“I was thrilled. Mannix had renewed my contract for another year, and given me a small pay raise to encourage me, but there was no such thing as security at MGM. At least if you were me there wasn’t! Louis Mayer could still drop me in a heartbeat for going ahead with the divorce. Nobody thought I would. Not even Bappie. Anyway, Howard Hawks’s invitation was wonderful. Who needed Mickey Rooney when you had Howard Hawks knocking on your door?
“Anyway, the night he was supposed to take me out, Johnny Meyer turned up instead. I opened the door and this fat, bald guy was standing there, grinning from ear to ear. He said, ‘Miss Gardner, Howard has been called away on urgent business. Like Miss Otis, he sends his regrets—and asks will I do?’ Well, I just burst out laughing. It was such a funny line.”
Johnny Meyer was her first date since she split with Mickey. “The photographers were all over us like a rash. They all wanted to get a picture of the new guy in my life. It was just fun in those days. The snappers wanted you to look pretty. Today they can’t wait to get you with a finger in your nose, up your ass. They’ve hit the jackpot if they get you looking looped. In the old days, if they got a bad photo of you coming out of a nightclub they’d tear it up. Hymie Fink was a little Jewish guy who had the biggest nose I’ve ever seen in my whole life. He had little squinty eyes and big thick glasses; it was a face you could never forget—but he was a dear. I loved him. He did all the nightclub pictures and would burn the negatives rather than use a bad one. That’s why the magazines were filled with beautiful, glamorous women in those days.
“Oh, another thing about Johnny Meyer, he had nice hands. He polished his fingernails with a pale varnish. Not many guys did that in those days. Today, people would think he was my ‘walker.’ But he wasn’t a fag. He wasn’t a bit faggoty. In fact, I think he had quite a few wives in his time.
“Anyway, he took me to dinner at Chasen’s. Johnny took me to plenty of dinners after that, as a matter of fact; Howard got called away a lot on business! At least that was his excuse, and Johnny was his regular stand-in. I didn’t mind, Johnny was always fun. That first night, he let me do twenty minutes on how thrilled I was to be asked out by Howard Hawks before he told me I had the wrong Howard.
“My date was Howard Hughes, not Hawks, he said. They both made movies but Hughes also owned TWA, the airline. That seemed to mean a lot more to Johnny than it did to me at the time. He said Howard was loaded, and also as deaf as a post, only he didn’t want people to know that. If Howard grinned at me like an idiot, I’d know he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Best advice about Howard anybody ever gave me,” she said.
“Johnny wasn’t the handsomest man in town, he was no Clark Gable, but he wore nice suits, he always smelled good. The opposite of his boss. Howard Hughes never cared much about what he wore, or what he looked like. Maybe on our first dates he did—or sometimes when he had to be presentable he would make an effort—but he went downhill pretty fast after that. He was never really aware of his personal hygiene even then, and I’m told it got worse. He definitely got crazier, that’s for sure.”
That evening, Johnny plied her with flattery and questions about her life: where was she born, what did her parents do? Questions about her brothers and sisters, and what she wanted out of life. “I liked being the center of attention. I was flattered. I didn’t feel he was coming on to me. I didn’t know he was just checking me out for Howard. Checking out girls for Howard Hughes was one of Johnny’s regular chores.
“Anyway, I must have passed the test because next day Howard Hughes called and apologized for standing me up. He was very charming. He must have been because I invited him around for a drink—I had a little place on Franklin Avenue. That was where I still occasionally entertained Mickey after we split.
“With hindsight, I should never have gotten involved with Howard. He could be damn nice but he was seventeen years older than I was. He was a low-key guy sexually. He was a real slow-burner romantically. Well, after Mick he was. Mick and I were still kids. You have to remember, I was eighteen when I met Mick, nineteen when I married him, and twenty when we split. With us, everything was fun and games—and fast. It was always Party Time.
“Howard could sometimes be heavy-going, except when he talked about planes. His passion was flying—he was always trying to break some airspeed record or other—and women, of course. He was passionate about them. He always liked to have a few on the go at the same time. He had them stashed all over town. Lana Turner told me he was once engaged to her and Linda Darnell at the same time. She thought it was hilarious, but I couldn’t have put up with that shit.
“He was filthy rich, of course. He inherited a fortune from his Daddy. Daddy owned the Hughes Tool Company in Houston. When Daddy died, Howard got the lot, the whole kit and caboodle. I think he was twenty, twenty-one when his father passed. ‘That’s when I realized that women found me attractive,’ he once said to me. I still haven’t figured out whether he was that naive about women! I don’t think he was being funny.
“Anyway, he always had plenty of women to console him. Lana, she did a good job for a while; she really expected to marry him. Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers. Jean Peters—he married her. Kate Hepburn. Linda Darnell. Oh my God, he had so many women. Jean Harlow, Jane Russell. They were all beauties, too. Kate Hepburn wasn’t a great beauty but I’m told she could turn guys on. Kate’s what now? She must be at least eighty?”
“About that,” I said. “Apart from Howard’s wealth, was he attractive?” I didn’t want to be sidetracked.
She thought about that for a while before answering.
“He was a skinny guy, not bad-looking, tall, well over six feet, maybe six-foot-four. He reminded me a lot of Daddy,” she said slowly. “He had a kind of remoteness about him like Daddy had, and that’s always attractive in a man. He was partially deaf, of course. That may have accounted for the longueurs in his conversation, and probably explained his shyness, too. Anyway, he never talked much. He was no raconteur; I called him the Quiet Texan.
“I’m talking about a time before he became that crazy basket case holed up in a Las Vegas hotel surrounded by fucking Mormons, and as mad as a hatter. I never knew that Howard Hughes, thank Christ. That Howard made me sad. I’m pleased I never met him.
“When I first knew him, he’d made Hell’s Angels, a helluva picture about pilots in World War I. It was the blockbuster of its day. I bet it still stands up. He was a pilot himself; he had an obsession with flying; he was what they’d now call an ‘action hero.’ He was badly injured showing the stuntmen on Hell’s Angels how it should be done. I think quite a few pilots died on that picture, too. He was a demanding sonofabitch. But he had plenty of guts, you have to give him that.
“A couple of months after we started stepping out together, he was in a serious plane crash in Nevada. I’d flown to Las Vegas with him and some of his people. He was going to pick up an amphibious aircraft he’d designed to put it through its water trials. He dropped me off in Las Vegas and went on to Lake Mead, where the plane crashed, killing a couple of the engineers on board.
“Howard was badly injured. He called me from the hospital to tell me what had happened. ‘I want you to know I just killed a couple of my guys,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, kid, I’m going to be okay.’
“I read that he grew a mustache while recovering from the burns—he said the burns on his face made shaving too painful. That was probably the truth of it, but he told me he grew it because I was a fan of Clark Gable, and Clark had a ’stache! I’m sure that was a load of applesauce, but it did make me laugh, and old Howard didn’t do that too often.”