I’ve been accused many times in my life of being a tight-fisted man, a man who can lose a million dollars and not care but won’t give his best friend a hundred-dollar loan or even a cookie, according to Noah Dietrich. There’s no truth to that. Katharine could have asked me for anything and I would have given it to her without any questions.
But I’ll give you an example of real cheapness. I was supposed to get a special Congressional medal for that flight around the world. Some miserable senatorial son of a bitch said this was a good chance to practice economy, and they wouldn’t vote the funds, all five or six hundred dollars of it, for that medal. Meanwhile they were pissing away millions on WPA projects, helping guys who in many cases should have gone out and helped themselves. It’s not that I gave a damn about the medal – hell, I never kept a single one that I got.
You skipped over Katharine Hepburn a bit too quickly. Why did she appeal to you?
She appealed to me because she was very bright and a lot of fun, and, I thought, extremely attractive. Now someone can say that about almost every woman. That’s what you think about any woman you care for, isn’t it? These things are chemistry. She was very independent, very strong-minded. She didn’t drink. Very clean woman – bathed two or three times a day when she could, and always said I was divine.
‘Howard, you’re dee-vine.’ I kind of liked that. And I can tell you one other thing: I loved her voice. A lot of people didn’t, but I did. I could hear her. I didn’t always have to say, ‘What? What?’
She was what I call a thoroughbred. And she was very strong-minded about her privacy. All these were admirable qualities, and then there was the chemistry, which I can’t define.
When did you start seeing her?
I suppose it was in 1936. She was in a play on tour, not on Broadway, and I hopped around quite a bit to see her. I saw that play five times, by the way, and it was terrible – it was Jane Eyre. I told Kate the critics would boil the play in oil and even though she was great, she’d get scalded too. And she took my advice, and bowed out. But the newsboys were after us everywhere we went on this tour, and that took the bloom off it a little bit.
This, of course, was before Spencer Tracy. Leland Hayward was the man in her life before I came along, but he and I got along pretty well. We once carried Katharine from room to room lying on a sofa. She was lying on the sofa, and we were carrying her. It was a joke, just for fun, and I can’t quite remember why we did that, except Katharine said it was ‘dee-vine.’
When did it break up between you and Katharine?
Just gradually. We stayed friends. She met Tracy when the war began, and then there wasn’t much contact between us after she got herself mixed up with that guy Henry Wallace, the one who’d been Vice-President under Roosevelt and then ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket. She made a campaign speech for him in the Hollywood Bowl, and I thought that was an error of taste. All right, are you satisfied? You know, there are times when I think you’re Hedda Hopper in disguise.
I’ll change the subject. When you got back from the flight around the world, didn’t you go to visit Herbert Bayard Swope, the publisher of the New York World?
Yes, because I had a hundred-dollar bet with him. He said I’d never make it around the globe in less than a hundred hours, and I was positive I would. Swope was a pain in the ass, a very lordly man, but I sort of liked him. He was living out on Long Island and I borrowed an Aeronca K. This was a few days after I arrived in New York. I wanted to try out some Edo floats and I flew out, landed right in front of his house in the Hamptons and said, ‘Pay up.’ He had a big party going. He always had big parties going, and I was dressed, I vaguely remember, in the usual way – dirty old pants and greasy shirt. I didn’t want to embarrass his guests, so we just went into the kitchen and he paid me the hundred dollars, and I had a glass of milk and then I took off again.
Did you know Charles Lindbergh?
Lindy and I flew the Stratoliner together in Seattle. I didn’t like him much, and I’ll tell you why. I’m not taking anything away from his achievements – I’m talking about him as a man. Lindbergh was out for publicity. He was vain and egotistical, and he was greedy. When he flew to Paris one of the first things he did before he made the trip was to arrange stories and articles to be written about it. He made something close to a hundred thousand dollars out of that. Now I feel, and I felt then, that it was not my privilege to capitalize, to make profit out of a trip like this. That was not its purpose.
But you had the money.
Yes, I had the money, but you can always use a little extra pocket money, can’t you? On the other hand, to give credit where it’s due, after Lindbergh made that flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, he pulled some of the same stunts that I pulled. When he got back to New York City, Whalen and all those guys gave him the treatment. They took him to the Ziegfeld Follies one night. During the intermission Lindy said he had to go to the toilet, and he vanished right out of the theater. When he told me that story, I had a sympathy for the man which I hadn’t had before. Because he couldn’t take it, either. He wanted the notoriety, but when the chips were down he was a flier. The way to do things was to get up there and fly, do what you had to do, and take your satisfaction in private – which unfortunately, he didn’t do all the time, and I did.
One more thing happened after I got back from the flight around the world, and I consider it important. There was a round of parties and celebrations in various cities. I flew the Model Fourteen down to Houston and there was a big flap for me there. All my father’s people – his people, my people – were out at the airport. I mean Toolco employees, rank-and-file workers, and they had signs that said WELCOME HOWARD, CONGRATULATIONS HOWARD, YOU DID IT HOWARD.
All that fuss in New York didn’t mean too much to me, but it meant something to me that Toolco people were out there, and that they liked me. Because it never occurred to me before that they liked me. That reception in Houston touched me very deeply. It’s one of my fondest memories.
8
IT WAS THAT same year, 1938, that I became involved in one of the major episodes of my life, which was scheduled to last for twenty-eight years. That was Trans World Airlines.
TWA had started long before that, in the Twenties. It was the first company that ever had a transcontinental flight across the United States, advertising ‘coast to coast in forty-eight hours!’ You started off in New York, took trains to some point in the midwest and then a series of hops by air, slept at night – you only flew during the day – and got to Los Angeles in forty-eight hours.
It wasn’t TWA then. It was TAT, and they’d been formed from several airlines: Western Airlines, Standard Airlines, and an outfit called Maddux Airlines. They all got together under Paul Richter and Jack Frye. I knew Jack Frye from way back, and he was the man I really worked with. He became a good friend. He was one of the original Thirteen Black Cats, the first stunt pilots out in Hollywood.
TWA was the first airline to fly coast to coast without rail transport as part of the itinerary. It was just a few weeks after they started operations that they abandoned the railways. Jack Frye said, ‘We’re an airline and we’re going to fly all the way.’ And I don’t think it took them more than twenty-four hours then, still flying Fokkers.