The plane is the largest ever constructed, completed, and flown. It cannot be abandoned. It would be criminal to abandon it now, much less tear it apart. Would you tear down the Empire State Building? Let it go derelict? Some day, after my death, that ship is going to wind up on display either at a specially constructed housing, or at the Smithsonian Institute, because it’s a landmark in the history of aviation. And these shortsighted bastards who delight in destroying these sorts of monuments won’t get their hands on her. I’m keeping her in trust.
It’s costing you several hundred thousand dollars a year, isn’t it, to keep that plane in the hangar?
It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it. Besides, it’s tax-deductible.
17
AFTER THE WAR my whole life changed. I wanted it to change. After the Senate investigation, and my crash in the F-11, and after vindicating myself by flying the Hercules, I felt that the first part of my time on earth was over. I was in my early forties. I felt I had to get away. And so I went to Ethiopia.
The story of those trips is something I’ve told only to one person, and it’s an oddly emotional subject with me.
After I finally took the Hercules up and made her fly, I was no longer content in any way with the things that I had been doing. Until then I’d been climbing my father’s image, you might say. He had been up there in front of me, as a target – not just a target to attain, but a target to shoot down.
And I realized I had done it, I had shot him down. He wasn’t there anymore, looming up in front of me larger than life. It came to me that this was a kind of a ridiculous thing for a man of forty-three to still be battling with his father’s image. Then one day the image was no longer there for me. I had defeated him. I’d shot him down, as you put it.
But it left a hole in my life. What was I supposed to be doing? I owned TWA, one of the biggest airlines in the United States. Toolco was flourishing as never before, and I was a millionaire many times over. I’d known all the beautiful women in Hollywood and I could theoretically take my pick, so money and sex were no longer unattainable or even difficult objects. Money never really was, but it certainly wasn’t then.
Family life – well, that’s something else, and I’ll get to it later. What matters is that I realized I was a dissatisfied man, and that dissatisfaction took me, of all places, to Ethiopia.
Flying was still connected with it. I went the first time in 1946. TWA had a management agreement with Ethiopian Airlines, like the one pending with BWA in the Bahamas. More or less the same, but much more complicated, because we were dealing with a vastly more difficult set of problems. The most complicated piece of machinery those Ethiopians had ever seen was a sewing machine, much less an airplane.
In Ethiopia, up in those mountainous gorges cut by the Nile, I had the feeling that I was plunging back 2,000 years into time. I saw places that I’m positive hadn’t changed since the days of Christ. Almost the whole country is off the beaten track, and I remember standing on some mountaintop or even a few hundred yards off an airstrip, in the brush, and saying to myself, ‘It’s entirely possible that I’m the first human being who has ever stood on this particular spot of earth.’ That gave me an eerie feeling, very beautiful in some ways. Did I ever tell you, by the way, that I once pissed in the Coliseum in Rome? I don’t know why that occurs to me now, but I did.
I was in Rome on my way back from somewhere, probably Ethiopia – maybe that’s why I think of it now – and I stopped off for a day to see the city, which I hardly knew. I was in the Coliseum at night, not another soul there, and there was the grandeur that was Rome surrounding me on a lovely moonlit night. I was impressed, so I walked out into the center of the arena and had a piss in the moonlight. I said, ‘That’s in honor of you, Julius Caesar. Howard Hughes salutes you.’
Then I saw a guard walking over to me, and I decided I’d better leave. He didn’t stop me.
I wonder if any dollars grew there where you pissed.
Let’s get back to Ethiopia. TWA was supposed to set up and run Ethiopian Airlines until the natives could take over and run it themselves. There was no Ethiopian air service at all in 1946. I’ve been out there several times – it’s dramatic and savage and beautiful, and hell to travel. The standard mode of travel in Ethiopia was by mule, and the country was so cut by rifts that you could take a week to reach a village you could already see. Even when you landed at the airstrips, you could see the town a mile or so away, but it took an hour to hike up there. No roads, just dirt tracks. There’s a railroad running down the coast to the port of Djibouti, but that’s all. If ever a country needed air transport, it was Ethiopia.
We had one thing going for us, and that was a bunch of Italian airfields left over from the war. They were in terrible shape. But they were there. And so we – that is, TWA – signed a management agreement with the Emperor Haile Selassi and we went out there and started managing things.
I saw Selassi go by in his green Rolls-Royce one time. Everybody bobbed up and down like they do in Japan. But I never met him. When I went out there in 1948 I didn’t go as Howard Hughes. I didn’t want the treatment. I wanted anonymity as much as I ever wanted it, so I didn’t use my own name.
Strangely enough, I felt very uncertain of myself. I felt as if I hadn’t really done anything with my life. I had a kind of empty feeling, and I asked myself: where was Howard Hughes? I mean I knew where Howard Hughes was, but I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know the man underneath the labels. Who had accomplished all those things I’d done? And who was the I? And how would it get me through the rest of my life? How would I justify what remained of my existence on earth? What good would all my money do me, or anyone else? What had I accomplished that was more than an effort to honor my ego? What was the meaning of an individual life?
These may seem like cliches to you, out of some psychiatric handbook or some hippie’s ravings, but I was in my early forties, and maybe you understand that it’s a crucial time in a man’s life, a time when certain powers may be beginning to fail. I don’t mean just the crude sexual powers; I mean the powers of sustained energy, the confidence and the recklessness and the supreme ego of youth. Those are the powers that catapult you into manhood. They say that the first forty years supply the text, the next forty years is the commentary. Schopenhauer said that, not me.
Well, I couldn’t read my own text anymore. It was unfamiliar, almost in a foreign language. So how could I supply the commentary?
I felt I had a chance to become a new person, or to find the old person, the person who had been there all along, which I could never find back there in the USA, surrounded by people who were constantly wanting things from me, and from whom I wanted things constantly. I wanted to live in a world where I didn’t have to want and other people didn’t have to want with such a desperate quality. I would just have a challenge and a job to do, and in the quiet moments I could figure things out.
That’s why I went to Ethiopia the second time. The TWA operation out there was in charge of a man named Swede Golien, and I didn’t want to see Swede. He’s an old-time pilot – been flying since not long after the First World War. He was in the capital, Addis Ababa, so I ducked in and out of there as quickly as I could. I went out as an airport engineer from the home office. I just called a few of the guys on top in Kansas City, and said a man I was interested in, an engineer named Charles Maddox, was going out to Ethiopia for me personally. I would take care of his salary, don’t put him on the books, and no special treatment by the guys in Ethiopia.