God of Speed Page 12

  Along the wall beside me here are my bulging file boxes stacked five high. I love having my boxes of memos within arm’s reach. They give me the sensation of substantiality. The medicine box when I want to fly; my memos when I want to return to earth. I don’t plan to weigh Jack down with reading. I just want to give him an idea of what I need to do to keep things running smoothly. I’m not expecting sympathy. We’re grown men, after all. But a small selection will give him insight. He will understand the operational economy of the memo system. He will understand my retreat from the public gaze. He will understand that I cannot afford to crowd my world with inessentials, as I inadvertently did for a while on that final night of 1955.

  That is all I am trying to do with my life, through the memos: reduce the inefficiencies.

  I knew how to streamline the wings of a jet, Jack!

  III

  “But now I have ceased to believe in my surroundings; I have withdrawn into myself, have shut my eyes, have not so much as batted an eyelid. I have the feeling that this torrent of visions is sweeping me away to a tranquil dream: so rivers cease their turbulence in the embrace of the sea …”

  —de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD, 1938

  SO, WE LANDED in France, Jack. And all the flashbulbs flashing. I drifted off a little from the round-the-world trip. When Jack wakes I must remember to stay on target.

  Mr. Hughes will have two hours’ rest. One could hardly call it sleep. I was pretty much immortal already.

  In fact we stayed four hours at the airfield in Paris: a broken strut and buckled stabilizer needed repairing. Things were a little funny with old Hitler around this time; he had a certain anxiety about war preparations being photographed. The French newspapers were warning us not to cross German airspace. But Germany was the fastest route to Russia, and we were falling seriously behind. So we flew anyway. Not wanting to lose face, Field Marshal Goering ordered us to fly at a high ceiling. (“We hope that our flight may prove a contribution to the cause of friendship between nations,” I had said in my speech at Floyd Bennett Field two days earlier, “and that through their outstanding fliers, for whom the common bond of aviation transcends national boundaries, this cause may be furthered.”)

  We buffeted through electrical storms for twelve hours; the great fronts squeezed us lower and lower to the ground. All night we were flanked by Luftwaffe fighter planes, tuned into our frequency and screeching Verboten! Verboten! We ignored them.

  Toward dawn, somewhere over Poland, while the men all slept, I found myself thinking of death. One moment I was in the cockpit—seemingly a simple matter—and the next I was deeply immersed in the absolute clarity of the knowledge that I had everything, and yet nothing, and that this was the end of the world. The glow of the control panel was both profound and distressing. In the intimacy of an airplane adrift on the sky with my cohorts deep asleep I could have shouted Hosanna! I could have put the barrel of the flare gun inside my mouth and scattered my head into phosphorous and flame; eventually the Cyclone would have fallen from the sky.

  The tricks night plays. At dawn we landed in Moscow for a quick refuel. We didn’t stay long. We were trying to make up time, and besides, those Bolsheviks gave me the jeepers creepers. I couldn’t think of anything good to say, so in my speech I spoke of how much I admired the airport design. Then we commenced the long haul to Omsk, Siberia, flying blind over great rain clouds, an infinitely bulbous dream of landscape. By now the time zones were blurring. My ears rang from the buzzing. It was cramped up there in that little metal room. But the amphetamines put a sparkle on the control panel, and everyone was focused on their tasks.

  All day we trundled and droned high above the Steppes.

  At some point a great sorrow overcame me, or perhaps it was just the sadness continuing from the night before. At first I felt it as two bands of pain across my middle back. I shifted in my seat and indeed stood up for a moment to stretch, but when I looked out all around me once again, the sadness merely resumed its position. It felt in fact like exhaustion. Undeniably the mood was brought on by that faint sense one imbibes, at ten thousand feet, of the curve of the earth. From there one contemplates the potentially debilitating, despair-inducing and claustrophobic notion that it (the planet) is not actually so huge after all … and yet, may the gods weep, it is endless. Hours and hours of the rolling Russian Steppes, rolling underneath, changeless, lead one to feel, or infer, a certain weight of sadness which must be going on, of its own momentum, down below. I am talking about the tawdry sadness of human lives. Odd to think all these things and keep one eye on the instrument panel as well. Every once in a while one sees a tiny town. It is quite oppressive really, the thought of it. The glowing gold of Russia’s summer wheat fields. Down there the peasants must be swamped in existence as in an inferno. From there this sky I fly through must appear implacable and pitiless, this plane a distant and determined bird, a speck of movement on the great blue static.

  And then the bad weather and the mountains moved in.

  The Lockheed strained and boomed and rattled as if its very hollowness were an echo chamber of fragility. As if every bolt and rivet had a life of its own and as if for every bolt and rivet the only music, the only destiny, was the blunting of thread and the tearing of metal. I imagined us suddenly exploding in the sky, the plane simply divesting itself of its metal, and my crew and I, unable to reach for our parachutes, flailing our graceless paths earthwards and downwards. The descent into Omsk was terrifying: the wings iced over, we bumped and lurched, our tiny ship was heavier than sleep. But somehow we landed safely on that raggedy godforsaken airstrip. Omsk, the ugliest outpost I have ever seen, a sorry excuse for a town, a repository of mud in the Siberian void, manned by imbeciles the likes of whom are not to be found in the United States.

  WEDDING BELLS BURIED IN THE

  CALIFORNIA STATUTES

  IF I TELL Jack the story of New Year’s Eve back in ’55 then I’ll have to tell him about marrying Jean. Jack, I’ll say, now the good thing was that on this particular night, at least, Jean had only Susan Hayward to project her worries onto. Jean knew about (and hated) Yvonne Shubert; she just didn’t happen to know Yvonne’s whereabouts that New Year’s Eve. The next day it was easy to patch things up with Jean—I just upped the volume on the marriage promises. Indeed, I had been planning marriage for some time, not because I had any faith whatsoever in the institution—it meant nothing to me other than claustrophobia and entrapment—but because my mind had not always been great for about ten years now, not wholly consistent in its piecing together of the world, let’s say, and I was sure I could sense the occasional rumbling from my men: would a day ever arise when it was necessary to commit Mr. Hughes? I had secretly asked my attorney, Greg Bautzer, to investigate the California statutes, and buried deep in there he came across the provision that the decision to commit to an insane asylum rests solidly enough, in the eyes of the law, with the husband or wife. And why would Jean ever commit me, knowing it might take her further away from her inheritance?

  So I married Jean a year or two after that rather complex night. Another saga in itself. Jean was safe, easy. I never really liked sleeping with her. It had been business as usual with Yvonne for some time; I was, it may be clear by now, Jack, ever the restless type. But I could feel that particular … energy … fading. I was in my mid-fifties now. To be frank, I didn’t know what I wanted. As for Jean, the press didn’t even find out about the marriage until two months after the event. So for a while I thought I’d gotten off scot-free on that count. But one night I arrived to visit Yvonne, and she screamed and raged, and threw the newspaper at me. It was a story, of course, about my recent marriage. Fortunately the press is so wonderfully corrupt, and she’d seen at first hand how the gossip columns simply made things up, that it was rather easy to convince her that of course it was all lies. I had to admit to her that I was still seeing Jean, as a friend, but only because one doesn’t just shut
someone out of one’s life, does one? One has to let them down slowly. And I promised Yvonne we would marry very soon.

  When will that be? she said.

  Just as soon as all the circumstances are right, I said. Just as soon as everything is in place.

  She was ever so happy to hear that.

  I decided it was the new phase of my life. No more nonsense! A new decade was coming. The sixties were like a gleaming vista stretching before me, endless space, room to breathe. My plan was to get everything sorted out and organized. Clean. I could consolidate everything and be a normal man, too. I was sorry to have told white lies to Yvonne, and sorry to have hurt her feelings. Jean Peters, as part of my new plan, was the simplest, most non-problematic person I could imagine; marriage seemed like a good idea. She fitted into the scheme of things, and my vision of the future. But for goodness’ sake, there was no point in rubbing Yvonne’s nose in it!

  THE STREAMING OF THE LIGHT

  AND EVERYTHING WENT swimmingly for a while. Jean was quite the homemaker. I was making more dosh per minute from Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft than the average American made in a year. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was not so much the Don Juan anymore. At last, I hear you say, Jack! Not so much the extrovert. Because a new thing was developing: I really liked the sensation of being still, in an enclosed space, with the curtains drawn. It took away the pressure for a while.

  I keep saying, For a while. That’s the gist of the problem right there. There are a limited number of for-a-whiles in your life, and then they, and it, are gone.

  For a while they gave me Ritalin tablets and for a while on Ritalin I felt really good. I was rarely in the cockpit but I sure knew how to fly. This was around ’61, when I was having big problems trying to hold TWA together. On certain days my stress levels would rise. The nervous anxiety embodied itself in the feeling that I was about to be overwhelmed. That I would, quite simply, quite spontaneously, collapse. The doctors were worried I might implode and thought Ritalin would help me focus on all the memos and deal permutations sure to emerge as the whole TWA buyback unfolded. It had been a long time since I’d had the thought that I might lose everything. My consciousness was made heavy by exhaustion. By now codeine and morphine and Valium and Seconal and Librium were like trusted friends. You have to be careful when a new friend is introduced into the mix. It can upset the balance. But I thought we all got along just famously.

  Ritalin. The last time I’d had speed that good, goddamn, I was making Hell’s Angels, running a million over budget (this was 1928, Jack) and it, the speed, shouldered some of the weight for me. It was the solution to problems of budget and focus and overload, and it helped me maintain control over a bucking project, since control, ultimately, is all there is. The problem was, this darned stuff is so good you take more (why wouldn’t you, if it works so well?) and nobody tells you that eventually it’ll tilt your axis. There were portals opening from my brain to the universe, there was such purity in the light and the shape of clouds, my breathing was magnificent. There was a crispness to existence. You feel that all engines will run forever.

  It is all just a glory. There is no sense of cause and effect. Ritalin doesn’t rush right through you in that ecstasy of urgency the way an injection does. But some hours later you find yourself beatifically propelled into the Onrush of Life and the Clarity of Things and the Purpose of Purposes. And there is just no stopping you. And the sense that not only is life sublimely good but that you can, methodically, efficiently, with speed but not haste, get all your tasks done, is a strong thick smell before it’s anything else, anything felt, heard, thought, abstracted, processed.

  And it all streamed out of me, like light. Memo after memo, I ruled my world.

  And for a while you don’t know it’s the drugs, the new friends working things out among themselves.

  Note to self: ask the Mormons about Ritalin. It might be good for the flying. Does wonders for that clarity, I seem to remember. Perhaps Jack would like to try some, too.

  Speaking of Jack, when the hell will he wake up? I wonder what time it is. Perhaps I should try to get some sleep myself soon. Then the morning will come faster. In the morning I’ll be as fresh as a daisy. Where was I? Ah, the Ritalin. Back in ’61, I’ll tell Jack, I tried to live with Jean (Peters, not Harlow) for a while, as man and wife, in the house at Cardiff-by-the-Sea. It almost worked, for several weeks the signs were good. Oh she was a breath of fresh air, that little sparrow. That annoying tweetie bird.

  Howard darling, can I get you something to drink?

  We almost made it, we almost got to live that life. Perhaps all I really lacked was the capacity for social niceties.

  That little tweetie bird. Flinging open the blinds, plumping up the bed. My own airline was suing me for mismanagement! For five hundred million in damages! I needed the Ritalin to work out my strategies. There were forces out to get me! The other business, the codeine, all that was just the underlay, the fabric of existence. I had to keep the wolves at bay. And Jean was so irredeemably up. And I was sinking and sinking, after the initial rush of the first few weeks, after the energy and excitement of new perspectives had worn off. She thought the salt air was so great. Wasn’t the view of the rolling hills so great? Wasn’t the green so intense? Wasn’t the air so wonderfully crisp? Wasn’t it marvelous, Howard? Didn’t she realize how contagion was all around us, how cleverly it traveled through the air? So I ordered the blinds taped shut again, and banished her to another bedroom. The problem was not the dust, which is inevitable; it was the disturbing of dust. So I had to ban the cleaners, too.

  Memo, 1961: Jean’s cat

  is missing

  I want someone who is an expert in the ways of animals of this type and who would know where to look and how to look and how to go about this. I mean, for example, directly, dogs get a cat treed up a tree and the cat just stays there, afraid to come down, and the dogs rush around in the vicinity somewhere. If we can find some evidence … the cat’s body, or somebody who heard the episode … Now, it just seems to me that if Bill gave a goddamn in hell about my predicament down here he would have obtained from somewhere, from some place—I don’t know where from—from Los Angeles or some place, he would have gotten some expert in the ways of animals, cats in particular, and had him come down here and then put about eight or ten of Maheu’s men at his disposal and they would have conducted an intelligent search based upon being instructed by somebody who knows the habit and ways of an animal of this kind. But, instead of that, so far as I have been able to make out, not one thing has been done …

  Kay, I am not going to run this organization this way anymore, and now Bill Gay goes cruising around today, having a good time, where nothing is done about looking for this cat down here. Not one goddamned thing except having a few of our guards cruise around in their cars. Maheu is in Los Angeles. You could have had him send a team of men down here. You could have gotten some experts who knew about cats and know where to look. There are many, many things that could have been done during the entire period of today to try and locate this animal or find out what happened to it today. I am goddamned sure that if some police case depended upon the determination of knowledge of what happened to this animal today, by God in Heaven they would have had a team of men scouting the countryside and located the cat or some shred of evidence of what happened to it.

  This is not the jungle; this is not the Everglades; this is not New York City with the dense population. It is thinly populated and it is no problem at all to question the people here and have them questioned by somebody and get at the truth and not permit somebody to conceal the truth just because they are afraid of being sued or something like that. Proper questions by people skilled in questioning could have been had. The animal could have been searched for by a team of people skilled in the ways of animals of this type. I know one thing; if a zoo had lost some valuable animal in this area, there would have been twenty-five or thirty men scouring the countryside, men
skilled in the habits and ways of an animal of this kind, and they would have found it by now.

  If there was a dangerous animal escaped from some zoo or circus like a goddamned wildcat or leopard or some animal, you can be goddamned sure they would have found it by now. I consider the loss of this particular animal and the consequences it has had to my wife to be just as important, and in the light of my resources and ability to pursue a matter of this kind, I feel that there is absolutely no reason why a search should not have been instigated for this animal equal in any way to what would have happened if some damned train had broken down here and some leopard or panther or what-not had escaped. There is absolutely no reason why a man of my resources and having the resources and organization that I have got, there is no goddamned reason in the world why efforts to locate this animal should not have been made equal in every way to what would have occurred if some dangerous animal had escaped in this area.

  In this situation here you don’t think Bill has done anything wrong, going off today to pursue his social activities, whatever it may be, while this situation of complete tragedy occurs down here and my home is likely to be broken completely asunder? You don’t think that at all? You think that it is my business and my worry and if Bill wants to go to his social affairs that is okay and I am expecting too much.

  I never meant anything more sincerely than I mean this.

  HIGHER TRUTHS OF THE DESERT

  JACK WILL UNDERSTAND why I had to get away from California and Jean the tweetie bird. Because finally in the Desert Inn I became invisible. Because eventually what had happened was, I made up my mind that I did not want to see anyone again. I mean business, I mean meetings. I mean even Jean. It didn’t quite work out with Jean, of course. We certainly gave it our best shot for a good few years—but it was all so exhausting. Just being alive, just trying to concentrate. Frankly, I just didn’t care what color the drapes were. Is dark a color, my dear?