Howard Hughes (10 page)

At first, when I got involved in the market, in 1927, at twenty-one, I had visions of myself as the boy wonder of Wall Street. I thought I had the golden touch. I wanted my own ticker-tape machine set up in my suite at the Ambassador Hotel, where I was living at the time. Western Union didn’t have a line running out to the Ambassador or anywhere near it. So I rented an office on Figueroa, near Seventh, where there was a line. I hooked it up myself. I drove down there in the middle of the night – because the whole procedure was illegal – and with my
own two hands I laid this whole thing from downtown Los Angeles along the trolley power-line to my room at the Ambassador Hotel.

But somehow I got the terminals reversed, and this immediately showed up on the Western Union Board as a red light flashing. They sent a couple of workmen to the Figueroa Street office that I’d rented. I wasn’t there at the time, but they found Noah Dietrich in the office, standing there like an idiot with the glass dome of the ticker-tape machine in his hand but no ticker-tape. He called me, and I rushed up there, and paid these guys some money to keep them quiet. When they left Noah told me I had the terminals reversed, and so I hooked the terminals up again properly, and the machine ran perfectly, and my ingenuity only cost me about $4 million when the market crashed.

Did you stay in the market after that after the crash in 1929?

I got out for a while. I’ve been back in since. I owned a little TWA stock at one time. Half a billion dollars’ worth, to be exact. And I had some Northeast airlines stock, Atlas, RKO, and a few others. But I rarely speculated again. Nineteen-twenty-nine took the wind out of my sails, and I decided there were better ways to lose money than in the market.

But even before the market debacle, I put my money in some strange ventures. My father had a Stanley Steamer, one of the first cars in Houston, and I was always taken with the steam car. In fact I still am – it’s never been developed, never showed its true potential. And so in 1928 I decided I was going to build one.

I already owned two – a Stanley and a Doble. The Doble was a great machine, but from my point of view it had two big flaws. For one thing it took anywhere up to five minutes to get up a head of steam, and the garage could burn down in that time. Also you couldn’t get more than seventy or eighty miles to a tankful of water. The motor would burn anything – kerosene, wood, buffalo chips, anything you wanted to throw in – but the water boiled away.

I went out one day to the California Institute of Technology and had a talk with Dr. Richard Millikan – he was president of the university and a Nobel Prize winner – and told him I had work for some of his
engineers. I wanted two real bright boys to come and work for me and develop the Hughes Steamer.

He found two young kids named Lewis and Burns – I don’t remember their first names – and I told them I wanted a steamer that would get up a head of steam instantly, or as close as possible, and that would give me four to five hundred miles without having to refill the boiler. I put them in a garage near Caddo’s headquarters on Romaine Street and I turned them loose.

People are always saying that I won’t let people alone, won’t let them do their work. They complain that I interfered in the operation of Hughes Aircraft and TWA and RKO. Damn right I did, and for good reason.

Lewis and Burns came up with the machine. But in the first place, it would cost $50,000 to make each automobile. I’m sure you’ll agree that in 1928 there wasn’t much of a market for an automobile at that price. But we might still have gone ahead with it on a trial basis. I figured I could sell fifty to a hundred of them a year, and I would have had a new car for myself whenever I wanted one.

They showed me the prototype for a jazzy-looking five-passenger convertible. It was stripped down to the metal, because I hadn’t told them yet what color I wanted it painted. They told me they had a
flash-firing
system worked out where they could get up steam in less than thirty seconds. I was certainly impressed. I asked them how they solved the water problem and Burns said to me, ‘We just made the whole body one big radiator, full of tubes.’

I looked at them – these bright, eager Cal Tech kids – and I said, ‘You mean the whole body is a radiator, including the doors?’ Burns said, ‘That’s right, Mr. Hughes. You can go 400 miles on a tank of water.’

‘So tell me what happens,’ I said, ‘if a car runs into me. Into my door, for example. Won’t I got cooked? Boiled? Burned to a crisp?’

They scuffed their toes like a couple of country boys caught in the pasture humping daddy’s favorite sheep. I walked away, called Noah, and said to him, ‘Turn that goddamnn thing into scrap metal. Project’s finished.’

It cost me $550,000 to have that car developed, made, and scrapped. That’s what happens when you turn technicians loose on a project without close supervision. I realized that right there and then, and I was only twenty-three years old, the same age as Lewis and Burns. But realizing and learning are two different things. It took me twenty years and about $200 million before I really learned.

The experience with the steam car did help me, however, when a crisis arose with the Tool Company in 1932. We were number One, like Hertz, and another company, like Avis, was creeping up from the position of Number Two.

I’ll have to give you some background. Toolco, after my father had invented the cone bit, was way ahead of everybody else in the drilling industry. There was virtually no competition the way we had the patents sewed up. And then a guy named Clarence Reed, who worked for my father, quit Toolco and swiped a set of the blueprints for our bit. He started a company called Reed Roller Bit.

That gave me a lesson very early on in life about keeping things locked up. People have accused me of being oversecretive and being a maniac about security. There was no security then at all – that was the age of innocence – and this was an early example of industrial espionage.

But it backfired on Clarence Reed. When we found out, back in 1922, Reed tried to tell everyone that he’d only taken the blueprints to be sure that when he made his own cone bit he wouldn’t infringe on our patents. He could tell that to a ten-year-old child, but my father knew it was cowplop. He’d come home and say, ‘That fucking Reed,’ which upset my mother because she didn’t like my father cursing in front of her like some wildcatter just turned loose from Spindletop on a Saturday night.

He sued Reed and won the case. There was a $50,000 cash settlement of the lawsuits and, as part of the penalty for the patent infringement, one of my father’s companies – the Caddo Rock Drill Bit Company – was awarded a percentage of Reed Roller Bit’s sales. Since Reed Roller Bit had to send us a check every month, we knew precisely how much they sold and where the competition stood.

But later, by 1932, because I was away in Hollywood, Reed Roller Bit came creeping up on us. I could see clearly that if their sales continued to increase at the same rate as in ‘30 and ‘31 they’d soon be the Hertz and we’d be the Avis of the drill-bit business.

I sent Noah Dietrich down there to find out what the trouble was, because Toolco was the backbone of my little empire. I told him that if Reed Roller Bit was selling nearly as many bits as we were, there had to be a reason for it, and that reason had to lie in the bit itself.

Noah disagreed with me. Noah thought it was bad morale and my being involved with making movies in Hollywood. But I said, ‘It’s in the bit, and you get down there and find out if it’s better than the Hughes bit, and if it’s better,
why
it’s better.’

Noah did that, and he found out their bit was a better bit than ours because it used a ball bearing. We didn’t have a ball bearing in the Hughes bit, because a ball bearing, my father had believed, wouldn’t stand up under pressure and would break apart after a while. But the Reed bits in 1932 weren’t breaking apart, and that’s what nobody could figure out.

I said to Noah, ‘Get my engineers to cut that Reed bit in half and find out what makes it tick.’ Sure enough, that’s all they had to do. They found out that the Reed ball bearings were soft, made of lead, and wouldn’t shatter. All we had to do was redesign our works for ball bearings of a similar type to the Reed bit. We held every patent there was.

But at the same time an even bigger problem cropped up. There was a palace revolt among my people down in Houston. Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose wanted me out. They felt that the place was being run by an absentee manager, and they were hamstrung in making important business decisions. The Toolco executives said to Noah, ‘We’re putting our life’s blood into this company here in Houston, and that kid up there in Hollywood is humping the starlets and making movies.’

Through Noah the Toolco executives made me an offer: $10 million in preferred stock if I’d get out and stay out. They’d pay me 5% on that preferred stock, which meant that I would have had an income of half a million dollars a year.

They didn’t see how I could possibly turn down such an offer.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said to Noah, ‘they want to make a fucking remittance man out of me!’

You could still have made movies and done whatever you wanted. You’re talking about 1932, and $500,000 a year then would be equivalent to ten million now.

I wasn’t interested in half a million or ten million. I said to Noah, ‘Holliday and Montrose can take their convertible stock and shove it up their ass. If they want to quit, that’s fine with me, I’ll find other people in Houston to run the company the way I want it run. I’m not giving away the Toolco, no, sir, and that’s final.’

Nobody quit. They were doing too well.

You may think I’m power-mad because I always want control. I’m not power-mad, but I do believe in power. Power can uplift, not just corrupt. If you have the power over a company or over a situation, and you know what you’re doing, then you can achieve amazing results which otherwise would be impossible. That’s proved by the fact that I’ve become, over the years, a billionaire. I can’t be modest about that. I had some breaks, like with the sale of my TWA stock, but the breaks mean nothing unless you’re there to seize them. Not physically there – that means nothing. I mean mentally there. And the billions didn’t fall from the sky. I went out and got them. I didn’t believe that crap that John D. Rockefeller handed out, that wealth was ‘a gift from heaven, signifying “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”’

Wealth is an abstraction: a means to power and independence, nothing more. I got it through sweat, and daring, and foresight, and stubbornness, through knowing when to be patient but mostly knowing when to take risks.

As a result, I’m a billionaire three times over. But you can take my word for it – the first billion is the hardest.

IN THE LATE 1920s I was pretty well known, not only in Hollywood, but all throughout the United States, and a great many magazines and newspapers had nothing better to do than run stories about me. My personal habits and idiosyncrasies seemed to exert an amazing fascination on the American public, and I’ll never quite understand why – like my public image of the unshaven man in a rumpled suit and dirty sneakers.

Was that how you dressed in those early days?

Not at all. I was a fashion plate. I got all my clothes from Savile Row.

You mean you went to London?

London came to me. Twice a year my tailors would send over men with swatches of samples and I would tell them what I wanted. They had my measurements – I didn’t change much over the years and they’d go back and make a dozen suits at a time for me. My shoes were all bench-made on Jermyn Street in London.

Wearing sneakers came later, after it occurred to me that I really didn’t have to impress anybody. I also developed the worst case of athlete’s foot known to man, and sneakers are the only things I could wear with any comfort.

What about the stories they told about you not carrying cash?

Absolutely true. There are men out there that would knock you off for three dollars and fifty cents. I never carried money, not then or later, and I let it be known that I didn’t.

In my early years in Hollywood I decided to build up a bit of a reputation as an eccentric. I thought maybe it would protect me from
robbers. I once gave both Ray Holliday and Noah Dietrich instructions what to do if they got ransom notes from a gang who claimed to have kidnapped me. I said, ‘Don’t pay a cent without my approval. If I think I’m in real danger of getting my throat slit, I’ll put down the amount to be paid on the ransom note, and I’ll sign it, and right down with my signature will be the letters P.D.Q. In that case, and in that case only, pay the ransom.’

Was that a code?

It meant ‘Pay Damn Quick.’ You’re laughing, but the United States is a violent country. I had a full-time bodyguard for a while, a former Texas Ranger. I figured they’re the best. I put him up in an apartment over the garage on Muirfield Road. He had his pocket picked of his first month’s salary. Then one day he was practicing quick draws in back of the house under the magnolia tree, and he shot himself in the foot.

Ella came to me and said, ‘Howard, this man is incompetent. You don’t need a bodyguard. You’re a young man. You’re tough, you’re able.’

I knew she was wrong, but since this guy was such a jerk I fired him and pretended to Ella that I was doing it for her sake. I was a better shot than the Ranger was, although hunting wasn’t in my catalog of interests.

My private life during the early Hollywood years was about on a par with my stock market experience and my steam car. In 1929, when I was still just twenty-three years old, Ella and I were divorced. She had actually left me during the filming of
Hell’s Angels
, because I was never around. I knew it was coming. I gave her a settlement of close to $1.5 million, and she went back to Texas.

What were the reasons for the marriage not working?

Ella wanted to live as a lady, which meant I had to live like her idea of a gentleman, and I’d discovered that I wasn’t interested in that kind of life. It paralleled my mother and father’s marriage. I got married at the age of nineteen because I thought it would make a man of me in the eyes of the world, and then one day I woke up to the fact that not only wasn’t it true, but that the world didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

I could give you a dozen reasons for my marriage and another dozen reasons for my first divorce, and eleven of them might be true, but none
of them would be precisely true. The real reason I got married is because I wanted to get married the way a child wants something that catches his eye. He says, ‘I want it.’ He doesn’t know why. Human nature is to want and to not want. The reason I got divorced is because I didn’t want to be married any longer. What we want one season, we don’t want the next season, but usually we’re stuck with it and we haven’t got the courage or wherewithal to haul ourselves out of the hole or the rut. It’s as simple as that, except people don’t like simple reasons and simple answers. They want complicated answers. They’re easier to deal with.

I just didn’t want to be married anymore. Ella and I lived on different schedules. I’ve never been at ease socially. I was interested in pursuing my passions, and my passions were movie-making, flying, inventing –

And women?

Since I know you’ve done your homework, I’ll tell you that there was one other woman during that period who meant a great deal to me. She was an actress named Billie Dove. In fact she starred in one of my films,
Age for Love
. I’d met Billie while I was still married to Ella. The marriage was breaking up and I was ripe for a serious affair. Not a fling, like with Harlow. A love affair, with all the drama and thrill and potential for disaster that those words imply.

I fell in love the way only a young man can fall in love: to the point of lunacy. Shakespeare called love a form of madness and he knew what he was talking about. I was surrounded by hundreds of girls in Hollywood, all of them beautiful and almost all of them willing, but for a while I was blind to everyone except Billie Dove.

It happened at first sight, corny as you can get. I saw her in the studio cafeteria. I walked right up to her, which was definitely not my habit. I said, ‘Who
are
you?’ I was twenty-three years old. She was a very beautiful girl.

Falling in love isn’t something a man can help, and if he could explain it like you break down a chemical formula, then it wouldn’t be love. Billie wasn’t a sexy woman, the Yvonne de Carlo type. She was quiet, and underneath that quiet she was sexy as hell. Still waters run
deep – sometimes too deep. I wasn’t proud that Billie could twist me round her little finger because of my physical desires.

If you were really in love, why did it break up?

Sanity and day-to-day living restore the balance. I’m not sure whether that’s for better or for worse.

In a way, the end of that affair was far more painful to me than my broken marriage. Billie was roaring along with her career, and at that time I was extricating myself from the movie business, and I knew I would be away from California a great deal. We drifted apart.

That still doesn’t make sense.

I’ll tell you the rest of it some other time. Anyway, the unfortunate aftermath of this was that I was hurt, and lonely for quite a while, despite the fact that I was surrounded by people. Some men can just shrug it off and go on to a second love affair, and a third and fourth, but I couldn’t. I tried one with Carole Lombard, but it didn’t work. I was always shy with girls and it took all my courage to speak to one of them for the first time. So you can see how bowled over I was by Billie when I saw her on the line at the studio cafeteria. I certainly didn’t have the so-called social graces – you could never have called me a charmer.

Why were you so shy?

As a boy I was as tall as I am now. I reached my full height, six foot three, by the time I was seventeen. I didn’t go in for sports except golf, and I felt awkward and gangling, conscious of my height, I wasn’t at ease in my skin. I’d trip over my own feet. I mean it literally. I don’t think I stood up straight until I was thirty years old. Until then I slouched and stooped because I didn’t want to seem too tall. I didn’t want people to have to look up at me, because I thought they resented that. I know that Noah Dietrich disliked me for being tall, and whenever he had the chance, when he felt his position was secure enough, he made fun of me a little bit – that I was gangling and thin and had a neck like a giraffe.

At one point I started going to a gym in Santa Monica. I went almost every day for a couple of weeks, worked out on the bicycle machine, tried to build my arms with weights, but eventually I began to suspect
the place was full of homosexuals. They used to stand around flexing their muscles and admiring themselves in the mirrors.

One evening there was a power failure. I had just finished working out and was in the shower. The minute the lights flicked out there was so much shrieking and giggling coming from these guys around me that I fled, all lathered up with soap. I grabbed my clothes and got dressed and ran out into the street, dripping wet. I caught a cold. That was the end of my muscle-building period.

You never had any childhood homosexual experiences?

Are you kidding? When I was a boy in Texas, a fairy would have been run out of the state on a rail. When I went to Hollywood, I was just barely twenty. I wasn’t Errol Flynn or Rock Hudson, but I believe it’s fair to say I was considered handsome. Hollywood then, as now, was full of homosexuals. I don’t know why they latched onto me particularly, maybe just because my interest in women may have seemed halfhearted. I certainly did stand up a lot of girls. I made dates and didn’t keep them, and a lot of girls walked out on me because I didn’t spend enough time with them. Then too, although I was married, I didn’t see much of my wife, and maybe that looked funny to people.

Some years later, one time, Gina Lollabrigida walked out on me. This was typical. I’d brought her over from Italy to star in one of my pictures. Finally she came to my bungalow. I had a cramp and had to go to the john. I had magazines lying around in there. One of then was a technical journal about flying. I was sitting there, poking through it, and the next thing I knew it was an hour later and Gina was gone. She had walked out. I can’t blame her. She was hot to trot, and who the hell wants to hang around an hour while some guy vanishes to take a crap?

Spyros Skouras, the movie magnate, once said to me, ‘Howard, you really and truly like women? I’d heard you were a fag.’

It was a fact that I was being approached by men far more often than I should have been in normal circumstances. This was early in my career, when I was producing my first three or four pictures.

I went to a Hollywood party at Mary Pickford’s house, and I had to take a leak. I went into the bathroom and Ramon Navarro – he was a
famous actor, a latin-lover type – stood there right behind me, chatting away to me. I was thinking about something else. I must have said, ‘Sure… yes… sure.’ When I buttoned up, he tried to grab me by the pecker.

I lost it. I popped him one on the jaw. Poor guy, he backed off and apologized, and after that he left me alone. So did everyone else who was that way inclined. The word got around that I was liable to react violently.

What about the stories that you employed a man to look for beautiful, interesting young women and make dates for you?

Sad to say, they’re true. I hadn’t the time. It wasn’t my nature to make quick contact. There was more than one man who did that for me. I had Pat DiCicco for a while, and then Walter Kane and Grady Reed, and then Johnny Meyer, and once there was a fellow called Bill Weston. But things didn’t work out well with Weston. He tried to blackmail me.

He was the former husband of some movie star, and he got me a date. She was a very sweet girl but she was only fifteen. Weston knew this and I didn’t, and you wouldn’t either if you looked at this girl. We spent the night together and in the morning she casually told me how old she was.

I put on my clothes in a hurry, called for a car, and said, ‘Nice to have met you. So long.’

Bill Weston came around soon after that, asking for a loan of $25,000. He said he had to make a down payment on a house and there would be other payments later, which made it clear to me that it wasn’t a loan and it wasn’t just $25,000.

I was taken aback and I said, ‘Bill, I have to think about this.’

I thought it over and talked it over with Noah. I called Weston the next day and said, ‘Meet me down at the railroad station at 7 P.M. sharp.’ When he arrived I was standing there beside the Twentieth Century Limited, which was due to pull out in fifteen minutes. I’d called him in his office, you see, and told him to come straight from the office. Meanwhile Noah had arranged for several of my people to go to his apartment and pack his clothes, and all his personal belongings, and those items were in a compartment in the train.

I handed him an envelope and said, ‘This is for you.’

In the envelope there was a ticket to Chicago. ‘That train leaves in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘Please get on it. Your luggage is inside. Don’t ever come back to California again, because if you do, something really bad, possibly even fatal, will happen to you.’

You didn’t give him any money at all?

Besides the train ticket there was $10,000 in cash in the envelope. My speech, of course, was pure bluff, but he bought it. He got on the train. I figured ten grand was cheap to get rid of him.

By making movies I’d realized my first ambition. Flying came next. But there were a lot of hurdles to get over. Recklessness was one of them, and I suppose I never cured myself of it until it was too late. I was a quick learner and a damned good pilot in more ways than one, and I took chances. I was young. I was invulnerable. I had my share of crashes, and in the end they ruined my health. My second crash, as I’ve mentioned, was in the Waco 9 during the filming of
Hell’s Angels
.

When was the first crash?

That took place in the same period, early in 1928, during the preparation for filming. Ruth Elder, a well known aviatrix, was flying with me. I met Ruth in one of the air meets, a Bendix Trophy Meet, and we developed a companionship rather than a love affair. In a sense, of all the women I’ve known, with one exception many years later, I was better friends with Ruth than anyone.

That time in 1928 I was flying a Sopwith Snipe, a World War I
ex-combat
plane, and Ruth was in an old Jenny. We were flying tandem from Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley where we’d been getting things ready for aerial combat scenes. I detoured a bit to fly over Los Angeles.