Free Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving Page A

believed in technology and I believed that the automobile industry was still in diapers. Henry Ford was just going into mass-production. If you put ten million more cars on the road, I thought, you’d need gasoline to make them run. You needed crude oil to make gasoline, and you needed the Hughes drill bit to find the crude oil.
    I decided I had to get rid of the rest of the family, and that required a two-pronged assault. It was like a military campaign on two fronts. The first thing I needed was money to fight the war against the family and to pay them off, and so I went to the banks. The president of the Texas Savings Bank, Oscar Cummings, was the man who really swung his weight behind me. He’d been a friend of my father’s, but there was more to it.
    He said to me, ‘Sonny, I’m giving you the money because I like the way you behaved in that Bender Hotel incident. I like the fact that you didn’t whine and snitch and send those men to jail. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I have to admit that one of those crooks was my cousin.’
    I borrowed $400,000 from Texas Savings, pledging my inheritance as collateral.
    That was the first step. The next thing I needed to do was get myself legally declared an adult, as opposed to a minor – and of course my relatives who owned the other 25% of Toolco were adamantly opposedto that happening. They still wanted to run that company. They saw that they would have another two years before I reached the legal age of twenty one, by which time they could… well, I don’t want to accuse them of being thieves, but surely they figured that they could do a hell of a lot better with the company than I could. Their attitude was: what does a snot-nosed nineteen-year-old kid know about business?
    As a matter of fact I didn’t know much at all. At this point, I think, stubbornness and momentum carried me through far more than any reasonable intelligence. But I did know enough to hire a powerful lawyer, Norris Messen, and I went to court against the family. The judge – an old upright Texan who wore a black string tie – was a close friend of Oscar Cummings of the Texas Savings Bank, whose cousin I’d declined to send to jail.
    I won the case. Technically the judge couldn’t declare me an adult, but under a provision of the Texas Civil Code he was able to declare me competent at the age of nineteen to handle the business affairs of Toolco and enter into contractual agreements as though I were legally an adult.
    And that’s exactly what I did. The cousins and other relatives couldn’t control anything with their measly 25%, and they kept squabbling among themselves, which I’d counted on, and finally I made them all a good fair offer for their shares. I wound up paying a total of $355,000 to all of them. That took about six months to negotiate and wrap up, and at the end of that time – still nineteen years old – I became sole owner of Toolco, about which I knew hardly anything.
    If they hadn’t sold out to you, how much would their $355,000 be worth today?
    Probably in the neighborhood of $700 million. But you can’t think that way. Otherwise there would be no such thing as a marketplace. Nobody would sell anything to anyone else. There would be no progress.
    Anyway, now I was sole owner of a thriving company. It finally occurred to me: in my ignorance, and at my age, what was I going to do with it? I hadn’t the slightest idea how to run it.

2
    Howard marries, becomes a multimillionaire, gives up control of Toolco, and decides to make movies.
    SHORTLY AFTER TAKING CONTROL of the Tool Company in 1925, I decided to get married. This was part of my effort to become an adult as quickly as possible.
    My bride was Ella Rice, a member of the famous Rice family of Texas, the people who built the Rice Hotel and founded Rice Institute, now Rice University. I’d spent nearly two years there as a student. I’d known Ella for quite a while, and we bumped into each other at social