“You want women in the army air force?”
“If we can fly as well as men, why not? We’re at war.”
They ordered sandwiches and iced tea and looked around for famous faces. Neither woman recognized anyone.
“You’re talking about noncombat flying?”
“As a start.”
“They’ll never let you fly in war.”
“One step at a time.”
“And you think I can help in some mysterious way? That’s why we’re having this lunch.”
“Exactly.”
Lizzie gave her a soft smile.
Despite the differences, you could tell they were sisters, something in how they walked and talked, even sat. Maggie moved her hands more, likely from her time in France, and with her darker complexion and athletic figure would always turn more heads. But Lizzie’s sandy hair and easy way of smiling and inviting you to tell her everything about yourself had its own appeal. Looking at the rows of pictures as they’d entered, they spied Sister Angie in white gown smiling out between Eve Arden and Bette Davis. Uncle Willie’s photo was still there.
Maggie sat back to observe her sister, who was dressed in a plain gray flannel skirt and beige sweater, the same style—maybe even the same clothes—she’d worn at UCLA. Her method was to use her anonymity to get what she wanted. No one ever mistook her for a hard-charging newspaper reporter. People felt sorry for the cute young thing in bangs and flats who didn’t seem to know what to ask. They’d start blabbing to cover the awkwardness. She had a good memory, a mnemonic camera that recorded everything but didn’t work when she was talking. So she didn’t talk. She smiled and nodded and poked here and there and remembered. She’ll marry Asa without telling a soul, Maggie thought, record it in her diary and tell us about it afterward. She’d always been like that. Little mouse sitting quietly in its corner, nose twitching, seeing everything, missing nothing.
“Howard Hughes,” Maggie began as lunch arrived, “is an impossible man—sexist, stubborn, prejudiced, just plain weird.”
Lizzie sipped iced tea.
“He is also extremely attractive.”
Lizzie arched an eyebrow.
“For all you read about him—the planes, the dames, the movies, everything sleek, fast-moving, nonstop—he is the most old-fashioned man I’ve ever met.
“Old-fashioned?”
“As in neat, picky, finicky, fastidious, everything in its place, antimacassars, lace doilies on the chairs, lace pillowcases.”
“Lace pillowcases?”
She smiled. “Yes, I was in the bedroom.”
Lizzie’s bright eyes asked the obvious question.
“No,” said Maggie. “It was a party. It’s where the coats were. Anyway, my point is that Howard thinks women belong in the bedroom, not in the cockpit. In Europe, I flew planes he’s never even heard of, and he still won’t let me fly.”
Lizzie chewed, drank, smiled at the passing waitress, waited. Maggie was prouder of her little sister than she ever let on, only four years out of college and already a familiar by-line for legions of newspaper readers. Who had changed more in those four years, she wondered: she herself, who’d lived in Europe, flown everything, witnessed war, married, seen her husband killed and made it home across an ocean infested with German submarines? Or the little mouse who hadn’t stirred out of Los Angeles yet somehow attained a level of stoical sophistication Maggie knew she would never have. It wasn’t jealousy. She loved her sister too much for that, and how could she be jealous of someone who’d always been in her shadow? But Lizzie had changed in those years, cloaked herself in a mystifying emanation that caused you to look past her, then quickly back again, certain you’d missed something. Maggie still remembered Santa Monica Hospital with doctors and police and parents all swirling around her bed and Lizzie sitting invisibly somewhere writing it all down. When would that appear in a book? Lizzie no longer lived in anyone’s shadow.
“Sleeping with him would make him even more stubborn,” Maggie went on. “He’s one of those men who gives nothing in return so what’s the point.”
The waitress brought coffee, watery and tasteless in two beige crockery cups. You didn’t come to the Brown Derby for the coffee. They fell silent, each woman lost in her thoughts. Lizzie still had no idea the purpose behind this lunch other than that they never saw each other anymore. Maggie hadn’t said a word about why she wanted to talk and obviously didn’t care whether she married Asa Aldridge or not. Lizzie would wait.
“So here’s my idea, Liz,” she blurted suddenly, “since I know you’ll never ask.” She smiled nicely. “What if I could get Howard Hughes into an air race with me, one on one? He loves competition, you know. He says women can’t fly, so what if I got him in a race and what if I beat him? What if the race was covered by the newspapers and followed all across the country, including in Washington? It could change everything. How could they then say that women can’t fly in this war?”
“Assuming you won, of course.”
“Oh, I can beat him all right. But say he fixes the thing some way so he wins—which I wouldn’t put past him—what would it matter? The race is the thing, isn’t it? The fact that he agrees to race a woman, one on one, that he recognizes our equality in the air.”
“If not on the ground.”
Maggie laughed. “That’s funny.”
“So how do you get him into a race like that?”
“That’s where you come in.”
Chapter 23
The five-star item appeared in Jack Smith’s Times gossip column.
***** Seems that Howard Hughes, known far and wide as a man with an eye for a sleek chassis of any kind and one who never refuses a challenge, is refusing a big one. The man who has set more air speed records than any other person alive or dead has declined a challenge to race around Catalina Island in his own planes, the H-1, planes built right here in Los Angeles and used to set most of his records. And who is the temerarious man who would challenge the champ? Why it is not a man at all. It is a woman, Margaret Mull of the well-known local Mull family. Miss Mull, a Hughes employee and well-known pilot in her own right, accuses her boss of under-valuing female pilots at a time the country needs pilots more than ever. So how about this, Mr. Hughes: accept Miss Mull’s challenge, invite the public to attend the race and dedicate the proceeds to the purchase of US War Bonds. The public wins—even if you don’t.
Hughes strong baritone was known to everyone at the plant and boomed out over loud speakers into every corner of the airfield and beyond to the marshes of Ballona.
“Will Margaret Mull please come to my office? ASAP.”
It was not repeated.
She was in greasy beige overalls, standing on a platform, her soft-helmeted head inside the motor of the F-11, a reconnaissance version of the D-2 ordered by the USAAF. Even so, she heard the announcement. All eyes immediately went to the only female in the hangar. Some of the guys shouted at her as she climbed down, her helmet muting their words, which was just as well. Ignoring them, she pushed the platform away from the plane, stowed her helmet, left the hangar, and started across the field toward the offices. She felt it like a summons to the vice principal’s office, of which she’d had a few. The men turned to watch. They liked to watch her walk, even in overalls. The summons was what she’d been waiting for.
He was standing with his back to the door, staring out the window to the airfield when she entered. He’d seen her coming, watched every step for a hundred yards, though she could not see him behind the tinted windows. He was dressed in a dark business suit. He didn’t turn around to see who’d come in. Melvin Cobb, his lead flack, was in a chair. They exchanged glances. She liked Mel. He liked her.
She waited for him to turn but was darned if she’d stand like some poor army lieutenant waiting for the colonel to acknowledge his existence. She sat down next to Cobb, who was na
tty in herringbone. It wouldn’t be the first pair of greasy overalls on Hughes’ snazzy furniture. He had it scrubbed down with saddle soap each night. He was a fiend for cleanliness, a fierce enemy of germs, paranoid on the subject. She wondered how he could make love like that.
“You might have talked to me before you planted this.”
Still he hadn’t turned.
His office looked out on the airfield he’d carved from the fields between Playa del Rey and Culver City. She was not two miles from the horses that had given her as a girl the taste for something faster. Looking northwest, beyond the runway, toward the wetlands and Eddie’s oil derricks, she spied a flock of something (whimbrels, godwits?) sweep through the air in perfect formation, like a squadron of fighters. Her eyes followed the curves of Culver Boulevard over the marshes and came to rest on the spot where Billy Todd was killed in a field of lettuce. Not the worst place to die.
“And you would have laughed me out of the office—as you did last time.”
Finally, he turned, wearing the sardonic smile that wasn’t a smile so much as simply the way his mouth shut because of the scars. She loved the way he looked—tall, ruggedly handsome, with the self-assurance of a man who accepted no limits.
He’d been in crashes and walked away each time, which some said explained his erratic behavior. He spoke loudly, and she was increasingly aware that he was hard of hearing. His outbursts with men who challenged him were legendary. He was known to be ruthless with men and courteous with women—with whom he didn’t have to be ruthless because they surrendered so easily. He was vain about his appearance and kept a large staff of lawyers and publicists to look after his image and interests. His troubles with movie censors, the notorious Hays’ Office, over The Outlaw, the movie he’d just completed, had been in the news for months. Featuring Jane Russell in a special Hughes-designed uplift bra, the film had been banned, and Hughes set his PR department to work on public opinion to win its release.
“This is betrayal, Miss Mull, which in the Hughes bible is a mortal sin. I can’t keep you on after this you must know.”
She came to the edge of her chair.
“Betrayal? I challenge you to a race, fair and square, and you call it betrayal? What kind of a man does that?”
She thought he suppressed a smile but he turned away so she couldn’t be sure.
“You went behind my back. Your sister is on the Times, isn’t she?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing—I’ll find out.”
“And I’m sure the next item in the Times,” she said with calculated anger, “or maybe it will be a full story this time, will be how the brave Howard Hughes dodged a challenge he knew he would lose.”
He turned back, and this time it was not a smile and was not suppressed. It was a horse laugh. “Lose to you?”
“You won’t be the only one to lose—everybody loses.”
She stood to go.
Melvin Cobb was shaking his head. “Mr. Hughes, you can’t do this.”
“Why can’t I do it, Melvin?”
Cobb spoke the words slowly, accenting each one. “Because you will look stupid and weak, Mr. Hughes.”
She was walking toward the door.
“Wait!” he called. “Why Catalina?”
She turned. “I thought it would have more appeal.”
“To . . .?”
“To everyone—to the press, to the public, to you.”
She watched him sizing things up, wondering how much of the look was about the race and how much about how she would look in the Russell bra.
“Sit down, Maggie.”
She came back and sat down, glancing at Cobb, whose look somehow suggested that the whole scene was arranged—Hughes the movie director at work. How else could Cobb, a factotum if ever there was one, have had the temerity to challenge his boss.
Hughes sat down behind his desk. “You think you can fly my H-1 Racer?”
“With a little practice.”
“I set world speed records in that plane, you know.”
“I do know that, Howard.”
“And you?”
“I flew a Dewoitine 520.”
“Not a bad plane. Handles like a Spitfire, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ve heard it said. I’ve never flown a Spitfire.”
“You’ll only embarrass yourself, you know.”
Maggie’s smile was so incandescent that both Hughes and Cobb broke out in laughter. “My embarrassment will be nothing like yours when I win.”
Again, the men erupted in laughter. This time Maggie joined in.
♦ ♦ ♦
The race was set for eleven o’clock on a hot, bright Saturday morning with the winds strong off the ocean making the women spectators hold down their skirts and the men onto their hats. It was to start from the Hughes test site adjacent to the bean and beet fields of Santa Ana. Ten thousand gawkers and a few dozen concessionaires came ready for a fair, ready for a summer carnival, ready for an event to lift spirits. The war news was looking brighter with both the German advance in Russia and the Japanese advance in the Pacific stalling, and what better way to celebrate than an air race to Catalina?
Basking in the free publicity, Hughes gave Maggie time to practice in his H-1 racer, the plane he’d used to set his speed records. She needed it. The H-1, made of wood and aluminum and built for speed and maneuvering, bore no resemblance to the heavy steel planes, some with armor plating, she’d flown in Europe. “Take all the time you need,” Hughes told her condescendingly. “I don’t want any excuses afterward.” He knew she would lose, but wanted a good showing by both planes, which could lead to more contracts for Hughes Aircraft, especially the D-2, the interceptor he was trying to sell to the army air force.
They brought Jack Smith down from the Times to act as official starter and flip the coin to see who flew which plane. Looking for idiosyncrasies, Maggie had flown both during her practice runs, finding nothing to separate them. They weighed the same, maneuvered the same and both speeds topped out near 350 mph, far faster than anything she’d ever flown. She’d been over the course four times, twice in each plane. With the planes equal, the pilot would determine victory, like the better jockey on horses of equal speed, the one who knows the animal, knows the track, knows the turns, knows the opposition, and, in the case of planes, knows the winds. Hughes had the advantage in knowing the planes, but as far as she knew had never flown the course—the attitude of someone who didn’t need to practice.
They’d picked mid-July when school was out and children could be brought to the field by moms whose husbands were away at war. Flags flew, hawkers hawked, spectators crammed the ropes around the bumpy grass runway, the press kept cameras snapping and rolling and microphones stuck in the face of anyone with an opinion on female pilots. Dressed in soft helmets, dark flight suits and boots, the fliers resembled each other except for their heights.
Maggie looked closely for Movietone News, which made the newsreels shown between features of movie houses across the nation. For two months she’d lost no opportunity to remind people that this was a race to show that women could fly planes as well as any man, including the great Howard Hughes.
“How can you beat the man who holds all the speed records?” a reporter asked her.
“It’s one thing to race against a clock, another to face an opponent.”
“Even when the opponent is a woman?” said the reporter.
She stifled a rude reply. Hughes claimed women were too emotional to make good pilots. She wanted these reporters on her side. As they prepared to climb aboard, she noticed the windsock pointing southeast, hard off the ocean, a headwind of thirty knots, stronger than during any of her trials. It would be slow going out but coming back they would shoot through the sky like missiles.
They took off
in tandem, dead into the wind, flying low, moving up for less resistance. Altitude was important but they’d agreed to stay under two thousand feet so spectators on land and water could follow the race. They flew side by side to the coast, veering southwest toward the island, wings never more than fifty yards apart, Hughes waving and smiling from his cockpit, Maggie ignoring him. Below, the seas were choppy with winds filling the sails of yachts put out to follow the race. The course was set for Seal Rocks on the southern tip of Catalina, where they would clear the first race marker, and Land’s End in the north and the second marker. After that, it would be the race of the swift back to the mainland. The final marker was at Turtle Rock southeast of Santa Ana, where they would turn back into the wind for landing.
Five miles out, Hughes took his plane to two thousand feet and pulled ahead. She moved up with him, and he came down, luring her into his wake. Higher altitude meant less resistance, but also meant using more time to climb and descend. It was a matter of geometry and wind resistance, but also of intuition. She tried to put his plane out of her consciousness and fly by what she remembered and felt in her hands, but he was always there in her peripheral vision, like an annoying wasp that would not leave her alone.
Catalina was in view from the beginning, a large aircraft carrier of an island, getting bigger each minute, its distinctive marks—Avalon Bay with the casino, the sands of strange Isthmus Cove, rocky Mount Orizaba at two thousand feet and Silver Peak in the north—slowly coming into focus. Turning northwest at Seal Rocks she lost him briefly, hoping he was behind, suspecting he’d gone higher, not sure where he was. At Land’s End, turning dead east, he was suddenly on her tail like an enemy fighter, higher, faster, coming straight at her and with machine guns would have had her, but she shot up into lighter air and suddenly was ahead.
Not for long. As they made the turn around the island and caught the tailwinds that would carry them back to the mainland, he’d gone higher again and had a half mile on her. She had no idea what he’d done, somehow found the air currents. They were two-thirds of the way and flying like the wind and though he was higher and had to come down farther, she knew at that moment that she would not catch him.
Blood and Oranges Page 17