‘Not good enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Pedro.’
‘I’m a friend of Octavio’s.’
I began to realize this was an elaborate and diabolical practical joke, I was already checking over in my mind the list of friends who might be responsible. ‘Pedro,’ I said slowly in Spanish, so he couldn’t possibly mistake the mood – ‘it’s four o’clock in the morning and I don’t want to play games. I’m glad you’ve got a friend named Octavio, but I don’t know what’s going on and I’d be grateful if you’d enlighten me before I hang up.’
He said cheerfully. ‘Octavio is the man you’ve come to see. Can you be ready in two hours?’
At dawn I was outside the hotel when a Volkswagen coasted up to the gate. Pedro was a slim, brown-faced Mexican of about thirty, with a neat mustache. We drove out of Oaxaca and into the countryside, past a small Indio village and then up a narrow paved road in steep spirals that circled an oddly-shaped mountain. The mountainside was lumpy with rough little cubes and pyramids overgrown by seared vegetation: this was Monte Alban, the once-sacred haven of the Zapotec kings who had ruled southern Mexico before the Aztecs came to conquer. The ruins overlooked the three green valleys of Oaxaca. The early morning air was fresh and cool, and the stepped temple buildings were brushed by puffs of clouds that seemed to touch the sky. There was a feeling at Monte Alban of being very close to a child’s idea of a finite and fixed heaven.
Pedro pulled up in a leveled-out space, a sort of dirt parking lot, behind the sunken stone ball court. He indicated another car, the only other car, about thirty yards away. I got out and walked over, scuffing at the dust, opened the door – and slid in next to Howard Hughes.
No eight-inch fingernails, no white hair touching his shoulders or white beard hanging to his belt. The last photograph of him I had seen had been taken in 1957. He looked simply like the same man grown older and thinner; the dark eyes and brows, the mustache, the sweptback hair now gray rather than black. He wore a cheap shortsleeved shirt of nondescript color, a tan cardigan with a button missing, creaseless brown slacks and a pair of loafers into which his socks somehow always managed to slip and vanish, so that when he crossed his legs there was a gap of bony white shin between the sliding sock and trouser cuff.
Aside from the mountaintop setting, it was a completely undramatic and anticlimactic meeting; the ‘phantom tycoon’ was a 65-year-old human being. We said all the polite and obvious things, we talked about Mexico, and then took a brief walk in the sunshine to the steps of one the temples. ‘Great place,’ Hughes said. ‘Beautiful,’ I agreed.
He said, uncomfortably, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Same time, but we’ll go somewhere else.’
I had been nervous and so had Hughes, I realized; and I said so. ‘Yeah… well, maybe,’ he said. ‘Thank you for taking the time, anyway.’
Pedro picked me up at six o’clock the next morning and drove me to the airport. He was a pilot as well as chauffeur and we flew in a private single-engine Cessna to Juchitan on the Isthmus of Mexico. We would dip down into the valleys between the sheer slopes of scarred mountains until a village of a dozen mud huts appeared abruptly under the starboard wing, and he would shout gleefully, ‘Look at those people! That is the stone age!’ I said, ‘Fantastic… amazing… ‘and then asked him please to gain some altitude so that we wouldn’t join them, forever, in their mountain fastness.
We landed in Juchitan, and Hughes and I met in a sparsely furnished room in a small hotel in the nearby town of Tehuantepec. He had a jug with him – ‘This place has the best orange juice in Mexico,’ he explained. He drank six cupfuls from paper cups that he took from his briefcase. I don’t know what test I had passed, but the mood had changed completely; he was expansive, and I was relaxed. We talked until early in the evening, the conversations and negotiations punctuated by his vanishing, from time to time, out the door and apparently to another room. The rules were set for the writing of what was then meant to be an authorized biography: we would tape a series of interviews, which he would transcribe, and I would work with them and whatever material I could unearth on my own. ‘None of my people know about this,’ he said, ‘and I want it to stay that way. So you’ll have to do this research that you’re talking about on your own. Don’t come running to me for help. Don’t use my name. And don’t talk about it, and tell your publishers not to talk. If it gets out to the press what we’re doing, the whole goddamnn thing’s off.’
Hughes vanished again and Pedro appeared, bearing an envelope containing $750 in cash to cover my expenses on the trip. ‘Señor Octavio asked me to apologize to you,’ he said. ‘He had to leave. I’ll fly you back to Oaxaca.’
The next day I flew back to New York, gave a report to my publishers, and then went home to Ibiza.
The next meeting, arranged by telephone, took place some weeks later in Puerto Rico. I flew from Madrid to San Juan and checked into the agreed hotel. Hughes telephoned at three o’clock in the morning and asked me to come down to the lobby, where a driver met me and led me through the darkness to an old Chevrolet parked at the curb. He did the familiar disappearing act and I slid behind the wheel next to Hughes, who was wearing, it seemed to me, the same clothes he had worn in Mexico the month before: styleless shirt, baggy trousers and cheap cloth windbreaker. In the interim, however, he had grown a startlingly full head of dark brown hair. ‘Well, goddamnit, it’s a wig. Cost me $9.95 in the five-and-dime. I have three or four of them and a few beards, too. I can’t afford to be recognized – you have no idea the risk I take in meeting you this way. It’s not that there’s always somebody out to subpoena me, although that’s bad enough. It’s worse.’
He wouldn’t elaborate. He suggested we drive while we talk, and pointed out the route past San Juan Airport and up into the Puerto Rican tropical rainforest. We reached the summit of vegetation just as dawn was breaking, and he said, ‘Stop here.’ After a while a woman materialized out of the undergrowth, carrying a basket full of bananas. Following Hughes’ request, I got out of the car and bought a dozen. He put on a pair of white cotton gloves and we began to peel and eat them. They were short, fat, sweet bananas. ‘These are the best bananas in the world,’ he said, and to prove it he ate four. ‘In America they’re made of plastic.’
After the banana feast we got down to talking business and procedure. Long after the sun rose and the lush greenery of the rainforest glittered with golden light, we checked off the last clause in the agreement and signed several necessary copies, resting the pages on Hughes’ briefcase against the dashboard of the Chevrolet. ‘Good,’ he said, smiling broadly for the first time since I had met him. ‘I hate these goddamn business details. Now we can get to work. You go back to Spain. I’ll call you when I’m ready to start.’
That was the prelude. I was full of contradictory impressions, and on the plane flying up to New York, I took out a spiral notebook and began making notes on some of the conversations. They sum up, better than any recollection, the tenor of what was said and the feelings I had then about what he had allowed himself to reveal; and so I reproduce them verbatim.
H: ‘The things that every man wants the most are the easiest to get. Money, fame, and women. That’s what happened to me. And so you get them – and what then? There’s that old gypsy curse: “May your dreams come true.”’
He knew Hemingway, apparently in Cuba. At first Hem. didn’t know who HH was – just another hanger-on. ‘Hem liked the fact that I knew something about planes. I had a private plane (where and when?) and I took Hem. up for a ride. He said, ‘You’re a hot pilot’… A year or so later when I saw him again I told him who I was. He said, ‘Well, you son of a bitch.’ He seemed to be impressed, and unfortunately that changed our relationship. Of course he gave me his word that he wouldn’t let on to anyone else who I was, and as far as I know he kept it.’