Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  The key is that I kept control. When I pressed that button, they knew that the boss was buzzing. I won’t say I thought of them as stooges at the time; they weren’t stooges, they were hard-nosed, tough-minded veteran businessmen. But as far as my life was concerned, they were employees, and to a great extent they did what I told them.

  Ella and I took the Sunset Limited to Hollywood. It makes me blush to think of this, but I sent a man out to Los Angeles to buy a pair of Rolls-Royces and had them meet us at the train with two chauffeurs.

  Aside from wanting to make a show of myself – that was youthful foolishness, nothing more – I had those two serious ambitions. I wanted to make movies and I wanted to fly. A barnstormer in Texas introduced me to some of the fliers in California who became my early flying instructors. One in particular, probably the best pilot I’ve ever known, Charlie LaJotte, gave me lessons at Clover Field. He taught me to fly on a Waco 9. I wanted to do some loops and spins in it when I was still learning. Charlie said, ‘Well, it’s not such a good idea, because the way you fly, young fella, the wings will come off.’

  Charlie drove a Model T Ford, and I had my Rolls-Royce, one of the classic Silver Cloud models, and a Duesenberg. One afternoon somebody dropped me off at Clover Field for a lesson, so that I didn’t have my car there when we landed, and I asked Charlie to drive me downtown to the Ambassador Hotel, where Ella and I were still staying. We put-putted right up to the front door and Charlie, in his old Model T, showed remarkable aplomb. He had flown in the First World War and spent some time in Paris, so he leaned out and said to the doorman,

  ‘Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous plait.’

  The doorman bowed and said, ‘Yes, sir, good evening, sir.’ He must have decided that Charlie was visiting French royalty. If you were French royalty you’d either drive a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur, or a Model T. We were both dressed like a pair of grease monkeys, but they knew I was a rich young grease monkey and they didn’t know who Charlie was. After we got out of the car Charlie decided they’d never let him into the hotel. I said, ‘You stick with me,’ and we marched right through the Ambassador Hotel wearing grease-stained flying suits, straight to the bar.

  One time I had made an appointment for a flying lesson with Charlie for ten o’clock in the morning. I didn’t show up. After an hour or so of waiting he took on some other student, and I was a little annoyed when I arrived. When he finally landed I said to him, ‘If I tell you I’ll be here at ten clock you’re paid from ten o’clock on, even if I don’t get here until midnight.’

  I loved flying from the start. I was a quick learner. I may have been young, but I had maturity thrust upon me by the early death of my parents. And when I decided to learn to fly, I had something else at the back of my mind all the time – that it wasn’t just to be a hot pilot, it was to lead to something else, that it would be the major direction of my life, and that I would achieve something significant. What exactly, I didn’t know, but I trusted my instincts.

  However, at that tender age, other things tempted me more than flying. Above all, I wanted to make motion pictures. I wanted glamor, and moviemaking was the most glamorous profession in the world.

  But before I got involved in that, I had something else to deal with, and that was my marriage.

  Ella and I stayed for a while in the Ambassador Hotel, and then I bought a house at 211 South Muirfield Road. It wasn’t luxurious like some of those mansions on Sunset Boulevard and in Beverly Hills; it was a simple, comfortable, two-story adobe house. That’s the last home I ever had. It was the first home I ever had, as a man, and it was the last. I’ve rented houses many times, in many places, and lived in whole floors of hotels, but I’ve never owned a home since I sold the place on Muirfield Road in 1931.

  How do you account for that?

  I’ve often wondered about it. Sometimes I’ve thought it was because I had never been used to living in a home, a permanent home. My father, as I told you, moved us all over southeast Texas. We were packing our clothes twice a year, so I wasn’t used to any kind of permanence. I didn’t like the idea of permanence then in Hollywood, even when Ella and I bought the house on Muirfield Road. I couldn’t understand being tied down to all that furniture. Ella was out decorating, buying carpets and drapes and flatware. She had grown up in that kind of world. I guess she thought of Hollywood as the place where she was going to raise her family, which unfortunately, she never did.

  I wasn’t home very much. I was a young buck and I had money. I was proud because already, just in those two years since my father had died, I’d made the right decision in buying out the family and gaining control of Toolco, and then the right decision in letting other men run the company on a daily basis.

  They did well, and history helped them – and it helped me too. The number of passengers carried by American railroads reached its peak around 1921, and from then on the automobile took over. The Model T had made Ford, and General Motors was well on the way to what it is today. By 1925 the total automobile production of the country had reached three million a year. What that meant for me, personally, was that Toolco had changed from a relatively small factory in the backwoods of Texas to a booming business. We tripled our facilities and plant space in those years, and our profits roared up like a space-age rocket.

  By the time I was twenty-two years old I owned a company that was worth well over $15 million – and the important thing is that I owned it lock, stock and barrel. I had no partners; I had followed Big Howard’s advice. It was a private company – no stockholders. I was completely independent at an age when most men are still struggling to get a foothold in the business world. I could put my hands on almost any amount of cash I needed. That meant I could do just about anything I wanted to do. Money is power. At twenty-two, when the future is a vague dot on the horizon and you think you’re capable of anything, it’s real power – power without a brake.

  But I still had some organizing to do, and of course, running a company that was growing by leaps and bounds, even at arm’s length there were always plenty of decisions to be made. One of my first decisions was one that affected the course of my business life for the next thirty-two years.

  I had Holliday and Montrose running Toolco in Houston. I decided I needed an accountant and a personal executive assistant to supervise things for me in whatever else I wanted to do. I needed someone who’d stand between me and the world, do the worrying, balance the books, and do the dirty work if there was any to be done.

  I let the word out that I needed such a person.

  Almost immediately someone was recommended to me and I said, ‘Let him call me.’ The man who called was named Noah Dietrich, and he came up to my office at the Ambassador Hotel. He was from Wisconsin, the son of a minister. He was a short man, and especially from my vantage point – I was already at my full height of six-foot-three, and Noah was about five-foot-six – and thirty-seven years old at the time. He was a CPA and he was used as a troubleshooter by the movie studios when they needed tax and other accounting help. He was married, he had children, he wasn’t a womanizer, and he was politically conservative. I’d had him investigated; I knew all about him before he got there. In theory he was exactly what I needed.

  I had just come off the golf course in Beverly Hills and I was carrying my putter, and while I talked to him I was putting on the green rug in the reception room. I had a little cup, a little hole, built into the rug there. Noah thought this was all a little eccentric. I had two secretaries then, and one of them worked several hours a day retrieving golf balls for me. (I saw this same scene in a movie years later, and I got a big kick out of it.)

  Every time my putter clicked against the ball, Noah jumped a little bit. It made him nervous.

  I told Noah what my situation was, that I’d inherited Toolco and bought out the other heirs, and I was interested in making movies and in various other projects, and I wanted somebody to look after my financial affairs. And then I pulled a question out of the hat. I asked
him to explain the principle of flight. This flummoxed him for a moment, but by God he came up with the answer, more or less, as much as I expected any non-flier to know.

  Why did you ask him that?

  I didn’t want just an accountant. I had this man do many jobs for me. I had him carry liquor during prohibition from Texas to California. I needed a man who could run a ticker tape through the streets of Los Angeles, which as it turned out, he couldn’t do. I needed a jack-of-all-trades with an accountant’s brain.

  I hired him, started him off at $10,000 a year, and he went up from there until he was making half a million plus a few little extravagances like a Packard I once gave him because he got me to the railroad station on time.

  But I had problems with Noah right from the beginning. Among other things, he had the ability to drive me crazy with his indecision. I got the feeling sometimes he enjoyed doing it, did it on purpose to get my goat. He was much older than me and he probably resented working for a younger man.

  This goes back to shortly after I’d hired him, and it almost made me fire him on the spot. He was basically an accountant, so naturally one of the first things he had to do was prepare my income tax return. I’d told him I wanted to file in California because I was going to live out there, but he pointed out that if I filed in Texas, which I could do because I still had legal residence in Houston, it would save me $10,000 a year. It had something to do with the community property law. I said to myself, ‘He’s an accountant, he knows what he’s doing.’ But I was uneasy about it, because I wanted to establish permanent residence in Hollywood, and that’s what Ella wanted too. She wasn’t in love with Hollywood but at least she wanted the illusion of permanence.

  We were down in Houston in the spring of 1927, looking into Toolco. We had two tax returns prepared – one for California and one for Texas. At the last minute, I told Noah, ‘No, damn it, file the California return.’ With a lot of muttering and mumbling, he dropped it off that night at the Internal Revenue office in Houston. There was a midnight deadline and he made it by less than ten minutes.

  Early the next morning he called me and said, ‘Howard, you’ve made a big mistake. I’ve been up all night figuring it out, and it’s going to cost you more than just $10,000’ – and he started giving me one of those complicated analyses of blocked income and joint interest in property. I didn’t understand a word. I was only twenty-two years old.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘get the California tax return back and file the Texas return, but please, for the love of God, don’t bother me anymore with it.’

  Noah rushed straight to the tax commissioner’s office and gave them some cock-and-bull story that he’d filed the wrong return for me, and please could he have the California return back and submit the Texas one, which he had in his pocket, together with my check for the right amount.

  They said to Noah finally, ‘All right, mistakes can happen, and we don’t want you to lose your job, so we’ll take your money.’

  When he came back to Houston we met for dinner. I asked him to please explain the whole thing to me in simple layman’s terms. I listened, and I think I must have gone white. It turned out that what he’d saved me, in hard cash, was about a couple of thousand dollars a year for the next three or four years, and I had to go back to Hollywood and still be a resident of Texas.

  I wanted to beat my fists against the wall, but I said quietly, ‘Go back to Austin and switch the returns again. I was right the first time. I want to file in California.’

  Now that was absurd of me, I know. You can’t go switching your tax returns from state to state three or four times. It’s not just that they’ll think you’re crazy, it’s that the tax people won’t bend over backwards until their spines snap. They won’t do it for John Doe and they won’t do it for Howard Hughes either.

  Noah pointed this out and I left the dinner table without another word and went upstairs to my room in the Rice Hotel. I was in such a turmoil that I thought, I’m going mad. This man can rattle my brains like popcorn. There was only one thing to do. I dived into a cold bath and lay there until it was time to sleep, and then the next morning l left a note saying, ‘Noah, it may cost me a small fortune, but you manage the finances the way you think best, in my life and at Toolco. You make the business decisions. I’ll make movies.’

  And I went back to Hollywood.

  The real point of that story is this: that’s how and why I asked Noah to take over Toolco – all over this silly tax matter – and how I was freed to do the things I really wanted to do. Destiny works in strange ways.

  3

  Howard wins an Oscar, makes Hell’s Angels, has his first air crash, and is seduced by Jean Harlow.

  THE FIRST MOVIE I made in Hollywood was called Swell Hogan, about a Bowery bum with a heart of gold. I knew an actor named Ralph Graves who had been a friend of my father’s. He took me to the Metro lot, and that time I got in.

  Graves talked me into making Swell Hogan. In my office at the Ambassador he played out all the scenes for me, acted it out before it had been written, and convinced me it was a million-dollar picture. I was impressed with his performance, and he said it would cost only fifty or sixty thousand dollars to make.

  ‘I’ll go fifty,’ I said. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  So I was in the movie business, and I made Swell Hogan. Or rather, Ralph Graves made it, and I watched and wept and paid the bills. When it was done, it had cost me $85,000, and it was a terrible movie. We couldn’t even get distribution. For a while I was a bitter and disillusioned young man.

  But nothing could stop me, not even failure. After Swell Hogan I met Mickey Nielan again, my father’s old pal, and we made a picture together, my first movie that was released. It was called Everybody’s Acting. I guess by standards today it was a pretty flimsy picture, but it made money.

  Then I hired Lewis Milestone, who had just quit Warner Brothers in a huff. He was a man whom I respected very much, and I hired him to direct a picture called Two Arabian Knights, a comedy set in the trenches of France during the First World War, and it won an Academy Award. That was the first year they had the Oscars and we won the award for best direction in comedy. It cost $500,000 to make – that was a lot of money, almost unprecedented, and people thought I was crazy, but it was a smash hit. If you take big risks there are big rewards. I knew that even then.

  These films were made by and released through my own company, Caddo Productions, which was named after the Caddo Rock Drill Bit Company in Louisiana, one of my father’s subsidiary interests that I’d inherited. Through Caddo Productions, Lew Milestone and I then made a gangster film called The Racket. All the time I was learning from my mistakes. I used to write everything down in a little ten-cent notebook I’d bought in Woolworth’s.

  One day I lost the notebook. I was beside myself, because it seemed that everything I knew was in that notebook. I’m not superstitious, I didn’t think that the loss of the notebook meant the loss of my luck as well, but it had very valuable information in it and unfortunately, once I write something down in black and white, I tend to forget it.

  I called Noah Dietrich. I had him retrace my routes that I’d traveled that day from Muirfield Road back and forth to United Artists. I told him to drive down that road and get down on his hands and knees every ten yards to see if it had fallen out of the car. He also had to creep around the studios – he sent me the cleaning bill for his trousers – but he still couldn’t find the notebook. I advertised in the newspapers. I offered a $500 reward and spent more than a thousand dollars in advertising to get that little ten-cent notebook back, and I never did. That still burns me up when I think about it.

  By 1927, when I was twenty-one years old, I had decided that I wanted to make a big, realistic picture about flying in the First World War. I wanted to do something important. I wanted my life to be of significance. I had the energy and arrogance of youth. And I had money to back them up.

  They’d made a few flying pictures before
then, but none were realistic, and by then I’d started to fly regularly and I knew all the hot pilots around Southern California – Charlie LaJotte, Frank Clarke, Frank Tomick, Roy Wilson, Jimmie Angel, Ross Cook, Al Johnson, Lyn Hayes, all of them. A lot of those guys had flown in the war and they’d seen some of these films that had been produced, including Wings, and they said, ‘Howard, it just wasn’t like that.’

  I said, ‘Well, tell me what it was like.’

  We had a lot of bull sessions – they liked me, because they thought I was crazy, like them – and the more they told me, the more I could see there was a great picture to be made, if it was made the way it was. The first time I heard that phrase, ‘the way it was,’ was from Ernest Hemingway. But that was twenty years later, when Ernest and I were friends.

  In 1927 I made the commitment. I began to shoot Hell’s Angels.

  We did things in that movie that had never been done before. I’m talking about the second version, because there were two. I shot it silent, and then talkies got started and I decided it was impossible to do this picture as a silent. The Vitaphone process had come in and I knew that it was to movies what the Sharp-Hughes drill bit had been to the oil business. I’d learned my lesson young: if you move with the times you can survive and do well, but if you want to come out on top of the heap you have to move just a little bit ahead of the times. You have to take the risks involved as well.

  I decided to reshoot the picture in sound. It wasn’t necessary to do the flying scenes a second time – and it would have cost a fortune – because there was very little talking during the battles, and that could be dubbed in the studio. It did take me a while to figure out how to get the sound of planes in combat, but I finally hit on the solution. We hung a pair of microphones from a helium balloon about a thousand feet over Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley, and I got Pancho Barnes – a famous aviatrix and stunt pilot – to buzz the mike two hours a day for nearly a week. Pancho flew a Travel Air Mystery S racer, and that engine could sound like a squadron of Fokkers when she revved it up and did a steep climb. We mixed those sound tracks every which way and got all the effects we needed.