Howard Hughes (19 page)

I fought to get her down. Glen Odekirk was up there in an A-20, an attack bomber we were using as a radio plane, spotting me. I tried like hell to get in touch with him. Glen was the man I trusted most in the
world. I couldn’t get through. I managed to get Santa Monica air tower and told them, ‘For Christ’s sake, clear the airwaves! Get in touch with Odekirk and tell him to get a report to me on what the hell’s happening with this plane!’ I still wasn’t sure the landing gear had retracted properly, and if I was breaking up outside I couldn’t see it.

None of this made any difference. It was too late. I went down in a hell of a crash, right in Beverly Hills. I was trying for the golf course. I thought if I could make one of those long fairways, I could maybe have brought her down in one piece, kind of eased up to the lip of the green. But I couldn’t do it. I chopped up a couple of houses and the plane caught fire. Naturally, I didn’t know what was going on. All I remember was coming down hard, and they told me afterward that I was trying to crawl out and this marine sergeant saved my life, pulled me out of the wreckage.

I felt grateful to him, and later I gave him a job. He had to go off to China first, he was still in the Marine Corps. But after his tour of duty I sent him down to Culver City, got him appointed assistant head of security, in line for the top post. I sent him down with a note to Personnel that said: ‘Don’t fire this man, ever.’

When he pulled me out, I was in pretty bad shape. A number of broken ribs, a crushed lung, burned-up face, and my left hand has never been the same. The only time I ever played golf again, and it was a sad performance, was two years later in Ethiopia, when I came out of the bush. I couldn’t even come close to my handicap.

After the crash, the doctors said I had less than a fifty-fifty chance. But I guess I just wasn’t ready to die.

I knew I was going to make it when I suddenly got the inspiration for a special bed. It showed me my brain was still working the way it should. The bed was simply a gridwork with each square of the grid moved by a separate motor. This was so that I could shift my body without breaking into a cold sweat each time from the pain. They might even have done something with this hand, but I’d enough of the hospital – I had to get back to work. So I walked out of there before they got around to any surgery on it. Probably a mistake, but, well, life is made up of mistakes.

D
idn’t Linda Darnell and Lana Turner visit you in the hospital?

A lot of people tried to visit me, but most of them had to be kept out because I was in no shape to fool around, not with Linda Darnell or Lana Turner or all the beauty queens in the world rolled into one, or even with Jean Peters, if she’d been willing, which up to that point she wasn’t. She did come to visit, though, which I appreciated. And Ava Gardner showed up with a bottle of bourbon, which she normally carried around with her in her handbag. This was some days after the crash. She got into the room somehow. I only vaguely remember what she said because I kept passing out, although at one time she was trying to shove me over to one side of the bed so she could crawl in with me. She said, ‘How can I help you, Howard? Do you want a blow job?’

I said to her, ‘For Christ’s sake, Ava, wait till I’m on my feet again. Then, yes, I’d love a blow job. But not now, thank you. It might get me all worked up and kill me.’ And eventually I found a nurse to get her the hell out of there.

An accident like that is like when a kid gets thrown off a horse: if he doesn’t climb up on her right away, he’s through riding. That’s how I felt about flying. And so very soon thereafter, I climbed in my plane, my bomber, and flew to Kansas City. I couldn’t have been more than a week or ten days out of the hospital. It was about two months after the crash. I’ve always had remarkable powers of recuperation, which probably means I just didn’t give a damn. I had to keep going. I’m not the sort of man who stays down for the count. I’m up at six or seven. I flew to New York to tangle with those censors, the bastards who were giving me such a hard time with
The Outlaw
.

We had a second test model of the F-11, and I took her up the next spring, just before I had to go into the arena and be fed to the lions in Washington. I took her up for over an hour.

It’s hard to believe what I had to go through before I could make that flight. The brass didn’t want me to fly it again, not after the first crash. I had to apply for permission and this time Wright Field turned me down. I went to see Ira Eaker, an Air Force general. I hired him later to run Hughes Aircraft, which was a godawful mistake, and it shows
you how sentimentality or the returning of favors has no place in practical business decisions.

But I went to Eaker and he told me he’d see what he could do, and he got me an appointment with Carl Spaatz, the commanding general of the Air Force and a hard-nosed son of a bitch. Spaatz said no dice, and fed me some crap about how I was too valuable a man to be lost in a crash.

I said, ‘The plane won’t crash and I won’t be lost, and if you’re worried about the money you’ve got tied up in it, don’t be, because I’ll guarantee the cost of the plane.’

Spaatz said okay, and I put it in writing that if the ship cracked up for any reason whatsoever, Hughes Tool Company would pay the Army $5 million. It wasn’t me they were worried about, it was their money.

The ship performed beautifully. I got up to 9,000 feet and I had her well over 400 miles an hour. I checked the propellers very well, you can believe that. The second test model didn’t have dual rotation. I was a little nervous, but I don’t think I showed it.

Didn’t you consider having another test pilot fly it that second time?

The F-11 was my ship. I had to fly it.

Wasn’t it after that crash that you grew a mustache?

Yes, but not to hide any scar. That’s what people have always assumed, but they’re wrong. I wasn’t vain that way at all. I grew the mustache because my mouth had been badly burned and it was very painful to shave. That’s the only reason, and since then I’ve shaved it off many times. I like a mustache, but if you have a cold you sneeze into it and all the germs get trapped, and it’s an uncomfortable feeling to have wet hair right under your nose. I certainly put my health before my appearance, so I always shave it off when I have even the beginnings of a cold, because you can sneeze in your sleep and not know that your mustache has become a culture medium for harmful bacteria.

You were wearing that brown fedora at the time of the crash, weren’t you?

I always wore it. I got it back though. The cops took it, and I asked for it and got it back.

You’ve said to me several times that you’re not superstitious. Did you really think of the hat as a good luck piece?

I’m not superstitious, believe me. I suppose it really doesn’t matter anymore, and I can tell you the truth about it now.

I wanted my hat back because there was money in it.

I always carried money in the lining of the hat. And not only that hat, but
all
my hats. I didn’t have just one hat. I had eight or nine like that, and they all looked alike. That’s where I kept my money for emergencies. My house had been burglarized once, and I thought if anyone breaks in again or finds out where I’m staying he may blow up the safe but he’ll never steal an old dirty hat. So I had all those hats and I kept my money in the lining. When I bought a new one it took me over an hour to scuff it up and trample on it, work the dust into it so that it looked disreputable enough, of no value, just like the others. I had those hats scattered all over, in each of the houses I had. I kept my money in the linings – about four or five thousand dollars in each one, in thousand-dollar bills. And a few singles in case I had trouble changing the larger ones. I never carried that much on me in my wallet or pocket. The hat I wore when the F-11 crashed had only $2,000 and change. But naturally, Jesus, I wanted it back. And the money was in it when they returned it.

And now where do you carry your money?

I can’t wear a hat like that anymore. It got too much publicity, became my trademark. And of course people are always looking for me for various reasons, and that hat would be a dead giveaway. But I carry money. Never mind where.

YOU COULD WRITE a whole book about my battle with Senator Owen Brewster of the Republican Party during the 1947 Senate investigations. I’ve often been tempted to do just that. It was one of the most dramatic things that ever happened to me, because that was the time that I actually met some of those people who were out to get me, face to face, on their home field – and I whipped their ass.

I bumped into Bernard Baruch just before this happened, in Washington. We had a little talk about it and he said, ‘Don’t worry, the bastards tried to do the same thing to me.’ He’d been hauled up before the Senate right after the First World War and accused of war profiteering. Naturally they couldn’t prove anything, and that cheered me up a bit, to think that a man of Baruch’s stature and reputation had to suffer the same mudslinging. He told me not to give an inch to them, admit nothing, not even the slightest mistake, because even if it was an innocent mistake, they’d pyramid it into the fact that I was the Dracula of the aircraft industry, sucking the blood out of innocent senators and generals. And Bernie said, ‘Never get excited. Keep your dignity.’

He also advised me to hit back at them every chance I got, because they were more vulnerable than I was, since they were congressmen, and that meant thieves and hypocrites. That was a fruitful talk and it gave me good ideas on how to handle it, although I’d been hitting back already through the newspapers.

This whole experience – going up before that Senate committee those two times – taught me something I’ve never forgotten. I hadn’t
been totally aware of it before, but it stayed with me and was a tremendous revelation. I developed a theory.

You take any given situation in life – from the senate investigation to a business deal – where you have two parties or individuals who want something from each other. In other words, practically every situation in life, because that’s what life is, one person putting the pressure on another person and that person trying to defend or attack or bargain or adjust. This excludes most situations where love is involved, but not all, because what passes for love – I’ve seen this time after time between people who are supposed to love each other – is often combat. Many times love degenerates into the most uncivilized form of combat precisely because the people won’t admit it’s combat.

In any situation such as I described – two parties or individuals who want something from each other – you have what I call a lion and a donkey. You can’t have equality in bargaining, in arguing, or in combat. You may have an apparent equality but it’s only an illusion, a false arrangement. You may get a tie score in a football game, or after thirty-six holes of a pro golf tournament, but if they play long enough someone’s going to win. There are no ties in life except if they’re arranged artificially. People are not equal; that’s a pernicious lie.

This is my lion and donkey theory. It’s not patented and it may not be original, but it’s mine. You always have a
need
for one person to be the lion and one to be the donkey. Most people aren’t aware of this, but it happens anyway.

Two men sit down to negotiate the price for some airplanes and the conditions of delivery. If one of them is accommodating and humble, and says, ‘Oh, yes, I see your point, you’re right, I understand your situation, your problems’ – then the other one automatically is going to have to play the part of the lion and eat the donkey up alive. He may not be a lion by nature, but if there’s a donkey sitting in front of him, all wobbly-kneed, his lion instincts are going to come out and he’s going to chew up the donkey and spit out the bones. If a man goes into that meeting roaring like a lion and says, ‘This is what I want! This is fair, and don’t fool around with me!’ – then it’s the other man who’s
going to play the part of the donkey, like it or not. Has to. Because nature, as in the animal kingdom, demands that these two parts be played – that’s nature’s way.

My point is that if you know this – and I began to realize it when the investigations got under way – you know that it can be up to you whether you’re going to be the lion or the donkey. And you can bet your last chip that if you don’t choose your part first, then the other guy is going to choose his, and if he’s got any brains or experience, or even peasant cunning, he’ll choose to be the lion.

So you can’t give him that opportunity. You can feel around a bit because maybe before you go roaring in you have a moment to see if he’s a natural donkey, or if he thinks you’re a natural lion, in which case he’ll start out as the donkey without your having to do anything, and you can just be a kind of, well…

A friendly lion.

That’s a nice idea.

Are you saying that you were the lion in the Senate investigations?

I’ll tell the story and you be the judge.

This whole thing goes back a long way in time, and it’s involved with politics and big money. The man who was out to pillory me was Owen Brewster, commonly known as the Senator from Pan American Airways. He was a Republican from Maine and he’d been lobbying for Pan American down in Washington for years. He was a close friend of Juan Trippe, president of Pan Am, and Sam Pryor, vice president of Pan Am. Trippe tried to keep his hands clean on this, as much as he could – Sam Pryor did his dirty work and was Brewster’s contact.

The other chief honcho on the investigative committee was Senator Homer Ferguson from Michigan. Ferguson wasn’t as bad as Brewster, but he was bad enough, and he was a longwinded son of a bitch. What he enjoyed most was strutting before the cameras. And there was Senator Joe McCarthy of later fame, although he kept his mouth shut most of the time during these hearings. He was learning his trade. Harry Truman had been the head of that committee and then they gave it to Brewster. There were a few Democrats on the committee,
including Claude Pepper from Florida. Pepper was a gentleman. I don’t remember the others’ names, but their faces are etched into my mind in indelible ink.

It all started when Juan Trippe got the bright idea to wipe out the competition. Pan Am was going to be the only airline flying from the United States to Europe and other foreign points. This was going to be a great measure of economy and efficiency, and all it required was for TWA and the other airlines to step down and get merged. It was called then the Community Airline Bill, sponsored by Senator Brewster.

Juan Trippe and Brewster came to tell me this personally, in Palm Springs, California, just before the war. It had been in the wind for several years and was being discussed between the various owners of the major airlines, of which I was one. Trippe came out and put the proposition to me.

But of course my terms were that I’d be right up there on top with Mr. Trippe. That was not acceptable. Mr. Trippe and Senator Brewster didn’t like the idea of playboy Howard Hughes horning in on their monopoly.

So the negotiations fell through.

The other part of the background was that this was 1947 and the committee, which was meant to be investigating the national defense program, had been jogging along, raising a little ruckus here and a little rumpus there, but fundamentally just shooting at clay pigeons. During the war the two major political parties buried the hatchet, decided to fight the Japs and the Germans instead of each other, but after the war they went back to the old business of cutting each other’s throats. Elections were coming up. The best thing the Republican Party could think of to win that election was to discredit the late President of the United States, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been my friend, by discrediting his son, Elliot Roosevelt, also my friend. Tar the father with the son’s brush.

Senator Brewster had political ambitions as well. Harry Truman had previously been chairman of this committee. He jumped from there to Vice President of the United States, and from there to the presidency. I think Owen Brewster saw himself climbing the same ladder. In fact it 
came out later that he had been promised the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party by none other than Juan Trippe. Trippe was a shrewd man, with influence, and Senator Brewster would have profited very handsomely. He could have given the old one-two punch to Roosevelt Sr. and Roosevelt Jr., and if he could have decked me at the same time, that really would have put a feather in his cap.

We knew all this beforehand. The committee sent an investigator out to California, a man named Francis Flanagan, to look over our records.

Flanagan was indiscreet. He said to Noah, without batting an eyelash, ‘Don’t kid yourself, the purpose of this committee is to get Elliot Roosevelt.’

‘Mr. Flanagan,’ Noah said, ‘I don’t care whether you get Elliot Roosevelt or not’ – Noah was a Republican – ‘but if Howard Hughes is your whipping boy, then you’re going to be doing an injustice to a man who doesn’t deserve it.’

Flanagan paid no attention, because he had his orders from the top. And pretty soon came the famous incident at the Mayflower Hotel.

Brewster had been thumping the drums for days, weeks, about how he was going to drag me before the committee and prove that not only hadn’t I delivered any planes during the war, but that I’d profited illegally. And also that I’d curried favor with Elliot Roosevelt, who was in the photo reconnaissance division, and that Johnny Meyer, a
public-relations
man for me, had bribed Colonel Roosevelt and various other important officials with sex and nylon stockings.

His intentions were public knowledge. I knew it, the newspapers knew it, the world knew it. The pressure was on me – because no matter how much I tried to keep in touch with what was going on in my company, I couldn’t know whether the office boys were selling
black-market
stockings or what the hell was going on in every sphere. And if you dig deep enough in every man’s life, you’ll come up with dirt. Frankly, I felt a little uncomfortable about going before that committee.

That’s when our friend Mr. Brewster came to me at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was staying there with Noah Dietrich and my Washington lawyer, Tom Slack.

We had lunch in my suite, and Brewster said, ‘Mr. Hughes, if you’ll go along with Mr. Trippe and the Community Airline Bill’ – in other words, if you’ll bend down in public and kiss Pan Am’s ass, and agree for TWA to suck hind tit – ‘we’ll call off the investigation.’

Don’t think that deals and demands in Washington are subtle things. Maybe that’s the way you’d write about them in a novel, but in real life there’s no beating around the bush. The man comes up and says, ‘I want you to do this, and this is what I’ll give you in return, and you’ve got forty-eight hours to decide.’

It didn’t take me forty-eight hours. I told Brewster to go to hell. Right then and there I made up my mind that I was going to face this committee, that I was going to clear myself, my company, Elliot Roosevelt, and everyone who was associated with me, and that I was going to wipe away the mud that man was flinging at us with both hands.

The first point of truth is that there had been no war profiteering on our part. I had lost a small fortune on my war contracts. I think I’ve mentioned that by 1947, out of my own pocket, I’d laid out $7 million for the construction of the Hercules. That was only the beginning. By 1951 I’d spent another ten million, and the fact is that the government had never put up the whole eighteen million they’d promised me. I had to sue the RFC for the difference. Not that I expected to get it, it was more a point of honor, and to set the record straight.

I had also taken a hell of a loss on the F-11. Both these contracts, which technically speaking I hadn’t delivered on – that is to say, the planes were not finished by the end of the war, and therefore of no immediate combat use to the military – involved a total outlay on the government’s part of about forty to fifty million dollars, which they considered money down the drain.

It wasn’t down the drain, for all the reasons I’ve given you, but that’s how they considered it, and even if they didn’t really believe it that’s what they were saying, loud and clear. Now that so-called forty- or fifty-million-dollar loss represented
less than one percent
of the entire amount the government lost during the war in unfulfilled military contracts. Less than one percent! And that total included
manufacturers like Boeing and Republic and Lockheed, companies that had a Priority One for material. I had a Priority Five, which was the lowest you could get.

The total government loss came to over $6 billion. But there was more fuss made about my supposed fifty million than all the others put together, because they’d singled me out as the scapegoat and also, as I said, this investigation was political in origin, a way to crush Elliott Roosevelt and the Democratic administration.

Republic, for example, was supposed to make a recon ship called the XF-12. I brought this up at the hearings, but of course they didn’t want to hear about it. They just brushed it off, because Pan American had worked with Republic on the XF-12 and Pan American was too delicate to touch. The XF-12 plane cost the government about $30 million and it was never delivered. There was never even a static model. The first test model nosed over and cracked up a minute after it got off the runway. But nobody cared about that because Howard Hughes hadn’t built it. I can’t remember the figures on how much money was put into aircraft that never flew, but you can bet that it came to well over $600 million.

As far as my employee Johnny Meyer was concerned, Johnny had been doing, on a small scale, what representatives of every single company in the United States had been doing throughout the course of the war, and on a much larger scale than Hughes Aircraft and Toolco – which is, specifically, lavishly entertain Army officers and government officials.

These men came out to meet you for an afternoon of business discussion. You couldn’t just throw them out of your office at 5 P.M. and say, ‘See you tomorrow morning, boys. Have a good evening.’ You took them out, you provided for them. It was simple hospitality. The hypocrisy of these senators, who called each other ‘gentlemen’ – ‘will the gentleman from Missouri yield for a minute to the gentleman from Montana?’ – really, that’s exactly how these pompous asses talked to each other when they were mouthing off in the senate chamber – the hypocrisy of these men who were living off lobbyists and accepting
favors right and left, money, women, free travel, free vacations, gifts, every week of the year, was beyond belief.