Free Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving Page B

events in the Houston of that era. I don’t know if I was in love with her or not. I thought I was, but what does a nineteen-year-old kid know about love? He knows what a hard-on is, that’s all, and he figures if he gets a hard-on quickly and often enough, he’s in love. He’s more to be pitied than scorned, like the poet says.
    Ella was twenty-one. She reminded me of my mother quite a lot – she was slim, curly-haired, soft-voiced, and she had quiet hazel eyes – and it was a socially correct marriage. Most of those people in Houston didn’t have a dime to their names before they struck it rich, but then they wanted to scrape off the mud and spray themselves with French perfume and pretend there was a society and they were part of it. When I was a kid, when things were going well for my father, before he’d blow it on a trip East or run up more bills than he could pay, my mother used to drag me off to concerts. Even though those cowboys and their womenfolk didn’t know Bach from Verdi, they organized concerts and I got hauled along. You could die of heatstroke in the concert hall, but you were obliged to show yourself off to the gentry. Iremember my mother took me once to Prince’s Theatre – not a concert that time, but Shakespeare’s As You Like It – and she fainted from the heat. We had to carry her out of there.
    Despite my intelligence and craftiness in getting control of Toolco, I was still a crazy kid. Getting married at the age of twenty is certainly proof of it. I wooed Ella, convinced her that we’d be together for the rest of our lives, and chemistry did the rest.
    Ella and her parents wanted to know where we’d live. They meant what part of Houston.
    I said, ‘Hollywood, California.’
    That upset everyone. Why did I want to go off to California?
    I explained that I wanted to go into the movie business.
    ‘And do what?’
    ‘Make my own movies,’ I said.
    That shocked everyone. I’d been nurturing this ambition in secret for many years, ever since I’d first gone out to Hollywood with my father and my Uncle Rupert had taken me to MGM and the other studios. At a deeper level, where did it come from? Who knows? It just seemed to me an exciting thing to do. And I had the money to do it.
    I didn’t dare tell Ella and her parents about my other ambition, which was to fly fast planes. I kept that one to myself.
    Money conquers all. I was determined, I didn’t seem to have anything of the crackpot in my makeup, and I had the wherewithal to fulfill my fantasies. That’s a hard combination to beat. Ella and the Rices said, ‘Well, all right… let’s see what happens. Maybe it’s something he has to get out of his system.’
    So we got married in Houston on June 1, 1924, a garden wedding at my in-laws’ house, and we went off on a honeymoon to New York City. I spent most of the time going to the movies, with or without Ella. I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good husband even then. I had the movie bug and that was all I thought about. When we came back to Houston, almost immediately I said, ‘Let’s not wait any longer. Let’s go to Hollywood.’
    But first I had to put my financial house in order. It was 1926, and I had a growing, prosperous company on my hands and little or noknowledge of how to run it. If I wanted to indulge my two ambitions, Toolco had to do well – better than well.
    Norris Messen, my lawyer, advised me. Right there in the higher echelons of the company I found two experienced oilmen, Ray Holliday and Monty Montrose, and I put them in charge of operations under Colonel Rudolph Kuldell, who was president and general manager, although he really didn’t know that much about the business. He was just a crony of my father’s with good government connections.
    A lot of people have told tales in the past years that Holliday and Montrose and Colonel Kuldell wanted me out of there and paid me to keep my hands off Toolco because they thought I’d wreck it. Sonny, or