Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  How was it possible for you to be principal stockholder if you only had $8 million worth of holdings?

  I bought more. And of course by the end of the war I wasn’t just the principal stockholder – I was running the airline. When I had free time I devoted a great deal of it to studying their problems and making suggestions. Not to be immodest, in the 1940s I was the principal factor in the growth of TWA as the only competitor that could stand up to Pan American, the python of the American air carriers. Unquestionably, TWA was the most progressive airline in the United States. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll disagree with me on that. Among other things, I got Eero Saarinen to design our terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. I told him roughly what I wanted, what I thought a terminal of the future should look like, and I said, ‘Go do it. It’s your baby.’ It’s probably the most beautiful and functional airline terminal that’s ever been constructed.

  Concerning this pipeline to the head office, why were you so suspicious of people?

  I had reason to be. I was suspicious of Noah too. One of Noah’s secretaries was on my payroll at the time. I had to know what Noah was doing, because Noah had completely free rein, except on the decisions. He could have stolen me blind. There’s an old biblical saying: ‘Who will watch the watchers?’

  It was also around this time, shortly after I bought into TWA, that I designed the plane that came to be known as the Constellation. It was the plane that, more than any other, changed the history of commercial aviation.

  It made long-distance flights possible, in relative comfort, for large groups of people. Today that’s commonplace, but then it was a breakthrough.

  Jack Frye helped me with the design, and Bob Gross was in on it too. That’s why Lockheed finally built it. Consolidated had turned us down, and then we went to Bob Gross at Lockheed. I got the idea for the plane when I was breaking the crosscountry record, Chicago to California, in the Northrop Gamma. I was so goddamn uncomfortable up there – the oxygen equipment wasn’t working, I was gasping for air, the hard pieces of the seat were jabbing into my spine – that I said to myself, ‘By God, when I finish this I’m going to design a plane that can carry people in comfort, nonstop from coast to coast.’

  I really said that – it’s not a line from a movie script. I said it. I always talk to myself out loud. It’s not the habit of a lunatic, it’s the habit of a man who wants to remember what he thinks.

  And that ship was the Connie. The most successful commercial piston-driven aircraft that ever flew. A radical departure from everything that went before.

  In what way?

  If you want to get technical, the fuselage had a curvilinear design that cut down the drag factor in an entirely new way. And it also worked as an airfoil. That had never been done before in an aircraft of that size. The Constellation carried a payload of 6,000 pounds and cruised at 250 knots. She was a very stable ship with a very soft ride. It went through a hell of a lot of changes after it was operational, got stretched and stretched until I thought, Jesus, soon you’ll be able to board the ship on the flight deck and walk aft and you’ll have walked from New York to Philadelphia. Bob Buck, who became TWA’s chief pilot, flew the first flight on regular passenger services. He said it was the finest aircraft he’d ever flown. And you know who else flew a Connie, one of the very early Connies, even before Bob Buck? Orville Wright. He took it up with me one day out of Miami. It was meant as a kind of tribute to him. I wanted to do something for him. He was a very old man then, on the way out, and I thought it would be nice for him. He flew it himself for over an hour.

  While we’re on the subject, did you prefer piloting propeller planes like the Connie, or did you prefer jets?

  A piston-driven aircraft is a delight to fly. A jet is a headache – far more complicated, a very mechanical operation, a power plant. A prop plane, especially the smaller ones, like the F-11 or the Sikorsky, the Lockheed Vegas or even a Northrop Gamma – that’s something you can feel. With a plane like that, you can dance. You can hardly love a jet but you certainly could – at least I could – love a prop plane, and I’m sure that most pilots who have flown both would agree with me.

  Actually I loved all the planes I designed and flew, but never for very long. I was fickle. You could say I had a harem of planes if you want to talk about it that way. I didn’t actually get tired of them, but I always had at least three or four that were operational, and I used them all. Of course when I was building something from scratch, like the H-1 or the F-11, I put my heart and soul into it to the exclusion of everything else and to the exclusion of any other aircraft I was using at the time – so you could say those were very intense love affairs.

  Anyway, on the first flight of the Connie, I broke the transcontinental record again, although it’s really a matter of absolutely no significance. The record has been broken a hundred times since then and it will be broken a hundred times more. I wasn’t setting out to break any record. I was just setting out to prove that the Constellation was a plane that could carry people in comfort from coast to coast, nonstop. And it did. But in the light of what we have today, in the light of what we’re going to have in future planes, in the history of aircraft, my record-breaking flights in the Constellation will be a footnote on page twenty-nine. My contributions to the industry were more basic than that.

  You know, I almost didn’t make that first flight in the Connie. We were ready for takeoff from Burbank when two young women came running out in the lights of the field. It was late at night, about three o’clock in the morning. One of them was a girlfriend of mine named Fran Gallagher, a gorgeous dark-haired woman, really talented and passionate in bed. She’d brought a girlfriend along – I seem to remember that her name was Valerie, and she was another knockout. So I had a ladder lowered and went out, and got involved in conversation with Fran and her friend Valerie. Fran wanted to come along – she said, ‘If you let Valerie and me come on this flight and the three of us are alone in the cockpit, Howard, this will be the most memorable flight of your life.’

  I was tempted, needless to say, but it was a proving flight and I didn’t want any noncontributing passengers aboard, even if they promised memorable fun and games. Still, I hesitated.

  When I looked round, the ladder was up in the cockpit and the plane was taxiing down the field. I said, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Jack Frye was my copilot and he was at the controls. It was just a joke, he wanted me to get moving. And so I kissed Fran goodbye and waved to Valerie and ran after the plane. They stopped and put down the ladder and I climbed up, and we were off.

  Didn’t you break the record again, in 1946, on a second flight with the Connie?

  Yes, we broke the speed record that time too, but again it was the kind of record that would last until the next favorable tail wind. That was a publicity flight for the plane, more than anything. You could call it a VIP flight, in a way. Some senators were aboard, and Danny Kaye and his wife, and Linda Darnell. Poor Linda, I was fond of her, and we had some wild times together, but she came to a bad end. Burned to death, set herself on fire smoking in bed in a drunken stupor.

  At one point I stepped out of the flight deck and went up to Linda and said, ‘Dig out that bottle of hooch you’ve got in your handbag.’

  She gave it to me, and everybody watched me walk back carrying a bottle of bourbon. I heard afterwards they thought I’d finally gone off the deep end and was going to go up there and get plastered. But I needed it. One thing we’d forgotten on board was the methylated spirits to clean the windshield. I needed alcohol, and I knew Linda had it.

  In 1946 I developed a radar system for the Connie, and that was a significant step forward in airline safety. It was the only radar for commercial aircraft that was worth a damn at the time, and I demonstrated it in 1947. It was the only device that gave the pilot a warning if he was too close to mountains or any other obstacle. It flashed a red light, and a warning horn sounded in the brainbox, the flight deck.

 
; I demonstrated it near Mount Wilson, in California, because, as usual, there were skeptics who didn’t think it would work. I took a group of newspaper people up in a Connie, and I scared the holy hell out of them. They thought with a 500-foot warning, that only allowed a few seconds for the pilot to avoid whatever obstacle there was. But that wasn’t the case, since this was a radarscope that picked up the obstacle at ground level.

  I flew them all around Mount Wilson and into those canyons around there. Naturally, the moment we got close to the mountains the red light went on and the horn started to sound. It was loud as hell – I’d had it amplified because I was too deaf to hear it at its normal pitch. I knew that part of the country pretty well, and I went up in the evening, just when it was getting dark, and each time the horn would sound and the light would flash on, I’d start a conversation with one of these guys and pretend I hadn’t heard the signal, which drove them out of their minds. I knew I still had thirty or forty seconds to get the ship out of danger, and I used pretty near every second of it. I proved my point. The newsboys weren’t skeptical anymore.

  Of course I could handle that ship, the Connie, like no other pilot in the world except maybe Bob Buck. I offered to take the same gang through the Grand Canyon if they wanted more proof. But they didn’t take me up on it. They had to file their stories and change their pants first – they wet them on that flight.

  You may have read that I was supposed to have lived in one of my Constellations, but that’s not quite true. It’s a fact that one of them was equipped for living, and I did spend an occasional night on board, but that’s all. Apart from that I had a lot of fun with my planes, and my friends did too. Cary Grant and I used to go to Mexico every once in a while, and there was one flight where our radio went on the blink and we were reported lost.

  Cary and I were good friends then. I arranged his marriage to Betsy Drake. I don’t mean I was a matchmaker – I mean I arranged the wedding. I picked them up at the airfield in Culver City, in my Connie, very early in the morning. They had to hop over a wire fence and run out to the plane, and I took off and flew them to Arizona. We went there because Cary and Betsy wanted to avoid publicity. They were being hounded almost as much as I was.

  This was Christmas day, 1949 – the day after my birthday. I landed in the desert at an abandoned Army airfield. It was an old strip, and it wasn’t built for something as big as a Connie. We came down right to the end of the runway and I almost overshot. I had to jam on the brakes hard to avoid running into a mess of cactus. I had arranged to have a car waiting to pick us up and we drove to the house of the local justice of the peace. I was Cary’s best man and I was so nervous I did everything ass backwards. First I stood next to Betsy, and then when the J.P. told me to move over to Cary’s side I did, but I stumbled and dropped the wedding ring and had to get down on my hands and knees to look for it under a sofa.

  Anyway, despite my efforts, finally they got married. We drove back to the landing strip and by then it was pitch dark. I hadn’t realized we would have to take off at night – I had to hustle back into town and hire a couple of taxis to come out to the airport and shine their lights on the runway so I could see where I was going. We took off, and toward the end of the flight Betsy came up and sat with me in the cockpit for a while. I thought I’d give her a little charge, so I buzzed Wilshire Boulevard.

  She turned white. She said, ‘My God, Howard, I’m not going to die on my wedding day, am I?’

  I put the ship down at Culver City, they hopped back over the fence, and that was that.

  Cary and I also went on a wild trip one time to Mexico – this was a couple of years before I arranged the gala wedding with Betsy. It was 1947, a few months after I’d cracked up the F-11. I was in a big hurry because I had a date down there with a woman.

  Lana Turner?

  No, sorry to disappoint you. This is someone you never heard of and I won’t mention her real name because… well, I’ll tell you this much. This incident happened in 1946. Not my flying to Mexico with Cary Grant to see her, but meeting her for the first time. It was one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened to me.

  I was flying to San Francisco from New York on a United Airlines plane. (I sometimes flew with the opposition, just to see how well or how poorly they did things.) Anyhow, there I was in my seat, dog-tired from whatever I’d been working on, and there was this woman sitting in the seat next to me. Not a girl, you understand – a woman in her early thirties, well-dressed and beautiful. I’ve never been much on small talk so we didn’t say more than a few words to each other, just stuff like ‘Pardon me’ and so forth. But I did notice that she was exceptionally attractive, with unusual features, and lovely blue-green eyes. Startling eyes, very clear. After dark I fell into a kind of doze, and I swear I don’t know how this happened, but when I woke up we were holding hands.

  Isn’t that incredible?

  We talked, and one thing led to another. Nothing happened right away – not in San Francisco, because she was being met by her husband. We lost touch for a time, but then we made contact, and she agreed to meet me in Mexico that time. That’s why I was in such a rush – I hadn’t seen her since that crazy time on the flight to San Francisco.

  You can’t give me her name?

  No, she’s still married to the same man. He was in the consular service. He’s a very highpowered diplomat now, he has a very exalted rank, so I won’t tell you his name. Her first name was Helga.

  Did she know who you were?

  Not during the flight, but later I wanted to keep contact with her, so I had to tell her. What I liked about her was that it didn’t impress her one way or the other. She just said, ‘Oh, you’re the man who flew around the world.’ I gave her some flying lessons, as a matter of fact, once in Santa Fe.

  Do you still see her?

  The last time was years ago – well, some time after she met me in Acapulco. Later I’ll tell you more about her.

  9

  Howard becomes a rich multimillionaire, has problems with a colonel in his brewery, and develops the first great growth company.

  IN THE PERIOD when I was first making movies in Hollywood I made the leap from a millionaire to a multimillionaire. And then in the period from 1937 through 1943 I made the leap from a multimillionaire to a rich multimillionaire. There are plenty of rich multimillionaires now, in 1971, but there weren’t many then.

  How do you define a rich multimillionaire? How many millions does it take?

  It’s not a matter of numbers. A man with five million may still be just a simple multimillionaire if he focuses on keeping what he’s got and worries about where to invest it. A rich multimillionaire doesn’t concern himself with those things – they seem to take care of themselves. Moreover, in my time there weren’t many men or women who had more millions than they knew what to do with. That was my status.

  I became a rich multimillionaire through a peculiar chain of circumstances.

  There were more cars on the roads in the United States than ever before, and whether times were good or bad they needed to run on gasoline. In order to make gasoline you had to refine crude oil, and in order to pump crude oil out of the ground you had to use the Hughes tool bit. It was around that time that I made a remark so some reporter which was very widely quoted. It was a smartass thing to say, and I regretted that I said it. But it was still true.

  I was asked if Toolco didn’t have an illegal lock on the drill bit industry, and I got a little huffy and said, ‘No one’s forced to use our bit. They can always go out and buy a pick and shovel.’

  We had just begun to move back on to the profit side around 1938. But I went over the books, and things didn’t look right to me. We were making money in Houston but not as much as we should have been making. The company didn’t seem to be growing fast enough, and I smelled that something was wrong.

  At the time I was pretty much involved in setting up Jack Frye in TWA so I called in Noah Dietrich once again. ‘Get down to
Houston, Noah, ingratiate yourself with the good ole boys, and straighten things out for me.’

  Noah took the train down and put his finger on the trouble, and it came right out of the brewery.

  In 1935 I had bought a brewery called the Gulf Brewing Company. In later years it became sort of a nickel-and-dime affair, but during the Thirties and Forties it was the biggest brewery in Texas. Actually, whenever I’d had enough of an executive in any of my companies in Houston or somewhere else, I would offer him a promotion. I’d send him down there to be brewmaster. The executive found the brewmaster’s tasks nonexistent and he was eased out by Noah, and that was the end of it. So I was spared any face-to-face confrontation with these people.

  If you want one of the various faults I have – and which I’ll admit to – that’s one. I couldn’t fire a man. I almost always had to have someone else do it for me. I don’t have the hardness, I suppose, deep down. Any sad story will make me change my mind when an individual’s concerned. Once, early on in Hollywood, I wanted to fire one of the first people who ever worked for me. That was the cameraman on that picture, Swell Hogan, which never got released. When I told him he was through, he said, ‘Gee whiz, Mr. Hughes, I’ve got a wife and three children to support… ‘and I couldn’t fire him, He messed up his part of the picture, as he’d been doing all along. After that, in other similar situations, I always told somebody else to fire a man if he had to be fired.

  Down in Houston in 1939 Noah learned that the brewery operation had a by-product. That was cereal mash, which they sold as cattle feed. When Noah went over the books of Gulf Brewing it didn’t show any money coming in from the mash.