That night I boarded an SAS jet and flew over the pole to Copenhagen. I bought Danish hand-knitted sweaters for Edith and the children and then telephoned to London. Nina’s maid, Mary, told me that Nina was in Ibiza. “But she left a message,” Mary said, “that if you came through you should stay here.”
Bleary-eyed and moving like a sleepwalker, I ran around London for most of the day to various photographic shops until the 500 contact negatives had been blown up to 8x10 glossies. The next day I caught the early afternoon plane to Ibiza. Edith, brown and beaming, was waiting for me at the airport with the children. I gathered them in my arms and said to Edith, “God, I’m glad to see you. What a hell of a trip.”
“It went good, darling?”
“It went …” I was too tired to elaborate. “I’ll tell you later, and you won’t believe it.” I slid behind the wheel of the Mercedes, shifted the seat back so that my legs had some room, then leaned across to kiss her. “We’ve got a book,” I repeated. “And it’s going to be great. All we have to do,” I said, grinning wearily, “is sit down and write it.”
Chapter 9
“Who’s Howard Today — You or Me?”
It was the moment we had been aiming for ever since Project Octavio was launched. We sat sweating in the sun-filled studio, I in my big red swivel chair with the broken rollers, Dick in the overstuffed armchair with his back to the view of the blazing Mediterranean. But we somehow dreaded to take the leap. We were committed, we were knowledgeable, we were hungry to work; yet there was a mental frontier to be crossed that held us at bay as though it contained a killing charge of electricity. No more plotting and planning — for the moment. This was it. We were about to create Howard Hughes. The hubris inherent in our scheme — there from the beginning but hitherto held in check — struck us simultaneously, although neither of us could articulate the awareness and the consequent unease.
“Let’s not get off to a false start,” I said, fidgeting and lighting another cigarette. “Let’s think a while.”
Dick nodded. “We could knock off for the day. Get cracking early tomorrow morning.”
Practically every surface in the studio, including the handloomed Moroccan bedspread, was covered with research material. A chopped-up, annotated version of the Dietrich manuscript lay on the desk next to the tape recorder and typewriter. Three shelves of my bookcase were crammed with books we had bought on our travels, and strewn about the tile floor were four dozen blue cardboard folders stuffed with Xeroxes of newspaper and magazine articles, 8x10 photographs of the Time-Life files, pamphlets, travel brochures, handwritten notes, and maps. There were folders marked TWA, EARLY FLYING EXPERIENCES, RKO, SPRUCE GOOSE, HELL’S ANGELS, SENATE HEARINGS, HUGHES AIRCRAFT, ETHIOPIA, HEMINGWAY; there were folders marked PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, WOMEN, and BUSINESS, the pertinent years noted in red ink. The apparent disorder was deceptive.
“Do you know where everything is?” Dick asked.
I had been in charge of the filing system. “I know where everything should be.”
He looked unhappily at the wall-to-wall disarray. “I couldn’t work this way. How the hell can you be so disorganized?”
“It’s all in my head,” I explained, poking the nearest folders with the toe of my sandal. “I can put my finger on everything … I think.”
“Well, how will we begin?”
“I don’t know exactly how. I guess we should talk about it. I mean, let’s have a plan.”
As far as McGraw-Hill and Life were concerned, I had already taped twenty-odd hours of interviews with Howard in Nassau, Los Angeles, and Palm Springs. The final long interview session, scheduled for September, had yet to take place; but Dick and I would tape and write it now, in advance. “I hope to God you remember what you told them he told you,” Dick said, reading my mind. “Did you make notes about what you said?”
“I never had time.”
“Do you remember everything?”
“Not really. I told them he met Hemingway, but I’m damned if I can remember when he met Hemingway. I mean I can’t remember when I told them he’d met Hemingway. Let’s do this in an orderly fashion,” I said, efficiently producing a leftover pad of yellow lined paper. “Let’s decide on certain basic things.”
“Like what?”
“Like what kind of a man we’re going to create. Who is Howard Hughes?”
“He hates germs,” Dick said. “He has two billion dollars.”
“Thanks. What else?”
“He’s lonely. He has no friends. He’s cursed with all that money. People are always out to get it from him.”
“Right. So he’s paranoid. He feels maligned and misunderstood. He’s tired of being a technological man. He’s searching for himself. That’s why he’s telling me the story of his life.”
“Let’s go back further,” Dick said. “He grows up in Texas.”
“How’s your Texas accent? Maybe it’ll help if you talk with a Texas accent. You have to feel your way into this part,” I explained, remembering something of what actor friends of mine had told me about the Stanislavsky Method. “Think Texas. It’s 1905, 1910, 1915 … the wide open spaces. Oil gushing from the prairie. You’re born, they bring you to your mother in the maternity ward and she says, ‘That’s not Howard!’ But you grow up anyway, a son of the Old West. Blacks love watermelon and Jews have hooked noses.”
“Me?” said Dick. “Am I going to be Howard?”
“Well, you be Howard part of the time and I’ll be myself, and part of the time I’ll be Howard and you be me. Let’s play it by ear, whoever’s in the mood. Who would you rather be, Howard or me?”
“Howard. He’s got two billion dollars.”
I nodded, then laughed. “Maybe when he reads this book — if he ever reads it — he’ll be so delighted he’ll make me his heir.”
“And maybe he’ll be so pissed off he’ll send two of the Mormon Mafia here to Ibiza to kill you. Did you ever think of that?”
“I think of it all the time,” I said unhappily.
“No, don’t worry.” Dick was always reassuring whenever my spirits flagged or the spectre of violence loomed in my imagination. “He won’t do that. He’s never done that kind of thing before.”
“He’s never had anyone write his authorized biography before, either.”
I stubbed out the cigarette, leaned over and picked up the telephone. “I think I’ll give Gerry and Laurel a ring. Find out if he’s got his boat in the water yet.”
“Come on,” Dick said, sitting suddenly upright in his chair. “Let’s stop looking for excuses. Let’s have a whack at it. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
I put the phone back in the cradle. He was right: it was time to fish or cut bait, as Howard would say. I plugged the microphones into the tape recorder, setting one microphone on the desk near me and the other on the file cabinet facing Dick. “Testing, testing, one, two, three …” I played it back, rewound the tape, and said, “Okay. Who’ll be Howard first, you or me?”
“Me,” Dick volunteered. “I know the Houston material purty good, pardner.” Dick had suddenly acquired as much of a Texas accent as could be expected from a Jewish boy born in the Bronx 46 years ago.
“Are we on now?” he asked.
“We’re on.”
“Well, where would you like me to begin?”
“I’d like you to begin at the beginning. Keep it in chronological order and it will help me a lot in the long run.”
The beginning. Well, I suppose the beginning is Christmas Eve, 1905, when I was born. That was in Houston. At least I think it was in Houston. There are some people say it was in Shreveport, Louisiana.”
“Hold everything,” I said, switching off the tape recorder. “What the hell’s this business about Shreveport? Where did you get that?”
“I don’t know,” Dick said. He seemed as surprised as I was. “It just popped up. Didn’t I read it somewhere?”
“No,” I said, “you made it up.”
&nbs
p; “Well, let’s keep it in. He’s confused. He’s never told his life story before. How do you know where you’re born? People tell you. Do you believe everything people tell you?”
“Okay.” I punched the START button again. “Keep popping … How can you not know where you were born?”
“We never talked about it. I just assume I was born in Houston, and any records I’ve ever seen indicate I was born in Houston. So that will just have to do.”
“Who told you you were born in Shreveport?” I grinned at Dick. Squirm out of this one, buddy.
“My grandfather, and my mother, I think. He … I saw him a few times before he died. He was a very old man. A veteran of the Civil War. Fought for the Confederacy. Finished as a major general, as a matter of fact. He once mentioned Shreveport. Said my father was in Shreveport looking for oil. I wound up in Shreveport once myself, in jail, but that’s another story. This goes way back, you understand … back before …”
I switched off again. “That’s his great-grandfather, the major general. Howard couldn’t have known him. You’re some researcher.”
Dick shrugged. “Put it in a footnote … say he was mistaken. It’ll look more natural if he makes mistakes like that now and then.”
When we stopped taping, several hours later, we had crammed both sides of one seven-inch reel and part of another. We lay back in our chairs like empty sacks — dripping sweat, exhausted — and yet filled with an elation that was to run like an electric current through our lives all that summer. We were on the road to a unique creation, a remarkable man telling a remarkable life story; all the more remarkable because it was based on fact and yet we had the freedom and power to infuse fact with the drama of fiction. When one of us would falter in stride, the other would step into the role. Howard Hughes, our Howard Hughes, would blossom like a plant beamed on by twin suns, one of which would always provide life-giving sustenance. Both Dick and I were aware of this from that first day’s session and it had an extraordinary effect on our spirits, carrying us through all the bad moments, all the dull stretches that usually characterize the wearying and lonely task of writing a book, where under ordinary circumstances only one fallible ego acts as creator and critic.
The tapes had to be transcribed and we could trust no one but ourselves with that job. Early the next morning Dick began the work. By the time I arrived, at ten o’clock, he had typed more than thirty pages. We took turns at the typewriter until we had transcribed everything we had taped the day before. Then we plugged in the mikes and started the next section of Howard’s boyhood.
Dick’s research in the Houston library proved invaluable. He had diligently ransacked old city telephone directories for the Hughes family addresses when Howard was a child. These, combined with old maps, economic surveys, and the society columns of those years, gave us a chronicle of the family fortunes. They had moved often, Dick found, as Howard Sr.’s luck in the oil fields waxed and waned: from the Rice Hotel to various boarding houses to private homes. Dick had also culled relevant items from The Houston Post and Chronicle of those early years: the prices of clothing, for example, at Houston’s leading haberdashers; and twenty pages from a 1915 Texas guide to etiquette and correct dress. I studied Texas etiquette for an entire morning and worked it into the transcript as follows:
HOWARD: Oh, he [his father] dressed well, but not the way she (his mother] would have liked. He bought his clothes in New York when he could, he was always very stylish but it wasn’t her idea of what a gentleman wore. It was too … well, too modern. I remember he wore a fob and not a watch chain and she thought that was undignified, and he wore a straw hat in April, it was hot as hell, and my mother said, “Howard, goodness me, you know you’re not supposed to wear a straw hat until the First of June!” It sounds silly, I know, but she was very serious and he, well, he didn’t take it too well, that sort of attention being paid to him. He had a white flannel golfing coat and it … it reduced her to tears when he wore it. She’d bought him a striped coat, which she considered correct, and he refused to wear it, said it was too goddam hot.
Dick also noted down bits of curiosa. One item, taken from a Houston Post of 1909, supplied us with the key to a spurious explanation of Howard’s germ-phobia that we felt sure would delight the soul of any amateur psychologist who read the book. It was a paragraph in which a New Orleans doctor claimed that cornbread was responsible for leprosy. We used it, and amplified on the theme to some extent:
HOWARD: … I remember once she caught me eating cornbread and got very upset, made me take a laxative and wanted to stick a wooden spoon down my throat to make me vomit it up.
CLIFFORD: Why did she …
HOWARD: She believed you got leprosy from eating cornbread. Some doctor had said that and my mother believed him and she told me, “Never eat cornbread.” I didn’t pay attention, or maybe I didn’t hear her, and she caught me eating cornbread and, well, she worried about me. She had a lot of theories about disease, I remember. I think it was you couldn’t eat gingerbread because you got … some disease or other. And meat had to be cooked until it was practically shoe-leather or you could catch hoof-and-mouth disease, which drove my father crazy because he liked his beef blood-rare. Also, Buffalo Bayou overflowed one year [another unrelated item we had found in The Houston Post] and my mother said, “No fish, we can’t eat fish now.” I don’t remember exactly what the reason was. And … well, no pork, no pork ever, but that was very sensible. She had a cousin who died of trichinosis.
Later, after the transcripts had been finished and submitted, the McGraw-Hill and Life editors felt that Howard’s mother was indeed the source of the billionaire’s phobias. “The material on her is a little thin,” they said. “Next time you see him, ask him some more questions about her.” I obliged, and added to the final manuscript the following anecdote, which came from my own personal childhood experience during a summer in Rockaway Beach, New York.
HOWARD: … One day Mama came around to the garage and said, “Come outside with me.” I went out with her to the street and there on the sidewalk were three boys from the neighborhood, about my age, just standing around. She had seen them playing nearby, playing cowboys and Indians. She had collared them, brought them to the front door, and told them to wait there. She brought me outside and then she announced to these boys, “This is my son Howard and he would like to play with you.” It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my childhood. I can remember it distinctly even now — that terrible feeling of shame, that my mother had forced my presence on these boys … She was so overprotective that … well, this may strike you as comical, but she was a Texas version of a Jewish mother. If she had lived to see it, I could well imagine her saying, “Help, help! My son Howard the Billionaire is drowning.” And she would have been right, because in later years, as I intend to tell you — from the age of thirty to nearly sixty — I was drowning.
“Wonderful,” the editors said, when they read that. “He really opened up to you.”
Early in the game, before our April research trip, we had decided that at some time in his life Howard would have visited India. “We’ll make it one of the climactic experiences of his life,” I said.
Dick, with a twinkle in his eye, added, “It will complete his disillusionment with the West.”
Both Dick and I had spent some time in India — I had visited Benares and lived in a houseboat in Kashmir; Dick had touched at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras as a merchant seaman — we reckoned that we could draw on our own experiences to lend verisimilitude to the episode.
To supplement our memories and to add point and piquancy to the story, Dick bought books on Eastern philosophy and mysticism by Rabindranath Tagore and Maharishi, and shipped them to Ibiza. We didn’t have time to read them through, but we poked about in them, selected a few key concepts and a suitable abstract vocabulary, and one day towards the end of July we decided to have a go at it.
An hour later, when we finished the taping, we played it back. D
ick held his nose and pulled an imaginary chain.
“Yeah,” I said, “like something out of The Razor’s Edge. But let’s transcribe it anyhow. Maybe it will read better than it sounds.”
The yarn we had concocted was wild enough to satisfy even the insatiable appetite of the people at McGraw-Hill for the outré; but it read like a dime novel. There was Howard, fifty-five years old, tormented by self-doubt, looking for “answers,” standing on the steps of the Ganges at Benares with the stench of the burning ghats in his nostrils. He sees a couple of fakirs — one who has stood on one leg for so long that the other leg has withered; the other fakir has blinded himself by staring at the sun hour after hour with open eyes. Howard is horrified and disgusted.
“But these are not the true holy men,” Howard’s guide tells him. “You must visit my father, Ramaprasad. Unlike these sad creatures, he is a repository of the true wisdom of the East.”
And so Howard visits the white-haired patriarch, Ramaprasad (the name of a 16th-century poet we had pulled at random from a book called Hinduism), in a village near Benares, and is astounded and impressed by the aura of serenity that surrounds him. He sits at the old man’s feet, literally and figuratively, for an indeterminate period (I said it should be two weeks; Dick insisted on a longer stay; I prevailed with the argument that if anyone at Life checked the chronology of those years, the longest unaccountable period would be two weeks) and learns to grapple successfully with the problems of the “self,” to tear aside the veil that separates him from the real, the true, the whole Howard Hughes.
Howard returns to visit Ramaprasad again, about a year later, and finds him dying of cancer. He sits the death-watch, donates $500,000 — anonymously — to establish the Ramaprasad School of Eastern Studies — ”it’s still there in India,” Howard says, “but you’ll have trouble finding it” — and returns once more to the United States, no longer a man divided against himself but prepared to cope with anything, including the loss of TWA and a $137-million judgment.
The Hoax Page 16
