Wait a second… I’m not sure that stories like this have a place in my book.
I think they do. It’s not all high finance and breaking airspeed records.
Well, all right. I was the injured party.
Was there any talk of marriage between you and Ava Gardner?
The usual talk. She shot her mouth off to the newsboys every now and then. I knew her for a long time, you know, but I usually made it a point to see her when she was between husbands. When she split up with Sinatra she sent me an SOS and I got her out of Las Vegas, because she thought the little bastard was going to kill her. She was hysterical. I sent a plane to Las Vegas and had her flown down to Cuba, and I arranged for a bodyguard for her, to protect her from Sinatra and his ratpack Mafia friends. It was the least I could do for her, to give her some peace of mind.
You were still friendly with her, even after she’d tried to brain you?
I didn’t turn my back on her again, you can be damn sure of that. But she came back weeping and said she was sorry, she didn’t know what had gotten into her.
To get back to Jane Russell – I made a contract with her years later, well after The Outlaw was done, and I still pay that girl a thousand dollars a week. I give her credit, she’s learned to act, but when I hired her for The Outlaw she couldn’t act worth a damn. But Jane had what I was looking for, so I signed her to a contract. She was bright, and I liked that. I hired this other unknown young actor, Jack Buetel, who was a jerk. Then I turned Russell Birdwell loose to build them up. I didn’t have the time for that kind of thing. I was involved in the HK-1 by then, and the D-2.
Of course the best bit of publicity that Bird had was a fluke, and that was when a Japanese submarine fired at Jane Russell on the beach near Santa Barbara. This happened during that long period between the time we finished The Outlaw and the time it was released, because the goddamn Hays office wouldn’t go for it at first. One day Jane went up the coast to take some publicity shots, and a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired a shot at some oil rigs, but fortunately Jane was in the way, or nearby.
Also fortunately, there was a man there taking publicity shots. He snapped photographs of Jane holding the shell fragments and looking very frightened. And that hit all the papers: front page. That made Jane Russell. (Now that’s an example of what’s called good luck, but if the photographer hadn’t been quick enough to take the photographs there wouldn’t have been any good luck.) We were off and away because Jane Russell was a target for the Japs. It would have been a bad break, of course, if one of these shells had nipped off a chunk of her natural endowments, but in that sense we were lucky, and so was she.
Then the Hays Office refused to give its seal of approval to the picture. We fought them on and off from 1941 to 1946. Jake Erlich, my lawyer, went into a courtroom with a bust of Venus de Milo, who as you know doesn’t wear a brassiere. The whole time that Jake conducted the case he had that bust sitting there in the courtroom, just to impress the people with the fact that the Greeks weren’t ashamed of the bare facts, and why the hell are we? And then the Motion Picture Producer’s Association got into the act and banned the film. I wound up suing them in 1948 for $5 million on the grounds that they were breaking the antitrust laws – boycott in restraint of trade.
Despite the fact that it was wartime and I was involved in far more serious endeavors, I had a showdown with these creeps in New York in 1944. We plastered the office with blow-ups, photographs of great female film stars of past and present, all of whom showed considerable amount of cleavage in their bosom. I hired a professor of mathematics from Columbia University. He came up there with his slide rule and calipers and measured the various amounts of cleavage and the amount of flesh that was showing, and he proved to the satisfaction of these people from the Hays Office and the Producers’ Association that, proportionately speaking, Miss Russell showed less of her natural endowments than the overwhelming majority of the great film stars of the past.
The point I was really making was that there should be no censorship at all, because it’s in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And time proved me right, for better or for worse. You look at movies that have been made years ago, and if you know the cuts that have been made you say to yourself, ‘Now why in hell did they ever cut that?’ Let’s say I had a much longer view than these shortsighted idiots who are out there to protect the morals of America’s children. Look what’s happened to the morals of America’s children. You think the Hays Office or the Breen Office could do anything to stop that? That’s a runaway freight train.
Didn’t you design a special bra for Jane Russell during the shooting of the pictures?
That was a simple problem in mechanical engineering – how to prop up two falling monuments. She was tied to a tree and I wanted those things sticking out like cannons.
I’ve tackled bigger problems than that in my life, although I guess I’ve rarely tackled bigger breasts. I told my engineers how it should be done, sketched it out, and the boys did it for me. That received a lot of publicity. I can’t understand why people make such fuss over petty stories like that. I certainly considered it a trivial achievement. That wasn’t the design of my life – lifting up Jane Russell’s breasts. I had started work on the flying boat. That was important. That was something I believed in, even though it led to one of the biggest disasters of my life.
11
IT WAS WARTIME. We were fighting Germany and Japan. Many things were happening in my life at the same time besides The Outlaw. I wanted to do my part in winning the war – airplane design and manufacture was of course the area where I felt I could best contribute. I started in right away, two days after Pearl Harbor. Actually I started a year before that, when I realized that one of these days we’d have to help out Great Britain and fight Hitler and the Nazis.
The experience with the Army turning down the H-1, which became the Zero, was what made me decide: to hell with those armchair generals. I said, ‘I’m going to make a new plane on my own. I don’t need their money.’ And in 1940, completely at my own expense, I built what was called the DX-2.
The DX-2 was meant to be a long-range medium bomber with a five-man crew and a speed of 300 miles per hour. Then in December of 1941 we changed it to a fighter plane with a two-man crew. But the plane was made of Duramold, and that was the whole trouble – the Army didn’t believe in wooden airplanes. The wooden De Havilland Mosquito saved the British Empire, but the U.S. Army pretended the Mosquito was an accident. They wanted only metal aircraft.
I was perfectly willing to let the Army have a look at the DX-2 anytime they wanted to, and in the middle of 1942 Echols and General Carroll and his boys looked, and made their report. They said, ‘It’s just another hobby of that playboy Howard Hughes. And it’s made of wood! We can’t buy a wooden airplane! We’ve never done it before, and what would people think?’
So they kept turning it down and I kept working on it. I had it ready sometime in 1943, and I flew it at 450 miles per hour.