Howard Hughes Read online

  I told him I had, and he said, with a smile on his ravaged face, ‘I’m glad we didn’t argue. I’m not such a bad guy after all, am I?’

  ‘No, you’re not a bad guy, and I never thought you were.’ Not wishing to be stickily sentimental, I had to add: ‘And you’ll be an even better guy in my eyes when you pay me that dollar you lost. Remember, I’m not the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and that’s not a $40 million dollar loan. A bet is a debt of honor.’

  He said brightly, ‘Good. I’m glad we’ve patched it up. A good evening of talk between friends will always do that. Let’s meet tomorrow night and get on with the work. I’ve still got a lot more to tell you about my life.’

  A couple of weeks later, after one or two reminders, he paid the dollar to me on Paradise Island, and he told me a lot more about his life. And now that it’s all over I vouch for his conclusion. He’s not such a bad guy after all. What follows is the story of his remarkable life, in his own words.

  Preface

  SINCE 1957, AS is well known, I haven’t granted an interview or had a photograph taken. It may seem as if I’ve gone overboard in a negative way, but a long time ago I decided I’m not here on earth to satisfy the vulgar curiosity of the mob.

  The fact that I shunned publicity had a backlash. Just because I was the richest man in the world and wouldn’t give interviews and didn’t want to be a public figure, that made me a public figure. Every newspaper and magazine in this country has a reporter whose sole job is to snoop into my private life and the doings of my companies. If I’d courted publicity, after a while they would have said, ‘Watch out, here comes old moneybags again, looking for free newspaper space.’ I just wasn’t tricky enough.

  But now, because I’m nearing the end of my life, I want to set the record straight.

  There’s an old American Indian torture. They’d pull out a little piece of your intestines and nail it to a tree, still attached to you, and then shove hot brands at you, burning brands, to make you run around that tree and pull out your own guts – leave a trail of your own guts unwinding behind you. The tradition’s still carried on in this country by politicians, big business, and the news media, in less obviously bloody ways.

  They tried to put me in an asylum. They wrote outright lies about me; I don’t mean distortions, I mean outright lies. The portrayal of me as an aging lunatic – I won’t have it. I want the balance restored. I don’t want future generations to remember Howard Hughes only as an obscenely rich and weird man. There’s more to me than that.

  Nevertheless, I intend to be dead honest, because a great deal of what I did I kept well hidden. This is the truth about my life, warts and all. This book will be my epitaph, the only one I’ll ever have.

  1

  Howard is embarrassed by his mother, takes his first airplane flight, inherits Hughes Tool, and loses his shirt in a crooked poker game.

  LET’S BEGIN AT the beginning. For me that was Christmas Eve, 1905, in Houston, Texas. That’s when I was born – only forty years after the Civil War ended, to put things in proper perspective. I was an only child. My mother wanted more children but she couldn’t have them. She wasn’t even meant to have me. I was a surprise, or so they told me. A welcome surprise, I think. My parents had great hopes for me.

  My father was a gambler, a high-roller. He took me out one time to Jakie Friedman’s place, a gambling hall way out on Main Street when that part of Main Street wasn’t even in Houston proper. I was seven or eight years old, just chin-high to the craps table. It was late for me to be up, but I have a vivid memory of that smoky room, those green-shaded lights, and Big Howard, in a sweat, rolling the dice.

  Big Howard is what they called my father. I was Little Howard, or Sonny. The name, Big Howard, fit my father in every way: he was larger than life, and either he was rolling in money or he and my mother didn’t know where the next bottle of French wine was coming from.

  Wildcatting – drilling for oil on short-term leases – was the biggest gamble of all in Texas, and that’s what Big Howard loved most. He went up to Sour Lake, hit it big there, then lost everything at Batson when the field turned to water. This was before he invented what came to be called the Sharp-Hughes drill bit, which became the basis for the family fortune. Until then we didn’t live in one place very long and it wasn’t until the manufacture of the drill bit got going that we settled down in the house on Yoakum Boulevard, and that’s the only place – to this day – that I can think of as home.

  In 1916, when I was ten years old, my father and his partner, Walter Sharp, were drilling for oil at a dusty place called Pierce Junction. They had leased the land for sixty days because Big Howard was sure there was oil there. But he had to give it up as a dry hole when he hit hard rock with the fishtail bit, a chisel-faced cutting tool they all used in those days.

  After that he drilled at Goose Creek and the same thing happened – they hit hard rock the fishtail bit couldn’t penetrate.

  My father was fed up, so he and Walter Sharp came up with the first crude designs for a high-speed rotating cone bit with one hundred and sixty-six edges. A few nights later, in a bar in Beaumont, Big Howard got to talking with a man named Granville Humason, a millwright. Humason had been thinking along the same lines as my father and Wally Sharp, and he’d made some sketches on a sheet of paper. He had a little model of the device too.

  These sketches and the model went well beyond what my father and Sharp had been contemplating. My father never hesitated. He bought everything from Humason for $150 cash that he hauled out of his money belt and slapped down on the bar. Humason signed a receipt which meant that the designs were the property of my father and Wally Sharp.

  Did Humason become their partner?

  No, Humason was naive, or a fool – it comes to the same thing. He let them buy him out completely, and three weeks later my father filed the patents, and with the first tool bit he went back to Goose Creek and brought in the well he couldn’t bring in before. Then he went back to Pierce Junction and did the same thing. He improved the drill and patented all the improvements a hundred different ways, and later he invented a gate valve and a disc bit for gumbo shale. He offered that bit to the government in 1917 for boring between trenches, but the damn fools turned it down.

  He used to deliver the drill bits wrapped in burlap or newspaper, because his patents weren’t secure yet. The rigs were deserted when he got to them. None of those roughnecks were allowed to work on them until the bit was down in the hole and out of sight. He made most of his money leasing the drill bits, and he said to me, ‘Sonny, this drill bit is your bread and butter money. Don’t ever do anything to jeopardize it.’ And I never did. That became a religion for me.

  I take it that your father had a great bearing on your life.

  Most fathers do, although most men can’t admit it. He was born in Missouri, but he spent his youth in Keokuk, Iowa. As a kid he was thrown out of half a dozen schools. There was a particular way he wanted to do things, and it didn’t always match up with the way the people who ran those schools thought things should be done. Nevertheless, he got into Harvard, and graduated, and became a lawyer before he became a gambler and a wildcatter. He practiced law for a while, but he once told me he never finished law school, he bought the degree. He went into lead mines too, in Joplin, and he was hunting for silver in Mexico at one time; he was a telegraph operator and then a reporter in Denver. A jack of all trades, and if you discount his losses at the gambling tables, a better businessman than I am.

  My father wanted money, and he got it. He wanted a fine home and he got that. And after my mother died, he wanted high living and he got that too, until the day he dropped dead. I was close to him when I was very young, before he invented the cone bit, but after that he was too busy for me, and I became a lonely kid.

  My mother was from Kentucky. Her maiden name was Allene Gano, and she was the daughter of a judge. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, against all odds an
d the doctor’s warnings, she got pregnant again. She began to miscarry in the fifth month, and they rushed her to the hospital. In those days the conditions were far from antiseptic. They were close to criminal. The hospital covered it up and never let out any of the details. I think the doctors cut an artery by mistake, but I’ve never satisfied myself as to the exact circumstances. All I know is that she died on the operating table of a hemorrhage. I was seventeen.

  Before that, when the tool company was founded and money began to flow in, my mother joined the Harmonic Society and the Houston Heights Literary Club, but my father wouldn’t have any part of that.

  ‘Won’t you join, Howard?’ she asked him. ‘It will enrich your life.’

  ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘I’m rich already.’

  She tried to get him to dress well. By then he bought his clothes in New York, and he was always stylish, but it wasn’t her idea of what a gentleman wore: it was too modern. He wore a fob and not a watch chain, and she thought that wasn’t dignified. He wore a straw hat in April, and my mother said, ‘Howard, you know you’re not supposed to wear a straw hat until the first of June!’

  He had a white linen golfing coat and it reduced her to tears when he wore it. She’d bought him a striped flannel coat, which she considered correct for a Texas gentleman. But he said, ‘Flannel is too goddamn hot.’

  She was always fussing over me. You couldn’t eat gingerbread because you got worms, and meat had to be cooked until it was practically shoe-leather or you could catch hoof-and-mouth disease, which drove my father up the wall because he liked his beef blood-rare. Buffalo Bayou overflowed one year and my mother said, ‘We can’t eat fish now. When the water flowed back into the bayou it brought dirt.’ And no pork ever, because she’d had a cousin in Kentucky who died of trichinosis.

  Once she caught me eating cornbread and she stuck a wooden spoon down my throat to make me vomit it up. She believed you got leprosy from eating cornbread – some quack had said that, and my poor mother believed him. She wanted to rush to me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. My father yelled, ‘Leave that boy alone! You’ll make him crazy!’

  Mama was not a Texan; she was Southern gentility with a touch of Eastern attitudes tempered by French Huguenot blood. She didn’t like frontier ways, and Houston was still in many ways a frontier oil city. I resented certain things about her – particularly her concern for me. When I was seven or eight years old we moved to a new neighborhood. The first few days we were there I spent most of the time in the garage, tinkering with a radio.

  My mother said, ‘Sonny, why aren’t you out playing with the other boys?’

  I said, ‘I’d rather be here, Mama.’

  The truth is that I didn’t know the kids in that neighborhood, and I was uncertain of myself and didn’t want to go out and meet them.

  One day Mama walked into the garage and said, ‘Come with me.’

  I went, and there on the sidewalk were three boys from the neighborhood. She had seen them nearby, playing Cowboys and Indians. She announced to these boys, ‘This is my son Howard and he’d like to play with you.’

  It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my childhood. I played with them for a little while. My mother was watching from the parlor window. Finally I just ran back into the house.

  It was a long time before I forgave her for that. She was a sensitive woman in many ways, but she was so overprotective that I think of her as a Texas version of the proverbial Jewish mother. If she had lived longer I could imagine her saying, ‘Help! My son Howard the billionaire is drowning.’ And she would have been right, because in later years – from the age of thirty-five to sixty – I was drowning. Drowning in what had always been the breath of life to me. Drowning in money and power.

  I was called ‘Sissy’ by the kids at Christchurch, which was a Houston school I went to, run by a Miss Eichler, a prim and proper lady. I didn’t curse, I’d run away rather than fight, and I played the saxophone, which was not the usual hobby for a kid living in Houston in 1920. In my mid-teens I had a collection of saxophones that I kept in a beautiful box of circassian walnut. I had six or seven of them – a beautiful little soprano sax, a baritone, a few tenors, even a basso profundo.

  Another reason I wasn’t very popular is that I had a serious hearing problem. I had measles when I was small, and that’s what started it. By the time I went to Miss Eichler’s, I couldn’t hear properly. In those days they may have had hearing aids, but my father would never have let me wear one because he didn’t want to know I couldn’t hear properly: that didn’t fit his image of his only son. People used to say I was a shy boy, but a lot of that shyness came from the fact that I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Then later, in 1936, I had a bad dive in a Northrop Gamma, the plane I used to break the transcontinental speed record, and it aggravated my condition. Six or seven airplane crashes over the years didn’t help.

  I have various types of amplifying equipment which make things easier for me, not only because I don’t like to wear a hearing aid, but also because it’s not really very effective. The condition of my inner ear is special. I have sensitive skin, and the hearing aid irritates the back of my ear. Besides, the electronic gear attracts germs and infection. Several operations have been considered, but the risk was always that I’d lose my hearing completely and go stone-deaf. So I prefer to hear what I can hear and to hell with the rest of it. Most of it isn’t worth listening to.

  I never made any bones about my deafness. When I went before a congressional witch-hunting investigation committee in 1947 I had an amplifier, but no equipment is really good enough to give a man perfect hearing. I sat there in the Senate, and sometimes I couldn’t hear a word of what the inquisitors were saying.

  I told the senators: ‘Speak up, please, I’m deaf.’

  I didn’t say, ‘I’m hard of hearing,’ and I didn’t say, ‘I have a hearing problem.’ I said, ‘I’m deaf.’ I don’t mince words.

  Some doctors, including Verne Mason, who used to be my private doctor until he tried to have me put away in a mental institution, said that the deafness might be in part psychological. They may have been right, because there are times when I hear better and times when I hear worse. When I’m depressed or preoccupied, it’s true I don’t hear as well. Make of that what you will.

  But it wasn’t only because I had poor hearing as a child, or because I played the saxophone, or because I was shy, that the kids in school thought of me as a sissy. The problem was really that they and their parents were always comparing me to my father, and Big Howard was about as far removed from a sissy as you could get.

  You couldn’t challenge my father – he would beat you at anything. He owned one of the first fine automobiles in Houston, a Peerless 35-horsepower. He rebuilt it himself down at Wally Sharp’s garage and he used to race in it. Some colonel in Dallas claimed he had the fastest car in Texas and could beat anything on wheels, and that’s all my father had to hear – he roared up to Dallas and bet this man $500 he’d beat him in his Peerless, and he did, at sixty miles an hour over a dirt track in the year 1920. He loved speed, and I came to love it too.

  He used to keep a cash fund down at the police station in Houston, locked up in the chief’s safe. He was haring around Houston then in the Peerless, and in a Stanley Steamer, and when he got picked up for exceeding the speed limits he’d tell the cop, ‘Take it out of my bank account down at the station house.’ They loved that. Texans loved my father. He was a man’s man.

  He was happy to pay off the law but he hated paying taxes. (I certainly share his views on that.) The income tax law came in around 1911, and some of my earliest memories are of my father yelling about ‘the goddamn government squeezing me out of my hard-earned money.’ He would back me into a corner and lecture me on how the country was going to the dogs, going to turn socialist. I couldn’t have been more than nine years old, but he tried his best to convince me that the income-tax law was going to ruin him and every oth
er businessman in the country.

  ‘Sonny, am I right or wrong? Are these taxes fair or is it the beginning of the end?’

  ‘You’re right, Daddy,’ I’d say, ‘they’re not fair’ – because that’s what my mother told me to say when he got hold of me like that.

  In 1919 the whole family visited California for the first time. My father was starting a branch of the Hughes Tool Company in Los Angeles. My Uncle Rupert invited us and introduced us out there. He was writing for the movies then, although he had already made a name for himself with a biography of George Washington. It was pretty exciting for me as a kid, going out to the West Coast, because even as early as that, Hollywood meant only one thing to me: movies. I’d been to see many of them at the nickelodeon in Houston when I was a kid. Rupert took me around to the studios, and I loved it.

  In 1921 we went out to California again. That second time I went only with my father, and he put me in the Thatcher School, just north of Los Angeles in Ojai. I was fifteen. That trip, although I didn’t fully realize it, was due to the fact that my father had said to my mother, ‘I need a long vacation from you and marriage, and I’m taking Sonny.’

  I was aware that things weren’t right between my parents. There was an atmosphere of bitterness in the house, and on more than one occasion when I was alone with my father, who was usually a talkative man, he would become silent and moody. Once I was in the workshop with him on a rainy day. He stood at the window watching the rain come down, and I could feel the bitterness oozing from him like pus.

  He said to me, ‘When you grow up, Sonny, make sure you find a woman who doesn’t pick holes in you and try to change you, and tell you how to dress and what not to say, and tie you down with a ball and chain.’