‘Hell,’ I said, ‘why should I pay someone else to have all that fun?’
Around that time I went to a party at Newport Beach and met a nineteen-year-old girl from Ohio – a farm girl, really – who had just won a beauty contest at Ohio State and had been given a Hollywood contract. Her name was Jean Peters. I thought she was delightful and we really hit it off. I asked her if she’d like to come up to Culver City and watch the test flight.
She was there. I waved goodbye to her when I taxied out onto the runway.
I took off in the XF-11 – it was about six-thirty, and still light – and climbed. She climbed beautifully at better than 400 miles per hour. I headed out over the Pacific for a little way, put her through her paces, and then started back to the Culver City field.
Suddenly, with no warning at all, it felt as though someone was pushing backwards on the starboard wing: like I was dragging a bull elephant along with me by the tusks. After half a minute I unfastened the seat belt, flew the ship with one hand and tried to raise myself up and peer through the canopy. But I couldn’t locate the trouble visually. I figured it out later. What had happened was that the pitch on the rear starboard propeller – these engines each had two propeller dual-rotation propellers – suddenly altered, went into reverse pitch, and was braking the plane.
We never found out why. At least those people at United Aircraft would never tell me if they found out. It was their Hamilton-Standard Division that made the propellers. There was a hell of a big investigation and the general theory was an oil leak, because even before the crash we’d noticed the starboard propeller was gobbling up oil. Maybe a faulty gasket, which was certainly the Hamilton people’s responsibility. They tried to say later that I should have spotted an oil leak, because the propeller would have started to hunt, and I could have locked the pitch or feathered it. My point was that I had no way of spotting it because the blade angle was cockeyed, that is to say, the two blades of the starboard propeller weren’t aligned properly – there was nearly a forty-five-degree difference, which threw everything out of whack. This was proved when they inspected the plane after the crash.
But of course, because it was me at the controls, they eventually claimed it was pilot error. I wasn’t supposed to take up my landing gear on that flight and they made as much of a fuss about that as they could.
But it had absolutely nothing to do with the crash and nothing to do with what went wrong. I thought the landing gear door might have jammed broadside – the red light was still on. You may not know anything about aircraft, but you probably know enough to realize it makes no difference whatever whether the landing gear is up or down as to whether that plane is going to crash. The proof of the pudding is that the landing gear retracted perfectly. I could have bailed out, but at a greater sacrifice than I was willing to make. Eight million dollars worth of airplane, my life’s work, was right there on the firing line. And it went deeper than that – I had a feeling by then that if I didn’t bail out I still was going to lose that plane, and I had put enough of my guts into that plane so that I felt if I lose it, I’m going to go down with it, like a captain with his ship. That was my airplane, and whenever I fly one of my own planes, there’s an identification there – it’s my child. And I could no more abandon it than a mother could abandon her own child if it was in trouble.
I fought to get her down. Glen Odekirk was up there in an A-20, an attack bomber we were using as a radio plane, spotting me. I tried like hell to get in touch with him. Glen was the man I trusted most in the world. I couldn’t get through. I managed to get Santa Monica air tower and told them, ‘For Christ’s sake, clear the airwaves! Get in touch with Odekirk and tell him to get a report to me on what the hell’s happening with this plane!’ I still wasn’t sure the landing gear had retracted properly, and if I was breaking up outside I couldn’t see it.
None of this made any difference. It was too late. I went down in a hell of a crash, right in Beverly Hills. I was trying for the golf course. I thought if I could make one of those long fairways, I could maybe have brought her down in one piece, kind of eased up to the lip of the green. But I couldn’t do it. I chopped up a couple of houses and the plane caught fire. Naturally, I didn’t know what was going on. All I remember was coming down hard, and they told me afterward that I was trying to crawl out and this marine sergeant saved my life, pulled me out of the wreckage.
I felt grateful to him, and later I gave him a job. He had to go off to China first, he was still in the Marine Corps. But after his tour of duty I sent him down to Culver City, got him appointed assistant head of security, in line for the top post. I sent him down with a note to Personnel that said: ‘Don’t fire this man, ever.’
When he pulled me out, I was in pretty bad shape. A number of broken ribs, a crushed lung, burned-up face, and my left hand has never been the same. The only time I ever played golf again, and it was a sad performance, was two years later in Ethiopia, when I came out of the bush. I couldn’t even come close to my handicap.
After the crash, the doctors said I had less than a fifty-fifty chance. But I guess I just wasn’t ready to die.
I knew I was going to make it when I suddenly got the inspiration for a special bed. It showed me my brain was still working the way it should. The bed was simply a gridwork with each square of the grid moved by a separate motor. This was so that I could shift my body without breaking into a cold sweat each time from the pain. They might even have done something with this hand, but I’d enough of the hospital – I had to get back to work. So I walked out of there before they got around to any surgery on it. Probably a mistake, but, well, life is made up of mistakes.
Didn’t Linda Darnell and Lana Turner visit you in the hospital?
A lot of people tried to visit me, but most of them had to be kept out because I was in no shape to fool around, not with Linda Darnell or Lana Turner or all the beauty queens in the world rolled into one, or even with Jean Peters, if she’d been willing, which up to that point she wasn’t. She did come to visit, though, which I appreciated. And Ava Gardner showed up with a bottle of bourbon, which she normally carried around with her in her handbag. This was some days after the crash. She got into the room somehow. I only vaguely remember what she said because I kept passing out, although at one time she was trying to shove me over to one side of the bed so she could crawl in with me. She said, ‘How can I help you, Howard? Do you want a blow job?’
I said to her, ‘For Christ’s sake, Ava, wait till I’m on my feet again. Then, yes, I’d love a blow job. But not now, thank you. It might get me all worked up and kill me.’ And eventually I found a nurse to get her the hell out of there.
An accident like that is like when a kid gets thrown off a horse: if he doesn’t climb up on her right away, he’s through riding. That’s how I felt about flying. And so very soon thereafter, I climbed in my plane, my bomber, and flew to Kansas City. I couldn’t have been more than a week or ten days out of the hospital. It was about two months after the crash. I’ve always had remarkable powers of recuperation, which probably means I just didn’t give a damn. I had to keep going. I’m not the sort of man who stays down for the count. I’m up at six or seven. I flew to New York to tangle with those censors, the bastards who were giving me such a hard time with The Outlaw.
We had a second test model of the F-11, and I took her up the next spring, just before I had to go into the arena and be fed to the lions in Washington. I took her up for over an hour.