God of Speed Page 6

  After a while Noah took me by the arm and said, leading me up the stairs, I’ll put you into bed. He was like a father to me. He was a wonderful accountant, too.

  COOL ARE THE FAIRWAYS

  AT NIGHT

  SOMETIMES WHEN THE moon was bright I would leave the house on Muirfield, climb the back fence, and roam completely free on the empty golf course, free of Billie Dove, of Jean Harlow, of the complications of how to interact. It soothed my head to wander. The shadows of animals, squirrels or rabbits perhaps, moved tentatively across the fairways. Sometimes I would take my clothes off and lie down on my back on the seventh green, arms and legs spread wide. Daylight is merely like an electric lamp; when it is switched off you can see out the window to what lies outside. And this is what night is: the eyes adjusting to the things outside of here. Sometimes I saw my place in the world, and felt precisely the right size.

  THE BILLIE-BONE IS CONNECTED

  TO THE WORLD-BONE

  BILLIE LEFT IN ’31. Howard, she said in the end, you’re frightfully young in the head. Howard, she’d said in Paris, when I couldn’t hide my boredom in the Notre Dame cathedral, can’t you just feel the beauty?

  We were all just rattling our cages, Jack, for quite a few years back then. And yes, Billie, of course I felt the beauty. For nine hundred years that stone had held its shape, which is better than any of us can say for ourselves.

  Late at night, in one of the screening rooms at Goldwyn Studios, I would run reels from Cock of the Air and The Age for Love. Just to once again watch her face in silence on the screen. Well, she was better off up there.

  The rest is the blink of an eye. Billie left me but it didn’t matter. There were no hard feelings when we crossed paths at Maxim’s. The world was full of color.

  We had spent much time together on the Rodeo, but it was time for change. So I bought the Rover, the fifth largest private yacht in the world, and renamed it the Southern Cross. The refit included crystal chandeliers, teak floorboards from Siam, pink marble in the bathrooms, and wolf skins for the master bed, a great circular expanse. My thought was that it would impress the debutantes and starlets.

  And indeed, it’s as if their underwear fell to the deck the minute they stepped on board.

  For years then I tumbled through urgency, each new woman, it was so exciting, I mean she was so exciting, I mean the whole situation: how would she smell, how would she look naked, how would she make love, how would she taste, what heat would leak from her lips and tongue? We would strut through the clubs, me and Pat de Cicco, Johnny Maschio, Alex D’Arcy. We thought if they want it they give it up. There was simply no strain in the whole of the world. In any one life it may be a narrow epoch, when the women’s legs go weak and the handsome young men come to bark at the moon. But in Los Angeles it is always summer.

  THE HANDSOME YOUNG MEN

  CARY GRANT HAS been leaving messages this week. He’s in London—did I tell you? I’d like to see old Cary but it is damned hard to conceive of how it might be done. I feel ashamed, Jack. I know I look different. It’s a long time since the thirties, my friend. Bodies entering a room are so dense with intrusion. Got to keep it all to a minimum. It took me an awful lot of effort just to get you here. You’re the first outsider in ten years. It’s a big decision to let someone in. There are so many possible disasters. Maybe I’ll never see Cary again. It might well be better that way.

  He was the gentlest of men. And how the women loved him—far more than they ever loved me. We met in 1935. After he divorced Virginia Cherrill he was spending a lot of time with Randolph Scott, who was spending a lot of time, on golf courses, in nightclubs, with me. When Cary Grant walked into a room it was just as if the doors had opened wide on spring, on all its breezes and the smell of fern. It was just as if the God of Charm had filled the space around you. I felt that I had learned my manners, all my ways of being, in public. How to hold a fork. How to ask a lady for a dance. It all came with effort. In Hollywood, one way or another, everyone was watching you. But you’d swear that Cary Grant was born with every skill already there.

  So the Latter Day Saints have told me that Cary has been in contact. He’d very much love to see me. We talked on the phone a few years back, in ’69. He’s a very private man, more so than me, and was reluctant to go to the Academy Awards that year to collect his special Oscar. A lifetime achievement, perhaps. I told him he should go, to share in the collective goodwill, to accept his due, to shower them with his love. He said, I’ll go if you go, Howard. We laughed. Well, nothing came of that, of course.

  And now he’s called again. It breaks my heart that he’s still so willing to try. It’s just that I am rather ill, and I don’t think I look so well, and it’s terribly embarrassing to be like this, and surely one visitor is enough for the week, or the month, or the decade. I need to get better again. For Cary. That’s no offense to you, Jack. It’s just … it’s different worlds. You were one of my most trusted executives. I need you for the planning of this flight. But it goes back so much deeper with him.

  When you come to think of it, I’ve had so few friends, really. So few voices other than my own. Lots of employees, of course. Some who fared better than others. And some who didn’t fare so well at all. Dick Felt, Ceco Cline. But does Lake Mead even have to be mentioned? Why spoil a good evening? Things go wrong, from time to time. I risked no one’s life more than my own. I was luckier, that’s all. Let’s talk about you, Jack, when you wake up. I’ll try not to talk about myself too much. I’ll ask you how your wife is. How is the weather in California? Let’s talk about California.

  Latter Day Saint! Syringe!

  The problem is, we have these walls set up here, the Mormons and me, and it’s so hard to imagine them breached. Even by Cary Grant. We have a system in place, carefully built up, layer by layer, over the years. The whole point of systems is to finetune them, not to introduce random new elements into the modulated lineaments of their precision. But Cary. But Cary. If I really could get better … then maybe next year, I could have him over. What do you think, Jack? I’d be living in a different place by then. A real house, perhaps. And perhaps California is not such a bad idea after all. We could go for a stroll, just me and Cary. Perhaps even a round of golf. We could sit in the garden and watch the sun go down over the Wilshire Country Club, as we did once at Muirfield Drive. In summer the gnats would hover like a holy gauze above the greens.

  THE END OF HISTORY

  I WILL NEED to tell him, more than almost anything, about the injections. Because that’s just something that can’t be hidden. What Jack perhaps won’t realize is that the more I take the clearer it all gets. He needs to understand, this is not something I do just for fun. This is about putting myself in the position I need to be in to make everything function. It’s not just about me. It’s about everything that surrounds me. If I’ve got enough of the appropriate medicine in me everything is flat, perfect. A levelness to existence is what you want to aim for. This is all made more difficult by the fact that the world is so full of things without any intrinsic meaning. Well, I mean to say, chock-a-block. Mothers with babies in prams. All children, everywhere. The poor and the nigger. The past. The other side of the planet. Joy. Suffering. Grocery lists. National Parks Walking Trails. Football. Religion. Road crews. Ironing boards. Antique collections. Books. Telephones. The stock exchange. Hope.

  Clearly you take more medicine to extinguish all the tensions.

  Inside the syringe, Jack, think of how safe that place must be. And yet, from the dose’s point of view, there is nothing to grip. Inside the barrel there is nothing but endless curvature, and a point to which everything drains, and a needle so narrow the atoms must pass through in single file.

  I can half-inject the Empirin and lie so still that the needle remains docked in the vein, and a while later, with serene balance, I can push the plunger the rest of its merry way. Every object in the world is journeying.

  And the Mormons. Clean men. For clean medical pr
ocedures. But mostly I still like to inject myself. In a good glass-barreled syringe you don’t need to jack back to find blood in order to confirm the puncturing of the vein. Instead when you hit a vein the plunger slides backward effortlessly—something to do with the vacuum, which is apparently more abundant than we think.

  In any case a syringe is like a drill bit, if you really think about it. It pierces through the rock of the flesh to the oil of the blood.

  What’s more, sometimes I’m of the opinion that the only purposeful and pure direction, now and forever—1973 so clearly being the end of history—is a gliding that takes place in the thirty seconds after the plunger’s rubber tip meets the barrel’s far wall, at which point everything has been squeezed through the steel of the needle, and meets with my body, which is all that there is and the essence of all that is welcoming.

  And only after some time, though time is rather an elastic concept here, does the blander warmth of being able to watch television take place.

  The by-product is that one remains, like all good monks, closer to the eternal. I have been fearless at times in my life. Okay, maybe not so much of late. But these years have not been so much a retreat as a purifying. And tomorrow I’ll be entirely fearless and fly again. Or is it already today? Completely naked, should the fancy take me. Because everything is cleaner, high in the air.

  Also, quite obviously I have an empire to run.

  FLUSH RIVETING

  IN 1934, WORKING on the prototype of my H-1, the Silver Bullet, I had a moment of great clarity, let’s call it an aerodynamic epiphany. I had all thirty thousand round-headed rivets bored out of the fuselage of the plane, and replaced with thirty thousand flush-head rivets.

  Flush riveting? I invented it, Jack. Every knob, every protuberance, every obstacle to progress: Begone, I said.

  You never saw Jean Harlow’s Venusian mound after that time she clear-felled the bracken with my razor, but let’s just say she would have met no wind resistance either.

  Because everything that gets in the way of the wind, or of anything else, is expendable.

  TRANSCONTINENTAL RECORD,

  JANUARY 14, 1936

  WHAT I WANTED to say, after all the noise died down, was simple, and easy, and pure.

  That the world’s magnificence was enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. And I played no small part in that.

  In September ’35, in my beautiful H-1, I had already broken the land speed record. But everything just kept getting faster, for a long, long time. There are two types of people in this world. You have to know what you want and focus on getting it. Or not, as the case may be. If your head were on fire, how urgently would you sprint to that nearby body of water? That is what I mean by focus. The Silver Bullet was a long time coming: I spent long days and nights through ’34 and ’35 out at the wind tunnel at Caltech, my alma mater, so to speak. There was so much to learn, peering through that small window, watching the vapor move over the polished hardwood surfaces of the model. There was so much to modify. You shave off every second you can find. This was the first land aircraft to use hydraulically retractable landing gear, and when retracted, it was difficult to even see the seams, so perfect was the fit. We are all moving toward the speed of light.

  For the transcontinental attempt at such we grafted a 925-horsepower Wright Cyclone engine, still being tested for the army, onto a Northrop Gamma, the result being a monstrously powerful beast. Also I realized that by climbing up to eighteen thousand feet I could immerse myself in the westerly jet stream and greatly reduce my flight time. From the moment I took off from Burbank, there was a sublime humming in my bones. I arrived in Newark at 12.42 a.m. I had crossed the continent in nine hours and twenty-seven minutes. Cyclone seemed a barely adequate name for the vehicle of my conquest.

  What I wanted to say was simple: that I liked speed a lot.

  You see, I’ll say, I knew all about the future, Jack. I saw it coming. I rode on it, I crested it, rode in on it. In an ocean the waves have water to ride on, and sound waves fight their way through air. But light is the medium itself! On the RKO logo, there is a tower on top of the planet, emitting pulses of pure information. My dream was to girdle the globe. My dream was the Empire of Light. The RKO tower was knowledge. But scattered all through the transparent air were those invisible packets of information, resplendent, resplendent. I could make everything happen at once. Every morning I was young again.

  And yet now, my old voice whining cheep-cheep-cheep, my wings withered to parchment, I am still here, and there is nothing, nothing at all in the world anymore, that could possibly surprise me.

  Luckily, there is an incredible aerodynamic twinship between the jet and the syringe, a point worth making despite and not because of its obviousness, since in jet and syringe the flow of time is pierced.

  Also I was very much enamored of women. I felt myself courageous in their presence. And sometimes, I simply relaxed.

  FUNDAMENTALS OF OXYGEN

  AT OTHER TIMES it didn’t pay to completely relax, and one did one’s best to fight the drifting snows of sleep. In order to still be here at all. On January 18, 1937, at 3.45 a.m., twenty thousand feet above Arizona, heading east at 330 mph, the oxygen suddenly, inexplicably, cut out. At first I felt no panic. I toggled the switch but to no avail. I noted that my breathing was becoming more rapid, but at exactly the same time I was overcome by the very lovely sensation—a kind of flooding—that everything, all flight, all of the world and the atmosphere around it, was playing itself out exactly as it should and must. And yet a certain sharpness was gripping my forehead. You have a headache, the happy part of me was telling the other part, I forget which part. And yet a deep and pleasant sleepiness was descending. I could see nothing at the edges of my vision. Oh, how beautiful the world is as a circle, I thought. This little world in front of me, these my knees, these my distant hands. This little lit gauge, these beautiful numbers, so significant in their whiteness, so stark, so self-important: what on earth could they mean? But my eyes felt too big for their sockets, and I blinked. I reached for the emergency supply switch. Nothing changed. My mind swooped into slowness, a grand expanse. There were thoughts taking pleasure in their new stately pace. There were planets being born. There were other thoughts, more distant, and more panicked. The fast thoughts were very annoying to the slow thoughts. The fast thoughts said, You are starting to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation. But what I was feeling, in fact, was something very neutral, and clean: I am my own garden; the sun bears down; a single leaf divides the false and true. Then I discovered I could not even raise my hand to my face. Then I discovered I could not even feel my fingers. My legs were also apparently paralyzed. The glow of the control panel seemed to mean something, but beyond that was absolute blackness, a funnel coming at me, not at the speed of light but at 330 mph, which is fast enough in the dark night, with the fuselage vibrating all around you. Bubbles of nitrogen fizzed distantly in my toes, but up here I was wallowing in my own carbon monoxide, a kind of fog of lassitude. I looked across to my notepad, that pencil dangling like a plumbline on its string. The roaring of the engines suddenly seemed unbearably loud, but the rest of my senses were now far away. My mind was split entirely in two. I was gripped with the sweet hopeless feeling that within a few minutes I would doze off to sleep. Just a little nap would surely see me through. And then I knew I was dying.

  Pushing my arms forward from the shoulders, I nosed the plane downwards with all my remaining strength. I needed to get down to where the oxygen was thicker. The danger was I would relax once more and sleep through all that hurtling. It would be a pleasant enough dream of momentum. But I dropped fifteen thousand feet, and gradually my mind returned, at the proper speed, and my body came back together, in this world of broken vessels, and I leveled out the plane from its descent. My heart flared wildly then, and a hot adrenalin burned through my shoulderblades. I held my head, relieved at the simple pleasure of being alarmed. Below me was the Painted Desert, i
nsofar as anything had substance, or even surface, at night, in or from a cockpit. I strained to look upwards, for a glimpse of star or a sliver of moon through clouds. But already it was only distant memory, half-sensed, half-lost: that I had been up there, afloat through the constellations, chewing down hydrogen and argon, gnawing on ether, endlessly unsated, and happy too.

  I HIT THE GROUND RUNNING

  MY NEW YEAR’S resolutions for 1938 were: marry Katharine Hepburn, be the first to fly non-stop around the world, and turn Hughes Aircraft into an aviation giant.

  It had been a very busy couple of decades. Whenever I looked back I couldn’t find the gap that divided events one from the other. I couldn’t decode the punctuation that gave one a sense of the way things unfolded. I couldn’t put a pattern on the screeching onslaught of time. I had gone to school at Fessenden and then Thacher, and Mother and Father had died in rather quick succession. I had married Ella, basically to keep everybody else happy. Have I spoken about her already, Jack? It is not easy, keeping the events in one’s mind. Money married money, like I said. I had fought my relatives and taken control of Hughes Tool, my rightful and eventual inheritance, after all. I had liked the look of the movie game and I’d liked the fine dry heat out west. Los Angeles seemed to me the dawn of everything. I hit the ground running.

  The years had passed. I hit the ground running and eventually ran straight into Katharine Hepburn, whose green eyes sparkled. Then I felt I was not the only person on the planet. Even Los Angeles was growing up. And Katharine, as always, brooked no nonsense. I gave her a little help in obtaining the rights to The Philadelphia Story, not because I expected anything from her but because of the delighted certainty with which she propounded its imminent, or eventual, success, whichever came first. The only thing not in doubt was that she would thrive, and one always felt somehow blessed in the presence of a thriver.