Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

He said, ‘Sí, sí, Papa, Papa!’ By then we were halfway there, and Papa turned out to be Ernest.

  I was let in without any ceremony. The maid at the door didn’t even ask my name. Ernest was sitting around the pool half-naked with a few other people, and I hadn’t had time to change. I was still wearing a business suit. I had taken my tie off, stuffed it in my pocket. I walked up and Ernest was sitting there with his pot belly hanging out, and he peered at me over his glasses.

  The first thing he said was, ‘Don’t stand there with the sun behind your back. I can’t make you out, and that makes me nervous. Move around this way.’

  I did as I was told, so he could see me. He looked at me with a grim expression – like, ‘What’s this?’ And then suddenly his face broke into a big beautiful smile, and he said, ‘Goddamnit, Tom, it’s great to see you!’

  I felt wonderful, that he’d recognized me after all those years and welcomed me so warmly.

  Ernest had that quality of welcoming, which is so rare. The house was full of people, apart from his family. There was his wife – at least some little woman running around that I thought was his wife. And some adoring blonde girl, who as I recall, the wife didn’t like very much, no doubt because Ernest was humping her. A bunch of servants, too, and some children, his own and others. And some college kids from the United States. They’d come down there and thrust themselves upon him with their manuscripts, expecting that he’d help get them published. He read their work with great patience, and I remember that when one of them left he asked Ernest for money because he didn’t have the fare back home, and Ernest gave it to him. That’s the kind of man he was.

  Did you keep masquerading as Tom Garden?

  I was afraid to tell him my real name. It was such a good relationship that I didn’t want to run that risk. We sat around the house and just talked. Ernest wanted to know what I’d been doing all these years, and I made up a few stories that paralleled my life. The events may have been different but the general content was the same, so that I wasn’t lying to him in any meaningful way. I stayed almost the entire first day at his finca, and then he drove me back to my hotel in Havana, the Nacional.

  The next day I was out there again with him, and on the third day we went fishing. I had taken Ernest up in my plane, and now he wanted to take me out on the fishing boat, to show me his specialty. I was not a sportsman; I played golf but I never went hunting, and I seldom fished anymore. I didn’t really know what to expect.

  There were a couple of Cuban helpers, one who was steering and one serving drinks. Ernest knew by then that I didn’t drink, so he had a bottle of milk along in the ice chest for me. I think he drank tequila or daiquiris, and he had a couple of thermoses full of them, and each time he’d take a belt he’d say to his barman helper, ‘Get out the milk for Señor Jardin.’ And then he would crack up laughing. It broke him up, that I drank milk.

  I was taken aback to begin with, when about fifteen minutes after we left the dock, there was Ernest at the helm of the boat, wearing a jock strap. Nothing else.

  The fishing was poor. Ernest said it was the fault of the tankers that had been torpedoed there by German subs during the war: the garbage that had spewed out of them had killed off most of the big game fish. And he grumbled, and then it got hot, and he said his jock strap was itching, and he peeled it off.

  He said, ‘Come on, Tom, you’re going to get prickly heat. Take off your clothes.’

  I checked over in my mind what I remembered of Ernest’s sexual habits, and I figured it was safe enough, so I peeled down to my skivvies. I’ve always been a little shy about being naked with other men, or women for that matter. Many times when I used to play golf, in the locker rooms all the men would shower together, and I waited till they were out of there before I would shower. Crept into a corner of the locker room when I had to change my clothes. I’m sure it harks back to my childhood, being tall and awkward, but I could never put my finger on the exact reason.

  After a while Ernest said, ‘Let’s go for a swim. Bareass, Tom.’

  I peeled off my skivvies and we dove over the side into the Gulf, which was perfectly flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for me, because we were grown men – I was forty-eight years old, and Ernest was somewhat older – and there we were in the water, naked, and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a killer whale, or a swordfish, and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other – ‘Watch out, whale, here I come!’ Splash around like children.

  And it was marvelous. It was a broiling hot day and we were two middle-aged men splashing around like kids in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

  It gave me a curious view of Ernest. I saw something in him which I now know is a common element in many great men: the capacity to play, to remain in some respects childlike until they’re too old to do it. I haven’t got that capacity, sad to say – never did. It’s a naturalness that men have when they’re not ashamed of themselves and of what’s buried inside of them.

  It was an absolutely fine day. I felt more relaxed with Ernest than I felt with men I had known all my life. We just took each other for granted, and I was terribly impressed. With myself, too. Mind you, I wasn’t conscious of this at the time. A lot of it came to me in thoughts afterward. But I was conscious of it to a certain extent, because I knew that this was not the way I usually behaved. And I was happy.

  Then I made a bad mistake. We had such a good relationship growing up between us that I felt ashamed of myself for deceiving Ernest by calling myself Tom Garden. It suddenly seemed ignoble. And so I said to him, ‘I have to tell you something. My name isn’t Tom Garden.’

  He took a gulp of his drink. ‘Then who the hell are you?’

  I said, ‘My name is Howard Hughes.’

  He looked at me for a minute, downed his drink, and said, ‘Goddamn! I should have guessed. That’s why you flew so well. I should have known it. Howard Hughes! Goddamn! I’ve always wanted to meet you, and here you are, bareass naked with me in the Caribbean!’

  He kept on chuckling, and I was relieved at his reaction. I thought everything was going to be okay.

  But it was a mistake to have told him. In subtle ways his attitude began to change almost at once. The first thing that happened is that he wanted to know all about me – that is to say, about Howard Hughes. He asked me a hell of a lot of questions. That’s when we got on to our long discussion about my crashes and wartime experiences, and that was all right – but then he started asking me the same sort of questions that reporters had asked me for years.

  I had developed a habit, the moment these kinds of questions were posed to me, of instantly ducking into my shell and being brusque. And that’s what happened to me then. When we went back to the house I said to Ernest, ‘The one thing I beg of you is not to tell anyone else who I am, because that ruins everything for me. People treat me differently and I don’t like it.’ I wanted him to pick up the hint.

  He said he understood. He wished that he could be anonymous sometimes, but his face was too well known, the big beard and everything. In retrospect I don’t believe him, but that’s what he said then.

  But his attitude had changed. He had always been fascinated by rich people, and he confessed that to me, and he began to talk about money.

  Money is not a subject that I’m shy about. Money’s played an important role in my life. I’m hardly alone in that: people will lie, beg, borrow, steal, do damn near anything for money. It’s played an exaggerated role in my life because I’ve had more of it than almost anybody else. If you’re a man seven feet tall, like ‘Wilt the Stilt’ Chamberlain, it’s bound to be important in your life that you’re taller than anyone else around. You stand out, and people are going to gawk at you. People have always gawked at me because I’ve had more money than they have. They treated me like a freak, which is one of the reasons I’ve always hid from them.<
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  And so I didn’t want Ernest pumping me about how much money I had, how I got it, and what I was doing with it. But obviously I couldn’t avoid the subject altogether. He wouldn’t let me. And the more I talked – I guess when I talk, I talk about a million dollars as most men talk about a hundred – the more Ernest became almost deferential to me. He was awed by all this.

  The worst thing that happened was that just before I left, he became aware that he had been deferential. Because he was a perceptive man and he was, I think, aware of his own attitudes as few men are. Once it dawned on him that he was being deferential – I may even have said something to him, not meaning to insult him, but said, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t pull that with me, that’s what I get from flunkies’ – he was ashamed.

  He turned against me. He became surly and difficult. Although when I left, we had one very good moment. He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I don’t care whether you’re Tom or Howard, I’m just delighted to know you, and I want you to come back and I look forward to seeing your skinny ass again.’

  And so everything was okay when I left.

  Did you see him again?

  I waited a long time. Much too long, in fact, because we had a good friendship, and if I had continued it I think I would have been the better for it. Ernest could have been the kind of friend I always needed. Different from me, although I don’t think that would have made a barrier.

  But those were the years that I got so terribly involved and embroiled. ‘My son Howard the Billionaire is drowning!’ I was drowning in details and deals, and I was sucked down into that morass of suits and countersuits and financing – the whole horror story of TWA.

  Did you and Ernest correspond with each other?

  No, he didn’t write letters and I rarely do. I did go back, though, to see him about five or six years later. That was sometime in 1959, and the Cuban revolution had already been accomplished. And this time I went deliberately – I had no business in Florida.

  I went straight to Cuba to see Ernest, because it was a time in my life when I was completely fed up with everything, and I had nothing but good memories of Ernest and the times we had spent together. I regretted that we’d been out of touch. I had read in the papers that Ernest was back in Cuba, and that was what prompted me to go. This was not meant to be a two-day visit, or a three-day visit, or anything. As happened again later, I was willing to burn my bridges behind me. I felt that Ernest and I had a great camaraderie, and there wasn’t much more I needed in life at that point other than one close friend. So when I went back it was with the idea that I would stay as long as I wanted to. It could have been for the rest of my life. I had no time limit in mind.

  You were married to Jean Peters then, in 1959. You mean to say you and Jean would have moved down to Cuba?

  I don’t know what would have happened. Things had started to go a little sour by then in my second marriage. In fact, long before then. But if I had stayed on in Cuba, and I was free to do so – all I had to do was throw over my entire industrial empire, so-called – I probably would have asked Jean to come out, give it a try to see if we could live together again.

  When I arrived and went out to Ernest’s finca, it was a terrible disappointment. It threw me completely, because everything had changed. Ernest had become an old man. And I don’t mean just old physically, old in appearance – he always had that big white beard – but the vitality had gone out of him. And some of the intellectual honesty had gone out of him too. He was crotchety and difficult and he talked to me in an entirely new way.

  The first day I was there, half our conversation had to do with Cuban cigars, because Castro had accomplished his revolution and Ernest was worried that Castro was nationalizing the cigar industry and the cigars would not be the same quality they were before. He said, ‘Howard, why don’t you buy the island from Fidel and go into the cigar business?’

  He pursued that theme. I’d come to talk to Ernest about a possible total change in my life, and he kept saying, ‘The cigars won’t be the same if they’re not rolled on the thighs of nubile Cuban girls, and you can make a good deal with Castro, you can buy in for a hundred million, and what does that mean to a man in your position, Howard?’

  I hadn’t come to discuss the quality of Cuban cigars. I was uncomfortable and a little impatient.

  The second day was just as bad: I never got a chance to talk to Ernest alone. He got up late and he had a lot of visitors. We had a pickup of meal out at the finca and there were a bunch of Cuban army officers and political figures. He introduced me, thank God, as Tom Garden. He still respected my wish for privacy. But he and these officers and politicos chatted away furiously in Spanish all afternoon. Every once in a while Ernest would stop and throw a line or two of translation in my direction. I was bored.

  By the time the afternoon was over, when they left, Ernest was drunk as a skunk. His head was falling on the table. I was embarrassed for him. This was a man who’d won the Nobel prize. I found it a pitiable thing to see a man of this power, this nobility of spirit, demeaned in this way. I didn’t want to see any more of it.

  I left. I was at the Nacional in Havana. It was empty, I had the whole floor to myself – and I hadn’t rented the whole floor that time, as I did years later at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Matter of fact there was a parade while I was there and Castro himself came marching down the street. I watched it from my window.

  I went back once more to see Ernest. It was even worse. I don’t know what had gotten into his head, but naturally he wanted to know all about what I’d been doing in the past years. I didn’t feel the machinations at Hughes Aircraft and troubles at TWA were the things that really would have fascinated him, but I gave him a brief rundown on it, and all he could do was criticize me, and harp on the fact that I was wasting my life on involvements with this kind of thing and the kind of people I had to deal with. Now I knew this. That’s precisely why I had come to see Ernest. I was like a man who had a crippled leg, and I had gone to the doctor to see if he could cure me, and all the doctor could say was, ‘Your leg is crippled, your leg is crippled.’ What I was looking for was the cure.

  Ernest offered me no suggestions, only harped on the fact that I was too involved with these people. I would say, ‘Yes, I know that, but I want to become uninvolved, and how do I do it? And where do I go? How do I cut loose?’ I may not have put it in such childlike terms as that, but it was clear that I was there for help. And instead of helping me, Ernest tried to bully me.

  When you bully me, I vanish. Usually I vanish physically, but sometimes I just vanish mentally and emotionally.

  I crawled into my shell, and the more I did that, the more Ernest tried to pry open the cover and knock holes in me. He still had a lot of the old charm, he wasn’t unpleasant enough for me to pick up and walk out of his house, because every time he saw me getting really uncomfortable, he’d slap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh, shit, it’s good to see you, Howard, or Tom’ – he called me both names. People in Cuba thought my name was Tom Howard or Howard Tom. Ernest had kept his promise, I think it amused him that he was the only one who knew.

  We didn’t go fishing this time. Ernest was in no condition for that. He was worried about whether the government was going to take over his farm and he didn’t even want to leave the house. He was worried about his health. I remember the doctor came out and took his blood pressure right there at the table.

  But there was still some of the old Ernest left. We drove into Havana together, and the car broke down halfway. Ernest cursed up a storm and started a speech about ‘goddamn modern machinery,’ and got out to open the hood. But I could tell what the trouble was from the way the motor had sputtered. I told him, ‘You’re just out of gas,’ and that’s what it was. His gas gauge was broken.

  This was where the old Ernest popped up out of that crotchetiness. There was a car parked nearby, not far from a house or a few houses. Ernest took a length of rubber tubing from the trunk. ‘Indispen
sable, Howard,’ he said. ‘Never travel without it.’ He siphoned a gallon or so of gas out of this other car, sucked it up with his mouth, which made me terribly nervous. I shudder to think of what fumes went down into Ernest’s lungs. And if the owner of the car had seen it he might have fired a shot at us.

  Anyhow, we got to the city all right and filled the tank there.

  It was a bad visit. It was a mistake. It colored the good memories of Ernest with an overlay of this unsuccessful meeting. What I most deeply regret is that I hadn’t known Ernest as a younger man, and that we hadn’t kept in touch. If I had known him during those years, let’s say even from 1946 up to 1959, that might have changed my entire life. But events intervened, and you don’t always see what’s the right course to follow, and we had lost touch.

  I never saw him again. I was deeply saddened when I heard of his death, that he’d blown his brains out. Not that I object to suicide. I feel it’s every man’s right to put an end to his life when it’s become intolerable to him. But what preceded it – the sickness and the periods of insanity, the decline of a brilliant and fine man into a wretched shell – saddened me deeply.

  What about you, in your life? Have you ever contemplated suicide?

  I imagine every man has. The first serious time was when I broke up with Billie Dove. That was a totally demoralizing experience for me. The other times were flashes of despair. But I have to tell you one thing, and then you’ll understand a lot about my life, about these past years.

  After my crash in the F-ll, when I was in the hospital and the doctors had just about given up on me, what saved my life was my will to live. And I’m not talking about an unconscious instinctive will to live, like the fox that bites off its foot in a trap – I mean a conscious repetition of my intense desire to go on living. I lay there in that hospital bed and I repeated it to myself time after time. ‘You’ve got to live. You’ve got to live.’ Not: ‘You’re going to live.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to live.’