Weren’t you once accused of building the Hercules as a movie set?
That came up at the hearings in Washington, the Senate hearings, later on. Can you imagine?
I thought Cary Grant actually suggested it to you.
Cary wanted to do a movie about a guy who travels around the world on a spaceship of the future. That got into the newspapers and Cary may have made some unfortunate statement that I was going to produce this picture and we’d use the Hercules for the set. Obviously I wouldn’t consider such a thing. I’ve never in my life capitalized on any of my aeronautical achievements. Two or three studio heads came to me in Hollywood during the war and said, ‘Let’s make a movie about your flight around the world,’ and I wouldn’t give those guys the time of day, if I knew it, which undoubtedly I didn’t because I didn’t wear a watch.
I certainly wasn’t going to consider vulgarizing a project that was still in the building stage, and where the U.S. Army was involved. I was working eighteen to twenty hours a day on the HK-1 and the F-11 and other Army work during the war, plus my own private projects and companies. I think Cary suggested the idea of a movie and I said, ‘Yeah, great, that’s interesting, you work on it.’ And that was all there was to it. They just brought that up because they needed something else to bellyache about.
They also didn’t like the incident that happened with Hap Arnold, who was still head of the Air Corps. I’d given orders – normal orders in such circumstances – that no one was to be allowed into the hangar where work on the HK-1 and the F-11 was going on. So Hap Arnold showed up with some other brass, and the guys at the plant barred the door and said, ‘Mr. Hughes says no one gets in.’
‘I’m General Hap Arnold, you goddamn idiots, let me in.’
But the guys said, ‘You may be Hirohito in disguise or you may even be General Hap Arnold, but it doesn’t matter because Howard Hughes, the boss, says nobody. And nobody includes you, even if you’re somebody.’ And they wouldn’t let him in.
It took Arnold a while to find me and get through to me, but a few days later he reached me and started yelling.
I said, ‘Hap, I don’t know where you’re calling from, but if you’re anywhere within 500 miles you don’t need a telephone, just yell out the window. Deaf as I am, I’ll hear you.’
He calmed down. All he wanted was an apology, which I gave him. I had nothing against Hap Arnold. I would have let him see the ship if I’d been around. And I don’t have anything against apologizing to a man. I’ve apologized thousands of times in my life. I don’t have any false pride. And I hate people yelling at me – I just wilt. Or I used to. Nobody’s yelled at me in many years.
What about the statement you made when you were discussing the Hercules with the press, that if it didn’t fly you’d leave the country and never come back?
That was one of the dumbest things I ever said. They really got my goat, and that shows how foolish it is to make public statements, to let those reporters and those officials get you over a barrel and wring you out. You wind up gasping for air – a squashed mackerel. I don’t think I’ve ever been correctly quoted in my life except once or twice when there was something I didn’t want to get into print, and I said, ‘Boys, that’s strictly off the record, don’t print that.’ Then, of course, they got it word for word, and put it on page one.
But you repeated that statement several times, about leaving the States if the Spruce Goose wouldn’t fly.
That’s what they wanted to hear, and I kept getting sucked into their trap and saying it. I guess I liked the sound of it. My father would have loved to hear me say something like that. That’s the Texan in me coming out. I must have said it once too often, because I remember, at one time, I said to myself, ‘Jesus H. Christ, if it doesn’t fly, I’ll really have to go.’
Would you have gone?
I’d have had to. They all would have remembered, and if through some mishap the Hercules wouldn’t get off the water and I didn’t go, they would have said, ‘There’s a man no one can trust.’
So it had to fly. It just had to.
13
I CAME BACK from England in wartime and got to work on the F-11. Of course I was still working on the HK-1, the Hercules, and both projects combined, going on simultaneously, were breaking my balls. Getting a release for The Outlaw also took up a lot of my time, and the plant in Culver City was turning out ammunition feeder chutes for the Air Corps all the while, so you could say I was busier than a one-armed paperhanger. Being in the movie business during the war was the straw that nearly broke my back.
I look back on myself at that time and I don’t know why I did it. It may have been because, with all that I’d accomplished, I was still desperately afraid of failing. I may have involved myself in a dozen projects at once with the unconscious feeling that even if one or two of them flopped, the law of averages was with me and I’d be bound to succeed at the rest of them and come out smelling of roses.
That can happen. The most frightening thing to do is put all your eggs in one basket – very few people are capable of that. It’s easier to dissipate your energies. It’s a form of cowardice. It’s often called a conservative approach, but I’m beginning to equate conservatism with inborn cowardice and fear of the dark. Very few conservatives make history. There isn’t a single great artist or great statesman who was conservative, except that sometimes, after the fact, we label them conservatives because we’ve already absorbed what they knew or what they did, and it seems obvious to us, with the advantage of hindsight, that they did what had to be done.
But the great men of history, during their own times, were all radicals venturing into the unknown, taking enormous risks and dealing with new ideas, and throwing their energies and their reputations without reservation into the battle. They never hedged their bets. Look at Joseph Conrad, Picasso, Stravinsky – Thomas Edison, Alexander Hamilton, Karl Marx, Einstein, Henry Ford, Roosevelt, Churchill, David Ben-Gurion – radicals, every one of them, in the sense that they broke new ground and were single-minded men on the verge of being fanatics.
I tried to plunge headfirst into all the various things I was doing, but you can’t do that unless you’ve got six heads, and I wasn’t that kind of monster. So a couple of my ventures fell on their ass, like my moviemaking. I hooked up very briefly, in 1944, with Preston Sturges, the director-writer-producer. Preston and I formed a company and made a couple of films. The first one, Mad Wednesday, starred Harold Lloyd, who I had talked into coming back in the movies. Then Preston and I made a film with Faith Domergue, a young actress I was fooling around with.
She had beautiful calves and wrists.
I tried to put the Hughes touch on all these films, where I could, but it didn’t work out with Preston. We each had our own way of doing things. And when two such men come head to head, as often happens in a business adventure, the man with the bigger bat, the bigger sack of dollars, is the one who comes out on top. And that’s me.