Howard Hughes (29 page)

Despite my terrible disappointment with Dr. Schweitzer, that I never got through to the man, and that he brushed me aside like some insignificant creature from out of the bush, I still felt that there were men in this world who had put their feet on the right path early in their lives and never left it. They were following a clearly marked path through the jungle that human life resembles.

I knew that I had my share of achievements, but when I added up everything I had done, I could see no focus. I’m talking about the early 1950s, when I was a man in my late forties. I could see I was not on a clear track that progressed from one stage of development to another. It was what seized my imagination at the time, and yet when I analyzed it in rare moments of introspection, I could see no progression. And when you can’t see progression in your own life, no clearcut advance from one goal to another, leading to major goals, then you can’t see your Self, which is blindness. That sort of blindness is worse than any kind of deafness.

And then I found the man I believed I was looking for.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND I had met briefly in Hollywood when I was making movies. It was hardly more than an introduction at a party in some bungalow in that crazy place he was living, the Garden of Allah. But Hemingway impressed me, and I thought I would like to see him again. I felt the tremendous force of his personality more than even the power of his work, although I had read and admired his novels very deeply, especially
The Sun Also Rises
.

The occasion arose, just after the war, sometime in the winter of 1948, when I went out to look over Sun Valley, Idaho, with the idea in mind of buying it and making it into a popular resort area. I flew out there in my bomber, a converted B-25. I knew Ernest was there with his family and he was hunting, and so I found out where he was living. I did something wholly uncharacteristic. I marched right up to his door, and knocked on it. He opened it.

I hadn’t gone out to Sun Valley as Howard Hughes. Traveling under the name of Howard Hughes is the kiss of death. The people who owned Sun Valley would have jacked the price up fifty percent just on that knowledge alone. I was using the name Tom Garden. I knew a Tom Garden very briefly once. I met him out in Ethiopia in 1946. He was a young Englishman who wanted to go exploring in the Danakil part of the country. A lot of really savage tribes in that neck of the woods, and the emperor, or the court, or whoever gave such permissions, wouldn’t give it to him. But he went anyhow, and he was never heard of again.

I don’t want to convey any idea that I felt any kinship of any sort with this wanderer who vanished. But the story had impressed itself on me, so that was the name I gave to Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley when he opened the door.

I must say I was struck by his reception. I myself – well, the occasion would never arise where some stranger would come up and knock on my door. First of all, nobody knows where my door is. Second, if they do know, there’s a guard out there, a guard outside and a guard inside. It would certainly never occur to me to open the door myself.

But there Ernest came out to the door, looking like a middle-aged tramp, wearing beat-up corduroy trousers and a lumberjack shirt open nearly to the waist. Come to think of it, I was not a hell of a lot more respectable. It was winter and I had on a couple of old sweaters.

I introduced myself and Ernest said, ‘Come in and have a drink, Tom.’

I came in, excused myself from the drink because I don’t drink, and we talked for a while. He immediately showed an interest in who I was and why I was there. Understand, I passed myself off as a member of a real estate group in California that was interested in Sun Valley. I didn’t say that I personally, even as Tom Garden, was going to buy it, but I suppose no matter how you dress, the smell of money doesn’t leave your skin. And Ernest cottoned on very quickly to the idea that I was rich, and he was fascinated by rich people. He took a great interest in my proposal for the valley and the surrounding area, asked me all sorts of intelligent and perceptive questions about how I was going to go about it.

The extraordinary thing is that I’d been in his house no more than fifteen minutes, and I was sitting in an armchair and talking as freely and easily as I’d talked with any man in my whole life. Writers often give you this feeling – it may be genuine, it may be phoney – you tell me – but they give you the feeling they’re interested in you, and in what makes you tick.

But Ernest had that quality of making you feel immediately at home. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours. We talked about practical things mostly, more than about either of us personally. We
talked about them in a very straightforward way that I wasn’t used to, except with pilots.

The thing is, at the time, I didn’t want anything from Ernest and he didn’t want anything from me. I had read a couple of his books, but I hadn’t dropped in to see him as a writer. It was more that I had in mind a certain image of Ernest Hemingway as a person who had gone through adventures and rough experiences, and he’d had a dangerous time of it and he’d come out of it whole, tough. Toughened, I mean. Not only did I respect him for that, but I was fascinated, and I wanted to know how and why.

We spent a couple of hours talking, and I invited him to take a spin with me in my B-25 next day, which he was delighted to do. The fact that I had my own bomber tickled him pink.

I told him I was doing a geographical survey on this flight. The purpose was just to get an over-all picture for myself of the valley and its potential. I flew around, in and out, through the canyons of Idaho. Ernest was in the co-pilot’s seat, and asked me a hell of a lot of questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it. That was a routine flight for me, so I could fly and answer his questions at the same time. He told me afterward that it was one of the most lucid and cogent explanations of flying that he’d ever heard.

And not only that – he couldn’t get over the fact that I could fly and look around and maneuver and at the same time maintain a running conversation with him about anything in the world. That really impressed him. I was so involved after a while, however, with what I was looking for, that I broke off the conversation and just concentrated on flying. The flight was a bit low, I suppose, and looking back on it now, dangerous. The wingtips were not too far from the canyon walls a couple of times. This was no Cessna 180, this was a B-25 bomber.

Ernest loved all that. On the way back he turned to me – there was a touch of awe in his voice – and he said, ‘Tom, you’re a hot pilot.’

‘You better believe it,’ I said. I wasn’t shy about my flying skills.

I left soon after that. We saw one another briefly the following day, and then I was off – had to go. But it was a rich encounter. Ernest
wanted to write to me about something, as a matter of fact, but I knew I wouldn’t answer, and I didn’t want to create that sort of situation, and so I told him some story that we were moving offices, and as soon as I had an address I would write him. It was a lot easier for me to get in touch with him than for him to get in touch with me.

I didn’t see him again for nearly nine years. It wasn’t a matter of deliberate waiting. I was so embroiled in affairs, I had no chance. Sort of like a drowning man – I’d draw my head up out of the water and I could see Ernest along the shore from time to time, but I was sucked down again before I could even call out to him. And he was off on his own affairs in Europe, Africa, Key West, and Cuba.

Cuba, as a matter of fact, is where I saw him the second time.

When you met him that first time, how did you get along with him politically? Did you know he’d been involved in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side?

Except for that brief anticommunist phase of mine in Hollywood, I’ve never been a political person. I’ve only voted twice in my life, and that was for Franklin Roosevelt, and it was a long time ago. I’ve always made sure that I had members of both parties on my payroll, so that no matter who won, Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft didn’t lose.

During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, I was involved in my flights and designing airplanes and I was about as apolitical as you could get. Moreover, from what I could gather, politics was never Ernest’s major interest, either. Strictly secondary. I’ve always had the feeling he went to Spain because there was a war on and he wanted to see men in action. That turned him on. Naturally his sympathies were with the Loyalists rather than with the Fascist side, because he was that kind of man. He had a sense of justice and a love for common people.

But he also had an obsession with death and how men faced it. He asked me a great many questions in later years about my accidents, how I had felt about them, and I answered to the best of my ability. He was the only man I ever knew who was almost as banged up physically – broken bones, and wounds – as I was. I often wondered if he ever used that stuff I told him in any of his books, or whether there’s some
unpublished novel of his that has quotes from me or some incident from my life in it, because later on his questions were endless, about how I felt in the various crashes, and how I felt when a plane was in trouble. Danger made him feel like a bigger person. That’s why he liked that ride in the B-25 so much.

Anyway, nine years later, in 1954, I was in Florida, where I had planned to build my own jet aircraft factory. I was already thinking of a short take-off and landing jet – the STOL – combined with an element of vertical take-off, what’s now called a VTOL. I was looking ahead to the future and intended to sell the first twenty-five planes to TWA – that is, to myself. Del Webb and I got together on it, but it fell through. And on the spur of the moment, that time in Palm Beach – I knew Ernest was in Cuba – I hopped over from Miami to Havana on a commercial flight.

First I went to the Floridita, that famous bar downtown, because I knew he spent a lot of time there, but he wasn’t there. It was empty at that hour of the afternoon.

So I took a taxi out to the finca. I didn’t remember the name of the finca, didn’t even know it was called a finca then. I just said to the cab driver, ‘Hemingway,’ and he said, ‘Ah,
Papa!
’

I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want Papa. I want Hemingway.’

He said, ‘
Sí, sí, Papa, Papa!
’ By then we were halfway there, and Papa turned out to be Ernest.

I was let in without any ceremony. The maid at the door didn’t even ask my name. Ernest was sitting around the pool half-naked with a few other people, and I hadn’t had time to change. I was still wearing a business suit. I had taken my tie off, stuffed it in my pocket. I walked up and Ernest was sitting there with his pot belly hanging out, and he peered at me over his glasses.

The first thing he said was, ‘Don’t stand there with the sun behind your back. I can’t make you out, and that makes me nervous. Move around this way.’

I did as I was told, so he could see me. He looked at me with a grim expression – like, ‘What’s this?’ And then suddenly his face broke into a big beautiful smile, and he said, ‘Goddamnit, Tom, it’s great to see you!’

I felt wonderful, that he’d recognized me after all those years and welcomed me so warmly.

Ernest had that quality of welcoming, which is so rare. The house was full of people, apart from his family. There was his wife – at least some little woman running around that I thought was his wife. And some adoring blonde girl, who as I recall, the wife didn’t like very much, no doubt because Ernest was humping her. A bunch of servants, too, and some children, his own and others. And some college kids from the United States. They’d come down there and thrust themselves upon him with their manuscripts, expecting that he’d help get them published. He read their work with great patience, and I remember that when one of them left he asked Ernest for money because he didn’t have the fare back home, and Ernest gave it to him. That’s the kind of man he was.

Did you keep masquerading as Tom Garden?

I was afraid to tell him my real name. It was such a good relationship that I didn’t want to run that risk. We sat around the house and just talked. Ernest wanted to know what I’d been doing all these years, and I made up a few stories that paralleled my life. The events may have been different but the general content was the same, so that I wasn’t lying to him in any meaningful way. I stayed almost the entire first day at his finca, and then he drove me back to my hotel in Havana, the Nacional.

The next day I was out there again with him, and on the third day we went fishing. I had taken Ernest up in my plane, and now he wanted to take me out on the fishing boat, to show me
his
specialty. I was not a sportsman; I played golf but I never went hunting, and I seldom fished anymore. I didn’t really know what to expect.

There were a couple of Cuban helpers, one who was steering and one serving drinks. Ernest knew by then that I didn’t drink, so he had a bottle of milk along in the ice chest for me. I think he drank tequila or daiquiris, and he had a couple of thermoses full of them, and each time he’d take a belt he’d say to his barman helper, ‘Get out the milk for Señor Jardin.’ And then he would crack up laughing. It broke him up, that I drank milk.

I was taken aback to begin with, when about fifteen minutes after we left the dock, there was Ernest at the helm of the boat, wearing a jock strap. Nothing else.

The fishing was poor. Ernest said it was the fault of the tankers that had been torpedoed there by German subs during the war: the garbage that had spewed out of them had killed off most of the big game fish. And he grumbled, and then it got hot, and he said his jock strap was itching, and he peeled it off.

He said, ‘Come on, Tom, you’re going to get prickly heat. Take off your clothes.’

I checked over in my mind what I remembered of Ernest’s sexual habits, and I figured it was safe enough, so I peeled down to my skivvies. I’ve always been a little shy about being naked with other men, or women for that matter. Many times when I used to play golf, in the locker rooms all the men would shower together, and I waited till they were out of there before I would shower. Crept into a corner of the locker room when I had to change my clothes. I’m sure it harks back to my childhood, being tall and awkward, but I could never put my finger on the exact reason.

After a while Ernest said, ‘Let’s go for a swim. Bareass, Tom.’

I peeled off my skivvies and we dove over the side into the Gulf, which was perfectly flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for me, because we were grown men – I was forty-eight years old, and Ernest was somewhat older – and there we were in the water, naked, and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a killer whale, or a swordfish, and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other – ‘Watch out, whale, here I come!’ Splash around like children.