Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

found a warmth and dry humor, as well as an acuteness of insight into American manners and ethics, which brought me up short again and again. Several times, at the end of the talk session, I found myself musing about the America that Howard Hughes had revealed to me in the course of our conversatiion, an America I was only aware of second- or third-hand. I knew little of high finance or of the interplay between business and politics – things that were of everyday familiarity to Hughes. But he never condescended to me, and I think the reason was that he was too anxious to explain and reflect. No one, after meeting him or reading his autobiography, could call him innocent; and yet there was about him, in the interstices between his stubbornness, his pride, his selfishness and cynicism, his eccentricity, his arrogance and sadness, a quality of innocence that may be uniquely American. He was a Texas boy, the ‘Sonny’ of his childhood who had suddenly awakened from a dream to find himself with two billion dollars and the consequent paradox that he was both slave and free man. In some ways he was like the narrator of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , looking in from the outside at a world of money and opulence, finding it unsatisfactory, and dreaming, in the end, of ‘that fresh green breast of the New World that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes’ and was no more. Howard had his dreams too.
    One afternoon in Florida toward the end of the many interview sessions that form the basis of his memoirs, he telephoned me. I was transcribing the tapes; I was tired and a little fed up. We had been wrangling for several days about something – the subject is unimportant – and there was no question but that our personal relationship had momentarily suffered. He was sniping at me and I was sniping back. After a 48-hour break he called and said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ I told him I didn’t have any plans. ‘Well, I thought I’d come down and visit you,’ he said, ‘if you weren’t busy. Not to doany more interviewing. I just thought maybe we could sit around and talk… you know, about this and that. Like friends do. No discussions about my sex life and business deals. No arguments. We’ll just chat.’ He asked hesitantly, ‘Would that be okay?’
    I replied that it would be a pleasure and he said he would be driven down by his driver between seven-thirty and eight. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘is your television set working?’ I said it was, and he arrived a few minutes before eight o’clock. I had turned off the air-conditioner, which was required for Howard’s visits even though the temperature was in the 80s, and the fridge was stocked with beer for me and Poland Springs mineral water for him. I stubbed out my last cigarette when I heard his tap on the door, dumped the ashtray in the wastebasket and sprayed the room quickly with Lysol disinfectant to kill the odor.
    Howard sat down in an easy chair and stretched out his long legs beside his briefcase. He always carried an oversized battered brown leather briefcase filled with various papers, graham crackers, packages of Kleenex, ballpoint pens, sanitary paper cups and paper toilet-seat covers. If he ever blew his nose he went immediately to the bathroom and flushed the Kleenex down the toilet. He wore the usual getup of sport shirt, cardigan, rumpled slacks and loafers. Without preamble, he said, ‘You like baseball, don’t you? Let’s turn on the TV. There’s a good ball game on. Giants against the Dodgers.’
    I had been a Dodger fan in my youth, before they deserted Brooklyn for Los Angeles and before I deserted New York’s West End Avenue for Ibiza, so I said, ‘Sure.’ I switched on the TV and Willie Mays’ grave smile filled the screen in a pre-game interview. The Dodgers were challenging the Giants for the Western division pennant in the National League. Mays explained the situation and Howard listened intently, straining forward to hear