Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  Noah quickly found out that Gulf Brewing’s trucks were being used to carry this mash out to a man who had a large cattle ranch. That man was Colonel Rudolph Kuldell. He’d been with the company since around 1920, he’d been a friend of my father’s, and now he was president and general manager of Toolco. He was more a figurehead, because Holliday and Montrose ran the show, but he was a figurehead with his finger in the pie.

  Noah called me and explained what he’d discovered. I said, ‘Noah, when you find a few ants running across your lawn, you know there’s a colony of them buried deep. Dig deeper. This guy’s doing more.’

  Sure enough, it turned out that not only was he stealing my money to feed the cattle, but his cattle were also supplying the milk for our cafeteria at five cents more than the normal price per quart.

  And it went even deeper. They had a very poor accounting system in those days. Checks would come to Toolco for what are called non-recurring items, a rebate for insurance, and the checks were all being stopped by Colonel Kuldell and going into his bank account. They didn’t use Swiss banks in those days to hide money – nobody was that sophisticated. He just put it into the Bank of Texas under his wife’s maiden name. He was also an art collector. We found out he went to New York once or twice a year and used Toolco money to buy expensive French Impressionist paintings that were supposed to go in Toolco offices. Toolco offices had about the same amount of wall decoration as the average men’s room in a railway station. The paintings wound up in this guy’s parlor and attic.

  It took a little while to get all this information together. Then I brought Noah back and he was fire-in-the-eye, ready to call out the Texas Rangers. He said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’

  Thieves are not necessarily unpleasant people, they can be very personable men, and if we had thrown Kuldell out he would have gone right over to Reed Roller Bit and taken all his accounts with him and all his knowledge. I made a simple calculation. Toolco had just made $7 million profit that past year. This guy had bilked the company to the tune of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If I wanted to save two hundred and fifty, I might be losing my seven million – I might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

  ‘Noah,’ I said, ‘here is your assignment. I want you to make sure that Kuldell is not in a position to steal more then $250,000 a year from me.’

  That was my limit. I didn’t like what the man was doing and I wouldn’t encourage others to emulate him, but I was stuck with the situation and I had to make the best of it.

  My plan didn’t work. By then all the other good people down at Houston had gotten wind of it and knew that the man was a thief, and they didn’t understand why I didn’t get rid of him. They threatened to quit unless I did.

  That shows you, in a sense, that they had very little imagination. You’d think, once they realized that I didn’t mind a guy stealing from me, they would have done a little pilfering themselves.

  I finally decided I had to handle this myself. I flew down to Houston in my plane and I took Colonel Kuldell to dinner.

  Was he really a colonel or was that just one of those honorary Texas titles?

  He was a United States Army colonel, retired, second in his class at West Point. He was assistant to the Chief of Engineers in Washington when my father hired him.

  ‘Rudy,’ I said, ‘we know what you’ve been doing. I’m sure you’re going to see the error of your ways and, for the sake of Toolco morale, you’re going to resign.’

  He dawdled around for a while – I didn’t exactly give him a time limit. Finally Noah called him in and said, ‘Get the hell out, you’re fired.’ Kuldell popped off a little to people, said it was a palace revolution and Big Howard would turn over in his grave.

  I told Noah he’d moved too fast. And just to show you that I was right, the year this man left, Toolco business profits dropped considerably more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  There weren’t many good men available, so I put Noah in charge of Toolco for a while, and then I hired Fred Ayres, who had worked for the Cadillac company. Between Noah and Ayres, with me supervising, they modernized the company and the profits went up and up and up. They got up to $60 million a year by 1947.

  Which meant $60 million a year in your pocket?

  Which meant $60 million a year that I plowed back into the company and my other companies. If there’s any one reason that I can give for the fact that I’ve become a multibillionaire, that’s it. I never had more than $50,000 a year income myself. I submitted an account of my expenses each year to Toolco, and the Board of Directors automatically voted me a dividend equal to the expenses. That ranged from $50,000 to about double that. Anyway, that’s what I paid taxes on. Not having any stockholders to have to satisfy with dividends and reports and those damn fool meetings, I just plowed the rest of the money back in. Toolco was the parent company that owned Hughes Aircraft and the brewery, RKO, TWA; whatever I bought I bought through Toolco, one way or the other, and I didn’t have to pay income tax.

  All you hear from investors these days is talk of growth companies, but some very smart guy said a while ago that a growth company is any company your broker wants you to buy stock in. That’s more truth than poetry. Toolco was probably the first truly great growth company in the United States.

  There’s another reason too, for my becoming a billionaire, which I admit didn’t hold true all the time, but most of the time. I spent a lot of money freely until after the war. I always owned about one or two dozen cars, which I kept parked in various parking lots and side streets all over the United States. But I didn’t buy new cars, except during the period when I first went to Hollywood. I bought old cars. I didn’t see any sense in buying a new Cadillac when a second-hand Chevrolet would do just as well. If you drive a second-hand Chevrolet, nobody looks twice at you. I had a fleet of them, mechanically perfect, very well maintained. I could have had my own taxi company.

  One Christmas I made Noah Dietrich a present of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL gullwing, with those doors that open straight up. I drove it, and it was a joy, and I was tempted to buy one for myself. Then I thought, no, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid. I didn’t want people watching that flashy car go down the street and yelling, ‘There goes Howard Hughes! Get him!’

  The point I’m trying to make is that after my Hollywood years, and after my boats and various personal airplanes, like my Boeing, which was pretty lush, and which I sold to some drunken son of a bitch from Texas who abandoned it at the Houston airport, I stopped spending money on myself. I didn’t have any quirks and fancies, no Taj Mahal in Palm Beach or Palm Springs, and I didn’t maintain two or three mistresses in the fashionable capitals of the world. I had no hobbies except golf, and I had to give that up after my last air crash.

  But didn’t you rent a number of houses in California at this time, where you kept women?

  I rented several small bungalows. One or two were decent-sized houses. I didn’t have a home of my own. I had to rent. If women stayed there it was because they had no place else to stay and because they were connected with me businesswise in one manner or another. I put up various executives there too. And I had to have some place to stay when I got somewhere. Because by then I had begun to realize that most hotel rooms were filthy, were very poorly cleaned, and I required a special sort of accommodation. It was cheaper in the long run to have a bungalow somewhere than it was to walk in and take the honeymoon suite at the Bel Air Hotel.

  What sort of rents did you pay?

  Whatever was fair. I didn’t pay them. Toolco paid them. They were charged off as business expenses. I ran the company, so if I stayed in them it was a business expense. And if friends of mine stayed in then, they might have been doing business for TWA too. I can’t remember every single person who stayed in my houses. But that’s the secret – that’s another reason for my getting rich and staying rich. I was a frugal man. I still am.

  Frugal? I’ve gotten an estimat
e that your bill at the Britannia Beach averages $50,000 a month. And you’re not even there most of the time.

  Where the hell did you find that out? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m positive it wouldn’t come to more than twenty thousand a month, which you’ll admit, is very modest for a man of my means. Naturally if you add up what those guys eat, and various other things, it’s going to run a lot higher. But that’s a drop in the bucket. I know $50,000 sounds like a lot of money to you, but that’s the interest on my capital for an hour or two.

  I want to repeat what I said, because I don’t think you’ve gotten the point correctly. And that is, despite what hotel bills I pay, and despite what secondhand cars I maintain around the world, I do not have any expensive fancies and quirks. I don’t piss away my money. I don’t personally own a luxurious jet – the company has several and I use them and others. But I still don’t have a large income, and therefore I’m not a drain on my companies’ resources. I pull my own weight.

  10

  Howard produces The Outlaw, fixes its sound track, turns down Jane Russell, and is slugged by Ava Gardner.

  AFTER THE CONSTELLATION, the next thing I tackled was The Outlaw. It’s not a major event in my life, but I want to give my version of what happened, since there’s been so much nonsense written about it.

  I say it’s not a major event in my life, but you may have noticed by now that whenever I’ve tackled anything I’ve gone into it heart and soul, and I haven’t always kept a sense of proportion. I’ve devoted as much time to unimportant projects as I have to things of more substance.

  It’s only in retrospect, however, that I consider The Outlaw to be an unimportant project. At the time I thought I was breaking new ground, as I did with Hell’s Angels. I had that in mind from the very beginning, and that’s why I searched as hard as I did for someone like Jane Russell and chose her to be my star. And once I found her I meant to see that her assets stayed in the public eye.

  I hadn’t made a motion picture in many years, but I had a yen to break down some of the puritan barriers that I felt had been holding back the American cinema. Today, of course, all the barriers have been broken, and what I did seems quixotic, but if you place it in the perspective of the history of the cinema, you’ll see that it was a major breakthrough.

  The story I selected was a version of the old Billy the Kid saga. I got a very fine director, Howard Hawks, but he didn’t work out very well – he got sore because he thought we were shooting in Arizona on location, and one day he arrived at the set and everyone was gone. I’d ordered them back to Hollywood to the sound stage, but Hawks hadn’t got the message. I still respect his work very much, and in fact he worked for me later at RKO.

  So I took over The Outlaw. I directed it. You don’t have to be a genius to direct a movie. You don’t even have to be terribly artistic. You just need the common sense to listen to the technical people around you – they usually know what they’re doing – and at the same time you have to let them know you’re the boss.

  I budgeted the picture very low, at a quarter of a million dollars. I had trouble immediately because Noah Dietrich got together with Hawks and said, ‘It can’t be done for a quarter of a million. It’s going to cost half a million, and knowing Howard that figure will probably be closer to two million.’

  He was wrong. It cost nearly four million. I have a tendency, when I plunge into something, to forget the costs. In my view, the costs are not important – it’s the finished product that matters and, maybe even more important, what you learn in the course of getting to the finished product.

  I started shooting, and what interested me, as always, was the opportunity to educate myself at the same time as I was making the movie. I always did that, and still do. You can never stop learning. There isn’t a day passes in my life that I don’t learn something. I try to learn one fact a day, or think about one new idea.

  One of the things that particularly interested me in The Outlaw was the background music, which was done by Victor Young. I got terribly involved in it.

  In those days we didn’t have the kind of magnetic sound track that they have now. We had what was called an optical track. You could literally see the sound track, and you could fool around with it – by putting masking tape on certain positions of the track you could block it off, raise and lower the volume, do what else you pleased. The technicians on this picture were not everything that I’d wanted them to be, so I took over and did the sound track myself. It took me, I would say, three or four weeks, working ten or twelve hours a day on it, and, mind you, not only was I half-deaf but I was doing other things at the time. By then it was wartime and I was building the Hercules and the D-2.

  As everyone knows, we had a great deal of trouble getting a release for The Outlaw, and it wasn’t until 1946 that the picture was released. It premiered in San Francisco at the Geary Theatre. I went up there, stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, and I wasn’t feeling well. I had a bout of pneumonia, and I decided I couldn’t make the premiere. Besides, I didn’t want to go out into the crowds and deal with all that horseshit.

  I stayed in my room that night, and I could hear that sound track in my head the whole time, and I suddenly realized something was wrong. So I got on the pipe to my film editor, Walter Reynolds, who was also up there in San Francisco. I can’t give you the exact hour and minute, but the point I’m trying to make is that the picture had already started, the audience was in their seats, Jane’s tits were on the screen, and I said to Walter, ‘Get the hell over here in a hurry and bring Reel Three to my hotel room.’

  He arrived in a terrible state. He had the jitters, because the reels ran about twenty minutes. At the Geary they were halfway through the first reel, and without the third, the premiere couldn’t go on.

  But I said, ‘Something’s wrong, Walter, and I want to make a cut.’

  ‘Howard, you can’t make a cut up here. You have no equipment, and I’ve got to bring that reel back to the theatre within fifteen minutes.’

  I’ve learned in my life not to let other people’s panics panic me. I said calmly, ‘Take it out of the can, Walter, and give it to me.’

  ‘You don’t have any film rods,’ he said. ‘You have no cutting equipment – and how are you going to hear the sound track?’

  All my life I’ve improvised, right up to now, when I put my own leaded glass screen in front of the TV set to cut out the gamma rays.

  So I ran the film over a fountain pen – you have to have something to run it over in order to count the frames – and while I was doing it I had the musical score in my head. I’ve told you that as a child I played the saxophone and the ukulele. I hummed the music, and I moved the film, and I found the exact spot where I wanted to make a cut and where I didn’t want any music in the background. I wanted that silence to create a certain effect, a mood which you can get sometimes by silence. I’ve thought a great deal about the nature of silence. As I’ve grown older, silence has become much more precious to me – in fact, there are times when I am grateful for my deafness.

  Walter had been sensible enough to bring a splicer. I cut twelve feet of film and he ran back to the Geary Theatre carrying Reel Three. Of course, it’s an art in itself, to cut twelve feet out of a finished film. But what astonished Walter was that I’d been able to cut the twelve feet of film and there was no awkward jump in the sound track, because I had it in my head and I knew that we moved from a C sharp to another C sharp chord.

  He came to me next day and said, ‘Howard, that was an absolutely perfect cut.’ He was impressed. Deep down I was a little impressed too, but I just said, ‘Sure, Walter. What did you expect?’

  Julie Furthman wrote the screenplay, but I wrote a good part of it too, and Joe Breen, the front man for the Hays Office, also made some contributions. This is hardly believable, but so help me, it’s true. There’s a scene in the movie where Jane Russell, Doc Holliday’s girlfriend, climbs into bed with Jack Buetel, who played Billy the Kid.
Billy’s been wounded and has to be kept warm.

  Walter Huston, who played Doc Holliday, comes back and finds them in the sack. Doc is pretty annoyed at this hanky-panky and threatens to gun Billy down. And Billy, who had loaned Doc his horse, reminds him of the fact, and says, ‘A fair exchange is no robbery.’ That was Julie Furthman’s line and I didn’t think it was clear, just a touch too highbrow, and I changed it to, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’

  That made Joe Breen’s hair stand on end. He’d already seen the rough-cut of the picture and he was yelling about the showing of Jane’s tits and the fact that everybody was climbing into bed with everyone else. It all boiled down finally to covering Jane’s cleavage here and there and eliminating that one line, ‘You borrowed my horse, so I borrowed your girl.’

  I said in disgust, ‘Okay, Mr. Breen, you want to change it, go ahead. Just give me another line in its place.’

  He said, ‘Well, how about “tit for tat”?’

  I couldn’t believe my ears, but I very grudgingly said, ‘Okay.’ When this got back to Will Hays, Breen’s boss, his hair stood on end. Finally he said, ‘Look, Hughes, you cut that one line out, “tit for tat,” and put in something else, and we’ll give the film the production seal.’

  I said, ‘How about, “You borrowed my horse, I borrowed your girl”?’ – which of course was my original line.

  Will Hays said, ‘Yes, anything, I’m sick of this argument, I’m getting ulcers.’ And that’s how it stood at the end.

  That was the first time I used Russell Birdwell as publicity agent. I knew that this picture needed a tremendous publicity campaign and Bird, which is what we called him, had been the publicity man for Gone with the Wind. I didn’t know him personally, but in those days when I wanted to meet a man I didn’t necessarily call him on the telephone and say, ‘I’d like to meet you. Please come over.’ I liked to meet people in more subtle ways.