Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  I put a guard on the Winged Bullet and took a taxi into New York and went to sleep for forty-eight hours. Of course the newspapers found out very quickly I’d broken another record and they were hammering at my door for days.

  In many ways I’ve often regretted that I made that flight. The aftermath was disaster. It was one of those absurd events – or nonevent, as it turned out – which nobody could predict or whip up out of their wildest dreams. Even after it happened nobody could realize its importance, but in many ways it was to change the course of my life and bring me more aggravation than if I’d opened the door to a cage of rattlesnakes.

  I’d broken all the speed records with the H-1, and naturally the U.S. Army Air Corps was interested. They didn’t have a plane that compared with mine. The speeds I had flown at were nearly double what any of their pursuit planes could fly, and that record stood for eight years, which I think is a record in itself. You can believe that the Army wanted to see that plane.

  When I was in New York, a general named Oliver Echols called me and asked me to stop off at Wright Field in Ohio on my way back to California. The Air Corps wanted to look at the plane.

  I said, ‘Sure.’ I was pleased.

  But it was several days before I left, and I had a lot on my mind, and I was tired from all the preparations, the flight and the aftermath of publicity. I wanted to get back to California. I took off, and the first stop I made was Omaha, to refuel. Then I went right on to California.

  What I didn’t know was that Echols had invited all the top brass in Washington to Wright Field in Ohio to inspect the plane. They were standing around waiting while the Winged Bullet and I were up there above the clouds and headed for California. I forgot. I’m human, and I forgot. And they never forgave me.

  Naturally the newspapers made as much of it as they could. The generals landed on Echols and blamed him, told him he’d screwed it up and must have got the date wrong. But he hadn’t got it wrong and he could prove it.

  The Hate Howard Hughes Club started that day, at Wright Field, and it had repercussions which were endless.

  My ship, the H-1, was far better than anything the Air Corps had, but after that incident they wouldn’t buy it, because they figured I’d snubbed them at Wright Field. Until the end of the Second World War they never built a plane to equal it. I was anxious to have that plane produced, but I didn’t have the facilities. It might have made a tremendous difference to us in the Second World War, because that plane – the original, the one I flew, wound up in the Smithsonian – became the Japanese Zero.

  Just before the war began, I told Noah to get together with Jesse Jones to find out how I could contribute to the war effort. Jesse took Noah to see General Knudsen, who decided he wanted me to make some accessories for the B-25, struts and cannon barrels. But then, as a part of the chain of command, the red tape rigmarole, Knudsen sent Noah along to General Echols.

  ‘If Howard Hughes gets any contracts from the Army,’ Echols said to Noah, ‘it’ll be over my dead body.’

  Noah told me that, and I got on the phone to Jesse Jones.

  ‘Jesse, tell the Army to put old grudges aside. This General Echols is screwing up the war effort. I’m not going to make any money out of manufacturing struts and casting cannon barrels, but if it’s necessary, you know I’ll do it. You tell Echols to shove his grudges up his ass.’

  Jesse bypassed Echols and we got the contracts. The Aircraft Division of Toolco made the struts and the cannon and six-inch shells during the war. But if Echols had his way, nothing would have happened. It’s a wonder we won the war with people like that in positions of responsibility.

  There was another reason why the Army had a grudge against me. This never came out at the Senate hearings in 1947, either, because it would have been too ridiculous to bring up a thing like this, but I happen to know that the Army brass always held this incident against me and it gave them a very poor opinion of me.

  It seems that sometime during the war there was a question of whether or not the contract for the HK-1 would be renewed, whether the government would still pump money into the project, because things were going slowly at that point and I couldn’t get the parts and the materials I needed. They wanted me to come to Washington, but eventually the top brass came to see me in California.

  I was with Russell Birdwell the night before – he was my publicity man and we were working on The Outlaw – and I was exhausted, rundown, and Birdwell said, ‘Howard, get some sleep. And in the morning you’ve got to shave and put on a suit and tie. You’re going to be put on the spot by the United States Army and you have to make a good impression.’ He was very considerate, anxious for my welfare.

  Birdwell left, and I got a few hours sleep, but I overslept. The appointment with Echols and Admiral Towers and the rest of the brass was for an early breakfast at the Ambassador. I was in a terrible hurry – I shaved, as I’d promised, but I dressed very quickly and put my suit and tie on over my pajamas. To this day I don’t know why I did that, but I did.

  I gave my progress report at breakfast in the Ambassador to those generals and admirals, eight or nine of them, and it was warm in the room and at some point I loosened my tie and opened my suit jacket. I stood up, and there were my pajamas tops hanging out from under my shirt, and my pajama bottoms sticking out from under my pants cuffs.

  I paid no attention. I was involved in trying to explain why there had been delays in the HK-1 and why the ship had to be completed, for the sake of both the Air Corps and the tremendous research we were doing in the field of large-plane design. But that’s another story. The point of this is that all the Army could see was that Howard Hughes hadn’t bothered to take off his pajamas before he put on his suit.

  What an insult! What a thing to do! They thought I was making fun of them in their starched uniforms with scrambled eggs and chests full of fruit salad, their campaign ribbons. They also thought this was evidence that I was a little nuts.

  That weighed heavily against me for the rest of the war. I was talking business and airplanes and I thought the military was doing the same thing. My sartorial splendor was totally beside the point in the long run, but not for them. For them it was worse than if I’d been Hitler’s secret second cousin. They never forgave me for that. It was constantly brought up whenever they had their conferences about me and what I was building for them. I was told this by Jesse Jones, and at the time he had no reason to lie to me. Their attitude hampered the war effort, and the military has tried to make my life miserable ever since.

  Think about it. If they’d bought the H-1 from me, the Japanese wouldn’t have had the Zero. It was the fastest thing around, nearly twice as fast as anything the Air Corps had. After the Air Corps had bitten off its nose to spite its face, I got some little company in the midwest to agree to tool up for producing it. They went broke. But before they went broke, the Japanese sent a delegation of engineers to their plant, studied the modified H-1, went home, and within a year the H-1 had become the Zero, made by Mitsubishi.

  Was the Zero an exact copy?

  With modifications, naturally, but not so much that you couldn’t recognize the H-1 with the rising sun on her wingtips. The Mitsubishi people had that ship in the air by early 1939. They rounded off the wings a bit, shoved in the armament, put in a 780-horsepower engine where I had a 1050-horsepower Wasp, and they got more than 350 miles per hour maximum speed out of her. That was better than anything this country had at the time. Naturally if any Air Force General admitted this when the war began and those Jap Zeros were buzzing all over the Pacific and kicking the crap out of the Navy, they would have had him personally cleaning out Oliver Echols mink-lined toilet. That was all hushed up. If we had had it in 1941 instead of them, the Japanese might never have attacked Pearl Harbor. Even if they had, we would have whipped their ass a hell of a lot quicker and probably wouldn’t have had to use the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  But none of that was to be, because I’d overflown Wrig
ht Field and worn my pajamas under my suit in a meeting with generals.

  7

  Howard flies around the world and breaks the speed record, and snubs the mayor of New York City to hide out with Katharine Hepburn.

  IN 1938, WHEN I was thirty-two years old, I decided to fly around the world and break the round-the-world speed record while I was doing it.

  That flight was far and away the most important I’d ever made, not in the sense that I cut Wiley Post’s previous record time, but that I showed that with proper organization and care it was possible to make this kind of flight a routine, which it is today.

  I don’t mean to say that in 1938 it was a routine flight – no icebreaking flight ever is. The preparations were extensive. I don’t remember how many thousands of man-hours we put in to get the plane ready. She was called the New York World’s Fair 1939 and she was a Lockheed Lodestar, the model Fourteen.

  At the outset I’d bought a D-1, made by Douglas; then I started fitting out a new model Sikorsky. But when Lockheed came out with their ship, which was the sturdiest and fastest transport around, I bought one of the first models, and I made the ship over from head to tail to fit my needs.

  Actually I made Lockheed, too, with that flight. I’m not blowing my own horn, I’m just stating facts. Bob Gross admitted to me that it was always spoken about among the executives at Lockheed in later years: ‘When Howard Hughes flew our plane around the world, everyone suddenly knew who Lockheed was.’ And the stock went up five points that week.

  The Model Fourteen later was modified and became the Hudson bomber that the British flew during the war. Lockheed sold them 3,000 planes before the war ended. The British also bought the New York World’s Fair 1939. That’s just an aside for the history books and the airplane buffs.

  The planning and preparation for the flight were extensive. For one thing we had to put in oversized gas tanks, which caused problems. Going over the equipment lists took days. Every inch of space was used. We had a rifle, shotgun and revolver – protection against anything that might come along if we had a forced landing in Siberia, because I was told that the polar bears weren’t too friendly. We had a solar still to convert sea water to drinking water in case we were forced down at sea.

  Loading the plane was an incredibly difficult job. We were overweight, of course, but we used something called a Librascope, a relatively new invention which computed the weight of everything in the various cargo compartments and the hull and then told you the location of the center of gravity, the center of balance. If it wasn’t at the optimum flight point you could shift cargo, which is what we did ten or twelve times before we got it right. The wingloading was enormous, the most I’d ever heard of, about fifty pounds per square foot. That scared me, and rightly so.

  We also used an entirely new system of radio communications, and tested it effectively for the first time in aeronautical history. We could send and receive on twenty-five wavelengths and the aerial, which was adjustable, gave us a tremendously powerful beam. I arranged to beam from Siberia all the way to Hermosa Beach, California. I had Dave Evans and Charlie Perrine, radio director for the flight, set up in a house on the beach operating a short-wave radio station, and I hit them all the way from Yakutsk in Siberia, nearly 5,000 miles away. Nobody made much of a fuss about that at the time, because they preferred to concentrate on the circus aspects which were considered more newsworthy, but that radio transmission was a fantastic step forward in the communications world.

  We ate nothing but sandwiches, mostly ham, during the flight itself. I wanted the men to get the most nourishment possible out of those sandwiches, so in New York I tested twenty different kinds of bread until I found the one I wanted. That was Pechter’s Jewish rye bread.

  But we had trouble the moment we took off. All that extra load we were carrying – mostly the gasoline in the wing tanks – made the takeoffs the most hazardous parts of the flight. We took off on Sunday evening, July 10, 1938, from Floyd Bennett Field, and I couldn’t get the ship off the ground. I used up all the runway and still I couldn’t get her off. I kept going, into the dirt, and one of the struts snapped – one of the wheel braces. I could feel it go, but there was nothing to do about it then, because the next second we were airborne.

  Everything went well after that. We got to Paris in one piece, and on schedule. I had to go through the usual crap at the airport, shaking hands with the ambassador and a bunch of goddamn dignitaries. For a while it looked as though we weren’t going to leave Paris because of the damaged wheel braces, but the Embassy turned up with an Army man named Cook, one of those handy types like myself that only seem to flourish in America, and he fixed the damn thing and we took off again with a minimum of delay. Then we went over Germany, flying at 16,000 feet for a while, which was the regulation altitude prescribed by the Nazi government. What happened then has never been told, because I was honor-bound not to discuss it, but I feel certain enough time has passed.

  Shortly before leaving New York City I had a visit from General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. He asked me to take aerial photographs of parts of Germany that were on my course, or could be on my course with a little adjustment. Specifically, he was looking for aircraft and arms plants in the western Ruhr and in Silesia, and large troop concentrations on the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia. We didn’t have anything like a U-2 then, and any aerial photo reconnaissance had to be done at very low altitudes and of course on a relatively clear day.

  The Germans, when we went over, instantly got us on the radio and told us to get the hell out of their airspace. They were building up, and they thought we might be taking pictures. We denied it vigorously, and in the newspapers it was denied vigorously, by me and several other people connected with the project, that anything like that had been in mind. Of course that was exactly what we were trying to do. We came down as low as we could over the critical areas, but we couldn’t break through the cloud cover. It was socked in right from the Black Forest to the Polish border. We were flying pretty low, hoping for a hole, and any minute I expected to see some of those Messerschmitt fighters coming right up at us.

  Did any of the men with you on the plane know what you were doing?

  If they’d used their heads they might have figured it out, because the camera was covered but mounted. One of them asked me about it, and I said it was to photograph polar bears in Siberia for the National Geographic. He believed me. Not all of those guys were terribly bright when it came to thinking about other things than their job.

  We went on to Moscow. A lot of bigwigs were there at the airport, including the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, on leave from Washington. I gave him the baseball scores and the American League standings – he was a Yankee fan, which was a safe bet in those days. The Model Fourteen had the red Lockheed star on the fuselage, and some of the Russian soldiers standing around the field thought this was a Communist plane making the trip. They got all excited – whoops, the Americans are Communists too!

  One thing I appreciated about the Russians: we didn’t have to pay any bills at their airports. It was all on the house. They asked me to keep that quiet – they didn’t want an invasion of pilots figuring the government would pick up the tab. We refueled, and had to turn down some caviar which would have made us overweight.

  And off we went to Omsk, in Siberia. They had lousy gasoline, very low octane, but we were prepared for that with a load of ethyl to boost it. That was only a minor inconvenience. But then the runway went uphill at Omsk and I didn’t think we were going to get off. It’s bad enough trying to take off on the level, on a good runway with the load we were carrying, but to take off uphill – well, it was like a landing strip in Ethiopia that I used many years later in a DC-3.

  Leaving Omsk we were lucky again. I’d better qualify this by explaining that I don’t believe in luck – it’s a phrase that’s applied after the fact. If a man prepares well, and is aware of all possibilities and mulls the
m over in his mind, and takes the necessary precautions to deal with emergencies – if a man does all that, and is ready to grasp opportunities, those opportunities come to him and people call that good luck. It’s not good luck. It’s the sum total of a man’s preparations for any given situation. A poor workman finds fault with his tools, and only a hypocrite says, ‘I had good luck.’ A man stands up, thumps his chest and says, ‘Me, I did it.’

  The phrase ‘bad luck’ is really another way of saying that a man wasn’t prepared, he didn’t know how to deal with the inevitable difficulties that came his way.

  But, as I found out flying around the world in 1938, there are certain exceptions, like when we ran into ten thousand-foot mountains that were marked as six thousand feet on the map. So it was fortunate that we reached them during daylight, because our schedule was messed up by the delays in Paris and Omsk. If we had reached these peaks at night, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. The wolves would have picked my bones clean on some mountaintop in Siberia.

  Then we went on to Fairbanks, Alaska. That was an awful hop, foul weather all the way so that the plane was mushing, but we made it. We headed on toward Winnipeg, where the weather was so lousy that we skipped it, stopped in Minneapolis, and then, from there, back to New York – three and a half days after we’d started out.

  I was beat. I just couldn’t face that mob. After the parade there was supposed to be a reception at City Hall, organized by Grover Whalen, the official greeter and hand-shaker for New York City.

  You can imagine that I was in no mood for such shenanigans after a round-the-world flight – and besides, I had a date. At the time I was very friendly with Katharine Hepburn. Her family up in Connecticut thought I was an odd duck because I once landed a plane on their beach up in Old Saybrook, but nevertheless there were rumors that Katharine and I were going to get married. It wasn’t true, we just saw a lot of each other. We had a fine friendship and I had seen Katharine before I left, and I wanted to see Katharine when I got back. Simple as that. I didn’t want to see these guys in top hats and tails.