Howard Hughes (4 page)

H: …I have to protect myself from myself. Do you understand?

C: Yeah, I understand. I think.

H: You think – well, never mind. That’s the way I am and I don’t give a goddamn what you think, or anyone else. Don’t be offended. I’m just being frank.

H: It’s a sexually dirty story, and she’s still a famous actress, so I’m not sure I want it included in the book. I’ve given you enough dirt already. Let’s just say… this puts me in an awkward light, that’s the trouble.

C: Well, you can tell it and then we’ll –

H: Now don’t nag me and then sulk. My God, I’d hate to be married to you. [And then he told me the story.]

There were lighter moments too. The following dialogue took place during the first taping of the June sessions; to understand the
references you have to know that Hughes for many years wore tennis sneakers instead of shoes. He gives the true reason in the text of his autobiography, but for nearly two decades the habit made him the butt of jokes and reinforced the image of his eccentricity.

He was discussing the beginning of his commitment to build a flying boat, the
Spruce Goose
or HK-1, at the time when Henry Kaiser was his partner:

H: And so Henry and I set up this little paper corporation. We put up a few thousand dollars apiece. Henry was very useful to me, not only because of his know-how but because he got along with those guys in Washington. They already had me on their shitlist… Wait a minute. I’m burning up with curiosity and I have to ask you. Is that supposed to be a joke, or what?

C: No, I have to wear them. It’s an old pair of tennis sneakers that my wife cut down for me. I have a sore here on the top of both feet from the sandals I wore in Nassau. The sandals I was wearing were new, and the strap opened the skin. Remember I was wearing a bandage? When I got back to Ibiza it was infected and I couldn’t even wear shoes – the pressure kept making the infection worse.

H: You’ve got to be careful with something like that.

C: My wife convinced me it needed air, and so she cut down these sneakers and I’ve been wearing them ever since, everywhere I go. See?

H: No, no, that’s all right. Don’t come closer.

C: Why did you think I was wearing them?

H: I thought it might be a joke. Some kind of private way of making fun of me.

The second batch of interviews were by far the most productive and covered the most ground in terms of time and depth. Hughes backtracked now and then to re-tell stories of the early years he felt he had not satisfactorily covered during the first sessions. He sometimes referred to notes, which I rarely had the opportunity to see, and we would often discuss in advance the territory we wanted to cover during a sitting. This time too I was better prepared, having plowed through all the available material on his business life: the
machinations at RKO, Hughes Tool, Hughes Aircraft and TWA. Dick Suskind had joined me for part of the trip, backstopping me with information and going over my notes after each session to see what might have been omitted by Hughes and what questions I might ask in the next session to fill in those gaps. His presence was invaluable to me; but at one moment it caused a near-disaster.

Howard, who was invariably late, had arranged to contact me at an out-of-the-way motel near Palm Springs, California. ‘I’ll be there between ten o’clock and midnight,’ he said. Suskind and I were sitting in my motel at about 9:30 p.m., playing chess, when there was a knock on the door. ‘It can’t be him,’ I said, and opened the door. The scene was memorable. Suskind, who eats organic food, lifts tons of weights each day at whatever gymnasium is available, stands 6’3’ tall, weighs 280 pounds and looks like a veteran NFC offensive tackle, is obviously not the sort of man who can pretend to be a waiter delivering an ice bucket. Hughes knew of his existence but had said he didn’t want to meet him.

The three of us stood awkwardly by the door. Finally I said: ‘This is Dick Suskind. He’s doing some research for me, uh, on the project…’

Howard stood for a moment, then said quietly, ‘Well, I suppose you know who I am.’

It was Suskind’s moment to claim ignorance and make a swift getaway, but he missed the signal. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, ‘and I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Hughes.’ He started to extend his hand, then drew it back quickly; he’d remembered my telling him Hughes was not a keen handshaker.

The man stood for a few agonizing seconds – agonizing for me, in any case. I can see now that we must have looked like three miscast characters in an Oscar Wilde drawing-room comedy; we had all forgotten our lines and a hush had fallen over the theatre. He finally reached deeper into his pocket. His right hand came out with a cellophane bag, which he pushed toward Suskind. ‘Have a prune,’ he said.

Dick took and examined a prune. ‘That’s an organic prune, isn’t it?’

‘Correct,’ Howard said. ‘The other kind are poison.’

For three or four minutes they discussed the merits of various organic fruits and vegetables and the superiority of natural vitamins over the chemically-processed kind. When the subject was exhausted, Dick said he had to go. The door closed behind him.

‘I’m sorry, Howard,’ I said immediately. ‘You told me ten o’clock. We’d just had dinner and we were sitting around playing chess –’

He waved his hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. Bright guy, very clear-thinking. Doesn’t smoke, I noticed – I had a good look at his fingertips. Good man to have around as a bodyguard. You may need one. Let’s get to work.’

The final session of interviews occurred on the East Coast of Florida during the months of August and September. I was staying in a motel bungalow on the beach and Howard was staying in a private home some twenty miles to the north. In June he had given me the typed transcripts of the Bahama interviews and I had spent six weeks checking out the details and correcting some names and dates. Howard refused to identify the transcriber-typist, except to refer to him good-humoredly as ‘The Abominable Snowman.’

‘I can understand why you call him that.’ I said. ‘He must have typed with all four paws.’ Whoever it was, he could neither type or spell. There were four notations in nearly three hundred pages to the effect that ‘tape broke; sorry; part missing.’ The phrase ‘unclear’ had replaced a dozen names and phrases, and the overlaps that naturally occur when two men are speaking were usually omitted. In general the manuscript was a mess. I said, ‘Howard, it won’t do. You’ve either got to find someone else or you’ve got to let me do it.’

He eventually decided there was no one else he trusted other than The Abominable Snowman, but he admitted the Snowman was incompetent. So I was awarded the job. It was coolie-labor, brutally boring. By the second week in Florida I was sick of hearing Howard’s voice repeating the same phrases – to catch a muttered monologue or a sharp exclamation the tape had sometimes to be run backwards and forward half a dozen times – and even sicker of hearing my own badgering and apologetic questions. Between transcribing and wrapping up the interviews I was virtually self-imprisoned in the
bungalow. Now and then I would step out and swim some laps in the pool under the sulky September sky or drive over to Route 1 to work up a sweat banging golf balls on the driving range, but during those weeks I had no time to learn the first name of a single Floridian other than the maid. Moreover, for the first time I had the precious tapes in my possession, which made Hughes uneasy. ‘If you see a man with a cane hanging around outside the bungalow,’ he said, ‘don’t jump on him. He’s there for your protection. (He meant, of course, for the protection of the tapes.) If there’s anyone else hanging around who doesn’t have a cane, tell your bodyguard to jump him or call the security guard. But get it straight – if he’s carrying a cane, he’s okay.’

‘This is Florida, Howard. There are thousands of people who walk with canes.’

‘Not men under thirty five years of age.’

In September we reached what ultimately proved the major decision about the book: the switch in character from authorized biography to autobiography. Howard, at the onset of the project, had wanted a biography because he felt that the outside objectivity would balance what otherwise might have been called by unfriendly critics an apologia; he was always meant to retain control and final approval or the text, but my authorship would obviously set up a system of checks and balances. However, when I read the mounting pages of transcript, I realized that the same objectivity, and more, had been achieved through dialogue and argument. I felt that what he had achieved was an honest and dramatic personal statement. Given a minimum amount of editing and re-shaping, it would be a viable concept in autobiography. To tamper with it might be a historical crime. I made the suggestion to my publishers, who were enthusiastic about the change to an autobiography but less so when I used the words ‘
book-length
interview.’ It was a form, someone remarked, that never had much luck in the marketplace. But they agreed to read it before they came to a decision.

Howard agreed instantly to the change. He had said what he had wanted to say. ‘It’s my autobiography,’ he said, ‘and I’m damned if I’ll
have you or anyone else monkeying around with my words. I’m not a writer, I’m a talker – at least I’ve been a talker for the last six months. You go up to New York and tell them that’s how I feel.’

We met once more on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and then I flew to New York, lugging two copies of the thousand-page transcript. As per our secrecy agreements they were read by the various publishers in a five-day marathon session in the living room of my suite at the Hotel Elysée, while I sat around emptying ashtrays and ordering pots of coffee. I heard no one cough, I saw no one’s attention begin to flag. The opinion was unanimous. The book-length ‘interview’ worked.

Go with the book as is, they said.

I flew south once again for a wrap-up interview, and Howard drafted what became the Preface to this book. Then I left for Europe. A copy of the transcript had been placed in escrow in a safe deposit box at the Chase Manhattan Bank in case I crashed en-route. But I reached Ibiza safely, doffed my capped to my wife, chucked my children under the chin, and went back to work, because there remained the massive job of editing and organizing the transcripts. Since certain significant discussions had taken place while the tape recorder was not running, Howard agreed to let me work from the many notes I had taken and weave these into the manuscripts at the appropriate places, provided that I reproduced his words with reasonable accuracy. This I did, and he checked them out at a later date, approving or disapproving, changing them or letting them stand; but such interpolations form a minuscule part of the manuscript.

To keep the flow of the narrative and also remove a certain inanity from the dialogue, I also eliminated as many of my questions as possible. For example, in the midst of a monologue about his tenure as boss of RKO, if I interrupted to ask, ‘When did such-and-such incident take place?’ and he replied, ‘The summer of 1949,’ I deleted my question and put into his mouth the words: ‘This took place in the summer of 1949.’ Similar questions such as, ‘But how did you feel when so-and-so left you?’ have been deleted, since usually the reply encompassed the intent of the question and rendered the latter
gratuitous. Certain personal exchanges have also been omitted; but I have retained many of them because they give the character of the man and triggered some unusual exclamations and opinions. Nothing has been added that Howard didn’t say or that I didn’t say. All the footnotes (and the Appendix) are my own responsibility; I hope the reader will keep in mind that Hughes in his Preface remarks that he doesn’t agree with all my commentary.

The major editing was done in the interests of a reasonable chronology and clarity. A human life is as much thematic as it is chromographic and any man relating his own history tends naturally to wander through time and space. One thought sparks another: the telling of a tale that took place in 1930 in Hollywood may remind him, for whatever reason, of something that happened in Las Vegas in 1965. This was certainly the case with Hughes – in this instance I’m referring to kidnapping attempts – and I made little effort during the interviews to check the free flow of anecdote and recollection. But in the final editing I shifted some things around to achieve a more chronological narrative.

However, there was a quality of mounting and cumulative revelation in the original interviews which I had decided was an integral part of the way Howard Hughes had told his life story, and to sacrifice that for the sake of chronology would have meant missing the point of the whole exercise. Hughes on several occasions told stories and later corrected them, or deliberately left a gap which he filled in when the mood suited him. In these instances the method again revealed the man, and I have not tampered with the way he worked his way round to nailing down the truth as he saw it. He says in his Preface, ‘I believe the reader will see I have tried very hard to tell the truth,’ and the revelatory and corrective passages in the text constitute a proof which I had no right to destroy.

When the cutting and pasting was done and the book had reached a near-final form, I found a number of anecdotes, conversations and lengthy statements of opinion that seemed to have no obvious historiographic slot in the narrative. They took place at various times and referred to different periods; some of them were in response to
stories I had heard about Howard which I retold to him, so that they were more dialogue than narrative and would lose their meaning if the form were bastardized. Rather than omit these bits and pieces, I pulled them together into a section called INTERLUDE: CONVERSATIONS AND OPINIONS, which follows Part III of the book. The arrangement of the book into four parts, by the way, is my responsibility and does not necessarily conform to the three major interview sessions. The breaks in the text, however – the unnumbered chaptering and the spaces separated by three asterisks (***) – generally represent either a separate night-session of talk or a switching-off of the tape recorder.