Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

28

IT’S TIME FOR me to clear up a mystery of my own creation. I’ve thought about it and really there’s no reason for me not to, provided that I exercise a little discretion.

You remember I discussed a woman I’d met once on a plane flying to San Francisco? Woke up holding her hand? And then I told you that when I flew with Cary Grant to Mexico in the winter of 1947, I was meeting someone in Acapulco. That was my friend – the wife of the man in the diplomatic corps, the one I’d met on the transcontinental flight.

I didn’t tell the full truth about her, and I realize this story of my life will be incomplete if I don’t, just as my life itself would be incomplete without Helga.

That’s her name. Helga. She’s of Scandinavian origin. We’ll skip her last name. Maybe Helga isn’t her first name. Maybe it’s a pseudonym. Names aren’t important.

I was seeing Helga fairly regularly until just about a year ago, because she filled a special place in my life. She’s not a famous person and she’s not a glamorous woman, not like the various movie stars I squired around in my Hollywood years. She wasn’t a beautiful woman in that sense. In fact she has a slightly hooked nose and imperfect teeth – I wanted to get her teeth fixed, I wanted to pay for it, but she said no.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not implying that she’s ugly or even odd-looking. She’s an unusually attractive woman, but she hasn’t got the conventional good looks that Americans usually associate with being beautiful. I’d call her handsome and strong-featured. Great jaw, great neck. Her blood is German and Norwegian; she’s got dark hair and green eyes with small hazel specks.

She’s an educated woman, far more educated than I am. Some of the ideas that I’ve had in recent years have in many ways been due to her influence. Helga has given me lists of books to read, from Plato to Tolstoy and up through Isaac Bashevis Singer, and for the most part I’ve read them and I’ve discussed then with her. She thinks clearly, which is a rare trait, and expresses herself simply, which may be even rarer.

Helga put herself through school in the face of great difficulties. You know, the Horatio Alger stuff, but in this case it was true, and I think even more admirable because she was a woman. When she was a teenager, one of her sisters committed suicide, hanged herself in the family garage. I tell you this just to show you the odds against such a woman making something of herself. But she did. She pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Right from the beginning he had this keen intelligence and determination. She worked her way through Columbia, and then she went to Europe for a year, lived in Paris and Mykonos, a Greek island.

At one point she wanted to be a lawyer but I’m not sorry that she didn’t achieve that. I told her some stories about the vultures that made her realize it’s not the noblest profession in the world. But she wasn’t able to do that because she met a man and got married and raised two kids.

Lovely children, by the way. Now, of course, they’re grown up, married, have children of their own. I knew them when they were very young, and I was very fond of them. In fact, it’s the only relationship I’ve ever had with children.

Do you miss not having children of your own?

Well, for some years – because there were periods in her marriage when she was apart from her husband – I spent a fair amount of time with Helga and the children. And, as I said, it was the first real contact I’d had with kids. I gave the boy a few flying lessons and taught him a lot about aeronautical engineering. He didn’t become an engineer or a pilot. He’s in another business entirely, with a brokerage house, but not in New York.

What I’m getting at is that I enjoyed teaching him, and I can see the pleasure a man can take in seeing his children grow and playing a vicarious part in their lives and having the responsibility of shaping a growing human being. I had it, as I say, very briefly in my life, during this on and off relationship with Helga. So I wish in a way that I had children, because there’s something missing from a man’s life if he doesn’t. It’s probably one of the major experiences in a man’s life. I missed it, and, yes, I’m sorry.

Mind you, in everything that I’ve seen, even with Helga’s two children, there’s so much heartbreak involved in the child-rearing process that I’m not sure the game is worth the candle. Those children have treated her very shabbily in the last ten years. For the most part they’ve taken their father’s side in the obvious deterioration of the marriage. She wanted a divorce but he was a professional diplomat and he claimed it would ruin his career. She stayed married to him only under duress, with the understanding that when she wanted a period of independence she took it, which is something the children never could fathom.

But the general breaking away of children from their home – not just Helga’s children, but all children – I should imagine is extremely painful to a parent. You don’t like to invest your emotional capital and never get a stockholder’s report or a decent dividend. Your children, Clifford, are much younger, and you haven’t experienced that yet, but it’s a good bet that you will.

And yet I sense that you would have liked to have had children of your own, despite this inevitable breakaway when they get older.

In the long run, yes. Any kids of mine would have had the best of everything, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to be happier in life and considerate of other people when you have money to fall back on. The cold wind of poverty may be a fine instructor in the realities of life, but it’s still cold.

But for me to have had children it would have been necessary to have a marriage that worked. The one thing I would never have done in my life is have children with a woman where I knew the relationship would end in divorce, as both my marriages have done. With my first wife, with Ella, I was just a harebrained kid, and the marriage never stood a chance. I knew that from the beginning. I’ve never been sorry we didn’t have children because Ella would have got them and they would undoubtedly have looked at me as that crackpot in Las Vegas who sent them – or never sent them – a million dollars a year.

And with Jean – well, we tried, and nothing happened, and I’m glad nothing happened because of what I’ve already told you. We’re divorced now, as you know, and she’s remarried and it would have been much more painful if we’d had children. Not only because of the broken home they would have had, but because I’m getting to be an old man and I’d have been gone before they would have reached their adulthood.

But Helga is one of the main reasons I’m sitting here today. She planted the idea in my head to write a book.

This was years ago. I was up to my eyeballs in lawsuits. I said to her, ‘I don’t have the time.’

‘Make the time,’ she said. ‘A man like you has to face up to himself and define himself, even if he does it badly.’

‘I don’t have to apologize for anything,’ I said. ‘That’s what most autobiographies are – apologies and cover-ups, full of half-truths and wishful thinking. I don’t want to do that, and I know I’m not clever enough to avoid the trap.’

‘How do you know until you try?’

I allowed her to nag at me, because the challenge was appealing. That’s my nature. Give me a challenge and I can’t resist taking a crack at it.

One day I started to do it. This actually was when I was living in Marty Nosseck’s screening room on Sunset Boulevard. I had an IBM electric typewriter of my own. And I started to write the book on my own. I knew plenty of journalists but I didn’t trust a single one of them, except maybe Frank McCulloch, and he was hooked up with the Luce publications so that was too dangerous. I wrote fifteen or twenty pages about growing up in Houston and about my father. I waited a few weeks and then read them, and they were awful. I showed them to Helga and she said, ‘Yes, they’re evasive, and there’s an underlying anger. Wait a while. The right time will come.’

Now, as you know, it’s come. I’ve faced my father. I’ve tried to see him in a clear light. I’m not angry at him anymore. I see that we are what we are, and what we do to other people is a function of our fundamental character. Almost unavoidable. That’s very liberating to know.

Did you ever show those pages to Jean, your wife?

No, Jean was wonderful, but that was something I couldn’t bring myself to share with her. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t.

How often did you meet with Helga during all the years since you woke up holding her hand on the transcontinental flight?

Oh, two or three times a year – sometimes less, sometimes more. It all depended. I saw her in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, when I was out there in ’48. She was living in Europe then. Her husband was posted there. She was able to get away for a week, and I showed her the country. I flew her all over. In some ways that was the happiest single week of my life.

She also… well, I’m not sure if I told you the reason I went down to Lambaréné to see Schweitzer.

You told me something about having visited a leper clinic in Ethiopia, and that started you thinking about him.

That was part of it, but only a minor part. Helga had told me about Schweitzer. He was a man she admired enormously, and so I read one of his books. It may have been his only book, the story of his early life. Helga said, ‘Why don’t you go down and see him and talk to him?’

So I went. Not that time, but the next time. But it didn’t work out, as I’ve told you.

On other occasions I rented a house on the outskirts of Oaxaca, in Zapotec Indian country in southern Mexico. That’s the place where we spent the most times together. She took me to all the Indian ruins and gave me a crash course not only in pre-Columbian history but in archeology. In fact, it was to Oaxaca that she brought her children to meet me for the first time, although it was done very discreetly. She stayed in a hotel in town with the children. I was in the bungalow and she came to see me there. But she wanted me to meet the kids. She felt that our relationship was important enough that I couldn’t understand her unless I knew her children and how she felt about them.

I went skiing with her once. She taught me. I fell down more times than I cared to, so I never became a real skier. I’ve never been fond of the snow or cold weather, but I went for many walks with her in the mountains. That was in Sun Valley. We kidded around, threw snowballs, and I was able to relax with her more than I had ever in my life with a woman. She reminded me of Ruth Elder. She was very much like Ruth, in the sense that she was interested in many of the same things I was interested in, and if she knew something I didn’t know she wasn’t overbearing or superior about it. In fact her belief, and mine too, is that the basis for any marriage is friendship of equals. Partnership. Sharing of knowledge.

Did you ever discuss with her the possibility of marriage?

It was out of the question. I came to the belief that the success of the relationship was based on the fact that we weren’t married and only saw each other on rare occasions. After I married Jean, I wasn’t free. And Helga was never free. Her husband would never have granted her a divorce. I didn’t mean to imply that she hated her husband. They were friendly, just incompatible. He smoked in bed, which is a disgusting habit – got the ashes all over the sheets, smelled up the house. And he resented her intelligence. He wanted to be in command and feel superior.

Then too, I often felt that she really didn’t want to get divorced, and if I’d suddenly said to her, ‘Helga, get rid of that dumb son of a bitch and marry me,’ she would have run for the hills. Because I would have been twice as difficult a husband as the one she was stuck with, even if I don’t smoke in bed. I’m no bargain in the husband department. Ask Jean.

I don’t have to. I believe you. Did her husband ever suspect that she was seeing you?

He knew that she was seeing somebody but I’m sure she never told him who. The kids found out after a while who I really was – you can’t keep children in the dark for too long a time, they have better noses for ferreting out mysteries than adults do. This wasn’t serious at first but unfortunately the kids were old enough to be, well, I’ll call it thrilled at the idea that Mommy was seeing someone like me – and also, unfortunately, not old enough to keep their mouths shut. They gabbed and the word got around, at least in a limited circle of people. I think finally what kept it from being accepted as the truth was that everybody believed I was a total recluse and incapable of having a real relationship with a female of the species. Sometimes it pays to be a professional eccentric. But I would never have been surprised in those years to pick up a newspaper and see some gossip columnist asking, ‘Who is Howard Hughes’s new secret love?’ or some sort of maudlin romantic crap like that. Thank God, it never happened. Helga herself was a completely discreet woman. She could arrange things on the q.t. almost as well as I could. Women often have that knack. If you care for a woman you call it discreet, if you can’t stand her you call it sly. Most judgments in life depend on where you stand and what mood you’re in when you make them.

Are you still seeing Helga?

If you don’t mind, I’ll save that story for its proper chronological place in this narrative – or maybe I won’t tell you at all. A little mystery has its place in every man’s life, don’t you think?

Cut me a little slack on this one. We’ll see.