I wasn’t yet twenty-five years old, and still a bit of a smart-aleck. I know now that you get a good writer, turn him loose on a project and let him do it. But at that time I took over Irving Thalberg’s idea, which was to put a number of writers to work on a story without letting any of them know that the others are working on it. I had Ben Hecht and W.R. Burnett and three or four other top-flight writers working on it, and none of them knew the others were involved. Around that time there were rumors around that I was going broke. I’d spent so much money on Hell’s Angels and the other films, and movie people didn’t know anything about the oil drilling business and probably thought Toolco was a printing plant where I turned out thousand-dollar bills and one day the government was going to catch up with me. Most people thought I was nothing more than a wild kid from Texas. People already had begun to tell stories about me that were off the wall.
Didn’t that annoy you?
If I got annoyed at every man who told a lie about me I’d have to be annoyed twenty-four hours a day, and I haven’t got that kind of time. You know, even $3 billion doesn’t buy you more than twenty-four hours between sundown and sundown. I value time, I value it very deeply. That’s one of the reasons I sleep so little. I trained myself to get along on four hours sleep a night, or an average of four hours out of every twenty four. It was a struggle for a while, because when I was young I liked to sleep. But I wouldn’t give in to that natural urge. In my early twenties I set the clock and got up and did something. And I’ve done that ever since, except after a year or so I no longer needed a clock.
To get back to Scarface: I had the four or five screenwriters at work, and when they had all finished a version of the script, I took all four or five versions of it, picked out the best parts, strung them together myself and wrote in my own interim connecting scenes. We brought in this fine actor from the Jewish theater in New York – Paul Muni. That was his first starring role, and we had Boris Karloff in there too, playing a gangster.
It was a hell of a good film and I was delighted with the results. That is, until I showed it to Will Hays, the Hollywood censorship mogul, and our troubles started. Today people say there should be more censorship because of the violence in movies, but there sure should have been less at the time I made Scarface. Will Hays, with his holier-than-thou attitudes, made speeches about how my film was un-American and how we should present a better image to the world.
Why un-American? It was the story of a gangster.
But in America, according to Will Hays, we didn’t have any gangsters – or if we did, we swept them under the carpet. I went along with them part way, because I knew otherwise I would have a tough time getting distribution. I changed one scene after another, even put in a totally phony ending showing Scarface hanged – the trial, the sanctimonious speech by the judge. They changed the title. They called it The Shame of the Nation. Joe Schenck of United Artists – UA was supposed to release the picture – was giving me a hard time too. He wanted to make a statement to the press just before the premiere in New Orleans that the picture was a social document which would help the police in their fight against crime – and some more bullshit to the effect that the changes were all good ones, and how grateful we were to the various police departments for suggesting them to us. He was afraid I’d open up my mouth about what a lot of crap this was and how the original version was so much better. He wanted the world to forget there’d ever been an original version, and he knew I’d never let them forget.
Then they showed the changed version to the New York censors, and the New York censors rejected it as unacceptable. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘if I’m going to have an unacceptable film, I might as well have an unacceptable good film’ – and I threw out all the changes and went back to the original version. And that’s the one that finally got distributed.
One other thing was notable about Scarface. In the Hays Office version, the New York Police Commissioner, Mulrooney, wrote the prologue to it, telling how noble everyone on the police force was, and how organized crime didn’t exist in the United States, it was all a myth. I saw a copy of the text before it was used, and I said, ‘This is pap for babies.’ I figured that I had to give it some juice, some fire. So I changed it, saying that the best way to stop crime in the United States was to prohibit the sale of firearms and their distribution interstate. That was included in the commissioner’s speech.
Did you really believe that, or were you making a statement to drum up publicity?
I believed it and I still believe it. I know it’s odd, coming from a man born in Texas where everybody is supposed to walk around with a Colt .45 strapped to his hip, and where, to their shame, there are more murders committed every year than there are in all of England, Scotland and Wales put together.
I believe that if a man can’t get his hand on a gun, he may give you a punch on the nose, but he’s not going to shoot you. I believed this as early as 1931. You know the NRA line: ‘Guns don’t kill people – people kill people’? That makes me sick, because obviously it’s people with guns who kill people. There was a big fuss about gun control when Jack Kennedy was shot, and then Martin Luther King, and then Bobby Kennedy, but nobody was saying it back in 1931 except a few oddballs, and I was one of them. I got this Irish police commissioner to include that statement in his introduction.
But we had other problems. Two of Al Capone’s men dropped in to see Ben Hecht in Hollywood. Somehow they’d got hold of the screenplay and they wanted to know if it was about their boss.
Ben gulped and said no, it wasn’t about Capone. They said, ‘Then why do you call it Scarface? That makes it sound like it’s about Al.’ Capone had a big scar on his face. And of course it was about Capone.
Ben said, ‘Because then people will think it’s about Capone, and we’ll make money.’
Money was something these hoods understood. ‘Okay, we give you permission.’
They asked Hecht who I was, and he said, ‘The sucker who’s putting up the money.’ He told me that story. He thought it was funny. So did I.
The sequel to this came a few years later, around 1933, when I was in Florida. I don’t know if it was the same two guys, but two men came to see me. Capone was in Alcatraz for income tax evasion. He had been to see Cornelius Vanderbilt before then – not the old man, but the son – and made him some sort of proposition about how they could divide up the territory of the whole United States. When these two hoodlums came to see me in Palm Beach that’s essentially what it was all about. They said that big Al was going to get out of Alcatraz one of these days, and he’d followed my career – I guess he got the newspapers in prison, and the picture Scarface naturally had interested him – and he would like to meet me when he got out.
Did they make a specific proposition to you?
They told me, ‘Big Al likes your style.’ I had the impression that what he wanted was some legitimate front, and he thought of me as a young kid with a lot of money who didn’t know his ass from second base, and he could use me.
I said, ‘That’s very interesting, and when Big Al gets out of prison, have him contact me.’ I gave them my telephone number on Romaine Street in Hollywood, which is about as much of a dead end as there is for reaching me. If he’d ever called I wouldn’t have known, because no messages came through for me for anyone who wasn’t on my ‘approved’ list.
In fact, much later on, I told the people at Romaine Street, ‘Anything new that comes up, I don’t want to hear about it. We’ll just discuss subjects that I raise. I have enough ideas for two lifetimes.’
I had a lot of money, more and more all the time, no matter what I spent, and I thought I should be doing things with it, not just letting it earn interest. At one point I seriously considered buying a couple of studios to get myself some real weight out there in Hollywood. The cost made even me hesitate, but I would have gone into it if I had the chance. I did buy about a hundred theaters, the Franklin chain, and I went so far as to make an offer for Paramount and MGM,
but those studios turned me down.
There was an idiotic rumor went around at one time there that I had offered to buy not just Paramount and MGM but United Artists, Warner Brothers, Universal, First National, and RKO, which would have made me sole owner of Hollywood. But that was a lot more than I cared to chew, even if I could have bitten it off. I couldn’t have afforded it then. Toolco in 1932 was doing very nicely, but I was in no position to buy out Hollywood. Now, yes. But luckily for them I’m no longer interested in the movie business.
The other films I made in those years were The Front Page, Cock of the Air, and Sky Devils, which was Spencer Tracy’s first big film. Ann Dvorak came out in that one too, and became a new star. They wanted to change her name to something more American – you know, Ann Roberts, Ann Dodds. I said, ‘What could be more American than a Polish name? Stick with Dvorak.’
I don’t want to give the impression that my early business life was an unbroken series of coups and money-making ventures. Aside from all the rest of it, I was busy losing a small fortune in the stock market. I took my bath in 1929 just like many others. Of course I had Toolco behind me, so there was no real danger of my losing everything, but nevertheless I dropped in the neighborhood of three or four million dollars. I was pretty heavily invested. I had Westinghouse and RCA, and some U.S. Steel too – all the losers, you might say.
In one day alone, I lost three-quarters of a million on RCA. This gave Noah Dietrich a few gray hairs. It didn’t bother me much. I always figured, that’s the bottom, now the market will bounce back and I’ll make a fortune. That’s how the losers always think.
At first, when I got involved in the market, in 1927, at twenty-one, I had visions of myself as the boy wonder of Wall Street. I thought I had the golden touch. I wanted my own ticker-tape machine set up in my suite at the Ambassador Hotel, where I was living at the time. Western Union didn’t have a line running out to the Ambassador or anywhere near it. So I rented an office on Figueroa, near Seventh, where there was a line. I hooked it up myself. I drove down there in the middle of the night – because the whole procedure was illegal – and with my own two hands I laid this whole thing from downtown Los Angeles along the trolley power-line to my room at the Ambassador Hotel.
But somehow I got the terminals reversed, and this immediately showed up on the Western Union Board as a red light flashing. They sent a couple of workmen to the Figueroa Street office that I’d rented. I wasn’t there at the time, but they found Noah Dietrich in the office, standing there like an idiot with the glass dome of the ticker-tape machine in his hand but no ticker-tape. He called me, and I rushed up there, and paid these guys some money to keep them quiet. When they left Noah told me I had the terminals reversed, and so I hooked the terminals up again properly, and the machine ran perfectly, and my ingenuity only cost me about $4 million when the market crashed.
Did you stay in the market after that after the crash in 1929?
I got out for a while. I’ve been back in since. I owned a little TWA stock at one time. Half a billion dollars’ worth, to be exact. And I had some Northeast airlines stock, Atlas, RKO, and a few others. But I rarely speculated again. Nineteen-twenty-nine took the wind out of my sails, and I decided there were better ways to lose money than in the market.
But even before the market debacle, I put my money in some strange ventures. My father had a Stanley Steamer, one of the first cars in Houston, and I was always taken with the steam car. In fact I still am – it’s never been developed, never showed its true potential. And so in 1928 I decided I was going to build one.
I already owned two – a Stanley and a Doble. The Doble was a great machine, but from my point of view it had two big flaws. For one thing it took anywhere up to five minutes to get up a head of steam, and the garage could burn down in that time. Also you couldn’t get more than seventy or eighty miles to a tankful of water. The motor would burn anything – kerosene, wood, buffalo chips, anything you wanted to throw in – but the water boiled away.
I went out one day to the California Institute of Technology and had a talk with Dr. Richard Millikan – he was president of the university and a Nobel Prize winner – and told him I had work for some of his engineers. I wanted two real bright boys to come and work for me and develop the Hughes Steamer.
He found two young kids named Lewis and Burns – I don’t remember their first names – and I told them I wanted a steamer that would get up a head of steam instantly, or as close as possible, and that would give me four to five hundred miles without having to refill the boiler. I put them in a garage near Caddo’s headquarters on Romaine Street and I turned them loose.
People are always saying that I won’t let people alone, won’t let them do their work. They complain that I interfered in the operation of Hughes Aircraft and TWA and RKO. Damn right I did, and for good reason.
Lewis and Burns came up with the machine. But in the first place, it would cost $50,000 to make each automobile. I’m sure you’ll agree that in 1928 there wasn’t much of a market for an automobile at that price. But we might still have gone ahead with it on a trial basis. I figured I could sell fifty to a hundred of them a year, and I would have had a new car for myself whenever I wanted one.
They showed me the prototype for a jazzy-looking five-passenger convertible. It was stripped down to the metal, because I hadn’t told them yet what color I wanted it painted. They told me they had a flash-firing system worked out where they could get up steam in less than thirty seconds. I was certainly impressed. I asked them how they solved the water problem and Burns said to me, ‘We just made the whole body one big radiator, full of tubes.’
I looked at them – these bright, eager Cal Tech kids – and I said, ‘You mean the whole body is a radiator, including the doors?’ Burns said, ‘That’s right, Mr. Hughes. You can go 400 miles on a tank of water.’
‘So tell me what happens,’ I said, ‘if a car runs into me. Into my door, for example. Won’t I got cooked? Boiled? Burned to a crisp?’
They scuffed their toes like a couple of country boys caught in the pasture humping daddy’s favorite sheep. I walked away, called Noah, and said to him, ‘Turn that goddamnn thing into scrap metal. Project’s finished.’
It cost me $550,000 to have that car developed, made, and scrapped. That’s what happens when you turn technicians loose on a project without close supervision. I realized that right there and then, and I was only twenty-three years old, the same age as Lewis and Burns. But realizing and learning are two different things. It took me twenty years and about $200 million before I really learned.
The experience with the steam car did help me, however, when a crisis arose with the Tool Company in 1932. We were number One, like Hertz, and another company, like Avis, was creeping up from the position of Number Two.
I’ll have to give you some background. Toolco, after my father had invented the cone bit, was way ahead of everybody else in the drilling industry. There was virtually no competition the way we had the patents sewed up. And then a guy named Clarence Reed, who worked for my father, quit Toolco and swiped a set of the blueprints for our bit. He started a company called Reed Roller Bit.
That gave me a lesson very early on in life about keeping things locked up. People have accused me of being oversecretive and being a maniac about security. There was no security then at all – that was the age of innocence – and this was an early example of industrial espionage.
But it backfired on Clarence Reed. When we found out, back in 1922, Reed tried to tell everyone that he’d only taken the blueprints to be sure that when he made his own cone bit he wouldn’t infringe on our patents. He could tell that to a ten-year-old child, but my father knew it was cowplop. He’d come home and say, ‘That fucking Reed,’ which upset my mother because she didn’t like my father cursing in front of her like some wildcatter just turned loose from Spindletop on a Saturday night.
He sued Reed and won the case. There was a $50,000 cash settlement of the lawsuits and,
as part of the penalty for the patent infringement, one of my father’s companies – the Caddo Rock Drill Bit Company – was awarded a percentage of Reed Roller Bit’s sales. Since Reed Roller Bit had to send us a check every month, we knew precisely how much they sold and where the competition stood.
But later, by 1932, because I was away in Hollywood, Reed Roller Bit came creeping up on us. I could see clearly that if their sales continued to increase at the same rate as in ‘30 and ‘31 they’d soon be the Hertz and we’d be the Avis of the drill-bit business.
I sent Noah Dietrich down there to find out what the trouble was, because Toolco was the backbone of my little empire. I told him that if Reed Roller Bit was selling nearly as many bits as we were, there had to be a reason for it, and that reason had to lie in the bit itself.
Noah disagreed with me. Noah thought it was bad morale and my being involved with making movies in Hollywood. But I said, ‘It’s in the bit, and you get down there and find out if it’s better than the Hughes bit, and if it’s better, why it’s better.’
Noah did that, and he found out their bit was a better bit than ours because it used a ball bearing. We didn’t have a ball bearing in the Hughes bit, because a ball bearing, my father had believed, wouldn’t stand up under pressure and would break apart after a while. But the Reed bits in 1932 weren’t breaking apart, and that’s what nobody could figure out.
I said to Noah, ‘Get my engineers to cut that Reed bit in half and find out what makes it tick.’ Sure enough, that’s all they had to do. They found out that the Reed ball bearings were soft, made of lead, and wouldn’t shatter. All we had to do was redesign our works for ball bearings of a similar type to the Reed bit. We held every patent there was.
But at the same time an even bigger problem cropped up. There was a palace revolt among my people down in Houston. Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose wanted me out. They felt that the place was being run by an absentee manager, and they were hamstrung in making important business decisions. The Toolco executives said to Noah, ‘We’re putting our life’s blood into this company here in Houston, and that kid up there in Hollywood is humping the starlets and making movies.’
Howard Hughes Page 9