Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

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LET’S BEGIN AT the beginning. For me that was Christmas Eve, 1905, in Houston, Texas. That’s when I was born – only forty years after the Civil War ended, to put things in proper perspective. I was an only child. My mother wanted more children but she couldn’t have them. She wasn’t even meant to have me. I was a surprise, or so they told me. A welcome surprise, I think. My parents had great hopes for me.

My father was a gambler, a high-roller. He took me out one time to Jakie Friedman’s place, a gambling hall way out on Main Street when that part of Main Street wasn’t even in Houston proper. I was seven or eight years old, just chin-high to the craps table. It was late for me to be up, but I have a vivid memory of that smoky room, those green-shaded lights, and Big Howard, in a sweat, rolling the dice.

Big Howard is what they called my father. I was Little Howard, or Sonny. The name, Big Howard, fit my father in every way: he was larger than life, and either he was rolling in money or he and my mother didn’t know where the next bottle of French wine was coming from.

Wildcatting – drilling for oil on short-term leases – was the biggest gamble of all in Texas, and that’s what Big Howard loved most. He went up to Sour Lake, hit it big there, then lost everything at Batson when the field turned to water. This was before he invented what came to be called the Sharp-Hughes drill bit, which became the basis for the family fortune. Until then we didn’t live in one place very long and it wasn’t until the manufacture of the drill bit got going that we settled down in the house on Yoakum Boulevard, and that’s the only place – to this day – that I can think of as home.

In 1916, when I was ten years old, my father and his partner, Walter Sharp, were drilling for oil at a dusty place called Pierce Junction. They had leased the land for sixty days because Big Howard was sure there was oil there. But he had to give it up as a dry hole when he hit hard rock with the fishtail bit, a chisel-faced cutting tool they all used in those days.

After that he drilled at Goose Creek and the same thing happened – they hit hard rock the fishtail bit couldn’t penetrate.

My father was fed up, so he and Walter Sharp came up with the first crude designs for a high-speed rotating cone bit with one hundred and sixty-six edges. A few nights later, in a bar in Beaumont, Big Howard got to talking with a man named Granville Humason, a millwright. Humason had been thinking along the same lines as my father and Wally Sharp, and he’d made some sketches on a sheet of paper. He had a little model of the device too.

These sketches and the model went well beyond what my father and Sharp had been contemplating. My father never hesitated. He bought everything from Humason for $150 cash that he hauled out of his money belt and slapped down on the bar. Humason signed a receipt which meant that the designs were the property of my father and Wally Sharp.

Did Humason become their partner?

No, Humason was naive, or a fool – it comes to the same thing. He let them buy him out completely, and three weeks later my father filed the patents, and with the first tool bit he went back to Goose Creek and brought in the well he couldn’t bring in before. Then he went back to Pierce Junction and did the same thing. He improved the drill and patented all the improvements a hundred different ways, and later he invented a gate valve and a disc bit for gumbo shale. He offered that bit to the government in 1917 for boring between trenches, but the damn fools turned it down.

He used to deliver the drill bits wrapped in burlap or newspaper, because his patents weren’t secure yet. The rigs were deserted when he got to them. None of those roughnecks were allowed to work on them until the bit was down in the hole and out of sight. He made most of his money leasing the drill bits, and he said to me, ‘Sonny, this drill bit is your bread and butter money. Don’t ever do anything to jeopardize it.’ And I never did. That became a religion for me.

I take it that your father had a great bearing on your life.

Most fathers do, although most men can’t admit it. He was born in Missouri, but he spent his youth in Keokuk, Iowa. As a kid he was thrown out of half a dozen schools. There was a particular way he wanted to do things, and it didn’t always match up with the way the people who ran those schools thought things should be done. Nevertheless, he got into Harvard, and graduated, and became a lawyer before he became a gambler and a wildcatter. He practiced law for a while, but he once told me he never finished law school, he bought the degree. He went into lead mines too, in Joplin, and he was hunting for silver in Mexico at one time; he was a telegraph operator and then a reporter in Denver. A jack of all trades, and if you discount his losses at the gambling tables, a better businessman than I am.

My father wanted money, and he got it. He wanted a fine home and he got that. And after my mother died, he wanted high living and he got that too, until the day he dropped dead. I was close to him when I was very young, before he invented the cone bit, but after that he was too busy for me, and I became a lonely kid.

My mother was from Kentucky. Her maiden name was Allene Gano, and she was the daughter of a judge. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, against all odds and the doctor’s warnings, she got pregnant again. She began to miscarry in the fifth month, and they rushed her to the hospital. In those days the conditions were far from antiseptic. They were close to criminal. The hospital covered it up and never let out any of the details. I think the doctors cut an artery by mistake, but I’ve never satisfied myself as to the exact circumstances. All I know is that she died on the operating table of a hemorrhage. I was seventeen.

Before that, when the tool company was founded and money began to flow in, my mother joined the Harmonic Society and the Houston Heights Literary Club, but my father wouldn’t have any part of that.

‘Won’t you join, Howard?’ she asked him. ‘It will enrich your life.’

‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘I’m rich already.’

She tried to get him to dress well. By then he bought his clothes in New York, and he was always stylish, but it wasn’t her idea of what a gentleman wore: it was too modern. He wore a fob and not a watch chain, and she thought that wasn’t dignified. He wore a straw hat in April, and my mother said, ‘Howard, you know you’re not supposed to wear a straw hat until the first of June!’

He had a white linen golfing coat and it reduced her to tears when he wore it. She’d bought him a striped flannel coat, which she considered correct for a Texas gentleman. But he said, ‘Flannel is too goddamn hot.’

She was always fussing over me. You couldn’t eat gingerbread because you got worms, and meat had to be cooked until it was practically shoe-leather or you could catch hoof-and-mouth disease, which drove my father up the wall because he liked his beef blood-rare. Buffalo Bayou overflowed one year and my mother said, ‘We can’t eat fish now. When the water flowed back into the bayou it brought dirt.’ And no pork ever, because she’d had a cousin in Kentucky who died of trichinosis.

Once she caught me eating cornbread and she stuck a wooden spoon down my throat to make me vomit it up. She believed you got leprosy from eating cornbread – some quack had said that, and my poor mother believed him. She wanted to rush to me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. My father yelled, ‘Leave that boy alone! You’ll make him crazy!’

Mama was not a Texan; she was Southern gentility with a touch of Eastern attitudes tempered by French Huguenot blood. She didn’t like frontier ways, and Houston was still in many ways a frontier oil city. I resented certain things about her – particularly her concern for me. When I was seven or eight years old we moved to a new neighborhood. The first few days we were there I spent most of the time in the garage, tinkering with a radio.

My mother said, ‘Sonny, why aren’t you out playing with the other boys?’

I said, ‘I’d rather be here, Mama.’

The truth is that I didn’t know the kids in that neighborhood, and I was uncertain of myself and didn’t want to go out and meet them.

One day Mama walked into the garage and said, ‘Come with me.’

I went, and there on the sidewalk were three boys from the neighborhood. She had seen them nearby, playing Cowboys and Indians. She announced to these boys, ‘This is my son Howard and he’d like to play with you.’

It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my childhood. I played with them for a little while. My mother was watching from the parlor window. Finally I just ran back into the house.

It was a long time before I forgave her for that. She was a sensitive woman in many ways, but she was so overprotective that I think of her as a Texas version of the proverbial Jewish mother. If she had lived longer I could imagine her saying, ‘Help! My son Howard the billionaire is drowning.’ And she would have been right, because in later years – from the age of thirty-five to sixty – I was drowning. Drowning in what had always been the breath of life to me. Drowning in money and power.

I was called ‘Sissy’ by the kids at Christchurch, which was a Houston school I went to, run by a Miss Eichler, a prim and proper lady. I didn’t curse, I’d run away rather than fight, and I played the saxophone, which was not the usual hobby for a kid living in Houston in 1920. In my mid-teens I had a collection of saxophones that I kept in a beautiful box of circassian walnut. I had six or seven of them – a beautiful little soprano sax, a baritone, a few tenors, even a basso profundo.

Another reason I wasn’t very popular is that I had a serious hearing problem. I had measles when I was small, and that’s what started it. By the time I went to Miss Eichler’s, I couldn’t hear properly. In those days they may have had hearing aids, but my father would never have let me wear one because he didn’t want to know I couldn’t hear properly: that didn’t fit his image of his only son. People used to say I was a shy boy, but a lot of that shyness came from the fact that I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Then later, in 1936, I had a bad dive in a Northrop Gamma, the plane I used to break the transcontinental speed record, and it aggravated my condition. Six or seven airplane crashes over the years didn’t help.

I have various types of amplifying equipment which make things easier for me, not only because I don’t like to wear a hearing aid, but also because it’s not really very effective. The condition of my inner ear is special. I have sensitive skin, and the hearing aid irritates the back of my ear. Besides, the electronic gear attracts germs and infection. Several operations have been considered, but the risk was always that I’d lose my hearing completely and go stone-deaf. So I prefer to hear what I can hear and to hell with the rest of it. Most of it isn’t worth listening to.

I never made any bones about my deafness. When I went before a congressional witch-hunting investigation committee in 1947 I had an amplifier, but no equipment is really good enough to give a man perfect hearing. I sat there in the Senate, and sometimes I couldn’t hear a word of what the inquisitors were saying.

I told the senators: ‘Speak up, please, I’m deaf.’

I didn’t say, ‘I’m hard of hearing,’ and I didn’t say, ‘I have a hearing problem.’ I said, ‘I’m deaf.’ I don’t mince words.

Some doctors, including Verne Mason, who used to be my private doctor until he tried to have me put away in a mental institution, said that the deafness might be in part psychological. They may have been right, because there are times when I hear better and times when I hear worse. When I’m depressed or preoccupied, it’s true I don’t hear as well. Make of that what you will.

But it wasn’t only because I had poor hearing as a child, or because I played the saxophone, or because I was shy, that the kids in school thought of me as a sissy. The problem was really that they and their parents were always comparing me to my father, and Big Howard was about as far removed from a sissy as you could get.

You couldn’t challenge my father – he would beat you at anything. He owned one of the first fine automobiles in Houston, a Peerless 35-horsepower. He rebuilt it himself down at Wally Sharp’s garage and he used to race in it. Some colonel in Dallas claimed he had the fastest car in Texas and could beat anything on wheels, and that’s all my father had to hear – he roared up to Dallas and bet this man $500 he’d beat him in his Peerless, and he did, at sixty miles an hour over a dirt track in the year 1920. He loved speed, and I came to love it too.

He used to keep a cash fund down at the police station in Houston, locked up in the chief’s safe. He was haring around Houston then in the Peerless, and in a Stanley Steamer, and when he got picked up for exceeding the speed limits he’d tell the cop, ‘Take it out of my bank account down at the station house.’ They loved that. Texans loved my father. He was a man’s man.

He was happy to pay off the law but he hated paying taxes. (I certainly share his views on that.) The income tax law came in around 1911, and some of my earliest memories are of my father yelling about ‘the goddamn government squeezing me out of my hard-earned money.’ He would back me into a corner and lecture me on how the country was going to the dogs, going to turn socialist. I couldn’t have been more than nine years old, but he tried his best to convince me that the income-tax law was going to ruin him and every other businessman in the country.

‘Sonny, am I right or wrong? Are these taxes fair or is it the beginning of the end?’

‘You’re right, Daddy,’ I’d say, ‘they’re not fair’ – because that’s what my mother told me to say when he got hold of me like that.

In 1919 the whole family visited California for the first time. My father was starting a branch of the Hughes Tool Company in Los Angeles. My Uncle Rupert invited us and introduced us out there. He was writing for the movies then, although he had already made a name for himself with a biography of George Washington. It was pretty exciting for me as a kid, going out to the West Coast, because even as early as that, Hollywood meant only one thing to me: movies. I’d been to see many of them at the nickelodeon in Houston when I was a kid. Rupert took me around to the studios, and I loved it.

In 1921 we went out to California again. That second time I went only with my father, and he put me in the Thatcher School, just north of Los Angeles in Ojai. I was fifteen. That trip, although I didn’t fully realize it, was due to the fact that my father had said to my mother, ‘I need a long vacation from you and marriage, and I’m taking Sonny.’

I was aware that things weren’t right between my parents. There was an atmosphere of bitterness in the house, and on more than one occasion when I was alone with my father, who was usually a talkative man, he would become silent and moody. Once I was in the workshop with him on a rainy day. He stood at the window watching the rain come down, and I could feel the bitterness oozing from him like pus.

He said to me, ‘When you grow up, Sonny, make sure you find a woman who doesn’t pick holes in you and try to change you, and tell you how to dress and what not to say, and tie you down with a ball and chain.’

I couldn’t cope with that. I certainly couldn’t sympathize with him openly, or even inwardly, and I didn’t dare defend my mother to him because I wouldn’t have known how to do it.

My mother never mentioned any of these problems to me. She was a repressed woman. I realize now that my mother loved me more than she loved my father. In a sense I had taken his place as the object of her love. My father knew this; he was a warm-hearted man, and my mother presented a very cool exterior. Many times I saw my father throw his arm around her shoulder and try to be affectionate, and she would stiffen up. I guess she knew she wasn’t the only one, anymore, who was the object of his affection, and over the years this had hurt her too much, and she crawled into a shell. But I have to be fair to Daddy too: he had a wider capacity for love, and if he loved many people it didn’t diminish has love for the few he loved the most.

Out in California I could see what my father was doing: there was. always a pretty woman around. We stayed at Mickey Nielan’s house in Hollywood. That was Marshall Nielan, the film director. One day Daddy went out with Mickey Nielan and left his Buick there in the garage, and I decided to play hookey from school and take a little spin in it. I had a girl with me, not a classmate but a waitress from one of the joints around there. I wasn’t having an affair with her –I was still a little too young and unsure of myself to fool around that way. Although according to my father I wasn’t too young. In fact he thought I was a little backward in that department.

Had he made any attempt to introduce you to sex?

Yes, he made an attempt, but I’d rather not talk about that – not yet.

I was with this girl, driving around in my father’s Buick. I was going to show her one of the film studios, the old Metro lot where Uncle Rupert had taken me on my first trip two years before. But we drove up to the gate and they didn’t know who I was – the name Howard Hughes didn’t mean anything then – and the guard wouldn’t let me in.

I was embarrassed, because I had given this girl a big line about my uncle, and I couldn’t even get past the guard at the Metro lot. To make matters worse, on the way home I banged into a traffic stanchion and put a dent in the fender of the Buick. This didn’t please my father, until I told him about the girl, and then he eased up and said, ‘Okay, Sonny, it was for a good cause.’

But the fact that I couldn’t get into the studio was a memory that stayed with me. In later years, when I owned RKO Pictures, I often remembered that there was a time in my life when they wouldn’t even let me past the gate at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer I mentioned that incident to Louis B. Mayer when I wanted to buy MGM from him, and we had a good laugh about it. He thought I was joking at first about wanting to buy his studio and then when he realized I wasn’t joking he didn’t take it well. He didn’t like the idea of a twenty-one-year-old telling him he wanted to take over MGM.

After Los Angeles I was sent East to the Fessenden School in Massachusetts, because Big Howard figured it would open the door for me to Harvard. It might have, if I’d been interested in going to Harvard, but I wasn’t. By then I wanted to fly airplanes. That was one of my two great ambitions, right from the beginning.

I was at Fessenden when I first flew, but even before then there were barnstormers down in Texas flying Jennies and Avros and other old World War I crates. I didn’t get to go up in any of them; my first flight was actually a present from my father. In Cambridge one time he asked me what I wanted most if Harvard won the crew race against Yale, and there happened to be a barnstormer there with a seaplane, offering rides for five dollars. I said, ‘A ride in that seaplane.’ Harvard won by half a length and my father made good on his promise.

During that flight I was breathing down the back of the pilot’s neck, jumping around, yelling, ‘Go faster, sir! Please go faster!’

The back of his neck got redder and redder. Finally he turned and said, ‘Sit the hell down! I ain’t about to kill myself for some dumb rich kid.’ He was from the Deep South. When we landed he cooled off a bit, but he told me something then that I didn’t forget for a long time. ‘When a man knows his job,’ he said, ‘let him do it.’

I took that to heart. But the trouble, as I found out, is that most men don’t know their jobs.

I was only at Fessenden for a year, and then I went out to California again and studied engineering for a semester at Cal Tech. That was when my mother died. I took the train back to Houston, and Big Howard wanted me there with him, so I transferred college to Rice Institute.

I was nineteen years old when one day the dean called me out of a physics class.

He didn’t mince words. He said, ‘Young Mr. Hughes, brace yourself. Your father’s died.’

Big Howard had had a heart attack. He was in his office – he’d been partying the night before – and he keeled over, dead on the spot. He was only fifty-four.

How upset were you by his death?

Very, although I hid it for many years. I’m just beginning to understand, at the age of sixty-five, how profoundly my whole life was influenced by my father.

The most obvious way was that he made me rich. Not so long after he died I inherited most of Hughes Tool – everyone called it Toolco, and still does – because Big Howard had bought out Walter Sharp’s share in 1912, after Mr. Sharp died, from the Sharp family.

After the funeral I was still in something of a daze, but it began to clear when the family lawyer called me into his office. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘I guess you realize that since your mother’s passed away too, and you’re an only child, that you’re your father’s principal heir.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I kind of figured that.’

But those were just words; I didn’t really know what it meant, and the lawyer was smart enough to realize that. So he explained to me that, in theory, I now owned seventy-five percent of Toolco.

‘What do you mean, “in theory”?’ I asked.

‘You’re a minor. Nineteen years old. The laws in Texas are a little peculiar regarding inheritance when a minor is involved. You and the rest of the family will have to get together and work things out.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘give me a little time to think about it.’

He was glad to do that, and we went into a waiting period, during which I began to make a fool of myself in almost every way possible. I wanted to stand in my father’s shoes, wanted people to think that I was a chip off the old block. I got my hands on a lump of money, cash that my father had kept around the house for emergencies – a considerable sum of more than twenty-five thousand dollars.

I carried the cash around with me in a briefcase. I spent some of it in a showy way, shopping at Levy’s and Kiam’s in downtown Houston, and then one day I bumped into this oilman, a wildcatter named Shepard who had done business with my father. I’d seen them together on several occasions – my father had a little place near Galveston where he and his friends used to go fishing on weekends. Shepard was an old roughneck who’d struck it rich a couple of times and then blown it on dry holes. He had one of those Southern faces, with the cross-hatched neck and the red leathery cheeks with the veins showing, and a certain blue-eyed brutal quality.

Shepard invited me up to a room in the Bender Hotel for a crap game. A few of the other men had also been friends of my father’s, but I should have spotted them for what they were. It was certainly no friendly game. If I knew it at that time I wouldn’t own up to it, and they hit me for better than twenty thousand dollars.

I had a cramp in my gut when I left that hotel, and I had to stop dead in my tracks when I got outside the room. I doubled over, held myself around the middle until the knot went away and I could limp out of the lobby. I’ve talked to people in Las Vegas since: Nick the Greek and other professionals have shown me how a man with a slick pair of hands can do anything with dice or cards and you’d never see it. There’s a certain poetry of motion there, but I wasn’t feeling very poetic with twenty thousand bucks down the drain.

These men went on operating in Houston, and a couple of weeks later some other loser complained, and they were taken to court. One of them confessed, or had it beaten out of him, that they’d also taken twenty grand from me with a rigged deck.

I was called into court to testify. It didn’t take me five minutes to decide that no man who called himself a Texan would snitch on even outright thieves like these. Besides, they’d been my father’s friends.

I told the judge, ‘No, sir, Your Honor, it was a straight game, and I don’t remember how much I lost but it wasn’t anywhere near twenty thousand dollars.’

The other losers had been bought off, and my testimony allowed these men to go free.

My friend Dudley Sharp – he was my father’s partner’s son, and we used to pal around together – told me I’d made a mistake. ‘These men should have been jailed or run out of the state.’ And some other people even accused me of cowardice.

Soon it became time to deal with my inheritance and how the Tool Company was going to be divided and run now that my father wasn’t at the helm. As I said, I was the heir to 75% of it, if I could get over the problem of being under twenty-one. I tried to think what my father would have done, because that’s what I wanted to do.

He had always said to me, ‘Don’t have partners, son, they’re nothing but trouble.’

That made things clear, and I decided to try and buy out the rest of the Hughes family – various cousins and uncles who owned the other 25% – and gain total control. A rough estimate was made of the company’s worth and it came to something under nine hundred thousand dollars.

But the first thing that happened was that the rest of the family challenged that figure, said it was far too low, and it looked like the thing could drag on forever once the accountants and the lawyers got their noses into it. By the time they’d gone through litigation the fees would have made us all poor.

I thought things over. I may have been a nineteen-year-old kid but I was able to look ahead into the future. In 1925 I believed in technology and I believed that the automobile industry was still in diapers. Henry Ford was just going into mass-production. If you put ten million more cars on the road, I thought, you’d need gasoline to make them run. You needed crude oil to make gasoline, and you needed the Hughes drill bit to find the crude oil.

I decided I had to get rid of the rest of the family, and that required a two-pronged assault. It was like a military campaign on two fronts. The first thing I needed was money to fight the war against the family and to pay them off, and so I went to the banks. The president of the Texas Savings Bank, Oscar Cummings, was the man who really swung his weight behind me. He’d been a friend of my father’s, but there was more to it.

He said to me, ‘Sonny, I’m giving you the money because I like the way you behaved in that Bender Hotel incident. I like the fact that you didn’t whine and snitch and send those men to jail. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I have to admit that one of those crooks was my cousin.’

I borrowed $400,000 from Texas Savings, pledging my inheritance as collateral.

That was the first step. The next thing I needed to do was get myself legally declared an adult, as opposed to a minor – and of course my relatives who owned the other 25% of Toolco were adamantly opposed to that happening. They still wanted to run that company. They saw that they would have another two years before I reached the legal age of twenty one, by which time they could… well, I don’t want to accuse them of being thieves, but surely they figured that they could do a hell of a lot better with the company than I could. Their attitude was: what does a snot-nosed nineteen-year-old kid know about business?

As a matter of fact I didn’t know much at all. At this point, I think, stubbornness and momentum carried me through far more than any reasonable intelligence. But I did know enough to hire a powerful lawyer, Norris Messen, and I went to court against the family. The judge – an old upright Texan who wore a black string tie – was a close friend of Oscar Cummings of the Texas Savings Bank, whose cousin I’d declined to send to jail.

I won the case. Technically the judge couldn’t declare me an adult, but under a provision of the Texas Civil Code he was able to declare me competent at the age of nineteen to handle the business affairs of Toolco and enter into contractual agreements as though I were legally an adult.

And that’s exactly what I did. The cousins and other relatives couldn’t control anything with their measly 25%, and they kept squabbling among themselves, which I’d counted on, and finally I made them all a good fair offer for their shares. I wound up paying a total of $355,000 to all of them. That took about six months to negotiate and wrap up, and at the end of that time – still nineteen years old – I became sole owner of Toolco, about which I knew hardly anything.

If they hadn’t sold out to you, how much would their $355,000 be worth today?

Probably in the neighborhood of $700 million. But you can’t think that way. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a marketplace. Nobody would sell anything to anyone else. There would be no progress.

Anyway, now I was sole owner of a thriving company. It finally occurred to me: in my ignorance, and at my age, what was I going to do with it? I hadn’t the slightest idea how to run it.