It was an absolutely fine day. I felt more relaxed with Ernest than I felt with men I had known all my life. We just took each other for granted, and I was terribly impressed. With myself, too. Mind you, I wasn’t conscious of this at the time. A lot of it came to me in thoughts afterward. But I was conscious of it to a certain extent, because I knew that this was not the way I usually behaved. And I was happy.
Then I made a bad mistake. We had such a good relationship growing up between us that I felt ashamed of myself for deceiving Ernest by calling myself Tom Garden. It suddenly seemed ignoble. And so I said to him, ‘I have to tell you something. My name isn’t Tom Garden.’
He took a gulp of his drink. ‘Then who the hell are you?’
I said, ‘My name is Howard Hughes.’
He looked at me for a minute, downed his drink, and said, ‘Goddamn! I should have guessed. That’s why you flew so well. I should have known it. Howard Hughes! Goddamn! I’ve always wanted to meet you, and here you are, bareass naked with me in the Caribbean!’
He kept on chuckling, and I was relieved at his reaction. I thought everything was going to be okay.
But it was a mistake to have told him. In subtle ways his attitude began to change almost at once. The first thing that happened is that he wanted to know all about me – that is to say, about Howard Hughes. He asked me a hell of a lot of questions. That’s when we got on to our long discussion about my crashes and wartime experiences, and that was all right – but then he started asking me the same sort of questions that reporters had asked me for years.
I had developed a habit, the moment these kinds of questions were posed to me, of instantly ducking into my shell and being brusque. And that’s what happened to me then. When we went back to the house I said to Ernest, ‘The one thing I beg of you is not to tell anyone else who I am, because that ruins everything for me. People treat me differently and I don’t like it.’ I wanted him to pick up the hint.
He said he understood. He wished that he could be anonymous sometimes, but his face was too well known, the big beard and everything. In retrospect I don’t believe him, but that’s what he said then.
But his attitude had changed. He had always been fascinated by rich people, and he confessed that to me, and he began to talk about money.
Money is not a subject that I’m shy about. Money’s played an important role in my life. I’m hardly alone in that: people will lie, beg, borrow, steal, do damn near anything for money. It’s played an exaggerated role in my life because I’ve had more of it than almost anybody else. If you’re a man seven feet tall, like ‘Wilt the Stilt’ Chamberlain, it’s bound to be important in your life that you’re taller than anyone else around. You stand out, and people are going to gawk at you. People have always gawked at me because I’ve had more money than they have. They treated me like a freak, which is one of the reasons I’ve always hid from them.
And so I didn’t want Ernest pumping me about how much money I had, how I got it, and what I was doing with it. But obviously I couldn’t avoid the subject altogether. He wouldn’t let me. And the more I talked – I guess when I talk, I talk about a million dollars as most men talk about a hundred – the more Ernest became almost deferential to me. He was awed by all this.
The worst thing that happened was that just before I left, he became aware that he had been deferential. Because he was a perceptive man and he was, I think, aware of his own attitudes as few men are. Once it dawned on him that he was being deferential – I may even have said something to him, not meaning to insult him, but said, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t pull that with me, that’s what I get from flunkies’ – he was ashamed.
He turned against me. He became surly and difficult. Although when I left, we had one very good moment. He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I don’t care whether you’re Tom or Howard, I’m just delighted to know you, and I want you to come back and I look forward to seeing your skinny ass again.’
And so everything was okay when I left.
Did you see him again?
I waited a long time. Much too long, in fact, because we had a good friendship, and if I had continued it I think I would have been the better for it. Ernest could have been the kind of friend I always needed. Different from me, although I don’t think that would have made a barrier.
But those were the years that I got so terribly involved and embroiled. ‘My son Howard the Billionaire is drowning!’ I was drowning in details and deals, and I was sucked down into that morass of suits and countersuits and financing – the whole horror story of TWA.
Did you and Ernest correspond with each other?
No, he didn’t write letters and I rarely do. I did go back, though, to see him about five or six years later. That was sometime in 1959, and the Cuban revolution had already been accomplished. And this time I went deliberately – I had no business in Florida.
I went straight to Cuba to see Ernest, because it was a time in my life when I was completely fed up with everything, and I had nothing but good memories of Ernest and the times we had spent together. I regretted that we’d been out of touch. I had read in the papers that Ernest was back in Cuba, and that was what prompted me to go. This was not meant to be a two-day visit, or a three-day visit, or anything. As happened again later, I was willing to burn my bridges behind me. I felt that Ernest and I had a great camaraderie, and there wasn’t much more I needed in life at that point other than one close friend. So when I went back it was with the idea that I would stay as long as I wanted to. It could have been for the rest of my life. I had no time limit in mind.
You were married to Jean Peters then, in 1959. You mean to say you and Jean would have moved down to Cuba?
I don’t know what would have happened. Things had started to go a little sour by then in my second marriage. In fact, long before then. But if I had stayed on in Cuba, and I was free to do so – all I had to do was throw over my entire industrial empire, so-called – I probably would have asked Jean to come out, give it a try to see if we could live together again.
When I arrived and went out to Ernest’s finca, it was a terrible disappointment. It threw me completely, because everything had changed. Ernest had become an old man. And I don’t mean just old physically, old in appearance – he always had that big white beard – but the vitality had gone out of him. And some of the intellectual honesty had gone out of him too. He was crotchety and difficult and he talked to me in an entirely new way.
The first day I was there, half our conversation had to do with Cuban cigars, because Castro had accomplished his revolution and Ernest was worried that Castro was nationalizing the cigar industry and the cigars would not be the same quality they were before. He said, ‘Howard, why don’t you buy the island from Fidel and go into the cigar business?’
He pursued that theme. I’d come to talk to Ernest about a possible total change in my life, and he kept saying, ‘The cigars won’t be the same if they’re not rolled on the thighs of nubile Cuban girls, and you can make a good deal with Castro, you can buy in for a hundred million, and what does that mean to a man in your position, Howard?’
I hadn’t come to discuss the quality of Cuban cigars. I was uncomfortable and a little impatient.
The second day was just as bad: I never got a chance to talk to Ernest alone. He got up late and he had a lot of visitors. We had a pickup of meal out at the finca and there were a bunch of Cuban army officers and political figures. He introduced me, thank God, as Tom Garden. He still respected my wish for privacy. But he and these officers and politicos chatted away furiously in Spanish all afternoon. Every once in a while Ernest would stop and throw a line or two of translation in my direction. I was bored.