Well, I meant this to be an honest revelation of myself – to set the record straight once and for all, so that when I die there will be someone left behind who’s recognizably Howard Hughes, not the figment of some hack’s imagination.
If that’s the only lie you’ve told, it’s not bad at all.
There are more. You asked me once if my father interested himself in my sex education. I don’t remember what I told you, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. Because that’s a sore that’s been festering in me all these years. It’s nothing terrible, nothing I’m ashamed of. And if I tell it, it may make you understand how crude my father was, and what a sad man. And yet also how he loved me, in his way. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word. This goes back a ways…
My father had a little cabin on the coast between Houston and Galveston. Closer to Galveston. He used it as a kind of base of operations for fishing – or that’s what he told my mother.
He used to go down often there for weekends, and of course I knew what he was doing down there. Jesse Jones was down there a couple of times too, and not with his wife. I don’t care about that – that didn’t horrify me in any way. That was just something that my father did, and I considered it his business, not mine. He was a man – I’m really not trying to criticize my father – he was a man with too much energy. He needed too many things. He needed other women, and he never hesitated to go out to get them. He didn’t go out of his way to hide it from me, and I guess for the most part I accepted it.
That’s what this little cabin was used for. On these fishing weekends he and his cronies would have two or three girls along to spice up the party.
Once they’d run out of booze, and I had to deliver it. This is when I was about fifteen years old. I drove down on a Saturday night. They were playing Red Dog and the girls were sitting around. I intended to turn around and go right back to Houston, but my father said, ‘Stick around, Sonny. Bring me luck.’
So I hung around. When the card game ended I wanted to go, but my father insisted that I drink whisky with him. I think that may have put me off drinking for the rest of my life. I had a few drinks. Most of the men disappeared, went off somewhere. This one man, Hastings, had another cabin nearby. The girl my father was with seemed old to me at the time, but I don’t suppose she was more than twenty-two.
The girl’s name was Colette. It didn’t really fit her. She looked like a Jane or a Mary – do you know what I mean?
My father took me off in a corner. He said, ‘I’ve had too much to drink. I’m going to sleep it off. You stay with Colette and take care of her. I think she’s tired, so show her the spare bedroom.’ He wasn’t crude, although the purpose was obvious.
I was certainly willing. I’m not trying to pretend that I protested, or anything. I got very excited by the whole idea.
I was a virgin, and Colette was a very pretty girl. Long, dark hair, lovely body, and green eyes. I went off with her into the bedroom and she threw off her clothes and then undressed me. Now I’m not trying to tell you some heart-throb of a story that I was impotent and couldn’t hump her. I could, and it was no problem. I enjoyed it. I was fifteen years old and my brains were in my prick. At least that night they were.
I jumped on that girl and away we went. I know she liked it, and when I finished I was lying there on top of her, getting my breath back. Then I realized there was someone else in the room. I turned around. Daddy was standing in the doorway, leaning against the door with a little sweet smile on his face, proud. He’d come in during the action and I hadn’t noticed. He’d been watching, to see how well I did it, and whether I would do it.
I don’t know if the point of it makes any sense to you, but for a long time, every time I was in bed with a woman, I was looking around to see if my father was watching me. I felt he was always there in the corner, leaning against the door, looking at me, and judging.
That time in the cabin near Galveston, did he say anything to you?
He was drunk, and he slapped me on the back, and he said something about me being a chip off the old block. He wasn’t unpleasant to me, wasn’t dirty or anything. He didn’t laugh at me, but I can’t begin to tell you how ashamed I felt. To think he was there the whole time, watching me! If I have any dominant picture in my mind of my father, it’s that moment.
I try so often to recall him in other situations, but he’s always standing there in the door, watching me on top of that girl. For a long time in my life it was a very unnerving thing to remember.
Poor Daddy. He had so much going for him. You know, I don’t think he was an unhappy man. I’m sure he was happier than I was, I mean happier than I am as a man or happier than I was at his age. I’ve lived a lot longer than he did, and that’s a miracle of sorts.
I don’t know why I say, ‘Poor Daddy.’ I suppose if he could see me now he’d say, ‘Poor Sonny.’
You’ve spent time in Texas, so you know the way they speak. I worked hard for a long time to get rid of that southern accent. But what I wanted to say is this, about his name. I told you they called him Big Howard, which pleased him no end, because the way they talked down there, it came out Big Hard. You see?
Yes, I do see. It never occurred to me.
As an adolescent, it was made quite clear to me. His friends made a point of saying it that way, and leering at me in case I didn’t get the point.
It bothered me. And yet, as I said, he wasn’t an unhappy man. Far from it. And people loved him. They don’t love me.
21
NOW I WANT to talk about TWA and the beginning of my real involvement, because RKO was just a sideshow.
Jack Frye and I were running TWA together and we were doing a good job. By the end of the war TWA stock was selling for more than $70 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. I had bought it in 1939, I think I told you, for $8 a share – then it went up to seventy-five in 1945.
By 1948, however, it dropped to nine dollars a share, which was not just a drop, but a crash. That stock was heading for the pavement and you would have been able to scoop it up with a shovel – or a sponge.
In wartime, planes were flying full. You had to have a priority to get on a commercial airline. Jack Frye made the mistake of assuming that this situation would continue after the war, and he committed my airline to a buying program which nearly broke us.
My mistake was that I had given him carte blanche because I was busy with other projects like RKO. However, I trusted Jack and we got along well. Unlike me, he was a man who knew how to ingratiate himself. He spent a great deal of time in Washington – although our head offices were located in Kansas City – entertaining and making friends with politicians. He was an influential man in Washington by the time the trouble started in 1948. He had a place in Chevy Chase, near Washington – I’ve never owned a house like that in my life. He had an estate on about eighty acres of parkland.
To explain how Jack operated in TWA’s interests, I have to remind you that I had contributed $25,000 to President Truman’s campaign when he was running against Dewey. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a substantial sum to you, but Truman wasn’t a rich man – sometimes these guys take whatever they can get, and they can be damned grateful for it.
As it turned out, it wasn’t enough. Shortly thereafter, TWA had some overseas route applications pending with the CAB, and Juan Trippe was trying to stop them from going through. He had friends in Washington too. So I told Jack Frye to have a talk to Truman about the routes, and push them through. And if he had to, he could remind the President that I’d personally contributed a substantial sum to his campaign, shoved it right in his hand in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.