Howard Hughes (17 page)

THE FLYING BOAT has been a running theme throughout my life. In a sense it was Henry Kaiser who conceived it, but Henry dropped out and never implemented the idea in any way. Let’s call him the oyster and me the pearl. He gave me the grain of sand around which I built the Hercules, which is what I called it. That idea has been incorporated at least in part in all the big jets that are flying today – the Boeing 747, the C-5A, and so on.

Henry Kaiser first came to visit me around 1941, just before the war began for the United States, and I think he had a very poor impression of me. He came up to my hotel room in San Francisco, at the Mark Hopkins. I was in bed recovering from pneumonia and I had blankets piled on top of me. I hadn’t told people I was sick and he thought it was simply another eccentricity on my part, for which I was already famous at the age of thirty-six.

But he didn’t seem to care. He had already talked to Jesse Jones, who was head of the RFC, the wartime Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Jesse was a Texan and he had been a friend of my father’s.

Henry Kaiser said to him: ‘Tell me about Howard Hughes.’

‘Mr. Kaiser,’ Jesse said, ‘I’ve known that boy all my life. He’s a man you can trust.’ He called me a genius. He said, ‘I wholeheartedly recommend that you and young Howard work together. All I suggest is that because of Howard’s methods of work, his concentration, and his attention to details, you leave him alone when he does the building.’

Kaiser sat by my bed at the Mark Hopkins. ‘Well, Howard, how
about some way to lick those goddamn German U-boats that are chewing up our shipping?’

I asked him what he had in mind.

‘I have in mind,’ Henry said, ‘a flying cargo ship. Something big enough to carry a battalion of troops and all their gear right over the Atlantic.’

I was speechless. I don’t want to detract from Henry’s inspiration, but something of the sort had been buzzing around in the back of my head for some time, and Henry’s words crystallized it for me. Right then and there I had the vision of what is commonly known as the Hercules, or HK-1, or the Spruce Goose, as it was later nicknamed.

I immediately got interested. The only thing, I told him, was that I didn’t know if I could mass-produce a ship of such scope and size.

He said, ‘That’s my specialty, Howard. You just design and develop it.’

I said okay, and we shook hands.

Literally?

Oh, I was half dead with pneumonia, practically a one-man germ factory, and it couldn’t have made any difference if I’d shaken hands with a crap-smeared ape in the zoo. It was Henry who took the risk that time, not me.

We set up a nonprofit paper corporation, and put up a few thousand dollars apiece. Henry was very useful to me, not only because of his knowhow, but because he got along much better with those guys in Washington. They already had me on their shitlist for that little incident at Wright Field. I let Henry handle all the socializing, and I set my mind to figuring out what we were going to build and how we were going to build it.

This was now in the beginning of 1942 and there was already a tremendous labor shortage. I had no idea where we were going to get skilled men to work on something of that scope. But I was going to go ahead with the project anyhow.

I worked up some preliminary designs and in September of 1942 Henry turned up with a Letter of Intent from the government, authorizing him to spend $18 million and build three planes. That’s better than I could have done if I’d gone to Washington. They would
have said, ‘Why don’t
you
cough it up, Mr. Hughes? You’ve got plenty of money.’

But Henry pulled one boner: he told the government that the planes would be ready within a year. I knew they’d barely be getting off the drawing boards by then, and we wouldn’t be able to freeze the design for at least eighteen months.

I took over one of our sheds at the Culver City aircraft center and moved two of our other projects into an abandoned laundry. My first problem was that I couldn’t get metal – it was in short supply, and the government wouldn’t provide me with any because I was who I was. I could have been building the atom bomb and they would have given me spit and paper clips to do it with.

And so I worked out a way of bonding wood, a blend of plywood and plastic called Duramold, and we started work. It was chaotic, and I had to hire men from other companies involved in the war effort, otherwise the project would have died a-borning.

The U-boats were cutting us up in the shipping lanes and men were getting killed, soldiers who hadn’t even seen battle. It was a pitiful situation. The advantages of a flying boat over a land-based plane were not so well publicized, but they were considerable. A flying boat could land anywhere where there was water, and this covers a lot of territory. It very much increased the safety factor of getting men secretly to their destination. This plane, understand, was eventually designed to carry more than 700 men plus their battle gear.

Did you really believe you’d get it finished before the war was over?

Who the hell could figure how long the war was going to last? You forget, before they knew the atomic bomb would work, the top brass were figuring the war might go on until 1947 or 1948. There was no way of knowing. Until early 1944 we didn’t even know for sure that we would
win
. We believed we would – I believed it – but nobody had a crystal ball or a guarantee from God. That’s something people tend to forget. Toward the end of the war there was a strong possibility that we’d have to keep on fighting against Stalin and the Russians. Roosevelt went to that conference at Yalta and cheated the
U.S Army out of a war that would have lasted another ten years, for which all those colonels who dreamed of being four-star generals never forgave him.

Anyway, at the time the Hercules was a highly practical concept. With both the Mars and the HK-1, and various other designs that were worked on after the war, the payload versus range comparisons showed the flying boat far and away superior to a conventional land plane of similar size. If you were trying to sell a project of any kind you had to make a comparison computation and on top of that a performance and utilization computation. But that’s all technical stuff. I worked like a son of a bitch: that’s what it boils down to.

I’d never tackled anything that big, and I don’t mean just in size. They had another name for the Hercules besides the Flying Lumberyard and Hughes’s Folly and the Spruce Goose. The guys who were working on it called it ‘The Jesus Christ’ – because every time they got a new workman in there, or some senator or one of the government engineers came to the hangar for the first time, he’d look up. The tail assembly was nine or ten stories high. And the first thing the guy would say was, ‘Jesus Christ!’

Cost was another thorny issue. The government put up $18 million and I personally, out of my own pocket, chipped in an additional seven million. So the initial costs were around $25 million. Since then it’s been even more. But I want to point out to you that in 1949 the British built what was supposed to be the largest land plane in the world, the Brabazon. Its wingspan was only 230 feet as compared with the
HK-1’s
wingspan of 320 feet. It flew only briefly – the British didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Labor troubles hurt them badly, just like now. I could have given them a few pointers, but it was the old story of every country wanting to be top dog. It cost them $48 million. Believe me, I could afford the money more than the British Empire could.

I also pointed out, then and later on, that a plane of this size and concept would be a magnificent research laboratory and well worth the government’s investment. They built the B19, you know, a plane that never saw service, and it paved the way for the B-29 which helped
win the war for us. So there was a precedent, and the Army knew it as well as I did.

But the Army didn’t care about how much money I forked out or what this plane might lead to. It wasn’t just that I’d flown over Wright Field without stopping, or that I’d worn pajamas under my suit – it went deeper than that. I was an independent. I didn’t kiss their asses and play the games that other manufacturers played, and I didn’t make the automatic assumption that because a man was a general in the U.S. Army Air Corps he knew everything there was to know about airplanes. A lot of them flew in World War One and were still thinking in terms of strafing and dogfights. They were the equivalent of the
old-line
army generals who thought the Second World War was going to be fought in trenches.

I wasn’t supposed to be as smart as they were, but I was a hell of a lot more knowledgeable when it came to talking about aircraft design. And I was under forty and rich and had a sense of independence. So they said, ‘There’s a young punk multimillionaire who wants to build warplanes as a hobby.’

I never baited them. I never told them what I thought of them. But they probably could see it in my eyes. They hate anybody who’s different, the same as these Eastern banking people. You know there was one guy involved with one of those banking houses trying to round up the money to help TWA who made a public statement which just about summed up the attitude of the Eastern Establishment, Wall Street, Washington, and the Army. He said that you can’t do business with a lunatic who wants to meet you in parked cars and men’s rooms to talk about hundred-million-dollar loans. He was saying, ‘You’re different from us, and we won’t tolerate it.’ That was the Army’s attitude too.

By 1947 I was out of pocket $10 million. It was a nonprofit venture from the start, and it got more nonprofit as it went along. Henry Kaiser lost money too – his half of the $5,000 we started the corporation with. He turned tail within a year. I don’t blame him – he had other things to do and he agreed to leave me on my own.

Bear in mind I never owned the plane. I don’t even own it now. The United States government owns it. I just lease it from them. That’s a sop they threw me for my first ten million and the forty or fifty million I’ve put into the ship since then. I’m leasing it, even now, for ten grand a year.

There were two men, Roper and Edwards, with the Defense Plant Corporation, whose contention was that you were never in the factory and there was terrible confusion there, and…

Stop right there. I’ve been through this before, with a battery of lights on me and the inquisitors throwing their questions. I don’t need you to do it too. I don’t want you to do it.

It was not true. Of course I didn’t breathe down my people’s necks. I told them what do, and I said, ‘You’re grown men, capable men. Get off your asses and do the job.’ I knew every goddamn thing that went into the plane, every problem and everything that was going on at the plant. If I had my drawing board at home, what the hell possible difference did it make where I tackled the problem? You tackle problems in your head, and your head is on your shoulders and it doesn’t matter whether your shoulders are at home, sitting on the john, or in an office. That’s the mentality of small men, that you have to do a job in an office with secretaries and eighty-seven telephones buzzing and ringing, and conferences and all that bullshit. I don’t do things that way.

Weren’t you once accused of building the Hercules as a movie set?

That came up at the hearings in Washington, the Senate hearings, later on. Can you imagine?

I thought Cary Grant actually suggested it to you.

Cary wanted to do a movie about a guy who travels around the world on a spaceship of the future. That got into the newspapers and Cary may have made some unfortunate statement that I was going to produce this picture and we’d use the Hercules for the set. Obviously I wouldn’t consider such a thing. I’ve never in my life capitalized on any of my aeronautical achievements. Two or three studio heads came to me in Hollywood during the war and said, ‘Let’s make a movie
about your flight around the world,’ and I wouldn’t give those guys the time of day, if I knew it, which undoubtedly I didn’t because I didn’t wear a watch.

I certainly wasn’t going to consider vulgarizing a project that was still in the building stage, and where the U.S. Army was involved. I was working eighteen to twenty hours a day on the HK-1 and the F-11 and other Army work during the war, plus my own private projects and companies. I think Cary suggested the idea of a movie and I said, ‘Yeah, great, that’s interesting, you work on it.’ And that was all there was to it. They just brought that up because they needed something else to bellyache about.

They also didn’t like the incident that happened with Hap Arnold, who was still head of the Air Corps. I’d given orders – normal orders in such circumstances – that no one was to be allowed into the hangar where work on the HK-1 and the F-11 was going on. So Hap Arnold showed up with some other brass, and the guys at the plant barred the door and said, ‘Mr. Hughes says no one gets in.’

‘I’m General Hap Arnold, you goddamn idiots, let me in.’

But the guys said, ‘You may be Hirohito in disguise or you may even be General Hap Arnold, but it doesn’t matter because Howard Hughes, the boss, says nobody. And nobody includes you, even if you’re somebody.’ And they wouldn’t let him in.

It took Arnold a while to find me and get through to me, but a few days later he reached me and started yelling.

I said, ‘Hap, I don’t know where you’re calling from, but if you’re anywhere within 500 miles you don’t need a telephone, just yell out the window. Deaf as I am, I’ll hear you.’

He calmed down. All he wanted was an apology, which I gave him. I had nothing against Hap Arnold. I would have let him see the ship if I’d been around. And I don’t have anything against apologizing to a man. I’ve apologized thousands of times in my life. I don’t have any false pride. And I hate people yelling at me – I just wilt. Or I used to. Nobody’s yelled at me in many years.

What about the statement you made when you were discussing the 
H
ercules with the press, that if it didn’t fly you’d leave the country and never come back?