The Mechanical Man

(See Cover)

In Hollywood last week, Howard Robard Hughes was throwing his weight around at RKO. The more literate observers were reminded of that memorable scene in Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, when a huge cannon breaks loose on the gun deck of a ship in a rough sea.

Dore Schary, RKO's earnest, gifted executive vice president in charge of production, was out (TIME, July 12). Like a thousand bumblebees in a clover field, the buzz of Hollywood speculation hung on the question of who would succeed Schary. Secretive Howard Hughes would not say. "It will be," he said, "someone you least suspect, a shocker."

Said Hughes: "My life is not exactly going to be dull for the next two years. I'm really cooking at RKO and things are going to pop. I'll make news for you. The only thing that could stop me would be my death--and even that would be a story."

Hollywood had known something of the meteoric Howard Hughes story for two decades. He had always been an independent--a lone wolf, unpredictable and exasperatingly successful most of the time. Now he had stepped into control of a top studio. After trying (characteristically) to get the stock for two points less than the market, he had paid Atlas Corp.'s Floyd B. Odium a whacking $8,825,690 for 929,020 shares.

What did Hughes, the lone wolf, want with RKO? He takes great pains to hide his motives; but no doubt one motive was his hankering for theater outlets controlled by himself. RKO owns 124 theaters. Hughes has had great trouble distributing The Outlaw--that long and vigorously publicized mixture of sex, slapstick and violence--mainly because of censorship, but partly because independent exhibitors were simply afraid of it. To date, it has played only about 40% of its original contracts. In the face of derisive snorts from highbrow critics, Hughes firmly believes that, if distribution obstacles can be overcome, The Outlaw will bring in one of the fattest yields of all time. He may be right. Hollywood has learned not to sell Howard Hughes short.

166 Cutting Edges. What manner of man is this Howard Hughes--this tall, gangling, aging, sick-looking man of 42 whose life and eccentricities have built a lurid legend?

In his ancestry, there was plenty of force, vitality, toughness, love of action. His mother was descended from a doughty line of French Huguenots; one of them was a rifle-shooting chaplain with George Washington's army. Another was a hell-for-leather cavalryman in the Civil War.

By the time Howard Hughes's mother, Allene Gano, was born, the family was established in the top drawer of Texas aristocracy.

Howard's father, Howard Robard Hughes Sr., was not exactly a nobody, although he came from a place the Ganos had never heard of--Keokuk, Iowa. Son of a Harvard-bred lawyer, he was expelled from several schools, but got through Harvard and hung out his shingle in Joplin, Mo. The lure of oil drew him to Texas. He made a small stake, bought a long Peerless car, met Allene Gano, married her in 1904.

Hughes Sr. converted his Peerless into a speedster (see cut), raced it against one owned by Financier Hetty Green's son, and won. He raced against Barney Oldfield, the celebrated professional, and lost. The Hugheses moved to Houston, where Hughes Sr. looked for oil. With his partner, Walter Sharp, he struck oil in the Goose Creek field, but the two-edged "fishtail" bits used in those days broke on subterranean rock. Thereupon Hughes designed a conical bit with 166 cutting edges. That tool is the original source and still the main prop of the Hughes fortune, which now amounts to about $145,000,000. The bit is leased, not sold, and accounts for some 75% of the rock bits used in drillings all over the world. The present Hughes enterprises include Hughes Aircraft at Culver City, Calif.; Hughes Productions (movies); a controlling interest in Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., and a brewery, the largest in Texas. There is an exceedingly large but unknown amount of cash out of which Howard Hughes paid for his RKO stock. The net income of Hughes Tool, the parent company, is estimated at $8-10,000,000 a year, but since Howard Hughes owns 100% of Hughes Tool he does not have to publish balance sheets.

Red & Black. Howard Robard Hughes Jr., an only child, was born in Houston on Christmas Eve, 1905. At the age of three he showed his interest in gadgets by taking pictures with a box camera. Later he showed his inordinate persistence by practicing on the saxophone at all hours of the day & night, until he had mastered it. Young Howard and his playmate, Dudley Sharp (son of Hughes Sr.'s partner), built a wireless set, mostly out of old doorbell parts and other junk. When Howard asked for a motorcycle and was refused, he made a motor out of an automobile self-starter and attached it to his bicycle. It ran. His interest in mechanical things, always much stronger than his interest in people, was growing by seven-league jumps.

Howard's mother died when Howard was 17, and after that Hughes Sr., always indulgent, became even more so. He sent Howard abroad accompanied by Dudley Sharp and packing an allowance of $5,000 or more a month. In Brussels, Hughes took a fling at roulette. Playing only red or black, he ran a stake of $10 up to $10,000, lost it all on one spin of the wheel, left the table without a word.

Howard's schooling was irregular. He went to private schools in Massachusetts and California, took a few courses at CalTech, attended Rice Institute in Houston for a year. When he tried, he got high marks, especially in math and chemistry.

Fun & Frustration. Two big things happened in 1924-25. Hughes Sr. suddenly died, and Howard got married, at a swank wedding in Houston, to Ella Rice (of the same family that founded Rice Institute). Four years later, they were divorced. Hughes was already in Hollywood, bringing starlets -home in droves. Ella got a million dollar settlement. Hughes now resents any mention of his marriage; he would rather be regarded as the world's most ineligible bachelor. People who know him well say firmly that he will never marry again.

His father's death, and his own inheritance, gave Hughes freedom. He did not know exactly what talents he had, but he knew he was smart. He had outgrown childish toys; he was ready for grown-up toys. He had (or soon would have) the money to buy them; he had the brains to use them. He would have fun. But grown-up fun, he quickly found, sometimes involves frustration.

He spent a year at the tool plant, learning the business thoroughly. Then he turned it over to his executives (he could always quiz and harry them by telephone) and went to Hollywood. Since boyhood, fascinated by the movies, he had jotted down ideas for scripts in a notebook. He had even met and cultivated a movie actor named Ralph Graves. In Hollywood, his uncle, Rupert Hughes--a prosperous fictioneer and biographer--had been writing and directing pictures. Howard hung around the sets, asked questions.

Hollywood laughed when it heard that this young upstart wanted to make pictures himself. His actor friend, Graves, had a terrific idea for a script--about a Bowery bruiser who adopts a baby. Hughes was impressed, laid out $50,000. This picture, Swell Hogan, was such an arrant turkey that it was never released. The wiseacres laughed louder.

"The More You Spend . . ." Hughes got mad. He also got a good story and a good director, Marshall Neilan, and made a successful picture called Everybody's Acting, which returned 50% on his $150,000 investment. He made another, Two Arabian Nights, directed by Lewis Milestone, who won an Oscar for his work on it. The scoffing died down.

Then came the smash hit, Hell's Angels, which quite a few people besides Hughes think of as the greatest air epic of all time. Hughes spent $3,000,000 making it as a silent picture; before he had finished the "talkies" arrived. Hughes got a new heroine (the first one had a Swedish accent), reshot the talking sequences, poured in another million. The new heroine was Jean Harlow, prototypal "platinum blonde." Angels has made a profit of $4,000,000 so far, and is still showing in outlying theaters.

After Angels, Hughes made five more pictures, including his two best: Scarface, with Paul Muni, and The Front Page, with Adolphe Menjou and a newcomer named Pat O'Brien. Then he turned to aviation. So far as Hollywood was concerned, he had come, seen, conquered. On one of his very rare visits back to Houston, he said to friends: "Movies are a cinch. The more you spend, the more you make."

It was in Hell's Angels that Hughes first revealed his intense preoccupation with the female bosom (in one scene, Miss Harlow's neckline swooped almost to the navel). But it was in The Outlaw that his interest reached its fullest flower. In the flogging scene, when the bosom movement seemed unsatisfactory, Hughes decided that it was an engineering problem, called for his drawing board, designed a new brassiere for his star, Jane Russell. Thereafter the scene was shot to his entire liking.

Where Was the Enemy? Hughes's anatomical work in The Outlaw could not contribute to human knowledge or advancement; his contributions to aviation, though a subject of bitter controversy, are much more substantial. In 1935 he had his racing plane, the Hi, ready to fly. This was the first airplane with flush joints and rivets (i.e., a smooth metal skin) and the first with power-driven retractable landing gear. In this plane Hughes set a new world's speed record (held in France for the previous two years) of 352 m.p.h., and a coast-to-coast nonstop record of 7 hrs. 28 min. And finally, in a regular Lockheed transport, adapted for long-distance flight, with special equipment, a skilled crew and egregiously painstaking preparations, he flew around the world in 3 days 19 hrs. 29 min. For these feats he got the Collier Trophy, the Harmon Trophy, a congressional medal, a handshake from Franklin Roosevelt and Broadway's accolade of ticker tape. In Hollywood and in the air, he had won. But where was the enemy? As his Uncle Rupert remarked, he was not much older than Alexander the Great when Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.

Last summer Hughes won again. A Senate committee investigating war contracts wanted to know why the Government had got nothing for $18 million paid to Hughes for his huge, eight-engined plywood cargo plane, or for $22 million paid for three XF115 (a high-ceiling, highspeed photo-reconnaissance plane). This inquiry suddenly involved Elliott Roosevelt, Johnny Meyer--the Hughes henchman with all the telephone numbers--and girls, girls, girls (TIME, Aug. 4 et seq.). Howard Hughes, uncowed and defiant, picked Senator Owen Brewster as a personal antagonist and made the Senator so uncomfortable that he presently departed for the Maine woods. The committee was glad to let go of Hughes.

Too Little Time. There are those who say that Howard Hughes cannot design an airplane and never has. Lockheed's famed triple-tailed Constellation, which Hughes pioneered on T.W.A., was originally billed as a Hughes design, but it is now represented as a Hughes "conception" (which it is) and a Lockheed design (which it is). Even his harshest detractors admit that he is a "hot pilot" but, they hasten to add, an exceedingly reckless one. ("Ah," says the Freudian, laying finger to nose, "our old friend, the subconscious death-wish. But why should this odd young man want to die? Perhaps it would be the greatest climax of all, a climax of which he somehow feels deprived.")

A crony of Hughes sees it differently: "Howard will never die in an airplane. He'll die at the hands of a woman with a .38."

The private life of Howard Hughes might be described as a complete and carefully protected disorder. He has no interest in clothes, only the barest minimum of interest in food and sleep. He owns five suits, of which the newest is five years old; he. is rumpled and disheveled most of the time, gets dressed up only for special occasions. He postpones haircuts as long as possible. "I used to be well-groomed," he says, "but now I am too busy to bother." The story that he once wore tennis shoes into Manhattan's superswank Stork Club infuriates him; he claims that he had no shoe-ration coupon and bought "canvas shoes" out of sheer necessity.

Hughes is moderately deaf but disdains a hearing aid. He hears well on the telephone, which is, by long odds, his favorite channel of communication with other human beings. Since he sleeps only when he is sleepy, he calls up his lieutenants at all hours of the night. Sometimes he identifies himself as "Mr. Hoyt." He has had a number of other aliases, including one for the Town House in Los Angeles, one for the tailors from whom he never buys any clothes, and one which he used, years ago, when he got a job as co-pilot with American Airlines ($250 a month but good experience).

"Just Wait." Hughes has no office, apparently because offices are too easily invaded by people. He likes to make business appointments at out-of-the-way spots, usually at night, and he is always 20 minutes to two hours late, if he shows up at all. He lives in a rather ornate house rented from Gary Grant, to which very few male visitors are admitted, and on which he seems to have made no marks of his own occupancy. He has no chauffeur, no cook, no valet--in fact, no servants in the ordinary sense but a quartet of aides-de-camp. They include Charlie Guest, his old golf pro, and another man named Barry, who might be described as lieutenants in charge of odds & ends, including admissions and evictions; Johnny Meyer, the man with the telephone numbers ; and Dick Davis, a Carl Byoir associate (high-voltage publicity).

Early in his Hollywood career, the town gossips began dividing Hughes's women friends into two classes: 1) the established celebrities--Billy Dove, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Bette Davis, Gloria Baker, Ruth Moffett, et al.--with whom he was seen in public; and 2) the young, eager and not too prudish unknowns with whom he was almost never seen in public. Hughes has a harsh word for the latter: he calls them "crows." But even from them he fears a rebuff. It is part of Meyer's job to see that the green light is up before Hughes ever appears on the scene.

Hughes has one quality which he shares with many another rich man: prodigality with large sums, stinginess with small ones. The story has often been told (it has reached the public prints at least once) of how he visited a girl in a small apartment, told her he did not think the place suited her personality. He said he would find her something better. A few days later, he escorted her to a spacious six-room apartment, so lavishly appointed that the girl's eyes popped. "Oh, Howard," she breathed, "this is wonderful!" "Yes," said Howard drily, "there's only one thing that worries me--can you afford it?"

This was Howard Hughes, the mechanical man. Things came easy; people didn't, quite. It was a commoner & commoner malady in Howard Hughes's century. If it needed a name, it might be called hypertrophy of the gadgets.

At RKO last week, only three pictures were in production. Several others scheduled by Dore Schary had been canceled by the new boss, Howard Hughes. Pink slips were going out to over half of the employees. Just starting this week, however, was a picture that would be right down Hughes's alley--a virile saga of professional football (the Los Angeles Rams) called Interference, starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball. "Just wait," someone said, "until Junior gets his teeth into that one."

Hollywood waited.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.