Howard Hughes Read Online Free PDF Page B

whole editions of magazines with articles on Hughes had been bought out and vanished from the public domain. The few unathorized biographies were useless, trading on business analyses in Fortune , parroting back the flamboyant stories that from time to time appeared in the national press, expanding New York Times ’ accounts of Hughes’ exploits in the air and in Hollywood back in the ‘30s. I read everything and realized immediately from what I had learned in the Bahamas that the public man was a myth bordering on a lie. His time as a bush pilot in Ethiopia, his meetings with Schweitzer and Hemingway, weren’t mentioned anywhere; his so-called seclusion in Las Vegas was accepted as gospel. Howard Hughes had neatly outfoxed the world for more than thirty years.
    When we met for the second series of interviews the mood was markedly different. Again they took place in my hotel or motel room. The fact that it was a second meeting, a reaffirmation of mutual purpose, was a powerfully positive factor. On a simpler level, we were glad to see each other again and said so. But as soon as the tape recorder was in position and I reached for the start button, Hughes snapped out at me. He had read and brought with him the transcript of the Bahama interviews. ‘You baited and bullied me,’ he accused. ‘You led me into saying things I didn’t mean to say. You kept interrupting and contradicting me. That’s got to stop.’
    We argued, and finally I said, ‘Okay, if I’ve done that I was unaware of it, and I apologize. I certainly won’t do it now. All I ask from you is the truth.’
    ‘That’s what I’m going to give you,’ he said sharply. ‘No more pussyfooting around.’ He had clearly made up his mind to something.
    In the course of the next weeks he opened up; but it was a hard, painful flowering. Think how hard it is for any man to speak and tap at the truths of his own experience with a blind man’s cane: because in that world of self-revelation we are all equally blind, or else we lie and wear masks we’ve collected throughout the years – collected, tested and saved for such occasions. But he tried from the beginning to get itright, get it straight, without the benefit of mask or mummery. He would start to speak, stop, then say, ‘No, that’s bullshit. Scrub that, don’t transcribe it. Let me start again.’ And he would do it again, and if he didn’t get it right he would frown and say, ‘We’ll come back to that. Remind me, will you, please?’ He wasn’t aiming to polish his words but to plumb his memory better; not so much to be analytically deep, but more to strike the mark as though he were an archer taking aim at a far target and not so sure his hand was steady or his sight good enough anymore to isolate it from the background. He was archer and target both; and that was why it hurt, more so when he struck the mark. A hard flowering, I said, and one that had to be respected. Again and again he came to our meetings in a fractious mood, skittery and prudent and startled like a virgin when the instrument of violation makes contact. He was violated by his own momentum to shatter that hymen of superficial memory, common to us all, stretched tightly across the past. We scrapped and argued all the way, then and later, because it was easy for him to confuse my pressuring him with his own need to get to the root and gut of things. Random exchanges taken from the transcribed interviews, verbatim – and not included in the text of the autobiography – will give an idea.
    H: …I have to protect myself from myself. Do you understand?
    C: Yeah, I understand. I think.
    H: You think – well, never mind. That’s the way I am and I don’t give a goddamn what you think, or anyone else. Don’t be offended. I’m just being frank.
    H: It’s a sexually dirty story, and she’s still a famous actress, so I’m not sure I want it included in the book. I’ve given you enough dirt already. Let’s just say… this