The truth is that at the age of twenty I made what I consider a reasonably intelligent business decision, insofar as I wasn’t experienced in business and these men could run the company better than I could in the day-to-day operation. I learned from them, and I insisted on reports, but I let them run the company.
The key is that I kept control. When I pressed that button, they knew that the boss was buzzing. I won’t say I thought of them as stooges at the time; they weren’t stooges, they were hard-nosed, tough-minded veteran businessmen. But as far as my life was concerned, they were employees, and to a great extent they did what I told them.
Ella and I took the Sunset Limited to Hollywood. It makes me blush to think of this, but I sent a man out to Los Angeles to buy a pair of Rolls-Royces and had them meet us at the train with two chauffeurs.
Aside from wanting to make a show of myself – that was youthful foolishness, nothing more – I had those two serious ambitions. I wanted to make movies and I wanted to fly. A barnstormer in Texas introduced me to some of the fliers in California who became my early flying instructors. One in particular, probably the best pilot I’ve ever known, Charlie LaJotte, gave me lessons at Clover Field. He taught me to fly on a Waco 9. I wanted to do some loops and spins in it when I was still learning. Charlie said, ‘Well, it’s not such a good idea, because the way you fly, young fella, the wings will come off.’
Charlie drove a Model T Ford, and I had my Rolls-Royce, one of the classic Silver Cloud models, and a Duesenberg. One afternoon somebody dropped me off at Clover Field for a lesson, so that I didn’t have my car there when we landed, and I asked Charlie to drive me downtown to the Ambassador Hotel, where Ella and I were still staying. We put-putted right up to the front door and Charlie, in his old Model T, showed remarkable aplomb. He had flown in the First World War and spent some time in Paris, so he leaned out and said to the doorman,
‘Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous plait.’
The doorman bowed and said, ‘Yes, sir, good evening, sir.’ He must have decided that Charlie was visiting French royalty. If you were French royalty you’d either drive a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur, or a Model T. We were both dressed like a pair of grease monkeys, but they knew I was a rich young grease monkey and they didn’t know who Charlie was. After we got out of the car Charlie decided they’d never let him into the hotel. I said, ‘You stick with me,’ and we marched right through the Ambassador Hotel wearing grease-stained flying suits, straight to the bar.
One time I had made an appointment for a flying lesson with Charlie for ten o’clock in the morning. I didn’t show up. After an hour or so of waiting he took on some other student, and I was a little annoyed when I arrived. When he finally landed I said to him, ‘If I tell you I’ll be here at ten clock you’re paid from ten o’clock on, even if I don’t get here until midnight.’
I loved flying from the start. I was a quick learner. I may have been young, but I had maturity thrust upon me by the early death of my parents. And when I decided to learn to fly, I had something else at the back of my mind all the time – that it wasn’t just to be a hot pilot, it was to lead to something else, that it would be the major direction of my life, and that I would achieve something significant. What exactly, I didn’t know, but I trusted my instincts.
However, at that tender age, other things tempted me more than flying. Above all, I wanted to make motion pictures. I wanted glamor, and moviemaking was the most glamorous profession in the world.
But before I got involved in that, I had something else to deal with, and that was my marriage.
Ella and I stayed for a while in the Ambassador Hotel, and then I bought a house at 211 South Muirfield Road. It wasn’t luxurious like some of those mansions on Sunset Boulevard and in Beverly Hills; it was a simple, comfortable, two-story adobe house. That’s the last home I ever had. It was the first home I ever had, as a man, and it was the last. I’ve rented houses many times, in many places, and lived in whole floors of hotels, but I’ve never owned a home since I sold the place on Muirfield Road in 1931.
How do you account for that?
I’ve often wondered about it. Sometimes I’ve thought it was because I had never been used to living in a home, a permanent home. My father, as I told you, moved us all over southeast Texas. We were packing our clothes twice a year, so I wasn’t used to any kind of permanence. I didn’t like the idea of permanence then in Hollywood, even when Ella and I bought the house on Muirfield Road. I couldn’t understand being tied down to all that furniture. Ella was out decorating, buying carpets and drapes and flatware. She had grown up in that kind of world. I guess she thought of Hollywood as the place where she was going to raise her family, which unfortunately, she never did.
I wasn’t home very much. I was a young buck and I had money. I was proud because already, just in those two years since my father had died, I’d made the right decision in buying out the family and gaining control of Toolco, and then the right decision in letting other men run the company on a daily basis.
They did well, and history helped them – and it helped me too. The number of passengers carried by American railroads reached its peak around 1921, and from then on the automobile took over. The Model T had made Ford, and General Motors was well on the way to what it is today. By 1925 the total automobile production of the country had reached three million a year. What that meant for me, personally, was that Toolco had changed from a relatively small factory in the backwoods of Texas to a booming business. We tripled our facilities and plant space in those years, and our profits roared up like a space-age rocket.
By the time I was twenty-two years old I owned a company that was worth well over $15 million – and the important thing is that I owned it lock, stock and barrel. I had no partners; I had followed Big Howard’s advice. It was a private company – no stockholders. I was completely independent at an age when most men are still struggling to get a foothold in the business world. I could put my hands on almost any amount of cash I needed. That meant I could do just about anything I wanted to do. Money is power. At twenty-two, when the future is a vague dot on the horizon and you think you’re capable of anything, it’s real power – power without a brake.
But I still had some organizing to do, and of course, running a company that was growing by leaps and bounds, even at arm’s length there were always plenty of decisions to be made. One of my first decisions was one that affected the course of my business life for the next thirty-two years.
I had Holliday and Montrose running Toolco in Houston. I decided I needed an accountant and a personal executive assistant to supervise things for me in whatever else I wanted to do. I needed someone who’d stand between me and the world, do the worrying, balance the books, and do the dirty work if there was any to be done.
I let the word out that I needed such a person.
Almost immediately someone was recommended to me and I said, ‘Let him call me.’ The man who called was named Noah Dietrich, and he came up to my office at the Ambassador Hotel. He was from Wisconsin, the son of a minister. He was a short man, and especially from my vantage point – I was already at my full height of six-foot-three, and Noah was about five-foot-six – and thirty-seven years old at the time. He was a CPA and he was used as a troubleshooter by the movie studios when they needed tax and other accounting help. He was married, he had children, he wasn’t a womanizer, and he was politically conservative. I’d had him investigated; I knew all about him before he got there. In theory he was exactly what I needed.