So I went. Not that time, but the next time. But it didn’t work out, as I’ve told you.
On other occasions I rented a house on the outskirts of Oaxaca, in Zapotec Indian country in southern Mexico. That’s the place where we spent the most times together. She took me to all the Indian ruins and gave me a crash course not only in pre-Columbian history but in archeology. In fact, it was to Oaxaca that she brought her children to meet me for the first time, although it was done very discreetly. She stayed in a hotel in town with the children. I was in the bungalow and she came to see me there. But she wanted me to meet the kids. She felt that our relationship was important enough that I couldn’t understand her unless I knew her children and how she felt about them.
I went skiing with her once. She taught me. I fell down more times than I cared to, so I never became a real skier. I’ve never been fond of the snow or cold weather, but I went for many walks with her in the mountains. That was in Sun Valley. We kidded around, threw snowballs, and I was able to relax with her more than I had ever in my life with a woman. She reminded me of Ruth Elder. She was very much like Ruth, in the sense that she was interested in many of the same things I was interested in, and if she knew something I didn’t know she wasn’t overbearing or superior about it. In fact her belief, and mine too, is that the basis for any marriage is friendship of equals. Partnership. Sharing of knowledge.
Did you ever discuss with her the possibility of marriage?
It was out of the question. I came to the belief that the success of the relationship was based on the fact that we weren’t married and only saw each other on rare occasions. After I married Jean, I wasn’t free. And Helga was never free. Her husband would never have granted her a divorce. I didn’t mean to imply that she hated her husband. They were friendly, just incompatible. He smoked in bed, which is a disgusting habit – got the ashes all over the sheets, smelled up the house. And he resented her intelligence. He wanted to be in command and feel superior.
Then too, I often felt that she really didn’t want to get divorced, and if I’d suddenly said to her, ‘Helga, get rid of that dumb son of a bitch and marry me,’ she would have run for the hills. Because I would have been twice as difficult a husband as the one she was stuck with, even if I don’t smoke in bed. I’m no bargain in the husband department. Ask Jean.
I don’t have to. I believe you. Did her husband ever suspect that she was seeing you?
He knew that she was seeing somebody but I’m sure she never told him who. The kids found out after a while who I really was – you can’t keep children in the dark for too long a time, they have better noses for ferreting out mysteries than adults do. This wasn’t serious at first but unfortunately the kids were old enough to be, well, I’ll call it thrilled at the idea that Mommy was seeing someone like me – and also, unfortunately, not old enough to keep their mouths shut. They gabbed and the word got around, at least in a limited circle of people. I think finally what kept it from being accepted as the truth was that everybody believed I was a total recluse and incapable of having a real relationship with a female of the species. Sometimes it pays to be a professional eccentric. But I would never have been surprised in those years to pick up a newspaper and see some gossip columnist asking, ‘Who is Howard Hughes’s new secret love?’ or some sort of maudlin romantic crap like that. Thank God, it never happened. Helga herself was a completely discreet woman. She could arrange things on the q.t. almost as well as I could. Women often have that knack. If you care for a woman you call it discreet, if you can’t stand her you call it sly. Most judgments in life depend on where you stand and what mood you’re in when you make them.
Are you still seeing Helga?
If you don’t mind, I’ll save that story for its proper chronological place in this narrative – or maybe I won’t tell you at all. A little mystery has its place in every man’s life, don’t you think?
Cut me a little slack on this one. We’ll see.
29
Howard buys the French Impressionists, declines to show up in court, and receives the largest personal check in history.
IN THE TWA case they’d been trying to subpoena me for six months but they hadn’t been able to find me. I know how to vanish, I’ve had decades to practice. For the most part I was playing golf in Hawaii or traveling with Helga, both activities under another name.
We went to Paris. Helga took me to all the art museums and I developed a taste for the Impressionists. I even bought a dozen Monet, Degas, and Renoir oils, not because I thought they’d go up in value, although I suspect they will, but because I really liked them. I decided not to hang them anywhere – I was sure someone would get wind of it and try to steal them – so I wrapped them up in a lot of cardboard and paper and crated them and stored them in a locker I rented in Orange County, California. They’re not even in my name. I arranged for a bank to pay the rental forever, and I padlocked the storage locker, and I have the key. If I died tomorrow, no one would know what lock that key fit, and those paintings would sit there forever.
You’d better do something about that. You could be hit by a bus, and the world would lose a dozen important paintings.
Yes, I will. Remind me, will you?
Anyway, during that period when I was dodging the lawsuit, and Jean and I had separated, Helga and I rented a little house in France, in a village just outside of Aix-en-Provence. I set out to learn French. It’s one of the few things in my life I’ve tried hard to do where I failed miserably. One of the others is to become friendly with French people. They’re charming, and often cultured, but for a man like me they’re Martians. And, although they respect my eccentricity, in other respects they regard me as someone from Pluto.
Meanwhile the flood of subpoenas mounted, demanding my presence in court, and eventually I couldn’t ignore them. From Marseilles I flew back to the States and conferred with my lawyers. It was a dollars and cents proposition in many ways. If I appeared I might be able to win the case, or more probably the judgment against me could have been reduced to ten or twenty million dollars. As it was, I knew that if I didn’t appear it would cost me well over one hundred and forty million.
But at that point I rose to the occasion. I felt I had demeaned myself so much by this enormous involvement with the case, and with the fight for control of the airline, that I couldn’t go any further without destroying myself. There was something in me, thank God, that really fought against this self-destructive process that had been the theme of my whole life, and I clung to that something like a drowning man clings to a plank.
When it came time, when I was subpoenaed, the horror of it finally got to me. I made a vow then that I would not only not go into that court, but never go into any court again in my life, either to defend myself or to attack anyone else.
I was fed up with the niggling, mean, unimaginative aspects of the business world. But I had visions of worthwhile things to be done in that world. There was nothing small-minded and petty about those visions, including what I tried to do in Las Vegas. But I’ll get to that in its proper place.
The upshot of the TWA lawsuit, however, was that they got a default judgment against me for $137 million and they threw out my countersuit. It was a judgment with treble damages.
A bond was put up by Toolco. The issue is still in the courts, and it’ll probably stay there as long as I’m alive. I don’t need the money, but those bastards aren’t going to get their hands on it. I’ve got that money earmarked for a nobler purpose.
The lawsuit, in any case, was totally unjustifiable. Of course they did their damndest to justify it. Ernest Breech made a public statement, just the sort of thing you would expect him to say, to the effect that as the new president of TWA he had an obligation to the stockholders and to the people who worked for the airline to sue me. He felt that was a cardinal principle of American business – the obligation to the stockholders to sue. It was a lot of doubletalk, because he forgot to mention that I was the principal stockholder and h
e was suing me with my own money.
After I went through the horrors of that lawsuit and the countersuit and the demands that I appear in court, I was totally fed up. I washed my hands of the whole thing.
But you held the stock.
I still liked TWA as an investment, and I liked it until 1966, when I sold it. Everyone has written that Ernie Breech and Charlie Tillinghast, who followed him, did such a great job of managing the airline and therefore made my fortune, or part of it. That’s a lot of crap. Tillinghast did do a good job of managing the airline, but that’s no more than you expect of the president of an airline, and the years between 1960 and 1966, when I was relatively inactive in TWA, using my weight here and there and holding the stock, were boom years in the American economy. Everyone prospered. I fail to see why such great credit should be given to Tillinghast and why everyone should demean me. If I had been running the airline, it would have prospered in exactly the same way, or maybe even better. They were also boom years in the stock market. That was the big bull market – with the exception of the 1962 drop it was just up, up, and away, until the spring of 1966.
I had taken my licking in the stock market back in 1929, just like everyone else, and after that I took the market a little more seriously. On my payroll I had what’s called a technical analyst. A technical analyst doesn’t just look at the value of a company. He looks at the movement and internal conditions of the market as a whole, and he looks at the movement of an individual stock, and he says, based on the price-and-volume movements of that stock, ‘It’s going to go up, or it’s going to go down.’ He doesn’t care whether it’s TWA flying around the world or whether it’s some company in Dogpatch that makes toothpicks. That toothpick company – if the movement of their stock is healthy, then it’s a buy. And if the price-and-volume dynamics of a stock like Xerox is poor, then no matter how good the company’s prospects look, then it’s a sell.
At the end of ’65 and the beginning of ’66, if you were at all aware of the internal condition of the stock market, you knew it was going to fall on its ass. In my view the market is a law unto itself. Stocks are worth only what people will pay for then. There are many old sayings about this: ‘Don’t fight the tape,’ and so forth – meaning that if you buy a stock and that stock goes down, then you were wrong to buy it, despite the fact that everything may look good for that company and you can’t understand why the price of the stock should sag. The fact that you can’t understand it doesn’t mean a thing, except that you can’t understand it. I once had a talk with Bernard Baruch about this and he disagreed with me. But I’ve made a lot more money out of the market than Baruch ever did. And with him it was a full-time occupation.
In the beginning of 1966, people on the inside and the banks who fix the prime rate of interest knew that the market was headed for a terrific drop. And I knew it, too. Every single technical indicator confirmed it. That’s when I decided to sell. Moreover I had other uses for the money. I didn’t see any sense in it just sitting there in stock certificates when I had already formed a plan – more than a plan, a vision – about the Las Vegas area, for which I needed cash. I’d been thinking about this for several years already. So, to put things as simply as possible, I decided to sell out my block of TWA.
It was the second largest underwriting in history. Merrill Lynch did the job for me, palmed off a lot of the business on other people, spread it around and did a very competent job. I have to give them full credit for that.
Nobody knew whether the fact that I was dumping was of any significance. They could have decided that I knew something that other people didn’t know – and the stock would have plummeted.
Or, as in fact happened, they could have decided that this was a tremendous buying opportunity. TWA had been virtually a privately-held corporation until then. I owned seventy-eight percent of the stock. Wall Street banged the drum that this was a great opportunity for the American public to have a share in a company that had previously been closed to them. The stockbuying public and the mutual funds liked that idea. They came running like chickens to a bag of corn. They bought. An example of mass stupidity.
They bought at $86 a share, which was just about the top, the all-time top, for the stock. The underwriters and Merrill Lynch got their cut out of it, you can be sure of that. They never lose. Merrill Lynch made more than $3 million, and there was another fifteen or sixteen million that went to other brokerage houses and all those other guys who dip their fingers in the pie. You know those gravestone ads – this was one of the longest in history, and some very fine firms were associated with it.
The check was placed in my hands for something like $566 million, which was the largest check ever issued to an individual, to my knowledge. I packed the bundles of cash in my suitcase and flew to Las Vegas.
You took that much cash with you?
No, no, that’s just a figure of speech. I rarely have more than a five-dollar bill in my wallet. I didn’t have enough money on me the other night to pay you that bet on the baseball game, did I? I’m cash-poor, I’ve told you that.
30
Howard invades Las Vegas, paces Hitler’s carpet, insults Frank Sinatra, fights for the SST, and finds out that he’s been kidnapped.
IN 1965, AS the TWA debacle was winding down, I moved my center of operations to Las Vegas, Nevada. For reasons I’ve never been able to understand, that move, and my residence there, captured the attention of the media more than anything else I’ve ever done, including breaking all those transcontinental and round-the-world air speed records. In the most recent years of my life I’ve received such an extraordinary amount of publicity that if you’d been reading the newspapers and watching television you would have thought I was setting up a separate kingdom in the state of Nevada with the Desert Inn Hotel as its capital.
When I bought a dinky little airline like Air West and changed it to Hughes Air, the business world behaved as though I were trying to take over Pan Am and United Airlines rolled into one. When I tried to get control of ABC you would have thought, if you subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, that the Russians and the Chinese were infiltrating the entire U.S. television industry.
And yet, paradoxically, my business life in recent years – and that includes the Nevada operation, which involved an expenditure of close to a billion dollars – was of little interest to me. Because these last years have been a period in my life when, for the first time – up to a point – I was able to let my business operations grow by themselves, so that I could do what I wanted to do, quietly and anonymously, in my private affairs.
I say ‘up to a point’ because of course I couldn’t just abandon the habits of a lifetime and keep my hands off enterprises that had a far-reaching purpose – and into which, incidentally I’d sunk a good part of my fortune. And there were times, I’m sorry to say, when I got involved right up to my eyeballs and beyond. I tried to take over the American Broadcasting Company in 1968, with a tender offer through Toolco for a controlling interest in the stock, about two million shares, but ABC management opposed me. It was the same old story – I was going to do the company irreparable harm. Get the logic of this. The stock was selling for about $58 a share before I made the offer. I offered $74 a share. Naturally the stock jumped to over seventy. That’s what they call ‘irreparable harm.’ They ran ads begging their stockholders to turn me down, and I came up 400,000 shares short.
With that, and other endeavors, I had to do a hell of a lot of organizing, because once I’d fired Noah Dietrich I was alone up there on the top of a pretty big heap. And then came the plunge into Las Vegas.
How did you manage to keep your affairs in order with your right-hand man gone?
Call him my left-hand man. I was always my own right-hand man. But I have to admit that it was a problem. The first person I turned to was Bob Gross. I tried to get him to take over the stewardship, I guess you’d call it, of the Hughes empire. He was still president of Lockheed. He didn’t want to give that up.
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br /> And in 1961 he died, which was a terrible blow for me because he was the best friend I’ve ever had since my youth. I’m not being egoistic when I say it was a blow for me. For Bob it was simply a quick finish.
When you’re alive you fear death, but when you’re dead, you’re dead and you don’t know a goddamn thing about it. I never feel sorry for anyone who dies. I feel sorry for the ones they leave behind and, all too often, alone. I mourn, if I ever mourn, for the living. They suffer. The dead just decompose.
I was no stranger to Las Vegas. The first time I went there was just after I’d gone on a little riding trip in Death Valley with Ruth Elder, my pilot pal. That was around 1930. We’d been away for a long weekend and ridden out into the desert, under a blue sky without a single cloud, although it was baking hot. Then we had an accident. Ruth’s horse was bitten by a rattlesnake, and panicked. Ruth held on, she was an excellent horsewoman, but the poison went through that horse like crap through a goose. He fell dead before he’d gone a hundred yards. Ruth landed clear, but that kind of took the bloom off the day, and we left Death Valley.
We spent the night in Las Vegas – my first sight of the town, which was just a pimple in the desert, with probably not more than five thousand people living there. Gambling was illegal. There were some tinhorn joints downtown but no one in his right mind would go in there.
Later I visited again, flying out from Hollywood. I flew over the whole state of Nevada ten or fifteen times. Every time I looked down I’d say, ‘What the hell is that? That wasn’t there before!’ The towns seemed to be leaking out from the center – Las Vegas in particular. And I got interested in it. First of all, I liked clean, dry desert air. Germs can’t live well, I thought, in that kind of air.
Howard Hughes Page 38