Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  The total government loss came to over $6 billion. But there was more fuss made about my supposed fifty million than all the others put together, because they’d singled me out as the scapegoat and also, as I said, this investigation was political in origin, a way to crush Elliott Roosevelt and the Democratic administration.

  Republic, for example, was supposed to make a recon ship called the XF-12. I brought this up at the hearings, but of course they didn’t want to hear about it. They just brushed it off, because Pan American had worked with Republic on the XF-12 and Pan American was too delicate to touch. The XF-12 plane cost the government about $30 million and it was never delivered. There was never even a static model. The first test model nosed over and cracked up a minute after it got off the runway. But nobody cared about that because Howard Hughes hadn’t built it. I can’t remember the figures on how much money was put into aircraft that never flew, but you can bet that it came to well over $600 million.

  As far as my employee Johnny Meyer was concerned, Johnny had been doing, on a small scale, what representatives of every single company in the United States had been doing throughout the course of the war, and on a much larger scale than Hughes Aircraft and Toolco – which is, specifically, lavishly entertain Army officers and government officials.

  These men came out to meet you for an afternoon of business discussion. You couldn’t just throw them out of your office at 5 P.M. and say, ‘See you tomorrow morning, boys. Have a good evening.’ You took them out, you provided for them. It was simple hospitality. The hypocrisy of these senators, who called each other ‘gentlemen’ – ‘will the gentleman from Missouri yield for a minute to the gentleman from Montana?’ – really, that’s exactly how these pompous asses talked to each other when they were mouthing off in the senate chamber – the hypocrisy of these men who were living off lobbyists and accepting favors right and left, money, women, free travel, free vacations, gifts, every week of the year, was beyond belief.

  What about Judy Cook?

  Judy Cook was a girl who worked for Johnny Meyer. She swam around in a pool. I always think of her as the girl I saw a hundred times. This pool had reflectors, so that it looked like there were a hundred Judy Cooks swimming through the pool.

  She was an Olympic swimmer and an actress, and the whole Judy Cook incident was completely innocent. Johnny found her and brought her down to Palm Springs for a couple of parties. What Judy did on her own time was her own business.

  Let’s get back to the senate committee. That was the important thing, not what happened or didn’t happen with Judy Cook in Palm Springs.

  Before I testified they had a parade of witnesses. By the time I got to the hearings they’d raked everyone over the coals, including Henry Kaiser and Johnny Meyer. They were digging into the entire story of the HK-1 and the F-11. A full transcript of the hearings runs close to 300,000 typed pages. Reading it is enough to make a man want to overthrow the United States government. The verbal inanity of those senators is beyond belief, and the American taxpayer has to foot the bill to have all that garbage put into print in the Congressional Record. The vanity of these boring little men almost passes human understanding.

  This committee wanted to know everything – they had nothing better to do. They hauled people away from important jobs, and from their families and their children.

  Then Johnny Meyer got on the stand. Johnny was a publicity man: flashy, accommodating, and not very bright. He had a hell of a way with girls, but that’s about as far as his talents went.

  I dreaded Johnny’s testifying, because they’d asked to see all of Johnny’s expense account records, and as Johnny admitted to me before he went to Washington, he had a habit of making them up quite a while after the actual event and skimming a few dollars on the side. I didn’t mind that. He had to live.

  But what mattered was that these records were not entirely accurate, and Johnny knew it, and I knew it. I’ve always had a kind of soft spot in my heart for Johnny. He was a congenial dope. I heard that at his birthday dinner a few years ago in Los Angeles his three ex-wives came to the party and toasted him. I don’t mean over a slow fire, I mean with champagne. That’s an eloquent tribute.

  Before he went to Washington to face the committee I told Johnny, ‘There’s only one thing you can do that’ll work. Go up before those senators and tell them the truth. Tell them that you made up the records long after the actual dinner at the Mocambo, or at ‘21.’ You’re human. They won’t send you to prison for it.’

  He tried, but they didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. They flattened him. He was like a jackrabbit on the road, in front of the lights of a truck – he kept running and dodging, but he didn’t have sense enough to get off the road, and they just ran him down like a goddamn dumb jackrabbit.

  He testified for days. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it, and I winced when I read reports of the testimony. Every word that came out of that man’s mouth put me further behind the eight ball. He wasn’t just Johnny Meyer sitting up there getting slaughtered, he was Howard Hughes’ right-hand man, the man who was taking Howard Hughes’ stooge, Elliott Roosevelt, out to dinner, and giving Elliot’s wife black market-nylon stockings as a present from Howard Hughes.

  The more he babbled, the blacker it looked. They got on to other people, but they told him to stay in town, they wanted him back on the witness stand at a later date.

  Johnny called me and said, ‘Howard, what am I going to do? I’m making a mess of this.’

  ‘You sure are. You’ve got to get out of town, Johnny.’

  ‘Where can I go?’

  ‘I’ll take care of that,’ I said.

  I got hold of a TWA plane and I put Johnny on it, sent him off to Europe and said, ‘Go to the French Riviera and rent a diving helmet. Go to the bottom of the Mediterranean and stay there until I call you.’

  That’s not something I’m ashamed of. It would have been totally unfair for Johnny to have reappeared on the stand until I’d had my say. They were making hamburger out of him. They were chopping him up, without benefit of onion, and cooking him to a fare-thee-well. And it wasn’t getting us any closer to the truth, because the truth lay back there in the Mayflower Hotel in the words of that viper, Senator Brewster.

  When we got to Washington the second time, for the hearings, I stayed in the Carlton Hotel with Noah and my lawyers. Noah walked into my room the first day and started to talk to me about what was going on. I said, ‘Noah, shut up. I haven’t even searched the room yet. You can bet your sweet ass they’ve got it bugged.’

  Noah said, ‘Then let’s go into the bathroom and talk.’

  We went into the bathroom and I sat down on the toilet seat. I looked around and there was a ventilator in the bathroom. I jumped up and said, ‘We can’t talk here, Noah. They’ve probably put a mike in the ventilator shaft.’

  Noah probably thought, Howard’s going round the bend again. We took the elevator downstairs. He started to talk in the hotel lobby right by a potted palm. I said, ‘For pete’s sake, Noah, the easiest place in the world to put a microphone is in a potted palm!’

  He thought that was all in the movies. I had to explain it happened in real life and every day. So we talked on the streets, which were safer.

  Well, this was one of many occasions when Noah had to admit I was right. Because it came out later that the ventilator shaft in the bathroom had been bugged, and there was a microphone hidden in it. Years later some police officer in Washington admitted that he tapped my telephone and installed bugs all over the hotel suite, including the bathroom ventilator shaft, for a thousand bucks, at the instigation of none other than our upstanding senator from Maine, Owen Brewster.

  All my life, ever since the telephones were tapped at Romaine street in 1931, I’ve been conscious of people eavesdropping, and since the advent of revolutionary sophisticated electronic devices there isn’t a place in the world that’s completely safe. There’s a type of microphone called a shotgun mike – people can
stand a hundred yards away from you and point that microphone at you and hear every word you’re saying. Do you know that they have a microphone that can be fired from a gun? It’s in the shape of a dart. A man can stand 500 yards away, aim his rifle at the side of your house, fire that dart into the wall of your house, and that microphone sits there and picks up everything that’s being said inside. You think you’re talking privately, but they’re broadcasting it in the Hollywood Bowl. Do you know what people would give to listen in to some of my conversation? If they could invent a dart to shoot into my brain and find out what I was thinking, they’d do it, no matter what the damage.

  After the incident at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, when I said a place was bugged, Noah believed it was bugged. I can smell a bug in any room, and I’m not talking about cockroaches. Not about cucarachas. You know that song? La Cucaracha. That’s one of my favorite songs.

  15

  Howard has a secret meeting with a friendly senator, cross-examines a hostile one, and smites his enemies.

  THE SENATE INVESTIGATION of me was the biggest post-war circus of its kind. All they wanted to do was make page one of every newspaper in the country, day after day, and they succeeded. Even before the circus started in Washington there were a lot of statements being made to the newspapers, mainly by me, because I figured once they got me in the witness chair, where I didn’t have the right to question the cross-examiners, I’d be not just behind the eight ball, I’d be jammed right into the side pocket and they’d be ramming their senatorial cue sticks up my ass every chance they got. I’d be the donkey, not the lion.

  What I was saying, principally, was what everyone who opened his eyes could see that Brewster and Trippe were in partnership and the whole thing was a smear campaign to ruin my reputation and take routes away from TWA, and put the pressure on me to merge with Pan American as the junior partner. And I got in my licks, because I let the world know that while Brewster was screaming about Johnny Meyer and my people entertaining Air Force people during the war, he, Brewster, was freeloading on my TWA planes. That took the wind out of his sails for a little while, but guys like Brewster, any politicians, have an answer for everything: a fountain of doubletalk.

  I had to prepare this carefully, because I knew pretty well what was going to happen. I telephoned Homer Ferguson and told him I wasn’t going to jump through the hoop like a trained seal and fly to Washington on twenty-four hours’ notice. I also wrote an article for the papers in which I asked how come an earlier investigation of Pan American – they’d built some airports and socked the government hard for the costs – had been dropped by the committee, and why Brewster lied in public about the committee having no authority to investigate Pan Am because the airports were built outside the United States.

  I still boil when I think about all this, and it was over twenty years ago. But my reputation, my personal and professional reputation, was on the line. This committee was like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. Every time you’d try to give them a straight answer, they’d interrupt you. Every time you were giving them answers they didn’t like, they’d call a recess. And every time one of them lied, or got the facts balled up, and I tried to challenge them for playing dirty pool, they’d yell, ‘You’re demeaning the dignity of this committee, Mr. Hughes! You stay at the back of the bus where you belong.’

  At first they wouldn’t let me ask a single question. So the only thing to do was turn the tables on them. I decided to treat it like a military operation. Right away, before we got anywhere near the meat of the thing, I demanded the right to cross-examine the senators.

  I kept hammering away at that until they were sick of hearing me say it. At the very beginning, before they could get their teeth into me the way they’d done to Johnny Meyer, I told them the story of Brewster propositioning me at the Mayflower. That hit the headlines. Then I said that, considering what had happened, Brewster should disqualify himself as chairman.

  They didn’t like all that, and we wound up with a compromise, something I hadn’t foreseen. They agreed to let me submit a list of written questions to Brewster, which he would answer one by one, in the order they were submitted, and Ferguson would take the chair while this was going on.

  Now, Claude Pepper, who I mentioned before, was a gentleman, and a Democrat, and he was on the committee. We had two private talks, once before the hearings began and once after the first day of my testimony. We met by the Lincoln Monument in a parked car. I remember some kids were playing softball on the grass there. One of the kids hit a foul ball and the ball rolled under my car. The kid came running over to get the ball, and Senator Pepper ducked his head and tried to hide under the dashboard. He was in such a hurry he hit his head and cut himself. He was afraid of being recognized.

  I said, ‘Claude, don’t worry, these kids wouldn’t know a United States senator from the Washington dogcatcher.’

  He hadn’t wanted to meet me there in the first place, but I said, ‘A public place is the safest. Nobody thinks of looking for two people like us in front of the Lincoln Monument.’

  He gave me all the information he had about Owen Brewster: where Brewster was vulnerable. And when it came time for me to submit my list of questions to Brewster, Pepper told me in advance what sort of questions might put Brewster on the spot, and I told him what I was planning to do, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s good,’ or ‘No, he can slide out of that for such and such a reason.’ This senator, you understand, wasn’t on my payroll, he wasn’t someone I’d helped politically. This was being done out of his sense of fair play.

  I was also filled in on some of the favors that Brewster had gotten from Bill McEvoy, who was a vice-president of Pan American and had taken Brewster to football games. I worked that into my questions too. I asked Brewster – Ferguson was asking the questions for me, but they were my questions – about McEvoy and the football games. He muttered around for a while, but he couldn’t very well deny it since he knew that two of the senators on the committee knew, and he wound up saying, ‘Yes, but I bought my own peanuts.’ This was a United States senator telling the world: ‘I bought my own peanuts.’

  I personally didn’t have the right to cross-examine, but the system worked – that is, with Ferguson asking questions for me. It worked not so much because of the advice I’d been given, but because of the method I adopted. Each night, as soon as the committee adjourned, I prepared a list of questions for the next session. I never flared up during those hearings. I kept absolutely in control of myself, but Brewster nearly went over the edge. He was yelling and pounding the table.

  I went back to the hotel each night and I asked everybody to leave except Tom Slack, my lawyer, and he had to keep quiet unless I specifically asked him something. I worked all night preparing the questions. The point of it was that I didn’t know what Brewster’s answers were going to be. I couldn’t really cross-examine as a courtroom lawyer would. But I could make a pretty educated guess what he might answer. So I geared the next question to what I figured he would answer to the last one, and the results were amazing.

  I’ll try to give you a small example. It was a little trap I set, and Brewster walked into it like a tame skunk on a string. In order to fathom the logic of the questioning, you need to know that Brewster was the one who pressed for the hearings to get started early, because he’d set up a timetable with Juan Trippe. There was even some doubt that the hearings would take place at all, but Brewster had his orders. He was pushing, and he bypassed Homer Ferguson when he announced it to the press. So first I asked Brewster a question: ‘Isn’t it true, Senator, that you yourself actually made the decision to start this hearing on July 28, the day it was begun?’

  I knew that Brewster was going to deny it, pass the buck to Ferguson, and he was a long-winded son of a bitch and he was bound to get himself all tangled up in the denial. Which is exactly what he did. So then Ferguson read the next question. It was: ‘Then, Senator, if you yourself didn’t make the decision to hold thi
s hearing, and if you left the decision up to Senator Ferguson, how do you explain the fact that Senator Ferguson was totally unaware that the decision to hold this hearing had actually been made until the day following the time when you announced the hearing to the press on July 24?’

  Silence in the senate chamber. Brewster looks pale. Then he turns red. Then he looks down, then right, then left – then up – but God wasn’t there to help him and neither was Juan Trippe.

  All Brewster could think of to say was, ‘I don’t know.’ He looked like a fool and he looked worse as it went on. A lot of the questions, since I couldn’t cross-examine him, were stuff like, ‘Do you still beat your wife?’ But that’s what they’d been trying to pull on me, and I figured two could play at that game.

  The upshot of it was, when I finished with him he dragged his crippled ass out of Washington and whined to the newspapers that he’d been shot full of poison arrows, and Howard Hughes didn’t play fair like a red-blooded American boy should. What he really meant was that he hadn’t seen the color of my blood, which he wanted to spill into buckets and use to paint his campaign posters for the Republican vice presidential nomination, and this sort of irked him – he saw his political star sinking down the drain. He didn’t know the half of it.

  After that he made a speech telling what a great upstanding senator he was, and I made a speech and said he had the reputation for being one of the greatest trick-shot artists in Washington. And then I blew my own horn a little because it had pretty much come down to a question that one of us was telling the truth and one of us was lying about the lunch in the Mayflower. I said I was from Texas, where a man’s word is his bond.

  The upshot was that once Brewster got caught wetting his pants in this remote control cross-examination, he didn’t have the whip hand anymore. The galleries cheered every time I told him off, told him how much money I’d lost on those contracts and how hard I’d worked.