I thought, if I marry Jean, that will bring stability and common sense to my life. I won’t worry so much about things like TWA and Hughes Aircraft – I’ll go for walks in the country and watch a movie and sit down to dinner at dinnertime like a normal man with his normal wife. I’ll have someone to care for me when I’m old and crippled, as I knew was inevitable after all the plane crashes I’d had and the damage I’d done to my body. If you damage the body, you also damage the mind. Mind and body are one. I thought Jean might stop me from losing my mind.
I proposed to her after many years of seeing her off and on, and she accepted. She loved me. She’d been married once before, to a businessman named Stuart Cramer III, but that didn’t work out, and the funny thing is that after he and Jean were divorced Cramer married my old girlfriend Terry Moore. Maybe there’s only a limited pool of women for every man and vice versa. These things are mysteries.
Jean and I were married in Tonopah, Nevada by a local justice of the peace, using other names to avoid publicity. That’s legal in Nevada. We flew down there in January 1957 in one of my Connies and the whole thing didn’t take more than three hours.
Where did you go on a honeymoon?
Right back to the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was too involved in the TWA horror to have a proper honeymoon. We didn’t even live together at first, mostly because my living habits were so outrageous that Jean wouldn’t stand for them. I intended to change them, and I told her so, but not just yet. We lived in separate bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel and we could see each other whenever we liked, but at least she didn’t have to listen to me doing business on the telephone at three o’clock in the morning and raiding the fridge at five o’clock for a bowl of French vanilla ice cream, which was my favorite.
I had five bungalows rented there at the hotel. One for Jean, one for me, one for business staff, one for cooks and waiters, and one for storage of my ice cream supply, cases of Poland Springs mineral water, plenty of Kleenex and soft toilet paper, and a few cartons of white athletic socks. I can’t stand the idea of running out of socks or soft toilet paper so I always keep a large supply handy.
We didn’t really lead a normal life, that was the problem. When I wanted to divert myself from business I’d go over to the Goldwyn Studios with Jean and screen a few movies. I could watch two or three in a row but she would inevitably fall asleep. Then at one point I got tired of the facilities Goldwyn offered me so I found a producer named Marty Nosseck who was willing to let me screen movies in his private screening room on Sunset Boulevard. Actually, I moved in there.
Into the screening room?
Yes, Marty Nosseck was very understanding about that, and I paid him well. My needs were few. I had a bed moved in and a supply of Kleenex and toilet paper, and a few telephones, and that’s where I conducted the TWA negotiations. I had a room there for my aides and my projectionists. I lived in the screening room for about three months.
What about Jean?
It was hard on her. Finally she put her foot down. She reminded me of all the promises I’d made her, especially that we would have a house where we could live together as man and wife. So on my fifty-fifth birthday, in 1960, I gave up the screening room and we moved into a house on an estate near Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County. Jean wanted me to buy it, of course, but I said, ‘Let’s try it out first and see how things to.’ I was a little frightened by the whole idea.
There was trouble right away. Not only couldn’t I give up my nocturnal business habits, and my eating habits, and my quite considerable and realistic precautions against germs and harmful bacteria, but we had a problem with her cat.
You were able to live in a house with a cat?
I love animals. They’re a lot cleaner than human beings. And a cat particularly is a clean animal. Jean loved her cat, which was a spayed female called Sweetness, gray and white and very friendly-looking. I often stroked her fur, which was like mink, and tickled her under the chin, and she purred a lot when I paid attention to her. I guess I was very fond of that animal.
And then one day it vanished. Just vanished. Didn’t come home that night as it always did. I thought it might have been kidnapped but Jean said that was ridiculous. Nevertheless, she was deeply upset, and I went out of my mind trying to locate that cat. I had my entire staff combing the neighboring estates and all of Rancho Santa Fe, and I hired a team of local rent-a-cops to supplement them, including four men on horseback and a helicopter. I told my people,
‘This is not the Everglades, this is not New York City with its dense population. This is a civilized bucolic area free of predators. Find that goddamn cat!’
And did they find her?
No, but she wandered in on her own a couple of nights later, a little the worse for wear – a cut on her nose and a patch of fur missing. Jean wept for joy.
That, however, was the end of our sojourn in Rancho Santa Fe. I knew the cat could go off again to meet with whatever cat she’d been hanging out with the time she vanished, and the plumbing in the house was lousy, so we moved back to Los Angeles where I rented a place in Bel Air. It was a large house and Jean and Sweetness lived in a separate part of it, although she – Jean, not Sweetness – visited me at least twice a day. I wasn’t feeling well at this time. I was taking codeine for pain and Valium to calm my nerves. I was under tremendous pressure.
27
NOW THAT WE’VE investigated my domestic life, I’ll get back to TWA: Act Three of the horror story. Be aware that from this point on, I was without Noah Dietrich. No one except my lawyers was advising me.
TWA was flying at 96% capacity, which is phenomenal. Our net profit per day pole-vaulted to an average of $175,000. The airline under my guidance was making big money. But suddenly I got wind that the Luce empire had decided there was a crack in the Hughes empire, and this was the time to pour troops through the breech and batter down the gates. They used Fortune, their most prestigious and conservative magazine, to do the job.
This attack had nothing to do with journalistic ethics or the search for truth. It had to do with the fact that Clare Booth Luce still hated me for turning down Pilate’s Wife, and she wanted revenge. So Henry Luce, her accommodating husband, did the job for her.
The guy who was going to write the Fortune story was a writer named Charles Murphy, who had already pilloried me once before, in 1953, when Fortune published an article about Hughes Aircraft. Now it was the turn of TWA.
Murphy had been around already talking to people, and he made no bones about what he intended to do. I did a lot of banking then with the Bank of America, and my man there was Keith Carver. Murphy had gone to Keith and told him he was going to pick up a literary axe and bury it in my skull.