Howard Hughes (22 page)

They also tried to harass me, while all this was going on, by citing me for low flying. The Civil Aeronautics Authority was going to do it on the basis of a complaint by the Long Beach Police.

I was flying a PBY with Glen Odekirk. We’d been using it over Long Beach to check out, among other things, the possibility of that cofferdam breaking again, and they tried to say we were less than fifty feet from the beach. We may have been, and it may have been careless in their eyes, but it didn’t matter – I was able to prove that we were approaching a landing area, in this case the bay, and there was no minimum altitude specified in the city regulations for landings. So they couldn’t get me that way.

You’re probably wondering why, nearly twenty years later, I still keep the Hercules. I’ll explain it to you. Once all this damage had been repaired, the ship became for me, among other things, a laboratory. You told me you flew across the Atlantic on the Jumbo Jet, the Boeing 747. You thought it was great. Do you think that 747 would be in the air if the HK-1 hadn’t flown seventy feet off the ground in 1948? I doubt that very much. When that plane flew, it was of tremendous importance to the aviation industry.

The plane is the largest ever constructed, completed, and flown. It cannot be abandoned. It would be criminal to abandon it now, much less tear it apart. Would you tear down the Empire State Building? Let it go derelict? Some day, after my death, that ship is going to wind up on display either at a specially constructed housing, or at the Smithsonian Institute, because it’s a landmark in the history of aviation. And these shortsighted bastards who delight in destroying these sorts of monuments won’t get their hands on her. I’m keeping her in trust.

It’s costing you several hundred thousand dollars a year, isn’t it, to keep that plane in the hangar?

It’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it. Besides, it’s tax-deductible.

AFTER THE WAR my whole life changed. I wanted it to change. After the Senate investigation, and my crash in the F-11, and after vindicating myself by flying the Hercules, I felt that the first part of my time on earth was over. I was in my early forties. I felt I had to get away. And so I went to Ethiopia.

The story of those trips is something I’ve told only to one person, and it’s an oddly emotional subject with me.

After I finally took the Hercules up and made her fly, I was no longer content in any way with the things that I had been doing. Until then I’d been climbing my father’s image, you might say. He had been up there in front of me, as a target – not just a target to attain, but a target to shoot down.

And I realized I had done it, I had shot him down. He wasn’t there anymore, looming up in front of me larger than life. It came to me that this was a kind of a ridiculous thing for a man of forty-three to still be battling with his father’s image. Then one day the image was no longer there for me. I had defeated him. I’d shot him down, as you put it.

But it left a hole in my life. What was I supposed to be doing? I owned TWA, one of the biggest airlines in the United States. Toolco was flourishing as never before, and I was a millionaire many times over. I’d known all the beautiful women in Hollywood and I could theoretically take my pick, so money and sex were no longer unattainable or even difficult objects. Money never really was, but it certainly wasn’t then.

Family life – well, that’s something else, and I’ll get to it later. What
matters is that I realized I was a dissatisfied man, and that dissatisfaction took me, of all places, to Ethiopia.

Flying was still connected with it. I went the first time in 1946. TWA had a management agreement with Ethiopian Airlines, like the one pending with BWA in the Bahamas. More or less the same, but much more complicated, because we were dealing with a vastly more difficult set of problems. The most complicated piece of machinery those Ethiopians had ever seen was a sewing machine, much less an airplane.

In Ethiopia, up in those mountainous gorges cut by the Nile, I had the feeling that I was plunging back 2,000 years into time. I saw places that I’m positive hadn’t changed since the days of Christ. Almost the whole country is off the beaten track, and I remember standing on some mountaintop or even a few hundred yards off an airstrip, in the brush, and saying to myself, ‘It’s entirely possible that I’m the first human being who has ever stood on this particular spot of earth.’ That gave me an eerie feeling, very beautiful in some ways. Did I ever tell you, by the way, that I once pissed in the Coliseum in Rome? I don’t know why that occurs to me now, but I did.

I was in Rome on my way back from somewhere, probably Ethiopia – maybe that’s why I think of it now – and I stopped off for a day to see the city, which I hardly knew. I was in the Coliseum at night, not another soul there, and there was the grandeur that was Rome surrounding me on a lovely moonlit night. I was impressed, so I walked out into the center of the arena and had a piss in the moonlight. I said, ‘That’s in honor of you, Julius Caesar. Howard Hughes salutes you.’

Then I saw a guard walking over to me, and I decided I’d better leave. He didn’t stop me.

I wonder if any dollars grew there where you pissed.

Let’s get back to Ethiopia. TWA was supposed to set up and run Ethiopian Airlines until the natives could take over and run it themselves. There was no Ethiopian air service at all in 1946. I’ve been out there several times – it’s dramatic and savage and beautiful, and hell to travel. The standard mode of travel in Ethiopia was by mule, and the country
was so cut by rifts that you could take a week to reach a village you could already
see
. Even when you landed at the airstrips, you could see the town a mile or so away, but it took an hour to hike up there. No roads, just dirt tracks. There’s a railroad running down the coast to the port of Djibouti, but that’s all. If ever a country needed air transport, it was Ethiopia.

We had one thing going for us, and that was a bunch of Italian airfields left over from the war. They were in terrible shape. But they were there. And so we – that is, TWA – signed a management agreement with the Emperor Haile Selassi and we went out there and started managing things.

I saw Selassi go by in his green Rolls-Royce one time. Everybody bobbed up and down like they do in Japan. But I never met him. When I went out there in 1948 I didn’t go as Howard Hughes. I didn’t want the treatment. I wanted anonymity as much as I ever wanted it, so I didn’t use my own name.

Strangely enough, I felt very uncertain of myself. I felt as if I hadn’t really done anything with my life. I had a kind of empty feeling, and I asked myself: where was Howard Hughes? I mean I knew where Howard Hughes was, but I didn’t know where
I
was. I didn’t know the man underneath the labels. Who had accomplished all those things I’d done? And who was the I? And how would it get me through the rest of my life? How would I justify what remained of my existence on earth? What good would all my money do me, or anyone else? What had I accomplished that was more than an effort to honor my ego? What was the meaning of an individual life?

These may seem like cliches to you, out of some psychiatric handbook or some hippie’s ravings, but I was in my early forties, and maybe you understand that it’s a crucial time in a man’s life, a time when certain powers may be beginning to fail. I don’t mean just the crude sexual powers; I mean the powers of sustained energy, the confidence and the recklessness and the supreme ego of youth. Those are the powers that catapult you into manhood. They say that the first forty years supply the text, the next forty years is the commentary. Schopenhauer said that, not me.

Well, I couldn’t read my own text anymore. It was unfamiliar, almost in a foreign language. So how could I supply the commentary?

I felt I had a chance to become a new person, or to find the old person, the person who had been there all along, which I could never find back there in the USA, surrounded by people who were constantly wanting things from me, and from whom I wanted things constantly. I wanted to live in a world where I didn’t have to want and other people didn’t have to want with such a desperate quality. I would just have a challenge and a job to do, and in the quiet moments I could figure things out.

That’s why I went to Ethiopia the second time. The TWA operation out there was in charge of a man named Swede Golien, and I didn’t want to see Swede. He’s an old-time pilot – been flying since not long after the First World War. He was in the capital, Addis Ababa, so I ducked in and out of there as quickly as I could. I went out as an airport engineer from the home office. I just called a few of the guys on top in Kansas City, and said a man I was interested in, an engineer named Charles Maddox, was going out to Ethiopia for me personally. I would take care of his salary, don’t put him on the books, and no special treatment by the guys in Ethiopia.

And in early 1948 Charles Maddox, yours truly, went out to Ethiopia.

I spent a couple of days in Addis Ababa – filthy hole – and the first thing that hit me was the altitude. I’d been in Mexico and so I knew you had to take it easy for a while when you first go to a place that’s more than 6,000 feet high. But it was much higher in Ethiopia. One of the TWA engineers had a heart attack the second night he arrived when he picked up some fancy whore in Addis. He conked out right in the middle of humping her. You don’t do much humping at 9,000 feet, not even in the best of circumstances, unless you’ve been doing it all your life and know how to pace yourself. You need a heart of oak, lungs like leather, and a pecker of steel.

Did you…?

For God’s sake, no. They had every venereal disease known to man. It was out of the question in Ethiopia.

I headed inland. That was some of the hairiest flying I’ve ever done
in my life. The downdrafts knocked you down a thousand feet before you could get control of the ship again. Murderous. They lost at least one or two planes that way.

Sometimes I was the pilot, sometimes a passenger. I don’t know which was worse. I got there just before the rains. The rainy season lasts from the middle of June to September, and it pours rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. I was there a little before the rains hit, and the flying looked possible.

The first time I flew it was up to a strip near a place called Dobi. I landed, and had a terrible scare. I saw several hundred people gathered on the edge of the strip, like a crowd at a drag race. ‘Christ,’ I said to myself, ‘they’re not giving me much room, but I suppose they’ll head for the hills when I drop my landing gear and put the nose up.’

But they didn’t. They just stayed there and watched. Orderly; they didn’t mill around or anything, but they didn’t give an inch of ground. They had more dumb faith than I’ve ever seen in my life. They were in awe of the planes, like those people in New Guinea who have the cargo cult, only not quite so maniac about it. They didn’t think the planes were gods who would one day drop down to provide bounty everlasting, but still they were in awe. You could see it in their faces. And it never occurred to them that if a crosswind hit you, you could veer and sheer off a few fuzzy heads with a wingtip.

The whole time the plane was there on the strip, which was a matter of some six or seven hours, from early morning until the middle of the afternoon, they just sat there, formed a big circle around the plane, a DC-3, got down on their haunches the way peasants do, and watched it. Men, women and children, just squatting there and watching that ship sitting in the dust. They had brought their lunches along too; it was a family affair. I thought this was wonderful. How simple people’s needs are, when their minds aren’t cluttered with all the garbage of modern-day life. I’m sure those people enjoyed staring at that DC-3, were moved by it – and it just sat there, completely inert – were more touched and thrilled than the average American is who sits like a chuckling moron in front of the boob tube and watches his favorite
sitcom. They were certainly more at peace. And the Ethiopians didn’t have to watch any commercials.

I didn’t spend all the time out there working as an engineer. I did my share of that work, but for the first time in my life I took a good look at how other people, I mean people besides Americans, live – and you can go a long way before you find people as
other
as Ethiopians. They’re a warrior people, old Christians, and they had an innate dignity which you don’t find many places.

I don’t mean I got friendly with them. I tried, but they’re touchy, arrogant people – hard to talk to. And there was the problem of their hospitality. I’m a bit finicky about my food. I’m not talking about Ethiopia, I mean in the United States. I had a little silver rake, which I carried into restaurants and banquets – especially banquets, with their limp salad and fat green peas. If there’s anything I hate in the food world, it’s a fat green pea. So I’d take out my little rake and rake through the green peas, and the ones that slipped through the tines were edible. The rest was just trash to throw out with the salad, for the hogs. These days it’s different. Now you can get tiny peas. But I don’t like peas anymore.

What do you eat now?

I eat figs and fresh raspberries and other fruit – all organically grown. No artificial fertilizers for me. I’m under a doctor’s care and he prescribes rare beef for me, but I can’t take it. He’d like me to take it bloody, but I can’t get it down, so I have it well done. Boiled, cut into small pieces.

This was one of the troubles I had out in Ethiopia, in 1948, when I met this tribal chieftain. It was in the southern part of the country, and the tribal chieftain invited a few of us to have a meal with him. The first dish was all right, except that the spice they put over it, called
wot
, could burn the roof of your mouth off. But I got through that part. Then four men came out carrying a skinned cow. I wouldn’t call it a steer – it was a cow, raw – and they stopped in front of me, and I saw that I was supposed to choose a piece. I had the idea they were going to cook it. I pointed to a nice filet mignon. They whacked it off and dropped it down in front of me,
plop
, on the plate in front of me. I was supposed to eat it.

That was the end of any social contact, you might say. I said, as politely as I could, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

I was concerned that this might offend the chieftain, but I didn’t think it would offend him as much as if I’d eaten the raw meat and then vomited it all over his lap.

When I was out there I lived in the tin huts that were scattered all over the country, where our TWA men were living. They lived separately from the natives, and didn’t have much contact with them. I managed some contact because I went out to find it. I had nobody to report to. I was a free agent, so I could take off whenever I wanted to, which suited my purpose. l would be a passenger going down to Desi or Kobbo or some even more remote place, and I would disembark and spend two or three days there, living in whatever accommodations were available. Once I slept in a place that was the equivalent of a flophouse for the poor people of the town. And poor in Ethiopia means poor in a sense that’s hard to understand if you’ve never been out there. That’s poor at the low end of the poverty scale – utterly destitute.

Of course I couldn’t speak the language, but I could get by. It’s amazing how, in situations like these, men understand one another. I made it known that I wanted a bed, but there was no hotel in this town. I had my own bottled water with me, and some dried fruit. That was enough for me. I didn’t eat much, and I didn’t need much sleep, but I’d been up for a day and a half before this trip, and I had to get some sleep.

I was taken to a little shack with maybe half a dozen men sleeping in it. It was cold, a few degrees above freezing, so I couldn’t sleep outside. I came in late, just as it was getting dark. I was shown to a pallet on the floor.