Howard Hughes Read Online Free PDF

the most sophisticated aircraft in the world; I had nearly failed high school physics and had trouble splicing two wires together. I had three children, Hughes had none.
    There were similarities too, that helped in oblique ways. Hughes had been an only child; so had I. The world of an only child is a special one and the male who moves from it into adulthood carries a heritage of ego, selfishness, self-sufficency and loneliness. This we shared. And we were both tall – Hughes nearly six foot three and I an inch taller. Tall men instinctively understand each other’s physical stance, the still-living memory of adolescent awkwardness, the vulnerability. There was also the fact that Hughes, who has been sued in court possibly more times than any living man, discovered one day that my publishers and I were being sued for libel and defamation of character as a result of my last published book. The damages claimed, worldwide, came to more than $160 million. ‘You know,’ he said to me, gravely, ‘I’ve never been sued for that much in my whole life. That’s really something. I’m sorry for you, but I’m impressed. That tops me by – let’s see – by $23 million.’
    ‘Yes, but you lost the lawsuit, Howard, and you’ve got that kind of money. I won’t lose because what I wrote was true and I can prove it. And if I lose, I haven’t got $160 million.’ He hadn’t listened. ‘That’s really something,’ he repeated, and I realized he had a new respect for me; he was mildly envious.
    The interviews began in the Bahamas. Most of them took place in my hotel room. The air-conditioning had to be turned off, the windows closed, and my wife, who was traveling with me then, had to disappear half an hour before the appropriate time. This meant that she saw a great deal of the nightlife in Nassau and once, at four o’clock in the morning, had to wrap herself in a hotel blanket and doze in a deck chair on the beach until the sun woke her. Her enthusiasm for the project was increasingly dim.
    Hughes was a talker and rambler, but I wanted more than facts and anecdotes: I wanted the man. ‘You ask some tough questions,’ he said, and after a while he began to call me ‘Mr. Why,’ because ‘Why?’ on my part became a refrain, until I was almost as tired of hearing myself say it as he was. We clocked about nine hours of actual taping time during the ten days I spent in the Bahamas, but that represented more than twenty hours spent together. He would wave his hand at the tape recorder. ‘Shut it off… I can’t stand that damn thing… ‘and he would vanish to the bathroom, carrying his leather briefcase.
    Coming back he would drop into his easy chair; I would switch on, we would talk again; after five minutes he would jiggle his hand again at the machine and after I had switched off he would say, ‘It’s not going good. This isn’t the way I thought it would be. Can’t you find out some of these details for yourself? I thought you were an experienced reporter.’
    The next meeting took place in June. I was better prepared this time. I had taken a crash course in the known life of Howard Hughes, largely due to the efforts of a man named Richard Suskind, whom I had hired as a researcher. I had known Dick Suskind for ten years on the island of Ibiza; he was a writer and a scholar, the author of books on the Crusades, Richard the Lion-Heart, the battle of Belleau Wood and the history of Anarchism. He knew how to dig into files, libraries and periodical indexes. At the time, still thinking that the Hughes book would be a definitive biography and therefore a two-year project of interviewing, researching, cross-referencing, writing and editing, I needed help. Suskind began scouring the United States in April and came back with a glum face. ‘There’s practically nothing,’ he said, ‘and most of itrepetitious, hearsay, stuff in gossip columns.’ Newspaper files had been stripped, court records were mostly unavailable,