I Was Howard Hughes Read online

  Ellis B. Tritt, Austin Distinguished Professor of

  History at the University of Chicago, from his

  book What Is Wrong With Us?

  We had a couple of dates and I thought Howard was nice. Joe hated him, of course.

  Marilyn Monroe in an interview with Screen

  Confidential, August 17, 1955

  Dammit, Hoover, what’s he [Hughes. See earlier note— ed.] doing? It’s not like we’re trying to get a picture of the pope in his bathrobe. I want some answers.

  Richard Nixon in a May 3, 1971, memo to J.

  Edgar Hoover, obtained through the Freedom of

  Information Act

  He was like a ghost, even before those final years when no one saw him. If he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t. You’d catch a glimpse of him and then he was gone. It was frustrating, let me tell you, like being assigned to get an eyewitness account of the face of God.

  Tom Lourdes, reporter for Screen News and then Look magazine

  I want somebody who is an expert in the ways of animals of this type and who would know where to look and how to look and how to go about this line. I mean, for example, directly, dogs get a cat treed up a tree and the cat just stays there, afraid to come down, and the dogs rush around in the vicinity somewhere… . If we can find some evidence … the cat’s body, or somebody who heard the episode … Now, it just seems to me that if Bill gave a goddamn in hell about my predicament down here he would have obtained from somewhere, someplace— I don’t know where— from Los Angeles or someplace, he would have got some expert in the ways of animals, cats in particular, and had him come down here and then put about eight or ten of Maheu’s men at his disposal and they would have conducted an intelligent search based upon being instructed by somebody who knows the habits and ways of an animal of this kind. But, instead of that, so far as I have been able to make out, not one thing has been done.

  Kay, I am not going to run this organization this way anymore and now Bill Gay goes cruising around today, having a good time, where nothing is done about looking for this cat down here. Not one goddamned thing except having a few of our guards cruise around in their cars. Maheu is in Los Angeles. You could have had him send a team of men down here. You could have got some experts who knew about cats and know where to look. There are many, many things that could have been done during the entire period of today to try and locate this animal or find out what happened to it today. I am goddamned sure that if some police case depended upon the determination of knowledge of what happened to this animal today, by God, in Heaven, they would have had a team of men scouring the countryside and located the cat or some shred of evidence of what happened to it.

  This is not the jungle; this is not the Everglades; this is not New York City with the dense population. It is thinly populated and it is no problem at all to question all the people here and have them questioned by somebody and get at the truth and not permit somebody to conceal the truth just because they are afraid of being sued or something like that.

  Howard Hughes in a memo to an aide on the

  disappearance of one of wife Jean Peters’s cats

  [The motivation for the hero’s action is— ed.] … a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind… . It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing … it is foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos … it bursts our human standards of value and of aesthetic form.

  [The] material of the visionary creator shows certain traits that we find in the fantasies of the insane. The converse is also true; we often discover in the mental output of psychotic persons a wealth of meaning that we should expect rather from the works of a genius.

  Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul

  The hero often ascends either literally in some kind of physical flight or figuratively in some kind of spiritual leaving of the body; in either case, this separates him from those of us chained to Earth by our corrupt and lacking natures. Now, this might sound funny— I’m switching gears here so stay with me— but have you ever eaten potato chips until you’re sick? Even as you’re doing it, you wish you weren’t, because you know you’re going to be bloated, sluggish, and full of self-loathing the rest of the day. You’re not even tasting the chips anymore, but you still stuff your mouth until the bag is empty. Then, almost in a panic, you start eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. You do that for a while. Your pants are tight, your head feels thick from hours of aimless television-watching, and you’re painfully aware that you’ve failed yourself once again. You don’t feel like you’re going to be flying anywhere anytime soon. Now, how is the hero different? Well, he’s able to stop eating. He has at least a modicum of faith in something beyond his immediate carnal pleasure. He’s able to put that kind of mundane baseness behind him, at least sometimes. That’s why heroes are rare. If you don’t believe me, look at what 90 percent of television commercials are about: food, or, even if they’re selling toilet paper or cell phones, sex. It makes me sick sometimes. It makes me want to go hide in Montana.

  Excerpt from Alton Reece’s lecture on the ideas

  of Joseph Campbell delivered at Johns Hopkins

  University on September 22, 1996

  This will ruin your figure and your career.

  Howard Hughes castigating actress Terry Moore

  about her consumption of ice cream, cookies,

  and peanuts

  I found them at Terry’s mother’s house. He didn’t try to run, he just stood in front of the piano. He didn’t look scared, his face was just blank. I popped him in the chin and he fell back on the piano keys, which made a crashing musical sound.

  Terry and her mother were screaming, so I left. I found out the next day he had to have his jaw wired.

  Glenn Davis, Heisman Trophy— winning Army

  end, commenting on his confrontation with Hughes

  when he discovered Hughes asking Terry Moore,

  Davis’s wife of two months, to marry him

  And what if the powers above do wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and shattering experiences in war, [love— ed.], and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.

  Odysseus in The Odyssey, Book V

  Well, the airplane seems to be fairly successful.

  Howard Hughes just after his successful flight in

  the HK-1, or ((Spruce Goose”

  He took care of medical bills for so many people. He would read about them in the newspaper and get tears in his eyes.

  Phyllis Applegate, actress and Hughes paramour,

  commenting on Hughes’s secret philanthropy

  I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me, probably, that you know someone who has cancer or someone who just got married or just had a baby, and that you can’t do that to those people. But don’t tell me that. And I’ll tell you why. Learn immediately. A corporation has no soul. I can’t know about those things and be a corporation.

  Howard Hughes after he bought RKO Studios,

  instructing an underling to fire writers

  I want to be the best pilot in the world, the best movie producer in the world, the best golfer in the world, and the world’s richest man. I would also like to be happily married.

  Howard Hughes at age twenty-one, speaking to

  right-hand-man Noah Dietrich

  I did not want to marry Howard. He was bright, and he was interesting. But I knew somehow that Howard and I had become friends and not lovers. Love had turned to water.

  Katharine Hepburn, explaining why she rejected

  Hughes’s marriage proposal

  I grew to despise Mr. Hughes. He had no sense of fiscal reality and for many years, Hughes Tool [the oil-drill-bit company found
ed by Hughes’s father, Howard Sr., who bought the design for a new oil drilling bit— it could cut through the hardest rock— in a saloon for one hundred dollars and parlayed it into a fortune— ed.] was the cash cow that supplied him funds to carry out his foolhardy whims. Sometimes his schemes caused us to have to cut our workforce in order to stay in business. He took food out of the mouths of our employees and their families.

  Burton Combs, executive at Hughes Tool

  Company in Houston from 1946 to 1971

  In the 1960s and 1970s, it looked like Howard Hughes was getting snookered every time he made a deal. An invalid lying in a hospital bed that had become his home, Hughes, on the shaky and self-interested advice of those in his employ, bought land and mineral rights in Nevada that were little better than worthless; however, by the time his estate was finally settled, more than twenty years after his death, that formerly worthless land was worth hundreds of millions. Howard Hughes was a veritable Midas.

  Laurence Riggs, associate professor of American

  Studies at Yale University, from his book

  Luck in American History

  Howard Hughes was laid to rest yesterday at Helton Memorial Gardens in a short graveside service attended by seven mourners, all distant family members.

  Excerpt from Howard Hughes’s obituary in the

  Houston Times-Chronicle, April 8, 1976

  I loved Howard and he loved me. I wish there was more I could’ve done for him.

  Jean Peters in a 2000 interview with Alton Reece

  She’ll do better than this, Odie. She’ll do three-sixty-five; I just know it.

  The first thing Howard Hughes said after barely

  escaping death during a crash landing in a beet

  field after setting a new airspeed record for

  land planes

  Athene of the flashing eyes came up to him now and said: Laertes, dearest of all my friends … [this is how a man wins greatness— ed.]: quickly swing your long spear back and let it fly.

  The Odyssey, Book XXIV

  WOMEN

  I SUPPOSE ANY DISCUSSION of a man’s relationships with women begins with his mother, and most Hughes biographies make much of Hughes’s relationship with his. The psychological autopsy done on Hughes called their relationship “clinging and unhealthy” (among other things, she would make him strip naked and then examine him from head to toe for signs of illness), and concluded by saying his childhood experiences with her had “marked him for life.” Those kinds of psychological connections are easy to make, but they’re also often sweeping, clumsy, and overstated— and I think that’s the case here. What’s probably most telling about Hughes’s relationship with his mother is that he always spoke well of her, even in his private diaries. He never dwelled on her mistakes or blamed her for any of his problems. That says at least as much about his character as any psychological analysis could.

  So, unlike every other Hughes biography I’ve read, in this one I respect Hughes’s own understanding of his life and start his story after his mother’s death. Over the course of the thirty years covered in this section, we see the whole arc of Hughes’s romantic life. He starts out quite naive, just trying to learn about sex, and then he tries to find his one great love and marry her; but after feeling he had found her and lost her twice in the persons of Billie Dove and Katharine Hepburn, he grows jaded, and this cynicism allows him, in midlife, to be the ladies’ man of his generation. Then, at age fifty-two, he finally does get his heart’s wish when he marries Jean Peters, a woman he truly loves; however, by this time, he’s not the man he once was. He’s changed, and not for the better.

  You’ve Got to Start Somewhere

  In the fall of 1925, after a honeymoon trip to Manhattan, Howard Hughes and his first wife, Houston socialite Ella Rice, arrived in Beverly Hills to set up residence. According to observers, Hughes was so shy, awkward, and distant with his wife it seemed likely the marriage had yet to be consummated; if this were true it means Hughes was probably still a virgin because our best evidence tells us he had not even dated another woman before his family arranged his engagement to Ella Rice and then pressured him to go through with the wedding.

  Hughes approached learning about sex in the same methodical way he did any other subject. He read the manuals available in his day and he gained practical experience by visiting expensive prostitutes, especially those at the establishment of Sallie Donovan, which is where most of the following episode takes place.

  Ethan Donovan, nephew of Sallie Donovan and as a child a resident of her bordello, reconstructed from a Hughes biographer’s interview transcript

  Lots of big shots came to Aunt Sallie’s place and Howard Hughes was one of them, sure. I was ten when he first came around. He was always in a gray or black suit, never drank, and was always polite. He tried to write Aunt Sallie a check the first time. Everybody laughed.

  Hughes showed up every day, seven days a week, at three in the afternoon on the dot. It was a dead time in the house, with most of the girls just then getting up. Hughes’d tell Aunt Sallie which girl he wanted and wait in the parlor while the girl took a bath and got ready.

  One day he spoke to me. I was carrying a model airplane through the parlor to the back porch. It was a balsa-wood model, not like these plastic kits nowadays where everything snaps together. You had to cut the wood with a jigsaw and shape the pieces by soaking them in water and putting them in clamps. The one I had that day had triple-decker wings.

  “What’ve you got there?” he said.

  I told him.

  “Mind if I take a look?” he said.

  I handed him the model. He held it up in front of his face and looked at it from all sides. “Pretty good,” he said and handed it back. He asked me if I built a lot of models.

  “Yes, sir. As many as I can,” I said.

  “You must like airplanes a lot,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said. “You ever had a ride in one?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “You want to go on one?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. That’d be swell,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said and looked at his watch. “Go get your aunt.”

  Sallie Donovan, reconstructed from a Hughes biographer’s interview transcript

  He came to my house every day for six months and not one time did he ask for me.

  So one day I was in the kitchen and had the needle in my arm and my nephew ran in. I could tell he wanted something but he knew better than to interrupt, so he watched me pull back the stopper and let the blood into the chamber and then shoot it back in. When I got the needle out and the tie-off undone I looked up to see what he wanted and there stood Hughes behind him, staring at me like I was an exhibit in a zoo.

  “Mr. Hughes,” I said.

  “Does it hurt when you do that?” he said.

  “No. I like it,” I said.

  “What kind of dope is that?” he said.

  I smiled. “Would you like some?”

  He shook his head. Then he said, “The boy here, I thought I might take him up in an airplane if you’d give your per­mission.”

  “Has he been bothering you?” I said.

  “No, he didn’t ask me to do it,” Hughes said.

  My colored cook walked between us and set the biscuits on the table, then went to the sink and started the water.

  “I’ve taught him not to beg,” I said. “There’ll be no beggars here. He understands that.” My shot was hitting me and suddenly I was in a mood to see if I could get him to ask for me. Under the table where he couldn’t see I loosened the belt of my kimono and let my jugs fall out. He turned his head right away and his face got red. He kept staring at the cook.

  “This boy is just such a trial,” I said. “You try to teach them but they don’t learn.”

  The cook turned off the water. “He eats more than three of them girls put together,” she said.

 
“That’s right,” I said, “and he’s not supposed to be in the parlor when customers are present. He knows that. Now, turn around and face me, Ethan.”

  I slapped him across the face. Then I pointed for him to go over and stand at the icebox.

  “Mr. Hughes, would you like for me to accompany you for the afternoon?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I don’t like dope,” he said.

  “A lot of the girls use it. Surely you know that?”

  He shook his head. He still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Most of the girls shoot between their toes so they can hide it, but I own the house so I don’t have to hide it if I don’t want to.”

  The cook finished putting away the dishes and closed the pantry door. She wiped her hands on her apron. Hughes watched her do all this. Wouldn’t take his eyes off her. I found that very funny.

  “Mr. Hughes?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Hughes, I’m over here,” I said.

  “I know where you are, Miss Donovan.”

  “Then why won’t you look at me?” I said.

  “Because you’re not decent,” he said.

  “Not decent?” I lifted one of my jugs and laughed. “You’re right. I’m not.”

  “I just wanted to know if you’d let me take the boy flying. That’s all,” he said.

  “Doing your good deed for the day?” I said.

  He shrugged. His face was as red as my nephew’s where I’d slapped him.

  “Go on,” I said. “You think I care one way or the other? Fly to Timbuktu for all I care.”

  Ethan Donovan

  I had to wait for him to have his encounter with the woman he’d picked that day, but then we got in his car, a big fine convertible, and took off. Down the street he pulled over and said he had to make a phone call. He went in the booth and stayed fifteen minutes. I was antsy. I just knew things weren’t going to come off. Finally he came out and got in the car. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I’ve got some business I’ve got to take care of. We can’t do it today.”