Unfortunately, he died while he was still president of TWA. Some people say that I drove him to his grave. It wasn’t true. He had cancer of the intestines.
Did you have more TWA stock, at this point, than the original stock you’d bought?
I had been buying the stock all along. I’m a heavy plunger. I believe in putting all my eggs in one basket and watching them hatch.
The situation after the war was as follows. All the airlines were running piston aircraft, but the jet age was just over the horizon and you had to be blind not to see it. They thought the propjet, the turboprop, would bridge the gap for a while, but that was a mistake. The gap narrowed too quickly. In the early 1950s all the airplane manufacturers – Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed, Martin, and the Convair Division of General Dynamics – were scrambling to get jets into production. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. And all the airlines were trying to make up their minds which manufacturers to buy from.
A conversion like this meant huge loans, many hundreds of millions of dollars. The ones who were really licking their chops were the banks. You don’t just say overnight, ‘Okay, scrap the piston planes and buy the jets.’ Not only was it a tremendous financial investment, but it involved retraining programs of pilots, mechanics, personnel of all types, changeover of hangar facilities and ground facilities. It was not something anyone plunged into. You could have been jumping off the diving board into an empty pool.
But anyone with a half a brain knew that the pool was filling up and the plunge had to be taken. I flatter myself that I’ve got half a brain. I went shopping. I decided right away that Boeing and Convair were going to make the planes to fit my needs.
Again, that decision was not so simple, because it’s not like buying a vacuum cleaner from a salesman who comes in and says, ‘See? This is our vacuum cleaner. Try it out. If you like it, buy it.’ Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the planes didn’t yet exist. And if we were going to buy a jet from Boeing, we had to tell Boeing precisely what our needs would be. To give you an example, each plane has a different seating potential. These planes were mocked up in the initial stages so that you could have a bank of three on the starboard side and a bank of two on the port side, or similar combinations. Dozens of other configurations had to be specifically arranged between the manufacturer and the airline.
With my attention to details, and you know what I’m talking about because you’ve read my memo about Jane Russell’s brassiere, I think I drove those airplane guys up the wall. But they let me do it. The men are who run American business receive annual salaries that run into the tens of millions of dollars. And yet if their companies prosper, it’s usually in spite of them, not because of them.
In 1955 I decided to buy jets from Jack Zevely, the boss at Convair. I was late making up my mind, but I finally did make it up. However, Jack thought I was a bit peculiar because of the way we started negotiations. I didn’t want the other airlines to know which planes TWA was going to buy. Moreover, I wasn’t sure that I was going to buy them at all. Beyond that, I wanted to keep the other manufacturers, like Boeing and Douglas, on the hook a little bit – so everything had to be done with the utmost secrecy.
I conducted my negotiations with Jack where I usually conduct my negotiations. I would instruct him to meet me in a specific remote area. One time we met at Indio in the California desert and then I drove him to a spot adjacent to the municipal garbage dump in Palm Springs. It was a hot night. Jack kept saying, ‘Open the windows, Howard.’
I said, ‘No, let’s keep the windows closed so we can talk privately.’
‘It’s stifling,’ Jack complained.
I finally opened them, with great reluctance, and then he realized we were next to the municipal garbage dump. The stink came through the windows of the car, and he yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, Howard, close the windows!’
TWA didn’t buy those jets from Convair, which disappointed Jack a great deal, because there had been protracted negotiations. The problem was that Ralph Damon had already made arrangements to buy another plane from Douglas Aircraft, and I had to back him up. He’d put his signature on paper – all I’d done was talk to a man a few times in a car. I chewed Ralph out for acting without my final approval, and I guess that’s the time he cried himself to sleep. I called him a few nasty names. I thought he was a big boy and could take it, but I guess he couldn’t.
I felt bad about breaking off the negotiations with Convair. They had plans to build a long-range jet, so I went to them and said, ‘I want a dozen.’ But they were slow. God, they were slow. Actually I worked with Jack Zevely on the design, and Jack has made statements since then that he never could have designed that plane without me. As it turned out, unfortunately, he couldn’t sell that one to me, either, because the planning took so long that by the time we’d finished it, the prototype of the Boeing 707 was in the air, the Dash-80, and the Douglas DC-8 hard on its heels, and Convair was out in the cold. Boeing and Douglas had made better planes.
Convair blamed me for this. But Jack Zevely didn’t have to do what I said. Any time he wanted to, Jack could have frozen the design and put that ship on the production line. He didn’t have to listen to me – I wasn’t God.
I started negotiating at one point with Lockheed, with Bob Gross. But he knew me too well and once I started making too many demands he turned the tables on me. One night at around 10 P.M. my private telephone rang. For once I happened to be asleep. I woke up quickly, alarmed, because no one who had that number would have called me at that hour unless it was on a terribly important matter. I grabbed the receiver and croaked, ‘Hello? What’s the matter?’
A voice said, ‘Knock, knock.’
I was too befuddled to say anything except, ‘Who’s there?’
‘Howard.’
I recognized Bob Gross’s voice, but I thought I might be wrong, and I was still dazed, so I said: ‘Howard who?’
Bob Gross said, ‘Howard you like to go fuck yourself, you goddamn maniac!’
Then he hung up, and I couldn’t get back to sleep – so he had his revenge for all those nights I’d driven him around the Nevada desert.
Meanwhile the Convair management was running around in circles. They abandoned the long-range jet and decided to go for something in-between, an intermediate. I still felt bad about what had happened, so I called Jack Zevely and found out what he was doing. I said, ‘I have complete faith in you and Convair, and I want the first thirty medium-range planes that roll off the line. ‘And let’s paint them gold, not silver.’ My engineers had developed a process to anodize aluminum so that it looked like gold, blazed in the sun, wouldn’t pit or tarnish. I offered it to the Convair people at no charge and they were delighted.
They came up with the CV-880. But it was supposed to be a medium-range aircraft, and it turned out to be a long-range jet, which meant it had to compete with the DC-8 and the 707, planes that were already operational. The 707 was a tremendous success right from the word go. Not as fast as Douglas’s plane, but handled nicely, a sturdy aircraft. She had problems, of course. Landing was one of them – they’d built the engine pods a little too close to the ground to keep them away from the fuel tanks in the wings, and on a crosswind landing you had trouble banking her, you could knock off a pod on the runway. And they’d yaw a lot if the damper wasn’t functioning one hundred percent.
You see, the Convair people, from the very beginning, had made a mistake in the negotiations with me. When I go in to negotiate with a man, or a company, I assume from the beginning that everybody’s out for his own interests, and from the beginning you’ve got to lean on the other guy. If he’s worth his salt he’s going to try and lean on you, and you have to get in the first push. So I started leaning on Convair from the beginning, and I leaned, and I leaned, and they fell right over without a whimper. They weren’t donkeys, they were lapdogs.