Howard Hughes (8 page)

This goes back to shortly after I’d hired him, and it almost made me fire him on the spot. He was basically an accountant, so naturally one of the first things he had to do was prepare my income tax return. I’d told him I wanted to file in California because I was going to live out there, but he pointed out that if I filed in Texas, which I could do because I still had legal residence in Houston, it would save me $10,000 a year. It had something to do with the community property law. I said to myself, ‘He’s an accountant, he knows what he’s doing.’ But I was uneasy about it, because I wanted to establish permanent residence in Hollywood, and that’s what Ella wanted too. She wasn’t in love with Hollywood but at least she wanted the illusion of permanence.

We were down in Houston in the spring of 1927, looking into Toolco. We had two tax returns prepared – one for California and one for Texas. At the last minute, I told Noah, ‘No, damn it, file the California return.’ With a lot of muttering and mumbling, he dropped it off that night at the Internal Revenue office in Houston. There was a midnight deadline and he made it by less than ten minutes.

Early the next morning he called me and said, ‘Howard, you’ve made a big mistake. I’ve been up all night figuring it out, and it’s going to cost you more than just $10,000’ – and he started giving me one of those complicated analyses of blocked income and joint interest in property. I didn’t understand a word. I was only twenty-two years old.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘get the California tax return back and file the Texas return, but please, for the love of God, don’t bother me anymore with it.’

Noah rushed straight to the tax commissioner’s office and gave them some cock-and-bull story that he’d filed the wrong return for me, and please could he have the California return back and submit the Texas one, which he had in his pocket, together with my check for the right amount.

They said to Noah finally, ‘All right, mistakes can happen, and we don’t want you to lose your job, so we’ll take your money.’

When he came back to Houston we met for dinner. I asked him to please explain the whole thing to me in simple layman’s terms. I listened, and I think I must have gone white. It turned out that what
he’d saved me, in hard cash, was about a couple of thousand dollars a year for the next three or four years, and I had to go back to Hollywood and still be a resident of Texas.

I wanted to beat my fists against the wall, but I said quietly, ‘Go back to Austin and switch the returns again. I was right the first time. I want to file in California.’

Now that was absurd of me, I know. You can’t go switching your tax returns from state to state three or four times. It’s not just that they’ll think you’re crazy, it’s that the tax people won’t bend over backwards until their spines snap. They won’t do it for John Doe and they won’t do it for Howard Hughes either.

Noah pointed this out and I left the dinner table without another word and went upstairs to my room in the Rice Hotel. I was in such a turmoil that I thought, I’m going mad. This man can rattle my brains like popcorn. There was only one thing to do. I dived into a cold bath and lay there until it was time to sleep, and then the next morning l left a note saying, ‘Noah, it may cost me a small fortune, but you manage the finances the way you think best, in my life and at Toolco. You make the business decisions. I’ll make movies.’

And I went back to Hollywood.

The real point of that story is this: that’s how and why I asked Noah to take over Toolco – all over this silly tax matter – and how I was freed to do the things I really wanted to do. Destiny works in strange ways.

THE FIRST MOVIE I made in Hollywood was called
Swell Hogan
, about a Bowery bum with a heart of gold. I knew an actor named Ralph Graves who had been a friend of my father’s. He took me to the Metro lot, and that time I got in.

Graves talked me into making
Swell Hogan
. In my office at the Ambassador he played out all the scenes for me, acted it out before it had been written, and convinced me it was a million-dollar picture. I was impressed with his performance, and he said it would cost only fifty or sixty thousand dollars to make.

‘I’ll go fifty,’ I said. ‘Let’s get to work.’

So I was in the movie business, and I made
Swell Hogan
. Or rather, Ralph Graves made it, and I watched and wept and paid the bills. When it was done, it had cost me $85,000, and it was a terrible movie. We couldn’t even get distribution. For a while I was a bitter and disillusioned young man.

But nothing could stop me, not even failure. After
Swell Hogan
I met Mickey Nielan again, my father’s old pal, and we made a picture together, my first movie that was released. It was called
Everybody’s Acting
. I guess by standards today it was a pretty flimsy picture, but it made money.

Then I hired Lewis Milestone, who had just quit Warner Brothers in a huff. He was a man whom I respected very much, and I hired him to direct a picture called
Two Arabian Knights
, a comedy set in the trenches of France during the First World War, and it won an Academy
Award. That was the first year they had the Oscars and we won the award for best direction in comedy. It cost $500,000 to make – that was a lot of money, almost unprecedented, and people thought I was crazy, but it was a smash hit. If you take big risks there are big rewards. I knew that even then.

These films were made by and released through my own company, Caddo Productions, which was named after the Caddo Rock Drill Bit Company in Louisiana, one of my father’s subsidiary interests that I’d inherited. Through Caddo Productions, Lew Milestone and I then made a gangster film called
The Racket
. All the time I was learning from my mistakes. I used to write everything down in a little ten-cent notebook I’d bought in Woolworth’s.

One day I lost the notebook. I was beside myself, because it seemed that everything I knew was in that notebook. I’m not superstitious, I didn’t think that the loss of the notebook meant the loss of my luck as well, but it had very valuable information in it and unfortunately, once I write something down in black and white, I tend to forget it.

I called Noah Dietrich. I had him retrace my routes that I’d traveled that day from Muirfield Road back and forth to United Artists. I told him to drive down that road and get down on his hands and knees every ten yards to see if it had fallen out of the car. He also had to creep around the studios – he sent me the cleaning bill for his trousers – but he still couldn’t find the notebook. I advertised in the newspapers. I offered a $500 reward and spent more than a thousand dollars in advertising to get that little ten-cent notebook back, and I never did. That still burns me up when I think about it.

By 1927, when I was twenty-one years old, I had decided that I wanted to make a big, realistic picture about flying in the First World War. I wanted to do something important. I wanted my life to be of significance. I had the energy and arrogance of youth. And I had money to back them up.

They’d made a few flying pictures before then, but none were realistic, and by then I’d started to fly regularly and I knew all the hot pilots around Southern California – Charlie LaJotte, Frank Clarke,
Frank Tomick, Roy Wilson, Jimmie Angel, Ross Cook, Al Johnson, Lyn Hayes, all of them. A lot of those guys had flown in the war and they’d seen some of these films that had been produced, including
Wings
, and they said, ‘Howard, it just wasn’t like that.’

I said, ‘Well, tell me what it was like.’

We had a lot of bull sessions – they liked me, because they thought I was crazy, like them – and the more they told me, the more I could see there was a great picture to be made, if it was made the way it was. The first time I heard that phrase, ‘the way it was,’ was from Ernest Hemingway. But that was twenty years later, when Ernest and I were friends.

In 1927 I made the commitment. I began to shoot
Hell’s Angels
.

We did things in that movie that had never been done before. I’m talking about the second version, because there were two. I shot it silent, and then talkies got started and I decided it was impossible to do this picture as a silent. The Vitaphone process had come in and I knew that it was to movies what the Sharp-Hughes drill bit had been to the oil business. I’d learned my lesson young: if you move with the times you can survive and do well, but if you want to come out on top of the heap you have to move just a little bit
ahead
of the times. You have to take the risks involved as well.

I decided to reshoot the picture in sound. It wasn’t necessary to do the flying scenes a second time – and it would have cost a fortune – because there was very little talking during the battles, and that could be dubbed in the studio. It did take me a while to figure out how to get the sound of planes in combat, but I finally hit on the solution. We hung a pair of microphones from a helium balloon about a thousand feet over Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley, and I got Pancho Barnes – a famous aviatrix and stunt pilot – to buzz the mike two hours a day for nearly a week. Pancho flew a Travel Air Mystery S racer, and that engine could sound like a squadron of Fokkers when she revved it up and did a steep climb. We mixed those sound tracks every which way and got all the effects we needed.

We did something in that picture that was revolutionary. First of all
we shot some of the scenes in Technicolor, which was a new process. There’s a scene in England, where the pilots, just before they’re taking off on a mission, have a big dance – and that was shot in color and cut into the film, which was of course made in black-and-white. And we had a red glaze over the film in some of the other parts. That was all new.

I did another thing that was even more exciting. We used a
widescreen
film like Cinemascope but then it was called Magnascope. There’s a moment in the picture just before the night sequence when the boys, Ben Lyon and Jim Hall, go out over France on a mission.

A title flashed on the screen: ‘SOMEBODY ALWAYS GETS IT ON THE NIGHT PATROL.’ And then the German planes started to come over. We had a system of pulleys rigged up in the theaters, and the screen got wider and wider and you’d hear the German Fokkers coming. We had special amplifying equipment and the noise got louder and louder, until that whole screen opened up and you saw a skyful of planes. That was a revolutionary device and it was my idea. We never had a preview, but I sat in the back row in some of the first performances. People shrank back in their seats when the German planes roared on to the screen. The screen kept growing bigger, and those planes looked like they were coming right at you and you were going to get chopped up by the props. Men sucked in their breath. Women screamed. I loved it. I was like a kid with a new toy, I’d built the toy, and my toy
worked
.

I had three airfields, and several hundred planes to simulate the actual combat aircraft. Most of the planes were real, like the Sopwith Camels, Avros, and a captured Gotha bomber, and I had some of the Fokkers shipped from Germany. I got Fokker himself, the man who built them, to round them up for me. I spared no expense. My whole idea was, and still is: once you commit, don’t hesitate or skimp. Do it
right
.

The guys who flew these ships were the real thing. Frank Clarke was a hell of a pilot, and a wild man. He was chief pilot on the picture, Tomick was in charge of the camera ships, and I was directing from the air in my Waco. Frank Clarke would fly anywhere in anything and take any risk – or, almost any risk. It turned out there was one he wouldn’t
take. There was a scene where a plane had to come in toward camera and make a sharp left bank at about 200 feet.

Frank said, ‘I can’t do it, Howard.’ This was a Waco, with a Le Rhone engine, which has a hell of a torque. ‘At that altitude,’ he said, ‘this goddamn plane’s going to crash right into the ground.’

I didn’t believe him. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘Howard, don’t.’

‘I can do it, Frank.’

He couldn’t talk me out of it and I couldn’t shame him into doing it. I took the ship up, went into the turn, and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital, half my face in bandages. I had a crushed cheekbone and needed some surgery to repair it; you can still see the indentation. That was my second crash. Frank ran up to the plane afterwards, they told me, to see if I was still alive, and I was, and he said, ‘Thank God! I thought we’d lost our meal ticket.’

I laughed when I heard that. I loved those guys, those pilots. They could say anything, even the truth, and it didn’t matter.

One time, when we were still getting ready to shoot
Hell’s Angels
, we’d got the German Gotha bomber fixed up in pretty good shape. Frank Clarke and I, with a couple of girls Frank had lined up for us, flew up the coast – except the Gotha wasn’t fixed up as well as all that, and we had some engine problem and Frank brought us down to a nice landing on a strip of beach near Monterrey, where we spent the night in a little Portuguese fishermen’s settlement where hardly anyone spoke English.

Frank was a good pilot, but he wasn’t much of a mechanic. And I was a pretty good mechanic but I couldn’t fix what was wrong with the Gotha. We had to send back for parts and spend the night there with these two girls in a little shack. Kind of crowded, just one room with the four of us. An odd experience for me. I’d never gone in for orgies. It made me feel kind of funny, the four of us in one room. And we each had our own girl, and then we switched the girls.

I really don’t want to talk about this incident anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. The details of sex are either vulgar, boring or repetitious.

L
et’s talk about the air crashes that took place during the making of
Hell’s Angels.

Three men were killed. Al Johnson was first, and then Clem Phillips. The third man wasn’t a pilot, he was a mechanic named Phil Jones. He was in that Gotha that Frank and I flew. Frank didn’t want to fly it that day – he probably had a hangover. So there was another pilot, Al Wilson, who went up with Jones, and they were running smoke pots to simulate a burning plane. They were supposed to go into a spin, bail out, and let the plane crash. Wilson bailed out at a thousand feet, but for some reason the mechanic didn’t. I was flying above them in a scout plane. I landed in the field next to the crash and tried to pull Jones out of the wreck. But there wasn’t much left of him. And he could never tell us why he didn’t bail out.

Those were the only deaths, but not the only crashes. The pilots themselves were calling it ‘The Suicide Club.’ I suppose the funniest crash, if you can call it funny when you’re facing death that way, was when Al Wilson bailed out over Hollywood. He was in a Fokker coming back to the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was socked in with fog and he decided he was over the mountains to the north but he had no idea which way to go. He was scared to ease her down, so he bailed out. He didn’t know it, but he was right over Hollywood Boulevard, and the Fokker cracked up the backyard of a producer named Joe Schenk. Schenk and his wife, Norma Talmadge, the famous actress, were there, and some other people, and they had a hell of a scare because a plane doesn’t hit the ground like a creampuff.

The propeller hit Hollywood Boulevard and nearly took some woman’s head off. That was good publicity in one way and not so good in another. We had a fair amount of complaints. Al Wilson himself landed on some guy’s roof. He was a lucky son of a bitch, more than once.

A few years later, around 1931, I made another picture about flying. That was
Sky Devil
, with Spencer Tracy and William Boyd. We started looking for the guys who had flown in
Hell’s Angels
, and it turned out that eight or nine of them were dead. That’s not including the ones who were killed when we were shooting the picture. They’d all cracked
up in just those few years. Lyn Hayes was dead, piled into a mountain somewhere. Ross Cook was dead, and Mory Johnson, Burt Lane, five or six others. All killed flying. It was a dangerous profession in those days – still is, only now you have to watch out for Arabs and hand grenades. But when I heard about this, I was very shaken up.

But it didn’t make you stop flying?

Nothing could have done that.

Did you think you had a charmed life?

I didn’t even think about it. I just kept flying. You read in the newspapers every day that thousands of people are killed in car accidents, but you don’t say to yourself, ‘I’ve got a charmed life, I’ll keep driving.’ You just keep driving because you need to get somewhere in your car. I needed to get somewhere in my plane. And I loved to fly. It was simple. Also, remember – I was young. A kid. I had many millions of dollars, but I was still a kid. If I was going to stop risking my life I would have stopped after I’d cracked up three or four times myself, but I didn’t. That never occurred to me.

I had one scene in
Hell’s Angels
where the Germans are forced by their commander to jump from their Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is being overtaken by the Allied planes, and in order to lighten the load the men have to jump. Being Krauts, and being ordered to jump by the captain, they jump. I shot that on the sound-stage, one of the few action scenes in that film that was shot indoors. We had a beautiful montage with a dark cloudy background. The men had to jump from the Zeppelin, down through the clouds. Of course we had a stack of mattresses on the bottom of the studio to catch them. That was one of the most dangerous scenes we shot. A lot of people thought the air stuff was the most dangerous, but this was worse, because the men had to land right on the mattresses, jumping from about forty feet, and those stunt pilots – guys who would do an Immelman or an outside loop without blinking an eye – were crapping in their pants. I shot that scene fifty or sixty times, because I wanted a certain effect.