We did something in that picture that was revolutionary. First of all we shot some of the scenes in Technicolor, which was a new process. There’s a scene in England, where the pilots, just before they’re taking off on a mission, have a big dance – and that was shot in color and cut into the film, which was of course made in black-and-white. And we had a red glaze over the film in some of the other parts. That was all new.
I did another thing that was even more exciting. We used a widescreen film like Cinemascope but then it was called Magnascope. There’s a moment in the picture just before the night sequence when the boys, Ben Lyon and Jim Hall, go out over France on a mission.
A title flashed on the screen: ‘SOMEBODY ALWAYS GETS IT ON THE NIGHT PATROL.’ And then the German planes started to come over. We had a system of pulleys rigged up in the theaters, and the screen got wider and wider and you’d hear the German Fokkers coming. We had special amplifying equipment and the noise got louder and louder, until that whole screen opened up and you saw a skyful of planes. That was a revolutionary device and it was my idea. We never had a preview, but I sat in the back row in some of the first performances. People shrank back in their seats when the German planes roared on to the screen. The screen kept growing bigger, and those planes looked like they were coming right at you and you were going to get chopped up by the props. Men sucked in their breath. Women screamed. I loved it. I was like a kid with a new toy, I’d built the toy, and my toy worked.
I had three airfields, and several hundred planes to simulate the actual combat aircraft. Most of the planes were real, like the Sopwith Camels, Avros, and a captured Gotha bomber, and I had some of the Fokkers shipped from Germany. I got Fokker himself, the man who built them, to round them up for me. I spared no expense. My whole idea was, and still is: once you commit, don’t hesitate or skimp. Do it right.
The guys who flew these ships were the real thing. Frank Clarke was a hell of a pilot, and a wild man. He was chief pilot on the picture, Tomick was in charge of the camera ships, and I was directing from the air in my Waco. Frank Clarke would fly anywhere in anything and take any risk – or, almost any risk. It turned out there was one he wouldn’t take. There was a scene where a plane had to come in toward camera and make a sharp left bank at about 200 feet.
Frank said, ‘I can’t do it, Howard.’ This was a Waco, with a Le Rhone engine, which has a hell of a torque. ‘At that altitude,’ he said, ‘this goddamn plane’s going to crash right into the ground.’
I didn’t believe him. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
‘Howard, don’t.’
‘I can do it, Frank.’
He couldn’t talk me out of it and I couldn’t shame him into doing it. I took the ship up, went into the turn, and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital, half my face in bandages. I had a crushed cheekbone and needed some surgery to repair it; you can still see the indentation. That was my second crash. Frank ran up to the plane afterwards, they told me, to see if I was still alive, and I was, and he said, ‘Thank God! I thought we’d lost our meal ticket.’
I laughed when I heard that. I loved those guys, those pilots. They could say anything, even the truth, and it didn’t matter.
One time, when we were still getting ready to shoot Hell’s Angels, we’d got the German Gotha bomber fixed up in pretty good shape. Frank Clarke and I, with a couple of girls Frank had lined up for us, flew up the coast – except the Gotha wasn’t fixed up as well as all that, and we had some engine problem and Frank brought us down to a nice landing on a strip of beach near Monterrey, where we spent the night in a little Portuguese fishermen’s settlement where hardly anyone spoke English.
Frank was a good pilot, but he wasn’t much of a mechanic. And I was a pretty good mechanic but I couldn’t fix what was wrong with the Gotha. We had to send back for parts and spend the night there with these two girls in a little shack. Kind of crowded, just one room with the four of us. An odd experience for me. I’d never gone in for orgies. It made me feel kind of funny, the four of us in one room. And we each had our own girl, and then we switched the girls.
I really don’t want to talk about this incident anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. The details of sex are either vulgar, boring or repetitious.
Let’s talk about the air crashes that took place during the making of Hell’s Angels.
Three men were killed. Al Johnson was first, and then Clem Phillips. The third man wasn’t a pilot, he was a mechanic named Phil Jones. He was in that Gotha that Frank and I flew. Frank didn’t want to fly it that day – he probably had a hangover. So there was another pilot, Al Wilson, who went up with Jones, and they were running smoke pots to simulate a burning plane. They were supposed to go into a spin, bail out, and let the plane crash. Wilson bailed out at a thousand feet, but for some reason the mechanic didn’t. I was flying above them in a scout plane. I landed in the field next to the crash and tried to pull Jones out of the wreck. But there wasn’t much left of him. And he could never tell us why he didn’t bail out.
Those were the only deaths, but not the only crashes. The pilots themselves were calling it ‘The Suicide Club.’ I suppose the funniest crash, if you can call it funny when you’re facing death that way, was when Al Wilson bailed out over Hollywood. He was in a Fokker coming back to the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was socked in with fog and he decided he was over the mountains to the north but he had no idea which way to go. He was scared to ease her down, so he bailed out. He didn’t know it, but he was right over Hollywood Boulevard, and the Fokker cracked up the backyard of a producer named Joe Schenk. Schenk and his wife, Norma Talmadge, the famous actress, were there, and some other people, and they had a hell of a scare because a plane doesn’t hit the ground like a creampuff.
The propeller hit Hollywood Boulevard and nearly took some woman’s head off. That was good publicity in one way and not so good in another. We had a fair amount of complaints. Al Wilson himself landed on some guy’s roof. He was a lucky son of a bitch, more than once.
A few years later, around 1931, I made another picture about flying. That was Sky Devil, with Spencer Tracy and William Boyd. We started looking for the guys who had flown in Hell’s Angels, and it turned out that eight or nine of them were dead. That’s not including the ones who were killed when we were shooting the picture. They’d all cracked up in just those few years. Lyn Hayes was dead, piled into a mountain somewhere. Ross Cook was dead, and Mory Johnson, Burt Lane, five or six others. All killed flying. It was a dangerous profession in those days – still is, only now you have to watch out for Arabs and hand grenades. But when I heard about this, I was very shaken up.
But it didn’t make you stop flying?
Nothing could have done that.
Did you think you had a charmed life?
I didn’t even think about it. I just kept flying. You read in the newspapers every day that thousands of people are killed in car accidents, but you don’t say to yourself, ‘I’ve got a charmed life, I’ll keep driving.’ You just keep driving because you need to get somewhere in your car. I needed to get somewhere in my plane. And I loved to fly. It was simple. Also, remember – I was young. A kid. I had many millions of dollars, but I was still a kid. If I was going to stop risking my life I would have stopped after I’d cracked up three or four times myself, but I didn’t. That never occurred to me.
I had one scene in Hell’s Angels where the Germans are forced by their commander to jump from their Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is being overtaken by the Allied planes, and in order to lighten the load the men have to jump. Being Krauts, and being ordered to jump by the captain, they jump. I shot that on the sound-stage, one of the few action scenes in that film that was shot indoors. We had a beautiful montage with a dark cloudy background. The men had to jump from the Zeppelin, down through the clouds. Of course we had a stack of mattresses on the bottom of the studio to catch them. That was one of the most dangerous scenes we shot. A lot of people thought the air stuff was the most dangerous, bu
t this was worse, because the men had to land right on the mattresses, jumping from about forty feet, and those stunt pilots – guys who would do an Immelman or an outside loop without blinking an eye – were crapping in their pants. I shot that scene fifty or sixty times, because I wanted a certain effect.
Fifty or sixty times? Are you sure?
I’m not exaggerating. It took days. I drove people crazy. I finally got what I wanted in one sequence when the hat came off one of these Krauts’ heads as he jumped. You saw that hat spinning through the air, and it gave a special feeling to the scene.
Noah was standing around the lot, and he had seen some of the rushes. He was pissing and moaning because he was thinking, that’s our money going down the drain. Already he was thinking about it as our money. He told people that any one of these rushes was just as good as any other. ‘I can’t see what Howard is after.’ But I knew what I was after and when I saw that one sequence, with the hat spinning slowly through the air, I thought, that’s it.
After all this time, I consider Hell’s Angels to be the best picture I ever made. It took me three years and over two million feet of film, not to mention over four million prewar dollars, but it still holds up. I looked at it not so very long ago and the dogfights were still the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on the screen in the way of aerial battles. We had good technical men in Hollywood even then, and they’re always the key people.
The acting, in retrospect, doesn’t measure up. I’d cast a Swedish actress called Greta Nissen in the female lead. She was one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, but she couldn’t speak English. When I decided to reshoot more than half the movie in sound, it was obvious that Greta had to go. Years later, by the way, they made a movie based on this situation –Singing in the Rain, with Gene Kelly. Nobody paid me a dime.
Arthur Landau, Greta Nissen’s agent, gave me a real sob story about her. I said, ‘What do you suggest I do?’
Arthur sighed. ‘If you’re going to dump Greta,’ he said, ‘the least you can do is take another girl from my stable.’
‘Who did you have in mind?’
‘You’ll love her. Her name is Jean Harlow.’
She’d been Harlean Carpenter until a few years before that, and in a few weeks she was the star of Hell’s Angels – her first leading role. It made her famous. She never wore a bra – that was the Harlow trademark.
Were you involved with her personally?
‘Involved’ is too strong a word. If you want to know whether or not I had an affair with her, the answer is yes. I went to bed with her because she was the star and I was the director and in those days it was one of those obligatory things to do. She came to my office one evening after the shoot and asked me to read some lines with her. I did that, of course, and the next thing I knew she was down on her knees, unbuttoning my fly to give me a blow job. I said, ‘Jean, this isn’t necessary. You’ve got the part.’ She answered something, but since she had her mouth full I couldn’t make out what she said. I just decided to relax and enjoy it.
Later, on a few occasions, we made love on the couch there, and at her house. I soon grew tired of her. She had an appeal to me, in a kind of overblown, sexy way, but after a while we had nothing to say to each other. And as an actress she was awful. I tried as hard as I could to get her to speak with just the semblance of an English accent. The others weren’t much good in that respect either, but at least occasionally they could do it. With Harlow it was totally impossible; I worked with her from midnight to dawn to get her to say ‘glass’ with an English a – to rhyme with ‘wash’ – because there’s a scene where she has to ask for a glass of champagne. And she finally got it right the sixteenth time, but when we got before the camera it came out ‘glaaas,’ like toity-toid street and toid avenoo.
I’ve seen Hell’s Angels and there’s a speech in it that Monty makes against war. I don’t know what the climate of opinion was back in 1928, but it struck me as a daring statement. I wondered if you had a hand in that speech, or if you approved of it.
I had more than a hand in that speech. I wrote it. That reflected my opinions exactly, and they haven’t changed since. I was twenty-two years old, but I wasn’t a complete fool. There was a period, I admit, when I fell under the hysteria of the Second World War – that’s probably the only patriotic and just war that I’ve lived through as a man. But before, and since, and right now, I’m as antiwar as anyone you’ll ever meet. I want to point out to you that during the period in the Fifties when I was so active against the Communists in Hollywood, it wasn’t that I wanted to go to war with Russia. There may have been a cold war but I wasn’t for a shooting war in any way, shape or form.
To me, the antiwar speech in Hell’s Angels – that war is caused by politicians – was the key statement in the movie. Of course I wanted to do an action picture, but often you start out on a project for mundane reasons, not especially high-minded, and at some point along the line you see that you’re able to make a statement of importance, and then that becomes the key to the whole thing. That speech meant a great deal to me. I had arguments with the scriptwriters about it.
They said, ‘You’re making this into a dogmatic picture.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I have the money and the money gives me the power. I want that speech made, and nothing’s going to stop me.’
I haven’t changed much since then. I say what I want to say and I do what I please – and if people don’t like it, they can go piss up a tree.
4
Howard battles the film censors, receives an offer from Al Capone, nearly gets wiped out in the stock market, and fights to retain control of Toolco.
IT WAS AROUND this time that I bought into something called Multicolor. I had used the Technicolor process for the ballroom scene in Hell’s Angels. I looked into the future and could see that one day nearly all movies would be made in color.
I was dead right, but I was premature. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s often best to let some genius do the spadework and suffer the heartbreaks, and then, if you’ve got the capital and the knowhow, you move in at the right time and take advantage of the other guy’s pioneering.
But it went against my grain to do that, and still does, because in that sense I’m more of a pioneer than a hardheaded businessman. I’m willing to take the risks if I believe strongly enough in something.
So in 1930 I bought the Multicolor process from its inventors, a couple of men named Fraser and Worthington, and we started a small company. I found a vacant lot on Romaine Street in Hollywood, built a laboratory, and wound up more than $400,000 in the red. Eventually I got sued by the other stockholders, the inventors and their backers, because I refused to throw good money after bad. They were the charter members of ‘The Sue Howard Hughes Club.’ The only thing I got for my investment was the building on Romaine Street, and that building became my principal offices for the next forty years. I’ve always referred to it as ‘Operations,’ but I never operated from there. I gave it to Noah Dietrich and told him to set it up in whatever way he wanted.
However, the issue was far from dead with these people who had sued me over Multicolor, and I was positive that they tapped my telephones. There was some piece of business – I don’t remember what it was, but there was no way it could have leaked out without someone overhearing a telephone conversation. Today, as you know, there’s no telephone in the United States that’s safe, except usually a public telephone.
And so over the years I developed a system. I do a great deal of my business at night and most of it on the telephone. I function best in the wee hours of the morning, and since I’m the one in charge, I often call my people at any hour of the night, and I expect them to call me back from a public telephone. They know this will happen; I don’t spring it on them. They can catch up on their sleep when they take their vacations.
I’ve used this to my advantage many times. But in these early cases it was simply for security reasons. I would call Ray H
olliday in Houston, for example, in the early morning and say, ‘Ray, I’ve got something to tell you. Get out to a public phone and call me back.’ I’d give him the number of the private phone I was calling from, if it happened to be a private phone.
Then a few minutes later Ray would call me back and give me the number of the phone booth he was calling from. Then I would go to the nearest public phone booth and call him at that number. In this way we were talking from two public telephone booths and the chances of anybody taping our conversation were sharply reduced.
You must have had to carry a sack full of dimes and quarters around with you wherever you went.
I’d charge the call to my office number. One day Perry Lieber, one of my publicity men at RKO, was visiting Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist. I called Perry and told him to get out to a public phone and call me back. A few minutes later he called. I asked him his number and he gave it to me, and right away I knew something was wrong. I checked my little black book, and the number he’d given me was Hedda Hopper’s unlisted number.
I said, ‘What the hell are you trying to pull, Perry? When I want you to call from a public phone I mean a public phone, because that’s private. Hedda Hopper’s private phone is about as public as you can possibly get.’
Perry started stammering, and finally admitted he was too lazy to leave Hedda’s bedroom and had taken the phone into a closet, which seemed to him private enough.
‘Private enough for you,’ I said, ‘but not for me. Get your ass out to a public telephone and call me back.’
I still wanted to make important movies, and the next one I did was Scarface.
Howard Hughes Page 8
