Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  What about the statement you made when you were discussing the Hercules with the press, that if it didn’t fly you’d leave the country and never come back?

  That was one of the dumbest things I ever said. They really got my goat, and that shows how foolish it is to make public statements, to let those reporters and those officials get you over a barrel and wring you out. You wind up gasping for air – a squashed mackerel. I don’t think I’ve ever been correctly quoted in my life except once or twice when there was something I didn’t want to get into print, and I said, ‘Boys, that’s strictly off the record, don’t print that.’ Then, of course, they got it word for word, and put it on page one.

  But you repeated that statement several times, about leaving the States if the Spruce Goose wouldn’t fly.

  That’s what they wanted to hear, and I kept getting sucked into their trap and saying it. I guess I liked the sound of it. My father would have loved to hear me say something like that. That’s the Texan in me coming out. I must have said it once too often, because I remember, at one time, I said to myself, ‘Jesus H. Christ, if it doesn’t fly, I’ll really have to go.’

  Would you have gone?

  I’d have had to. They all would have remembered, and if through some mishap the Hercules wouldn’t get off the water and I didn’t go, they would have said, ‘There’s a man no one can trust.’

  So it had to fly. It just had to.

  13

  Howard goes to jail in Louisiana, has his worst air crash, is visited in the hospital by a willing Ava Gardner, and confesses where he keeps his petty cash.

  I CAME BACK from England in wartime and got to work on the F-11. Of course I was still working on the HK-1, the Hercules, and both projects combined, going on simultaneously, were breaking my balls. Getting a release for The Outlaw also took up a lot of my time, and the plant in Culver City was turning out ammunition feeder chutes for the Air Corps all the while, so you could say I was busier than a one-armed paperhanger. Being in the movie business during the war was the straw that nearly broke my back.

  I look back on myself at that time and I don’t know why I did it. It may have been because, with all that I’d accomplished, I was still desperately afraid of failing. I may have involved myself in a dozen projects at once with the unconscious feeling that even if one or two of them flopped, the law of averages was with me and I’d be bound to succeed at the rest of them and come out smelling of roses.

  That can happen. The most frightening thing to do is put all your eggs in one basket – very few people are capable of that. It’s easier to dissipate your energies. It’s a form of cowardice. It’s often called a conservative approach, but I’m beginning to equate conservatism with inborn cowardice and fear of the dark. Very few conservatives make history. There isn’t a single great artist or great statesman who was conservative, except that sometimes, after the fact, we label them conservatives because we’ve already absorbed what they knew or what they did, and it seems obvious to us, with the advantage of hindsight, that they did what had to be done.

  But the great men of history, during their own times, were all radicals venturing into the unknown, taking enormous risks and dealing with new ideas, and throwing their energies and their reputations without reservation into the battle. They never hedged their bets. Look at Joseph Conrad, Picasso, Stravinsky – Thomas Edison, Alexander Hamilton, Karl Marx, Einstein, Henry Ford, Roosevelt, Churchill, David Ben-Gurion – radicals, every one of them, in the sense that they broke new ground and were single-minded men on the verge of being fanatics.

  I tried to plunge headfirst into all the various things I was doing, but you can’t do that unless you’ve got six heads, and I wasn’t that kind of monster. So a couple of my ventures fell on their ass, like my moviemaking. I hooked up very briefly, in 1944, with Preston Sturges, the director-writer-producer. Preston and I formed a company and made a couple of films. The first one, Mad Wednesday, starred Harold Lloyd, who I had talked into coming back in the movies. Then Preston and I made a film with Faith Domergue, a young actress I was fooling around with.

  She had beautiful calves and wrists.

  I tried to put the Hughes touch on all these films, where I could, but it didn’t work out with Preston. We each had our own way of doing things. And when two such men come head to head, as often happens in a business adventure, the man with the bigger bat, the bigger sack of dollars, is the one who comes out on top. And that’s me.

  Be that as it may, Preston and I had an argument and almost came to blows. He had a theater and a club that he owned in Hollywood, very near that crazy place where Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and a lot of other people stayed – the Garden of Allah. Preston’s theater was called the Players Club, and it looked like an alpine chalet. In those days everything in Hollywood, as you know, had to look like something else.

  There was a restaurant on the top floor of the Players Club, and I liked to eat there because nobody bothered you. Nobody bothered me anyway, since I’d very often book the whole place, go in the back door and up the back staircase. There were all sorts of people downstairs in the bar, the cream of Hollywood, and the less I had to do with them, the better.

  I had a habit of writing on tablecloths when I was bored, and unfortunately I was bored most of the time with most of the girls I knew. And it wasn’t only boredom, because sometimes I’d get an idea, some new design for a plane I was working on, and I had to scribble notes. I had to do it immediately while the idea was fresh in my mind. I needed a lot of space and the tablecloth had the most space to write on.

  Then I took the tablecloths home with me, to transfer the designs and notes, and Preston got annoyed. I said, ‘Buy extra tablecloths and send me the bill.’

  For some reason he thought I was being high-handed, and he blew up and accused me of stealing his tablecloths. One thing led to another until finally he said our contract wasn’t equitable, and I walked out on him, and that was more or less the end of our partnership – but it all blew up, as I said, because I was designing a new flap motor for the Constellation on his tablecloth.

  All this activity, this jumping from one thing to another to the point where I was getting about twenty hours sleep a week, took its toll. That was a time when I came nearer to going off the deep end than I ever have in my life. In 1945 I was working on both the HK-1 and the F-11, and I was still editing The Outlaw and fighting the censors. There were a couple of women I was interested in and I was having a tough time seeing them without one finding out about the other. On top of that I began to have nightmares about those recon flights I’d made in Europe. Those kids over there had been doing them daily, but I wasn’t a kid and I was having nightmares.

  I began to think I was mentally ill, and I went to see my doctor, Verne Mason. I told him that I was repeating myself all the time. Noah Dietrich brought this to my attention. In one telephone conversation with him, Noah claimed I’d said to him, ten or twelve times, ‘Any five-year-old child knows that.’ He said I’d better see a doctor, and for once he was right. Verne explained that I was under too much strain and I was close to a nervous breakdown.

  I didn’t listen to him.

  I come into a vague period here. I remember getting into one of my Chevrolets, and I remember driving down to San Diego. I had a Sikorsky amphibian moored there, and I took off.

  The next thing I knew I was in a filling station in Shreveport, Louisiana. Now why in the world I went to Shreveport, I don’t know. I must have been behaving strangely, because the attendant called the police. I had fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars in cash in my pocket – that was unusual for me. I suppose I had taken that much because I was going somewhere, had something on my mind. I may have started off for Mexico, planning to spend some time down there. But I went to Shreveport, and I think something went wrong with the plane there.

  I hadn’t shaved in a week and my clothes were rumpled and smelly and I was mumbling, or was vague, because the gas station attendant called the pol
ice and they roughed me up a bit. I told them who I was and they laughed in my face. I told them I had a plane and they laughed some more.

  They took me down to the station and next thing I knew I was in the goddamn bullpen with drunks lying next to me in their own vomit. I spent the night there, passed out on a bunk. In the morning I started to yell and make sense, and they began to do things. They called the Toolco man in Shreveport, a man named John Long, and he came down. He’d never seen me, of course, but he asked me some questions about Toolco and he realized immediately I knew what I was talking about, and he said to the cops, ‘This man is telling the truth. He’s Howard Hughes.’ They let me go.

  That never got into the papers. I didn’t pay off the cops, but somebody did. And that wasn’t even the end of the trip. I was still in a bad way and I went down to Florida to Palm Beach, to the house of a friend. I’d just got to his place and had a square meal and gone to bed when suddenly in the middle of the night I realized I was still wearing those clothes I’d worn in that filthy jail cell. I literally saw maggots and worms and other frightful things crawling out of my garments. This was what you might call the teetotaler’s equivalent of the Dts.

  I couldn’t wait to get out of my clothes. I started to burn them in the man’s backyard, by the pool. He came rushing out, thinking his house was burning down, and I was prancing around there like a naked savage around this bonfire, full of glee, and laughing like a maniac.

  He said, ‘Howard, what in the world are you doing? Come in, let me call the doctor.’ He was very kind. He realized, as I did, that I’d gone off the deep end.

  It turned out to be temporary, thank God.

  On the F-11 I had to build three experimental prototypes, which were considered part of the hundred-plane contract, and a static test model which wasn’t. A static test model is an exact duplicate of your experimental prototype, only it’s not meant to fly. It’s meant to be broken up on the ground, part by part, to see what’s wrong with it or right with it. Eventually the static test model was ready and two of the prototypes were operational, and I announced delivery.

  But this took time. When they knew they had the atomic bomb and could finish the war quickly by simply wiping out two or three hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children, they started tightening up on priorities, and quietly tooling up for peacetime manufacture – which meant that the first airplane manufacturer who was going to find himself short of the metal he needed to fulfill his contracts was none other than, guess who, yours truly.

  Around late 1944 and into 1945 every time I needed something that wasn’t on hand, that I couldn’t beg, borrow or steal from some garbage dump in the Greater Los Angeles area, I had to go to the Army with my cap in my hand. They’d give me the runaround. So the F-11 didn’t get finished until early 1946, which wasn’t bad at all, considering the obstacles.

  Then I flew it, and crashed it in Beverly Hills. That’s the one I think of as the bad crash. I’ve had other crashes, but none of them like that. And that was the last one, thank God.

  It happened on July 7, 1946. I’d finished two prototypes of the F-11, incorporating everything I’d learned on the missions I’d flown. The war was over, but there’s always another one coming along – in this case, it turned out to be the fiasco in Korea. I finished the plane and I took it up on a Sunday, in the early evening. They didn’t want me to fly it myself, but I’ve always said, ‘If a man is unwilling to trust his life to his own work, his work can’t be worth a damn.’ There were things wrong with the plane, but nothing you could put your finger on – gremlins. I felt the only way to find out what they were was by flying it.

  Was that your only reason?

  No, there was more to it than that. A pilot had once said to me, ‘Howard, why don’t you hire me or someone else to fly these experimental planes? You’re a busy man with a lot of responsibilities, and being a test pilot is a risky business.’

  ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘why should I pay someone else to have all that fun?’

  Around that time I went to a party at Newport Beach and met a nineteen-year-old girl from Ohio – a farm girl, really – who had just won a beauty contest at Ohio State and had been given a Hollywood contract. Her name was Jean Peters. I thought she was delightful and we really hit it off. I asked her if she’d like to come up to Culver City and watch the test flight.

  She was there. I waved goodbye to her when I taxied out onto the runway.

  I took off in the XF-11 – it was about six-thirty, and still light – and climbed. She climbed beautifully at better than 400 miles per hour. I headed out over the Pacific for a little way, put her through her paces, and then started back to the Culver City field.

  Suddenly, with no warning at all, it felt as though someone was pushing backwards on the starboard wing: like I was dragging a bull elephant along with me by the tusks. After half a minute I unfastened the seat belt, flew the ship with one hand and tried to raise myself up and peer through the canopy. But I couldn’t locate the trouble visually. I figured it out later. What had happened was that the pitch on the rear starboard propeller – these engines each had two propeller dual-rotation propellers – suddenly altered, went into reverse pitch, and was braking the plane.

  We never found out why. At least those people at United Aircraft would never tell me if they found out. It was their Hamilton-Standard Division that made the propellers. There was a hell of a big investigation and the general theory was an oil leak, because even before the crash we’d noticed the starboard propeller was gobbling up oil. Maybe a faulty gasket, which was certainly the Hamilton people’s responsibility. They tried to say later that I should have spotted an oil leak, because the propeller would have started to hunt, and I could have locked the pitch or feathered it. My point was that I had no way of spotting it because the blade angle was cockeyed, that is to say, the two blades of the starboard propeller weren’t aligned properly – there was nearly a forty-five-degree difference, which threw everything out of whack. This was proved when they inspected the plane after the crash.

  But of course, because it was me at the controls, they eventually claimed it was pilot error. I wasn’t supposed to take up my landing gear on that flight and they made as much of a fuss about that as they could.

  But it had absolutely nothing to do with the crash and nothing to do with what went wrong. I thought the landing gear door might have jammed broadside – the red light was still on. You may not know anything about aircraft, but you probably know enough to realize it makes no difference whatever whether the landing gear is up or down as to whether that plane is going to crash. The proof of the pudding is that the landing gear retracted perfectly. I could have bailed out, but at a greater sacrifice than I was willing to make. Eight million dollars worth of airplane, my life’s work, was right there on the firing line. And it went deeper than that – I had a feeling by then that if I didn’t bail out I still was going to lose that plane, and I had put enough of my guts into that plane so that I felt if I lose it, I’m going to go down with it, like a captain with his ship. That was my airplane, and whenever I fly one of my own planes, there’s an identification there – it’s my child. And I could no more abandon it than a mother could abandon her own child if it was in trouble.

  I fought to get her down. Glen Odekirk was up there in an A-20, an attack bomber we were using as a radio plane, spotting me. I tried like hell to get in touch with him. Glen was the man I trusted most in the world. I couldn’t get through. I managed to get Santa Monica air tower and told them, ‘For Christ’s sake, clear the airwaves! Get in touch with Odekirk and tell him to get a report to me on what the hell’s happening with this plane!’ I still wasn’t sure the landing gear had retracted properly, and if I was breaking up outside I couldn’t see it.

  None of this made any difference. It was too late. I went down in a hell of a crash, right in Beverly Hills. I was trying for the golf course. I thought if I could make one of those long fairways, I could maybe have brought her d
own in one piece, kind of eased up to the lip of the green. But I couldn’t do it. I chopped up a couple of houses and the plane caught fire. Naturally, I didn’t know what was going on. All I remember was coming down hard, and they told me afterward that I was trying to crawl out and this marine sergeant saved my life, pulled me out of the wreckage.

  I felt grateful to him, and later I gave him a job. He had to go off to China first, he was still in the Marine Corps. But after his tour of duty I sent him down to Culver City, got him appointed assistant head of security, in line for the top post. I sent him down with a note to Personnel that said: ‘Don’t fire this man, ever.’

  When he pulled me out, I was in pretty bad shape. A number of broken ribs, a crushed lung, burned-up face, and my left hand has never been the same. The only time I ever played golf again, and it was a sad performance, was two years later in Ethiopia, when I came out of the bush. I couldn’t even come close to my handicap.

  After the crash, the doctors said I had less than a fifty-fifty chance. But I guess I just wasn’t ready to die.

  I knew I was going to make it when I suddenly got the inspiration for a special bed. It showed me my brain was still working the way it should. The bed was simply a gridwork with each square of the grid moved by a separate motor. This was so that I could shift my body without breaking into a cold sweat each time from the pain. They might even have done something with this hand, but I’d enough of the hospital – I had to get back to work. So I walked out of there before they got around to any surgery on it. Probably a mistake, but, well, life is made up of mistakes.

  Didn’t Linda Darnell and Lana Turner visit you in the hospital?