by Sam Moffie
“Frightening,” Powell answered.
“Can you imagine if my buddy Joe Kennedy was the only one running Hollywood?” Hughes asked sarcastically, because he loathed Joe Kennedy.
“Yeah. Nothing but movies starring Gloria Swanson,” Powell said, knowing full well his boss’ feelings toward Joe Kennedy.
“And the movies will all be about Irish politicians, Irish cops and Irish gangsters. Of course all would have Bostonian accents,” Hughes added.
“I see your point,” Powell said.
“Monopolies in Hollywood would be very bad. However in politics, it is far worse,” Hughes said.
“We don’t have any monopolies in politics. We have a very strong two-party political system,” Powell said.
“No we do not. It is really one party — the party in power, which is very dangerous and getting worse each day,” Hughes told Powell.
“But Republicans and Democrats are so different on so many issues,” Powell pointed out.
“Don’t be naïve, Dick. That’s all a game to keep everyone focused on what the politicians are not doing. The only place that doesn’t have a total monopoly gripping it yet is the marketplace of business. Although that, too, changes more each day — because politicians are teaming up with certain industries to create monopolies that favor each other and screw everyone else. This gives me a lot of stress.”
“You said ‘yet,’ Howard,” Powell said.
“I see the handwriting on the wall. I have always been very good at reading it. That’s why I’m so rich. We’re entering a new dawn of government and certain businesses having incestuous relationships that will ruin it for everyone,” Hughes said.
“So boss, how do you deal with your stress?” Powell asked the richest man in the world.
Howard Hughes was a routine junkie. Relieving his stress was no exception to this rule.
Howard Hughes had set up a three-step routine with himself to deal with defeating stress. He had set it to memory a very long time ago. First, he would do a bit of cleaning; if he happened to be in his main office, he might start in the top drawer of his desk. He would empty it out onto the top of his desk and reorganize everything in it, after cleaning the inside of the drawer with a solution that was developed for only him by one of his company’s new-product development teams. If he happened to be at home dealing with his stress — he would always start in the master bathroom. He would zero in on the combination shower-bath enclosure, wielding a very fine toothbrush and start on the grout, again using a cleaning solution developed for only him by one of his company’s new-product development teams. If he happened to be in a hotel room, he would strip the bed of all sheets and blankets and turn the mattress over. He would then call room service and ask for replacement sheets and blankets and he would then remake the bed and fluff up the pillows.
Hughes’ second step was that of exercising. Hughes didn’t use weights. He was a disciple of isometric exercising. A workout that traced its routes back to yoga and kung fu. Isometric was pure Howard Hughes — total concentration of a muscle without any movement to a joint. It helped that Hughes got all his instructions from his own personal trainer — Jack LaLanne — who was a legend in nutrition and exercising. Since Howard’s accident, LaLanne had been helping him gain strength.
Jack started Howard out on a device that LaLanne called the Glamour Stretcher. It was a band that Howard used to stretch the parts of his body that had been hurt the most in the crash. LaLanne wanted Howard to be very limber before Howard began his routine. Howard would use the Glamour Stretcher first and foremost, and stretch his body to make it as loose as possible before he began. Then came push-ups. Howard’s push-ups were done by making his back rigid and pushing up and down from his toes and forearms. He followed this up with chin-ups. He had the luxury of one of his engineer’s helping him design a portable chin-up bar that he could take with him anywhere. Then he did some squats. For this, all he needed was a wall to lean against. He put his hands on his hips and squatted very slowly. His next exercise was all about building up his arms. He would grasp his hands and push as hard as he could — left hand and arm versus right hand and arm. His last exercise was sit ups. Here he would slide his feet in between a bottom step and slowly lower himself to about six inches from the floor. He was amazed at how tight this made his stomach muscles. He really enjoyed how limber and toned he was able to keep himself, not to mention the effect all this isometric exercising had on ridding him of his stress. It also pleased him that he never got hurt like so many others did when they took up running or lifting weights. Howard had had enough pain from the injuries he’d sustained in that plane crash a few years back.
Howard’s last step was the one he had to concentrate on even harder than making sure his medication labels all faced the same direction. It was the act of masturbation. He had taken a keen interest in the results of the masturbation studies he had read from all the research that had been compiled at Wittenberg University. But Howard being Howard, he had to take it one step further. He wouldn’t allow himself to climax. He would get naked, sit down in front of a mirror or, depending upon where he was, take a mirror, lean it against a wall and stroke his penis with a lubricating gel that had been invented by another one of his research teams from yet another one of his companies.
His fantasies about what women he was with when and while he was masturbating changed all the time, but his concentration did not. He would close his eyes very tight as he pulled at his shaft in every way a hand can pull, tug and stroke a man’s penis. When he felt himself about to climax — he would let go of his cock and open his eyes at the same time and stare into the mirror. He really wanted to see what the many women he had bedded would see when he achieved orgasm.
After this particular set, which would last from four to five minutes, Howard would rigorously wash his hands and penis, put on his clothes and go back to step one if his stress hadn’t been eliminated. He would repeat his three-step program until he felt as calm as he wanted to feel. Sometimes one set of the three steps would do the trick and other times it took seven, eight or even nine times to calm Howard Hughes down. No matter how long it took — he was always amazed at himself for having the control not to ejaculate. Furthermore, he was always amazed that every time he opened his eyes to see what his expression would have been had he climaxed — he always wore the same expression on his face.
“I think that this fallout problem is going to set a new standard for me to relieve my stress,” Hughes said out loud in his office as he grabbed the files that among other things listed the names of the complete cast and crew on his movie The Conqueror.
Of course it came as no surprise to Howard that the first name on the list was his director — Dick Powell. Like everything else — even in Hollywood — organizational charts began at the top. So, here was the name of his studio-chief-in-waiting, Dick Powell, staring him in the face, and he could feel his neck muscles getting all tense as he thought about the potential of nuclear fallout hurting Dick, one of his favorite people in Hollywood. He opened the bottom left drawer to his desk and took out the cleaning solution that had been developed for his spruce wood desk and set it on top of the giant piece of furniture and glanced at the second name on the list.
“Surprised that the writer’s name is listed second,” Hughes said out loud. I thought that writer’s came in last, he thought as he chuckled at what he had tried to do to get Oscar Millard to accept Wayne as Genghis Khan.
“John Wayne!” Hughes suddenly yelled out in a tone of awe, as he thought about what nuclear fallout could do to the biggest star in Hollywood.
If Duke gets sick, he will kill me for sure… or his fans will, Hughes thought. And I will deserve it for sure — for being played as one of the biggest suckers of all time.
This thought made every muscle in his body tense up. He opened the top drawer to his desk and emptied all its belongings onto the top of the desk and started to clean the inside of the drawer very slowly with h
is special cleaning solution. He was hoping to not only relax the muscles but his thought process as well.
Suddenly he started rubbing the wood in the drawer very hard as he realized how ironic it was that of all the movie stars in Hollywood that could be done in by the military, it would be the biggest military star of them all, John Wayne, who possibly could be affected. Furthermore, the nuclear fallout was a direct result of the United States’ military’s many attempts to fight Communism, of which Wayne was a big proponent, along with many others of Hollywood’s more conservative political faction.
This thought brought Hughes to his feet and he hadn’t even finished reorganizing the objects on his desk from the top drawer, let alone finished wiping it clean to his standards. He started pacing back and forth in his office, holding the list of the entire cast and crew from his movie, while pondering what their fates might become. This only increased his stress level and he found himself going into isometric exercise mode.
After a few sets of his favorite exercises he found himself feeling better. He returned to his desk, looked at the top drawer and nodded that it was clean enough for him at the moment. He silently and quickly put everything back into the drawer and returned the drawer into the desk. He picked up his file and started reading the names of the cast and crew.
He read the names appearing after John Wayne. Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, John Hoyt, William Conrad, Ted de Corsia, Leslie Bradley, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Mamakos, Leo Gordon. He noticed that he still had a lot more names to read — and that was before he came to the full list of the crew. This made him tense up and he moved to step three in the Howard Hughes’ trilogy of releasing stress: he started to remove his clothes.
It took him much longer to reach an almost climax. Since it was totally against his own personal code to ejaculate — and he had come much closer than ever before — he decided to take a very long cold shower. He thought this might take the edge off his stress and give him some serenity. Then he would go back to his list of names, but focus on the people behind the actors and actresses.
The first name he saw was that of the man responsible for the sound track. His name was Victor Young. This brought the first smile to his face that wasn’t a direct result of his stress-release mechanism, otherwise known as masturbation. Howard had noticed numerous times that when he was about to climax and opened his eyes to see his facial expression, he always wore a big smile. No matter how many times he practiced this technique — when he opened his eyes — he wore the exact same smile. He thought that was a good thing for the woman to see and was glad he came with a smile. But now, he was smiling for another reason. Victor Young wouldn’t be a potential victim of the fallout, because he would be busy doing his job on the RKO studio lot and nowhere near Southern Utah.
“Oh, oh,” Hughes said as he glanced at the next names. “The cinematographers are always on the set. I sure hope that Joe, William, Leo and Harry are not more exposed than any of the others.”
That line made everyone of Howard Hughes’ muscles tense up more than anything else that he had ever experienced... and Howard Hughes had experienced a lot.
More exposed than anyone else he thought as he flipped to the last page, which would list all the names of the stunt men and women who also doubled their pay by working as extras, set builders, cleaners and just about anything else that was needed when a movie with a big budget was being filmed on location.
This thought sent Howard Hughes into a frenzy of cleaning the rest of his office, more isometrics and even more masturbation.
I guess that cold shower didn’t work after all, he mused as he grabbed the cleaning solution that was invented for his bathrooms.
When the location of an on-site movie production is Southern Utah, in a town called St. George, not many of the people that will be on-site and involved with the making of the movie would mistake the location for something trendy, historic or exotic. They would find it full of open space, which is something that the vast majority of actors, actresses, producers, directors, stunt people, photographers, costume design, make-up and set builders were not used to, being from urban Hollywood.
They were used to either a small commute from their homes if filming on the studio lot, or to a short travel distance from a hotel to where the movie was being made, if they were not in Hollywood. Ninety-nine percent of the time the area where they lived in and around Hollywood, or where they were on location, was congested. Except for a very few members of the cast and crew, the majority involved in filming on location in St. George were not familiar with the vast, open space that the United States military had leased to Howard Hughes for the princely sum of $1.
Most producers hated to film on location, where vast amounts of land surrounded very small towns for one reason and one reason only — downtime.
All producers and to a lesser degree, directors, hated downtime when filming on location.
In a variety of ways, on-location filming could be problematic, expensive and very boring during downtime, especially if the right cast, crew and producers were not around. The only item that Hughes and Powell worried about during the planning of the filming of The Conqueror was, indeed, boredom.
“And boredom on the set when making a movie is a bad thing,” Powell once told his intern Randy Komara, when the two were discussing making movies back in Dick’s office on the set before the script for The Conqueror had even been seen by John Wayne.
“How could anyone get bored on set while making a movie?” Randy asked Dick.
“Easy,” replied Powell. “Way too easy when the movie is in the middle of nowhere.”
“Makes perfect sense,” Randy replied.
“People don’t get bored filming in Paris. People don’t get bored filming on the back lots of Hollywood. People don’t get bored filming in New York City. People don’t get bored filming a safari. People really get bored filming in wide open spaces,” Powell said.
“Then why are so many westerns being filmed all the time? Not only that, most of them are really good,” Komara pointed out.
“Because there is nothing else to do when filming a western on location but to make a good movie,” Powell said.
“Oh,” replied Komara. “I think that makes sense.”
“Don’t think in Hollywood… do,” Powell said.
But Powell wasn’t seeing or hearing about any problems with boredom when it came to downtime on the set. His 11th-century western being filmed in the vast desert and remote surroundings of Southern Utah seemed to be having the opposite effect on the cast and crew. He hoped that this meant that his movie was going to be a smash.
“I’m taking back what I said about downtime and boredom on the set of a western,” Powell told Komara during their once-a-week phone call from Dick Powell’s favorite general store about what Dick needed done for the movie from the main studio.
“Guess it is true what they say about Hollywood,” Komara said to his boss.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What do ‘they’ say?”
“Just when you think everything is going to be the same… it changes,” Komara said.
“Did I teach you that?” Powell asked Komara.
“Yes sir,” Komara said. “Now when do you want those dump trucks to come up there and get the 60 tons of red sand?”
“Good kid that Komara,” Powell said to John Wayne and Oscar Millard, as the three men saddled their horses in order to go for a ride while they were not needed on the set.
“He has a future,” Oscar said.
“You think?” Powell asked.
“He’s screwing that good looking secretary of yours… that’s why,” Millard said.
“The one with the great body?” Wayne enquired.
“The very one,” Millard answered.
“That’s impossible,” Wayne said.
“No, that’s Hollywood,” Powell joked and the other two laughed.
“It’s been a long time since I spent downtime on a fil
m with the director and screenwriter,” Wayne said as he turned his horse to the west with the other two following on their horses. “How did you get the time off, Dick?”
“Second-unit action scenes are running way behind schedule. Ed and Cliff have a lot to do and I trust their work,” Powell said.
Wayne led the others for a long time in complete silence. The quietness was giving all three a taste of serenity — as the set had been very busy, not to mention the other items in all three of the men’s lives.
“Once you get out of the desert and behind this mountain range, it isn’t such a bad place,” Wayne said as he broke the silence.
“The wind has been one royal pain in the ass,” Powell said. “Glad to have these mountains blocking it.”
“We shouldn’t be sand skiing, we should be sail boating with the way the wind whips and blows out here,” Oscar quipped.
“I can’t stand the way it sticks to every orifice of my body,” Duke said as he spurred his horse on a little faster.
The others followed.
“Hey, looks like there’s a driveway up a ways,” Wayne pointed out.
“What the hell is a driveway doing around here?” Powell asked.
“Maybe it isn’t a driveway? Maybe it’s a road,” Millard said.
“If Duke says it’s a driveway… it’s a driveway,” Powell said.
“Oh boy, don’t start that again,” Milliard groaned.
“How do you know it’s a driveway, Duke?” Powell called out to Wayne, who was out in front of them.
Wayne pointed to a sign and waited for his two companions to catch up to him.
The sign that Wayne pointed to read: Private Drive for Enchanted Cottages.
“You have great vision John,” Millard said, and then under his breath he said “but lousy diction when it comes to reading my script.”