Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

I thought, if anything, a man growing old should have some answers. I didn’t have a goddamn one. I hardly knew the questions any more. That was terrible. I knew that lions ate donkeys and I knew that wasn’t enough to know.

With Helga as my tutor, I began to read more difficult books. I started to read Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I tackled the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-gita, and Lao-Tse, and some Zen, and I tried the teachings of Buddha. I was put off by the imprecision of the language, the vague terms that were used, speaking of the Self and the One and the Absolute. These were the sort of terms I couldn’t come to grips with. At the time I put the books away in disgust. I don’t want to be irreligious, but a lot of it seemed crap. I’ve always disliked organized religion, and while this Eastern stuff wasn’t organized, it had all the trappings of the junk the church was pouring down everybody’s gullet day after day. All the churches, not just the Catholics, except that these happened to be Asian religious terms.

A period of time passed while I drove myself crazy with the TWA situation and then the SST scheme. I began to claw my way out of it, and I was still just as restless and dissatisfied and it occurred to me that there might, after all, be something to this Eastern philosophy because so many millions of people had learned from it, and it certainly had a following among intelligent people in the United States and Europe, by people you couldn’t help but respect.

Someone in Japan had done a private survey on Hughes Aircraft, They sent me a copy of it in Japanese, which I had translated. And shortly thereafter, in the late summer of 1970, I was invited to Japan by a consortium of industrialists. I decided to go.

These Japanese industrialists needed a billion or so dollars capital for expansion and it seemed to me like a good opportunity to get into new fields that were beginning to interest me. I was in contact with the Mitsubishi people, Sony, Matsushita, the one or two others in the electronics and television industries out there. They were starting to develop computers. I knew that was the future. I just didn’t know who to trust to build them right.

My business trip to Japan came to nothing, because the government there was, and still is, anti-foreign, and didn’t want to allow foreign capital to come in with any measure of control – and I of course would not invest any significant capital without obtaining a significant measure of control. They should have known that, but, amazingly, they didn’t.

I wanted Helga to come out with me, but she couldn’t. She was having problems with her teenage daughter who had got involved with drugs. She said she’d tried to meet me in Kyoto, or maybe later in India.

I asked her, ‘What makes you think I’m going to India?’

She said, ‘Go to India, Howard. It’s different from anything you know. Go, and you won’t regret it.’

‘But I hate the sight of horrible poverty.’

‘We all do,’ Helga said. ‘Still, it doesn’t hurt to see what you hate. You can always walk away from it.’

I had a little time to wander about Japan. I couldn’t break the habits of a lifetime and I missed several appointments, ducked out, for which some of those grim Japanese bigwigs couldn’t forgive me – I’d made them lose face. I didn’t care. I went down to Kyoto, where they have a shrine, and took a walk in the gardens, watched the deer, sat on the steps of the monastery and looked at the monks in their yellow robes. I found it a beautiful country, but a toy country for a man of my size. None of the beds fit. I had to sleep on the floor on a mat with one of those wooden pillows. It gave me a crook in my neck that took weeks to go away. And I found Tokyo a disgusting city – totally polluted, overcrowded, a cheap, honky-tonk atmosphere. I wanted none of that.

So as soon as the business was over, I left. And I stopped in India on my way home.

Did you make the stop in India because of Helga?

Probably. I’ve never been totally sure. I wired my itinerary to Helga in Europe and asked her to meet me out there. Maybe it was written in the book of life and I had to go.

It certainly had nothing to do with business. In fact I had no specific aim in mind when I went there. I had a few names and addresses that Helga had given me, and I thought that since I was out in that part of the world, I might as well take a look around.

As far as my business associates back in the States were concerned, it was the same old game I had always played, which was that I had vanished, and nobody knew where. I was hiding out somewhere, probably Mexico or France, with some starlet, and that was that. When I went to Cuba to see Ernest, nobody knew I went, and when I went to Zihuatanejo with Helga on those trips, my people were close-mouthed at all times about anything and everything that concerned me.

And so I flew from Tokyo to India. I stayed in New Delhi briefly, but only because the plane landed there. It didn’t interest me. Delhi struck me as just another filthy city with a lot of jerry-built modern buildings.

I went to Calcutta, and quickly left. There was a cholera epidemic, and I found out that this was an annual event. People were dying in the streets. It was hard to tell the dead from the living, mind you – these poor scrawny kids, women and children, living in a patch of gutter, sharing it with their sacred cows. Calcutta disgusted me even more than Tokyo, because there was such an extraordinary contrast between the few rich Indians and the fat tourists and the teeming masses. You can believe me, it took all my courage to walk through the streets. You know how I feel about filth and contamination. This was like plunging in a cesspool.

In that case, why did you do it?

Curiosity overcame my repugnance. They must have thought I was some apparition from outer space, because I walked through those streets wearing white gloves and spraying my throat with a special spray from time to time. I would have worn a surgical mask, but I knew it would have drawn a crowd.

I became a vegetarian during my stay there, too, because I thought there was less chance of getting poisoned from their vegetables than their meat.

After the experience in Calcutta I almost left the country. I said to myself, ‘This country has nothing to offer except a few beautiful temples, poverty, filth, and superstition. I’m not learning anything, I’m just confirming my prejudices.’

But I decided it would be foolish, having come so far, to flee so quickly, and that’s when I took a better look at the addresses Helga had given me. I remembered she had shown me a book about the holy city of Benares, where all the fakirs and babas worshipped by the banks of the Ganges. It had great meaning for the Indians, and it was on my way back to New Delhi. I wanted to please Helga, to show her that I was more broad-minded than she thought I was, and open to new experience. I hired an air-conditioned car and chauffeur and went to Benares – now they call it Varanasi, but then it was Benares. The chauffeur was a student, bright and friendly. He acted as a guide for me.

It’s almost always been my habit to get up pretty early in the morning, so it was no problem for me when he wanted to get down to the river, the Ganges, at five o’clock in the morning, just when the action started.

That’s a sight I’ll never forget. I had read about Benares and it had a certain legendary quality for me, but you never believe that things will be as exotic as they really are. I visited the temples. I saw the burning ghats along the river, where they were cremating the bodies of their dead. The Ganges was just a stream of mud and crap. But it’s holy. Boy, if that’s holy! The people had come down to the river just as soon as the sun was up, before they had to go to work, and they were bathing in this brown soup, this slop, and drinking it.