‘Okay, I’ll take the Dodgers – for old time’s sake.’
Howard smiled; the Giants were favored. Then the terrifying thought hit me: what did ‘a little bet’ mean to Howard Hughes?
‘How much?’ I asked.
He thought for a minute. ‘Well, let’s make it interesting. Let’s bet a dollar.’
We settled back to watch, all nine innings, and the Dodgers beat the Giants, 4 to 2. Howard stuck it out, muttered against the inanity of the commercials, and from time to time when Mays was at bat or taking a long lead off first he would say, ‘Watch him carefully. He’s a professional. It’s a pleasure to watch anything he does.’ He even commented on the way Willie swung his bat in the on deck circle. ‘The rest of those guys, he remarked, ‘are just black and white trash. All those black players,’ he explained, ‘have really made the grade in sports since I was a kid. The white man threw them a bone so he wouldn’t have to throw them any meat and potatoes.’
It was almost eleven o’clock when the game was over. I switched off the set and sat down for the chat between friends that Hughes had suggested when he called. I could see he was tired, though, and a little ill at ease. He kept drinking mineral water and clearing his throat. Finally I told him a few tales about how I’d sailed the Atlantic in a three-masted schooner with five other people who’d also never sailed an ocean-going yacht before, and then at eleven-thirty he yawned and said he’d better be on his way, he had some work to do where he was staying – something to do with a few million shares of stock of some company he was trying to buy or sell, I don’t remember which.
I said, ‘What about the dollar you owe me for the bet?’
Howard blushed. He explained that he didn’t have any cash with him – no small bills. He had ‘a large bill’ sewn into the lining of his trousers, but it would be hard to get at. He would pay me the next time we met, he promised.
I took him to the door, from which point he would skulk his way through the darkness to the parking lot of the motel where his driver waited in a five-year-old Chevrolet, and there he turned to me and said, ‘That was a pleasant evening, wasn’t it? Did you enjoy yourself?’
I told him I had, and he said, with a smile on his ravaged face, ‘I’m glad we didn’t argue. I’m not such a bad guy after all, am I?’
‘No, you’re not a bad guy, and I never thought you were.’ Not wishing to be stickily sentimental, I had to add: ‘And you’ll be an even better guy in my eyes when you pay me that dollar you lost. Remember, I’m not the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and that’s not a $40 million dollar loan. A bet is a debt of honor.’
He said brightly, ‘Good. I’m glad we’ve patched it up. A good evening of talk between friends will always do that. Let’s meet tomorrow night and get on with the work. I’ve still got a lot more to tell you about my life.’
A couple of weeks later, after one or two reminders, he paid the dollar to me on Paradise Island, and he told me a lot more about his life. And now that it’s all over I vouch for his conclusion. He’s not such a bad guy after all. What follows is the story of his remarkable life, in his own words.
Preface
SINCE 1957, AS is well known, I haven’t granted an interview or had a photograph taken. It may seem as if I’ve gone overboard in a negative way, but a long time ago I decided I’m not here on earth to satisfy the vulgar curiosity of the mob.
The fact that I shunned publicity had a backlash. Just because I was the richest man in the world and wouldn’t give interviews and didn’t want to be a public figure, that made me a public figure. Every newspaper and magazine in this country has a reporter whose sole job is to snoop into my private life and the doings of my companies. If I’d courted publicity, after a while they would have said, ‘Watch out, here comes old moneybags again, looking for free newspaper space.’ I just wasn’t tricky enough.
But now, because I’m nearing the end of my life, I want to set the record straight.
There’s an old American Indian torture. They’d pull out a little piece of your intestines and nail it to a tree, still attached to you, and then shove hot brands at you, burning brands, to make you run around that tree and pull out your own guts – leave a trail of your own guts unwinding behind you. The tradition’s still carried on in this country by politicians, big business, and the news media, in less obviously bloody ways.
They tried to put me in an asylum. They wrote outright lies about me; I don’t mean distortions, I mean outright lies. The portrayal of me as an aging lunatic – I won’t have it. I want the balance restored. I don’t want future generations to remember Howard Hughes only as an obscenely rich and weird man. There’s more to me than that.
Nevertheless, I intend to be dead honest, because a great deal of what I did I kept well hidden. This is the truth about my life, warts and all. This book will be my epitaph, the only one I’ll ever have.
1
LET’S BEGIN AT the beginning. For me that was Christmas Eve, 1905, in Houston, Texas. That’s when I was born – only forty years after the Civil War ended, to put things in proper perspective. I was an only child. My mother wanted more children but she couldn’t have them. She wasn’t even meant to have me. I was a surprise, or so they told me. A welcome surprise, I think. My parents had great hopes for me.
My father was a gambler, a high-roller. He took me out one time to Jakie Friedman’s place, a gambling hall way out on Main Street when that part of Main Street wasn’t even in Houston proper. I was seven or eight years old, just chin-high to the craps table. It was late for me to be up, but I have a vivid memory of that smoky room, those green-shaded lights, and Big Howard, in a sweat, rolling the dice.
Big Howard is what they called my father. I was Little Howard, or Sonny. The name, Big Howard, fit my father in every way: he was larger than life, and either he was rolling in money or he and my mother didn’t know where the next bottle of French wine was coming from.
Wildcatting – drilling for oil on short-term leases – was the biggest gamble of all in Texas, and that’s what Big Howard loved most. He went up to Sour Lake, hit it big there, then lost everything at Batson when the field turned to water. This was before he invented what came to be called the Sharp-Hughes drill bit, which became the basis for the family fortune. Until then we didn’t live in one place very long and it wasn’t until the manufacture of the drill bit got going that we settled down in the house on Yoakum Boulevard, and that’s the only place – to this day – that I can think of as home.
In 1916, when I was ten years old, my father and his partner, Walter Sharp, were drilling for oil at a dusty place called Pierce Junction. They had leased the land for sixty days because Big Howard was sure there was oil there. But he had to give it up as a dry hole when he hit hard rock with the fishtail bit, a chisel-faced cutting tool they all used in those days.
After that he drilled at Goose Creek and the same thing happened – they hit hard rock the fishtail bit couldn’t penetrate.
My father was fed up, so he and Walter Sharp came up with the first crude designs for a high-speed rotating cone bit with one hundred and sixty-six edges. A few nights later, in a bar in Beaumont, Big Howard got to talking with a man named Granville Humason, a millwright. Humason had been thinking along the same lines as my father and Wally Sharp, and he’d made some sketches on a sheet of paper. He had a little model of the device too.