Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  I arranged to be out one night with Norma Shearer and I knew that Russell Birdwell would be at a certain night club. So I sat down with Norma and Myron Selznick at a table and listened to Birdwell talk to them. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t know who I was. He must have thought I was just another hanger-on, because by then I wasn’t paying attention to the way I dressed – I would wear a shirt until the collar frayed, socks till they’d stand up by themselves and walk out of the room. If people didn’t like the smell of my feet, they could go somewhere else and smell some other millionaire’s feet.

  I hired Bird because Jane was unknown. Some agent had given me a photograph of her – she was nobody, not even an actress. She was a receptionist for some dentist out in the San Fernando Valley. She wanted to be an actress, but so did everybody in Hollywood. She had great cleavage, that was her principal asset.

  I never gave screen tests – I didn’t believe in them. I wanted one thing: a still photograph with no makeup, because if a woman has got It, and you know what I mean by It, that certain star quality will come through. A woman in the morning, after you’ve spent the night with her and all the makeup has worn off, if she’s not beautiful then, you don’t want to have anything to do with her. Take my advice – that’s the acid test. And that was my method to find out whether or not these girls had It.

  However, I did not spend the night with Jane Russell, I can assure you of that, even though she made it known to me that she was willing. I tend to favor a more slender woman. And at that time I was prettily heavily involved with Ava Gardner. You couldn’t exactly call Ava slender, but her proportions were a great deal more pleasing to my eye than Jane Russell’s. Ava was young then – she hadn’t bloomed yet. At the time I was seeing her, she couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It was just at the beginning of her career. But kid or not, slender or not, Ava was tough and she packed a mean wallop. She slugged me once with a bronze statue. I’m lucky to be here talking about it, and Ava’s lucky she isn’t behind bars for manslaughter.

  It was around 1942, when she was getting a divorce from Mickey Rooney. Ava and I had been seeing one another off and on when she was breaking up with Rooney. But when I went with a woman, she went with me only, and I wasn’t about to share her with somebody else – I’d had my fill of that in the past and I knew the risks involved. Ava is a hell of a woman, probably one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. Sexual as hell. And certainly sexual enough for Mickey, because he screwed her from time to time at her place when I wasn’t there. He was a little guy but they say he was hung like a donkey. That’s not true of me, not at all.

  I have ways to learn things, and once I found out this was happening, I confronted Ava with it and gave her a piece of my mind. In fact, I lost my temper and threatened to slap her across the chops.

  But I reckoned without that gypsy temperament. I was on my way out, and she picked up a bronze statuette and let me have it behind the ear. I hit the carpet and was out like a light. They told me later she was leaning over me with blood in her eye, ready to plant that bronze statuette six inches into my skull, when her maid heard the yelling and stopped her. That would have polished me off for good. The colored maid saved my life.

  Wait a second… I’m not sure that stories like this have a place in my book.

  I think they do. It’s not all high finance and breaking airspeed records.

  Well, all right. I was the injured party.

  Was there any talk of marriage between you and Ava Gardner?

  The usual talk. She shot her mouth off to the newsboys every now and then. I knew her for a long time, you know, but I usually made it a point to see her when she was between husbands. When she split up with Sinatra she sent me an SOS and I got her out of Las Vegas, because she thought the little bastard was going to kill her. She was hysterical. I sent a plane to Las Vegas and had her flown down to Cuba, and I arranged for a bodyguard for her, to protect her from Sinatra and his ratpack Mafia friends. It was the least I could do for her, to give her some peace of mind.

  You were still friendly with her, even after she’d tried to brain you?

  I didn’t turn my back on her again, you can be damn sure of that. But she came back weeping and said she was sorry, she didn’t know what had gotten into her.

  To get back to Jane Russell – I made a contract with her years later, well after The Outlaw was done, and I still pay that girl a thousand dollars a week. I give her credit, she’s learned to act, but when I hired her for The Outlaw she couldn’t act worth a damn. But Jane had what I was looking for, so I signed her to a contract. She was bright, and I liked that. I hired this other unknown young actor, Jack Buetel, who was a jerk. Then I turned Russell Birdwell loose to build them up. I didn’t have the time for that kind of thing. I was involved in the HK-1 by then, and the D-2.

  Of course the best bit of publicity that Bird had was a fluke, and that was when a Japanese submarine fired at Jane Russell on the beach near Santa Barbara. This happened during that long period between the time we finished The Outlaw and the time it was released, because the goddamn Hays office wouldn’t go for it at first. One day Jane went up the coast to take some publicity shots, and a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired a shot at some oil rigs, but fortunately Jane was in the way, or nearby.

  Also fortunately, there was a man there taking publicity shots. He snapped photographs of Jane holding the shell fragments and looking very frightened. And that hit all the papers: front page. That made Jane Russell. (Now that’s an example of what’s called good luck, but if the photographer hadn’t been quick enough to take the photographs there wouldn’t have been any good luck.) We were off and away because Jane Russell was a target for the Japs. It would have been a bad break, of course, if one of these shells had nipped off a chunk of her natural endowments, but in that sense we were lucky, and so was she.

  Then the Hays Office refused to give its seal of approval to the picture. We fought them on and off from 1941 to 1946. Jake Erlich, my lawyer, went into a courtroom with a bust of Venus de Milo, who as you know doesn’t wear a brassiere. The whole time that Jake conducted the case he had that bust sitting there in the courtroom, just to impress the people with the fact that the Greeks weren’t ashamed of the bare facts, and why the hell are we? And then the Motion Picture Producer’s Association got into the act and banned the film. I wound up suing them in 1948 for $5 million on the grounds that they were breaking the antitrust laws – boycott in restraint of trade.

  Despite the fact that it was wartime and I was involved in far more serious endeavors, I had a showdown with these creeps in New York in 1944. We plastered the office with blow-ups, photographs of great female film stars of past and present, all of whom showed considerable amount of cleavage in their bosom. I hired a professor of mathematics from Columbia University. He came up there with his slide rule and calipers and measured the various amounts of cleavage and the amount of flesh that was showing, and he proved to the satisfaction of these people from the Hays Office and the Producers’ Association that, proportionately speaking, Miss Russell showed less of her natural endowments than the overwhelming majority of the great film stars of the past.

  The point I was really making was that there should be no censorship at all, because it’s in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And time proved me right, for better or for worse. You look at movies that have been made years ago, and if you know the cuts that have been made you say to yourself, ‘Now why in hell did they ever cut that?’ Let’s say I had a much longer view than these shortsighted idiots who are out there to protect the morals of America’s children. Look what’s happened to the morals of America’s children. You think the Hays Office or the Breen Office could do anything to stop that? That’s a runaway freight train.

  Didn’t you design a special bra for Jane Russell during the shooting of the pictures?

  That was a simple problem in mechanical engineering – how to prop up t
wo falling monuments. She was tied to a tree and I wanted those things sticking out like cannons.

  I’ve tackled bigger problems than that in my life, although I guess I’ve rarely tackled bigger breasts. I told my engineers how it should be done, sketched it out, and the boys did it for me. That received a lot of publicity. I can’t understand why people make such fuss over petty stories like that. I certainly considered it a trivial achievement. That wasn’t the design of my life – lifting up Jane Russell’s breasts. I had started work on the flying boat. That was important. That was something I believed in, even though it led to one of the biggest disasters of my life.

  11

  After a visit with President Roosevelt, Howard flies wartime combat missions out of England.

  IT WAS WARTIME. We were fighting Germany and Japan. Many things were happening in my life at the same time besides The Outlaw. I wanted to do my part in winning the war – airplane design and manufacture was of course the area where I felt I could best contribute. I started in right away, two days after Pearl Harbor. Actually I started a year before that, when I realized that one of these days we’d have to help out Great Britain and fight Hitler and the Nazis.

  The experience with the Army turning down the H-1, which became the Zero, was what made me decide: to hell with those armchair generals. I said, ‘I’m going to make a new plane on my own. I don’t need their money.’ And in 1940, completely at my own expense, I built what was called the DX-2.

  The DX-2 was meant to be a long-range medium bomber with a five-man crew and a speed of 300 miles per hour. Then in December of 1941 we changed it to a fighter plane with a two-man crew. But the plane was made of Duramold, and that was the whole trouble – the Army didn’t believe in wooden airplanes. The wooden De Havilland Mosquito saved the British Empire, but the U.S. Army pretended the Mosquito was an accident. They wanted only metal aircraft.

  I was perfectly willing to let the Army have a look at the DX-2 anytime they wanted to, and in the middle of 1942 Echols and General Carroll and his boys looked, and made their report. They said, ‘It’s just another hobby of that playboy Howard Hughes. And it’s made of wood! We can’t buy a wooden airplane! We’ve never done it before, and what would people think?’

  So they kept turning it down and I kept working on it. I had it ready sometime in 1943, and I flew it at 450 miles per hour.

  That was exceptionally fast, you realize. It was the fastest thing around. But it needed modifications. There are a lot of kinks in a ship at that stage. The military saw the certified results of those tests. They were finally impressed and they said, ‘We don’t need another fighter, but we do need a photo-reconnaissance plane. If you can make the D-5 into the F-11, we’ll buy it.’

  How did we get from DX-2 to D-5?

  X means experimental. By then we’d worked up several new models and the last one happened to be the fifth, so it was the D-5. We dropped the X when the plane was finished. The F-11 – F stands for photo-reconnaissance – was the XF-11 at the beginning, because it was experimental. Got it?

  The only difference was that they bullied me into making the F-11 out of metal. I was willing, since the plane wasn’t going to carry armament and had to be pretty tough. I was also willing because for the first time the sons of bitches were going to make metal available to me, which they hadn’t been willing to do before that – I suppose they thought I might wake up one day in a bad mood and use their aluminum to make experimental yo-yos. After all, how can you trust a man who wears pajamas under his suit?

  I received a contract for a hundred planes. They were pretty specific about what they wanted in a reconnaissance plane. It had to fly a minimum of four thousand miles without adding any fuel tanks. They wanted external tanks so that it could go another thousand miles. They wanted a plane that could cruise at 30,000 feet, because as I later found out, the stuff they were flying then, those converted P-38s, had a lot of trouble above 18,000 feet. They wanted a ship that could fly 450 miles an hour. Naturally they had to have reasonable protection for the crew, which meant armor plating and positioning of two men so they were less vulnerable to machine gun fire and flak. And no armament on the ship.

  This is a hell of an assignment, but I was willing to do it. I felt I had the basic plane in the D-5. However, it’s one thing to have the specifications laid out on paper for you, and it’s another thing to have the experience in the kind of flying that this plane was required to do. I had flown the hottest planes in the world of my own design. But I had never flown a recon plane, and I had certainly never flown one in combat.

  The first thing that occurred to me was, I don’t know what the hell it’s like up there, I don’t know what this ship has to do in actual combat conditions. So I decided to get a firsthand look at how things were in combat – to try the available planes and see what they were lacking and what my plane would need to have to justify its existence.

  I went to General Benny Meyers, a friend of mine. Benny couldn’t do anything. Even Elliot Roosevelt, while obviously well placed, couldn’t open the right doors for me. But his father could. So I called Jesse Jones and told him I wanted to see the President, although I didn’t tell him why.

  You went straight up to FDR?

  He was the Commander-in-Chief, the boss, just like me. What he said, went. I’m not a Democrat, but neither am I a Republican. In fact I have no use for party lines. But Roosevelt was a horse of another color. He was an intellectual, a brilliant man, and he pulled the country out of the worst hole it’s ever been in, at any rate since I can remember.

  He gave me a few minutes of his time after a White House dinner reception for a visiting Russian, between the rubber chicken and Eleanor’s apple pie. He was amused at my request, but he tried to talk me out of it. He said, ‘Howard, you’re a lunatic. It’s a mistake for a man in your position to expose himself. We need generals as much as front-line troops, and you’re in the general class.’

  I said, ‘From what I’ve seen of your generals, Mr. President, you need them like a dog needs fleas in August.’ And I talked him into it. I was pretty stubborn and I think Franklin always liked me. He had given me a medal years before – we had a private lunch following my round-the-world flight – and I guess he had a paternal attitude toward me, which certainly manifested itself when I showed up in Washington in 1944 and said I wanted to fly some missions.

  He passed the word down. Several of the TWA stratoliners had been commandeered by the Army, and within a few days it was arranged for me to fly one of them to England. Oral orders were issued by Roosevelt himself, and I had a high priority pass. I was carrying OSS men, all destined for parachute missions in Europe.

  The base I landed at was north of London somewhere, near Oxford – it was called Mount Farm – and it was the 7th Reconnaissance Group with the 8th Air Force. Never been so cold in my life. The sun shone about ten minutes a day, on a good day. It was even colder indoors. I don’t drink, I don’t even drink coffee or stimulants, but I must have put away a gallon of tea every day while I was there, just to keep my insides warm.

  I was in uniform but I had no rank, just one of those olive-drab uniforms with some kind of insignia patch on the shoulder. But that was enough, with my presidential pass. I wasn’t used to wearing a uniform and I hadn’t worn a tie in years, except when I absolutely had to. I walked into the officers’ mess the first day, and I was still wearing the same pants I’d worn flying across the Atlantic, and my shirt was rumpled, and I wore an old tattered sweater over it, and earmuffs.

  A kid marched up to me and said, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  I said, ‘I’m Major Henry Hughes.’ That shook him up, and he just stammered something and left. But pretty soon the commanding officer, Colonel Paul Cullen, marched up to me and said, ‘Listen, Major, this isn’t a spit-and-polish outfit, but we do expect our officers to walk around in something other than a sweater with torn elbows, and you might have those pants pressed, and take off those red earmuffs.’

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sp; I said, ‘My ears are cold.’

  ‘Take them off. That’s an order, Major.’

  ‘Yes sir, I’ll do that, sir,’ I said, finally, because I didn’t want to make any waves.

  I went up to Oxford and got my things cleaned and pressed and bought a new beige cashmere sweater, and for the rest of the time I was just as beautifully turned out as any of the brass around there. But I wasn’t there long. I didn’t have any time to fool around – I got out on the first clear day, the first recon mission since I’d arrived.

  I was flying a modified P-38, called an F-5B. Good plane, but no match for the Kraut pursuit planes, because they crapped out too low, about 22,000 feet, and weren’t fast enough. Any higher than that and you were likely to throw a rod. At that, they were an improvement over the F-4s, the unmodified P-38s, which threw rods as low as 17,000 feet. Elliot Roosevelt told me they lost a lot of pilots that way, especially in Africa.

  But the F-5B had one big advantage: two engines, so if one was shot out you could limp home on the other. I was familiar with the P-38. Frankly, I think, and I have often said, that I designed the P-38 myself. I proposed the basic design to the Army and they turned it down. And then by some strange coincidence, as often happens in industry, they gave the contract to build the plane to Lockheed. And sure enough, when it came out, the P-38 had all the earmarks of my design. I didn’t squawk too loudly about this – it wouldn’t have got me the contract by then – but anyhow, I was familiar with the plane.

  After a few days we got a little break in the weather and the squadron went out on a dicing mission. That’s a low altitude flight, using a nose oblique camera. We were flying along the channel coast of France, on the Cherbourg peninsula, photographing the Kraut defenses. The air was full of flying metal – no flight for a sane man to be on.