God of Speed

by Luke Davies

After that trip I bought her an eighty-foot yacht, named it Rodeo (after her character Rodeo West in The Painted Angel ), and it became our love nest, a term very much gaining vogue in those days. I had to pay her husband $325,000 for an uncontested divorce. Jiminy and Gee Whiz.

  JEAN HARLOW HAD

  THE KNOWLEDGE

  THE YEAR 1929 was the last time I let technology take me by surprise. I was $3.9 million into my first film, Hell’s Angels, by the time I realized that sound was not just a novelty after all: the talkies were here to stay. We’d wasted more than a year of shooting, but there was nothing we could do about it. For the movie to survive and compete we would need to completely rebuild and re-shoot it (another two million). Greta Nissen was wonderful to look at but had a thick Scandinavian accent and a voice like a hacksaw. We had to find a new girl who spoke English.

  The very rich man can get the star, though riches on their own are not always enough. The movie-maker, on the other hand, can make the star, decide who the star will be. I very much enjoyed being a movie-maker. In the cattle calls I discovered Carole Lombard, and for a couple of weeks, until Jean Harlow turned up, it looked like she had the role. It is unbelievable just how long you can fuck for, blood, head and body that hallucinatory trilogy, amphetamines coursing through you like a river in flood. By this time I was getting better. Sex with Ella had never been great, but Billie Dove had taught me a lot, though I was still something of a skittish colt, all bones and angles and too much self-consciousness. And now with Carole, we’d make love all night. I don’t mean many different times, I mean the one fuck seemed to go on forever. Years later, when she picked me up on a motorcycle and ran a bath in her backyard, things had slowed down, that being a period of relative peace, before the difficulties descended and the drugs went up a notch. Of course, I was off my noggin back in ’29, Jack, but that’s more the benefit of hindsight. In any case it was all a tremendous boost to my confidence. More to the point it was something of a test-run in relation to Jean Harlow.

  I didn’t think much of poor Jean the day she first walked into a casting session. I thought she looked too cheap. She had beady eyes and a too-sharp chin, a beacon of white hair so bright it clashed with rather than complemented her pale lemon dress, and eyebrows as ungenerous as her lips. And yet when she grinned crookedly, such promise of mischief was released. Still, I didn’t think she had the sophistication to portray the girl in love with my two flying aces. But her agent, Art Landau, convinced me that in fact she was just the kind of girl who would put out for airmen, selflessly, knowing they might soon die, whereas in fact Carole Lombard might come across a little too virginal and clean in this regard.

  It wasn’t easy breaking the news to Carole, and there were tears, of course, of the sweet, distressed kind. Carole, forlorn and disheveled, saying, Am I not good enough? But one simply had to move through tough decisions. Besides, the more I watched Jean in the test rushes, the more I saw there was, as Landau had pointed out, something about her: a golden slut of sorts. The girl who said, If you would like to fuck me I have absolutely no problem with that, I don’t need to know your motives, I don’t need to know the future or the past. Whatever happens, I don’t mind. I am completely open, completely pliant, to all your wishes, Mr. Hughes. Jean Harlow was like a night of roaring winds and waterfalls, and a clinging, a desperation soft and sweet beyond imagining. Carole, okay, of course, you can imagine. She went on to do great things. You’ve seen the movies, we all have. But there was something unbelievable with my blonde, my blow-job queen. Jean gave that extra something. Jean went that extra mile. My first great star creation, too, I’m proud to say. Jean literally elasticized one’s sense of time until the bed was nothing but the expansion of space in the compression of a heartbeat; nothing but swirling. Because Jean had the Knowledge. Knew what to do with every fingertip, every stroke of the palm of her hand on the nape of your neck or the small of your back, every shifting of hips; every hot-breathed kiss. Two in every hundred women have it deeply, instinctively. The rest work at acquiring skill with greater or lesser diligence. Jean had it all. She was only nineteen. But I gathered she’d been spreading wide for a good long time by then.

  And I was sailing. I was soaring. There wasn’t a call sheet invented yet that I couldn’t deal with. Sleep was for the other humans. I could shoot all day from six, I could eat at Saltieri’s or Maxim’s or the Oasis, go out to all the clubs, the Montmartre or the Cocoanut Grove, till dawn. And somewhere in there fuck little Jean all night.

  Of course, I was still officially “with” Billie Dove at this point, a little ball of energy, you could almost hold her in the palm of your hand. And I was most in love with her. I had helped her through her divorce with Irvin Willat. She had helped me through mine with Ella. I really did intend to spend my life with her. Billie was my first love; Ella was more like an arranged marriage. And all those other girls: spur-of-the-moment situations, with a sprinkling of momentum thrown in. Also clearly for a man it is quite difficult to have sex just the once. First you have to get the awkwardness and newness out of the way. Twice is much better. Three times is better than twice. I am talking about occasions, full nights, nights bleeding into days, sequences of events, rather than single fucks. A couple of weeks’ worth is best of all. You just get on a roll. You owe it to yourself to explore all the way to the end of the river, as long as the river stays interesting enough. Jean was never really my type. It was never going to be more than a quick and dirty fling. Sometimes that’s exactly what makes it so damned good: the fact of the necessity of imminent cessation. We really shouldn’t be doing this. It’s like a chorus down through the ages, like bells ringing out some secret history of infidelity.

  I never felt a moment’s guilt, not a second, not a microsecond, about Billie. Not in the middle of the swirl with Jean, at least. Nor about Ella, in relation to Billie. Guilt had a habit of coming later. But wait a minute. Should I say all this to Jack? He is, after all, a family man. But I did what I did, for better or for worse. Even now, more than forty years later, I feel my blood stir, codeine-sluggish though it is, even now, thinking about Jean, through the endless savannahs of the Empirin. Her life was one grand game. When Billie was filming up in Oakland one time, and Ella gone by now, Jean arrived in LA at the house on Muirfield, chauffeur-driven, naked beneath a mink fur coat, on a day when if you stood outside the dust blew fiercely and grit found its way between your teeth, crunch crunch. Yet inside the house there was only smoothness, and so much juice to be gobbled up.

  THE TENDENCY OF GRAVITY

  I DIDN’T ALWAYS know what I was doing—behind the camera or behind the controls—but I didn’t think it really mattered. I had so much money and so much energy, no mistake was beyond fixing. We had to shoot the big dogfight scene with forty-five airplanes. Nothing like this had ever been done before. There were many contingencies bubbling. There were weather delays, mechanical difficulties. Production costs were running at twenty-five thousand dollars a day.

  It was my first movie, Jack. In truth, I was feeling more than a little stress. I was perfectly aware the eyes of the world were upon me as the hayseed from Houston with too much damned money. But the amphetamines helped me to understand that all would unfold correctly and in sequence and that indeed correctness was the deep state of the world. My decisions emerged from my throat with the ease and authority of a god, and I marveled at their majesty. Do this, do that. Cancel this, buy that. In any event, my first plane crash was not as bad as a couple of the later ones.

  A blue-sky winter day over Inglewood, early ’28. Paul Mantz was my head flyer, a decorated war ace and a fine pilot but an obstinate man and a stickler for the rules. He refused to allow any of the stunt pilots to perform a strafing dive in which I wanted a plane to come in steep and get as low as two hundred feet above the runway; he said a thousand was the bottom safety limit. Men without vision!

  Ten years earlier all these aviators had been to hell and back, to Poitiers, Ypres, Cantigny. Everything they k
new they knew from their own hands; their continuing existence was the proof. Others less fortunate had nosedived into Flanders or the English Channel, patient and abiding. These guys, princes among men, had made it back to their fiefdom, Los Angeles. Things could only get better. I suppose they wanted to live long lives.

  But I was cranky. I said I’d do it myself. I had set up a camera tower, eleven cameras stacked vertically to catch the action. I wanted the plane to describe the low arc of its parabola as close to the tower as possible. I knew the ins and outs of the Thomas Morse Scout, a simple enough plane. Maybe the lesson I should have learned that day was more about not flying in anger than any mastery of technology. I had mastered the goddamned technology! I radioed Action! and began my dive, feeling that glorious tug in the groin and contemplating oddly enough the fact that if something did go wrong, it, and I, would be immortalized on film.

  At fifteen hundred feet I knew the dive was out of control. I tried to pull out but the plane merely maintained its path like a bullet. I felt, if there is an adequate way of describing it, serenely panicked. The horizontal earth, as harmless as a map from up there, flew vertically upwards, and very fast, to meet me. The engine strained and whined. The wings rocked and shuddered as if ready to detach themselves and leave me sitting in this streamlined cylinder gaining speed. The controls seemed only ornaments by now. I dropped down through one thousand feet as in a dream. Seven hundred and fifty feet was already a distant memory. I felt perhaps I was underwater, one only among a species, giant manta rays drifting free through the stately oceans. Five hundred feet. The wind fed through my nostrils and my skull. My eardrums popped, preparing for silence. I pulled one more time, without hope, at the controls. The Scout pulled ever so slightly into a curve. I banked, ready for impact, thinking to spin the plane sideways. Then an eruption of noise and wing and cockpit. I thought I might come apart.

  Then I remember my head hurt very much, though the blood in my ears and eyes was comfortably warm. I looked out over the red tarmac to the distant red figures running through the red smoke and dust.

  I stood somehow, though my back ached tremendously. Then I thought I was walking in a garden, perhaps the Zoological Garden, the Houston Zoo, on a cool fall day, and I was a giraffe, a giraffe made of air, swaying gently, stretching, stretching, to eat more sky. My head felt cool up there. Then I found myself bending at the knees. Then in fact I fell to one knee. Down there, crouched like a quarterback in the huddle, a little dizzy, I had time to look at the beautiful tarmac, just a little local sliver of it, as it became wet, as dark oil seemed to pool and grow and spread, and I thought, An engine somewhere is leaking, we must tell the foreman, where is the foreman, where is the head mechanic, where has everybody gone? I tried to follow the source of the oil but it seemed to be growing from inside its circle of spread. I touched my fingers to its darkness but they came up inexplicably red. Then I seemed to be leaning against some very solid structure. I looked up around me. I was standing alone in a vast hall, somewhat like an empty aircraft hangar. Outside in the red daylight was a plane, a Thomas Morse, apparently recently crashed, crumpled and in pieces. Smoke rose from the wreck as from a pyre. I felt very peaceful by now; the dizziness had gone. Perhaps in fact it was not after all the remains of an airplane but the sand traps and hump leading up to the seventeenth green. To where I was strolling at that very moment. A chip shot, and things were looking good. But then I recognized these red men, Paul Mantz and Roscoe Turner, running toward me like figures from a nightmare, and I was a little confused because they were my pilots and not my golf partners, and then I felt very tired and wanted to lie down a moment.

  I had a short nap and when I woke up I had been in a coma in hospital for three days, and the light was very bright. Noah, my accountant, my friend, was by my bed with others. Harold, he said, you are a very lucky man. There must be some mistake, I said, my name is Howard not Harold. The doctor shone a torch into my eyes and said, Mr. Hughes, you are somewhat concussed and you have suffered under the yoke of a terrible accident. This was all the approximate sequence of words and events from that day three days later. Everybody was greatly relieved.

  THE LUXURY OF A

  COHERENT REALITY

  I RECOVERED QUICKLY, but it took a hell of a lot longer to finish the movie. At some point I broke the record for the longest film shoot in history—but I was always breaking records. I sent aerial photography crews far afield, to Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, to get the right damned clouds, which were never there when you wanted them. Months would pass like this. Cablegrams and weather reports. The continuity of the light. It mattered to me to get it right.

  That stab of annoyance in the edit room, when the cutaways did not exactly match up. Nonetheless there comes at last a time when everything is in alignment, even our limousines all in convoy at the Hell’s Angels premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on June 30, 1930. Jean Harlow, our new star in the firmament, traveled in the car in front of us. Billie Dove sat beside me holding my hand, but all my yearning was funneled forward into that Daimler thirty feet ahead. Jean’s smooth legs, the gymnastics of her abandon. Billie suspected nothing at this point and Jean behaved herself all night, in public.

  We finally made it, I said to Jean, referring to the movie, smiling for the flashing bulbs. I squeezed her elbow tight for an instant. Most everything has a multiplicity of meaning, and everything stands for something else, but sometimes, as in that brief squeeze, metaphor and intent fuse, and one enjoys the luxury of a coherent reality.

  Still, I stayed with Billie Dove a while longer. Things could never have lasted with Jean, as I said. There was an enticing tang to her imbecility but the long-term prospect was for boredom, and in any case her own frail self was not to last long. Goodbye Jean. In the summer of 1930 I took a European tour with Billie. Europeans didn’t think the same as Americans, and did things, most things, more dumbly. It is simply not an efficient continent. In addition they make very little effort to get their English right. But in July we sailed on the Europa from New York.

  Leaving the harbor and all those buildings and all that heat behind, I felt the sweat cool on the back of my neck. When choices are reduced you can perhaps really love someone, and I thought I might love Billie after all. Concentrate on her, at least. Too much choice and you can go into meltdown. But when America recedes, you can make love in the Europa’s Presidential Suite, slowly, deliberately, and then suddenly there does not seem too much heat in the world after all. Liberty. Liberty. The ship trundles across the Atlantic, the cabin itself is a river, the bed a ship of flowering. You are drenched for days.

  We took out the light bulb in a narrow powder room at a party in Paris. We had lurched, laughing, to the far end of the house. We were trying to be quick. But the door swung open the moment we’d stopped caring, and a pale red-haired woman gasped, Oh, pardonnezmoi! as the slat of light revealed perhaps a glimpse of cock, or Billie Dove’s pale thighs ahoicked to mine, her dimpled buttocks pressed to the marble sink, or her stockings dangling helplessly from her toes.

  We visited the Arc de Triomphe. From the Eiffel Tower there is a very pleasant view.

  RICOCHET

  BUT THE FIRST time I ever experienced a clearly identifiable stammer in the monologue of life was 1930. Amphetamines helped me get through those long days trying to keep Hell’s Angels together. I liked the energy modern pharmaceuticals supplied; I liked how fully Here and Now the world became; I liked the way 1930 was surely the most present of all presents the world had ever passed through.

  The amphetamines smoothed me out, and yet after a while they were just so inconsistent. One night in bed in the house on Muirfield I was a little angry to think there were stonemasons nearby sawing through granite—what the hell were they doing what the hell were they doing up at this time of night—and at one point called the police, but we couldn’t identify the source of the noise, couldn’t get a fix on the direction. The police in fact claimed they couldn’t actually hear any
thing.

  I was quite embarrassed several nights later when I realized it had only been the grinding of my teeth.

  At other times I got somewhat exhausted and needed noise to deafen the clatter in my brain, some kind of override device (I wouldn’t discover morphine for another sixteen years). After shooting for twelve hours and then viewing the dailies I would come home late at night not knowing what to do with myself, not knowing even how to properly sit on a couch. I would pace the house, dread chewing at my stomach. The very stillness seemed menacing. So in the basement at Muirfield I let fly for a few seconds with a Thompson submachine gun I’d taken from the movie set. It was as if the machine gun were pleading, then and there, for its purpose on the planet to be fulfilled.

  Exposing myself to the danger from ricochet in that confined cellar was probably a sign that things were not well. But the noise was magnificent, and took me for a moment away from my own sense of exhaustion and into a still and silent place, warm and welcoming. So that I was rather calm when Noah rushed over, alerted by one very worried maid.

  He said, Do you want to talk?

  I didn’t have the energy to answer.

  We stood in silence, both leaning against the cool stone walls. I had taken him on as my chief accountant; he would be with me for many years, until his welcome wore out, as they do. But for a while, a couple of decades, we would be close. Smoke wisped lazily up from the barrel of the gun. I had a sudden sense that above me the whole of the world burned too brightly and it was better to live in the darkness here, in a cooler place, nearer to the tendrils of the orchids reaching down, nearer to all these labyrinths in the soil, than that world up there of Each Bright Object Too Clearly Encased In Itself. I also had a sense that although we were close, Noah and myself, friendship was hard. It was hard enough just concentrating on the women.