I Was Howard Hughes

by Steven Carter

  “What the hell?” Hughes said.

  “Oh, God,” Brookes said.

  The man pointed the gun at me. “Lock the door and pull the shades.” I did.

  “Do you want money?” Hughes said and you could see his hands rustling underneath the apron. Then Brookes dropped his scissors and they clattered on the floor, everybody jumped, and the man jerked the pistol in the direction of the noise. Hughes ducked.

  “Watch it,” the man said.

  Everybody stared at each other.

  “What’d you want?” Hughes said.

  The man sighted the pistol at Hughes and squinted one eye.

  “If I did something to you I’m sorry,” Hughes said. He kept scooting up in the chair, trying to move away somehow— he was practically standing up on the footrest. Brookes kept edging away from him with these little steps.

  “Would you still like to be in Hell’s Angels?’ Hughes said.

  “Very funny,” the man said.

  “We’ll reshoot your scene and splice it in,” Hughes said. “New prints can be made. We’ll redo the credits.”

  “That would be just goddamn wonderful,” the man said, “if you were telling the truth.”

  “I’m completely serious,” Hughes said. His hands moved underneath the apron and he pulled out a business card. “Here. Call this number this afternoon. I’ll set everything up. It’ll be shot within the week.”

  “You’re lying,” the man said.

  “If I say I’m going to do a thing, I do it,” Hughes said.

  “You said I had a job on Hell’s Angels.”

  “No, Howard Hawks said you had a job.”

  The man finally lowered the pistol. He stepped off the shine stand and grabbed the card and looked at it.

  “All right,” he said. He switched the pistol to his left hand and held out his right one for Hughes to shake. Hughes didn’t take it.

  “I want a handshake,” the man said.

  “My word’s my word,” Hughes said.

  “I said I want a handshake,” the man said.

  “If I’m lying a handshake isn’t going to change anything,” Hughes said.

  “I’m not kidding,” the man said. “Shake my hand.”

  “I can’t,” Hughes said.

  “Why not?” the man said.

  “I don’t shake hands with anyone who’s been drinking,”

  Hughes said.

  “What?” the man said.

  “I’m sorry, but I just don’t do that,” Hughes said.

  “That’s crazy,” the man said.

  “Well, crazy’s a strong word,” Hughes said. “I don’t know if I’d call it that.”

  The man stared at Hughes like Hughes was some kind of freak. I did too. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t just go ahead and shake the guy’s hand and get rid of him.

  “You call that number this afternoon,” Hughes said.

  “I’m going to,” the man said, “and if you’re lying, I’ll find you again. Count on that.” He went to the door, then looked over his shoulder at Hughes and pointed the pistol at him. “Remember, I’ll find you,” he said. Then he stuck the pistol in his pants pocket, unlocked the door and left, half of one shoe still covered with polish.

  “Christ, I’m calling security,” Brookes said.

  “No,” Hughes said. “And I want you to do me a favor. Don’t mention this to anyone.”

  “Mr. Hughes, I’ve got to notify—”

  “Please don’t,” Hughes said, “and if anyone asks if I was here today I want you both to deny it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Brookes said.

  “We’ve got to keep this quiet,” Hughes said.

  It took Hughes awhile to convince him, but finally Brookes agreed. Then he finished the haircut. He lathered up the back of Hughes’s neck and used the razor. He toweled him off, then held up the mirror and moved it around the way barbers do so Hughes could approve. Hughes kept frowning as he looked at himself.

  “Is everything satisfactory, Mr. Hughes?” Brookes asked.

  “Cut it all off,” Hughes said.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Brookes said.

  “Make me look like a plumber or welder or something. Like any man you might meet on the street.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” Brookes said.

  “I’m sure,” Hughes said.

  Hughes diary entry, September 11, 1933

  I must find a woman who does not know me. After we are in love I will tell her who I am. If her attitude toward me stays the same then I will have found true love but if she starts asking for luxuries then I will have been deceived again.

  Time is of the absolute essence. The actor today showed me that. He was a messenger telling me to change my path immediately. I had to look death in the face in an absolutely unexpected situation to be shocked enough to hear his message: Get away. Change your life. Time is of the essence.

  People think I am the luckiest man on earth. But what if by some impossible freak of nature a wolf was born into a family of squirrels? How would that wolf feel when he tried to climb a tree or eat some acorns? Most would look at that wolf and think, what a lucky animal, he is so powerful among the squirrels. But what if this wolf wanted to sleep in a cave instead of a tree? Howl instead of squeak? What if he had to fight the constant maddening impulse to kill and eat the squirrels? That is the situation I find myself in. I am torn between being a pilot named Charles Howard for the rest of my life or possibly becoming Howard Hughes again at some point and developing Nevada after my own vision. Either way, this project I am embarking on will help me take one of these courses of action and will be a beginning on getting me out of my present circumstances.

  Faces. That’s what I want. I want to see them around the dinner table. One has come in second in the spelling bee. Another one pouts because she was teased while playing with the neighborhood children. Another one wants me to help him build a model airplane after dinner. Sometimes you stop and look around and ask yourself why am I making the most popular movies in America? Why am I building an aviation empire? Why am I dating and winning the world’s most beautiful women? Why is Nevada important? Without faces it means nothing.

  Joel Pym, reconstructed from Tom Lourdes’s story notes

  Hell’s Angels wasn’t out then, but they re-released it about a year later and I went to see it. Sure enough, there was the guy, saying the same line he’d said in the shop. You could tell the background in his shot was a little different than in the rest of the scene. But maybe you wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t know what I did.

  When the guy said his line he was grinning like he really had just seen Jean Harlow.

  Alton Reece interview with Janice and Lisa Trundle at their home in Fort Worth, Texas

  I arrive for the interview on a cloudy, overcast afternoon; the air is thick with the coming rain. I use the brass knocker, then wait outside the neat white clapboard house for what seems a long time; I’m almost ready to leave when Janice Trundle’s daughter Lisa finally opens the door, and as she does rain begins falling in widely spaced splats.

  Lisa Trundle is a tall, large-boned woman, probably forty five, with long dirty-blond hair. She leads me down a hallway in which books are haphazardly stacked to waist height on both sides and into a living room in which shelves of books cover the walls — the house looks like an untidy used-book store. Janice Trundle, dressed in a quilted dark blue housecoat, her white hair noticeably thinning, sits in a wheelchair, reading. When I enter she looks up at me and her glasses are so thick her eyes look huge, startling. She doesn’t say hello when her daughter introduces me, but just stares at me, expressionless. The air in the close dim room is warm and musty. Clear plastic is draped over much of the furniture. I sit on the love seat, the plastic crinkling loudly, and Lisa sits down next to me. I smile at Janice Trundle, but she just continues to stare at me blankly with her huge-looking eyes.

  AR: Mrs. Trundle, thanks for seeing me.

  JT: (She closes the
book in her lap, and I see that it is Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. She nods at her daughter.) She liked your book about Melville. She’s the one who wanted to meet you.

  LT: Actually I did. I thought your book was the most interesting thing I’d read in a long time.

  AR: Thank you.

  JT: I didn’t care for it. It was too scattered for my taste.

  LT: (Rolling her eyes.) Yes, Mother prefers Galsworthy-type romanticism. English countrysides with flowers growing in the characters’ ears, their underwear— wherever they have enough moisture to flourish.

  JT: I think Galsworthy’s horrid. You know that.

  AR: (I clear my throat.) Mrs. Trundle, on the telephone Lisa told me that in order to do this interview, you insisted it be used in its entirety or not at all. Did anyone call you about our interview?

  LT: Yes, yes, this man named Tom Lourdes called her. I begged her not to listen to him.

  AR: All right. I just wondered.

  JT: (A faint smile on her lips.) Even if Lourdes hadn’t called, I’d have made sure we had that agreement. I read the article about you in People, and I don’t—

  LT: Dammit, Mother, stop. Just don’t go there.

  AR: (I put my notepad down on the coffee table.) You know, I can see this probably isn’t going to work out. We should just stop before we waste any— LT: (Touching my arm.) No, please, stay. I don’t think … say, are you okay?

  AR: I’m fine.

  LT: You’re sure?

  (I nod.)

  LT: You know, I don’t know why people are such vultures when it comes to knowing about the private lives of talented people like yourself. And the IRS, everybody knows what they’re like— they punish success, and I’m sure that’s why they’re after you.

  (I nod again.)

  LT: You know, I can tell you anything you want to know. You won’t have to deal with her at all. (She gives her mother a dirty look.) God knows I heard this enough growing up. She’d tell me the story of the great Charles Howard at bedtime like it was a fairy tale. She’d even bring him up to my father. She always let him know he never made her as happy as the great Charles Howard did. She broke his heart. Put him in an early grave.

  JT: (She clears her throat, and then in a phlegmy voice.) The price of a fifth of whiskey going up to three dollars is what killed him.

  LT: Mother, if you’re not going to be helpful, just be quiet, okay? You’ve already shared enough of your negativity for one day. (She smiles at me.) Now, let’s see, where to start? She was working as a cigarette girl on a train. She was twenty-two—

  JT: Twenty.

  LT: Twenty, then. She always said Hughes was about the handsomest man she’d ever seen, but she didn’t recognize him because she didn’t read movie magazines. He was dressed in a browrn suit that was too big for him and was writing in a leather-bound journal. She stood there with that tray she carried and asked him if he wanted anything, and when he looked up at her, he looked angry that she was bothering him.

  JT: (Impatiently.) No, he didn’t. He looked shy.

  LT: (She sighs.) So, she asked him if he wanted anything and he said no. Then she asked him what he was writing. He just said his ideas and didn’t elaborate, but as they kept talking he told her he was going to Fort Worth to try to get a job with American Airlines. Then he asked for a Hershey bar. When he reached up to pay, the price tag for his suit was hanging off his sleeve. Mother used the scissors she kept in the tray for trimming cigars and cut it off for him.

  AR: Did he pursue her after they got to Fort Worth?

  LT: Oh, he didn’t wait that long. Apparently she saw him a few minutes later in another car, walking down the aisle toward her. He asked her for another Hershey bar, then asked her if she’d like to eat supper with him on her break. She had to say no because they weren’t allowed to fraternize with passengers, but she told him they could have a meal together in Fort Worth.

  AR: So did they get together that evening?

  JT: (Smilingfaintly.) Of course not. Women weren’t such rutting whores then.

  LT: (She rolls her eyes, then touches my arm and leans toward me.) Listen, she has always just insisted he never touched her, except to kiss her good night. (She makes the OK sign.) Right. And according to her, every time he came to see her he had some piece of junk for a gift.

  JT: It wasn’t junk.

  LT: A puppet of the Mad Hatter? (She raises her eyebrows.) If that’s not junk, what is? Purple pebbles he found in a streambed? A block of wood he’d carved to look like a locomotive? All junk.

  AR: Do you still have any of those things?

  LT: No, she got drunk one night when I was a child and burned them all. All she’s got left is the engagement ring he gave her. It’s in a lockbox down at the bank. It’s really in amazingly poor taste. (She wrinkles her nose as if smelling something rotten.) A ten-carat diamond for a center stone, with twenty-one smaller diamonds and twenty-one rubies clustered around it. I had it appraised three years ago and the man priced it between two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand, but it still looks like it came out of a gumball machine.

  AR: I’d like to see it, if it’s possible.

  JT: (Sharply.) No.

  LT: (With a droll smile.) My name’s on the signature card, Mother.

  AR: Didn’t that ring seem like a red flag that Hughes might not be who he said he was?

  LT: Oh, he had a lie to explain the ring, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The time leading up to when he gave her the ring, apparently he just about lived in this house. She always said Hughes became fast friends with her parents. Maybe that’s true, but I always suspected she just said that to hurt my father, because he didn’t get along with her family— they thought he was beneath her. He was a ticket clerk at the railway station. He’d been asking her out for a long time and getting nowhere, but after Hughes dumped her she ran to him.

  JT: (Livid.) My parents thought the world of Charles, don’t you ever doubt that! He and Father were always out back working on father’s old cars. (Her face is red.) He’d … he’d help my mother make the ice cream every night, too. Those were just wonderful times.

  AR: So how did the engagement take place?

  LT: He asked her to marry him the day after Thanksgiving, while they were taking a walk here in the neighborhood. When he asked her there wasn’t any big romantic moment, he just handed her the ring and then started talking about its history right away, covering his tracks. He said his father had been a card shark and had won the ring from a timber baron in a poker game up in Vancouver.

  JT: That’s not how it happened.

  LT: Then what’d he do, Mother? Ride in on a white horse and climb your hair to the top of the tower?

  JT: (She eyes her daughter with a cool, detached, superior expression.) I’ll tell you what happened. We were walking, and it was chilly. I had forgotten to put on a sweater, so Charles took off his pilot’s jacket and gave it to me— he was still wearing his uniform because he had just come in from a flight. After I put on the jacket he told me to check its side pocket. I reached in and pulled out a ring box. I opened it, and he said, “You can wear that if you want to.”

  AR: So how’d the engagement get broken off?

  LT: He just dumped her.

  JT: That’s another lie, but it’s what she tells herself to make herself feel better, since no one’s ever asked her. What Charles said was that his time with me had been the happiest days of his life and he didn’t want to break up, but he was doing it for my own good because life as Howard Hughes wasn’t normal and he didn’t want to put me through that. He was crying like a baby.

  LT: Yes, he called her on the telephone from Cleveland. It was a very touching scene.

  AR: Okay. (Short pause.) Well, I don’t have any more questions.

  LT: Would you like to see the room Hughes slept in when he stayed over here? It’s my room now.

  AR: Sure, okay.

  JT: No. Absolutely not.

  LT: Just be quiet, Mothe
r.

  Hughes diary entry, November 27, 1933

  I have asked Janice to marry me but I still cannot make myself tell her who I am. I gave her the ring for the express purpose of using its appearance as an opening to reveal to her that I am Howard Hughes, but then I just could not do it. The longer this deception continues the greater her sense of betrayal will be when I do tell her. It is probably already too late. I will probably lose her now no matter what I do.

  I like being Charles Howard. If there was just some way to really become him. It could be done, I think. It would entail selling absolutely everything, the tool company, the real estate, all of it. There would be some publicity but I don’t think I would have to appear in the public eye at any time to accomplish this so Janice would never find out. But would this truly work? Someone like me giving away all I have would be like Alexander the Great conquering the world and then giving it back. It would be unheard of. Historic. Such a thing has never been done on the scale it would be if I did it. Has one of the richest people in the world ever given away all he had and then lived a normal life? For the life of me I cannot think of one so I guess it has never happened because if it had his name would be on everyone’s lips in an instant like Lincoln’s.

  I have to decide whether I am going to take one of the most historic steps in human history.

  O. C. Mennick, pilot with American Airlines, 1931— 1953, reconstructed from Tom Lourdes’s story notes

  We made eight, ten flights a week together for four months and during that time I had no idea he was actually Howard Hughes. The day the truth finally came out, we were on a flight between Fort Worth and Cleveland. I was ribbing him about getting married and asked him if they had set a date. He said no.

  “You will soon,” I said. “A girl wants to get that settled so she can plan things.”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me she hasn’t mentioned it,” I said.

  “She has,” he said, “but just in a very general way. We’ve got a lot of things that need working out first. It’s going to be a while.”