Be that as it may, Preston and I had an argument and almost came to blows. He had a theater and a club that he owned in Hollywood, very near that crazy place where Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and a lot of other people stayed – the Garden of Allah. Preston’s theater was called the Players Club, and it looked like an alpine chalet. In those days everything in Hollywood, as you know, had to look like something else.
There was a restaurant on the top floor of the Players Club, and I liked to eat there because nobody bothered you. Nobody bothered me anyway, since I’d very often book the whole place, go in the back door and up the back staircase. There were all sorts of people downstairs in the bar, the cream of Hollywood, and the less I had to do with them, the better.
I had a habit of writing on tablecloths when I was bored, and unfortunately I was bored most of the time with most of the girls I knew. And it wasn’t only boredom, because sometimes I’d get an idea, some new design for a plane I was working on, and I had to scribble notes. I had to do it immediately while the idea was fresh in my mind. I needed a lot of space and the tablecloth had the most space to write on.
Then I took the tablecloths home with me, to transfer the designs and notes, and Preston got annoyed. I said, ‘Buy extra tablecloths and send me the bill.’
For some reason he thought I was being high-handed, and he blew up and accused me of stealing his tablecloths. One thing led to another until finally he said our contract wasn’t equitable, and I walked out on him, and that was more or less the end of our partnership – but it all blew up, as I said, because I was designing a new flap motor for the Constellation on his tablecloth.
All this activity, this jumping from one thing to another to the point where I was getting about twenty hours sleep a week, took its toll. That was a time when I came nearer to going off the deep end than I ever have in my life. In 1945 I was working on both the HK-1 and the F-11, and I was still editing The Outlaw and fighting the censors. There were a couple of women I was interested in and I was having a tough time seeing them without one finding out about the other. On top of that I began to have nightmares about those recon flights I’d made in Europe. Those kids over there had been doing them daily, but I wasn’t a kid and I was having nightmares.
I began to think I was mentally ill, and I went to see my doctor, Verne Mason. I told him that I was repeating myself all the time. Noah Dietrich brought this to my attention. In one telephone conversation with him, Noah claimed I’d said to him, ten or twelve times, ‘Any five-year-old child knows that.’ He said I’d better see a doctor, and for once he was right. Verne explained that I was under too much strain and I was close to a nervous breakdown.
I didn’t listen to him.
I come into a vague period here. I remember getting into one of my Chevrolets, and I remember driving down to San Diego. I had a Sikorsky amphibian moored there, and I took off.
The next thing I knew I was in a filling station in Shreveport, Louisiana. Now why in the world I went to Shreveport, I don’t know. I must have been behaving strangely, because the attendant called the police. I had fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars in cash in my pocket – that was unusual for me. I suppose I had taken that much because I was going somewhere, had something on my mind. I may have started off for Mexico, planning to spend some time down there. But I went to Shreveport, and I think something went wrong with the plane there.
I hadn’t shaved in a week and my clothes were rumpled and smelly and I was mumbling, or was vague, because the gas station attendant called the police and they roughed me up a bit. I told them who I was and they laughed in my face. I told them I had a plane and they laughed some more.
They took me down to the station and next thing I knew I was in the goddamn bullpen with drunks lying next to me in their own vomit. I spent the night there, passed out on a bunk. In the morning I started to yell and make sense, and they began to do things. They called the Toolco man in Shreveport, a man named John Long, and he came down. He’d never seen me, of course, but he asked me some questions about Toolco and he realized immediately I knew what I was talking about, and he said to the cops, ‘This man is telling the truth. He’s Howard Hughes.’ They let me go.
That never got into the papers. I didn’t pay off the cops, but somebody did. And that wasn’t even the end of the trip. I was still in a bad way and I went down to Florida to Palm Beach, to the house of a friend. I’d just got to his place and had a square meal and gone to bed when suddenly in the middle of the night I realized I was still wearing those clothes I’d worn in that filthy jail cell. I literally saw maggots and worms and other frightful things crawling out of my garments. This was what you might call the teetotaler’s equivalent of the Dts.
I couldn’t wait to get out of my clothes. I started to burn them in the man’s backyard, by the pool. He came rushing out, thinking his house was burning down, and I was prancing around there like a naked savage around this bonfire, full of glee, and laughing like a maniac.
He said, ‘Howard, what in the world are you doing? Come in, let me call the doctor.’ He was very kind. He realized, as I did, that I’d gone off the deep end.
It turned out to be temporary, thank God.
On the F-11 I had to build three experimental prototypes, which were considered part of the hundred-plane contract, and a static test model which wasn’t. A static test model is an exact duplicate of your experimental prototype, only it’s not meant to fly. It’s meant to be broken up on the ground, part by part, to see what’s wrong with it or right with it. Eventually the static test model was ready and two of the prototypes were operational, and I announced delivery.
But this took time. When they knew they had the atomic bomb and could finish the war quickly by simply wiping out two or three hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children, they started tightening up on priorities, and quietly tooling up for peacetime manufacture – which meant that the first airplane manufacturer who was going to find himself short of the metal he needed to fulfill his contracts was none other than, guess who, yours truly.
Around late 1944 and into 1945 every time I needed something that wasn’t on hand, that I couldn’t beg, borrow or steal from some garbage dump in the Greater Los Angeles area, I had to go to the Army with my cap in my hand. They’d give me the runaround. So the F-11 didn’t get finished until early 1946, which wasn’t bad at all, considering the obstacles.
Then I flew it, and crashed it in Beverly Hills. That’s the one I think of as the bad crash. I’ve had other crashes, but none of them like that. And that was the last one, thank God.
It happened on July 7, 1946. I’d finished two prototypes of the F-11, incorporating everything I’d learned on the missions I’d flown. The war was over, but there’s always another one coming along – in this case, it turned out to be the fiasco in Korea. I finished the plane and I took it up on a Sunday, in the early evening. They didn’t want me to fly it myself, but I’ve always said, ‘If a man is unwilling to trust his life to his own work, his work can’t be worth a damn.’ There were things wrong with the plane, but nothing you could put your finger on – gremlins. I felt the only way to find out what they were was by flying it.
Was that your only reason?
No, there was more to it than that. A pilot had once said to me, ‘Howard, why don’t you hire me or someone else to fly these experimental planes? You’re a busy man with a lot of responsibilities, and being a test pilot is a risky business.’