One Christmas I made Noah Dietrich a present of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL gullwing, with those doors that open straight up. I drove it, and it was a joy, and I was tempted to buy one for myself. Then I thought, no, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid. I didn’t want people watching that flashy car go down the street and yelling, ‘There goes Howard Hughes! Get him!’
The point I’m trying to make is that after my Hollywood years, and after my boats and various personal airplanes, like my Boeing, which was pretty lush, and which I sold to some drunken son of a bitch from Texas who abandoned it at the Houston airport, I stopped spending money on myself. I didn’t have any quirks and fancies, no Taj Mahal in Palm Beach or Palm Springs, and I didn’t maintain two or three mistresses in the fashionable capitals of the world. I had no hobbies except golf, and I had to give that up after my last air crash.
But didn’t you rent a number of houses in California at this time, where you kept women?
I rented several small bungalows. One or two were decent-sized houses. I didn’t have a home of my own. I had to rent. If women stayed there it was because they had no place else to stay and because they were connected with me businesswise in one manner or another. I put up various executives there too. And I had to have some place to stay when I got somewhere. Because by then I had begun to realize that most hotel rooms were filthy, were very poorly cleaned, and I required a special sort of accommodation. It was cheaper in the long run to have a bungalow somewhere than it was to walk in and take the honeymoon suite at the Bel Air Hotel.
What sort of rents did you pay?
Whatever was fair. I didn’t pay them. Toolco paid them. They were charged off as business expenses. I ran the company, so if I stayed in them it was a business expense. And if friends of mine stayed in then, they might have been doing business for TWA too. I can’t remember every single person who stayed in my houses. But that’s the secret – that’s another reason for my getting rich and staying rich. I was a frugal man. I still am.
Frugal? I’ve gotten an estimate that your bill at the Britannia Beach averages $50,000 a month. And you’re not even there most of the time.
Where the hell did you find that out? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m positive it wouldn’t come to more than twenty thousand a month, which you’ll admit, is very modest for a man of my means. Naturally if you add up what those guys eat, and various other things, it’s going to run a lot higher. But that’s a drop in the bucket. I know $50,000 sounds like a lot of money to you, but that’s the interest on my capital for an hour or two.
I want to repeat what I said, because I don’t think you’ve gotten the point correctly. And that is, despite what hotel bills I pay, and despite what secondhand cars I maintain around the world, I do not have any expensive fancies and quirks. I don’t piss away my money. I don’t personally own a luxurious jet – the company has several and I use them and others. But I still don’t have a large income, and therefore I’m not a drain on my companies’ resources. I pull my own weight.
10
AFTER THE CONSTELLATION, the next thing I tackled was The Outlaw. It’s not a major event in my life, but I want to give my version of what happened, since there’s been so much nonsense written about it.
I say it’s not a major event in my life, but you may have noticed by now that whenever I’ve tackled anything I’ve gone into it heart and soul, and I haven’t always kept a sense of proportion. I’ve devoted as much time to unimportant projects as I have to things of more substance.
It’s only in retrospect, however, that I consider The Outlaw to be an unimportant project. At the time I thought I was breaking new ground, as I did with Hell’s Angels. I had that in mind from the very beginning, and that’s why I searched as hard as I did for someone like Jane Russell and chose her to be my star. And once I found her I meant to see that her assets stayed in the public eye.
I hadn’t made a motion picture in many years, but I had a yen to break down some of the puritan barriers that I felt had been holding back the American cinema. Today, of course, all the barriers have been broken, and what I did seems quixotic, but if you place it in the perspective of the history of the cinema, you’ll see that it was a major breakthrough.
The story I selected was a version of the old Billy the Kid saga. I got a very fine director, Howard Hawks, but he didn’t work out very well – he got sore because he thought we were shooting in Arizona on location, and one day he arrived at the set and everyone was gone. I’d ordered them back to Hollywood to the sound stage, but Hawks hadn’t got the message. I still respect his work very much, and in fact he worked for me later at RKO.
So I took over The Outlaw. I directed it. You don’t have to be a genius to direct a movie. You don’t even have to be terribly artistic. You just need the common sense to listen to the technical people around you – they usually know what they’re doing – and at the same time you have to let them know you’re the boss.
I budgeted the picture very low, at a quarter of a million dollars. I had trouble immediately because Noah Dietrich got together with Hawks and said, ‘It can’t be done for a quarter of a million. It’s going to cost half a million, and knowing Howard that figure will probably be closer to two million.’
He was wrong. It cost nearly four million. I have a tendency, when I plunge into something, to forget the costs. In my view, the costs are not important – it’s the finished product that matters and, maybe even more important, what you learn in the course of getting to the finished product.
I started shooting, and what interested me, as always, was the opportunity to educate myself at the same time as I was making the movie. I always did that, and still do. You can never stop learning. There isn’t a day passes in my life that I don’t learn something. I try to learn one fact a day, or think about one new idea.
One of the things that particularly interested me in The Outlaw was the background music, which was done by Victor Young. I got terribly involved in it.
In those days we didn’t have the kind of magnetic sound track that they have now. We had what was called an optical track. You could literally see the sound track, and you could fool around with it – by putting masking tape on certain positions of the track you could block it off, raise and lower the volume, do what else you pleased. The technicians on this picture were not everything that I’d wanted them to be, so I took over and did the sound track myself. It took me, I would say, three or four weeks, working ten or twelve hours a day on it, and, mind you, not only was I half-deaf but I was doing other things at the time. By then it was wartime and I was building the Hercules and the D-2.
As everyone knows, we had a great deal of trouble getting a release for The Outlaw, and it wasn’t until 1946 that the picture was released. It premiered in San Francisco at the Geary Theatre. I went up there, stayed at the St. Francis Hotel, and I wasn’t feeling well. I had a bout of pneumonia, and I decided I couldn’t make the premiere. Besides, I didn’t want to go out into the crowds and deal with all that horseshit.
I stayed in my room that night, and I could hear that sound track in my head the whole time, and I suddenly realized something was wrong. So I got on the pipe to my film editor, Walter Reynolds, who was also up there in San Francisco. I can’t give you the exact hour and minute, but the point I’m trying to make is that the picture had already started, the audience was in their seats, Jane’s tits were on the screen, and I said to Walter, ‘Get the hell over here in a hurry and bring Reel Three to my hotel room.’