Howard Hughes

by Clifford Irving

  To minimize this risk I had a little square chalked just in front of the door in exactly the right place. When someone came to visit me, I would make sure that the guard had him placed in the center of that square before I opened the door to admit him. In other words, that square was placed so that I could open the door the absolute minimum to allow him to come in. Once this happened with Charles Laughton came to see me. Laughton was a fat man, so I opened the door and it hit him in the belly. Knocked the wind right out of him. He went down to all fours. I had to help him up and apologize.

  Why didn’t you use something similar to a decompression chamber?

  Are you making fun of me, Clifford? As a matter of fact, I did that once. But people wouldn’t stand for it. That was in my bungalow in Las Vegas, years before I moved into the Desert Inn. I had a bungalow off the Strip, set well back into the desert. I also had a battery of ultra-violet ray machines set up in the entrance halls but people said it would give them cancer, and I finally had to drop it.

  And you object to the word phobia?

  There’s nothing phobic about a man taking care of his health. I’ve gotten through to the age of sixty-five, and for a man who’s suffered as much physical injury as I have, that’s a triumph. A man with my ailments who hadn’t cared for his body the way I have, and who let people push him around, would have been dead at the age of fifty.

  I mentioned to you that the typists on Romaine Street end elsewhere wore white gloves, and so did the people who came on plane trips with me. But one pair of white gloves wasn’t enough, I realized, especially for these people on the trips. They used two pair.

  At the same time?

  Yes. One pair, the one on top, was discarded when they got into the plane, at the top of the gangway, and the second pair which they wore during the trip, discarded when they left. And this way I got some measure of precaution against the hordes of germs that surround us.

  You mean everyone who flew with you had to go through this?

  Not everyone. Only the ones I didn’t know well, and people who were obviously dirty. I had ratings for people, Class A, B, C and D. A file card had to be consulted by my people who would arrange the meetings.

  I’m well aware that this attitude and my precautions leave me open to the charge of being insane. That accusation has been leveled at me for many years, and I’ll take this opportunity to refute it. I’m not insane, but I am eccentric. Eccentricity is often a sign of a superior intelligence. I’m not trying to say that I have a superior intelligence, because the truth is I don’t believe I do. My creative talents are limited to technical spheres. I’m a synthesizer, an enlightened opportunist. I’m a hard worker and I’m stubborn, and above all I’m a man of action. Any such man is eccentric by common standards.

  Ridiculing eccentricity is the sign of an inferior intelligence. You told me about your wife’s father, how he ordered food in restaurants – two French fried potatoes and six string beans. Now that was really eccentric, and the waiters probably thought he was crazy. That’s why they were waiters and he was a rich industrialist. Does your wife think he was crazy?

  She thinks he was a great man.

  Exactly. My point – and I think it’s of the deepest importance that I spell this out for you - is that my eccentricities are intelligent safeguards against the uncommon dangers of life. Every man would behave in a so-called peculiar manner – not necessarily my manner, but his own peculiar manner – if he had the courage.

  And the money.

  Correct. The money to indulge his wishes and to tell other people to go to hell if they don’t like it. That explains in a nutshell why I’m odd. My oddness is the essence of my individuality, which I can afford to express whereas others can’t or are too frightened to do so. And so the ones who can’t express themselves look at someone like me – what they know of me – and they say, ‘He’s nuts.’

  If you’re rich you can structure your life to suit your deepest personal tastes, without fear of the consequences. And any man’s personal tastes are – if he expresses them honestly – goddamn peculiar.

  Artists are the closest, in this sense, to a man like myself. They have a highly developed sense of their own individuality and they don’t mind telling the world to go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, and I don’t, either.

  You were saying that you rated people from A to D in terms of cleanliness. What did the ratings mean?

  Filthy, Dirty, Moderately Dirty, and Moderately Clean. Moderately Clean was Class A – that was the highest rating I would give.

  How many people got Class A ratings in your system?

  Very few. And there were other people, of course, who simply wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t wear the two sets of gloves. Too strong-minded.

  Where do you rate me?

  Look at your fingernails and make a guess.

  * * *

  When I started out in business, there were thousands of men far richer than I in this country. This proves, I believe, that it’s not true that the man with the most money always has the advantage. Not if he’s a poor business gambler. Then he’ll lose his shirt. You have to figure the odds, and when they’re in your favor you have to bet and bet hard. If you turn chicken, you’re going to lose. I’m sure these are not the high-sounding tales you read in the Madison Avenue magazines about how the mighty men in American industry make their deals. But take it from the horse’s mouth, that’s the way it happens.

  The coming thing in modern American business is the computer. Supposedly no decisions are made until all the data has been fed into the IBM 3600 or the Control Data monster or whatever is being used. But I know how these CEOs operate, and that computer is there like a court jester in the olden days – it’s there to amuse the executives and to back up their gut-level decisions. Any businessman worth his salt makes his decision first, based on his gambler’s instinct, and then assembles the necessary data to support his decision. And now, sometimes, just to satisfy his stockholders, he gets the bright boys who run the computers to feed all the data in and… well, you know the phrase: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ I heard someone say that ten million monkeys, working nonstop on a problem for a thousand years, could not make the same major mistake that a computer could make in one tenth of a second. In many respects the purpose of the computer is public relations.

  I don’t say that they’re not useful. My companies use them in all our operations, but we don’t use them to make decisions. Many of the finest businessmen I know had no more than high-school educations, and in many fields they were totally ignorant. They rose to the top of the business world because they were intelligent gamblers, able to act intuitively and swiftly, far more intelligently than any computer.

  Do you think if you hadn’t inherited Toolco, you’d still be the billionaire that you are today?

  Of course not. But I still would have become a pilot, and I would have turned my energies at some point toward aircraft design. I would have made a lot of money at it. That was built into my genetic makeup. I don’t know if I would have become a major figure – what I am now, in an odd sense – but I sure as hell would have created something of value.

  I’m a creator, and I’m proud of it. I consider myself a man much maligned, a human being who has made a lot of big splashes but has missed the mark. My own fault. Life is a struggle, and the tools we’ve got are our muscles, our brains, our imaginations, our will to achieve something, and our ability to sniff out danger – that last is a sixth sense which we share with animals. If you don’t use those tools wisely, and you fail, you have no one else to blame. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ I know that quote well. And not only underlings, but overlings who have missed the mark. In the darker moments, that’s how I see myself. If this book has any value, I hope it will have the value of showing such a man. You can’t live your life over again, so you might as well learn from it and make an example of it for the people who come after you.


  25

  Howard makes a permanent loan to Richard Nixon, and whispers in a Washington columnist’s ear.

  I’VE MENTIONED RICHARD NIXON’S name several times to you, and this is as good a time as any to tell the story of my involvement with him.

  I want to say at the outset that I have nothing against the man personally, and in no sense is it my intention to cut him out of the pack of politicians as a particular target. This just happens to be something that happened in my life, and therefore I feel the obligation to tell the tale.

  I’ve often believed that every man has the family he deserves, and Dick Nixon is no exception. He’s got the biggest jerk for a brother that you can imagine. Early in the 1950s Donald Nixon was running a glorified hamburger stand in the Nixons’ home town, Whittier, California. The restaurant featured the Nixonburger. That was nothing more than a hamburger, and not a very good one at that.

  Don Nixon would have done better running a soup kitchen for the Salvation Army, or any other nonprofit organization, because, Nixonburger and all, he was up over his ears in debt. His food suppliers were dunning him and he couldn’t even pay his light bills. In 1957, soon after Dick had been elected Vice-President under Eisenhower, Don, with this white elephant of a hamburger joint on his hands, needed $205,000 to bail himself out. And no bank or legitimate loan institution in its right mind was going to lend two hundred and five thousand United States dollars on a corner candy store operation like that.

  Dick Nixon would have given his brother the money, I’m sure, but he didn’t have a plugged nickel at that time. Politicians make money after they get elected, not before.

  It’s important to understand that I didn’t get wind of his brother being in trouble and make an offer to Nixon. I didn’t know who the hell his brother was, and I cared even less. Nixon specifically asked me for the money. Clark Clifford, my lawyer, the man who had worked for Truman when he was president, called from Washington on a secure phone and spelled out the situation. Dick Nixon needed money to save his brother’s neck and he wanted it from me.

  There was no shilly-shallying about this, nothing cute. It was a direct request for a loan, and it was also pretty clearly an indirect request that the loan be a permanent one.

  Why did he come to you?

  We had met before and he had me on his list for an emergency. This was the emergency. I had a number of things pending before government agencies at the time – I’ll get to those in a minute – and I figured $205,000 worth of juice ought to grease the skids. I agreed to provide the money.

  The only security the Nixon family had for the loan was a vacant lot owned by their mother in Whittier, California. They wanted to build a filling station there. As a matter of fact, I own that filling station right now. I had to take it over, much to my annoyance, because it’s a pain in the ass. A filling station has no place in the Hughes Empire. But at least I could gas up my car whenever I went to Whittier, and it didn’t cost me a nickel.

  I had to get this money to Donald Nixon sub rosa, because it wouldn’t do, naturally, for the papers to associate a Howard Hughes loan with Dick Nixon’s brother. They might think I was looking for favors from the government, especially since Dick was being widely called ‘Tricky Dick’ and had just barely saved his political skin when he was campaigning with Eisenhower in 1952. You way remember the famous Checkers speech that he made, when he had to explain why these big businessmen in California had him on their payroll at the same time he was a U.S. senator. That’s when he cried on television. I always thought he had an onion in his handkerchief.

  Anyhow, Noah Dietrich tried to kill the whole idea of the loan. Noah was a rockribbed Republican but he sensed that Nixon might be a little careless about covering up, and this thing could come out as easily as the campaign-contribution thing and we all would have a hard time explaining it the second time around.

  Noah was so firm about it that he convinced me it was a mistake.

  I said, ‘All right, but you’d better go talk to Nixon personally. Explain our position. I don’t need him as an enemy.’

  Noah went to Washington and saw Nixon. The appointment was in Nixon’s office, the vice-presidential suite. He and Noah had lunch together. Noah began to express his fears, but Nixon said that if any of it came out, well, tough titty, he could handle it. He’d been accused of worse things in his life. He said to Noah, ‘Don needs the money. I put my family ahead of my career.’

  He also dropped a little bombshell on me, via Noah. He said he wanted an additional $200,000, so that his brother could go into another business.

  Noah asked him what that business might be, and Nixon said, ‘I’ll work that out.’

  When Noah told him that he didn’t believe that Mr. Hughes would want to put up any more money than the sum originally agreed on, if even that, Nixon said, ‘Tell Mr. Hughes I’m going to be in U.S. politics for a long time, and there are a great many favors I can do for him over a great many years.’

  Noah reported this to me and said, ‘Don’t do it, Howard. He’s slippery.’

  ‘Yes, and loyal to his idiot brother, and thoroughly dishonest. I can use a man like that. We’ll give him the money.’

  We worked it out and eventually resorted to various methods to get the money to Don Nixon. The full four hundred thousand. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the Brits say.

  What did Nixon do for you?

  The most important thing was a problem with the CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board. They wouldn’t let TWA deal directly with Toolco, because I owned them both. That squabble had been going on for twelve years and caused me no end of aggravation. A couple of weeks after the loan was made, the CAB lifted that restriction.

  Did you specifically ask Nixon to remove the restriction?

  I didn’t ask Nixon anything. I just saw that a memo with a short list of my problems appeared on his desk. The other important item was that Toolco was involved in an anti-trust suit from the Justice Department. That was settled by a consent decree. And then we had another domestic route granted to TWA, and also we were allowed to stop in Manila on our Far Eastern flights.

  In other words, I got my money’s worth. About that time Hughes Aircraft received a number of defence contracts, but that didn’t really have anything to do with it because the stuff we were turning out was of such superior quality that we would have got those contracts anyhow. Of course, if I’d changed my mind about the loan the way Noah wanted me to – who knows what would have happened? There might have been trouble.

  Be that as it may, we covered up pretty well. But when you’re dealing with Nixons, with second-rate minds who haven’t got the brains to hire better than second-rate minds to work for them – there’s no covering up. When someone craps on the table you can’t wipe his ass for him. I mean it’s too late – you can wipe his ass for him but it doesn’t solve the problem. The pile of crap is still there.

  We even tried to haul that jerk Don out of the hole he’d dug for himself and show him how to run a restaurant. We set up a committee with Pat DiCicco in charge. Pat had the feeding contract for Hughes Aircraft – brought in box lunches for the guys on the assembly line. He was supposed to know something about the restaurant business.

  But Don Nixon didn’t like to deal with committees. I can’t blame him for that, although in this case it might have saved his bacon, or his Nixonburger, because the restaurant went out of business a couple of months after the committee pulled out.

  Meanwhile, of course, we had given him the four hundred and five thousand. I hadn’t dared to make it a direct loan. Most of it I passed it to him through a Los Angeles law firm, Waters and Arditto, which I used at the time. It was convenient, because Waters was a friend of Dick Nixon’s – there was some tie-in through their wives. The money was sent to Jim Arditto, who did some work for my companies, and had actually taken care of the arrangements for me to get married to Jean in Nevada. And Arditto turned the four hundred grand over to Don Nixon’s mother, who passed
it along to Don. In return for this, Hannah Nixon, the mother, gave us a mortgage on the gas station, as collateral for the loan, and agreed to pay a monthly mortgage payment of a few hundred dollars. But the lot and gas station were worth, at best, about forty thousand dollars.

  Someone had to receive that mortgage payment. We didn’t want it to be Toolco, so the mortgage was transferred to an accountant in Waters’ office, a guy named Philip Reiner. He was a dummy. I don’t mean he was stupid. I mean he was a dummy for Toolco – he held the trust deed on the property in Whittier.

  Reiner was a registered Democrat. Nobody seemed to think that mattered at the time, and of course I knew nothing about these details. But bear that fact in mind – he was a Democrat, and I don’t think he made any secret of it.

  Reiner received the rent checks, and kept them.

  One summer day in 1960, three years later, while Nixon was just starting to campaign against Jack Kennedy for the presidency of the United States, an auditor going over the books down at Toolco in Houston found that $205,000 figure standing there all by itself, very lonely, on one page. The other $200,000, fortunately, came from an offshore source, a Mexican corporation that had a bank account in the Cayman Islands. No one in Toolco knew about that.

  But the two hundred five thousand had been there on our books for three years and the auditor wanted to know what it was all about. It passed along up the line and it got to Arditto’s office in Los Angeles. Arditto figured that the men in Houston were asking him to account for the rent money. He called in Philip Reiner, who been pocketing the few hundred bucks a month rent – by then the total was about ten thousand dollars. Peanuts. But not peanuts to the auditor at Toolco. And certainly the two hundred and five thousand on the books, which nobody could really account for, wasn’t peanuts.