Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  I wasn’t feeling too well down in Zihuatanejo, and Helga had to leave earlier than planned, so I left. I made a stop in Houston on the way back. I went back there with some sentimental idea of catching a glimpse of Sonny. But Sonny was swallowed up in that mass of fifty-story buildings that had gone up since I left there.

  You didn’t contact anybody there?

  Who? I didn’t know anybody. I took a cab out to Yoakum Boulevard, to have a look at the old house, but the old house was long gone, which I should have known it would be. Some school, St. Thomas’s, had been built on the lot.

  Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. Not because home has changed so much, but because home’s not there anymore. So I came back to Las Vegas and the Desert Inn sooner than expected.

  And the place was in a turmoil. Jerry Alberts had been kidnapped.

  I couldn’t understand how this had happened. Jerry was under strict orders not to leave the ninth floor. Maybe, I thought, he got bored. Maybe he went out to see to some woman. No one knew. This, of course, was the thinking that was going on when I came back, when it was discovered that he had been kidnapped. You see, until then, Bill Gay and the Mormons thought I had been kidnapped. They had no way of knowing it was really Jerry. They only had the vaguest idea that I employed doubles. That was my private system of checks and balances.

  What had happened was that about three days after I had left for Mexico, my people received a ransom note asking for a million dollars. This situation had never arisen before, but the men had their instructions. First they tried to establish contact with me in my apartment – an emergency signal – but there was no answer to it. The protocol then was to break in, and they discovered that I was missing.

  Now I’ll jump ahead a little bit and tell you this from my point of view. I returned, as I said, considerably earlier than I had planned. I probably was away ten days in all. When I walked in, that is, when I established communication with my people again, their mouths hung open and they said, ‘But, Mr. Hughes, how did you escape?’

  I misunderstood. I said, ‘How I left is none of your business – I’ve told you that before.’

  They yelled: ‘But, Mr. Hughes, you’ve been kidnapped!’

  I said, ‘Is that so? Tell me about it.’

  The story came out about the ransom note.

  But this was six days after they had received the note. I said, ‘Why haven’t you paid the ransom?’

  You can believe there were some red faces. They had all sorts of excuses for that. First of all they weren’t sure it was me.

  Did you still use the ‘Pay Damn Quick’ code?

  Yes, and the note that was supposed to have come from me, accompanying the ransom letter – while it was a good forgery of my handwriting, nevertheless it didn’t have in it the letters ‘PDQ.’ That was one reason they gave. Also they said they were trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, to get some proof that they really had me.

  I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, I could have had my throat slit by now.’

  My point was that despite the code we had arranged, I wasn’t satisfied with the reaction I had got from my people, because for all they knew I might have been given drugs by these kidnappers and unable to remember what I was supposed to put down.

  When I got back and explained that it was Jerry who had been kidnapped, each of these Mormons said to me: ‘I wanted to pay, Mr. Hughes, but not the other – not him.’

  We were faced with an extraordinary situation. The kidnappers had Jerry, who they believed was Howard Hughes – at least that’s what we assumed, even though I realized that Jerry would have told them he was a double – and they were demanding a million dollars for the wrong man.

  Someone said, ‘Don’t pay, Mr. Hughes. After a while they’re realize they have your double and they’ll let him go.’

  ‘They may not believe him,’ I said. ‘They may kill him if I don’t pay.’

  You met and discussed all this with your people?

  I didn’t meet them face to face. It was discussed on the telephone. But they knew damn well it was me, and they knew damn well I wasn’t calling from some place up near Reno, where the kidnappers were supposed to be. They knew I was right there on the ninth floor on the other side of the wall.

  Finally we worked it out. These people, whoever they were, got in touch with us and were told they had the wrong man. They believed it finally, because Jerry had insisted, and although he was my double he didn’t look precisely like me – he had a little nervous tic which I don’t have, thank God – and his voice was quite different, much deeper than mine. I spoke to one of them on the telephone. They realized they’d made a mistake, but they said, ‘If you want this man back alive, it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars.’ Why they selected that sum, I don’t know, but they did.

  It was paid in cash, twenties and hundreds left under a cactus bush outside of Reno. It was all done like a cheap Hollywood gangster thriller, and Jerry was delivered unharmed, a little bruised and dirty – he hadn’t bathed in a week – and apparently very grateful that I had saved his skin.

  That was the end of it, except that a few weeks later, Jerry quit working for me. He quit under peculiar circumstances. He was being well paid for doing damn little, but he gave some excuse that his wife was sick and he felt he should be with her in the East. And then, before we had time to discuss whatever his real problem might really be, he was gone.

  It came out shortly after that – not from me, I wasn’t the least bit suspicious – but from other people who did a little investigating – that Jerry was starting to live pretty high on the hog in the Virgin Islands. Then I realized what had happened. I can’t swear to it, but it looked like I’d been taken for $100,000. And if my people had been more diligent and more deeply concerned about me, I would have been taken for a cool million. There was no kidnapping mob, there was just Jerry and a confederate.

  The funny thing is, I didn’t try to track him down. Once I got over my first annoyance at having been bilked, I found I had a secret admiration for the man. He had guts, and it was a clever scheme. I told Helga and she agreed. I saved most of my annoyance for my Mormon bodyguards who would have let me rot.

  Finally I decided to leave Nevada. I was too old to be disillusioned. Call it a disenchantment.

  A number of things caused it. The Atomic Energy Commission, for one. The AEC put out a brochure about their Nevada test site in which they called it ‘America’s Outdoor Nuclear Explosives Laboratory.’ They presented it like a handbill for tourists. Nevada is relatively uninhabited, so naturally it’s fair game.

  The first stage came about when they fired off a hydrogen bomb underground at a place called Paute Mesa, no more than a hundred miles from Las Vegas. Windows broke downtown, people heard it within a hundred miles, and the shock waves were felt in Los Angeles. It clocked well above five on the Richter scale. I left, of course – I slipped away to a safer place.

  The other big negatives were the slow collapse of America’s SST program and the fact that I lost the appeal on the original $137 million default judgment in the TWA litigation, which, with lawyers’ fees and interest, had climbed up in the lofty neighborhood of $250 million. The government said, ‘You’ve got to pay.’ And just as I said when the United States Senate demanded I bring Johnny Meyer back to Washington from St. Tropez, I said, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’

  But before I left Nevada for good, I decided to take another trip. Not to Mexico this time. Not for pleasure. This time the trip was for a measure of enlightenment, and to save what was left of my life.

  31

  Howard reads the Bhagavad-Gita, meets a guru, and begs by the banks of the Ganges.

  DURING THOSE YEARS in Las Vegas I had been involved in a lot of reading. And before that too. Not long after my last visit to Ernest Hemingway, I began reading other things besides novels. I’d always read casually for diversion, but then for the first time in my life I began to read in order to learn.
And I don’t mean to learn engineering or anything like that. I got curious about Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I had found very little satisfaction finally in the way I’d grown up, with all the things all American kids are supposed to be proud of being able to do, to repair things and to build things, and to make money. These had become, for me, dry, mechanical operations with no deeper value than practicality. They didn’t answer any of the questions that were looming larger and larger for me.

  I was no longer looking for a great teacher or a guru. I didn’t believe in that any more. After my disappointing encounters with men of great reputation, I sort of put this down as a childish notion. In fact, I had concluded that any man whose name was a household word was either corrupted or had the seeds of corruption in him. I felt, for example, that any man who would allow himself to be put in a position like Ernest, where he was so publicized and lionized, was being false to himself. How could he be wise?

  I decided that if there were any wise men in this world, their names were totally unknown to me and to you, and to anyone who was reading the newspapers or even reading books.

  I read about Bertrand Russell and the peace marches. He seemed an impressive man. I tried to read some of his works and, I confess, they were a little over my head, except for the mathematics. But when I read of him marching down the streets in London, I thought, hell, this is show biz.

  Then what should I seek? Should I just look inside myself? I didn’t dare. I didn’t really respect myself as much as I once had, or thought I had. And if I looked too deep, I was afraid of what I’d find.

  I considered myself well into middle age at that time – on the cusp of being old, mostly because of the physical damage I had suffered in those various accidents and partly because of the mental pounding I was taking, the constant attacks by these businessmen who were out to strip me of all they could. And partly, I suppose, because when you reach your early forties, you start to feel you’re not young any more, but you don’t want to face it. Then when you get to your fifties, you’ve learned to face it. Unless you’re an idiot, you have no choice. At first it’s a bit of a shock. In the end, however, it’s a good thing – in Asia, you know, they have a proverb: ‘Whom the gods curse, they keep young.’

  My first reaction was to say to myself, ‘Well, soon I’ll be an old man and I’d better start thinking like an old man.’

  I don’t mean I wanted to jump into my wheelchair. I meant I wanted to assess my life and latch on to some sort of self-understanding – the beginning of it, at least. It seemed absurd to me to have lived some fifty-odd years and have no answers to questions. It wasn’t enough to have more money than anyone else in the world. Most rich people I knew were awful human beings, angry and paranoid and grasping. They can tell you how to steal a company or invest money safely, or what a van Gogh is worth at Sotheby’s, or where you can buy the best bench-made shoes, but they know damn little else. They certainly can’t tell you the meaning of life, except in terms of gross national product and stock splits.

  I thought, if anything, a man growing old should have some answers. I didn’t have a goddamn one. I hardly knew the questions any more. That was terrible. I knew that lions ate donkeys and I knew that wasn’t enough to know.

  With Helga as my tutor, I began to read more difficult books. I started to read Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I tackled the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-gita, and Lao-Tse, and some Zen, and I tried the teachings of Buddha. I was put off by the imprecision of the language, the vague terms that were used, speaking of the Self and the One and the Absolute. These were the sort of terms I couldn’t come to grips with. At the time I put the books away in disgust. I don’t want to be irreligious, but a lot of it seemed crap. I’ve always disliked organized religion, and while this Eastern stuff wasn’t organized, it had all the trappings of the junk the church was pouring down everybody’s gullet day after day. All the churches, not just the Catholics, except that these happened to be Asian religious terms.

  A period of time passed while I drove myself crazy with the TWA situation and then the SST scheme. I began to claw my way out of it, and I was still just as restless and dissatisfied and it occurred to me that there might, after all, be something to this Eastern philosophy because so many millions of people had learned from it, and it certainly had a following among intelligent people in the United States and Europe, by people you couldn’t help but respect.

  Someone in Japan had done a private survey on Hughes Aircraft, They sent me a copy of it in Japanese, which I had translated. And shortly thereafter, in the late summer of 1970, I was invited to Japan by a consortium of industrialists. I decided to go.

  These Japanese industrialists needed a billion or so dollars capital for expansion and it seemed to me like a good opportunity to get into new fields that were beginning to interest me. I was in contact with the Mitsubishi people, Sony, Matsushita, the one or two others in the electronics and television industries out there. They were starting to develop computers. I knew that was the future. I just didn’t know who to trust to build them right.

  My business trip to Japan came to nothing, because the government there was, and still is, anti-foreign, and didn’t want to allow foreign capital to come in with any measure of control – and I of course would not invest any significant capital without obtaining a significant measure of control. They should have known that, but, amazingly, they didn’t.

  I wanted Helga to come out with me, but she couldn’t. She was having problems with her teenage daughter who had got involved with drugs. She said she’d tried to meet me in Kyoto, or maybe later in India.

  I asked her, ‘What makes you think I’m going to India?’

  She said, ‘Go to India, Howard. It’s different from anything you know. Go, and you won’t regret it.’

  ‘But I hate the sight of horrible poverty.’

  ‘We all do,’ Helga said. ‘Still, it doesn’t hurt to see what you hate. You can always walk away from it.’

  I had a little time to wander about Japan. I couldn’t break the habits of a lifetime and I missed several appointments, ducked out, for which some of those grim Japanese bigwigs couldn’t forgive me – I’d made them lose face. I didn’t care. I went down to Kyoto, where they have a shrine, and took a walk in the gardens, watched the deer, sat on the steps of the monastery and looked at the monks in their yellow robes. I found it a beautiful country, but a toy country for a man of my size. None of the beds fit. I had to sleep on the floor on a mat with one of those wooden pillows. It gave me a crook in my neck that took weeks to go away. And I found Tokyo a disgusting city – totally polluted, overcrowded, a cheap, honky-tonk atmosphere. I wanted none of that.

  So as soon as the business was over, I left. And I stopped in India on my way home.

  Did you make the stop in India because of Helga?

  Probably. I’ve never been totally sure. I wired my itinerary to Helga in Europe and asked her to meet me out there. Maybe it was written in the book of life and I had to go.

  It certainly had nothing to do with business. In fact I had no specific aim in mind when I went there. I had a few names and addresses that Helga had given me, and I thought that since I was out in that part of the world, I might as well take a look around.

  As far as my business associates back in the States were concerned, it was the same old game I had always played, which was that I had vanished, and nobody knew where. I was hiding out somewhere, probably Mexico or France, with some starlet, and that was that. When I went to Cuba to see Ernest, nobody knew I went, and when I went to Zihuatanejo with Helga on those trips, my people were close-mouthed at all times about anything and everything that concerned me.

  And so I flew from Tokyo to India. I stayed in New Delhi briefly, but only because the plane landed there. It didn’t interest me. Delhi struck me as just another filthy city with a lot of jerry-built modern buildings.

  I went to Calcutta, and quickly left. There was a cholera epidemic, and I found out that this was
an annual event. People were dying in the streets. It was hard to tell the dead from the living, mind you – these poor scrawny kids, women and children, living in a patch of gutter, sharing it with their sacred cows. Calcutta disgusted me even more than Tokyo, because there was such an extraordinary contrast between the few rich Indians and the fat tourists and the teeming masses. You can believe me, it took all my courage to walk through the streets. You know how I feel about filth and contamination. This was like plunging in a cesspool.

  In that case, why did you do it?

  Curiosity overcame my repugnance. They must have thought I was some apparition from outer space, because I walked through those streets wearing white gloves and spraying my throat with a special spray from time to time. I would have worn a surgical mask, but I knew it would have drawn a crowd.

  I became a vegetarian during my stay there, too, because I thought there was less chance of getting poisoned from their vegetables than their meat.

  After the experience in Calcutta I almost left the country. I said to myself, ‘This country has nothing to offer except a few beautiful temples, poverty, filth, and superstition. I’m not learning anything, I’m just confirming my prejudices.’

  But I decided it would be foolish, having come so far, to flee so quickly, and that’s when I took a better look at the addresses Helga had given me. I remembered she had shown me a book about the holy city of Benares, where all the fakirs and babas worshipped by the banks of the Ganges. It had great meaning for the Indians, and it was on my way back to New Delhi. I wanted to please Helga, to show her that I was more broad-minded than she thought I was, and open to new experience. I hired an air-conditioned car and chauffeur and went to Benares – now they call it Varanasi, but then it was Benares. The chauffeur was a student, bright and friendly. He acted as a guide for me.