Howard Hughes: Hell's Angel

998 Pages·2010·12.51 MB·English

by  Darwin Porter

HOWARD HUGHES HELL’S ANGEL
Copyright ©2010, Blood Moon Productions, Ltd.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
www.BloodMoonProductions.com
Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-936003-13-6
Cover designs by Richard Leeds ( Bigwigdesign.com) Videography and
Publicity Trailers by Piotr Kajstura Distributed in North America and Australia
through National Book Network ( www.NBNbooks.com) and in the UK through
Turnaround ( www.turnaround-uk.com)
123 45 6789 10
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE LEGACY OF
STANEY MILLS HAGGART
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the pages ahead, a description of the source of each individual piece of
information is positioned very close to the spot where that information actually
appears. Also, within the pages ahead, direct quotations have been transcribed
“as they were remembered” by the witnesses who originally heard the remarks.
They’re presented with the same nuances, and with the same phraseologies, that
were used when those remarks were originally transmitted.
CHAPTER ONE
Hollywood, 1921
Party-loving Hollywood was setting out to put the roar in the Roaring
Twenties.
With his wife and son safely tucked away in Houston, Texas, Howard
Hughes Sr., or “Big Howard” as he was called, sat looking up at the mauve-
colored sky over Los Angeles. But not for long.
Female screams around the swimming pool quickly diverted his eye. Milling
about the pool, or else splashing in it, was a bevy of beautiful, long-limbed
showgals better looking than any he’d seen in the fleshpots of Chicago or New
York.
Hughes was not a handsome man but he was secure in his belief that before
the evening ended he could snare any of these big-breasted chorines. Not bad for
a Missouri farm boy who had been born dirt poor in 1869.
He was rugged and tall; a man of rough-hewn, roguish looks who'd wandered
across the dusty plains of Oklahoma and between the snow-capped mountains of
Colorado, seeking to strike it rich by buying and selling leases on silver and zinc
mines. He'd also been a regular aboard the gambling showboats that steamed up
and down the Mississippi, each of them loaded with wild and wanton women
whose charms were usually available for one gold dollar. Whiplashed by the
booms and busts of the Robber Baron Age, he sometimes flaunted his bundles of
cash to entrap the shapeliest and most glamorous of women and occasionally, a
virginal teenage girl.
From boomtown to boomtown, he'd been a wildcatter, coping with a string of
broken dreams, but still hoping to acquire "all the pots of gold at the end of the
rainbow."
He’d wanted a wife who “acted and looked like a queen” and he found her
one Christmas Day in Dallas in 1902 as he came into the ballroom of the Gaiety
Hall for a Yuletide Cotillion. Allene Stone Gano, born in 1883, was only
nineteen when he was introduced to her. Clad in a pink lace gown, she’d stunned
him with her flowing brunette hair, high cheekbones, and liquid brown eyes—an
ascetic appearance of enormous appeal to a thirty-two year-old roustabout who’d
spent most of his sexual life suckling at the breasts of prostitutes. She was in the
Social Register, daughter of a prominent Texas judge and granddaughter of a
famous general in the Confederate army.
He was happy that he’d dressed up that night in his Brooks Brothers, charcoal
gray, pin-striped suit, with white spats, a black bowler hat, and a diamond
stickpin. Her eyes had seemed to dance as he’d gazed into them. She’d stood
before him, tall and reed-thin, a young filly of charm and grace.
From the beginning, he’d viewed her as ideal wife material, the kind of
woman he could impregnate, stash away in a fine home somewhere, visit on
occasions, and continue to lead the wild bachelor life he’d always had. Wife or
no wife, Howard Sr. valued his freedom above all.
In spite of his wild living, he was an educated man, having been born the son
of a Missouri lawyer. Hughes Sr. had graduated from Harvard, had earned his
law degree from the University of Iowa, and for a time had practiced law with
his father in Keokuk, Iowa. His courtship of Allene had been brief. After his
proposal under a full Texas moon in March of 1903, the couple were married
only a few weeks later, on May 24, at the home of her parents on Masten Street
in Dallas.
When Howard Sr. had met Allene Gano, he’d been mesmerized by her charm
and her taste in clothing. Although her French Huguenot family had urged her to
marry a multi-millionaire, she’d fallen for Hughes Sr. At the time he had exactly
fifty-thousand dollars in the bank, and on their 1904 honeymoon in Britain and
the Continent, he managed to spend $49,100 of that treasure, something that
even the Gilded Age scions of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors didn’t
exceed during their spendthrift tours across Europe.
Even if he had a wife and son, he’d need to be able to run away at a
moment’s notice, perhaps to mud-dirt Texas towns like Goose Creek or Pierce
Junction where he might strike it rich in the oil business. Back then, he’d known
that such rip-roaring towns would be only stations along the way for him, places
to join local riggers hunting for the black gold that lurked in the bowels of the
earth.
Allene had not only married him, but stood by him, even as he neared the age
of forty and still hadn’t hit pay dirt. And then there came a sudden reversal of
fortune.
He’d had no great success as a wildcatter, but he had nevertheless struck it
rich with his “rock eater,” a drill with 166 cutting edges that could pierce
through granite. “Or drill through Hell itself,” Hughes claimed.
Up until then, oilmen had used the standard “fishtail” bit with two cutting
edges that blunted whenever they hit hard rock.
Even though he lied and wasn’t the sole inventor, as he’d later maintain, he’d
acquired two U.S. patents on August 10, 1909. He’d made many improvements
to the bit, but the invention itself had been purchased for $150 from Granville A.
Humason, a young Mississippi millwright.
Hard rock, once thought impenetrable, could be pierced by his “rock bit” and
the precious oil reserves tapped. The rock drill had forever changed the way men
pursued oil deposits.
Years later, Hughes Jr. was asked if his father’s tool company had a
monopoly. “Of course not!” he replied. “People who want to drill for oil and not
use the Hughes bit can always use a pick and shovel.”
By the time Hughes Sr. arrived in Hollywood in 1921, word had spread
through the movie colony that “the richest oilman in Texas” was in town. With
his drill plowing for oil in countries around the world, and his bank account
growing fatter and fatter by the day, Hughes felt he deserved some pleasure.
The Hollywood party to which he’d been invited was getting wilder. Already
six bathing beauties had pulled down the tops to their suits and jumped into the
pool.
He was trying to pick his favorite for the evening when he was overcome
with the smell of a strangely scented, over-perfumed cigarette.
Looking around, he spotted his hostess—attired in a flamboyant peacock
dress of emerald green and royal blue—gliding toward him with a long cigarette
holder. She was the grand empress of the estate, the Garden of Alla, with its
swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea of her homeland.
“Howard, darling,” she called out to him in a Russian-accented voice.
He rose from his chaise longue to stand in front of her. Since she was a
virtual midget, he towered over her. Her head of frizzy hair hardly came to his
navel, yet this petite little bird was the Queen of Hollywood.
The exotic Alla Nazimova herself.
She extended her mauve-colored gloved hand to him for it to be kissed.
Nazimova artfully seated herself in a peacock chair across from Hughes, as
an Amazon-like maiden wearing a breast plate arranged her gown. Standing over
her was a Nubian slave in a pink-colored, bulging loincloth gently fanning her,
as she continued to smoke her Turkish cigarette. She motioned for the Nubian to
offer Hughes one of the cigarettes, which he accepted.
“You Hollywood stars sure like drama,” he said.
With her pumpkin-shaped head and gunboat feet, Nazimova confronted him.
“My whole life is devoted to drama. In fact, I don’t think I’m capable of doing
anything that’s not dramatic.”
As he inhaled deeply on the cigarette, he leaned back and more closely
studied the image of Nazimova. Her beauty was but an illusion, yet she was the
highest paid actress in Hollywood, earning $13,000 a week. He respected
women who earned their own money and didn’t depend on a man to keep them
like chattel.
When a tall, handsome man came over to shake Hughes’ hand, Nazimova
introduced him as Charles Bryant. She called him “the Rosebud of my life.”
Bryant quickly departed. Nazimova moved closer to Hughes, her face coming
into the spotlight. He noticed that heavy rice powder covered the pockmarks of
some childhood illness.
“Charles is not really my husband,” she said. “He’s actually my beard. He’s a
bad actor, really just a bit player. I bring him out to show him off anytime the
press wants an interview.” She gazed toward the beauties in the pool.
“Otherwise, I prefer my tender young maidens.”
“I hope we won’t be fighting for the same pussies tonight,” Hughes said to
her.
“Not at all,” she said. “I’ve arranged very special entertainment for you.”
“Can’t wait,” he said.
“Mr. Hughes,” she said rather abruptly. “You and I have much in common. I
am dangerously seductive because of my beauty and charm. In spite of your
rather plain looks, you are also dangerously seductive because of your money.
You and I ruthlessly pursue glamorous women. But, unlike yourself, I prefer a
man from time to time. Not for sexual pleasure of course, but because I want to
know how to relate to them on the screen. How to make passionate love to them
like I did to Rudolph Valentino in Camille.”
“You’re one hell of an emotionalist,” he said.
“Emotionalist,” she repeated, mulling that over a moment. “I’ve been called
many things—never that. Noticing how intently he was scrutinizing her, she
must have mistaken his interest. “I must warn you,” she cautioned him. “Don’t
fall in love with me the way Valentino’s wife, Jean Acker, did. I’m exactly as I
am on the screen. I betray lovers as ruthlessly as men have always betrayed
women. I would only break your heart. Shatter it into so many pieces you’d
never be able to put it together again.”
“I’ve never been in love, Nazimova, and I never will be,” he said. “I take
momentary pleasures in bodies presented to me. But when that short-lived
pleasure is over, I move on. I prefer to sleep alone. Love! Men who fall in love
never succeed in this world. They are mere lovesick fools—nothing more.”
“A man after my own heart,” Nazimova said. “The only thing I’ve ever loved
is that incredible image of my flickering face on the screen.”
The cigarette was making him feel drugged—almost but not quite like get
ting too drunk. He knew that Nazimova hadn’t invited him to her Garden of Alla
to admire his physique, and he was anxious to finish their business so that he
Nazimova could pursue the intrigues of the night. “Assuming I want to go into
the business of making movies, and I’m just flirting with the idea, just how much
money do you need to make Salome?”
“I need another $100,000,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m putting up
$300,000 of my own money, and that’s all I have in the bank. It’s what I’ve
saved from what my accountants call a lifestyle lashed with extravagances.”
“I know the Biblical story,” he said, “but what kind of costume epic are we
talking about here?”
“Salome will be the most artistic film ever made in the history of
Hollywood.”
“Artsy-fartsy,” he said. “Will it have sex and plenty of it?”
“Beyond anything that’s ever made it to the screen,” she promised. “In tribute
to Oscar Wilde’s drama, I’m demanding that my entire cast be homosexual, and
very scantily dressed. It will have beautiful slave boys, and a Syrian captain of
the palace guard fitted in black tights with a natural pouch showing, a beaded
necklace placed over his chest before a fishnet hood is draped over his body and
his nipples painted purple. The black male slaves will be selected for their
physiques and will wear white wigs with curls like those of Mary Pickford. Each
will be clad in a silver lamé loincloth. The handsome Roman soldiers will appear
in sleeveless armor to better show off their muscles. They’ll wear metallic skirts
ending just below their crotches, and they’ll each be bare-legged. The black
executioner will be played by a stunning Mandingo wearing a fully packed satin
loincloth. His string of white beads will be as big as ostrich eggs matching the
size of his testicles, with will be outlined in all their male glory.”
“And the young gals?” Hughes asked. “What about them?”
“I’m selecting the most beautiful women in Hollywood to play the ladies of
Herod’s court,” she said. “Except they won’t be women, but men dressed as
women and sporting wigs.”
“I see,” Hughes said. “Let me think it over tonight, and I’ll give you my
answer tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.”
“As you desire,” she said, standing up, as her hand-maiden rushed to help
her.
“And my party favor for tonight?” he said, having tired of Nazimova’s film
talk. Salome was not his dream fantasy.
“She’s already waiting at the front of the Garden of Alla,” she said
provocatively. “Waiting to take you in her arms for a night of exquisite pleasure
unlike what you’ve ever known before.”
“I can’t wait!” Hughes said, getting up and kissing Nazimova’s gloved hand
once more. “Your film sounds exciting, and I can tell you one thing right now: I
think I’m going to back it—maybe back the whole thing so that you won’t have
to put up one red cent.”
“Oh, Howard darling, that would make me the happiest goddess in
Hollywood.”
Nazimova paled in comparison to what was waiting for Hughes at the
entrance to the Garden of Alla. A sleek canary yellow Rolls-Royce stood ready
to whisk him away into the night. Because of the car’s darkened glass, he could
make out only the shadowy figure of the woman seated in the rear.
Upon his approach, two liverymen in pink uniforms rose in their white boots
from the box of the limousine where they were waiting patiently. The one on the
right opened the door handle to the rear compartment. To Hughes, the handle
looked like real gold.
The moment he peered into the vehicle he recognized its occupant. It was
Mae Murray, “the girl with the bee-stung lips,” who was rapidly replacing
Nazimova as the Queen of Hollywood.
Never in his life had Hughes seen such a stunning beauty. All in white satin
and ermine, she wore an elaborate headdress of feathers as befits the ex-Follies
showgirl that she was. She beckoned him to sit beside her in the midnight blue
patent leather interior. Her perfumed aroma evoked a field of gardenias, and her
gold gown was studded with white pearls. A dazzingly large marquis diamond