Howard Hughes (26 page)

You’re always trying to dig up dirt – I’ll give you a little dirt. I’d put Hedy up in one of my rented cottages in Bel Air. I had her under contract at the time. The problem was that in my opinion she was a lousy actress. She may have been a decent actress when she started out, but she had become passé. Her acting technique didn’t measure up. And I couldn’t really find anything for her, so I just kept her in the bungalow.

I used to visit her every now and then, and spend the night with her. Beautiful woman – smooth skin, white like talcum powder. Lovely accent when she spoke English. But she was a very peculiar girl. For example, she was caught for shoplifting a few years ago in Los Angeles. And she stole me blind in that house. By the time I got her out of there the silverware was missing, and a few precious knickknacks – an ivory elephant, for instance, with a broken trunk, a present somebody once gave me. And my favorite golf ball. She didn’t only take things of value – she was a kleptomaniac.

She also had some peculiar sexual notions, which I wouldn’t go along with. She was A.C.-D.C, and she had a certain perversion which – let’s say only a behind man could have gone for it. I refused. I’d just as soon stick my pecker in a wet loaf of bread.

These interviews leave me washed out. Why don’t you talk for a while? Tell me about your life, about your pleasures and your mistakes. You must have some good stories to tell – you’ve led a full life for a comparatively young man.

I’ve told you a lot, here and there.

Tell me some more. See how it feels.

What’s the matter with you tonight?

I’m all in a turmoil inside. Got a cat sewed up in my gut. I’m sorry to be getting at you that way. The point is that I haven’t told the whole truth a number of times. I’ve been thinking about this. I told you on two occasions what I thought you wanted to hear instead of what I knew to be the truth. Maybe it’s your fault, because you seem to expect a certain macho attitude from me.

I guess I’ve also told you a lot of things that I didn’t intend to tell you. But it’s just so difficult for any man to sit down and tell the whole truth about himself. There’s too much that galls. Especially the unpalatable truths that we all have to face. And mine, I assure you, are as unpalatable as anybody else’s.

You’re referring to something that happened with Hedy Lamarr?

No, just other personal things we’ve talked about, I felt a sense of shame, because I’ve been trying to impress you in some way. This is what I meant when I said it was your fault, because you seem to be so interested in sex – you believe that sex motivates people far more than I believe it does. And I don’t understand why I should feel I have to impress you, or anybody.

Just the other day I asked myself why I was doing this. Because it’s going to be published? It will be published only if I allow it to be.

Nevertheless, it’s depressing to recount all this and see your life being swallowed up by a tape recorder. It seems to me, as I’ve spoken to you, the life I’m talking about could be viewed as an unbroken record of things half accomplished, gestures made for God knows what reason. And I mean particularly on the very personal level, and at this stage of my life that’s all that really interests me. Someone very close to me once told me that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. I’m examining my life now, and I don’t like it – and even an examined life, in this case, sometimes seems as if it was not worth living. I feel it all the time these days, and that’s the reason for my being glum, since you asked.

In what ways do you feel you’ve failed?

The simplest thing I can say is: I haven’t measured up to my own image of what a man should be. That image was based on my father. I suppose every man-child grows up with that idea in mind – that he’s got to outdo his father, and I was no exception.

You told me you’d licked that father-image when you took the Hercules off the water.

I licked it in the sense of physical challenge. I outdid my father. I’ll put it to you this way. I know it’s common to every man, but I only live in my own skin. Your problems don’t interest me. That’s probably a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Maybe most men feel that way, and won’t admit it. I do admit it. My own problems are what concern me. If you have insights into them, good for you, but it doesn’t help
me
, because it’s me who’s got to have those insights. And the insights have to be comforting, not unpleasant.

So many times in my life I’ve had flashes of understanding – flashes
that gave me tremendous hope, and made me think, ‘Yes! Now I see what I have to do.’ It may have been something that someone said to me, or just a moment when I had some communion, some osmosis with whatever is going on around us, whatever spirits are in the air – the Great Spirit the Indians talk about – and those flashes really elevated me.

And then day-to-day existence wipes them out, and a week after you’ve had that wonderful moment, you stop, and you look, and you say, ‘Shit, I’m doing exactly the same things I was doing before. No better.’ New Year’s resolutions.

I’m on the wheel of life. That phrase, when I read it, made not much sense to me. But I understand it now. I understand something else, even more depressing, which is that people don’t change. More hundreds of times than I care to remember, I’ve said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve learned my lesson, I’ll never do
that
again’ – only to find myself doing exactly that, whatever it may have been, within hours sometimes. How do you escape from that? What’s the answer? Do you know?

I don’t know the answer. I have the same problem and so does almost everybody I know. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve got myself into a situation where I behaved badly, mostly out of cowardice, because I was afraid to hurt someone, and therefore hurt that person twice as badly by being dishonest. When the mess and shouting were over, I swore to myself I’d never do it again. And yet I did precisely the same thing again.

Well, this may sound callous, but that’s encouraging. It means I’m not alone in this way, as I sometimes thought I was.

The problem is that the learning process is such a slow one that we don’t have enough time. And it’s not even a matter of willingness to change. It’s a matter of ability. I think that the mold we’re cast in goes back to our genes and from then on we’re in the hands of destiny.

I’ve been in a state of depression, and the reasons for that are still with me. And those reasons were – to be blunt – the one or two lies I told you earlier. One in particular. You remember I told you about how I fixed up the Gotha and flew north and broke down on the beach near Monterrey?

Yes. You and Frank Clarke, when you were shooting
Hell’s Angels
in 1928
.

I’ve been thinking about that story and it’s made me squirm. Because, although we did fly up north and did come down near Monterrey, and we did spend the night in Tortilla Flat, with those two girls – for my part, nothing happened.

The four of us were there. Frank was a little drunk and I was sober, but Frank had to screw them both. I couldn’t do anything with mine and she despised me for it, and I despised myself for it.

Howard, all men have bouts of impotence, and the fact that you didn’t tell me the truth about it is common.

Well, I meant this to be an honest revelation of myself – to set the record straight once and for all, so that when I die there will be someone left behind who’s recognizably Howard Hughes, not the figment of some hack’s imagination.

If that’s the only lie you’ve told, it’s not bad at all.

There are more. You asked me once if my father interested himself in my sex education. I don’t remember what I told you, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. Because that’s a sore that’s been festering in me all these years. It’s nothing terrible, nothing I’m ashamed of. And if I tell it, it may make you understand how crude my father was, and what a sad man. And yet also how he loved me, in his way. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word. This goes back a ways…

My father had a little cabin on the coast between Houston and Galveston. Closer to Galveston. He used it as a kind of base of operations for fishing – or that’s what he told my mother.

He used to go down often there for weekends, and of course I knew what he was doing down there. Jesse Jones was down there a couple of times too, and not with his wife. I don’t care about that – that didn’t horrify me in any way. That was just something that my father did, and I considered it his business, not mine. He was a man – I’m really not trying to criticize my father – he was a man with too much energy. He needed too many things. He needed other women, and he never hesitated to go out to get them. He didn’t go out of his way to hide it from me, and I guess for the most part I accepted it.

That’s what this little cabin was used for. On these fishing
weekends he and his cronies would have two or three girls along to spice up the party.

Once they’d run out of booze, and I had to deliver it. This is when I was about fifteen years old. I drove down on a Saturday night. They were playing Red Dog and the girls were sitting around. I intended to turn around and go right back to Houston, but my father said, ‘Stick around, Sonny. Bring me luck.’

So I hung around. When the card game ended I wanted to go, but my father insisted that I drink whisky with him. I think that may have put me off drinking for the rest of my life. I had a few drinks. Most of the men disappeared, went off somewhere. This one man, Hastings, had another cabin nearby. The girl my father was with seemed old to me at the time, but I don’t suppose she was more than twenty-two.

The girl’s name was Colette. It didn’t really fit her. She looked like a Jane or a Mary – do you know what I mean?

My father took me off in a corner. He said, ‘I’ve had too much to drink. I’m going to sleep it off. You stay with Colette and take care of her. I think she’s tired, so show her the spare bedroom.’ He wasn’t crude, although the purpose was obvious.

I was certainly willing. I’m not trying to pretend that I protested, or anything. I got very excited by the whole idea.

I was a virgin, and Colette was a very pretty girl. Long, dark hair, lovely body, and green eyes. I went off with her into the bedroom and she threw off her clothes and then undressed me. Now I’m not trying to tell you some heart-throb of a story that I was impotent and couldn’t hump her. I could, and it was no problem. I enjoyed it. I was fifteen years old and my brains were in my prick. At least that night they were.

I jumped on that girl and away we went. I know she liked it, and when I finished I was lying there on top of her, getting my breath back. Then I realized there was someone else in the room. I turned around. Daddy was standing in the doorway, leaning against the door with a little sweet smile on his face, proud. He’d come in during the action and I hadn’t noticed. He’d been watching, to see how well I did it, and whether I would do it.

I don’t know if the point of it makes any sense to you, but for a long time, every time I was in bed with a woman, I was looking around to see if my father was watching me. I felt he was always there in the corner, leaning against the door, looking at me, and judging.

That time in the cabin near Galveston, did he say anything to you?

He was drunk, and he slapped me on the back, and he said something about me being a chip off the old block. He wasn’t unpleasant to me, wasn’t dirty or anything. He didn’t laugh at me, but I can’t begin to tell you how ashamed I felt. To think he was there the whole time, watching me! If I have any dominant picture in my mind of my father, it’s that moment.

I try so often to recall him in other situations, but he’s always standing there in the door, watching me on top of that girl. For a long time in my life it was a very unnerving thing to remember.

Poor Daddy. He had so much going for him. You know, I don’t think he was an unhappy man. I’m sure he was happier than I was, I mean happier than I am as a man or happier than I was at his age. I’ve lived a lot longer than he did, and that’s a miracle of sorts.

I don’t know why I say, ‘Poor Daddy.’ I suppose if he could see me now he’d say, ‘Poor Sonny.’

You’ve spent time in Texas, so you know the way they speak. I worked hard for a long time to get rid of that southern accent. But what I wanted to say is this, about his name. I told you they called him Big Howard, which pleased him no end, because the way they talked down there, it came out Big Hard. You see?

Yes, I do see. It never occurred to me.

As an adolescent, it was made quite clear to me. His friends made a point of saying it that way, and leering at me in case I didn’t get the point.

It bothered me. And yet, as I said, he wasn’t an unhappy man. Far from it. And people loved him. They don’t love me.

NOW I WANT to talk about TWA and the beginning of my real involvement, because RKO was just a sideshow.

Jack Frye and I were running TWA together and we were doing a good job. By the end of the war TWA stock was selling for more than $70 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. I had bought it in 1939, I think I told you, for $8 a share – then it went up to seventy-five in 1945.

By 1948, however, it dropped to nine dollars a share, which was not just a drop, but a crash. That stock was heading for the pavement and you would have been able to scoop it up with a shovel – or a sponge.

In wartime, planes were flying full. You had to have a priority to get on a commercial airline. Jack Frye made the mistake of assuming that this situation would continue after the war, and he committed my airline to a buying program which nearly broke us.

My mistake was that I had given him carte blanche because I was busy with other projects like RKO. However, I trusted Jack and we got along well. Unlike me, he was a man who knew how to ingratiate himself. He spent a great deal of time in Washington – although our head offices were located in Kansas City – entertaining and making friends with politicians. He was an influential man in Washington by the time the trouble started in 1948. He had a place in Chevy Chase, near Washington – I’ve never owned a house like that in my life. He had an estate on about eighty acres of parkland.

To explain how Jack operated in TWA’s interests, I have to remind you that I had contributed $25,000 to President Truman’s campaign
when he was running against Dewey. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a substantial sum to you, but Truman wasn’t a rich man – sometimes these guys take whatever they can get, and they can be damned grateful for it.

As it turned out, it wasn’t enough. Shortly thereafter, TWA had some overseas route applications pending with the CAB, and Juan Trippe was trying to stop them from going through. He had friends in Washington too. So I told Jack Frye to have a talk to Truman about the routes, and push them through. And if he had to, he could remind the President that I’d personally contributed a substantial sum to his campaign, shoved it right in his hand in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

Jack got himself invited out on the President’s yacht, in the Potomac. Clark Clifford was on board that yacht. He’d been a naval captain during the war and he handled the yacht, made sure Harry Truman didn’t fall overboard without a life preserver. Clark told me later he didn’t really like Truman. Truman wasn’t classy enough for him. Also, Clark Clifford liked shrimps and Truman hated them. Truman said, ‘That’s rich man’s food,’ and he wouldn’t eat them. Clark worked for me later on – he was my lawyer in Washington, but he was really a lobbyist for TWA. He was paid $50,000 a year to see that things went right for TWA, but I can honestly say – and I’m not being vindictive – he earned about fifty cents of that money.

Anyway, while Jack Frye was with Truman on the Potomac he reminded him about the money. Jack said, ‘I was lucky I didn’t have to swim home. The President almost kicked me off the yacht.’

That was one time I felt I didn’t get my money’s worth. Perhaps the mistake I made was I should have given him four hundred thousand, as I did later to Dick Nixon.

I tell you all this background to show you that Jack Frye, although he didn’t make any headway with Harry Truman, was a well-placed man. At least he could get on the yacht. He knew everyone who was anyone in Washington, which was an advantage to me at one time, and proved a terrible disadvantage at another.

Then TWA stock just fell over the precipice after the war, crashing
down to nine dollars a share. The airline was on the verge of bankruptcy. Lee Tallman, the treasurer of TWA, said they needed $17 million to get it off the ground again. I disagreed. I think they were afraid to deal in large numbers. My estimate was that we needed forty million.

That’s when Noah Dietrich came into the picture, and I want to give Noah all the credit that’s due him, despite our later differences.

‘Go to New York,’ I told Noah. ‘Go to the largest and most powerful brokerage house – Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith. Talk to Maury Bent, because he’s the man who swings the weight up there.’

Noah talked to Maury Bent, and Maury talked to a man named Parkinson, head of Equitable Life Assurance Company. It turned out, by sheer coincidence, that Equitable Life at the time was keen to make a major investment in one of the airlines. They had liquidity, and they were looking for a growth-oriented situation in a progressive company. TWA filled the bill. Equitable, within three days of Maury Bent’s approaching them, came up with a guarantee of $30 million cash on a debenture, with a reserve of ten million.

There was a little hook on it, though, which played an important role later on. None of the money was to go for deficit financing. It all had to be pumped into capital assets.

So we had what we needed. And Jack Frye pissed it away. Most of the money went toward salaries and operating costs, but some of it found its way into deficit financing, which was Jack’s mistake. I can’t call it a misinterpretation of the terms of the loan. It was dire necessity, and that thirty million vanished like sweat from your forehead in the desert. That year we lost $20 million.

There was no question in my mind as to who was responsible. Jack was down in Washington entertaining politicians and screwing Russian ballet dancers, and he didn’t have his finger on the button. Some people, like me, are able to control a large corporation from a distance. Jack couldn’t.

There was only one solution: Jack had to go. This pained me deeply, because I knew Jack and I knew his wife, Helen – a lady in every sense of the word. She had married one of the Vanderbilts, and then she
married Jack, and I was very fond of her. I think I worried even more about what this would do to Helen than to Jack.

The problem was, Jack didn’t want to go. He had fought like a gladiator when the board of directors of TWA tried to get rid of him in 1938. I had bailed him out then. Now I was playing the role of the board of directors, and Jack put up the same kind of fight that he had in 1938 – only tougher. And this is where Jack’s contacts in Washington worked against me.

The airlines, even today, are in the grip of the government. The airlines carry the mail, and that mail is awarded on contract. The way you get those contracts is to have friends on Capitol Hill. Jack had those friends. He’d done a lot of favors for them. Not just cash – other things too, like call girls, and even call boys. When the crunch came, and it was Jack Frye against Howard Hughes, Jack Frye had his allies. They didn’t want to offend him, because he knew too much. As soon as I realized that he wasn’t going to step down meekly, I decided I had to fight this as best I could, and with whatever weapons I had at hand.

The major weapon I had at hand, as usual, was money.

So I went to Mr. Parkinson at Equitable Life and said, ‘TWA is in trouble – therefore your forty million is in jeopardy. I’ll bail out the operation, personally, through Hughes Tool. And I’ll pump another ten million into the airline. I have one condition. I want Jack Frye out.’

Parkinson didn’t know whether he could arrange that, but Noah came up with an idea. Because Jack had used some of that money for deficit financing, Equitable could throw the loans into default, which would force Jack out.

Again we faced a problem, which was that until Equitable received the next quarterly financial report from TWA they couldn’t legally default the loan.

Time was of the essence, because Jack and I were already at loggerheads. Christ knows what he would have done in the remaining three months of his tenure. I didn’t wait until that next report came in. I wouldn’t put in my ten million until Jack Frye was out on his ass. This, you understand was to save the airline, because I loved the
airline. I believed in the airline. There was nothing personal in it. Jack Frye was a friend.

Parkinson made a tactical mistake, which you can’t blame him for. He put the proposition to Jack and tried to talk him into leaving for the good of the airline. Next thing we knew, practically all of Washington was lined up against us. The Tong wars in Chinatown are like snowball fights compared to what happened next. This is one of those inside battles that never gets into the headlines, because it demonstrates the possibility of corruption in the government, which of course, as you know, is nonexistent.

The postmaster-general himself, Bob Hannigan, was a friend of Jack’s, and he called Parkinson and TWA.

He didn’t mince words. ‘If Jack Frye goes, your airmail contracts go too.’

Once again the solution was to fight fire with fire. Parkinson, at my instruction, sat down and wrote letters to every member of the board of directors of TWA. He said to them, in effect, that if they turned down my offer of ten million, which meant that Equitable would fall on its ass with their forty million, he was going to pillory every single one of them, hold them responsible, and run them out of American business.

You understand that all this time the airline was losing a fortune every day under Jack Frye’s mismanagement. A few more months and TWA could have gone on the Canadian Stock Exchange, where they trade penny stocks.

Then we got the biggest break we could possibly have had. The pilot’s union decided to strike against us. They didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes, and neither did the newspapers. We couldn’t even meet the payroll of TWA at that time, and then the pilots came along and threatened to strike, which would have shut down the airline.

Naturally I gave it out to the newspapers at the time that I was extremely upset about it – you can’t very well tell the newspapers that the strike is sent from heaven. I think if the head of any large American corporation ever told the truth to the newspapers he should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor by the government and thrown
into a mental home by the stockholders. It’s the First Commandment of business: ‘Thou shalt not tell the truth to the public, ever.’

I made the usual statements, that we were willing to arbitrate and we were immediately going to make an effort toward negotiations, and I convinced the media people that the strike was going to cripple us and we wouldn’t recover for another five years.

This was unadulterated crap, because behind the scenes we were thanking God and the pilots’ union. And we shut down the airline. We furloughed all TWA employees for the entire duration of the strike.

That convinced the Board of Directors of TWA that they had to accept my offer or the whole goddamn airline would go up the creek without a paddle. And they booted Frye out, took my ten million, and enlarged the board of directors with a number of my people on it – and from that time on I was the undisputed boss.

But that was not quite the end of it. Because it bothered me all the time that Jack, who was one of the few friends I’ve ever had, and poor Helen, should have to bear the brunt of all this. He’d made mistakes, but it just didn’t seem fair that a man like that should be thrown out on the streets like a common bum. This is where I made what I consider to be my first major management mistake.

Jack called me, and we sat down in one of my cars on a side street in Kansas City. I said to him, ‘Jack, this is killing me, that you’re out.’ He said, ‘Howard, it’s killing me too.’

I came up with the idea that Jack would still work for me. Because of his influence in Washington, he was an invaluable man. We didn’t have anyone in Washington at the time who was what you might call a lobbyist, and I figured Jack would fill the bill perfectly. But he wanted a salary of $100,000 a year, and a plane at his disposal, and an expense account – which Noah quickly pointed out to me, when you figured that Jack would undoubtedly run the expense account up to the sky, came close to three hundred thousand. I didn’t care. Money was not the important thing. The important thing was to do right by Jack. Because Jack had done his best. It wasn’t good enough, in fact it was awful, but it was his best.

Then came the moment of truth. With Noah it was always
our
money; probably deep down he figured
his
money. He was older than I was, but I think he believed that one of these days I was going to kill myself in an airplane crash and he would take over and run the whole business, and so he was saving the nickels and dimes. Three hundred thousand dollars a year was a lot of nickel and dimes.

Noah hadn’t liked the idea of my hiring Jack to do this job in Washington. He sent me a telegram: ‘It’s me or Jack Frye. You can’t have us both.’

I mulled it over, made my decision, and my decision was my mistake. I chose Noah Dietrich over Jack Frye. I called Jack and said, ‘It’s no good, Jack, it won’t work.’ I turned down a good man, a friend, for Noah Dietrich, who was nothing more than a glorified bookkeeper. And that’s one of my deepest regrets. I thought at the time I needed Noah more. I made an unsentimental business decision and it was the wrong thing to do. Business decisions are to make money or save money. But why did I need to make more money or save more money? I was rich beyond most people’s understanding. Money was already beginning to corrupt me and I was too blind, or too stubborn, or already too corrupted, to see it. Jack Frye never spoke to me after that.

The $10 million that I then put into TWA was one of the best investments I ever made. That gave me total and absolute control of the company. Not just through my owning more than half the stock, but also through the fact that more than half the guys on the board of directors worked for me. There was one little hook in it – which didn’t seem important then, but made its impact felt years later – and that was an indication that if for any reason TWA got into financial trouble due to my control, Equitable Life could ask me to appoint them as trustees of my stock.

But the big problem at the time was that my $10 million wasn’t a straight loan. There was a clause in the agreement that gave me the right to convert the money into TWA stock at any time I wanted – that is to say, during a specified period, at the current market price. In other words, I had a three-year option, similar to a warrant, to convert $10
million into stock at average closing market price the ten days before my actual conversion. When TWA was selling for nine dollars a share, my ten million would have brought me well over a million shares of the stock. But I didn’t buy. Like an idiot, I waited.