Howard Hughes Read Online Free PDF Page A

hate you for it. Like Ava [Gardner] and Lana [Turner]. They want too much. I didn’t have that much to give.’ I n reference to my own private past life he said, ‘You really find individual women so different?’
    I said, ‘I sure do,’ and he made no comment; but he obviously disagreed.
    H: (about me) ‘You’re an outsider, of a sort – a kind of cultivated maverick. Putting aside judgments as to the harm you’ve done, because by your own admission you’re a selfish son of a bitch, that’s probably why I get along with you. I have to like any man who goes his own way, as long as he doesn’t step on my toes.’
    I feel strongly his consciousness of death as a powerful factor in his life. To describe him, at this junction: alone but not necessarily lonely; careful but not cautious; straightforward but not simple; intelligent but not intellectual; fussy but not really phobic; frail but making no obvious demands for his frailty; desperately curious about anything he doesn’t know about; eccentric but not crazy; anxious to communicate but doubly anxious not to be misunderstood.
    Most men flatter themselves that they live in their own world, but in fact they care a hell of a lot what the world-at-large thinks of them. Hughes, it would seem, for the most part has no time for self-flattery and less for caring about the world’s opinion. Maugham said that money is the sixth sense which enables us to make the best of the other five. Maugham said it; Hughes may have lived it.
II
    The book – at that time still an authorized biography – was codenamed ‘Project Octavio’ by the few privileged executives at McGraw-Hill and Life magazine (which had immediately bought first-serial rights) aware of its existence. Hughes had insisted on absolute secrecy and this was spelled out unequivocally in the various contracts. A breach of that secrecy gave him the opportunity to withdraw. ‘None of my people know I’m doing this,’ he repeated, ‘and I don’t want them to know. If it leaks to the press and you’re asked, you’ve got to deny everything.’ The proscriptions extended into all areas, including this introduction, which will account for the fact that certain place names and dates have either been changed or omitted. The tape-recorded interviews would be transcribed and typed under Hughes’ direction – that is to say, by some trusted lower-echelon associate – and my copy of the transcripts was to remain in my possession at all times. When it was read by the publishers, our agreements stipulated that I was to be physically present. ‘They can come up and read it in your hotel room,’ Hughes counseled. ‘Don’t go to their offices. You’ll go out to take a leak and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you zip up your fly. I’m counting on you,’ he said.
    We were so unalike. He was nearly thirty years older than I, bred in the Texas oilfields, orphaned young, a college dropout. I came from a middle-class Jewish home in Manhattan and had loafed through a bucolic university education at Cornell. In 1951 when Hughes was ferreting Communists out of the film industry in Hollywood, I was marching with Paul Robeson at Union Square and writing angryletters to The Nation . This gave a good base for conflict and we used it when we had to. He was a billionaire twice over; I still couldn’t qualify for an American Express card and Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times had called me ‘America’s best worst-selling novelist,’ which was a nice compliment but didn’t pay the rent. Hughes had lived almost all his life in America; I had taken off at the age of twenty-two and become, without design but nonetheless firmly, an expatriate. His world of adventure had taken place in moviemaking, flying, high finance; I had bummed my way around four continents, worked in steel mills and wheat harvests, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, married several times and written six books. He had designed and built one of