I want to stop a minute to draw breath and give some perspective. I talked once about the time I was in my late twenties and I went into flying. I felt then that I was not a man in the full sense of the word.
When I got back from Ethiopia and French Equatorial Africa, I was forty-four years old. But I was a man in a lamentable state of bewilderment. I had made a great deal more of my life than if I had just stepped on my father’s shoulders – I had made more money than he had, I had accomplished more, and he was no longer a challenge. Having done that, I had nothing to do. I was lost. I had contempt for my world and I felt that there had to be something else, and this is what I went to Ethiopia to find. I didn’t find it. I certainly didn’t find it when I went down to see the good doctor.
I was in search – drowning in a sea of impressions, all of them new and strange. And moreover I came back that last time with an even worse case of dysentery – it never quite leaves your system.
Verne Mason, my doctor, put me in a private clinic, but while he was checking me out he said, ‘I’d better have a closer look,’ and he did a proctoscopy.
They stick a pipe up your ass and shine a light through it, and look to see if anything is growing in there that shouldn’t. He found polyps. They were benign, but it was better to take them out, Verne said, because they often turned malignant, if left to grow. Now this may strike you as fairly insignificant, and it was. But more even than my bad crash in the F-11, and more even than other close shaves I’ve had crashing in Lake Mead and during the war in England, this gave me a feeling of mortality. My body, which I’d always taken for granted, was betraying me.
One of the fools who wrote one of my so-called biographies quoted some other fool as saying, ‘Howard Hughes isn’t going to die in bed or as the result of a plane crash. He’s going to die at the hands of a woman with a .38.’ Time magazine printed that originally – it must have sounded colorful.
That’s a lot of baloney. Howard Hughes is going to die, as most men die, because the machinery of his body is breaking down and betraying him.
The first realization of this was overwhelming. More than most men I had retained a feeling of immortality until quite late in my life, partly because I’d gone through so many crashes and come through them where others couldn’t. But more than that it’s something inexplicable, something innate. I had talked to some of these young fellows over in England who had lost this feeling very young. Every time it came time to go out on a mission, they’d get a haunted look in their eyes, and you knew they were aware they might die. They didn’t have that feeling of immortality, of inviolability, that young men usually have – which is of course what makes wars possible, because you can’t get an army made up of men who know they’re probably going to die. You’ve got to get it made up of kids who can face the horrors feeling that it’s going to happen to someone else, not to them.
This youthful belief in immortality is a wonderful thing, but you can cut your throat with it if you’re careless. And it’s a terrible thing when you lose it and first become aware of death, perched on your shoulder… waiting. I first became aware after that simple operation. From then on I was aware of my heart pumping, of the digestive process taking place, of the glands secreting their vital fluids. I became as death-haunted as any man could be. It’s colored my every action, every thought, in ways I don’t fully understand. It’s not as if I’m planning to leave some noble monument for posterity. I’m a dying man – we’re all dying men and women – but I’m more so than many others are.
Didn’t you investigate the possibility of the deep-freezing of bodies, of going into suspended animation?
I’d heard about the cryogenic process, and I checked it out to see if there was anything in it, which there wasn’t. The state of the medical art is a long way from being able to accomplish that. I wasn’t looking for immortality, you understand. But I thought if I had another ten years of life coming to me, I’d prefer to live them in a later century than this one. I’ve had enough of this one.
Anyway, the dysentery cleared up, and I had this minor operation. But my physical condition in general was rotten. All the accidents, and all the illnesses – I’ve had pneumonia three or four times, and my lungs were weak – had taken their toll, and I felt fragile.
I went off to hide for awhile on the Pacific coast of Mexico, in a little fishing village called Zihuatanejo, still as Charles Maddox. I loafed around in a hammock under a palapa, careful of what I ate, read some books, thought about the past and the future, and at the end of that time – it was a couple of weeks – I knew what I had to do, which was very simple.
Be active. Bury myself in work.
I felt this was the only salvation, and so that’s what I did. I not only plunged back into TWA and Toolco and Hughes Aircraft, but I bought RKO and went back to the film-making business. It was a way of avoiding a confrontation with the things in life that I didn’t understand and thought I could never understand.
It turned out to be a terrible mistake.
18
I DECIDED TO go back into the movie business. I had some new ideas. I had learned that if you do something well and then stay away from it for many years – provided that you work on something else during those years of absence – you can go back to the original work and find that the accumulated experience of the intervening time is a tremendous plus. You don’t pick up where you left off. You pick up far ahead of where you left off. Your mental muscles are tougher and the problems that might have given you headaches ten or twenty years previously are problems that you can often solve, after all those years, with a snap of the fingers.
This time I wanted to go into the movie business on a large scale. I had the money, I felt I had the know-how. All I needed was the venue. It wasn’t a true creative urge and it wasn’t a calculated business decision. It was simpler than that. I liked making movies. It was a business I already knew well, and it was a business that I thought, if I got hold of the right people, could run itself.
I looked around. I had done some business previously with Floyd Odlum, who was the head of the Atlas Corporation, which had the controlling interest in RKO. Floyd had turned out a number of films that made a lot of money, but he was ready to get rid of RKO by then, partly because he had slow years in 1946 and ’47. I thought the big years were still to come.
I guess I hadn’t learned as much as I thought, because that goddamn company gave me nothing but headaches. RKO was a peanut-sized business compared to Toolco, compared to Hughes Aircraft and TWA, but it wasn’t as anonymous, at the time, as those other companies, and I wanted to put my own stamp on it, run it my own way. In 1948 I bought Odlum’s controlling interest in RKO for about $10 million, and got into trouble right away with the people in there who were running the show. We didn’t see eye to eye. The weight of the money counts, and out they went.
Peter Rathvon had been president of the company under Odlum, and I kept him on for a while. Dore Schary was head of production. Schary, of course, was an enormously talented and experienced man. He was a little too radical for my tastes, but I wasn’t running a political party, I was running a movie business, so I explained to him he could pretty much make the kind of films he wanted to. He was a shrewd man, because one of the first things he told me was that a man in my position, as rich as I was, who had bought a film studio and had previous film experience, would certainly want to run it, and he didn’t want to be in the position of being number two man. I assured him that he would be at least on a level with me.