Noah Dietrich and I told him to burn them. Burn everything! Including the shirt off my back. I found out later he gave it all to the Salvation Army.

I didn’t leave the house for days. I ordered a fresh supply of sheets and towels until the rooms were fumigated. Then I had some clothes brought in to me and started life over again. The delivery people came to the door to deliver the clothes and sheets – I was stark naked, had to hide down behind a chair to cover myself and hand them the money for the sheets and things.

Billie then went on to have an affair with George Raft, who was in all those gangster movies. I always wondered if she passed the disease along to him. He might have had her rubbed out.

You can imagine, having corrupted myself in such a way that I would actually pay money for her, to have had this other thing happen to me, crushed me for years. It almost emasculated me.

After that I never made love to a woman without using a minimum of two contraceptives. And even then I felt unsafe. I had worshipped Billie, I had never dreamed that she could be carrying such a disease. After that I felt: what woman is exempt?

My sexual needs were never very strong – I had the reputation of being a ladies man, but it was undeserved. I married Ella, and that didn’t work out. I made a certain show out of being a ladies man, because I thought that was what the world expected of me. I suppose I was trying to follow in my father’s footsteps, if you want to put it simply – something I could never do. Very often I would take out a woman, and always a beautiful woman, and when the time came to perform, I felt I couldn’t. I’m not trying to say to you that I was impotent. I wasn’t at all. If I got into bed with a woman I did what had to be done, what she wanted.

But I remember, time after time, I would drive someone home and she’d say, ‘Aren’t you coming in for a cup of coffee?’ – and I had a vision of myself being unable to perform or getting bored and I would almost always say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I have a business appointment. You know I keep peculiar hours.’

Or I would arrange when I was out with a girl that a telephone call would come to me just before midnight, just about the time we were supposed to leave the club, wherever we were, saying my presence was urgently needed somewhere else.

I look back on it now, from the vantage point of sixty-five years, when such problems no longer plague me, and I have nothing but pity for myself as a young man. Pity because of the problem that I had and because the image of me that people had, even my closest friends, was so different, that I didn’t dare tell anyone. How could I go to Glen Odekirk or Jack Frye or Bob Gross, men who loved me and would have done almost anything for me – and say, ‘I’m afraid to go to bed with a woman for fear that I can’t perform or that I’ll be bored?’ I didn’t have the vocabulary for that, and I lived with this ridiculous feeling of shame. I lived a terrible life.

Part of this was this Texas thing we’ve spoken about, and which still very much ruled my thinking. I thought of myself as a Texan, Big Hard’s son. Still today, to come from Texas, to be a Texan, you’re supposed to be a big-balled son of a bitch. And frankly, that wasn’t me.

Despite my terrible disappointment with Dr. Schweitzer, that I never got through to the man, and that he brushed me aside like some insignificant creature from out of the bush, I still felt that there were men in this world who had put their feet on the right path early in their lives and never left it. They were following a clearly marked path through the jungle that human life resembles.

I knew that I had my share of achievements, but when I added up everything I had done, I could see no focus. I’m talking about the early 1950s, when I was a man in my late forties. I could see I was not on a clear track that progressed from one stage of development to another. It was what seized my imagination at the time, and yet when I analyzed it in rare moments of introspection, I could see no progression. And when you can’t see progression in your own life, no clearcut advance from one goal to another, leading to major goals, then you can’t see your Self, which is blindness. That sort of blindness is worse than any kind of deafness.

And then I found the man I believed I was looking for.