Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  When I recovered and found out what had happened I was very upset at this man dying that way. Von Rosenberg broke some bones in his back, but they patched him up in Boulder City. He had to wear a cast for a year. And the mechanic, Dick Felt, died from head injuries he’d suffered in the crash.

  It was a bad crash. For a while I felt responsible, but they had federal investigation and ruled it an unavoidable accident; they said the plane had been incorrectly loaded by the ground crew and her center of gravity was out of whack. But that didn’t bring Cline and Felt back to life, and it didn’t make me feel any better about being at the controls.

  The only other accident I had where someone got killed was an automobile accident in 1936. I’d been cited for speeding twice before that, once in the San Fernando Valley and once in Gilroy, California. That Rolls of mine was a beauty – it made you want to speed. But that night there weren’t any cars on the road, and I wasn’t endangering anybody even though I was driving fast. You feel safer in a Rolls or a Duesenberg doing ninety than you do in a Chevy doing fifty or sixty.

  I was in the Hancock Park area, on my way back to the Ambassador. A car came at me from the side and forced me toward the curb. A department-store salesman, a sixty-year-old man named Gabe Meyer, didn’t see me and started to cross the street. I couldn’t possibly have stopped in time. I was speeding – how fast, I don’t know – and to this day I remember the crunch of the man’s body smashing into the front of the car.

  I must have carried him on the hood of the car for twenty-five, thirty feet, and then he sailed through the air for another thirty or forty feet and smashed against the pavement. He was dead on first impact. It was a terrible mess. It was his fault. He darted out at the wrong time from a streetcar safety zone, gave me no chance whatever to stop – although that doesn’t make it any the easier to bear the burden of guilt.

  I was with a society girl, the daughter of some rich Pasadena people, and I told her to leave, not to get involved, and I got my lawyer, Neil McCarthy, down there pronto. He was a good man and he did what had to be done.

  I make no bones about it: I paid off the LAPD. If I hadn’t been Howard Hughes and a multimillionaire, I wouldn’t have got off so easily. American justice works that way. There’s never been a really rich man convicted of any serious crime except where embezzlement of big money is involved and other rich men are the victims. I don’t feel guilty about using my money and influence, because it was not my fault. The man literally darted out in front of me. I had no choice. The coroner’s jury acquitted me of negligence.

  In 1933 I closed down Caddo Productions. I was a man of twenty-seven, and that’s an age, I think, when you first start feeling you’re a man.

  I should qualify that. I felt a man in the sense that I had accomplished part of what I had set out to do. I had made movies – some good ones, some bad ones, but over-all I was not dissatisfied with what I had done. And of course I had made a lot of money. I was proud of the fact that I had stood up to a great many people much older than I was, much more experienced, who had looked at me with a certain disdain and didn’t think I could accomplish my goals.

  But in other ways I was not a man and I knew it. I had a long uphill way to go before I reached maturity. I already had one broken marriage behind me, which pained me and made me feel inadequate. A broken marriage is a failure even if it’s a mistake from the word go, as mine was; it’s evidence of an emotional failure somewhere within you. I had also had a broken love affair, and it contributed to that feeling of uncertainty and failure.

  There I was in my late twenties, and I had made a splash. I look back now on the age of the late twenties. You may not be a man yet, but you have a tremendous energy and a tremendous manly strength. You’re out of the first flush of youth but you still have all the power of your youth and a little of the experience that comes with age. Most men I know who ever accomplished anything were on the track of it by the time they were thirty or they never did a damn thing.

  Toolco was growing steadily. I can’t say it was doing very well, because it was the Depression, but it was holding its own, and even in the years that it lost money there was enough cash flow so that basically I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to I could put my hands on ten or fifteen million dollars without straining the resources of Toolco. I was worth, all told, about sixty or seventy million. Not too shabby. I already had my base of operations on Romaine Street, I had Noah Dietrich handling things for me in California, I had Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose handling Toolco’s affairs in Houston, and I had a highly competent engineer and pilot ln Glen Odekirk, who was absolutely devoted to me, helping me in my flying ventures.

  I had achieved a kind of superficial personal freedom. I had ordered my life so that I could do whatever I wanted to do without any strain.

  I looked back eight years to the nineteen-year-old gawky kid standing in a Houston courtroom, listening to the judge say, ‘Okay, Sonny, go out and be an adult,’ and I realized I had done it. I had made mistakes in those eight years, but I had gained a great deal of self-assurance and I had a clearer idea of what I liked and didn’t like.

  I avoided one big mistake. That’s the mistake of the young man who says, ‘All right, I’m going to go out and I’m going to make ten million dollars,’ and then suddenly at the age of thirty-five finds himself with his ambition realized and nothing else to do. He set his sights too low.

  A lot of people said, ‘You’ve made a hell of a lot of money, Howard. Why don’t you spend some of it? Take a trip around the world. Play golf in Europe. Enjoy yourself.’

  I couldn’t do that. Sometimes I went on a vacation aboard my yacht, but after a week, or a week away anywhere, I was restless. I was an active man, always have been an active man, can’t stand sitting on my tail for too long.

  Even now, despite the physical condition I’m in, you have no idea how I fret at enforced inactivity. I know it’s absurd – a sick man of sixty-five can’t go out there and do. But I would love to.

  But then I was in my late twenties. Okay, what next? I had maintained a continual interest in flying, right along through the movie-making period, and in 1934 I decided it was time to devote all my energies to it instead of working with my left hand.

  I thought it out and made a decision.

  I assembled a crew of friends, hired some other competent men, and we started building a plane of my own design with which I was going to make an attempt on the world speed record.

  6

  Howard builds the fastest plane in the world, crashes it, breaks all existing speed records, and meets with the U.S. Army Air Corps in his pajamas.

  IN THE EARLY 1930s flying was a hit-or-miss proposition. The world’s best pilots were the eccentric daredevil types who flew by the seat of their pants. Instrumentation was haphazard, standards were indifferent, and the Bendix Trophy winners, practically every one of them, built his own plane in his backyard. I was out to do quite a bit more than that – to set standards for the vision I had of air travel.

  The first record I went for was the world land speed record held by the Frenchman, Raymond Delmotte. I wanted to break records, and that was why I started out to build the H-1. The H stood for Hughes.

  But if you’re going to build a plane that’s the fastest plane in the world, naturally you have to make some innovations. And while breaking the record may have been my motive at the start, I quickly became so interested in the engineering problems that long before I was finished, and certainly long before I flew the ship, it was the engineering that had begun to fascinate me, to the point where I said to myself, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do with my life.’

  I became totally absorbed in the concept and problems of design, and that stayed with me for decades. The rest of it – speed records and even the commercial airlines that I pioneered – took second place. As for the technical stuff, I don’t see how these details would interest anyone except me, and maybe a few airplane buffs. I don’t want people pickin
g up this book and thinking it’s a manual on aircraft design. Let’s just say I designed the H-1, then built it, then flew it on Friday the 13th. I tried a day or so before, but you had to do four runs to qualify for the record and it got dark and I didn’t finish.

  Glen Odekirk said, ‘For God’s sake, Howard, don’t try again on Friday the 13th.’

  But I did. I was never a superstitious man. I broke the record that day at Martin Field in Santa Ana, California. Amelia Earhart and Paul Mantz were there as witnesses, and a guy named Therkelsen was up in a Lockheed Vega as official observer.

  After I broke the record I decided to see what the ship could really do. It was about the sixth or seventh passage and I was all in a lather and could have flown all day. I pushed the ship too hard. We gave out a story that some steel wool had worked its way into the fuel line, which unfortunately led to rumors that there was sabotage, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t want any aspersions cast on the H-1 so that was the simple thing to say, and I said it. The truth is that when I pushed the ship too hard, the engine froze. She conked out. The landing gear wouldn’t come down either. It was still retracted and it stayed that way. I couldn’t make the airfield. I made a dead stick landing on some farm just short of it.

  With a small airplane – anything piston-driven, except for something as large as a Constellation or a big passenger jet – you come close to stalling when you land. At a certain point on the glide path you throttle down and put the nose up. A full stall landing, with your nose up high, gives you the slowest possible landing speed and a short ground roll, which you want if you’ve got no engine. Getting the wheels on the ground is only half the battle, especially if you have a tail wheel and there’s no weight resting on it. You still have to bring her to a stop without going ass over tit, and without power that’s not easy. You have, or you had, just as many accidents after a ship touched down as you had on the glide paths.

  Anyway, it wasn’t a bad crash and I wasn’t hurt, just knocked out for ten minutes or so and bruised.

  The transcontinental records that I set were in 1936 and 1937. I flew a Northrop Gamma for the first trip. I’d put in a new supercharged engine designed by the Army and it was in a sense an uneventful trip. I just flew like a bat out of hell and didn’t have too much trouble. I didn’t let on that I was out to break the record. I told people that I wanted to fly to New York, and then I took off. I was really testing the airplane and myself. I just tried to see how fast I could get there – nothing more to it than that.

  This wasn’t a breakthrough in aviation technology, although it led to many other things. I wasn’t out for publicity and I don’t think I would have got half as much as I did if I hadn’t been Howard Hughes, a young buck with an enormous amount of money and the producer of Hell’s Angels. If I had just been some barnstormer I’d have been treated as a thirty-year-old good pilot who broke a few records, which everyone knew would be broken time and time again, and that would have been that.

  However, I was what they called ‘good copy,’ and from my point of view that was unfortunate. I would have accomplished a lot more in my early life if reporters hadn’t been hanging around waiting to pump me and ring wedding bells for every girl I took to a night club or for a flight. That drove me crazy.

  Were there any particular incidents on those trips that weren’t reported at the time?

  The incidents happened on the way back, the first time, when I flew from east to west. I usually prepare things pretty well, and in this case I’d certainly prepared the ship well, but I couldn’t do anything about all the gauges that were supposed to be working, and weren’t. I had realized en route that I didn’t have any aerial maps to continue with from Chicago to California, and you won’t believe this, but when I landed at Chicago they didn’t have any maps at the airport, either.

  I did, of course, have a general idea of which way to go, and I headed west, following the great circle route at twenty thousand feet.

  But then everything went wrong. My oxygen blew out. I had no oil pressure whatever – I had to pump the oil by hand – and I had ice on the wings. I was lucky to make it over the Rockies.

  What did you do when you had no oxygen?

  Took deep breaths. What the hell else can you do?

  And you could survive at 20,000 feet without oxygen?

  I’m here to tell the tale. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else, and I certainly didn’t want to try it again, at least not with that kind of faulty equipment.

  But I was a young man. It was marvelous, it was a battle, and I loved every minute of it. Of course that doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified half the time. The newspapers at the time made a great deal out of the fact that I’d made a $50 bet with a friend that I’d have my lunch in Chicago and my dinner in Los Angeles. They didn’t tell everything that happened, though. I won the bet, but I was in such a state of nerves when I ate the meal that I got the worst case of indigestion I’ve ever had in my life.

  Those flights, in a sense, were false heroics. I look back on them now and I can see that I did such things out of ego. But I don’t want to apologize for them. I’ve done many things I’m ashamed of, but flying isn’t one of them. In fact that’s one of the cleaner, brighter images of my past. Because when you’re flying, people don’t clutter up the works. It’s just man and machine, and there’s a purity and nobility to that experience that I haven’t found in anything else. I’ve always been better with machines than I have with people. Machines are predictable; people are not. One thing about a machine – you can take it apart and put it back together and it’s the same machine. You can’t do that with a human being. I know. I’ve tried.

  All my troubles – the reason I live as I do, the nearest thing to being a hermit – stemmed from personal relationships. I’ve always been able to deal with machinery with great pleasure. I invented a new kind of shock absorber when I was a fifteen-year old kid. I didn’t patent it, but it worked, and my father had it installed in one of his cars. I’ve worked for hours and hours figuring out a new concept for some minor airplane part, or how to improve an existing design. But when I was called away from my work to deal with people, for either pleasure or business, my heart sank, because I knew it would almost always end badly.

  I’m a recluse – that’s obvious. I avoid meeting people. I didn’t start this way, I can assure you. I had friends and acquaintances as a child and I desperately wanted people to like me. Maybe I never admitted it, but I wanted it very much. And, frankly, I don’t think most people did like me. But I kept trying until finally I just stopped, because I had been hurt and disappointed in them and in myself, again and again, and I saw that I was incapable of dealing with people properly. I haven’t had a real friend since I was a child. The closest I’ve come to it has been Bob Gross, president of Lockheed, and that was at least 60% business. My last real friend in the sense of a pal was Dudley Sharp, I suppose, and that ended as most such youthful friendships end. We drifted apart, lost contact.

  That’s one of the terrible sadnesses of life – this process of losing contact with people who mean a great deal to you. Sometimes it’s physical circumstances – you’re on the move, they’re on the move – but more often it’s because people don’t keep pace with each other, they drift into different pursuits and develop different ideas, and one day they realize they’ve got nothing in common anymore. It’s one of the most depressing things in the world to bump into an old friend you haven’t seen for twenty years, and you realize you have nothing to say to him except, ‘Hey, do you remember when…?’ It’s usually better to live with memories than to try to update them.

  For other people I’m sure it’s easier. Their so-called friends probably aren’t always out to get something from them. That’s one of the problems about being very rich. Poor people don’t usually do it to you, but anyone who’s well off but not so rich as you are, invariably wants something from you – tries to use you. This happened to me time and time again.

  There are
times when I’ve thought I could only be friends with billionaires. And how many of those are around?

  In 1936, after I broke the record with the Northrop Gamma, I set about remodeling my own plane, the H-1. I worked on that until early 1937. I redesigned the oxygen equipment and worked out a new type of experimental oxygen mask. I fiddled around with the retractable landing gear and the shape of the wings, and I put in a better engine, an 1100-horsepower twin-row Wasp, with fourteen cylinders. I rebuilt her to withstand stresses up to 550 miles an hour, although of course I couldn’t keep up that speed for very long and didn’t intend to. I gave her a name. I christened her the Winged Bullet.

  Then in late January of ‘37 I was ready. I wanted to see what the ship could do at high altitudes – I wanted to make a long run at twenty thousand feet.

  It turned out to be from Burbank to Newark. Coast-to-coast, about 2,500 miles. I took off in the H-1 at two o’clock in the morning, pitch-dark, and I said to myself, ‘What the hell, I’ll go all the way to Newark.’ I thought at first I’d only fly to Chicago, but once I took off I just kept going, changed the route a bit and decided to keep flying.

  I had a little trouble again – the oxygen valve jammed when I passed over Albuquerque and I had to throw the damn thing away and get down to 14,000 feet where I could breathe. I always had bad luck with oxygen equipment.

  When I got to Newark I’d broken my own record, and I knew it, and the hell of it was I couldn’t land. There was a United Airline Boeing 247 on the runway having engine trouble. I had to wait until they moved it out of the way. I had no radio, just buzzed the field a few times and waggled my wings so they’d know I wanted to land. That added about twenty minutes to my time, but I still broke the record by about forty minutes.