After six weeks of this she signed a contract and flew back to Italy, where she stayed. I never put her in a picture because she was too temperamental. The stockholders sued me for wasting all that money on her.
Then they said I’d signed Merle Oberon to a fat contract, $125,000 a year for six years, and never used her in a picture. That was true. I’d made a mistake. No mistakes are allowed. And there was a ballerina, Zizi Jeanmaire, a French girl, who I wanted in a picture about ballet. I hired the troupe as well, the Ballet de Paris, and the stockholders thought that was extravagant.
Was there any justification to these lawsuits? What part of all these accusations was accurate? I don’t know. Half the time I didn’t know where half these people were or what they were doing, and the other half of the time half of them didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. I didn’t know who was responsible and nobody else did, either. All I knew was that I wanted these stockholders’ lawsuits off my back. That was accomplished, in the end, very easily. I simply bought all the stock. If the stockholders sold all their stock and weren’t stockholders anymore, there would be no more stockholders’ suits. I’d be the only stockholder.
I certainly wasn’t going to sue myself.
And they sold it all to you?
Of course they did. If you appeal to people’s greed you can’t lose. The stock was selling at three dollars a share, and I made a tender offer at six. Noah suggested five, but I said, ‘Come on, let’s give them six, because then each little guy will say to himself, ‘Yippee, I’m doubling my money overnight!’ and psychologically that’s better than him just thinking he’s making seventy percent.’ I owned about 25% of the stock then – I think there were about four million shares outstanding, and I had well over a million. It cost me $16 million and it saved me forty million in stockholders’ suits, not to mention the legal fees. But the public gobbled it up like pigs at a trough.
You were buying a company on the edge of bankruptcy. I understand that you got rid of the lawsuits, but what else did you have then except a white elephant?
I had a beautiful tax loss, a carryback, a tax credit I could have used any way I wanted to. Toolco and the Aircraft Division were making money hand over fist. I had the physical assets of the studio – the lot, the sound stages, the equipment, a corporate shell. They were valuable. And I had a backlog of movies I could dump into the television market for ten or fifteen million dollars if I wanted to hang on and wait for the right bid.
I had plenty – but you’re right, it was a white elephant and I was tired of feeding it gold peanuts. I wanted to get out. So I put her up on the block, one fat old white elephant for sale. Well, pretty soon some syndicate boys came along with an offer. What’s commonly known as Cosa Nostra, Mafia, Organized Crime – you name it. Gangsters. Their money is as good as anybody else’s. Well, it’s as green as anybody else’s.
I accepted their offer of roughly seven and a half million dollars. But I couldn’t go through with that sale. The newspapers got hold of the background information on these syndicate guys, the spotlight turned on them and things got too hot. They had made a down payment of a million and a half. It was generally thought that they left this behind when they got out. But I’m sure you know nobody leaves behind a million and a half dollars without a good fight, and that was the case here. These guys were not the kind of guys to get out and just shrug their shoulders, and I was not about to expose myself to retaliation and revenge. I had enough enemies in my life without taking on the Mafia.
So I quietly and immediately paid these people back their down payment. And in some ways that was one of the best investments I have ever made. Because later, when I bought into Las Vegas, those men were invaluable. They opened doors for me, they gave me contacts I could never have had any other way.
After the deal with the syndicate boys fell through, I still wanted to get rid of RKO, but I was goddamnned if I was going to take a thumping on it. Things diddled and fiddled off and on for a number of years, during which I was involved with many other things. Toolco was in trouble. TWA was in bigger trouble. I had to spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and sleepless nights dealing with TWA – I poured the sweat of my life into that airline. I had a big break with Noah Dietrich. But I still had to make time to get that albatross off my neck. That’s what RKO turned into – first a white elephant, then an albatross.
Finally Manny Fox put in a bid for the company. I knew he had it on his mind, but one or two things had put him off, and then one day I was driving him to Los Angeles International Airport. He was going off to Europe. Without warning, he made me an offer on the way. He offered me twenty-two million and that was enough so that my foot went down on the brake without even thinking about it, and we nearly went up on the sidewalk with a big screeching of tires. He was all shaken up.
We pulled up in front of a luncheonette and I jumped out of the car and ran inside and called the airport to cancel his reservation. Fox didn’t know I’d done it until I came back to the car and said, ‘I canceled your reservation on the plane.’ He couldn’t understand why I did that in such a hurry, and I said, ‘Well, you just offered me $22 million. We’ve got to talk.’
He said, ‘But you nearly killed us there! You nearly broke my neck just to save the price of an air ticket!’
‘Manny,’ I said, ‘watch out for the pennies and the dollars look after themselves. The twenty-two million is just cash in the bush, but the $500 air ticket is a bird in the hand.’
But that deal fell through, too. Eventually I sold RKO to General Tire. They wanted to be one of those big conglomerates. More than that, they wanted our film library for television. And more than that, I’m positive that some of those executives up at General Tire wanted to hump the film stars. That, as you realize, is the main reason why all those guys running the conglomerates have bought the various movie studios. They’re rarely money-making operations. They may be tax write-offs in some instances, but as far as business goes, they’re year-round headaches and crapshoots. But they give these guys access to the starlets. It’s a free call-girl service.
I exempt myself from that group. With me it was more a matter of availability. The movie stars just happened to be where I was. And it’s not true, not in all cases. I was attracted to a woman physically because – well, it’s no secret that I used to have an eye for a well-turned calf. I’m a leg man. Some men like breasts, but that never meant anything to me. Others go for behinds. I myself have always liked legs and wrists. There’s something about a nice slim wrist that really appealed to me.
Being out there in Hollywood I inevitably met beautiful women, either in the movies or trying to get into the movies. Every one of them wanted to get me into bed. Not that I was such a beautiful specimen, or a sexual maniac – I was anything but that. But I was Howard Hughes, the famous billionaire eccentric who’d been seen with beautiful women all over. They didn’t realize that in most cases that’s all there was to it. But there were exceptions, and one of them was considered to be one of the world’s great beauties – Hedy Lamarr.