Howard Hughes (23 page)

One look at the men sleeping there and any sane man would have thought, ‘I won’t last the night, I’ll get my throat cut.’ The man in charge had a scar, looked like a knife wound, running down one side of his face. The scar was almost white, and in that black face it made him look positively evil. But the whole point of what I’m trying to tell you is: I wasn’t really worried. If my throat had been cut during the
night, I would have accepted it. I wouldn’t have known, of course. What I mean is, for the first time in my life I was on my own, in strange circumstances, where the fact that I was Big Howard’s son, the billionaire Howard Hughes, wasn’t going to help me a bit. Nothing could help me. I had nobody I could turn to. If I had got in trouble and said to one of these TWA men, ‘Get me out of this, I’m Howard Hughes,’ he would have laughed in my face. And I couldn’t very well say it to the natives, could I?

I bedded myself down on this pallet. You know I’m a fastidious man, and I’m often amazed that I was able to do that. I’m even more amazed that it didn’t cure me of my fastidiousness. I lay there, and I thought, I’ll never sleep. Not that I was afraid – it was just damned uncomfortable, and it stank of goat hides and men who hadn’t washed in weeks. I thought, I’ll never sleep, and I lay down there in all that filth, and the next thing I knew it was a beautiful early morning and I woke up and I felt very well indeed because I’d put my trust in myself.

There was an old Coptic church on a hill nearby, a broken-down white wooden building with a domed roof. I went up there to look at it. I’m not a believer. A priest – a black, black man with a big beard and long robe – was standing out in front, and something came over me, and I went in. I don’t mean to suggest I had any mystical or religious experience, or anything like that. But I found a moment of peace such as I have rarely known in my life, in that quiet old church on the hill in Ethiopia. I didn’t pray. I wouldn’t have known who to pray to.

Just for a change of view, the first thing I did after leaving there was to get a flight back to Addis Ababa, where I moved into one of the best hotels. I showered, changed clothes, and played eighteen holes of golf at the Imperial Ethiopian Golf Club. I just had to get back to the flavor of western civilization after that sojourn with the fleas.

I went back to the States shortly after that. I didn’t want to stay away for too long at one time. I was getting involved in RKO and I had plans for TWA, and the usual financial troubles. When I think about that period now, it strikes me as amazing that I was able to juggle all these things at the same time, but I’ve done that all my life. The following
year, however, I went back to Ethiopia. I still used the name Charles Maddox. On my previous trip I had stumbled across a leper clinic, and it really shook me to the depths of my being to see those deformed, suffering souls. It made me stop to think about a man who was close enough to touch them. This was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the great healer. He was in Africa then – he had a clinic down in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa. I didn’t stay long in Ethiopia that trip because I got some mild dysentery, not amoebic but damned uncomfortable – and I went back to California and had it looked after.

But on the flight back I started to think about Schweitzer. Here was a man who was universally respected. He was famous in any number of fields, and it seemed to me that we had something in common. He had reached the heights in his fields, and I had reached them in mine. I had gone right to the top of the heap, and so had he, and he had abandoned the whole show at an age not so much younger than mine. He became a doctor and he went down to Africa to serve humanity, but also, I’m convinced, to look for Albert Schweitzer.

Don’t get the wrong idea that I was placing myself on his level. We operated on different spheres, and his, I believed, were far more exalted than mine, but we did have this one thing in common. We were both in the middle years, men who had accomplished something of note, and yet we were lost and we were looking for something more. I thought: I’d like to talk to that man.

When I make up my mind to do something, I do it. When I was feeling better I flew back to Africa, to Cairo, and then down to Lambaréné. I took a canoe from there to Schweitzer’s clinic. The people who paddled the canoes were the most horrible collection of emaciated souls I’d ever seen. I’m sure some of them were lepers. I found out afterward there was a power boat I could have taken, but I didn’t see it around at the time, or my French wasn’t good enough to make myself understood and I had to get into this goddamn canoe.

I visited Schweitzer, and he reminded me of myself back in the States. Didn’t want to see any visitors.

I didn’t tell him who I was, because I doubt that it would have meant
anything to him. The magic of the Hughes name didn’t penetrate to Lambaréné. But in any event I found it impossible to talk to Dr. Schweitzer. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with the man. He was totally brusque, indifferent to me and to any problems I may have had. I realized after a short time that this wasn’t personal – he acted this way toward everybody. He showed this Olympian detachment even toward the poor sick souls lying around in his clinic, which, incidently, was filthy. I don’t know what kind of doctor he was, but he sure as hell didn’t know much about ordinary hygiene. In that sense he might better have stayed in Germany and played the organ.

This place was a big establishment, not just a little clinic the way I imagined it would be. It was a compound, dozens of big buildings and lots of little barracks, like an army camp built in a swamp. The mosquitos nearly drove you crazy, and the heat, the humidity – well, it was hotter than Houston, and that’s saying something.

I don’t want to be too hard on Schweitzer. He looked awful, thin, and tired, and pale. I was there in the evening to see him. I was wandering about the compound, looking at the animals. There were a lot of African deer around, antelopes and other animals, and just before it got dark and I was supposed to go, I saw Dr. Schweitzer running around in a panic, shoving people into various huts and padlocking the doors. I asked myself, ‘My God, what’s happening?’ I thought for a minute there was a mad elephant on the loose, or a new leper had come to the clinic and there was something especially contagious about him.

I ran around myself, trying to find out what was going on, and it turned out that this was just his nightly routine. Schweitzer locked everything and everybody up because he was afraid they’d steal his medicines and his books and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. He wasn’t a very elevated soul. He certainly had no detachment.

I came back the next day and managed to talk to him. He pretended not to speak more than a few words of English, although I knew damn well that he did. I asked him a few questions, because I also knew he had built the clinic, all those buildings and huts, with his own two
hands. I complimented him on that, and he said, ‘You can’t trust these people to do anything. If you want it so it won’t fall down, you have to do it yourself.’

That’s the sort of answer I’d expect from some redneck planter in Mississippi. It wasn’t what I expected from the great Dr. Schweitzer. You know, you can read all the Chinese philosophy in the world – he did, by the way, which is why I mention it – but if you come out of it with the feeling that you can’t trust anybody else to build a hut, and, more to the point, if you don’t choose to teach people how to do it, I don’t think you’ve learned very much.

That was about the extent of our conversation. The last time I saw him he vanished back into the depths of his clinic, padlocked his doors, and I got into the canoe and left – waved goodbye to a hippopotamus.

It was a long trip for a meeting that came to nothing. And since then I’ve taken a different attitude toward the famous seers and philosophers of this world. I’ve decided the best thing is to read what they have to say, but don’t meet them. They’re too human, or they’re not human enough. It’s disillusioning.

I want to stop a minute to draw breath and give some perspective. I talked once about the time I was in my late twenties and I went into flying. I felt then that I was not a man in the full sense of the word.

When I got back from Ethiopia and French Equatorial Africa, I was forty-four years old. But I was a man in a lamentable state of bewilderment. I had made a great deal more of my life than if I had just stepped on my father’s shoulders – I had made more money than he had, I had accomplished more, and he was no longer a challenge. Having done that, I had nothing to do. I was lost. I had contempt for my world and I felt that there had to be something else, and this is what I went to Ethiopia to find. I didn’t find it. I certainly didn’t find it when I went down to see the good doctor.

I was in search – drowning in a sea of impressions, all of them new and strange. And moreover I came back that last time with an even worse case of dysentery – it never quite leaves your system.

Verne Mason, my doctor, put me in a private clinic, but while he
was checking me out he said, ‘I’d better have a closer look,’ and he did a proctoscopy.

They stick a pipe up your ass and shine a light through it, and look to see if anything is growing in there that shouldn’t. He found polyps. They were benign, but it was better to take them out, Verne said, because they often turned malignant, if left to grow. Now this may strike you as fairly insignificant, and it was. But more even than my bad crash in the F-11, and more even than other close shaves I’ve had crashing in Lake Mead and during the war in England, this gave me a feeling of mortality. My body, which I’d always taken for granted, was betraying me.

One of the fools who wrote one of my so-called biographies quoted some other fool as saying, ‘Howard Hughes isn’t going to die in bed or as the result of a plane crash. He’s going to die at the hands of a woman with a .38.’
Time
magazine printed that originally – it must have sounded colorful.

That’s a lot of baloney. Howard Hughes is going to die, as most men die, because the machinery of his body is breaking down and betraying him.

The first realization of this was overwhelming. More than most men I had retained a feeling of immortality until quite late in my life, partly because I’d gone through so many crashes and come through them where others couldn’t. But more than that it’s something inexplicable, something innate. I had talked to some of these young fellows over in England who had lost this feeling very young. Every time it came time to go out on a mission, they’d get a haunted look in their eyes, and you knew they were aware they might die. They didn’t have that feeling of immortality, of inviolability, that young men usually have – which is of course what makes wars possible, because you can’t get an army made up of men who know they’re probably going to die. You’ve got to get it made up of kids who can face the horrors feeling that it’s going to happen to someone else, not to them.

This youthful belief in immortality is a wonderful thing, but you can cut your throat with it if you’re careless. And it’s a terrible thing when
you lose it and first become aware of death, perched on your shoulder… waiting. I first became aware after that simple operation. From then on I was aware of my heart pumping, of the digestive process taking place, of the glands secreting their vital fluids. I became as death-haunted as any man could be. It’s colored my every action, every thought, in ways I don’t fully understand. It’s not as if I’m planning to leave some noble monument for posterity. I’m a dying man – we’re all dying men and women – but I’m more so than many others are.

Didn’t you investigate the possibility of the deep-freezing of bodies, of going into suspended animation?

I’d heard about the cryogenic process, and I checked it out to see if there was anything in it, which there wasn’t. The state of the medical art is a long way from being able to accomplish that. I wasn’t looking for immortality, you understand. But I thought if I had another ten years of life coming to me, I’d prefer to live them in a later century than this one. I’ve had enough of this one.

Anyway, the dysentery cleared up, and I had this minor operation. But my physical condition in general was rotten. All the accidents, and all the illnesses – I’ve had pneumonia three or four times, and my lungs were weak – had taken their toll, and I felt fragile.

I went off to hide for awhile on the Pacific coast of Mexico, in a little fishing village called Zihuatanejo, still as Charles Maddox. I loafed around in a hammock under a
palapa
, careful of what I ate, read some books, thought about the past and the future, and at the end of that time – it was a couple of weeks – I knew what I had to do, which was very simple.

Be active. Bury myself in work.

I felt this was the only salvation, and so that’s what I did. I not only plunged back into TWA and Toolco and Hughes Aircraft, but I bought RKO and went back to the film-making business. It was a way of avoiding a confrontation with the things in life that I didn’t understand and thought I could never understand.

It turned out to be a terrible mistake.

I DECIDED TO go back into the movie business. I had some new ideas. I had learned that if you do something well and then stay away from it for many years – provided that you work on something else during those years of absence – you can go back to the original work and find that the accumulated experience of the intervening time is a tremendous plus. You don’t pick up where you left off. You pick up far ahead of where you left off. Your mental muscles are tougher and the problems that might have given you headaches ten or twenty years previously are problems that you can often solve, after all those years, with a snap of the fingers.

This time I wanted to go into the movie business on a large scale. I had the money, I felt I had the know-how. All I needed was the venue. It wasn’t a true creative urge and it wasn’t a calculated business decision. It was simpler than that. I liked making movies. It was a business I already knew well, and it was a business that I thought, if I got hold of the right people, could run itself.

I looked around. I had done some business previously with Floyd Odlum, who was the head of the Atlas Corporation, which had the controlling interest in RKO. Floyd had turned out a number of films that made a lot of money, but he was ready to get rid of RKO by then, partly because he had slow years in 1946 and ’47. I thought the big years were still to come.

I guess I hadn’t learned as much as I thought, because that goddamn company gave me nothing but headaches. RKO was a peanut-sized
business compared to Toolco, compared to Hughes Aircraft and TWA, but it wasn’t as anonymous, at the time, as those other companies, and I wanted to put my own stamp on it, run it my own way. In 1948 I bought Odlum’s controlling interest in RKO for about $10 million, and got into trouble right away with the people in there who were running the show. We didn’t see eye to eye. The weight of the money counts, and out they went.

Peter Rathvon had been president of the company under Odlum, and I kept him on for a while. Dore Schary was head of production. Schary, of course, was an enormously talented and experienced man. He was a little too radical for my tastes, but I wasn’t running a political party, I was running a movie business, so I explained to him he could pretty much make the kind of films he wanted to. He was a shrewd man, because one of the first things he told me was that a man in my position, as rich as I was, who had bought a film studio and had previous film experience, would certainly want to run it, and he didn’t want to be in the position of being number two man. I assured him that he would be at least on a level with me.

This didn’t hold up, though, because he got off on the wrong foot with me right away. He was making a film called
Battleground
, which he figured was going to set the pace in Hollywood for war films. He figured there was going to be a big run of them, and I disagreed.

I said, ‘The timing is wrong. The public is fed up with war.’ I was fed up with it, so I figured the public was – that was my mistake, to assume the mass thinks as I do – and I told him to stop production on it. What I didn’t realize, and what I know now, is that the public loves blood and violence more than anything, even more than sex, and blood and violence is always a moneymaker, because the mass of people are sick.

That was one item of disagreement. The other one was that he was trying to make a star out of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that one I was right on. I didn’t see star quality there, and it wasn’t there. Schary and I came to loggerheads over these two things.

He said, ‘Howard, you’re trying to make a messenger boy out of me.’

So I said, ‘Quit.’ And he did.

I was wrong about
Battleground
. He bought the property from me, took it with him to MGM and made a mint out of it. It was the biggest hit of 1949, as I recall.

Then I buckled down and lopped off some heads, cut off a lot of fat, fired about 700 people who were totally unnecessary. That’s when Peter Rathvon quit. This was also the time I got into that terrible wrangle with Paul Jarrico. As usual it was only one incident of many – Jarrico was one screenwriter out of fifty or sixty who was blacklisted by the movie industry, and I was only one producer out of fifty who was wielding the axe and doing the blacklisting of left-wing people, but I was Howard Hughes and that meant headlines on page one.

This was during the McCarthy era, which in retrospect I view as one of the more shameful periods of American political life. But at that time it was a kind of mass purge and mass hysteria, and I got sucked up by it.

Everyone in Hollywood was bleating about Communist domination of the industry. I had no use for communism as a workable philosophy, and I thought for the most part that the Communists I knew were misguided idealists who were all messed up emotionally and got starry-eyed and wobbly-kneed and simply lost every ounce of their common sense when they talked about the glorious life in the Soviet Union.

I think I was right in the long run, and the simplemindedness of their thinking was proved to me when the same people who swore there couldn’t possibly be such things as slave labor camps in Siberia – their argument, if you recall, was that it was theoretically incompatible with a Marxist workers’ state, and if it was theoretically impossible it had to be impossible in practice as well, and it was just another lie coming out of Wall Street – it was these same people who quit the party and dived like lemmings back into the liberal and capitalist ranks when Khrushchev made his famous speech denouncing Stalin.

They knew, I think – because most of them were superficially intelligent men and women – that they were being intellectually dishonest. What they didn’t know was that they were emotionally
unstable, and they were just waiting for a chance to bail out with what they could call honor. Khrushchev’s speech gave them their chance, and they took it. It’s like a pilot who’s flying an experimental plane he’s claimed is the best in the world. The nuts and bolts start to fly off and the plane loses altitude, but he can’t and won’t give up. Then the engine drops out and he says, ‘Thank God,’ and bails out. It happens all the time in politics and marriage. And it’s happening now in Vietnam.

Anyway, at that time, in the fifties, when I fired Paul Jarrico, I was head over heels in the fight against so-called Communist domination of the film industry. Jarrico, I’m convinced, was not a member of the Communist party, not a card-carrying member. He couldn’t be; this guy was on a salary of $2,500 a week from the studio, which put him pretty clearly in the capitalist class. He was what they called a fellow traveler.

When he went up before that committee in Washington, he took the Fifth Amendment. The one thing that really got my goat, one thing that made me boil over, was a man who wouldn’t stand up for his principles. Now if the man was a Communist or even if the man was only a sympathizer, he should have stood up there and said, ‘Yes, this is what I am, I believe such-and-such, and I’ll take the consequences for it.’ For not saying that, I couldn’t respect him, and I couldn’t respect any of those guys who looked the other way and ducked out and avoided the responsibility. I didn’t like those Reds who went to prison, they were hardly my friends and idols, but I had respect for them insofar as they said, ‘Yes, that’s who I am and that’s what I stand for. You want to throw me behind bars for my beliefs, okay, my conscience is clear and I’m an honest man.’

Of course, far worse than someone like Jarrico, was a man like Elia Kazan, the film director, who went before the witch-hunting committee in Washington and snitched on all his friends. His excuse was that the committee already knew they were Communist; other snitches had named them. All the more reason not to give the names, since they weren’t needed. The committee’s purpose was to intimidate and humiliate, and Kazan bent over and spread his cheeks in order to insure his career. Arthur Miller, who wrote
Death of a Salesman
,
refused to testify. He survived. Kazan was a great film director and a creepy human being.

After all these years, do you regret the role you played in the witch-hunt?

The answer to that isn’t a simple one. If it has to be ‘yes or no’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I do regret it.’ But that would be a fundamental dishonesty on my part, because it would be too easy a way of skating out of something. I can’t deny that I did what I did – I even went so far as to try and get the RKO Theaters Corporation to ban the showing of
Limelight
, because I considered Charlie Chaplin a pinko and a man who’d run away to Europe rather than stay at home and fight for what he believed in, whether it was right or wrong.

But I refuse to talk in terms of ‘if I had it all to do over again,’ because that’s equivalent to saying, ‘If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.’ I did what I did because I was the man that I was. If I had done anything else I would have been a hypocrite and a coward and then I really would regret it now.

In other words, I don’t regret what I did but I do wish that I had been a different kind of man, the kind of man who would not have done those things. That’s also, I suppose, a kind of shadowy statement, but it’s the best I can give, because I realize now that I was swept along with the mob and that’s always demeaning to the soul and damaging to the man as a whole.

But it’s even more damaging to go against your own nature. Sometimes you have to plunge in headfirst and wallow in the trough of your own stupidity just in order to climb out and take a bath and feel your own clean skin again.

As far as the anticommunist battle went, it was a battle, and in battle you fight with whatever weapons you’ve got and with whatever allies you can find. I was obsessed; I admit it. I’m not proud of it. I gave a talk before the American Legion at that time. Not that I was a great backer of the American Legion, I want to make clear. They’re a bunch of warmongers, as I realized later on. It’s simply, as I said, that you had strange bedfellows in those days. Must have been a good talk, though, because it was put in the Congressional Record by Richard Nixon.

He was then a senator from California. I had a letter from him, and we met around that time for lunch, rather quietly, because Nixon was sowing the seeds then for the future. And I was sowing mine. I didn’t like him. A mealy-mouthed guy. But he was ambitious, and slick, and, I thought, just mediocre enough to make it. So I filed him away for future reference. I figured his time would come, and I would make use of him.

One other important thing happened when I owned RKO, although at the time I didn’t see its huge significance, that it would cloud my entire future.

Henry Luce was the man who owned
Time, Life
, and
Fortune
. A publishing mogul, energetic, conservative, very powerful. His wife was Clare Boothe Luce. In her time she’d written a couple of decent plays but then she got herself elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Connecticut, so that will give you a good idea of her ideological bent. She spent part of each year in Hollywood throwing lavish parties for producers, because she wanted them to produce movies she wrote.

I never went to those parties, of course, but Liz Taylor brought her once to my bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet me, and I bumped into her a couple of times on the beach in Santa Monica. I used to go for long walks on the beach and so did Clare Luce. So we were on cordial terms.

One day on the beach she collared me and bled my ear about a script called
Pilate’s Wife
. I may have said we’d be interested in producing it if it was good, and she told me that René Clair wanted to direct it. She let it leak to the newspapers that the movie was going to be made by me and RKO. I paid no attention to that. Finally she turned up at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a draft of the screenplay. She left it there with a note that said, ‘I’ll be back in exactly a week, dear Howard, and we’ll discuss who can play Jesus and who can play Mary Magdalene.’

I read it. It was pap, Sunday school stuff for children. It was absolutely non-producible in the form she’d written it, and when she showed up a week later she asked me if I had any ideas for improving
the plot and the characterization. She thought of course the answer would be no, and she was right – it was impossible to improve the plot and characterization in the script, because they didn’t exist.

But I couldn’t say that to her. She showed up, and we discussed the script in the lobby at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I tried to be diplomatic, I tried to point out to her why I thought it wasn’t right for RKO. Diplomacy, I guess, isn’t my strong suit, but in any case it’s not easy to be diplomatic with somebody who thinks she’s a female apostle, the most brilliant thinker and writer of our time. When I finally said for about the third time that RKO was going to pass, she claimed I’d humiliated her because she’d told
Variety
and about three dozen top actors that I was going to make her biblical horror. I said, ‘Well, you jumped the gun, Clare.’

Right there, in the lobby, she stamped her feet, spat like a cornered cat, and swore that she and all her husband’s magazines,
Time, Life
, and
Fortune
, would hound me for the rest of my days. Clare Luce was a vengeful woman. That was not an idle threat.