The Case of the Lascivious Banker

Told from the personal perspective of Noah Dietrich, one anecdote in the James Phelan manuscript reads, in part:

HUGHES Tool had a portfolio of securities, but by now the depression was deepening and stocks, bonds, government securities were bringing a fraction of their value. It was the worst possible time to sell any securities, but I cleaned out the portfolio to finance his moviemaking. I particularly remember a line of Australian government bonds, for which we had paid a premium prior to the crash. I sold them off at $38, barely more than a third of their par value.

The money I raised fell far short of what he needed ... He called me in again and asked me to raise $3,000,000 against the value of Hughes Tool Co. I went down to Houston and talked to the executives there about a loan from the Houston banks . . . They told me they would talk to their bankers, and came back and claimed the banks had turned them down.

I went off to New York, and raised the three million from a bank that will remain nameless, for obvious reasons ... I told the banker we would make the loan, and found out that he had one more condition. He hemmed and hawed and then came out with it.

"I've heard that they have some hot stag movies floating around Hollywood," the pillar of finance told me. "If you can dig up a good one for me, I'll close the deal."

I went back to L. A. and made some discreet inquiries. In those days, pornography was a hush-hush subject, and trafficked in by wealthy rakes rather than by neighborhood movie houses. I finally came up with an old classic called Gozinta, sent it off to the banker, and got final approval for Howard's $3,000,000 loan.

The same incident, told by Irving in the purported words of Howard Hughes, reads, in part:

I had the Tool Company. Toolco kept going right through the Depression and we, that is to say the company, owned a fair amount of stock, government securities and bonds. So I sold them. We had Australian government bonds and I took a terrible beating on them. And even that wasn't enough. Joe Schenck [a leading movie producer] had to have $3,000,000 more, and I had to come up with it. 1 tried to go to Toolco again. I was busy so I sent Noah down there, but he couldn't do a goddam thing because he didn't know those people . . .

Then I sent Noah to New York.

He could deal with Easterners and I couldn't . . . Anyway Noah found a banker finally who was willing to put up the $3,000,000.

Well, this will show you how crazy business is sometimes. The banker had only one condition. He was a pervert. He wanted some stag movies, one of those blue films that were being made in Hollywood, and he said he'd come up with the money if we could get a really hot stag film. Noah told me this on the telephone. So I scoured Hollywood and came up with some film. It was disgusting. I ran it off at home to see what it was like--Billie [Actress Billie Dove] was with me and she nearly died of shame ... I sent it off Special Delivery to Noah in New York, breaking all the mail laws of the country in the process, and he gave it to the banker and we got our three million dollars.

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