Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  I finally cured myself of it. With Terry and Lana and the others, I just saw them from time to time and went to bed with them rarely. It was reassuring to know they were there and that they liked me, but I didn’t do it out of deep need. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I’m sure it’s common to most men. Only most men never see what they’re doing. Fortunately I did, after a while.

  And even then I made mistakes. Just about that time some actress I was going out with got pregnant. It’s probably the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten a woman pregnant, and I was using every possible precaution and so was she. But the superficial evidence pointed to the fact that it was my responsibility. Neither of us wanted the child and I didn’t want to get married to her. That was out of the question. And so I got in touch with Verne Mason and he took her over to a clinic in France for an abortion. They flew TWA, of course.

  I suppose I’m a little bitter about it because I did feel that this girl was trying to trap me into marrying her. I don’t trust women – that’s a fact, sad to say – and I have trouble communicating with them. I have the disquieting notion that the female of our species is as foreign to the male as a lioness is to a bull moose. I’ve never understood women. I don’t even understand my own involvement with them, and my need for it. There are times when I felt that I was punishing myself – in all instances but one. If you knew what I’d been through, you’d understand.

  Who’s this other person you talk about? I have a feeling there was someone else in your life besides your two wives.

  You’re badgering me to death and I see you’ll never let up, so we better get this out of the way.

  I’ve revealed more to you than I have to anybody for a long time. I’ve opened up these windows to my past – not only for you, but for myself. It’s strange. My original idea in this whole thing was to give you my ideas and views, to talk about the present, and I find myself going deeper and deeper instead into the past. Oddly enough, I see myself sometimes with your eyes. You have very hard eyes sometimes. Well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s been a very strange experience, this telling the story of my life. Not always so good for me, though. I think sometimes you take advantage of me, try to make me the donkey. You’ve picked that up. And I don’t guard against you, which I should do.

  But we’re at a critical point. I don’t want to sound poetic, but I’m peering in at a window that I’ve kept locked for many years. So let’s open it.

  I’ve told you about Billie Dove, the woman I loved in Hollywood in the early Thirties. Billie and I very likely would have married, and almost did, but for a horrible thing that happened, which I suppose, has colored my relationships with women ever since. What you call my ‘germ phobia’ may stem in great part from what happened to me with Billie Dove.

  She gave me the clap.

  At that time it was not a laughing matter. This was before penicillin, and I went through the agonies of the damned. I thought my pecker would fall off every time I took a piss. While that creature, who gave me her social disease, walked around as though nothing had happened. You have no idea what lengths I had gone to for this woman, what favors I had done her. She and her husband, Irving Willatt, were estranged, and I paid him $325,000 in cash, in thousand-dollar bills, to get out of her life, to open the way for us –

  Now, wait a minute. Let’s start at the beginning.

  Well, the beginning – what is the beginning? The classic movie plot. Boy meets girl, boy buys off husband, boy gets clap from girl, boy leaves girl. I don’t mean to be flippant – I’m not telling you this to provoke laughter. You’re leading me into that. This was a serious matter for me, and don’t be misled by my temporary jocularity.

  I didn’t know where Billie got the clap. I never did find out. But it terrified me, as well as making me sick. First of all I had to undergo a nasty period of treatment. This was in Hollywood, in 1931. I was twenty-five years old, a man with a limited sexual experience. I was in love, and I took sex very seriously. I still had the deepest idealism regarding women. Billie shattered that, and it was a long time before I entertained serious thoughts about a woman again.

  Billie and I would certainly have been married if it weren’t for my getting sick that way. That terrified me. When I learned what I had, I went through my house – we were practically living together on Muirfield Road – and I gathered all my clothes, everything I owned, even including the towels and the rugs from the bathroom floor, and I packed it all into burlap bags, like mail bags, and I gave them all to Noah Dietrich and I told him to burn them. Burn everything! Including the shirt off my back. I found out later he gave it all to the Salvation Army.

  I didn’t leave the house for days. I ordered a fresh supply of sheets and towels until the rooms were fumigated. Then I had some clothes brought in to me and started life over again. The delivery people came to the door to deliver the clothes and sheets – I was stark naked, had to hide down behind a chair to cover myself and hand them the money for the sheets and things.

  Billie then went on to have an affair with George Raft, who was in all those gangster movies. I always wondered if she passed the disease along to him. He might have had her rubbed out.

  You can imagine, having corrupted myself in such a way that I would actually pay money for her, to have had this other thing happen to me, crushed me for years. It almost emasculated me.

  After that I never made love to a woman without using a minimum of two contraceptives. And even then I felt unsafe. I had worshipped Billie, I had never dreamed that she could be carrying such a disease. After that I felt: what woman is exempt?

  My sexual needs were never very strong – I had the reputation of being a ladies man, but it was undeserved. I married Ella, and that didn’t work out. I made a certain show out of being a ladies man, because I thought that was what the world expected of me. I suppose I was trying to follow in my father’s footsteps, if you want to put it simply – something I could never do. Very often I would take out a woman, and always a beautiful woman, and when the time came to perform, I felt I couldn’t. I’m not trying to say to you that I was impotent. I wasn’t at all. If I got into bed with a woman I did what had to be done, what she wanted.

  But I remember, time after time, I would drive someone home and she’d say, ‘Aren’t you coming in for a cup of coffee?’ – and I had a vision of myself being unable to perform or getting bored and I would almost always say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I have a business appointment. You know I keep peculiar hours.’

  Or I would arrange when I was out with a girl that a telephone call would come to me just before midnight, just about the time we were supposed to leave the club, wherever we were, saying my presence was urgently needed somewhere else.

  I look back on it now, from the vantage point of sixty-five years, when such problems no longer plague me, and I have nothing but pity for myself as a young man. Pity because of the problem that I had and because the image of me that people had, even my closest friends, was so different, that I didn’t dare tell anyone. How could I go to Glen Odekirk or Jack Frye or Bob Gross, men who loved me and would have done almost anything for me – and say, ‘I’m afraid to go to bed with a woman for fear that I can’t perform or that I’ll be bored?’ I didn’t have the vocabulary for that, and I lived with this ridiculous feeling of shame. I lived a terrible life.

  Part of this was this Texas thing we’ve spoken about, and which still very much ruled my thinking. I thought of myself as a Texan, Big Hard’s son. Still today, to come from Texas, to be a Texan, you’re supposed to be a big-balled son of a bitch. And frankly, that wasn’t me.

  Despite my terrible disappointment with Dr. Schweitzer, that I never got through to the man, and that he brushed me aside like some insignificant creature from out of the bush, I still felt that there were men in this world who had put their feet on the right path early in their lives and never left it. They were following a clearly marked path through the jungle that human life resembles.
/>   I knew that I had my share of achievements, but when I added up everything I had done, I could see no focus. I’m talking about the early 1950s, when I was a man in my late forties. I could see I was not on a clear track that progressed from one stage of development to another. It was what seized my imagination at the time, and yet when I analyzed it in rare moments of introspection, I could see no progression. And when you can’t see progression in your own life, no clearcut advance from one goal to another, leading to major goals, then you can’t see your Self, which is blindness. That sort of blindness is worse than any kind of deafness.

  And then I found the man I believed I was looking for.

  24

  Howard flies to Sun Valley under a pseudonym, swims naked in the Caribbean with Ernest Hemingway, is invited to buy Cuba, and contemplates ending his life.

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND I had met briefly in Hollywood when I was making movies. It was hardly more than an introduction at a party in some bungalow in that crazy place he was living, the Garden of Allah. But Hemingway impressed me, and I thought I would like to see him again. I felt the tremendous force of his personality more than even the power of his work, although I had read and admired his novels very deeply, especially The Sun Also Rises.

  The occasion arose, just after the war, sometime in the winter of 1948, when I went out to look over Sun Valley, Idaho, with the idea in mind of buying it and making it into a popular resort area. I flew out there in my bomber, a converted B-25. I knew Ernest was there with his family and he was hunting, and so I found out where he was living. I did something wholly uncharacteristic. I marched right up to his door, and knocked on it. He opened it.

  I hadn’t gone out to Sun Valley as Howard Hughes. Traveling under the name of Howard Hughes is the kiss of death. The people who owned Sun Valley would have jacked the price up fifty percent just on that knowledge alone. I was using the name Tom Garden. I knew a Tom Garden very briefly once. I met him out in Ethiopia in 1946. He was a young Englishman who wanted to go exploring in the Danakil part of the country. A lot of really savage tribes in that neck of the woods, and the emperor, or the court, or whoever gave such permissions, wouldn’t give it to him. But he went anyhow, and he was never heard of again.

  I don’t want to convey any idea that I felt any kinship of any sort with this wanderer who vanished. But the story had impressed itself on me, so that was the name I gave to Ernest Hemingway in Sun Valley when he opened the door.

  I must say I was struck by his reception. I myself – well, the occasion would never arise where some stranger would come up and knock on my door. First of all, nobody knows where my door is. Second, if they do know, there’s a guard out there, a guard outside and a guard inside. It would certainly never occur to me to open the door myself.

  But there Ernest came out to the door, looking like a middle-aged tramp, wearing beat-up corduroy trousers and a lumberjack shirt open nearly to the waist. Come to think of it, I was not a hell of a lot more respectable. It was winter and I had on a couple of old sweaters.

  I introduced myself and Ernest said, ‘Come in and have a drink, Tom.’

  I came in, excused myself from the drink because I don’t drink, and we talked for a while. He immediately showed an interest in who I was and why I was there. Understand, I passed myself off as a member of a real estate group in California that was interested in Sun Valley. I didn’t say that I personally, even as Tom Garden, was going to buy it, but I suppose no matter how you dress, the smell of money doesn’t leave your skin. And Ernest cottoned on very quickly to the idea that I was rich, and he was fascinated by rich people. He took a great interest in my proposal for the valley and the surrounding area, asked me all sorts of intelligent and perceptive questions about how I was going to go about it.

  The extraordinary thing is that I’d been in his house no more than fifteen minutes, and I was sitting in an armchair and talking as freely and easily as I’d talked with any man in my whole life. Writers often give you this feeling – it may be genuine, it may be phoney – you tell me – but they give you the feeling they’re interested in you, and in what makes you tick.

  But Ernest had that quality of making you feel immediately at home. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours. We talked about practical things mostly, more than about either of us personally. We talked about them in a very straightforward way that I wasn’t used to, except with pilots.

  The thing is, at the time, I didn’t want anything from Ernest and he didn’t want anything from me. I had read a couple of his books, but I hadn’t dropped in to see him as a writer. It was more that I had in mind a certain image of Ernest Hemingway as a person who had gone through adventures and rough experiences, and he’d had a dangerous time of it and he’d come out of it whole, tough. Toughened, I mean. Not only did I respect him for that, but I was fascinated, and I wanted to know how and why.

  We spent a couple of hours talking, and I invited him to take a spin with me in my B-25 next day, which he was delighted to do. The fact that I had my own bomber tickled him pink.

  I told him I was doing a geographical survey on this flight. The purpose was just to get an over-all picture for myself of the valley and its potential. I flew around, in and out, through the canyons of Idaho. Ernest was in the co-pilot’s seat, and asked me a hell of a lot of questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it. That was a routine flight for me, so I could fly and answer his questions at the same time. He told me afterward that it was one of the most lucid and cogent explanations of flying that he’d ever heard.

  And not only that – he couldn’t get over the fact that I could fly and look around and maneuver and at the same time maintain a running conversation with him about anything in the world. That really impressed him. I was so involved after a while, however, with what I was looking for, that I broke off the conversation and just concentrated on flying. The flight was a bit low, I suppose, and looking back on it now, dangerous. The wingtips were not too far from the canyon walls a couple of times. This was no Cessna 180, this was a B-25 bomber.

  Ernest loved all that. On the way back he turned to me – there was a touch of awe in his voice – and he said, ‘Tom, you’re a hot pilot.’

  ‘You better believe it,’ I said. I wasn’t shy about my flying skills.

  I left soon after that. We saw one another briefly the following day, and then I was off – had to go. But it was a rich encounter. Ernest wanted to write to me about something, as a matter of fact, but I knew I wouldn’t answer, and I didn’t want to create that sort of situation, and so I told him some story that we were moving offices, and as soon as I had an address I would write him. It was a lot easier for me to get in touch with him than for him to get in touch with me.

  I didn’t see him again for nearly nine years. It wasn’t a matter of deliberate waiting. I was so embroiled in affairs, I had no chance. Sort of like a drowning man – I’d draw my head up out of the water and I could see Ernest along the shore from time to time, but I was sucked down again before I could even call out to him. And he was off on his own affairs in Europe, Africa, Key West, and Cuba.

  Cuba, as a matter of fact, is where I saw him the second time.

  When you met him that first time, how did you get along with him politically? Did you know he’d been involved in the Spanish Civil War on the Loyalist side?

  Except for that brief anticommunist phase of mine in Hollywood, I’ve never been a political person. I’ve only voted twice in my life, and that was for Franklin Roosevelt, and it was a long time ago. I’ve always made sure that I had members of both parties on my payroll, so that no matter who won, Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft didn’t lose.

  During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, I was involved in my flights and designing airplanes and I was about as apolitical as you could get. Moreover, from what I could gather, politics was never Ernest’s major interest, either. Strictly secondary. I’ve always had the feeling he went to Spain because there was a war on and he wan
ted to see men in action. That turned him on. Naturally his sympathies were with the Loyalists rather than with the Fascist side, because he was that kind of man. He had a sense of justice and a love for common people.

  But he also had an obsession with death and how men faced it. He asked me a great many questions in later years about my accidents, how I had felt about them, and I answered to the best of my ability. He was the only man I ever knew who was almost as banged up physically – broken bones, and wounds – as I was. I often wondered if he ever used that stuff I told him in any of his books, or whether there’s some unpublished novel of his that has quotes from me or some incident from my life in it, because later on his questions were endless, about how I felt in the various crashes, and how I felt when a plane was in trouble. Danger made him feel like a bigger person. That’s why he liked that ride in the B-25 so much.

  Anyway, nine years later, in 1954, I was in Florida, where I had planned to build my own jet aircraft factory. I was already thinking of a short take-off and landing jet – the STOL – combined with an element of vertical take-off, what’s now called a VTOL. I was looking ahead to the future and intended to sell the first twenty-five planes to TWA – that is, to myself. Del Webb and I got together on it, but it fell through. And on the spur of the moment, that time in Palm Beach – I knew Ernest was in Cuba – I hopped over from Miami to Havana on a commercial flight.

  First I went to the Floridita, that famous bar downtown, because I knew he spent a lot of time there, but he wasn’t there. It was empty at that hour of the afternoon.

  So I took a taxi out to the finca. I didn’t remember the name of the finca, didn’t even know it was called a finca then. I just said to the cab driver, ‘Hemingway,’ and he said, ‘Ah, Papa!’

  I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want Papa. I want Hemingway.’