Howard Hughes (13 page)

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.

IT WAS THAT same year, 1938, that I became involved in one of the major episodes of my life, which was scheduled to last for twenty-eight years. That was Trans World Airlines.

TWA had started long before that, in the Twenties. It was the first company that ever had a transcontinental flight across the United States, advertising ‘coast to coast in forty-eight hours!’ You started off in New York, took trains to some point in the midwest and then a series of hops by air, slept at night – you only flew during the day – and got to Los Angeles in forty-eight hours.

It wasn’t TWA then. It was TAT, and they’d been formed from several airlines: Western Airlines, Standard Airlines, and an outfit called Maddux Airlines. They all got together under Paul Richter and Jack Frye. I knew Jack Frye from way back, and he was the man I really worked with. He became a good friend. He was one of the original Thirteen Black Cats, the first stunt pilots out in Hollywood.

TWA was the first airline to fly coast to coast without rail transport as part of the itinerary. It was just a few weeks after they started operations that they abandoned the railways. Jack Frye said, ‘We’re an airline and we’re going to fly all the way.’ And I don’t think it took them more than twenty-four hours then, still flying Fokkers.

The American aircraft industry in those days wasn’t what it is today. We had to go to Europe for a lot of our planes, which I felt right from the beginning was a mistake. I felt we had to lead. And we wound up leading until recently, when we found ourselves fast falling behind
because of those politicians in Washington dragging their asses about the SST.

I had already flown once as a copilot, back in the early Thirties, for American Airways, the forerunner of American Airlines. They flew Curtis Condors, which were the first sleeper planes, and we also had the first stewardesses. I flew Los Angeles to Atlanta, Kansas City, and Cleveland.

Why did you take a relatively low-level job like that?

I wanted the experience. I had it in my mind even then that one day I was going to start an airline – I didn’t know I was going to buy one. I was dreaming then of Hughes Transoceanic Airlines. And I wanted to learn from the ground up. The one thing I had never done was fly a commercial airliner, so I took the job with American Airways, using the pseudonym Charles Howard. That’s because I didn’t want people gawking at me all the time and saying, ‘There goes Howard Hughes. Go up to the cockpit and have a look at the boy wonder.’

But I didn’t make a secret of it to my people. I told them I was taking a job as a copilot on an airline. This wasn’t like my trips to Ethiopia, or the time I went down to Lambarene to see Dr. Schweitzer, or my Cuban trips with Ernest Hemingway, or my trip to India. This was something that was known to the people who were close to me.

I flew only a very short time for American Airways, because I was a quick learner. I watched passengers’ reactions and I wrote it all down in my notebook. I had a new notebook by then and I made sure not to lose that one.

It hadn’t been my plan to buy into TWA, but I knew Jack Frye, who was president of the airline, and one day he called me and said, ‘Howard, I need twelve million dollars.’ A lot of stories have circulated since then about why Jack Frye needed this money, but none of them have ever told the truth. The truth is that the Board of Directors of TWA wanted to kick Jack out.

What had he done?

There’s always a guy ready to take over and reverse the pecking order. That’s all some people live for. I’ve been through that and I’m
sure Jack was going through the same thing. I don’t know what he’d done or not done. But I knew Jack, and he was a good man.

He came to me and he said he could keep control if he could get hold of a block of stock that was being peddled around by Lehman Brothers, the banking house in New York City. TWA didn’t have much stock outstanding – less than a million shares – and Lehman Brothers had about 120,000 shares that were for sale. Jack figured if he picked up that block he’d have the controlling interest and they couldn’t boot his ass out of there. And so he came to me for twelve million.

I said, ‘Okay, Jack. It’s a small fortune, but the money is yours. The only thing I want is to run the show with you.’

He thought it over for about ten seconds, and then he agreed. I guess he figured for $12 million cash it was worth letting me in on my terms.

Then a funny thing happened. I had a lot on my mind: the war was looming on the horizon and I was developing the H-1, which was supposed to be the big Army pursuit plane, and then it went to the Japs. And we had troubles down at Houston with Toolco, and Henry Kaiser wanted me to go into the car business. What with one thing and another, after I made my arrangements with Jack, they slipped my mind.

Jack called Noah Dietrich one day and said, ‘I’m Jack Frye, and where’s my money? Where’s that check? Lehman Brothers hasn’t gotten the check!’

Noah said, ‘What’s this all about?’

Jack became annoyed, understandably. Noah said he’d have to talk to me about it, which he did. I remembered. I was mortified. ‘Shit, Noah,’ I said, ‘I’d forgotten the whole thing.’ Noah asked me how much I’d agreed to pay, and I said, ‘Ten dollars a share.’

‘The stock isn’t worth ten dollars a share,’ Noah said.

‘Noah, you have no vision. It’s worth more than ten dollars a share. That stock is going to be worth a hundred dollars a share in three years, if I run that airline.’

‘That’s not the point, Howard. I had a feeling from talking to this
man Frye on the telephone that he’s in a tough spot, and he needs that money from you badly. If you hold out for a week or so, if we can spin him some story that Toolco has to approve the transaction’ – because the funds had to come from Toolco, since I didn’t have a dime of my own – ‘and you’ve gone off the deep end a bit, and the board of directors of Toolco says, ‘Okay, but we’ll only pay seven or eight dollars a share for it,’ you can get it for that price.’

‘Noah,’ I said, ‘that’s not the way to do business with friends.’

But he talked me into it. Maybe I wasn’t focused at the time. I said, ‘Noah, you handle it in your own inimitable way.’

I don’t buy that. You were the boss. It was your money, and you were the one who said yes or no.

Okay, I’m not trying to slough off all the responsibility for that tricky maneuvering. I knew what we were doing. Noah got back to Jack Frye and spun this yarn about the board of directors of Toolco having to approve the deal. I don’t know whether Jack fell for it, because if Jack had an ounce of brains in his head, he’d know that when I said, ‘Shit,’ the board would squat and strain.

Be that as it may, Noah was right, and very soon thereafter I got the stock for eight and a quarter a share.

Jack Frye was a little sore at me. He felt that I’d gone back on my word, and it bothered me because in a sense he was right, and I’ve always regretted that I let Noah talk me into that. It made bad feeling between me and Jack Frye to the point where I had to appoint Noah to the board of directors of TWA after I’d taken over. Not that Noah really had any say up there, but he was a spy for me. He never got along well with Jack, because Jack always blamed him for the change in the original buying price from ten to eight and a quarter.

Eventually, because Jack disliked Noah so much, I made Noah step down from his position. But I asked him to keep in touch with a few executives up at TWA who were friendly to me and were willing to give out inside information about what Jack was doing. We set up a system where they funneled information to Noah and he funneled it to me. I had my pipeline to the head office. You understand that at the time,
even though I was principal stockholder in TWA, I didn’t have a position. I never had a title.

How was it possible for you to be principal stockholder if you only had $8 million worth of holdings?

I bought more. And of course by the end of the war I wasn’t just the principal stockholder – I was running the airline. When I had free time I devoted a great deal of it to studying their problems and making suggestions. Not to be immodest, in the 1940s I was the principal factor in the growth of TWA as the only competitor that could stand up to Pan American, the python of the American air carriers. Unquestionably, TWA was the most progressive airline in the United States. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll disagree with me on that. Among other things, I got Eero Saarinen to design our terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. I told him roughly what I wanted, what I thought a terminal of the future should look like, and I said, ‘Go do it. It’s your baby.’ It’s probably the most beautiful and functional airline terminal that’s ever been constructed.

Concerning this pipeline to the head office, why were you so suspicious of people?

I had reason to be. I was suspicious of Noah too. One of Noah’s secretaries was on my payroll at the time. I had to know what Noah was doing, because Noah had completely free rein, except on the decisions. He could have stolen me blind. There’s an old biblical saying: ‘Who will watch the watchers?’

It was also around this time, shortly after I bought into TWA, that I designed the plane that came to be known as the Constellation. It was the plane that, more than any other, changed the history of commercial aviation.

It made long-distance flights possible, in relative comfort, for large groups of people. Today that’s commonplace, but then it was a breakthrough.

Jack Frye helped me with the design, and Bob Gross was in on it too. That’s why Lockheed finally built it. Consolidated had turned us down, and then we went to Bob Gross at Lockheed. I got the idea for
the plane when I was breaking the crosscountry record, Chicago to California, in the Northrop Gamma. I was so goddamn uncomfortable up there – the oxygen equipment wasn’t working, I was gasping for air, the hard pieces of the seat were jabbing into my spine – that I said to myself, ‘By God, when I finish this I’m going to design a plane that can carry people in comfort, nonstop from coast to coast.’

I really said that – it’s not a line from a movie script. I said it. I always talk to myself out loud. It’s not the habit of a lunatic, it’s the habit of a man who wants to remember what he thinks.

And that ship was the Connie. The most successful commercial piston-driven aircraft that ever flew. A radical departure from everything that went before.

In what way?

If you want to get technical, the fuselage had a curvilinear design that cut down the drag factor in an entirely new way. And it also worked as an airfoil. That had never been done before in an aircraft of that size. The Constellation carried a payload of 6,000 pounds and cruised at 250 knots. She was a very stable ship with a very soft ride. It went through a hell of a lot of changes after it was operational, got stretched and stretched until I thought, Jesus, soon you’ll be able to board the ship on the flight deck and walk aft and you’ll have walked from New York to Philadelphia. Bob Buck, who became TWA’s chief pilot, flew the first flight on regular passenger services. He said it was the finest aircraft he’d ever flown. And you know who else flew a Connie, one of the very early Connies, even before Bob Buck? Orville Wright. He took it up with me one day out of Miami. It was meant as a kind of tribute to him. I wanted to do something for him. He was a very old man then, on the way out, and I thought it would be nice for him. He flew it himself for over an hour.

While we’re on the subject, did you prefer piloting propeller planes like the Connie, or did you prefer jets?

A piston-driven aircraft is a delight to fly. A jet is a headache – far more complicated, a very mechanical operation, a power plant. A prop plane, especially the smaller ones, like the F-11 or the Sikorsky, the
Lockheed Vegas or even a Northrop Gamma – that’s something you can feel. With a plane like that, you can dance. You can hardly love a jet but you certainly could – at least
I
could – love a prop plane, and I’m sure that most pilots who have flown both would agree with me.

Actually I loved all the planes I designed and flew, but never for very long. I was fickle. You could say I had a harem of planes if you want to talk about it that way. I didn’t actually get tired of them, but I always had at least three or four that were operational, and I used them all. Of course when I was building something from scratch, like the H-1 or the F-11, I put my heart and soul into it to the exclusion of everything else and to the exclusion of any other aircraft I was using at the time – so you could say those were very intense love affairs.

Anyway, on the first flight of the Connie, I broke the transcontinental record again, although it’s really a matter of absolutely no significance. The record has been broken a hundred times since then and it will be broken a hundred times more. I wasn’t setting out to break any record. I was just setting out to prove that the Constellation was a plane that could carry people in comfort from coast to coast, nonstop. And it did. But in the light of what we have today, in the light of what we’re going to have in future planes, in the history of aircraft, my record-breaking flights in the Constellation will be a footnote on page twenty-nine. My contributions to the industry were more basic than that.

You know, I almost didn’t make that first flight in the Connie. We were ready for takeoff from Burbank when two young women came running out in the lights of the field. It was late at night, about three o’clock in the morning. One of them was a girlfriend of mine named Fran Gallagher, a gorgeous dark-haired woman, really talented and passionate in bed. She’d brought a girlfriend along – I seem to remember that her name was Valerie, and she was another knockout. So I had a ladder lowered and went out, and got involved in conversation with Fran and her friend Valerie. Fran wanted to come along – she said, ‘If you let Valerie and me come on this flight and the three of us are alone in the cockpit, Howard, this will be the most memorable flight of your life.’