Of course I could handle that ship, the Connie, like no other pilot in the world except maybe Bob Buck. I offered to take the same gang through the Grand Canyon if they wanted more proof. But they didn’t take me up on it. They had to file their stories and change their pants first – they wet them on that flight.
You may have read that I was supposed to have lived in one of my Constellations, but that’s not quite true. It’s a fact that one of them was equipped for living, and I did spend an occasional night on board, but that’s all. Apart from that I had a lot of fun with my planes, and my friends did too. Cary Grant and I used to go to Mexico every once in a while, and there was one flight where our radio went on the blink and we were reported lost.
Cary and I were good friends then. I arranged his marriage to Betsy Drake. I don’t mean I was a matchmaker – I mean I arranged the wedding. I picked them up at the airfield in Culver City, in my Connie, very early in the morning. They had to hop over a wire fence and run out to the plane, and I took off and flew them to Arizona. We went there because Cary and Betsy wanted to avoid publicity. They were being hounded almost as much as I was.
This was Christmas day, 1949 – the day after my birthday. I landed in the desert at an abandoned Army airfield. It was an old strip, and it wasn’t built for something as big as a Connie. We came down right to the end of the runway and I almost overshot. I had to jam on the brakes hard to avoid running into a mess of cactus. I had arranged to have a car waiting to pick us up and we drove to the house of the local justice of the peace. I was Cary’s best man and I was so nervous I did everything ass backwards. First I stood next to Betsy, and then when the J.P. told me to move over to Cary’s side I did, but I stumbled and dropped the wedding ring and had to get down on my hands and knees to look for it under a sofa.
Anyway, despite my efforts, finally they got married. We drove back to the landing strip and by then it was pitch dark. I hadn’t realized we would have to take off at night – I had to hustle back into town and hire a couple of taxis to come out to the airport and shine their lights on the runway so I could see where I was going. We took off, and toward the end of the flight Betsy came up and sat with me in the cockpit for a while. I thought I’d give her a little charge, so I buzzed Wilshire Boulevard.
She turned white. She said, ‘My God, Howard, I’m not going to die on my wedding day, am I?’
I put the ship down at Culver City, they hopped back over the fence, and that was that.
Cary and I also went on a wild trip one time to Mexico – this was a couple of years before I arranged the gala wedding with Betsy. It was 1947, a few months after I’d cracked up the F-11. I was in a big hurry because I had a date down there with a woman.
Lana Turner?
No, sorry to disappoint you. This is someone you never heard of and I won’t mention her real name because… well, I’ll tell you this much. This incident happened in 1946. Not my flying to Mexico with Cary Grant to see her, but meeting her for the first time. It was one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened to me.
I was flying to San Francisco from New York on a United Airlines plane. (I sometimes flew with the opposition, just to see how well or how poorly they did things.) Anyhow, there I was in my seat, dog-tired from whatever I’d been working on, and there was this woman sitting in the seat next to me. Not a girl, you understand – a woman in her early thirties, well-dressed and beautiful. I’ve never been much on small talk so we didn’t say more than a few words to each other, just stuff like ‘Pardon me’ and so forth. But I did notice that she was exceptionally attractive, with unusual features, and lovely blue-green eyes. Startling eyes, very clear. After dark I fell into a kind of doze, and I swear I don’t know how this happened, but when I woke up we were holding hands.
Isn’t that incredible?
We talked, and one thing led to another. Nothing happened right away – not in San Francisco, because she was being met by her husband. We lost touch for a time, but then we made contact, and she agreed to meet me in Mexico that time. That’s why I was in such a rush – I hadn’t seen her since that crazy time on the flight to San Francisco.
You can’t give me her name?
No, she’s still married to the same man. He was in the consular service. He’s a very highpowered diplomat now, he has a very exalted rank, so I won’t tell you his name. Her first name was Helga.
Did she know who you were?
Not during the flight, but later I wanted to keep contact with her, so I had to tell her. What I liked about her was that it didn’t impress her one way or the other. She just said, ‘Oh, you’re the man who flew around the world.’ I gave her some flying lessons, as a matter of fact, once in Santa Fe.
Do you still see her?
The last time was years ago – well, some time after she met me in Acapulco. Later I’ll tell you more about her.
9
IN THE PERIOD when I was first making movies in Hollywood I made the leap from a millionaire to a multimillionaire. And then in the period from 1937 through 1943 I made the leap from a multimillionaire to a rich multimillionaire. There are plenty of rich multimillionaires now, in 1971, but there weren’t many then.
How do you define a rich multimillionaire? How many millions does it take?
It’s not a matter of numbers. A man with five million may still be just a simple multimillionaire if he focuses on keeping what he’s got and worries about where to invest it. A rich multimillionaire doesn’t concern himself with those things – they seem to take care of themselves. Moreover, in my time there weren’t many men or women who had more millions than they knew what to do with. That was my status.
I became a rich multimillionaire through a peculiar chain of circumstances.
There were more cars on the roads in the United States than ever before, and whether times were good or bad they needed to run on gasoline. In order to make gasoline you had to refine crude oil, and in order to pump crude oil out of the ground you had to use the Hughes tool bit. It was around that time that I made a remark so some reporter which was very widely quoted. It was a smartass thing to say, and I regretted that I said it. But it was still true.
I was asked if Toolco didn’t have an illegal lock on the drill bit industry, and I got a little huffy and said, ‘No one’s forced to use our bit. They can always go out and buy a pick and shovel.’
We had just begun to move back on to the profit side around 1938. But I went over the books, and things didn’t look right to me. We were making money in Houston but not as much as we should have been making. The company didn’t seem to be growing fast enough, and I smelled that something was wrong.
At the time I was pretty much involved in setting up Jack Frye in TWA so I called in Noah Dietrich once again. ‘Get down to Houston, Noah, ingratiate yourself with the good ole boys, and straighten things out for me.’