Meanwhile I’d gone out of sight, and my lawyers were holding up the proceedings by employing the usual delaying tactics. It would have taken a good long time before anything would have happened with the condemnation procedure, but in the meantime Noah continued some quiet negotiations.
Finally he came to me and said, ‘Howard, I had to sell them an acre and a half, just to keep them off your back a while.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I squawked, ‘I told you I didn’t want to sell any of that land for less than $50,000 an acre. How much did you get?’
‘I got $62,000 an acre,’ Noah said.
That took the wind right out of my sails. ‘All right, an acre and a half. But don’t sell them any more. Got to pay taxes on all that profit.’
However, once the thing got going, it was like a snowball rolling downhill, and I sold them about 120 more acres. I realized after a while I must have taken a screwing when they bought the first lot for sixty-two thousand. I operate under the principle that if a man accepts my offer I must have offered him too much, and if a man agrees to pay what I ask him for something, then I’ve set the price too low. So I wound up asking $77,000 an acre. ‘Take it or leave it,’ I said.
They took it. That’s not bad, is it?
23
MY PRIVATE LIFE during those years was a swamp of complications. I was swimming as best you can when you’re in a swamp – from woman to woman, getting involved and then getting uninvolved, and it sapped a good deal of my energies. There’s no satisfaction in that way of life, and certainly no salvation.
I had an affair at that time with Terry Moore, the movie star. It started in 1950 and it lasted quite a while. It was interrupted when she married Glenn Davis. He was the West Point football star, the Mr. Outside of the combination that won all those games for Army. Mr. Inside was Doc Blanchard. Terry wasn’t really interested in Davis in spite of the fact that they got married. It was one of those harebrained things that happen, particularly in Hollywood. And later, when she came back to Los Angeles, we took up where we left off. That is, back in the sack, making whoopee.
Things worked between me and Terry. She had a straightforwardness which I appreciate. The problem was her husband, Glenn Davis. After she left him and came back to me, he arrived ranting at my bungalow in Malibu. When we opened the door he walked up to me and belted me on my ass without another word. I’m tall, but I was skinny – I wasn’t a football player – and he knocked me flat on my back. I walked around with a big black eye for days afterward.
He accused me of breaking up his marriage, which was a lot of horseshit, because the marriage was broken up long before that night. I didn’t bring Terry at gunpoint, she came to my bed all willing. So this obviously wasn’t my doing.
What other women did you know in those years?
There was Gene Tierney, the actress, a beautiful woman – that was another time I got hit. I met her at a party given by William Randolph Hearst; he was always giving big parties up at San Simeon and throwing women at me. Gene was married to Oleg Cassini, the designer, and one afternoon when I brought her home from a walk on the beach Cassini was hiding in the garage waiting for us. He leaped out and clipped me. I ran away. The next time I saw him was at a Hollywood party and he threatened to brain me with a cut-glass decanter. I had to hide in an upstairs bedroom and call for help. Ginger Rogers was another one, although I can’t remember who she was married to. At least he never jumped out at me. I stopped going to parties after the Cassini assault. It was too dangerous.
Did you get a kick out of involvement with married women?
The truth is, I didn’t hunt for them, they hunted me, and I guess during that period I enjoyed the company of attractive and witty women and I didn’t duck their attentions. Obviously none of them was in what I would call a good marriage. And in one sense it was safer than an involvement with a single woman who was looking for a husband – although as I’ve mentioned, there were physical risks.
Before Terry and Gene and Ginger, and after, I was involved with Lana Turner. A story went the rounds that Lana had her sheets embroidered H.H. because she thought I was going to marry her. I was supposed to have said, ‘Well, go marry Huntington Hartford.’ But that wasn’t true. I would never be so crude. I just told her, ‘In a pinch, you can always sell them to Huntington Hartford.’
There were plenty of women who were under the impression that I wanted to marry them, although I never said so or even hinted. For a while I was taking out some of these society girls, and they’d announce to the papers every other week that wedding bells were going to ring in the spring. That’s what they would say – really – that’s how their minds worked. ‘Wedding bells may ring in the spring for Howard and me.’ I’m talking about Gloria Baker and Tim Lansing and Meg Lindsay, and a few others. There was nothing really happening there. I suppose I did see Gloria Baker somewhat more than the others. I flew her once from New York to Los Angeles, and by the time that flight was over and she’d chewed my ear for fifteen hours I thought, God, I’d rather hear wedding bells in the spring with a female baboon than this girl’s voice every day of my life, and I ended the relationship right there at the airport.
Usually I let these girls think whatever they wanted to think. I never put anything in writing. My father once told me: ‘Do right, and fear no man. Don’t write, and fear no woman.’ That was wise advice and I followed it, especially the last part. You know, they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Howard, if we were married?’
And I would say, ‘Uh, uh, uh… yes, maybe… who knows?’ And if they ever got more serious than that I’d complain of an earache.
With Tim Lansing once, I had trouble with her parents. I had met her in Palm Springs and her parents came down to get her out. I think it was all a plot on her part to get me to marry her. They said she’d told them I’d told her I was going to marry her, and we’d even set a date.
I said, ‘I don’t remember it. You know I’m deaf. I obviously misunderstood.’
They didn’t pressure me any further. I don’t think they thought I was such a great catch. They thought I was a little crazy. That’s another reason why they’d come down to rescue their daughter.
What did it mean to you to have such a succession of quick affairs, on and off, as you put it?
My behavior was based on one of those fallacies that are common to most men’s lives. When you’re young, assuming you’re not a fairy, you think that women are essential to your life. You waste an awful lot of time wooing them or putting the make on them. This is a hangover from adolescence, I suppose, when you’re yearning for a girl and you can’t get one because you don’t know how. My adolescence, and yours too, probably – although maybe not the adolescence of the kids today.
But I went through that as a very young man, and then as a grown man, up to thirty-five or so, and then the physical thing, which had never been very big with me, tapered off. But the habit didn’t. The habit of seeing women, squiring them around, and the apparent need for feminine company. In those years when I had solved most of my problems with women, when I was supposedly a mature man, I still had this hangover from the earlier years, this habit of wanting women around, of wanting their company and treating them ultimately as sexual objects rather than as people who happened to be female.