I’ve seen Hell’s Angels and there’s a speech in it that Monty makes against war. I don’t know what the climate of opinion was back in 1928, but it struck me as a daring statement. I wondered if you had a hand in that speech, or if you approved of it.
I had more than a hand in that speech. I wrote it. That reflected my opinions exactly, and they haven’t changed since. I was twenty-two years old, but I wasn’t a complete fool. There was a period, I admit, when I fell under the hysteria of the Second World War – that’s probably the only patriotic and just war that I’ve lived through as a man. But before, and since, and right now, I’m as antiwar as anyone you’ll ever meet. I want to point out to you that during the period in the Fifties when I was so active against the Communists in Hollywood, it wasn’t that I wanted to go to war with Russia. There may have been a cold war but I wasn’t for a shooting war in any way, shape or form.
To me, the antiwar speech in Hell’s Angels – that war is caused by politicians – was the key statement in the movie. Of course I wanted to do an action picture, but often you start out on a project for mundane reasons, not especially high-minded, and at some point along the line you see that you’re able to make a statement of importance, and then that becomes the key to the whole thing. That speech meant a great deal to me. I had arguments with the scriptwriters about it.
They said, ‘You’re making this into a dogmatic picture.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I have the money and the money gives me the power. I want that speech made, and nothing’s going to stop me.’
I haven’t changed much since then. I say what I want to say and I do what I please – and if people don’t like it, they can go piss up a tree.
4
IT WAS AROUND this time that I bought into something called Multicolor. I had used the Technicolor process for the ballroom scene in Hell’s Angels. I looked into the future and could see that one day nearly all movies would be made in color.
I was dead right, but I was premature. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s often best to let some genius do the spadework and suffer the heartbreaks, and then, if you’ve got the capital and the knowhow, you move in at the right time and take advantage of the other guy’s pioneering.
But it went against my grain to do that, and still does, because in that sense I’m more of a pioneer than a hardheaded businessman. I’m willing to take the risks if I believe strongly enough in something.
So in 1930 I bought the Multicolor process from its inventors, a couple of men named Fraser and Worthington, and we started a small company. I found a vacant lot on Romaine Street in Hollywood, built a laboratory, and wound up more than $400,000 in the red. Eventually I got sued by the other stockholders, the inventors and their backers, because I refused to throw good money after bad. They were the charter members of ‘The Sue Howard Hughes Club.’ The only thing I got for my investment was the building on Romaine Street, and that building became my principal offices for the next forty years. I’ve always referred to it as ‘Operations,’ but I never operated from there. I gave it to Noah Dietrich and told him to set it up in whatever way he wanted.
However, the issue was far from dead with these people who had sued me over Multicolor, and I was positive that they tapped my telephones. There was some piece of business – I don’t remember what it was, but there was no way it could have leaked out without someone overhearing a telephone conversation. Today, as you know, there’s no telephone in the United States that’s safe, except usually a public telephone.
And so over the years I developed a system. I do a great deal of my business at night and most of it on the telephone. I function best in the wee hours of the morning, and since I’m the one in charge, I often call my people at any hour of the night, and I expect them to call me back from a public telephone. They know this will happen; I don’t spring it on them. They can catch up on their sleep when they take their vacations.
I’ve used this to my advantage many times. But in these early cases it was simply for security reasons. I would call Ray Holliday in Houston, for example, in the early morning and say, ‘Ray, I’ve got something to tell you. Get out to a public phone and call me back.’ I’d give him the number of the private phone I was calling from, if it happened to be a private phone.
Then a few minutes later Ray would call me back and give me the number of the phone booth he was calling from. Then I would go to the nearest public phone booth and call him at that number. In this way we were talking from two public telephone booths and the chances of anybody taping our conversation were sharply reduced.
You must have had to carry a sack full of dimes and quarters around with you wherever you went.
I’d charge the call to my office number. One day Perry Lieber, one of my publicity men at RKO, was visiting Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist. I called Perry and told him to get out to a public phone and call me back. A few minutes later he called. I asked him his number and he gave it to me, and right away I knew something was wrong. I checked my little black book, and the number he’d given me was Hedda Hopper’s unlisted number.
I said, ‘What the hell are you trying to pull, Perry? When I want you to call from a public phone I mean a public phone, because that’s private. Hedda Hopper’s private phone is about as public as you can possibly get.’
Perry started stammering, and finally admitted he was too lazy to leave Hedda’s bedroom and had taken the phone into a closet, which seemed to him private enough.
‘Private enough for you,’ I said, ‘but not for me. Get your ass out to a public telephone and call me back.’
I still wanted to make important movies, and the next one I did was Scarface.
I wasn’t yet twenty-five years old, and still a bit of a smart-aleck. I know now that you get a good writer, turn him loose on a project and let him do it. But at that time I took over Irving Thalberg’s idea, which was to put a number of writers to work on a story without letting any of them know that the others are working on it. I had Ben Hecht and W.R. Burnett and three or four other top-flight writers working on it, and none of them knew the others were involved. Around that time there were rumors around that I was going broke. I’d spent so much money on Hell’s Angels and the other films, and movie people didn’t know anything about the oil drilling business and probably thought Toolco was a printing plant where I turned out thousand-dollar bills and one day the government was going to catch up with me. Most people thought I was nothing more than a wild kid from Texas. People already had begun to tell stories about me that were off the wall.
Didn’t that annoy you?
If I got annoyed at every man who told a lie about me I’d have to be annoyed twenty-four hours a day, and I haven’t got that kind of time. You know, even $3 billion doesn’t buy you more than twenty-four hours between sundown and sundown. I value time, I value it very deeply. That’s one of the reasons I sleep so little. I trained myself to get along on four hours sleep a night, or an average of four hours out of every twenty four. It was a struggle for a while, because when I was young I liked to sleep. But I wouldn’t give in to that natural urge. In my early twenties I set the clock and got up and did something. And I’ve done that ever since, except after a year or so I no longer needed a clock.