Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  Of course, far worse than someone like Jarrico, was a man like Elia Kazan, the film director, who went before the witch-hunting committee in Washington and snitched on all his friends. His excuse was that the committee already knew they were Communist; other snitches had named them. All the more reason not to give the names, since they weren’t needed. The committee’s purpose was to intimidate and humiliate, and Kazan bent over and spread his cheeks in order to insure his career. Arthur Miller, who wrote Death of a Salesman, refused to testify. He survived. Kazan was a great film director and a creepy human being.

  After all these years, do you regret the role you played in the witch-hunt?

  The answer to that isn’t a simple one. If it has to be ‘yes or no’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I do regret it.’ But that would be a fundamental dishonesty on my part, because it would be too easy a way of skating out of something. I can’t deny that I did what I did – I even went so far as to try and get the RKO Theaters Corporation to ban the showing of Limelight, because I considered Charlie Chaplin a pinko and a man who’d run away to Europe rather than stay at home and fight for what he believed in, whether it was right or wrong.

  But I refuse to talk in terms of ‘if I had it all to do over again,’ because that’s equivalent to saying, ‘If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.’ I did what I did because I was the man that I was. If I had done anything else I would have been a hypocrite and a coward and then I really would regret it now.

  In other words, I don’t regret what I did but I do wish that I had been a different kind of man, the kind of man who would not have done those things. That’s also, I suppose, a kind of shadowy statement, but it’s the best I can give, because I realize now that I was swept along with the mob and that’s always demeaning to the soul and damaging to the man as a whole.

  But it’s even more damaging to go against your own nature. Sometimes you have to plunge in headfirst and wallow in the trough of your own stupidity just in order to climb out and take a bath and feel your own clean skin again.

  As far as the anticommunist battle went, it was a battle, and in battle you fight with whatever weapons you’ve got and with whatever allies you can find. I was obsessed; I admit it. I’m not proud of it. I gave a talk before the American Legion at that time. Not that I was a great backer of the American Legion, I want to make clear. They’re a bunch of warmongers, as I realized later on. It’s simply, as I said, that you had strange bedfellows in those days. Must have been a good talk, though, because it was put in the Congressional Record by Richard Nixon.

  He was then a senator from California. I had a letter from him, and we met around that time for lunch, rather quietly, because Nixon was sowing the seeds then for the future. And I was sowing mine. I didn’t like him. A mealy-mouthed guy. But he was ambitious, and slick, and, I thought, just mediocre enough to make it. So I filed him away for future reference. I figured his time would come, and I would make use of him.

  One other important thing happened when I owned RKO, although at the time I didn’t see its huge significance, that it would cloud my entire future.

  Henry Luce was the man who owned Time, Life, and Fortune. A publishing mogul, energetic, conservative, very powerful. His wife was Clare Boothe Luce. In her time she’d written a couple of decent plays but then she got herself elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Connecticut, so that will give you a good idea of her ideological bent. She spent part of each year in Hollywood throwing lavish parties for producers, because she wanted them to produce movies she wrote.

  I never went to those parties, of course, but Liz Taylor brought her once to my bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet me, and I bumped into her a couple of times on the beach in Santa Monica. I used to go for long walks on the beach and so did Clare Luce. So we were on cordial terms.

  One day on the beach she collared me and bled my ear about a script called Pilate’s Wife. I may have said we’d be interested in producing it if it was good, and she told me that René Clair wanted to direct it. She let it leak to the newspapers that the movie was going to be made by me and RKO. I paid no attention to that. Finally she turned up at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a draft of the screenplay. She left it there with a note that said, ‘I’ll be back in exactly a week, dear Howard, and we’ll discuss who can play Jesus and who can play Mary Magdalene.’

  I read it. It was pap, Sunday school stuff for children. It was absolutely non-producible in the form she’d written it, and when she showed up a week later she asked me if I had any ideas for improving the plot and the characterization. She thought of course the answer would be no, and she was right – it was impossible to improve the plot and characterization in the script, because they didn’t exist.

  But I couldn’t say that to her. She showed up, and we discussed the script in the lobby at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I tried to be diplomatic, I tried to point out to her why I thought it wasn’t right for RKO. Diplomacy, I guess, isn’t my strong suit, but in any case it’s not easy to be diplomatic with somebody who thinks she’s a female apostle, the most brilliant thinker and writer of our time. When I finally said for about the third time that RKO was going to pass, she claimed I’d humiliated her because she’d told Variety and about three dozen top actors that I was going to make her biblical horror. I said, ‘Well, you jumped the gun, Clare.’

  Right there, in the lobby, she stamped her feet, spat like a cornered cat, and swore that she and all her husband’s magazines, Time, Life, and Fortune, would hound me for the rest of my days. Clare Luce was a vengeful woman. That was not an idle threat.

  19

  Howard hands cash to both presidential candidates, makes two movies with Ingrid Bergman, and designs a special bra for Jane Russell.

  DURING THAT PERIOD I had to keep my eye on politics, and I made a fair share of contributions over the years to both political parties. A little here, a little there. I figured in the long run it would pay off. It added up to two, three, four hundred thousand dollars a year. You have no idea how many people you have to have on your payroll to get a fair shake. I’m not just talking about sheriffs and tax assessors. I’m talking about state governors and mayors, even higher up, very much higher up.

  There isn’t a politician in America who wouldn’t be tarred and feathered if the people found out the truth of what goes on in politics. Bribery and favors are at the root of the American political system. They’re at the root of human nature, if you accept the proposition that human beings are political animals. They have to form social groups to survive and those groups have to organize themselves politically to keep the members from exercising their basic instincts and clubbing one another to death to gain property and territory.

  Money is the medium, in a so-called civilized society, that serves as a club. I have no illusions any more about what people will do for money if they think they haven’t got enough of it – and how many people think they’ve got enough? Probably no more than a hundred men in the entire country. Half of them are multimillionaires and the other half are in the insane asylum getting fed through a nipple. Every man has his price, and the worst part of it is, if you pay that price, he raises it.

  I could be wrong about what I said, about the people – that they’d tar and feather a man they’d elected to office if they found out the truth. They probably wouldn’t do that at all. They’d raise the usual fuss and feathers and then when it died down they’d clap the man on the back and forgive and forget, because they’d know deep down he wasn’t any worse than they would be if they had the same opportunity. They only make the fuss in the first place because they’re sore that this guy had the opportunity to do what they would have done if they were in his position, only they’re ashamed to admit that because they’ve fed all this crap to their kids – you know, that you have to go through life on the Boy Scout oath and never lie, never steal, never take advantage, never covet thy neighbor’s goods or thy neighbor’s wife.

  Who really ever lives that way? Ha
rdly anybody. And the few who do are usually sicker than the rest because they’re so frustrated. People are so tangled up in lies – spouting lies day in and day out to themselves and their friends and their dear children, their dear children who are going go grow up and be the same fountains of crap – that it breaks my heart to think about it. I know you think I’m an old cynic, but I wasn’t always this way. The world made me this way – and in some ways I’m not that way even now. It breaks my heart. It used to break my heart even more, but now it just makes me feel sick.

  I’m not telling you all this to make myself out to be any sort of angel in the dungheap of humanity. That’s obvious. I’m telling you exactly how much I lived in that dungheap. If I tell you I had a Mayor Poulson of Los Angeles on my payroll it doesn’t reflect much credit on him, but it also certainly doesn’t reflect much credit on me.

  But I don’t care, I’m above all that now. I’d be overjoyed if people would admit what scheming hypocrites they are, and tell the truth about what really goes on in life. We certainly wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now, with things the way they are now. Life seems to me a hopeless proposition sometimes. By the time you’re old enough to get from behind your mama’s apron strings and out from under your father’s heel, you’re in such a mess, so godawfully indoctrinated… how can you win? How can you achieve any personal honesty?

  When I hear a man say, ‘I did a terrible thing, but I’ll never do it again,’ you know what I say to myself? ‘New Year’s resolutions. Crap.’ I don’t believe it. And I’m not ashamed to say what I’ve done in my life because there are very few men who would or could have done better in the same position, and a great many who would have done worse.

  Let’s just say that political bribery is at the toot of any political system, whether it’s a democracy or a republic or a monarchy. Recorded history proves this time and time again. In Mexico, for example, they make no bones about it. They accept bribery as part of social life and they hand a man cash, and that’s that. The only difference in this country is that they do it more secretly, the money gets funneled through dummy corporations, and so forth.

  How high up did you go on the political ladder to get men, as you say, on your payroll?

  Just as high as I could go. They wouldn’t always take it. Tom Dewey turned me down once. You remember him? They called him ‘the little man on the wedding cake,’ because he had a funny mustache and that’s what he looked like. He was governor of New York State, and then he ran for President in 1948. That’s where the Luce people really fell on their ass, putting him on the cover of their magazine and saying, ‘The next President of the United States crosses Niagara Falls,’ or whatever he was doing. He should have taken my money, it might have helped him.

  I’d given some money to Harry Truman as well, because I liked him and I had a hunch he’d win. I gave it to him personally. He was stumping out in Los Angles and I went to the Biltmore Hotel with Neil McCarthy, my attorney, and told Neil to give it to him. There’s a sequel to this, but I’ll save it for later. Anyway, Neil came back to the lobby, where I was waiting in a corner behind a potted palm, and said there had been several people in the room and he’d just handed Truman the envelope.

  And I said, ‘Jesus Christ, my name’s not on the envelope, and he may not have known who you were, that you were my attorney.’ I mean he may have known Neil was my attorney, but not necessarily have known that Neil was handing him my money.

  So I ran right upstairs and got Truman into a corner and said, ‘That envelope the guy gave you – the cash inside it is mine. It’s from me to you.’ I stressed that.

  I thought you said you tried to give it to Thomas E. Dewey. Wasn’t Dewey running against Truman in that election?

  Of course. I figured I’d better play it safe, so, later on, probably a month before the election, I sent Noah to the guy who was running Dewey’s campaign, Harold Talbot, and told Noah to give him $25,000, which is what I’d put in the envelope for Truman.

  Talbot turned it down, and he was very insulting to boot. Dewey must have found out that I’d given the money to Truman also, and Dewey thought he was a shoo-in by then and he didn’t want to be obligated to me, especially since it was Eastern money that was backing him, and they hated my guts.

  Dewey lost the election. Served him right.

  This was my money we contributed, which meant it came out of Toolco. It was illegal for a corporation to donate funds to a candidate or an officeholder, but it wasn’t illegal for a foreign corporation to donate. Our money flowed through subsidiaries in Toronto and the Bahamas which had exactly enough cash flow to pay the bills for the various congressmen and governors and mayors and vice-presidents I had on the payroll.

  Did you just contribute to campaigns, or did you keep paying them when they were in office?

  Mostly before they got into office. Sometimes afterward. I didn’t start the system of political contributions. I was just doing it to create good will, which I needed a lot more than most businessmen. I often gave some of these guys free flights, in some cases private planes, when they were stumping. And I’d hate to tell you how many hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners I paid for, and bar bills, and hookers. I think after a while I got the reputation of being an easy touch. The list of people was very long.

  They got the bill, of course, either at the time of their election or later on. The bill came to Richard Nixon. But I’ll tell that story in its time and place.

  I had my troubles with RKO – couldn’t get the damn thing off the ground. I took an axe to the fat, lopped that off and got it down to a backbone staff. This was in the first years I had it, 1948 up through 1951.

  I shot my mouth off a little too much at first, said we were going to make forty pictures a year. But we only made about fifteen or twenty a year in the first few years – I was in Ethiopia then and later in Mexico and, as always, I overburdened myself with work. I put Noah in as Chairman of the Board, but he didn’t understand the movie business and he made a total mess of it. I wanted to do another picture with Jane Russell, because everybody associated Jane Russell with me as a result of The Outlaw, and I figured we were a winning combination.

  Overall, the studio was losing money, but I can’t break it down for you picture by picture. I do remember we had trouble with Jet Pilot, took a lot of cutting and dubbing and cost us $4 million. And we took a bath on that Bergman-Rossellini thing, Stromboli. I did that one personally – I went out of my way to do it. I did two pictures with Ingrid Bergman. Walter Wanger talked me into the first one, Joan of Arc. Wanger had gotten booted out of MGM and I picked him up right away, and just about that time I had a vision that Ingrid Bergman was the finest actress in the world, and box-office besides.

  I put them together, Walter and Ingrid, and they made Joan of Arc, and in the midst of it, or just about when they finished shooting, it all came out about Ingrid and Rossellini and the illegitimate kid.

  This was 1950 or thereabouts, and the world was not quite as much of an open sexual circus as it is today. People still blabbed about morality. I said to myself, ‘Well, that kills Joan of Arc.’ But I got talked into one of the worst mistakes you can make – I threw good money after bad. Rossellini wanted to make Stromboli with Bergman, and somehow I figured out that if we were absolutely blatant about it, if we had Ingrid in a very adult film made by her lover and the father of her illegitimate kid, we’d have a smash.

  I made Stromboli and I lost my shirt on it, or at least my left cufflink, in a manner of speaking, and then I said, ‘Okay, release Joan of Arc,’ which also fell on its ass.

  At this point the studio was losing about five million a year. I let Noah watch the bookkeeping. I finally decided that I’d made a mistake and the movie business was just taking up too much of my time. It represented no more than ten to fifteen percent of my holdings, and Noah pointed out I was spending 85% of my time running it.

  That’s not to say that I was physically there at the studio. In fact, I was never there.
Not once. Oh yeah, once, early on, I put on a suit and a wig and took the guided tour, just so that I’d know the physical layout of the place. I had my office over at the Goldwyn Studios and if I wanted anything done, I got on the pipe and told the man running that particular section what I had in mind. And once I flew over the lot and saw what condition it was in, and I said, ‘Paint it.’ Other than that, I never once visited it except on the guided tour.

  But I kept in touch with things. I had my men working there who reported to me directly. I’ve always run things at a distance and I’ve been criticized for that all my life, and unfairly. It always seems to me that you can get a much better perspective if you’re not up to your neck in the daily crap that’s going on around a place. If you stand a little bit aloof, let the thoughts and information come to you, then you can see better than the men who are buried up to their armpits in the action.

  To give a perfect example of what I mean, I wrote a memo when we were doing another Jane Russell picture. I treated Jane like a problem in aeronautical design, and I’m not talking about the bra I designed for her in The Outlaw, I’m talking about another picture. It was Macao, a film I made for RKO about that place off the China coast. I wrote a memorandum to a man named Tevlin who was in charge of Jane’s breasts.

  Now you may think when you read it that it’s trivial that I should spend four pages discussing the shape of her nipples underneath her bra. But that’s what makes movies, that’s what catches the public eye, and if you’re dealing with a property like that, you’ve got to deal with it realistically.

  By that time Jane’s tits weren’t what they were cracked up to be. This was long after The Outlaw – she was a little older and she had begun to sag a bit. That’s natural. The human body doesn’t have struts, the pectoral muscles fortunately are not made of aluminum. One day I called Jane to my bungalow and asked her if she’d be kind enough to strip down to the waist, because I wanted to see for myself what kind of design job we had to run. She understood, and she did it. I looked at her from all angles and made a lot of notes. She was wonderfully patient. A lot of women wouldn’t have stood for it, but Jane was a pro.