He was the former husband of some movie star, and he got me a date. She was a very sweet girl but she was only fifteen. Weston knew this and I didn’t, and you wouldn’t either if you looked at this girl. We spent the night together and in the morning she casually told me how old she was.
I put on my clothes in a hurry, called for a car, and said, ‘Nice to have met you. So long.’
Bill Weston came around soon after that, asking for a loan of $25,000. He said he had to make a down payment on a house and there would be other payments later, which made it clear to me that it wasn’t a loan and it wasn’t just $25,000.
I was taken aback and I said, ‘Bill, I have to think about this.’
I thought it over and talked it over with Noah. I called Weston the next day and said, ‘Meet me down at the railroad station at 7 P.M. sharp.’ When he arrived I was standing there beside the Twentieth Century Limited, which was due to pull out in fifteen minutes. I’d called him in his office, you see, and told him to come straight from the office. Meanwhile Noah had arranged for several of my people to go to his apartment and pack his clothes, and all his personal belongings, and those items were in a compartment in the train.
I handed him an envelope and said, ‘This is for you.’
In the envelope there was a ticket to Chicago. ‘That train leaves in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘Please get on it. Your luggage is inside. Don’t ever come back to California again, because if you do, something really bad, possibly even fatal, will happen to you.’
You didn’t give him any money at all?
Besides the train ticket there was $10,000 in cash in the envelope. My speech, of course, was pure bluff, but he bought it. He got on the train. I figured ten grand was cheap to get rid of him.
By making movies I’d realized my first ambition. Flying came next. But there were a lot of hurdles to get over. Recklessness was one of them, and I suppose I never cured myself of it until it was too late. I was a quick learner and a damned good pilot in more ways than one, and I took chances. I was young. I was invulnerable. I had my share of crashes, and in the end they ruined my health. My second crash, as I’ve mentioned, was in the Waco 9 during the filming of Hell’s Angels.
When was the first crash?
That took place in the same period, early in 1928, during the preparation for filming. Ruth Elder, a well known aviatrix, was flying with me. I met Ruth in one of the air meets, a Bendix Trophy Meet, and we developed a companionship rather than a love affair. In a sense, of all the women I’ve known, with one exception many years later, I was better friends with Ruth than anyone.
That time in 1928 I was flying a Sopwith Snipe, a World War I ex-combat plane, and Ruth was in an old Jenny. We were flying tandem from Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley where we’d been getting things ready for aerial combat scenes. I detoured a bit to fly over Los Angeles.
But my motor gave up and I came down unexpectedly – and hard – near Inglewood. I crawled out with a couple of cracked ribs, twisted ankle, broken collarbone, black and blue all over. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks.
As far as I know that crash has never been mentioned in anything that’s been written about you.
The things that have been written about me aren’t worth a fart in a windstorm. Nobody knows the facts. I’ve had four or five serious crack-ups in my life and maybe three or four others not so serious, and nobody paid the slightest attention to most of them. I’m not complaining. I didn’t take a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times and say, ‘Howard Hughes wishes to announce he’s cracked up another plane and is on his death bed.’
The worst accident, and the one I suffered most from physically, was the crash with the F-ll in Beverly Hills, which I’ll get to later. But there was one I felt worse about.
This was in 1943 on Lake Mead in Nevada. I was flying an amphibian, a big twin-engine experimental job, a Sikorsky S-43. Glen Odekirk was with me, and a man named Cline who was a CAA inspector from Santa Monica, and Charlie Von Rosenberg, my copilot, and a mechanic named Dick Felt.
I was coming in to land on Lake Mead. The water was like a mirror, not a ripple. The sun was glaring off it, blinding me, but still I set the plane down for a perfect landing. We touched down on the water. Then we picked up some drag. Maybe I’d come down a little more quickly than was normal, but it was eighty miles an hour and I’d done it before and never had any trouble. We picked up drag and then, without any warning, that Sikorsky veered off, put its nose down, and began skipping across the lake. The whole plane came apart, piece by piece. Each time we bounced it was like a separate crash. That ship weighed ten tons. Finally we stopped, still afloat.
I had cut open my head badly, and I was in shock – in fact, Charlie Von Rosenberg had to practically shove me out the pilot’s window. He saved my life. Some fishermen pulled us out, and everyone got clear except the CAA man, Cline. I hired navy divers and we hunted for him for a long time and couldn’t find him. He’s still down there at the bottom of Lake Mead.
When I recovered and found out what had happened I was very upset at this man dying that way. Von Rosenberg broke some bones in his back, but they patched him up in Boulder City. He had to wear a cast for a year. And the mechanic, Dick Felt, died from head injuries he’d suffered in the crash.
It was a bad crash. For a while I felt responsible, but they had federal investigation and ruled it an unavoidable accident; they said the plane had been incorrectly loaded by the ground crew and her center of gravity was out of whack. But that didn’t bring Cline and Felt back to life, and it didn’t make me feel any better about being at the controls.
The only other accident I had where someone got killed was an automobile accident in 1936. I’d been cited for speeding twice before that, once in the San Fernando Valley and once in Gilroy, California. That Rolls of mine was a beauty – it made you want to speed. But that night there weren’t any cars on the road, and I wasn’t endangering anybody even though I was driving fast. You feel safer in a Rolls or a Duesenberg doing ninety than you do in a Chevy doing fifty or sixty.
I was in the Hancock Park area, on my way back to the Ambassador. A car came at me from the side and forced me toward the curb. A department-store salesman, a sixty-year-old man named Gabe Meyer, didn’t see me and started to cross the street. I couldn’t possibly have stopped in time. I was speeding – how fast, I don’t know – and to this day I remember the crunch of the man’s body smashing into the front of the car.
I must have carried him on the hood of the car for twenty-five, thirty feet, and then he sailed through the air for another thirty or forty feet and smashed against the pavement. He was dead on first impact. It was a terrible mess. It was his fault. He darted out at the wrong time from a streetcar safety zone, gave me no chance whatever to stop – although that doesn’t make it any the easier to bear the burden of guilt.
I was with a society girl, the daughter of some rich Pasadena people, and I told her to leave, not to get involved, and I got my lawyer, Neil McCarthy, down there pronto. He was a good man and he did what had to be done.
I make no bones about it: I paid off the LAPD. If I hadn’t been Howard Hughes and a multimillionaire, I wouldn’t have got off so easily. American justice works that way. There’s never been a really rich man convicted of any serious crime except where embezzlement of big money is involved and other rich men are the victims. I don’t feel guilty about using my money and influence, because it was not my fault. The man literally darted out in front of me. I had no choice. The coroner’s jury acquitted me of negligence.