Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

32

A GREAT PART of my experience in India – that last part, I mean, when I visited Sai Baba and ended up by the Ganges as a beggar – is of course difficult to explain. Most people wouldn’t believe it, and so I haven’t told it to anybody. They’d think I was cracked. They probably think it anyway, but if I told them about the vibhuti and the rest of it, they’d be absolutely certain.

Helga and I flew down to Rajastan: saw some temples, rode an elephant who tried to pickpocket me with his trunk, stayed in some palaces – played at being tourists.

While we were in Jaipur she said, ‘Howard, my husband knows about us. He doesn’t know it’s you, but he knows it’s someone. He begged me not to leave him for you.’

That made me nervous. I had never asked her to leave her husband.

She knew that. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I told him I wouldn’t. Then he asked me to give up seeing you so that he and I could try to make our marriage work again. I thought about it for a few days and then I agreed to do that, after this trip to India. He and I have a history, you see. History counts.’

‘You and I have a history too,’ I said.

‘I know. Well, maybe we’ll see each other again. Just give me time.’

I told her I understood. We flew back to California, I said goodbye to her at LAX, and then I took off for Las Vegas.

I didn’t feel good about that parting, but nevertheless, in a way, I felt liberated. I didn’t own her. I had fine memories. I still do. We talk now and then, but I haven’t seen her since. Sometimes that saddens me. But I’ve learned to accept it. What can I do? She made a choice. It was the right choice for her and the wrong choice for me. The Mexicans say, ‘Ni modo’ – so it goes. It implies the acceptance of suffering as part of life.

As soon as I reached Nevada, I thought, my time here is up. I’m leaving. This is not how I want to live. Let them take their treble damages, I no longer cared. My health was failing, and I had the feeling that there were greener pastures elsewhere, in the Bahamas, where the government was friendly to me, and malleable.

Did you try to buy the Bahamian government?

I didn’t have to go that far. I could just rent it, so to speak, for as long as it was convenient.

I flew out to the Bahamas on Thanksgiving Day of 1970. But that wasn’t a snap decision. In fact it was a decision I had made at least a year before that. I contacted the people I know on Paradise Island and they set it up within two weeks. I took over the top floor of the Britannia Beach Hotel.

Do you like the view better than the one from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas?

There is no view. I had light-proof curtains put up before I moved in. I don’t need a view. The view is in my mind.

Regarding my getaway from Las Vegas, the newspaper accounts, as always, were partly cockeyed and partly accurate. I did contact the people I knew at Lockheed and borrowed one of their Jetstars to fly out of Nevada. But I never got carried down nine flights of stairs and put on any stretcher, and I never will – unless they’re carrying me out feet first to the graveyard, or I’m too sick to walk, or they’ve drugged me and are taking me away to dump me down an abandoned mine shaft. That last carries the highest probability rating, and if you ever hear that I’ve been carried away flat on my back you can tell the world that it undoubtedly wasn’t of my own free will.

I left the hotel in the back of a panel truck and drove out to the airport and flew down to Nassau. I had done that twenty times in the previous five years, although not to Nassau. Only this time the newspapers found out because my people moved out too. And they made a fuss beyond belief.

You wonder why I’ve cut myself off from people? Why I live the way I live? There’s your answer. I fear people because they’re empty-headed and therefore dangerous. How is it possible that I’ve become like a specimen in the zoo when I’m deliberately not living in the zoo? That intrigues me. What an age we live in. I can tell you, I wouldn’t mind getting out of it for awhile, and I’m not talking about using the cryogenic process to deep-freeze my body. With all the fine research facilities I’ve had at my command I should have stolen a page from H.G. Wells and had my people develop a time machine, a time traveler. I suppose if I sunk my entire fortune into it they’d be bound to come up with something that worked.

Where would you go if you had your choice?

I’d go back to China when they were building the Great Wall, and I’d be an engineer and help to build it, and I’d live a quiet life and die in my sleep. Have my Chinese sons bury me. Or out of curiosity I’d go back to America in 1870, to Texas, to see what the real West was like. That would fascinate me. Two-gun Howard, the Yoakum Kid.

But if I had just one choice, one trip, I’d go forward to the year 3000 and see what was going on then. See if there’s anything left.

You don’t regret your life, do you?

No, that would be a useless emotion. All that I really regret is that I was orphaned young, that I was rich much too soon to be able to deal with it properly, and that I couldn’t have lived a more simple life among simpler people.

And what does it mean to you now to be one of the three richest men in the world?

I’ll bet you or anyone else, including Paul Getty, that I’m not one of the three richest men in the world – I’m the richest. Every one of those Nevada properties which everyone thinks are such a bust is going to pay – and what do you think is going to happen when the United States, as it absolutely must, within the next five years, devalues the dollar by letting the price of gold float to its proper level? Do you know how much gold I’ve got, in the ground and out of it?

You have no idea. Well, plenty. And nobody knows how much real estate I’ve got. Not even me. But I can tell you it’s worth a fortune. I have other investments where nobody knows I’ve got them. I put money into Indonesian oil a few years ago. I’m riding that one out, but it’s a handsome profit so far. Getty’s got an oil company and a collection of paintings. Big deal. The Sultan of Brunei is an out-and-out liar about what he owns. I can tell you, the most conservative estimate I can make of what I own – right now, this minute – is two billion nine hundred million dollars. That’s conservative, that’s on the shallow side.

What’s the top?

Three billion one. And if I wanted to use an optimum figure, including my Indonesian oil, it’s pushing three and a half billion. That makes me nearly twice as rich as Getty. The others, Hunt and the Mellons and Bob Smith, don’t even come close. The one who’s creeping up is Ludwig, the shipping guy. And of course one day someone’s going to invent a computer that the average citizen can use in his home, and a way to write and pay your bills with it and communicate with other computers, and that man or woman will automatically make $10 billion and be on top of the heap. And it will be some twenty-five-year old whiz kid, because the computer industry is a young man’s game.

I’ll change my question. What does it mean to you to be the richest man in the world?

Not a damned thing. Money is of no interest to me anymore. All I care about is that I have a little peace in the rest of my days, and freedom from the seven internal foes of humankind. You remember?

Not offhand, but I’ll look it up. Who are you leaving all that money to that doesn’t interest you anymore?

That’s in my will. Of course I won’t have it published before I die. Nobody knows the contents of my will but me, not even the people who helped me draw it up.

I worked out all the variations, the ways in which I planned to divide my property on my death, and had a dozen typists type them up. I’ve done this several times. I had different sets of different bequests, all sorts of possibilities – I threw in a batch of red herrings. I had each of the secretaries type up a different version of the will, with each clause on a separate page. It was like taking a deck of cards and shuffling them. They couldn’t possibly know the eventual outcome. In one paragraph I’d leave Toolco to the Hughes Medical Institute. In another I’d leave Hughes Aircraft to the United States government, ha ha ha. And in another to my cousins in Houston, or a dog pound in Las Vegas, or a guy who once gave me a lift in the desert when I ran out of gas. When I got all these pages back I threw out what I didn’t want and arranged the right ones in the correct final order, and I had the last page, with my signature, witnessed by people in my organization. They saw only the last page.

The secretaries couldn’t figure it out by seeing which pages were discarded, because I personally burned them and flushed the ashes down the toilet. You can reconstruct the writing on paper that’s been burned, you know. But I doubted that anyone was going to climb down into the cesspools under Los Angeles or Las Vegas to find the ashes.

And I have one more question, if you don’t mind. A naive one.

I know your naive questions pretty well by now. What’s this one: how many people have I murdered in my lifetime?

I just wanted to ask you, after all you’ve gone through, in a long life with many achievements and many sorrows, what you believe in. Do you have a philosophy of life now? A guiding principle?

That certainly is a naive question, but I’ll answer it. I can put it in one sentence. Live and let live. Privacy is all we’ve got – you, me, anybody. You can take any road in this world and if there are other people on it, no matter how crooked that road is, no one will pay serious attention to you except to flatter you and get things they want from you. But people will think you’re ‘normal.’

If you cut your own road, go your own way without inviting anyone along, then everyone in the world will say you’re crazy, you took the wrong road. Because it is your own. You made it. People can’t stand that, unless of course you invite them along – in which case it’s not yours anymore and you might as well cut your losses and start all over again.

Did it ever occur to you that it doesn’t make any difference what road you take, even if there are other people on it, as long as you’re independent? ‘If you are alone, you are your own man’ – according to Leonardo da Vinci.

I like that. It could serve as a motto on my nonexistent family crest. You’ve said something intelligent. Now, why don’t you ask me an intelligent question instead of things like, ‘What’s your philosophy of life?’ and ‘How does it feel to be the richest man in the world?’

What would you consider an intelligent question?

Why don’t you ask, ‘Did you enjoy your breakfast today?’ That’s a question that makes sense.

Did you enjoy your breakfast?

Yes, I did. Fresh fruit is a gift from the planet. And since I’ve reached what’s undoubtedly the final decade of my life, you could also ask me what is my greatest ambition at this point.

What is your greatest ambition, Howard?

To enjoy my breakfast tomorrow.

What about Sai Baba’s question? ‘In the years remaining, if you knew beyond doubt that you wouldn’t fail, what is the one thing that you would do?’ What is that one thing?

Don’t you know?

Not really. Unless it would be to seek enlightenment.

That would have been a magnificent task, but beyond my spiritual capability and the years I had left to me. What I chose to do was tell the story of my life, warts and all. And I’ve just finished.