One thing I appreciated about the Russians: we didn’t have to pay any bills at their airports. It was all on the house. They asked me to keep that quiet – they didn’t want an invasion of pilots figuring the government would pick up the tab. We refueled, and had to turn down some caviar which would have made us overweight.
And off we went to Omsk, in Siberia. They had lousy gasoline, very low octane, but we were prepared for that with a load of ethyl to boost it. That was only a minor inconvenience. But then the runway went uphill at Omsk and I didn’t think we were going to get off. It’s bad enough trying to take off on the level, on a good runway with the load we were carrying, but to take off uphill – well, it was like a landing strip in Ethiopia that I used many years later in a DC-3.
Leaving Omsk we were lucky again. I’d better qualify this by explaining that I don’t believe in luck – it’s a phrase that’s applied after the fact. If a man prepares well, and is aware of all possibilities and mulls them over in his mind, and takes the necessary precautions to deal with emergencies – if a man does all that, and is ready to grasp opportunities, those opportunities come to him and people call that good luck. It’s not good luck. It’s the sum total of a man’s preparations for any given situation. A poor workman finds fault with his tools, and only a hypocrite says, ‘I had good luck.’ A man stands up, thumps his chest and says, ‘Me, I did it.’
The phrase ‘bad luck’ is really another way of saying that a man wasn’t prepared, he didn’t know how to deal with the inevitable difficulties that came his way.
But, as I found out flying around the world in 1938, there are certain exceptions, like when we ran into ten thousand-foot mountains that were marked as six thousand feet on the map. So it was fortunate that we reached them during daylight, because our schedule was messed up by the delays in Paris and Omsk. If we had reached these peaks at night, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. The wolves would have picked my bones clean on some mountaintop in Siberia.
Then we went on to Fairbanks, Alaska. That was an awful hop, foul weather all the way so that the plane was mushing, but we made it. We headed on toward Winnipeg, where the weather was so lousy that we skipped it, stopped in Minneapolis, and then, from there, back to New York – three and a half days after we’d started out.
I was beat. I just couldn’t face that mob. After the parade there was supposed to be a reception at City Hall, organized by Grover Whalen, the official greeter and hand-shaker for New York City.
You can imagine that I was in no mood for such shenanigans after a round-the-world flight – and besides, I had a date. At the time I was very friendly with Katharine Hepburn. Her family up in Connecticut thought I was an odd duck because I once landed a plane on their beach up in Old Saybrook, but nevertheless there were rumors that Katharine and I were going to get married. It wasn’t true, we just saw a lot of each other. We had a fine friendship and I had seen Katharine before I left, and I wanted to see Katharine when I got back. Simple as that. I didn’t want to see these guys in top hats and tails.
I drove down to the party with Whalen and Mayor LaGuardia and a big motorcycle escort. Fiorello LaGuardia was a funny little guy and I liked him. But our friendship was nipped in the bud. I hadn’t shaved in three days and, what’s more, I hadn’t bathed in three days. I stank like a polecat. I could see people backing off from me every now and then when they got a whiff of what was coming out from under my armpits.
So I slipped the word to Whalen that before the festivities began, I wouldn’t mind taking a bath. Whalen said, ‘Okay, certainly, anything you want, Howard.’
They found an office at City Hall that had a bathtub, and I lowered myself into the bath and, by God, it felt marvelous. It was like the first fresh egg after you’ve been at sea for a week. Suddenly I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to go back in there. Kate’s waiting for me. The hell with these ass-kissing politicians.’
So I got out of the bathtub and put on, unfortunately, the same dirty clothes I’d been wearing when I got off the plane, and slipped out the back door.
Maybe it was a bit rude of me to leave that way, but I guess I figured they would understand. I was wrong. What happened afterwards I got straight from the horse’s mouth, because Grover Whalen told me.
Mayor LaGuardia said, ‘Well, where is Mr. Hughes? Where is our hero?’
Grover went to look for me, and I wasn’t there. They searched the building. No Howard Hughes.
Now LaGuardia was mayor of New York City when you were a boy, and you probably heard him reading the comics over the radio on Sunday morning. But LaGuardia’s general language in private was unprintable. He had one of the foulest mouths I’d ever heard, and some of it I didn’t even understand, because he spoke Italian a lot. His language was almost as bad as mine when I get riled up.
So LaGuardia started to rant and curse me in front of everybody, and then he pulled what I consider one of the dirtiest tricks that’s ever been pulled on me – and there have been some lulus. First he called in the newspaper people and told them I had slipped out. Meanwhile some cop had phoned Whalen and told him that he’d tailed me from City Hall. He’d seen me slip out and thought it was his job to know where I was going, to protect me from the mob, and he’d followed me and knew where I was. I was at Katharine Hepburn’s place on the East Side in the Forties. I took a taxi up there and the cab driver didn’t know who I was, he thought I was a bum, and I could see he was worried I wouldn’t be able to pay him.
This cop gave his report to Whalen, and Whalen gave it to LaGuardia, and then LaGuardia said to the press, ‘Gentlemen, I’ll tell you where that Texas son of a bitch has gone’ – or words to that effect in English and Italian.
I was up there in the sack with Kate, in her apartment, and the next thing we knew there was a pounding on the door. I said, ‘My God, they’ve found us!’
Neither of us wanted publicity, and that would have been the worst kind. Then I really might have had to marry her, which I think is what she wanted.
I piled all the furniture in the living room against the front door – the sofa, the chairs, the dining room table – because they would have gotten an axe, a battering ram, anything they could get their hands on, to get in there and find us. I whispered to Kate, ‘Don’t say a word. Even in bed. No groans or moans of passion, sweetheart.’
We had a great time, in total silence. It felt a little perverted, in its way.
And after an hour or so they gave up and went away.
What did this affair with Katharine Hepburn mean to you at the time?
Words like ‘affair’ don’t always fit such relationships. Katharine and I were close friends. I saw her on and off in ’36 and ’37. We went sailing together, and flying, and I cared for her. I wanted to make a movie with her around that time, do the life of Amelia Earhart, whom I knew pretty well. It didn’t work out. I was too busy and so was Katharine.
Once I did her what I think was a great favor. She was doing well, but she hadn’t saved her nickels and dimes and she wanted to star in a film called The Philadelphia Story. She needed money to buy the property and I loaned it to her. She owned most of the rights when the movie was made, and she cleared a tidy sum.