Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

These sketches and the model went well beyond what my father and Sharp had been contemplating. My father never hesitated. He bought everything from Humason for $150 cash that he hauled out of his money belt and slapped down on the bar. Humason signed a receipt which meant that the designs were the property of my father and Wally Sharp.

Did Humason become their partner?

No, Humason was naive, or a fool – it comes to the same thing. He let them buy him out completely, and three weeks later my father filed the patents, and with the first tool bit he went back to Goose Creek and brought in the well he couldn’t bring in before. Then he went back to Pierce Junction and did the same thing. He improved the drill and patented all the improvements a hundred different ways, and later he invented a gate valve and a disc bit for gumbo shale. He offered that bit to the government in 1917 for boring between trenches, but the damn fools turned it down.

He used to deliver the drill bits wrapped in burlap or newspaper, because his patents weren’t secure yet. The rigs were deserted when he got to them. None of those roughnecks were allowed to work on them until the bit was down in the hole and out of sight. He made most of his money leasing the drill bits, and he said to me, ‘Sonny, this drill bit is your bread and butter money. Don’t ever do anything to jeopardize it.’ And I never did. That became a religion for me.

I take it that your father had a great bearing on your life.

Most fathers do, although most men can’t admit it. He was born in Missouri, but he spent his youth in Keokuk, Iowa. As a kid he was thrown out of half a dozen schools. There was a particular way he wanted to do things, and it didn’t always match up with the way the people who ran those schools thought things should be done. Nevertheless, he got into Harvard, and graduated, and became a lawyer before he became a gambler and a wildcatter. He practiced law for a while, but he once told me he never finished law school, he bought the degree. He went into lead mines too, in Joplin, and he was hunting for silver in Mexico at one time; he was a telegraph operator and then a reporter in Denver. A jack of all trades, and if you discount his losses at the gambling tables, a better businessman than I am.

My father wanted money, and he got it. He wanted a fine home and he got that. And after my mother died, he wanted high living and he got that too, until the day he dropped dead. I was close to him when I was very young, before he invented the cone bit, but after that he was too busy for me, and I became a lonely kid.

My mother was from Kentucky. Her maiden name was Allene Gano, and she was the daughter of a judge. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, against all odds and the doctor’s warnings, she got pregnant again. She began to miscarry in the fifth month, and they rushed her to the hospital. In those days the conditions were far from antiseptic. They were close to criminal. The hospital covered it up and never let out any of the details. I think the doctors cut an artery by mistake, but I’ve never satisfied myself as to the exact circumstances. All I know is that she died on the operating table of a hemorrhage. I was seventeen.

Before that, when the tool company was founded and money began to flow in, my mother joined the Harmonic Society and the Houston Heights Literary Club, but my father wouldn’t have any part of that.

‘Won’t you join, Howard?’ she asked him. ‘It will enrich your life.’

‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘I’m rich already.’

She tried to get him to dress well. By then he bought his clothes in New York, and he was always stylish, but it wasn’t her idea of what a gentleman wore: it was too modern. He wore a fob and not a watch chain, and she thought that wasn’t dignified. He wore a straw hat in April, and my mother said, ‘Howard, you know you’re not supposed to wear a straw hat until the first of June!’

He had a white linen golfing coat and it reduced her to tears when he wore it. She’d bought him a striped flannel coat, which she considered correct for a Texas gentleman. But he said, ‘Flannel is too goddamn hot.’

She was always fussing over me. You couldn’t eat gingerbread because you got worms, and meat had to be cooked until it was practically shoe-leather or you could catch hoof-and-mouth disease, which drove my father up the wall because he liked his beef blood-rare. Buffalo Bayou overflowed one year and my mother said, ‘We can’t eat fish now. When the water flowed back into the bayou it brought dirt.’ And no pork ever, because she’d had a cousin in Kentucky who died of trichinosis.

Once she caught me eating cornbread and she stuck a wooden spoon down my throat to make me vomit it up. She believed you got leprosy from eating cornbread – some quack had said that, and my poor mother believed him. She wanted to rush to me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. My father yelled, ‘Leave that boy alone! You’ll make him crazy!’

Mama was not a Texan; she was Southern gentility with a touch of Eastern attitudes tempered by French Huguenot blood. She didn’t like frontier ways, and Houston was still in many ways a frontier oil city. I resented certain things about her – particularly her concern for me. When I was seven or eight years old we moved to a new neighborhood. The first few days we were there I spent most of the time in the garage, tinkering with a radio.

My mother said, ‘Sonny, why aren’t you out playing with the other boys?’

I said, ‘I’d rather be here, Mama.’

The truth is that I didn’t know the kids in that neighborhood, and I was uncertain of myself and didn’t want to go out and meet them.

One day Mama walked into the garage and said, ‘Come with me.’

I went, and there on the sidewalk were three boys from the neighborhood. She had seen them nearby, playing Cowboys and Indians. She announced to these boys, ‘This is my son Howard and he’d like to play with you.’

It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my childhood. I played with them for a little while. My mother was watching from the parlor window. Finally I just ran back into the house.

It was a long time before I forgave her for that. She was a sensitive woman in many ways, but she was so overprotective that I think of her as a Texas version of the proverbial Jewish mother. If she had lived longer I could imagine her saying, ‘Help! My son Howard the billionaire is drowning.’ And she would have been right, because in later years – from the age of thirty-five to sixty – I was drowning. Drowning in what had always been the breath of life to me. Drowning in money and power.

I was called ‘Sissy’ by the kids at Christchurch, which was a Houston school I went to, run by a Miss Eichler, a prim and proper lady. I didn’t curse, I’d run away rather than fight, and I played the saxophone, which was not the usual hobby for a kid living in Houston in 1920. In my mid-teens I had a collection of saxophones that I kept in a beautiful box of circassian walnut. I had six or seven of them – a beautiful little soprano sax, a baritone, a few tenors, even a basso profundo.

Another reason I wasn’t very popular is that I had a serious hearing problem. I had measles when I was small, and that’s what started it. By the time I went to Miss Eichler’s, I couldn’t hear properly. In those days they may have had hearing aids, but my father would never have let me wear one because he didn’t want to know I couldn’t hear properly: that didn’t fit his image of his only son. People used to say I was a shy boy, but a lot of that shyness came from the fact that I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Then later, in 1936, I had a bad dive in a Northrop Gamma, the plane I used to break the transcontinental speed record, and it aggravated my condition. Six or seven airplane crashes over the years didn’t help.