Free Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving

went into a waiting period, during which I began to make a fool of myself in almost every way possible. I wanted to stand in my father’s shoes, wanted people to think that I was a chip off the old block. I got my hands on a lump of money, cash that my father had kept around the house for emergencies – a considerable sum of more than twenty-five thousand dollars.
    I carried the cash around with me in a briefcase. I spent some of it in a showy way, shopping at Levy’s and Kiam’s in downtown Houston, and then one day I bumped into this oilman, a wildcatter named Shepard who had done business with my father. I’d seen them together on several occasions – my father had a little place near Galveston where he and his friends used to go fishing on weekends. Shepard was an old roughneck who’d struck it rich a couple of times and then blown it on dry holes. He had one of those Southern faces, with the cross-hatched neck and the red leathery cheeks with the veins showing, and a certain blue-eyed brutal quality.
    Shepard invited me up to a room in the Bender Hotel for a crapgame. A few of the other men had also been friends of my father’s, but I should have spotted them for what they were. It was certainly no friendly game. If I knew it at that time I wouldn’t own up to it, and they hit me for better than twenty thousand dollars.
    I had a cramp in my gut when I left that hotel, and I had to stop dead in my tracks when I got outside the room. I doubled over, held myself around the middle until the knot went away and I could limp out of the lobby. I’ve talked to people in Las Vegas since: Nick the Greek and other professionals have shown me how a man with a slick pair of hands can do anything with dice or cards and you’d never see it. There’s a certain poetry of motion there, but I wasn’t feeling very poetic with twenty thousand bucks down the drain.
    These men went on operating in Houston, and a couple of weeks later some other loser complained, and they were taken to court. One of them confessed, or had it beaten out of him, that they’d also taken twenty grand from me with a rigged deck.
    I was called into court to testify. It didn’t take me five minutes to decide that no man who called himself a Texan would snitch on even outright thieves like these. Besides, they’d been my father’s friends.
    I told the judge, ‘No, sir, Your Honor, it was a straight game, and I don’t remember how much I lost but it wasn’t anywhere near twenty thousand dollars.’
    The other losers had been bought off, and my testimony allowed these men to go free.
    My friend Dudley Sharp – he was my father’s partner’s son, and we used to pal around together – told me I’d made a mistake. ‘These men should have been jailed or run out of the state.’ And some other people even accused me of cowardice.
    Soon it became time to deal with my inheritance and how the Tool Company was going to be divided and run now that my father wasn’t at the helm. As I said, I was the heir to 75% of it, if I could get over the problem of being under twenty-one. I tried to think what my father would have done, because that’s what I wanted to do.
    He had always said to me, ‘Don’t have partners, son, they’re nothing but trouble.’
    That made things clear, and I decided to try and buy out the rest of the Hughes family – various cousins and uncles who owned the other 25% – and gain total control. A rough estimate was made of the company’s worth and it came to something under nine hundred thousand dollars.
    But the first thing that happened was that the rest of the family challenged that figure, said it was far too low, and it looked like the thing could drag on forever once the accountants and the lawyers got their noses into it. By the time they’d gone through litigation the fees would have made us all poor.
    I thought things over. I may have been a nineteen-year-old kid but I was able to look ahead into the future. In 1925 I