Howard Hughes (9 page)

Fifty or sixty times? Are you sure?

I’m not exaggerating. It took days. I drove people crazy. I finally got
what I wanted in one sequence when the hat came off one of these Krauts’ heads as he jumped. You saw that hat spinning through the air, and it gave a special feeling to the scene.

Noah was standing around the lot, and he had seen some of the rushes. He was pissing and moaning because he was thinking, that’s our money going down the drain. Already he was thinking about it as
our
money. He told people that any one of these rushes was just as good as any other. ‘I can’t see what Howard is after.’ But I knew what I was after and when I saw that one sequence, with the hat spinning slowly through the air, I thought, that’s it.

After all this time, I consider
Hell’s Angels
to be the best picture I ever made. It took me three years and over two million feet of film, not to mention over four million prewar dollars, but it still holds up. I looked at it not so very long ago and the dogfights were still the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on the screen in the way of aerial battles. We had good technical men in Hollywood even then, and they’re always the key people.

The acting, in retrospect, doesn’t measure up. I’d cast a Swedish actress called Greta Nissen in the female lead. She was one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, but she couldn’t speak English. When I decided to reshoot more than half the movie in sound, it was obvious that Greta had to go. Years later, by the way, they made a movie based on this situation –
Singing in the Rain
, with Gene Kelly. Nobody paid me a dime.

Arthur Landau, Greta Nissen’s agent, gave me a real sob story about her. I said, ‘What do you suggest I do?’

Arthur sighed. ‘If you’re going to dump Greta,’ he said, ‘the least you can do is take another girl from my stable.’

‘Who did you have in mind?’

‘You’ll love her. Her name is Jean Harlow.’

She’d been Harlean Carpenter until a few years before that, and in a few weeks she was the star of
Hell’s Angels
– her first leading role. It made her famous. She never wore a bra – that was the Harlow trademark.

Were you involved with her personally? 

‘Involved’ is too strong a word. If you want to know whether or not I had an affair with her, the answer is yes. I went to bed with her because she was the star and I was the director and in those days it was one of those obligatory things to do. She came to my office one evening after the shoot and asked me to read some lines with her. I did that, of course, and the next thing I knew she was down on her knees, unbuttoning my fly to give me a blow job. I said, ‘Jean, this isn’t necessary. You’ve got the part.’ She answered something, but since she had her mouth full I couldn’t make out what she said. I just decided to relax and enjoy it.

Later, on a few occasions, we made love on the couch there, and at her house. I soon grew tired of her. She had an appeal to me, in a kind of overblown, sexy way, but after a while we had nothing to say to each other. And as an actress she was awful. I tried as hard as I could to get her to speak with just the semblance of an English accent. The others weren’t much good in that respect either, but at least occasionally they could do it. With Harlow it was totally impossible; I worked with her from midnight to dawn to get her to say ‘glass’ with an English
a
– to rhyme with ‘wash’ – because there’s a scene where she has to ask for a glass of champagne. And she finally got it right the sixteenth time, but when we got before the camera it came out ‘glaaas,’ like toity-toid street and toid avenoo.

I’ve seen
Hell’s Angels
and there’s a speech in it that Monty makes against war. I don’t know what the climate of opinion was back in 1928, but it struck me as a daring statement. I wondered if you had a hand in that speech, or if you approved of it
.

I had more than a hand in that speech. I wrote it. That reflected my opinions exactly, and they haven’t changed since. I was twenty-two years old, but I wasn’t a complete fool. There was a period, I admit, when I fell under the hysteria of the Second World War – that’s probably the only patriotic and just war that I’ve lived through as a man. But before, and since, and right now, I’m as antiwar as anyone you’ll ever meet. I want to point out to you that during the period in the Fifties when I was so active against the Communists in Hollywood,
it wasn’t that I wanted to go to war with Russia. There may have been a cold war but I wasn’t for a shooting war in any way, shape or form.

To me, the antiwar speech in
Hell’s Angels
– that war is caused by politicians – was the key statement in the movie. Of course I wanted to do an action picture, but often you start out on a project for mundane reasons, not especially high-minded, and at some point along the line you see that you’re able to make a statement of importance, and then that becomes the key to the whole thing. That speech meant a great deal to me. I had arguments with the scriptwriters about it.

They said, ‘You’re making this into a dogmatic picture.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I have the money and the money gives me the power. I want that speech made, and nothing’s going to stop me.’

I haven’t changed much since then. I say what I want to say and I do what I please – and if people don’t like it, they can go piss up a tree.

IT WAS AROUND this time that I bought into something called Multicolor. I had used the Technicolor process for the ballroom scene in
Hell’s Angels
. I looked into the future and could see that one day nearly all movies would be made in color.

I was dead right, but I was premature. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but it’s often best to let some genius do the spadework and suffer the heartbreaks, and then, if you’ve got the capital and the knowhow, you move in at the right time and take advantage of the other guy’s pioneering.

But it went against my grain to do that, and still does, because in that sense I’m more of a pioneer than a hardheaded businessman. I’m willing to take the risks if I believe strongly enough in something.

So in 1930 I bought the Multicolor process from its inventors, a couple of men named Fraser and Worthington, and we started a small company. I found a vacant lot on Romaine Street in Hollywood, built a laboratory, and wound up more than $400,000 in the red. Eventually I got sued by the other stockholders, the inventors and their backers, because I refused to throw good money after bad. They were the charter members of ‘The Sue Howard Hughes Club.’ The only thing I got for my investment was the building on Romaine Street, and that building became my principal offices for the next forty years. I’ve always referred to it as ‘Operations,’ but I never operated from there. I gave it to Noah Dietrich and told him to set it up in whatever way he wanted.

However, the issue was far from dead with these people who had sued
me over Multicolor, and I was positive that they tapped my telephones. There was some piece of business – I don’t remember what it was, but there was no way it could have leaked out without someone overhearing a telephone conversation. Today, as you know, there’s no telephone in the United States that’s safe, except usually a public telephone.

And so over the years I developed a system. I do a great deal of my business at night and most of it on the telephone. I function best in the wee hours of the morning, and since I’m the one in charge, I often call my people at any hour of the night, and I expect them to call me back from a public telephone. They know this will happen; I don’t spring it on them. They can catch up on their sleep when they take their vacations.

I’ve used this to my advantage many times. But in these early cases it was simply for security reasons. I would call Ray Holliday in Houston, for example, in the early morning and say, ‘Ray, I’ve got something to tell you. Get out to a public phone and call me back.’ I’d give him the number of the private phone I was calling from, if it happened to be a private phone.

Then a few minutes later Ray would call me back and give me the number of the phone booth he was calling from. Then I would go to the nearest public phone booth and call him at that number. In this way we were talking from two public telephone booths and the chances of anybody taping our conversation were sharply reduced.

You must have had to carry a sack full of dimes and quarters around with you wherever you went.

I’d charge the call to my office number. One day Perry Lieber, one of my publicity men at RKO, was visiting Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist. I called Perry and told him to get out to a public phone and call me back. A few minutes later he called. I asked him his number and he gave it to me, and right away I knew something was wrong. I checked my little black book, and the number he’d given me was Hedda Hopper’s unlisted number.

I said, ‘What the hell are you trying to pull, Perry? When I want you to call from a public phone I mean a public phone, because that’s
private
. Hedda Hopper’s private phone is about as public as you can possibly get.’

Perry started stammering, and finally admitted he was too lazy to leave Hedda’s bedroom and had taken the phone into a closet, which seemed to him private enough.

‘Private enough for you,’ I said, ‘but not for me. Get your ass out to a public telephone and call me back.’

I still wanted to make important movies, and the next one I did was
Scarface
.

I wasn’t yet twenty-five years old, and still a bit of a smart-aleck. I know now that you get a good writer, turn him loose on a project and let him do it. But at that time I took over Irving Thalberg’s idea, which was to put a number of writers to work on a story without letting any of them know that the others are working on it. I had Ben Hecht and W.R. Burnett and three or four other top-flight writers working on it, and none of them knew the others were involved. Around that time there were rumors around that I was going broke. I’d spent so much money on
Hell’s Angels
and the other films, and movie people didn’t know anything about the oil drilling business and probably thought Toolco was a printing plant where I turned out thousand-dollar bills and one day the government was going to catch up with me. Most people thought I was nothing more than a wild kid from Texas. People already had begun to tell stories about me that were off the wall.

Didn’t that annoy you?

If I got annoyed at every man who told a lie about me I’d have to be annoyed twenty-four hours a day, and I haven’t got that kind of time. You know, even $3 billion doesn’t buy you more than twenty-four hours between sundown and sundown. I value time, I value it very deeply. That’s one of the reasons I sleep so little. I trained myself to get along on four hours sleep a night, or an average of four hours out of every twenty four. It was a struggle for a while, because when I was young I liked to sleep. But I wouldn’t give in to that natural urge. In my early twenties I set the clock and got up and did something. And I’ve done that ever since, except after a year or so I no longer needed a clock.

To get back to
Scarface
: I had the four or five screenwriters at work, and when they had all finished a version of the script, I took all four or five
versions of it, picked out the best parts, strung them together myself and wrote in my own interim connecting scenes. We brought in this fine actor from the Jewish theater in New York – Paul Muni. That was his first starring role, and we had Boris Karloff in there too, playing a gangster.

It was a hell of a good film and I was delighted with the results. That is, until I showed it to Will Hays, the Hollywood censorship mogul, and our troubles started. Today people say there should be more censorship because of the violence in movies, but there sure should have been less at the time I made
Scarface
. Will Hays, with his
holier-than-thou
attitudes, made speeches about how my film was
un-American
and how we should present a better image to the world.

Why un-American? It was the story of a gangster.

But in America, according to Will Hays, we didn’t have any gangsters – or if we did, we swept them under the carpet. I went along with them part way, because I knew otherwise I would have a tough time getting distribution. I changed one scene after another, even put in a totally phony ending showing Scarface hanged – the trial, the sanctimonious speech by the judge. They changed the title. They called it
The Shame of the Nation
. Joe Schenck of United Artists – UA was supposed to release the picture – was giving me a hard time too. He wanted to make a statement to the press just before the premiere in New Orleans that the picture was a social document which would help the police in their fight against crime – and some more bullshit to the effect that the changes were all good ones, and how grateful we were to the various police departments for suggesting them to us. He was afraid I’d open up my mouth about what a lot of crap this was and how the original version was so much better. He wanted the world to forget there’d ever been an original version, and he knew I’d never let them forget.

Then they showed the changed version to the New York censors, and the New York censors rejected it as unacceptable. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘if I’m going to have an unacceptable film, I might as well have an unacceptable
good
film’ – and I threw out all the changes and went back to the original version. And that’s the one that finally got distributed.

One other thing was notable about
Scarface
. In the Hays Office
version, the New York Police Commissioner, Mulrooney, wrote the prologue to it, telling how noble everyone on the police force was, and how organized crime didn’t exist in the United States, it was all a myth. I saw a copy of the text before it was used, and I said, ‘This is pap for babies.’ I figured that I had to give it some juice, some fire. So I changed it, saying that the best way to stop crime in the United States was to prohibit the sale of firearms and their distribution interstate. That was included in the commissioner’s speech.

Did you really believe that, or were you making a statement to drum up publicity?

I believed it and I still believe it. I know it’s odd, coming from a man born in Texas where everybody is supposed to walk around with a Colt .45 strapped to his hip, and where, to their shame, there are more murders committed every year than there are in all of England, Scotland and Wales put together.

I believe that if a man can’t get his hand on a gun, he may give you a punch on the nose, but he’s not going to shoot you. I believed this as early as 1931. You know the NRA line: ‘Guns don’t kill people – people kill people’? That makes me sick, because obviously it’s people
with
guns who kill people. There was a big fuss about gun control when Jack Kennedy was shot, and then Martin Luther King, and then Bobby Kennedy, but nobody was saying it back in 1931 except a few oddballs, and I was one of them. I got this Irish police commissioner to include that statement in his introduction.

But we had other problems. Two of Al Capone’s men dropped in to see Ben Hecht in Hollywood. Somehow they’d got hold of the screenplay and they wanted to know if it was about their boss.

Ben gulped and said no, it wasn’t about Capone. They said, ‘Then why do you call it
Scarface
? That makes it sound like it’s about Al.’ Capone had a big scar on his face. And of course it
was
about Capone.

Ben said, ‘Because then people will think it’s about Capone, and we’ll make money.’

Money was something these hoods understood. ‘Okay, we give you permission.’

They asked Hecht who I was, and he said, ‘The sucker who’s putting up the money.’ He told me that story. He thought it was funny. So did I.

The sequel to this came a few years later, around 1933, when I was in Florida. I don’t know if it was the same two guys, but two men came to see me. Capone was in Alcatraz for income tax evasion. He had been to see Cornelius Vanderbilt before then – not the old man, but the son – and made him some sort of proposition about how they could divide up the territory of the whole United States. When these two hoodlums came to see me in Palm Beach that’s essentially what it was all about. They said that big Al was going to get out of Alcatraz one of these days, and he’d followed my career – I guess he got the newspapers in prison, and the picture
Scarface
naturally had interested him – and he would like to meet me when he got out.

Did they make a specific proposition to you?

They told me, ‘Big Al likes your style.’ I had the impression that what he wanted was some legitimate front, and he thought of me as a young kid with a lot of money who didn’t know his ass from second base, and he could use me.

I said, ‘That’s very interesting, and when Big Al gets out of prison, have him contact me.’ I gave them my telephone number on Romaine Street in Hollywood, which is about as much of a dead end as there is for reaching me. If he’d ever called I wouldn’t have known, because no messages came through for me for anyone who wasn’t on my ‘approved’ list.

In fact, much later on, I told the people at Romaine Street, ‘Anything new that comes up, I don’t want to hear about it. We’ll just discuss subjects that
I
raise. I have enough ideas for two lifetimes.’

I had a lot of money, more and more all the time, no matter what I spent, and I thought I should be doing things with it, not just letting it earn interest. At one point I seriously considered buying a couple of studios to get myself some real weight out there in Hollywood. The cost made even me hesitate, but I would have gone into it if I had the chance. I did buy about a hundred theaters, the Franklin chain, and I went so far as to make an offer for Paramount and MGM, but those studios turned me down.

There was an idiotic rumor went around at one time there that I had offered to buy not just Paramount and MGM but United Artists, Warner Brothers, Universal, First National, and RKO, which would have made me sole owner of Hollywood. But that was a lot more than I cared to chew, even if I could have bitten it off. I couldn’t have afforded it then. Toolco in 1932 was doing very nicely, but I was in no position to buy out Hollywood. Now, yes. But luckily for them I’m no longer interested in the movie business.

The other films I made in those years were
The Front Page, Cock of the Air
, and
Sky Devils
, which was Spencer Tracy’s first big film. Ann Dvorak came out in that one too, and became a new star. They wanted to change her name to something more American – you know, Ann Roberts, Ann Dodds. I said, ‘What could be more American than a Polish name? Stick with Dvorak.’

I don’t want to give the impression that my early business life was an unbroken series of coups and money-making ventures. Aside from all the rest of it, I was busy losing a small fortune in the stock market. I took my bath in 1929 just like many others. Of course I had Toolco behind me, so there was no real danger of my losing everything, but nevertheless I dropped in the neighborhood of three or four million dollars. I was pretty heavily invested. I had Westinghouse and RCA, and some U.S. Steel too – all the losers, you might say.

In one day alone, I lost three-quarters of a million on RCA. This gave Noah Dietrich a few gray hairs. It didn’t bother me much. I always figured, that’s the bottom, now the market will bounce back and I’ll make a fortune. That’s how the losers always think.