“There it is,” he said, commandingly, waving his arm across the windows, an amiable smile on his face. The guests had seated themselves, but still he stood. “That’s where the marina goes—right after Eddie’s wells come out.”
“We know that, Howard,” said Cal, after a moment, breaking the mood of edgy camaraderie. “What we don’t know is why you want the land.”
Hughes sat down at the center of the semi-circle. Maggie, Terry, and Cal were on one side, Lizzie and Joe on the other. Lizzie brought out a pad and pen, not risking the tape recorder. She’d been to Hughes Aircraft once before, for a story on the Spruce Goose shortly before its one and only flight. Since then, Hughes kept it locked up.
Either he hadn’t heard Cal or chose to ignore him. No sign of a hearing aid. “You’re looking at an oil man who is going to bring down derricks and plug up wells.” Again he smiled. “You don’t find that every day.”
“Don’t forget the stables,” said Maggie.
He was staring at Lizzie. “You’re not writing about this for the Times, are you? You’re invited here as a principal, not as a reporter.”
“I am not writing about this for the Times, Howard.”
“It’s a habit with her,” said Maggie. “Some people fidget, Lizzie writes.”
“I have your word?”
“You have my word.”
He looked over them to Cobb, making sure he got that down.
“Good. Well, as we all know, Los Angeles County, with backing from the federal government, wants to build a marina out there, maybe ten thousand yachts, bigger than anything south of San Francisco. You own the property and the government wants to buy it. How does Howard Hughes fit in, you ask?” He turned to look around, eyebrows arched high over expressive blue eyes. “Hi Joe,” he said with a smile, and winked at Maggie. “Easy: With me involved you make more money. Simple as that. You get richer. Up to you. End of pitch.”
Maggie felt a tingle. Hughes had always dazzled her. For a while she’d wondered if they would marry, but she knew better. Arnaud was dashing and handsome, but Arnaud had no surprises. Howard, dashing and handsome, was shrouded in a mystery no one had ever broken: wealth, genius, passion, courage, deafness, charm, humor, obsessiveness, paranoia, his contradictions made him unique. Irresistible.
She’d gone to work for him soon after he’d broken up with Kate Hepburn. He’d grown a scraggily mustache to hide the scars from too many crashes, but she’d rather liked it. Their first dates were not in Los Angeles but in Washington where she was based, thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt, to help set up the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the World War II WASPs. Hughes was often in Washington to meet with the War Department and testify to Congress on the constant cost overruns and delays on his planes. He needed a place to stay, so he stayed with her. The affair lasted on and off for two years. When she returned to Hughes Aircraft after the war it was as employee. She had no complaints.
“How do we make more money, Howard?” asked Joe.
Hughes looked benignly at him. He’d heard about a script for a Western being read at RKO. Something about a pseudonym. He made a mental note to call Buddy Fix. “Because the government will screw you, Joe, but it won’t screw me. We know each other too well. In short, you will make more money, much more money, selling the land to me and letting me negotiate with people I’ve been negotiating with for years.”
You had to admire his balls, thought Cal. The argument was preposterous: that somehow they could do better with Hughes getting a cut of the proceeds than without him. Having worked with city government, Cal knew the weaknesses of civil servants, but why should they overpay just because they were negotiating with Howard Hughes? Buying property just to flip, wasn’t that a kind of flimflam? What about government auditors? What about the press? Would Lizzie be able to keep from writing about something as fishy as a huge land flip?
“What guarantee can you give, Howard?” asked Cal.
“Guarantee? There are no guarantees in business negotiations, son. Call it experience against inexperience.”
“Howard was good with Congress,” said Maggie. “I’ve seen him perform.”
Hughes turned to her. “Perform is not the word I would have chosen.”
She smiled. “Okay, negotiate.”
“I’m willing to go as high as $50 million.”
“Because you think you can get $100 million from the government,” said Cal. “You’ll have do better than that.”
“Can’t do it. Bankers won’t let me.”
It was time for Cal’s surprise.
“You want our land, Howard. What about your land?”
“What?”
“What about the land we’re sitting on right now?”
Hughes leaned closer. Did he miss something? “What about it?”
“Let’s assume the marina is built. Now look a few years down the road, a decade or two. Say the marina has ten thousand yachts by then—a huge man-made harbor surrounded by dry docks, shops, apartments, yacht clubs, restaurants—a seaside community unto itself.”
They’d all turned toward him.
“What are you saying?” said Hughes.
“Do you intend to hold on to an empty airfield during all this?”
“What do you mean empty airfield? This is Hughes Aircraft.”
“Which can be moved anywhere—Lancaster, Ontario, Riverside, the middle of the desert for that matter, where you do most of your testing. You’ll want to move by then, Howard, and the question is, what happens to this land we’re sitting on?”
Hughes face was blank. If the future of his airfield was something he’d never thought about, he wasn’t going to show it. Cal’s guess was that the idea was new to him. A man of action, a dealmaker and egotist focused on whether he could fly the fastest airplane, run the best studio, own the most successful airline and screw the sexiest actress, why would he think about the future? He was buying new land, not selling what he had. Who cares about two decades out? We’ll all be gone.
“This land stays an airfield.”
“It can’t for long,” said Terry, speaking for the first time. “Not with the expansion of L.A. International two miles away. Not with jet airliners on their way.”
Hughes stared at his pilot, having trouble remembering why he was there.
“All this land belongs to Ballona,” said Cal, sweeping his arm across the window. “Maggie, Lizzie, and I have been coming here since we were children, long before you came to town, Howard. All of it—from the airfield, across the wetlands, beyond the stables to the beach, down Ballona Creek and across to the oil fields and the Venice canals—becomes more vital as the city grows. A marina is good land use, but what will surround it? Hughes Aircraft will have to move. Are you going to sell to developers who put up high-rises right down to the ocean? How is that better than oil wells? How do the stables survive, as you promised?”
Hughes had been leaning forward to make sure he heard every word. Now he sat back. One could almost see the wheels of his mind spinning.
“What exactly are you asking for?”
“A stipulation concerning the future use of your airfield.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, not crazy. Looking to the future.”
“You want a land swap?”
“Of course not.”
“So what is it?”
“Do you have a will?”
A smile inched slowly across his rugged face and he looked around at the others. “I believe that he wants the Sierra Club to be in my will. No sir, I have no will. Why would I have a will? I am a healthy man. Ask Maggie. I have no heirs and don’t intend to have any. Anyone who claims to be my heir is an impostor.”
Cal looked closely at him. A little gaunt maybe, but still impressive. He thought of the pretty girl in pink plumeria at Maggie’s wedding. But there were the p
lane crashes, the loss of hearing, the rumors. You can’t always tell by looking at a person.
“What about a statement of intent? Would you sign a statement with Mull Oil that Hughes Aircraft land is protected and cannot be used for future commercial development?’
Hughes looked over them to Cobb.
“No such statement would be legally binding,” said the factotum.
“Of course not,” said Cal. “So Howard would have no problem signing it.’
Hughes’s mind was processing. “How would such a statement influence the present negotiations?” he asked at length.
“Maybe it wouldn’t. I haven’t discussed this yet with my cousins, who look as surprised as you do. On the other hand, maybe it would.”
“An interesting idea,” said Lizzie.
“We need to talk,” said Maggie.
Hughes stood up. “When you’re ready, call me.”
Chapter 35
The fifties were the golden age of Los Angeles, when a perfect balance was achieved between man, his resources, and his ambitions: Human life was good. Population went on growing, but was no longer doubling every decade. Governments were progressive, but not too. The Cold War continued, but in Los Angeles that meant jobs at companies like Hughes, Douglas, and Lockheed. Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, was elected in two landslides, winning California and Los Angeles both times and presiding over a booming national economy that paid record high income taxes no one seemed to mind. Public education was free and was good. Tuition at USC, a private university, cost eight hundred dollars a year. Across town at UCLA, tuition was free and accessible to anyone with a B average from public high school.
The oil wells on the beaches came down. The movie industry had never been stronger, and the mob decamped from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (where air-conditioning had arrived) for legalized gambling and off-track betting. Palm Springs was a pleasant two-hour drive away where a few thousand dollars would buy you a stucco and a date ranch. A federal highway bill passed that would make a mess of the city, but that was still a few years out. The interurban rail system that once was the envy of the nation was demolished, but Eisenhower was promising to bring the demolishers to justice. The water arriving from the Owens and Colorado Rivers, the water that built Los Angeles, was no longer sufficient but a state water project would be passed to bring water from Northern California, where the water was, to Southern California, where the people were.
It was a period of stability and equilibrium. It would have taken a person of diabolical imagination to foresee the chaos that was coming: the smog, traffic, trash, crime, riots, drugs, viruses, and homelessness; the building frenzy that would destroy hillsides and mountains and guarantee the revenge of summer fires and winter floods; the Big One that finally struck—but was it really the Big One when the epicenter was in the Valley and only fifty-seven people died? In the fifties, people didn’t know about any of that. They didn’t make much money, but nothing cost much either. Doctors and dentists made no more than anyone else, hamburgers were nineteen cents and gasoline twenty-nine cents a gallon. Movies were a quarter. You could buy a prewar stucco in West Hollywood for fifteen thousand dollars or pay the same for a new tract house in Westchester. Free of oil wells, beaches were again for sunning and swimming. The Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn and the Rams still played in the Coliseum. The fifties in Los Angeles was as good as it gets.
Lizzie had not forgotten her inheritance. When Eddie’s estate was probated, taxes paid and assets distributed, Security Bank and Trust set up a trust in her name with a value just under $20 million—not counting the Venice oil fields. What to do with it? She’d worked for the Times for twenty years, been reporter, editor, reporter, editor, and reporter again. She had no intention of stopping writing. She’d filled pages of private notebooks—thoughts and profiles and sketches back to her days writing for Miss Adelaide Nevin. She had material ready for a Pitts-Callender book when an idea for a novel struck her: a corporation takes over a town, destroys what has been built up over decades, ruins lives and gets away free. She showed Joe the outline and watched him take a book from the shelves, The Octopus, by Frank Norris. She read the book and tore up her outline. She would stick to nonfiction.
Saturday morning and they were in their garden. They had hangovers from a few too many the night before with Maggie and Terry at Lawry’s on La Cienega, but coffee and Seville oranges (with sugar) in sunny chairs and the green freedom of the garden without their son was restoring them. Robby had spent the night at a friend’s house and was due back anytime. They talked a while about what to do with their son. His teachers said he was two years ahead of his classmates and ready for high school—academically but not emotionally. He was twelve years old and a handful. They didn’t mind at all when he slept over with friends.
“You know I didn’t mean to discourage you the other day,” Joe said. “Frank Norris had a good idea but was no good at characterization. The subject can be done better.”
“Let’s see how the Pacific Electric trial turns out first.”
“Why? If it’s a novel, you can make it turn out as you like. Use your imagination.”
He liked the way she looked in the morning, something about her short, mussed, sandy hair being provocative. She was aging well; or maybe it was because she was a dozen years younger, and he was aging faster. He liked making love to her Saturday mornings when she wasn’t rushing off to work. She’d thrown on jeans and a shirt to sit with him in the privacy of their garden, read the newspaper and talk.
“Not sure I have the imagination for novels.”
“You never know till you try.”
“Sure you do. You, for example, are always making things up, composing stories in your head, inventing dialogue. I just watch and listen and take notes.”
They fell silent. He watched her reading the paper, thinking he loved her more than he thought he could ever love any person. But he had something else on his mind. She glanced up and saw the look that said something was coming that she didn’t really want to hear.
“I’ve never told you this before, but as a newspaper the Times stinks.”
She didn’t say a word.
She knew it, of course, but that made it no easier to hear. She’d belonged to the Los Angeles Times for two decades, the only professional life she’d known. She’d given it all she had, put her life on the line and wasn’t yet done. Joe’s arrow hit its mark and it showed in her face and her silence. He wanted her to quit the newspaper and write books. He worried about her always being on the frontlines of stories that put her in danger.
“That doesn’t mean you stink, hon,” he said, trying to recover, “just that the Times isn’t good enough for you. You deserve better. So does this city.”
She levelled angry eyes at him. “This is Los Angeles, Joe, not your precious New York. We don’t have six dailies. The Times is still the best newspaper in town. In New York, you don’t like theTrib, you go to the Times; you don’t like the Times, you go to the Sun or World-Telegram or Post or Daily News or whatever. What can I do here—work for Hearst?”
“You are at the point where you don’t have to work for any newspaper.”
“It’s what I do, Joe, who I am. Novels—that’s not me.”
“So do a blow-by-blow story about Pitts-Callender. We’ll put it in a script.”
She tried a smile. “Maybe . . . someday.”
He finished his coffee and lit up, first one of the day. “My question is simple: why isn’t the Times better? The Chandlers own this town. They are drowning in money. What’s wrong with that family? Why can’t the Los Angeles Times be the New York Times of the West? Why is everything local? Give us national news, foreign news, tell us about the world. People here care about things beyond the city limits. This is a city of foreigners.”
“Rich family newspaper. No real tradition. Clip coupons and bank their dividends. Big
houses and cars. Why change?”
“Norman Chandler could do it. He’s the boss, isn’t he?”
“Norman is afraid of his family.”
“What about son Otis, the golden boy—any hope there?’
“Otis comes in every day—when he’s done surfing and weight lifting.”
“Aren’t you sick of it?”
“No.”
“Try your hand at a script. Maybe Howard Hughes and RKO would like it.”
“Howard Hughes doesn’t like me.”
“You haven’t slept with him yet.”
She picked up an orange to throw, but started laughing. “I never compete with Maggie.”
“With the money you’ve got you can do anything you want.”
She stopped laughing. “That money is yours, too.”
“If I didn’t write I would die.”
She smiled. “What would Hollywood do without Memory Laine?”
“You don’t like my nom de plume?”
“It’s cute—just that everybody knows it’s you.”
“Buddy’s tired of the game. He’ll put my name back up one of these days.”
“My point is, money doesn’t change a thing, does it?”
“Why don’t you do something useful with it?”
“Like give it to the Sierra Club?”
He laughed. “Cal would name a mountain after you.”
“Not to change subject again,” she said, “but back to Robby.”
“Any ideas?”
“I keep telling myself it’s a phase, but he doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
“Doesn’t talk . . . ?”
“Not a word. Something boiling in there.
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