City of Nets Read online

  For one big scene, the shooting down of a German Gotha bomber, Hughes insisted that the pilot put the plane into a real spin, and then bail out if necessary. But the scene also required a technician who would crouch in the rear of the fuselage and set off a series of smoke bombs as the doomed plane was supposedly hit by machine-gun bullets. Then he, too, could bail out as the plane went into its spin. Several pilots refused the assignment, but Hughes paid a substantial bonus to one willing daredevil, Al Wilson, and then hired as his assistant an eager mechanic named Phil Jones. When the plane went into its spin, only the pilot bailed out, but the crash of the Gotha made a great scene.*

  Hughes was nearly finished, after two years of filming and more than two million dollars in expenses, when he rather belatedly realized, as other Hollywood executives were just as belatedly realizing, that all silent films had been doomed ever since The Jazz Singer had opened two years earlier. Hughes characteristically determined to begin all over again. He hired a scriptwriter to start providing Hell’s Angels with some dialogue, and he even decided that he had to eliminate his star, Greta Nissen, who could not play the English heroine without a thick, Norwegian accent. While reshooting around his missing heroine, Hughes tested dozens of replacements. When the inevitable agent, Arthur Landau, inevitably appeared with an eighteen-year-old blonde named Harlean Carpenter, Howard Hughes looked at the screen test of the future Jean Harlow and inevitably said, “In my opinion, she’s nix.” Perhaps just as inevitably, though, Hughes let the agent talk him into hiring his young client for $250 a week.

  Hughes’s overall costs on Hell’s Angels eventually reached a towering $3.8 million, a record for extravagance at that time, and although the film achieved a considerable success, it could never earn back Hughes’s investment. There was a pattern here. Partly, it was an idiosyncratic psychological pattern, which Hughes’s admirers liked to call “perfectionism,” but which actually started with Hughes’s eagerness to confront, all by himself, a series of challenges beyond his experience or ability. Then, after repeated refusals to take any advice from anyone, there came a number of predictable mistakes, miscalculations, failures, and then a desperate effort to correct those mistakes, or rather not to correct them but to deny them, to obliterate them.

  Such spectacles of self-indulgence were familiar enough in Hollywood. Though Hughes was no immigrant from Eastern Europe, his inherited wealth gave him the same sense of infallibility that acquired wealth gave to a Louis B. Mayer or a Jack Warner. Theoretically, according to the economic laws proclaimed by Adam Smith, the bungling misjudgments of the average millionaire should should end in ruin, thus enabling the system to correct itself, but millionaires have generally found it more convenient to suspend Smith’s laws by bribery and monopoly. Just as it was monopoly that persuaded the Mayers and Warners and the rest that they were great showmen with an instinctive understanding of what the American people wanted, so it was the Hughes Tool Company’s control of an indispensable oil drilling bit that enabled Howard Hughes to imagine himself one of the kings of Hollywood. No matter what he did, no matter how much money he wasted, the Hughes drilling bit would always pay his bills, would always protect him from harm.

  Having conquered Hollywood at the age of twenty-five, Hughes went on to make five more movies within a year, notably Scarface and The Front Page (for which he rejected two still-obscure young actors named James Cagney and Clark Gable), but Hughes’s passion now was to fly. It was not a new passion. He had been a schoolboy of sixteen when he first learned to pilot a rickety plane, but this had become the age of Lindbergh, whose solo flight to Paris had redefined the nature of heroism. Hughes acquired a Boeing pursuit plane and began streamlining it (that was originally the sole purpose of the Hughes Aircraft Company). He won his first trophy in Miami in 1934 for flying the Boeing at 185 miles an hour, then built a plane of his own called the H-1 and piloted it to speed records of 339, 351, and 355 mph. In 1937, he flew from Los Angeles to Newark at an average of 332 mph, a coast-to-coast record of seven hours, twenty-eight minutes. The following year, he cut Lindbergh’s flight time to Paris by half, and then flew on to set a round-the-world record of three days, nineteen hours, seventeen minutes.

  He was a national hero, a second Lindbergh, and since his ignored wife, Ella, had gone back home to Houston during the filming of Hell’s Angels, he was now regarded as one of the nation’s “most eligible bachelors.” It was an honorific that made him a regal figure in Hollywood. No photographic record of that period would be complete without a picture of the tall, scarred, and inarticulate millionaire ambling into some neon-lit nightclub, outfitted in Hollywood’s black-tie uniform and displaying a beautiful blonde on his elbow. No matter how late Hughes telephoned, no matter how imperiously he demanded that some starlet prepare herself for his arrival, there is no record of anyone ever rejecting his invitations.

  On the other hand, there is ample testimony to his fumbling and tongue-tied helplessness as a courtier. Darryl Zanuck recalled that Hughes once said he would like to meet Norma Shearer, so Zanuck invited the two of them, along with an appropriate smattering of Hollywood celebrities, to his estate in Palm Springs. When Hughes met the object of his desire, he said, “I’m very pleased to meet you”—and left. Lana Turner recalled that Hughes was “likable enough but not especially stimulating.” Hughes once got as far as announcing his “preference for oral sex,” but Miss Turner reported that she “wasn’t interested.” “That didn’t seem to bother him . . .” she added. “He’d come to my house just to sit and talk to my mother.” Hughes also kept company with Ava Gardner for a time, but he could not reconcile himself to her independent ways. When his spies reported that she had gone dancing after midnight at the Mocambo, he summoned her to his place in Beverly Hills for a scolding. She swore at him. He slapped her face. She reached for the nearest object, a brass bell, and knocked him cold.

  Hughes apparently suffered an affliction known as ejaculatory impotence, which rather surprised Bette Davis, who had taken him quite seriously. So much so, in fact, that her husband, Harmon Nelson, who spent his evenings as a bandleader in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, became suspicious. Nelson hired a detective to wire the bedroom, and then, as required by the primitive technology of the day, established himself in a sound truck parked in a nearby canyon. After listening for a while to his wife and Hughes struggling to achieve some sort of climax, Nelson went running down the hill to his home, burst into the bedroom, and threatened to make his recordings public. Hughes swung wildly at the cuckold but missed. Miss Davis went into hysterics. Nelson finally decided to salvage his honor by blackmailing Hughes for seventy thousand dollars, and Hughes, terrified by the threatened disclosure of his sexual problems, paid the money. Bette Davis, the only one in the triangle who showed any sense of honor at all, insisted on repaying Hughes every cent.

  So Hughes went on with his highly publicized romances. Gene Tierney, who was eighteen when Hughes was thirty-five, found, like Lana Turner, that dates with the millionaire often included her mother. And some grand gestures. “Before our first date, he sent me flowers,” she recalled. “Not just flowers, but a roomful of gardenias. My mother looked around the small, modest apartment we had rented in Westwood and said it smelled like a funeral home.” Hughes liked to take his girls and their mothers out flying. He once flew Miss Tierney and her mother to lunch in Tijuana, where he had reserved an entire restaurant and a band for the three of them. “He did not make conversation easily,” Miss Tierney observed, and he spoke ardently only of airplanes, “all the while quoting weights and measures and ratios that were just so much confetti to me.”

  Despite his incoherence, Hughes had a basic attraction. “Money is sexy and he certainly had a blinding overabundance of cash appeal,” according to another pigeon, Joan Fontaine, who reported that Hughes proposed marriage to her after one casual meeting. But Gene Tierney was accustomed to moneyed people, and she liked Hughes because of what she considered “a soft, boyish,
clear-eyed quality about him.” She remembered, too, that when Hughes somehow heard of her infant daughter’s mental retardation, he flew a prominent specialist to see the child and unquestioningly paid the doctor’s outrageous bill of fifteen thousand dollars for one day’s useless services.

  This aspect of Hughes seemed to die in the worst of his plane crashes, in Beverly Hills, when he suffered nine broken ribs, a broken nose, a fractured skull, a collapsed left lung, and third-degree burns over much of his body. After he emerged from the hospital, Miss Tierney recalled, “the eyes had turned beady, the face had tightened. Rather than adding character, the scars only aged him. . . .” At some point in this series of crashes, Hughes also began suffering a major hearing loss, though it was typical that one of his glamorous friends, Veronica Lake, insisted it was all a charade. “Howard, for some reason, pretended he was deaf,” she said. “I suppose he found it advantageous in business dealings, a technique to keep others off their guard while he took in everything they said.”

  The disastrous crash in Beverly Hills was the first flight of the XF-11, in which Hughes had invested more than six million dollars of his own money. Originally, it had been the D-2, a five-man bomber designed to fly at 450 miles per hour. The D-2 was a commonplace project, though, compared to the vast flying boat that was taking shape in the mind of Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser and Hughes were both such public heroes that the War Production Board authorized the payment of eighteen million dollars for this inherently absurd project. And so Hughes began designing and building the plane that was officially named the Hercules; some irreverent employees began calling it the Spruce Goose. Designed to carry 700 passengers or a load of 60 tons, the first prototype of the gigantic flying boat stood 30 feet high and had a wingspan of 340 feet, longer than a football field. Its tail alone was 100 feet high, almost as tall as a ten-story building. And it was made entirely of wood. The only trouble was that the war was long over before Hughes was able to take his prototype out for its first flight.

  These were not Hughes’s only aircraft projects. He owned the patent on a device that could speed the loading of machine guns on B-17 bombers, and the 90,000 that he produced were eventually used on 90 percent of all U.S. bombers. And he made airplane parts: 6,370 fuselages for other manufacturers’ planes, 5,576 aircraft wings, 14,766 landing gear struts. His plants also manufactured nearly one million artillery shells. But though he eventually acquired a forty-million-dollar contract to manufacture his D-2—a contract that he won after some subsequently disputed entertainment of President Roosevelt’s son Elliott and several other entertainable air force officers—Hughes never managed to build and deliver, before the war came to an end in 1945, one single warplane.

  He had other things on his mind. One of them was a movie that he had been puttering around with since 1939. It was called Billy the Kid, and it had been written by Ben Hecht, who had learned about Howard Hughes while writing Scarface a decade earlier. Hecht insisted that he be paid one thousand dollars in cash every day, promptly at 6 P.M. “In that way,” he wrote later, “I stood to lose only a day’s labor if Mr. Hughes turned out to be insolvent.” Hughes did not turn out to be insolvent, only neurotic. When two scowling gunmen from Chicago came to interrogate Hecht about whether they should grill Hughes on the moral niceties of Scarface, Hecht said Hughes was completely innocent. “He’s got nothing to do with anything,” said Hecht. “He’s the sucker with the money.”

  Then came the usual search for unknown performers. Hughes eventually signed up a baby-faced actor named Jack Buetel at $75 a week to play Billy the Kid (what ever became of Jack Buetel?). He also signed up a few experienced professionals, Walter Huston and Thomas Mitchell—and Howard Hawks as director—and then he indulged himself in the more gratifying task of hunting a heroine. He and his cronies spent hours looking through heaps of photographs of ambitious girls, and in due time he paused over a picture of a buxom creature who was earning $27.50 a week as a receptionist in a chiropodist’s office.

  “Give this Jane Russell a test,” Hughes said as he went on thumbing through the photographs. The job of taking off the chiropodist’s patients’ shoes and dipping their feet into pails of warm water had actually taken only about a week of Miss Russell’s young life. Newly out of high school, she had also spent some time at the Max Reinhardt School, though she never actually met Reinhardt, and then she had some pictures taken by a photographer, who hung one up on the wall of his studio. There it was seen by one of those agents who made a practice of collecting such pictures and showing them to men like Howard Hughes. So Hughes had her summoned and given a screen test and then signed up for $150 a week. Hughes was not at all certain that he wanted to use her as his heroine, but he had long made it a practice to sign up girls at small salaries and then keep them on call indefinitely. At about the same time that he acquired Miss Russell, for example, he bought from Warners the contract of a beautiful fifteen-year-old named Faith Domergue. After four years of waiting for something to happen, Miss Domergue finally threw a tantrum. “All right, you pick the story you want to do,” said Hughes. When Miss Domergue selected an antique melodrama called Vendetta, Hughes ordered another one of his victims, Preston Sturges, to start filming it. (What ever became of Faith Domergue?)

  Something about Jane Russell spoke to Howard Hughes. She had no talent, and she wasn’t even very good-looking, but Hughes decided that she had commercial possibilities. He sent Howard Hawks out to Arizona to start filming Billy the Kid. Theoretically, Hawks was in charge of the production—Hughes had promised him that—but Hughes could never abide by his own rules. After midnight one day in 1940, he telephoned Russell Birdwell, the press agent, and ordered him to come immediately to Hughes’s headquarters on Romaine Street. Hughes himself ran through all the rushes on the projector and then demanded to know what Birdwell thought.

  “Excellent,” said the uncomprehending Birdwell.

  Hughes ran through the rushes all over again.

  “I think the rushes are brilliant,” Birdwell tried again. “Of course, they are rough. . . .”

  “Didn’t you notice anything?” asked Hughes.

  “Notice something?” Birdwell echoed.

  “No clouds,” said Hughes. “Why go all the way to Arizona to make a picture unless you get some beautiful cloud effects? The whole purpose of going on location is to get scenery you cannot achieve in a Hollywood studio. The damn screen looks naked. Naked.”

  Birdwell suggested that there might not be any clouds in Arizona at that particular moment, and that it would be a waste of time to keep the whole company waiting for them to appear. Hughes sent him home, spent the rest of the night rerunning the rushes of Billy the Kid, then telephoned Hawks in the morning. “Howard, you’re turning out one hell of a movie,” Hughes said, according to Birdwell’s account. “In fact, the project is so promising that I want to up the budget from $400,000 and give you $1 million to work with. And, Howard, I would like you to get some clouds in the sky, even if you have to wait a little while.”

  Hawks may have been paranoid, or he may just have been sensitive to Hollywood language, or he may just have wanted to escape from Howard Hughes. “Look, Howard,” he said. “I’ve been offered a new picture with Gary Cooper called Sergeant York, and I can’t take it until I get Kid out of the way. I have an idea. You apparently don’t like what I’m doing out here, so why don’t you take over on this picture? Then you can do what you want, and I can do what I want.” It was Marshall Neilan and Hell’s Angels all over again. Howard Hughes was being challenged once again to take the controls. How could he refuse?

  Hughes’s first act was not to fly to the scene but rather to demand that the entire cast and crew, some 250 people, abandon all work at the site nearly 100 miles beyond Flagstaff, Arizona, and return to Los Angeles for consultations. When filming resumed under Hughes’s direction, it resumed at Hughes’s own bizarre pace. Often he appeared only late at night and then insisted on filming all night long. Sometimes he demanded th
irty retakes of a simple scene, sometimes none at all. While Hughes dawdled, M-G-M stole his title and hastily produced its own Billy the Kid, starring Robert Taylor. Hughes called up Louis B. Mayer to protest. Mayer was not stricken by remorse. Hughes had to change to a new title: The Outlaw.

  If Hughes could not coerce Mayer, he could at least torment his own employees, and so, during one of those all-night filming sessions, there occurred the famous scene of the Jane Russell brassiere. The heroine was supposed to be undergoing torture by Indians, supposed to be tied by the wrists between two trees, supposed to be writhing in pain. Hughes, playing director, insisted on having the scene shot over and over. It eventually became clear that he was having trouble in satisfying his own fantasy of what a girl strung up between two trees should look like. “This is really just a very simple engineering problem,” he said as he called for a drawing board, paper, and pencil. The legend is that Hughes regarded the Russell bosom as a challenge to his skill in aeronautical design, that he quickly sketched a plan for a new brassiere, and that a wardrobe mistress immediately stitched together something that would fulfill Hughes’s fantasies. The legend defies plausibility, if only because of Hughes’s continuing inability to design airplanes that functioned properly. The only plausible element, indeed, was Hughes’s morbid insistence that his employees spend their evening hours watching him direct other employees in taking pictures of a girl strung up between two trees. As for what actually happened, Miss Russell herself is the best witness: “When I went into the dressing room and tried it [the new bra] on, I found it uncomfortable and ridiculous. Obviously he wanted today’s seamless bra, which didn’t exist then. . . . So I put on my own bra, covered the seams with tissue, pulled the straps over to the side, put on my blouse and started out. . . . Everybody behind the camera stared, and Howard finally nodded okay, and filming proceeded.”