JP: (Callingfrom across the hall.) H. L.?
HL: Yes?
JP: Could you come help me get this box down out of the closet?
HL: Certainly.
(I glance over my shoulder and see that he’s gone, then pick up the gold horse and put it in my pants pocket. Then I stare out the window behind the computer at a sapling in the yard braced with two lengths of twine. On one of its thin, leafless branches a bird with a gray body and a dark blue chest cocks its head back and forth. I keep watching it. Then I feel a tap on my shoulder, and when I turn my head H. L. Landry is standing behind me.)
HL: Jean wanted you to have this. (He holds out a thin rectangle of bills folded in half.) She doesn’t want to make a federal case out of this, though, so there’s no need to say anything to her. She knows you appreciate it, and she knows you’ll repay her later.
AR: I couldn’t.
HL: She insists. (He reaches out and takes my hand and presses the bills into my palm. I nod, stick the money in my shirt pocket, then swivel the chair around and stare out the window again. The bird cocks its head back and forth, up and down. Then suddenly it flies away. Not long after that, Jean Peters enters the room.)
JP: I found one.
(She hands me the letter. The paper is from an oversized yellow legal pad and is brittle with age. The handwriting sprawls and leans down the page, nothing like Hughes’s usually neat script, but the signature at the bottom is without question his.)
AR: This is just what I was looking for. Thanks.
(Jean Peters and H. L. Landry watch as I type the short letter and print out a copy. When I’m finished, I turn off the monitor and stand up and face the two of them.)
JP: Well, all right, Alton. It’s been good to see you again.
AR: Yes, and thank you for everything.
Jean Peters letter, January 27, 1958
Dear Howard,
Your letters over the last two weeks have led me to believe the medication they are giving you is quite strong. You don’t seem quite yourself and that is why I have not written until now. But even now I don’t really know what to say. I am not betraying you. I am here and willing to be the best wife I know how to be for you. Why can’t you believe that? I miss you more than I can say, and I am worried sick about you. If you believe anything, believe that. I love you and want to be with you more than anything in the world. Please believe that, too.
Where is your hospital? Howard, tell me where you are. Let me come help nurse you back to health.
I love you,
Jean
Hughes letter, February 1, 1958
Dear Jean,
If you cook the potatoes in tap water you might as well go ahead and blow your brains out. Boiling does not 100% sterilize the tap water— ask any scientist worth his salt. For the love of God cook them in hot oil.
I’m coming home soon. I’m going to take care of you. We’re going to be together. Watch for me.
Love,
Howard
Reprinted from the “Newsmakers” section of the August 12, 200,issue of Newsweek
CONTROVERSY HELPS
The free publicity Alton Reece received from his divorce, bankruptcy, and IRS troubles are part of why his book, I Was Howard Hughes (Knopf), is doing so well. It’s also helped that after mailing the manuscript to his editor from Provo, Reece disappeared just as Howard Hughes often did and that became a story, too. Last week, though, after six months with no word of his whereabouts, security video at a Circle K in Grand Junction, Colorado, caught him standing at the register in a tank top and a baseball cap, smiling and chatting with the female clerk. He would’ve gone unnoticed, except a woman identified as Lois Patterson, in better days his research assistant and in the video obviously pregnant, came out of an aisle and started arguing with him; finally she started throwing things. Reece calmly ducked the missiles, until the clerk shouted that she’d called the police, and then both Reece and Patterson left the store and drove off, the clerk said, in an old pickup with a camper top. It just so happened that the officer who reviewed the video recognized Reece; the store owner has sold the tape to Entertainment Tonight. Look for book sales to get even better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AFTER THE PUBLICATION of my first book, Melville and the Whale, Carol Tetley, my editor at Knopf, suggested Howard Hughes as the subject for my second book. I said thanks but no thanks. Hughes just didn’t strike my fancy and, at the time, my life was topsyturvy. I was coming off an exhausting book tour, and I was trying to finish a commissioned screenplay for Melville. My wife and I had just moved from Baltimore to Beverly Hills and we were still living out of boxes, eating takeout, pricing furniture, and— well, patching up some differences, let’s say. There wasn’t room in my life for Howard Hughes. And besides, who was he? As far as I knew, just a wealthy recluse with long hair and long fingernails who had been terrified of germs and had stayed hidden in a hotel suite in Las Vegas until he died.
But Carol kept after me, God bless her. She kept sending me old articles and clippings about Hughes. For instance, he went to Hollywood at age twenty-one and by twenty-three, he had produced a picture that won an Oscar, a comedy called Two Arabian Knights. The same night he won, he was discovered on a soundstage at Warner Bros., sitting on the floor in his tuxedo, the latest new movie camera disassembled into a million pieces around him; he told the guard he was just trying to see how it worked. At the same time he was making his early films he was also building what would become the fastest airplane of its day, the H-l or Silver Bullet. On a Friday the thirteenth Hughes arrived at Santa Monica Airfield to pilot the plane on its first attempt at the world speed record; Amelia Earhart was also present, piloting one of the two trailing planes that monitored such attempts, and on his first run Hughes didn’t try to set the record but instead played a flirty cat-and-mouse game with Earhart, dropping his plane to let her fly by and then coming up behind her. Hughes easily set the record that day, but he also ran out of fuel and had to crash-land in a beet field. He walked out of the wreck.
Old photos Carol sent of the young Hughes showed he was as good-looking as any leading man, tall, with dark hair and eyes and a shy, enigmatic smile. Women loved him, but not just for his looks. Ginger Rogers said she first felt attracted to him when he walked into the Polo Lounge wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes. Marian Marsh said he was introduced to her at a party and said little more than hello and good-bye, but then sent her five dozen roses every day for a month. Bette Davis said she fell for him when, at a fancy Hollywood dinner party, he stood up and left the table without a word to anyone; twenty minutes later he still hadn’t returned, so she went looking for him and found him in the kitchen, eating a sandwich and chatting with the servants. Errol Flynn himself gave Hughes the nickname “the Lone Wolf” as a tribute to his seemingly effortless ability to win women. A partial list of the famous women Hughes was involved with: Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Ida Lupino, Lana Turner, Susan Hayward, Yvonne De Carlo, Joan Fontaine, Cyd Charisse, Gina Lollobrigida, Janet Leigh, Barbara Hutton, Gene Tierney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow.
How could I not want to write that man’s story?
So thanks, Carol, for giving me the germ of what became a great idea.
My agent, Sherri Lollo, deserves thanks for nudging us toward contract talks and holding firm on the sum we both agreed was a reasonable figure for an advance, given Melville and the Whale’s surprising sales and favorable critical reception. Now, I’m going to call a spade a spade here: Knopf didn’t do much to promote Melville, not until the grassroots groundswell among independent booksellers and the resulting sales numbers showed them they had a winner on their hands, so this time around when they balked at our asking price (let’s just say seven figures), I was surprised and, as I think anyone could understand, a little miffed. But cooler heads, in this case Sherri’s, prevailed, and we got the contract we wanted. In fact, thanks to Sherri’s savvy and good sense every
thing on the business end of my career, despite gossip-column rumors to the contrary, has been going just fine.
The people who actually knew Howard Hughes and allowed me to interview them were, of course, indispensable. Some required I use their interviews in their entirety. Sometimes their reasons made sense to me— as with Jean Peters— but sometimes the demand seemed arbitrary and ill-considered. However, what’s done is done, and I want to thank everyone who let me interview them.
I just mentioned Jean Peters, and I want to say more about her. During her career she was one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood— she looked like a young Ingrid Bergman, gorgeous, but not unapproachable. Her best-known film is probably Three Coins in the Fountain and it’s nearly impossible to watch this romantic comedy set in Rome without falling in love with her character, a demure young woman hoping for love and a husband. She had a light touch in her acting style, nothing overdone, nothing overstated, but when she married Howard Hughes she left acting and what would’ve surely become a more celebrated career to devote herself to being a good spouse in what was, admittedly, a less-than-ideal marriage. However, until she spoke to me, she had never said one word to any reporter or biographer about Howard Hughes and I think that shows how much character and class she has. I feel honored she decided to speak to me, and the fact that she did, after refusing so many others, makes me believe I must be on the right track in my portrayal of Hughes. I thank her for her faith in me.
I did a lot of research at the Hughes Archives in Culver City, California, as did my assistants. There was some confusion over policy there, some misunderstandings. Neither my assistants nor I did anything wrong, and that’s all there is to say.
Next, I want to thank my assistants, Jenny, Hannah, and Lois, three young women whose hard work freed me from the more tedious aspects of research. I started calling them “Alton’s Angels,” and though we had some laughs about that, I want each of you to know the angel part is absolutely true. Jen, I know a day didn’t pass without us having one of our little spats, but just remember they never lasted long and we were usually smiling by the end of them. Hannah, I’ll never eat lasagna again unless it’s yours. And Lois, thanks for helping me learn to navigate Beverly Hills, in more ways than one. Each of you was a bright spot for me in the long, lonely process of writing this story. Thanks for being there.
Thanks to Lyle Peters and Tom Merkle, the craftsmen who built the replica of the Hughes box I took along on one of my research trips.
Thanks to the people at Fox Television, especially Larry Deane. Things, didn’t work out, but your interest, time, and financial support were much appreciated. Maybe in the future.
Next, I would like to say some things to the MacArthur Some there have stated publicly (in a Vanity Fair article; in offhand “joking” remarks from the dais at the PEN/Faulkner banquet, where they ruined an otherwise lovely evening for my wife and me) that they feel I erred by not mentioning them in the acknowledgments for Melville and the Whale. Fine. I can go on at length about them, if that’s what they want.
In every contact I had with anyone from the MacArthur Foundation I felt like I was dealing with a seventeenth-century French king handing out Christmas lagniappes. They were condescending. It was subtle, but it was there. It was the same kind of snobbery and arrogance— at heart, a cover for mediocrity— that had made me shake the dust of the academy off my feet.
Don’t get me wrong. I cashed the check. I just wasn’t going to bow and scrape before or after I did it. I also know enough about how awards and grants work not to take winning too seriously. The people who deserve these awards get them maybe half the time— think of the Nobel in literature. I say judge the prize by the book. Pick a decade, any decade, and get up a list of National Book Award winners. I’ll jump off a bridge if you’ve heard of more than two of them. There’s lots of politics and lots of tin ears in this world. So, MacArthur folks, please, give me a break. You didn’t sweat or risk or suffer for the money you give away. You’re not the writers and artists you give the money to, either, who spend years working in obscurity with nothing to sustain them but their joy in the beauty of what they’ve created. You’re administrators. You sign checks.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife, Alene Reece, the prettiest, smartest, kindest, most solid woman in the world. She showed unimaginable patience with me while I spent time away from her promoting Melville and then gadding about with Madonna and her entourage for Rolling Stone and then, finally, researching and writing this book. God, where has the last year and a half gone? Dear, no matter how it seems sometimes, no matter what some smiling Iago might whisper in your ear, please know that everything I do, I do for you, and even though we’re back to doing the East Coast/West Coast thing after our brief “California experiment,” as you call it, never doubt that you’re in my thoughts every second, and if I thought my body could survive a red-eye flight to Baltimore every day I’d do it just to be with you. Someday we’ll be together all the time, just like we used to be. Soon. I love you.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS BOOK is a work of fiction. While the information it contains concerning Howard Hughes’s life and the events in his life is largely factual, all of the interviews, diary excerpts, memos, letters, and most of the quotations used are entirely fictitious.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
A graduate of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, Steven Carter currently teaches at Georgetown College in Kentucky. I Was Howard Hughes is his first novel.
First published in Great Britain 2005
Copyright © Steven Carter 2005
This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The right of Steven Carter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 2056 8
www.bloomsbury.com/stevencarter
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books.
You will find extracts, authors interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.
I Was Howard Hughes Page 18