Howard Hughes Read online

  Hughes vanished again and Pedro appeared, bearing an envelope containing $750 in cash to cover my expenses on the trip. ‘Señor Octavio asked me to apologize to you,’ he said. ‘He had to leave. I’ll fly you back to Oaxaca.’

  The next day I flew back to New York, gave a report to my publishers, and then went home to Ibiza.

  The next meeting, arranged by telephone, took place some weeks later in Puerto Rico. I flew from Madrid to San Juan and checked into the agreed hotel. Hughes telephoned at three o’clock in the morning and asked me to come down to the lobby, where a driver met me and led me through the darkness to an old Chevrolet parked at the curb. He did the familiar disappearing act and I slid behind the wheel next to Hughes, who was wearing, it seemed to me, the same clothes he had worn in Mexico the month before: styleless shirt, baggy trousers and cheap cloth windbreaker. In the interim, however, he had grown a startlingly full head of dark brown hair. ‘Well, goddamnit, it’s a wig. Cost me $9.95 in the five-and-dime. I have three or four of them and a few beards, too. I can’t afford to be recognized – you have no idea the risk I take in meeting you this way. It’s not that there’s always somebody out to subpoena me, although that’s bad enough. It’s worse.’

  He wouldn’t elaborate. He suggested we drive while we talk, and pointed out the route past San Juan Airport and up into the Puerto Rican tropical rainforest. We reached the summit of vegetation just as dawn was breaking, and he said, ‘Stop here.’ After a while a woman materialized out of the undergrowth, carrying a basket full of bananas. Following Hughes’ request, I got out of the car and bought a dozen. He put on a pair of white cotton gloves and we began to peel and eat them. They were short, fat, sweet bananas. ‘These are the best bananas in the world,’ he said, and to prove it he ate four. ‘In America they’re made of plastic.’

  After the banana feast we got down to talking business and procedure. Long after the sun rose and the lush greenery of the rainforest glittered with golden light, we checked off the last clause in the agreement and signed several necessary copies, resting the pages on Hughes’ briefcase against the dashboard of the Chevrolet. ‘Good,’ he said, smiling broadly for the first time since I had met him. ‘I hate these goddamn business details. Now we can get to work. You go back to Spain. I’ll call you when I’m ready to start.’

  That was the prelude. I was full of contradictory impressions, and on the plane flying up to New York, I took out a spiral notebook and began making notes on some of the conversations. They sum up, better than any recollection, the tenor of what was said and the feelings I had then about what he had allowed himself to reveal; and so I reproduce them verbatim.

  H: ‘The things that every man wants the most are the easiest to get. Money, fame, and women. That’s what happened to me. And so you get them – and what then? There’s that old gypsy curse: “May your dreams come true.”’

  He knew Hemingway, apparently in Cuba. At first Hem. didn’t know who HH was – just another hanger-on. ‘Hem liked the fact that I knew something about planes. I had a private plane (where and when?) and I took Hem. up for a ride. He said, ‘You’re a hot pilot’… A year or so later when I saw him again I told him who I was. He said, ‘Well, you son of a bitch.’ He seemed to be impressed, and unfortunately that changed our relationship. Of course he gave me his word that he wouldn’t let on to anyone else who I was, and as far as I know he kept it.’

  H., on women briefly: ‘They wear you out trying to get ideas across to them. Then later, when you give up trying, they hate you for it. Like Ava [Gardner] and Lana [Turner]. They want too much. I didn’t have that much to give.’ I n reference to my own private past life he said, ‘You really find individual women so different?’

  I said, ‘I sure do,’ and he made no comment; but he obviously disagreed.

  H: (about me) ‘You’re an outsider, of a sort – a kind of cultivated maverick. Putting aside judgments as to the harm you’ve done, because by your own admission you’re a selfish son of a bitch, that’s probably why I get along with you. I have to like any man who goes his own way, as long as he doesn’t step on my toes.’

  I feel strongly his consciousness of death as a powerful factor in his life. To describe him, at this junction: alone but not necessarily lonely; careful but not cautious; straightforward but not simple; intelligent but not intellectual; fussy but not really phobic; frail but making no obvious demands for his frailty; desperately curious about anything he doesn’t know about; eccentric but not crazy; anxious to communicate but doubly anxious not to be misunderstood.

  Most men flatter themselves that they live in their own world, but in fact they care a hell of a lot what the world-at-large thinks of them. Hughes, it would seem, for the most part has no time for self-flattery and less for caring about the world’s opinion. Maugham said that money is the sixth sense which enables us to make the best of the other five. Maugham said it; Hughes may have lived it.

  II

  The book – at that time still an authorized biography – was codenamed ‘Project Octavio’ by the few privileged executives at McGraw-Hill and Life magazine (which had immediately bought first-serial rights) aware of its existence. Hughes had insisted on absolute secrecy and this was spelled out unequivocally in the various contracts. A breach of that secrecy gave him the opportunity to withdraw. ‘None of my people know I’m doing this,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t want them to know. If it leaks to the press and you’re asked, you’ve got to deny everything.’ The proscriptions extended into all areas, including this introduction, which will account for the fact that certain place names and dates have either been changed or omitted. The tape-recorded interviews would be transcribed and typed under Hughes’ direction – that is to say, by some trusted lower-echelon associate – and my copy of the transcripts was to remain in my possession at all times. When it was read by the publishers, our agreements stipulated that I was to be physically present. ‘They can come up and read it in your hotel room,’ Hughes counseled. ‘Don’t go to their offices. You’ll go out to take a leak and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you zip up your fly. I’m counting on you,’ he said.

  We were so unalike. He was nearly thirty years older than I, bred in the Texas oilfields, orphaned young, a college dropout. I came from a middle-class Jewish home in Manhattan and had loafed through a bucolic university education at Cornell. In 1951 when Hughes was ferreting Communists out of the film industry in Hollywood, I was marching with Paul Robeson at Union Square and writing angry letters to The Nation. This gave a good base for conflict and we used it when we had to. He was a billionaire twice over; I still couldn’t qualify for an American Express card and Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times had called me ‘America’s best worst-selling novelist,’ which was a nice compliment but didn’t pay the rent. Hughes had lived almost all his life in America; I had taken off at the age of twenty-two and become, without design but nonetheless firmly, an expatriate. His world of adventure had taken place in moviemaking, flying, high finance; I had bummed my way around four continents, worked in steel mills and wheat harvests, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, married several times and written six books. He had designed and built one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world; I had nearly failed high school physics and had trouble splicing two wires together. I had three children, Hughes had none.

  There were similarities too, that helped in oblique ways. Hughes had been an only child; so had I. The world of an only child is a special one and the male who moves from it into adulthood carries a heritage of ego, selfishness, self-sufficency and loneliness. This we shared. And we were both tall – Hughes nearly six foot three and I an inch taller. Tall men instinctively understand each other’s physical stance, the still-living memory of adolescent awkwardness, the vulnerability. There was also the fact that Hughes, who has been sued in court possibly more times than any living man, discovered one day that my publishers and I were being sued for libel and defamation of character as a result of my last p
ublished book. The damages claimed, worldwide, came to more than $160 million. ‘You know,’ he said to me, gravely, ‘I’ve never been sued for that much in my whole life. That’s really something. I’m sorry for you, but I’m impressed. That tops me by – let’s see – by $23 million.’

  ‘Yes, but you lost the lawsuit, Howard, and you’ve got that kind of money. I won’t lose because what I wrote was true and I can prove it. And if I lose, I haven’t got $160 million.’ He hadn’t listened. ‘That’s really something,’ he repeated, and I realized he had a new respect for me; he was mildly envious.

  The interviews began in the Bahamas. Most of them took place in my hotel room. The air-conditioning had to be turned off, the windows closed, and my wife, who was traveling with me then, had to disappear half an hour before the appropriate time. This meant that she saw a great deal of the nightlife in Nassau and once, at four o’clock in the morning, had to wrap herself in a hotel blanket and doze in a deck chair on the beach until the sun woke her. Her enthusiasm for the project was increasingly dim.

  Hughes was a talker and rambler, but I wanted more than facts and anecdotes: I wanted the man. ‘You ask some tough questions,’ he said, and after a while he began to call me ‘Mr. Why,’ because ‘Why?’ on my part became a refrain, until I was almost as tired of hearing myself say it as he was. We clocked about nine hours of actual taping time during the ten days I spent in the Bahamas, but that represented more than twenty hours spent together. He would wave his hand at the tape recorder. ‘Shut it off… I can’t stand that damn thing… ‘and he would vanish to the bathroom, carrying his leather briefcase.

  Coming back he would drop into his easy chair; I would switch on, we would talk again; after five minutes he would jiggle his hand again at the machine and after I had switched off he would say, ‘It’s not going good. This isn’t the way I thought it would be. Can’t you find out some of these details for yourself? I thought you were an experienced reporter.’

  The next meeting took place in June. I was better prepared this time. I had taken a crash course in the known life of Howard Hughes, largely due to the efforts of a man named Richard Suskind, whom I had hired as a researcher. I had known Dick Suskind for ten years on the island of Ibiza; he was a writer and a scholar, the author of books on the Crusades, Richard the Lion-Heart, the battle of Belleau Wood and the history of Anarchism. He knew how to dig into files, libraries and periodical indexes. At the time, still thinking that the Hughes book would be a definitive biography and therefore a two-year project of interviewing, researching, cross-referencing, writing and editing, I needed help. Suskind began scouring the United States in April and came back with a glum face. ‘There’s practically nothing,’ he said, ‘and most of it repetitious, hearsay, stuff in gossip columns.’ Newspaper files had been stripped, court records were mostly unavailable, whole editions of magazines with articles on Hughes had been bought out and vanished from the public domain. The few unathorized biographies were useless, trading on business analyses in Fortune, parroting back the flamboyant stories that from time to time appeared in the national press, expanding New York Times’ accounts of Hughes’ exploits in the air and in Hollywood back in the ‘30s. I read everything and realized immediately from what I had learned in the Bahamas that the public man was a myth bordering on a lie. His time as a bush pilot in Ethiopia, his meetings with Schweitzer and Hemingway, weren’t mentioned anywhere; his so-called seclusion in Las Vegas was accepted as gospel. Howard Hughes had neatly outfoxed the world for more than thirty years.

  When we met for the second series of interviews the mood was markedly different. Again they took place in my hotel or motel room. The fact that it was a second meeting, a reaffirmation of mutual purpose, was a powerfully positive factor. On a simpler level, we were glad to see each other again and said so. But as soon as the tape recorder was in position and I reached for the start button, Hughes snapped out at me. He had read and brought with him the transcript of the Bahama interviews. ‘You baited and bullied me,’ he accused. ‘You led me into saying things I didn’t mean to say. You kept interrupting and contradicting me. That’s got to stop.’

  We argued, and finally I said, ‘Okay, if I’ve done that I was unaware of it, and I apologize. I certainly won’t do it now. All I ask from you is the truth.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to give you,’ he said sharply. ‘No more pussyfooting around.’ He had clearly made up his mind to something.

  In the course of the next weeks he opened up; but it was a hard, painful flowering. Think how hard it is for any man to speak and tap at the truths of his own experience with a blind man’s cane: because in that world of self-revelation we are all equally blind, or else we lie and wear masks we’ve collected throughout the years – collected, tested and saved for such occasions. But he tried from the beginning to get it right, get it straight, without the benefit of mask or mummery. He would start to speak, stop, then say, ‘No, that’s bullshit. Scrub that, don’t transcribe it. Let me start again.’ And he would do it again, and if he didn’t get it right he would frown and say, ‘We’ll come back to that. Remind me, will you, please?’ He wasn’t aiming to polish his words but to plumb his memory better; not so much to be analytically deep, but more to strike the mark as though he were an archer taking aim at a far target and not so sure his hand was steady or his sight good enough anymore to isolate it from the background. He was archer and target both; and that was why it hurt, more so when he struck the mark. A hard flowering, I said, and one that had to be respected. Again and again he came to our meetings in a fractious mood, skittery and prudent and startled like a virgin when the instrument of violation makes contact. He was violated by his own momentum to shatter that hymen of superficial memory, common to us all, stretched tightly across the past. We scrapped and argued all the way, then and later, because it was easy for him to confuse my pressuring him with his own need to get to the root and gut of things. Random exchanges taken from the transcribed interviews, verbatim – and not included in the text of the autobiography – will give an idea.

  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.