I Was Howard Hughes Read online

  I nodded.

  “Don’t worry, though,” he said. “I promise you we’re going flying.”

  I was a pretty tough kid, but on that ride back I was so disappointed my eyes watered up. I kept looking away from Hughes and he was nice enough not to say anything about me crying. He talked about airplanes.

  The next morning Hughes showed up at the house, which was a surprise because he hadn’t said anything about us going up that morning. Nobody was awake but me and the cook. He took me to a diner for breakfast, then we went up in a two-seater biplane. He had goggles and a leather helmet and jacket for me. We went out over the ocean, up toward San Fran, everywhere. Spent two hours in the air, then landed and refueled and went up again. He let me have the controls some. Except for my kids being born, it was maybe the greatest day of my life.

  I never talked to him again. He never came to Aunt Sallie’s place again after he took me up. But when I was fourteen Aunt Sallie kicked me out of the house and I had to quit school and get a job, and somehow Hughes knew about it. He had a man come to my rented room and tell me he had arranged for me to live with a family in Pasadena and he gave me a part-time job as a mechanic’s helper at Hughes Aircraft— after graduation, I went right into a full-time job. Then a few years later, when my wife needed an eye surgery I couldn’t afford, one of his men showed up at our house and said Millie would be on a train to Johns Hopkins in two days. Understand, I hadn’t mentioned her condition to anyone at work. Then when each of my three children was born there were college funds started anonymously for them at my bank and two hundred dollars was deposited every year.

  Long after he had gone out of the public eye, it was 1970, a man showed up at my house right after the New Year and said he represented Howard Hughes. He said Mr. Hughes sent his best wishes and wanted to ask a favor. Did I have any family photographs I could spare? Mr. Hughes would like to see my family. By that time I was a grandfather and I’d just had a couple of rolls of film from Christmas developed. I gave the man some of the prints and asked him to give Mr. Hughes my best.

  After he left I sat there and thought about what had just happened and I started feeling sorry for Hughes. I had all the pictures I wanted but he had to ask me for some. Then Millie came downstairs from a nap. She asked if someone had been there, she said she thought she heard the door. I told her no, no one had been there, she was probably just dreaming. She would’ve been upset about me giving away her pictures of the grandchildren, but that wasn’t why I lied. I wanted to keep what happened private. Between me and Hughes. I can’t really say why.

  That was the last time I heard from him. I would’ve liked to have sat down and talked with him, but of course I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  Operation Nevada

  In 1929, Hughes, miserable in his arranged marriage, started an affair with Billie Dove, a silent-screen star who was then one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood. She looked like the quintessential flapper, slim, coltish, with blond bobbed hair and large doelike blue eyes. They both determined to divorce their spouses so they could be together; however, Dove’s husband, the director Irvin Willat, refused to grant a divorce unless Hughes paid him $325,000 (about $2.5 million today). Hughes promptly paid. Billie Dove was his first real love.

  During the early, happy days of the affair, Hughes cooked up a scheme for Dove to establish residency in Nevada and obtain a divorce. The plan, named Operation Nevada by Hughes himself, called for him and Dove to masquerade as brother and sister and live together in a dirt floor lean-to as tenant workers on a small farm in Nevada. They did so for two weeks, until Hughes’s lawyers discovered the lean-to was not legally a residence.

  Billie Dove, reconstructed from a Hughes biographer’s interview transcript

  This was during the Depression and there were all sorts of transients who really were in the position we were pretending to be in. This helped make us believable. Today, because of television, something like this couldn’t be done. Even an isolated farm couple like the Myersons would’ve known who we were and what we looked like. In those days, though, you could still get away with something like this.

  Howard sprang the idea on me out of nowhere. He called up and insisted I have my maid buy clothes I wouldn’t be caught dead in, but wouldn’t tell me why. I got a calico dress, a bonnet, and brogan work shoes. I thought there was probably going to be a costume party. That afternoon Howard arrived in a limousine and he wore old denims, a work shirt, brogans, and a straw hat. As soon as we saw each other we started laughing. I demanded he tell me what was going on, he did and I loved the idea, and the limousine took us to the station. We boarded a coach car on a Nevada-bound train.

  The Myersons were about fifty, childless, just quiet, hardworking people. During the short time we were with them Howard and I both felt guilty. Here we were playing at something that was actually survival for them. Their farm was a hardscrabble place and they made just enough to live. Howard would work in the fields all day and I would help out in the house with whatever Mrs. Myerson was doing. I learned how to can vegetables and how to kill, clean, and dress a chicken. Howard learned to plow with a mule and other things about farming. He was very interested in all of it, seemed very happy, and he didn’t complain about the work. At night in the little shack that served as our quarters he would talk about what he was learning and the new ideas he had for agriculture. I’ll have to say I wasn’t quite as keen on it all. I had come from a middle-class background, not a farm, mind you, but I still knew about the tedium of life when you had to do all the daily things for yourself, the cooking and washing and all. I think this was the first time Howard had seen this side of life and he found it exotic.

  After three days we stank to high heaven. Our shack didn’t have running water and we couldn’t bathe except with the pitcher and washbowl. The place had one window but it had no glass and we used a burlap sack for a covering so a lot of dust and dirt blew in. The floor was dirt. We worked in dirt all day. Everything was dirt. There were two cots and we’d scoot them together at night, though in the morning we’d have to be sure to pull them apart again in case someone came by. You’d slap your hand on the bed and enough dust to make you sneeze would bounce up. The first and only Sunday we were there the Myersons let us borrow their big washtub and we built a fire and heated water and took baths. That was quite a treat.

  I guess I put up with it all because, at the time, I loved Howard and was desperate to be free from Irvin. But I lost weight while we were there, and I was pretty small to begin with. We took our meals with the Myersons and I had no taste for the food but Howard liked it, it was the kinds of things he ate anyway. A lot of fried meat, and potatoes at every meal.

  In the evenings we would walk down to a grove of trees at the edge of the property where we could be alone and out of sight. We’d hold hands and talk about our future together. Howard had such dreams. In truth, most of my dreams had already come true. I was one of the most popular actresses in the movies— that was soon to end, of course, but I didn’t know that then. I had all the money I’d ever need and other than a happy marriage, I had everything I wanted. Howard, on the other hand, was more restless. We would sit with our backs against a tree looking out over the miles and miles of empty land and sky and it was as if Howard was in a hurry to fill them up with something. He’d talk about his ideas for farming the desert and about building an airline that took people around the world, not just the country. He said he wanted to come to wide open places like this one and make movies with me in them. He’d go from subject to subject like a man with too many ideas in his head. He’d go on about how Nevada was just waiting for someone with his resources to move in and do things the right way and show the rest of the country what could be accomplished. He’d say we were looking at a new frontier and talk about building a new city in the desert and making it the center of the world’s aviation. Ships had ruled commerce to this point in history, he would say, but now airplanes would. New York had become grea
t because it had a great port but the city he would build in Nevada would be great because the whole sky was its port.

  So he’d talk like that. Then at dark we’d go back to our little shack and Howard would light our one lamp and write in his diary until I coaxed him to bed.

  Hughes diary entry, May 21, 1930

  I cannot believe how well things are working out. Sometimes I am so happy I am sure somehow a fly will get in the ointment and ruin things. I will keep my fingers crossed against this and hope for the best.

  I am falling in love with this state, just as surely as I am in love with Billie. I feel like I am heading out on an old time wagon train to make my fortune, as if there is a new country to be built and I am the man, or at least one of the men, to do it. Nevada is still what this whole country once was, a place where a man can break away from the past and build something new. I imagine Alaska is the same, but the climate there is too harsh to be practical.

  The work here is hard but I enjoy it. My arms and shoulders are dead tired from wrestling the mule reins all day and my legs feel as if they have the arrows of St. Sebastian stuck in them but I enjoy the exhaustive nature of the work because it relaxes me mentally and is good for thinking. I have decided that the main purpose of my life, the most important purpose after my devotion to Billie, will be to build the state of Nevada into a shining example for the rest of the country and even the world to follow. It has all the necessary advantages to make this possible:

  a) Hard working people.

  b) Close enough to the ports of California and Oregon and Washington that, until I can design and build airships that make oceangoing ships obsolete except for recreation, we can get all the materials needed for building projects with relatively low transportation costs.

  c) Oil is readily available.

  d) No large cities. This will allow metropolitan areas to grow from scratch in an intelligently planned manner.

  e) Low population makes the state easy to control politically and therefore the usual problems associated with government will not be a roadblock.

  f) Low taxes.

  Nevada will be a mecca in two areas: aviation and tourism. Right now the possibility of the growth of either in this state seems remote because it is so barren; however, that is exactly why this plan should work. This is a pie that no one except me wants a piece of. I will have a free rein here. More than likely both the regular population and those in power will be happy for the opportunities my plans offer them. I see an aviation complex growing in this state that outstrips any kind of manufacturing and services conglomerate ever envisioned. We will build the planes here, test them here, build the parts for them here, service them here, and build the world’s largest and most active airfield here. As for tourism, right now I am thinking about the possibility of popularizing golf and making it the all American game instead of just recreation for the upper tier. Land costs almost nothing here and so it would be the perfect place to build golf course after golf course if I can design a cost-effective irrigation system that would be practical on this barren land. We will make golf available to the American family. Cheap enough for anyone with a decent job. We will build a string of Hughes Golf Courses across the country, with Nevada being the starting point. We will even build little courses for children with short holes and childish attractions along the way, the same way they make the little baseball gloves and bats. There will be classy hotels with swimming pools and shops and first class restaurants where families can vacation in a clean and wholesome atmosphere at a reasonable price and this growth as a tourist spot will feed our aviation business. We will attract weary city dwellers from around the country to the wholesome outdoor atmosphere of golf and we will fly them here cheaply and in style. Nevada will be an orderly state with low taxes and little or no intrusion from outside forces if a man (like me) has a good idea and wants to implement it. That is what this country started out to be but somewhere got lost along the way. Our current economic troubles bear me out on this.

  I live for the day I can begin work on these plans. There are many pressures and obligations I must get rid of first, but all my problems are solvable. It will just take time and effort and I look forward to the future. Having Billie makes everything worthwhile.

  Transcript of the 1930 interview between R. A. Myerson and Tom Lourdes, reporter for Screen News and later Look magazine, at the Myerson farm in Tonopah, Nevada. Lourdes was the only reporter able to track down Hughes and Dove and discover the truth about Operation Nevada.

  TL: Mr. Myerson, what was your impression of Howard Hughes?

  RAM: Good boy. Never shirked his work. He’d plow, hoe out a field, whatever was needed.

  TL: Did you two talk much?

  RAM: No, mostly we worked.

  TL: You never had a conversation of any length?

  RAM: Sometimes we got to talking while we was eating lunch. He’d talk about the farm. Said he was going to figure a way to put all these dry acres under cultivation, going to figure a way to put in an indoor bathtub and feed it from our well. Talked so much one day he started reminding me of one of them Wobblies. I seen them in Detroit when I worked there during the war. I asked him if he’d ever been to Detroit and he said he had and so I asked if he knew any Wobblies and he said no, he hated the Red bastards. I said that’s funny cause you talk like a Wobbly. I was smiling and trying to joke him but he didn’t take it like that. He got onto Hoover. Said there was a Wobbly and a Bolshevik if you wanted one. Said Hoover had made it so a man couldn’t build a house or own a piece of land or start a business without getting the permission of the g.d. government. He said a man had to buy a g.d. permit to do anything nowadays.

  TL: Did he talk about anything else?

  RAM: He always talked about how he liked Martha’s fried chicken.

  Transcript of Tom Lourdes’s 1930 interview with Martha Myerson

  TL: Mrs. Myerson, your husband said Miss Dove seemed unhappy here, that she didn’t like the work or the food and that she would start arguments with Mr. Hughes. Do you agree?

  MM: Pshaw! I told him she wasn’t especially good at kitchen work, but she did try. Once she started crying when she tried to bake a cake but didn’t keep the oven fire hot enough and it turned out runny, but otherwise she was a fine girl to have around. And she’s not a big eater, but that’s her business.

  TL: So you didn’t think she was rude at meals?

  MM: Goodness gracious no. She wouldn’t take a lot on her plate when we passed the dishes. She didn’t waste.

  TL: What about their arguments?

  MM: Well she certainly didn’t start them.

  TL: You’re saying Mr. Hughes did?

  MM: Yes.

  TL: What would he do?

  MM: If he wasn’t trying to make her eat he was worrying her with something else. Saying he was going to do this, going to do that— all his big talk even got on my nerves so I can only guess how that poor girl felt. Then one night she said something about liking the actor in a moving picture I’d mentioned being on in town, I can’t remember who it was right now, and he just put down his fork and quit eating. The biscuit he had in his hand, he squeezed it into a little ball and dropped it onto his plate. R. A. asked him if the food didn’t suit him. He said the food was fine but something else wasn’t. That’s when I knew something was funny. Brother and sister aren’t jealous like that.

  TL: So you believe Hughes’s jealousy caused their arguments?

  MM: Well, that one time. The other times it was him wanting her to eat or talking so big for so long you’d just as soon as shot him as listened to it one more second.

  Alton Reece interview with Tom Lourdes at the Tremelo Retirement Home in Wharton, Vermont

  I meet Tom Lourdes on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. The facility he lives in is small and dingy, though the attendants I meet seem cheerful. Susan, a slim attractive young woman with cotton-candy-pink lipstick and a habit of smiling at whatever she has just said even if it’s only hello, escorts me i
nto an empty dayroom and tells me Mr. Lourdes is finishing lunch and will be brought in shortly. She tells me that for his age, ninety-four, Mr. Lourdes is quite sharp. He’s even writing a book, she says, works on it at least an hour every morning he feels up to it. I ask what the book’s about and when she says Hughes, I’m surprised. Soon she leaves and I’m left alone in the room, which is much too warm and has a faint medicinal odor. The rain patters on. Finally, a wiry black man in a white smock wheels Tom Lourdes in and positions him at a round card table that has a checkerboard painted on it. Mr. Lourdes is very thin and frail— his shoulders are no wider than a clothes hanger — and he wears a faded blue terrycloth bathrobe over yellow pajamas. His hair is yellowish-white and, by the smell of it, slicked down with some kind of old-fashioned barber’s pomade. The attendant leaves, I sit down, and we start the interview.

  AR: Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Lourdes.

  TL: Oh, it’s no problem. I’ve really been looking forward to this, and, well, I just can’t tell you how happy I am to be a part of this project. Tickled to death, actually. I’m glad the truth about Howard Hughes is finally going to be made public, so that all this folderol that’s usually said about him can be put to rest. That’s what I’ve always wanted, so I’m glad we’re going to be partners, I suppose you could call it, in redeeming a fine man’s reputation. (Then, with some difficulty, he bends over, flips up the footpads on his wheelchair, and places his slippered feet on the floor. He looks up, smiling wryly.) But you know, don’t you, that you’re lucky I’m still alive? (He gives a dry, brittle laugh.)

  AR: That I am, sir. (I smile.) Well, I guess we should get started. Wasn’t the first time you covered Hughes during his affair with Billie Dove?

  TL: Yes, the tabloids were saying they’d gone to Mexico for divorces, but I didn’t believe it.