H., on women briefly: ‘They wear you out trying to get ideas across to them. Then later, when you give up trying, they hate you for it. Like Ava [Gardner] and Lana [Turner]. They want too much. I didn’t have that much to give.’ I n reference to my own private past life he said, ‘You really find individual women so different?’
I said, ‘I sure do,’ and he made no comment; but he obviously disagreed.
H: (about me) ‘You’re an outsider, of a sort – a kind of cultivated maverick. Putting aside judgments as to the harm you’ve done, because by your own admission you’re a selfish son of a bitch, that’s probably why I get along with you. I have to like any man who goes his own way, as long as he doesn’t step on my toes.’
I feel strongly his consciousness of death as a powerful factor in his life. To describe him, at this junction: alone but not necessarily lonely; careful but not cautious; straightforward but not simple; intelligent but not intellectual; fussy but not really phobic; frail but making no obvious demands for his frailty; desperately curious about anything he doesn’t know about; eccentric but not crazy; anxious to communicate but doubly anxious not to be misunderstood.
Most men flatter themselves that they live in their own world, but in fact they care a hell of a lot what the world-at-large thinks of them. Hughes, it would seem, for the most part has no time for self-flattery and less for caring about the world’s opinion. Maugham said that money is the sixth sense which enables us to make the best of the other five. Maugham said it; Hughes may have lived it.
II
The book – at that time still an authorized biography – was codenamed ‘Project Octavio’ by the few privileged executives at McGraw-Hill and Life magazine (which had immediately bought first-serial rights) aware of its existence. Hughes had insisted on absolute secrecy and this was spelled out unequivocally in the various contracts. A breach of that secrecy gave him the opportunity to withdraw. ‘None of my people know I’m doing this,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t want them to know. If it leaks to the press and you’re asked, you’ve got to deny everything.’ The proscriptions extended into all areas, including this introduction, which will account for the fact that certain place names and dates have either been changed or omitted. The tape-recorded interviews would be transcribed and typed under Hughes’ direction – that is to say, by some trusted lower-echelon associate – and my copy of the transcripts was to remain in my possession at all times. When it was read by the publishers, our agreements stipulated that I was to be physically present. ‘They can come up and read it in your hotel room,’ Hughes counseled. ‘Don’t go to their offices. You’ll go out to take a leak and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you zip up your fly. I’m counting on you,’ he said.
We were so unalike. He was nearly thirty years older than I, bred in the Texas oilfields, orphaned young, a college dropout. I came from a middle-class Jewish home in Manhattan and had loafed through a bucolic university education at Cornell. In 1951 when Hughes was ferreting Communists out of the film industry in Hollywood, I was marching with Paul Robeson at Union Square and writing angry letters to The Nation. This gave a good base for conflict and we used it when we had to. He was a billionaire twice over; I still couldn’t qualify for an American Express card and Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times had called me ‘America’s best worst-selling novelist,’ which was a nice compliment but didn’t pay the rent. Hughes had lived almost all his life in America; I had taken off at the age of twenty-two and become, without design but nonetheless firmly, an expatriate. His world of adventure had taken place in moviemaking, flying, high finance; I had bummed my way around four continents, worked in steel mills and wheat harvests, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, married several times and written six books. He had designed and built one of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world; I had nearly failed high school physics and had trouble splicing two wires together. I had three children, Hughes had none.
There were similarities too, that helped in oblique ways. Hughes had been an only child; so had I. The world of an only child is a special one and the male who moves from it into adulthood carries a heritage of ego, selfishness, self-sufficency and loneliness. This we shared. And we were both tall – Hughes nearly six foot three and I an inch taller. Tall men instinctively understand each other’s physical stance, the still-living memory of adolescent awkwardness, the vulnerability. There was also the fact that Hughes, who has been sued in court possibly more times than any living man, discovered one day that my publishers and I were being sued for libel and defamation of character as a result of my last published book. The damages claimed, worldwide, came to more than $160 million. ‘You know,’ he said to me, gravely, ‘I’ve never been sued for that much in my whole life. That’s really something. I’m sorry for you, but I’m impressed. That tops me by – let’s see – by $23 million.’
‘Yes, but you lost the lawsuit, Howard, and you’ve got that kind of money. I won’t lose because what I wrote was true and I can prove it. And if I lose, I haven’t got $160 million.’ He hadn’t listened. ‘That’s really something,’ he repeated, and I realized he had a new respect for me; he was mildly envious.
The interviews began in the Bahamas. Most of them took place in my hotel room. The air-conditioning had to be turned off, the windows closed, and my wife, who was traveling with me then, had to disappear half an hour before the appropriate time. This meant that she saw a great deal of the nightlife in Nassau and once, at four o’clock in the morning, had to wrap herself in a hotel blanket and doze in a deck chair on the beach until the sun woke her. Her enthusiasm for the project was increasingly dim.
Hughes was a talker and rambler, but I wanted more than facts and anecdotes: I wanted the man. ‘You ask some tough questions,’ he said, and after a while he began to call me ‘Mr. Why,’ because ‘Why?’ on my part became a refrain, until I was almost as tired of hearing myself say it as he was. We clocked about nine hours of actual taping time during the ten days I spent in the Bahamas, but that represented more than twenty hours spent together. He would wave his hand at the tape recorder. ‘Shut it off… I can’t stand that damn thing… ‘and he would vanish to the bathroom, carrying his leather briefcase.
Coming back he would drop into his easy chair; I would switch on, we would talk again; after five minutes he would jiggle his hand again at the machine and after I had switched off he would say, ‘It’s not going good. This isn’t the way I thought it would be. Can’t you find out some of these details for yourself? I thought you were an experienced reporter.’
The next meeting took place in June. I was better prepared this time. I had taken a crash course in the known life of Howard Hughes, largely due to the efforts of a man named Richard Suskind, whom I had hired as a researcher. I had known Dick Suskind for ten years on the island of Ibiza; he was a writer and a scholar, the author of books on the Crusades, Richard the Lion-Heart, the battle of Belleau Wood and the history of Anarchism. He knew how to dig into files, libraries and periodical indexes. At the time, still thinking that the Hughes book would be a definitive biography and therefore a two-year project of interviewing, researching, cross-referencing, writing and editing, I needed help. Suskind began scouring the United States in April and came back with a glum face. ‘There’s practically nothing,’ he said, ‘and most of it repetitious, hearsay, stuff in gossip columns.’ Newspaper files had been stripped, court records were mostly unavailable, whole editions of magazines with articles on Hughes had been bought out and vanished from the public domain. The few unathorized biographies were useless, trading on business analyses in Fortune, parroting back the flamboyant stories that from time to time appeared in the national press, expanding New York Times’ accounts of Hughes’ exploits in the air and in Hollywood back in the ‘30s. I read everything and realized immediately from what I had learned in the Bahamas that the public man was a myth bordering on a lie. His time as a bush pilot in Ethiopia, his meetings with Schweitzer and Hemingway, weren’t mentioned anywhere; his so-called seclusion in Las Vegas was accepted as gospel. Howard Hughes had neatly outfoxed the world for more than thirty years.