“Howard Hughes was kindness itself to Mama when she was dying. I nearly killed the ****er once but he was marvelous to Mama when she was dying,” she said. “All her life she had to roll with the punches. I got my survival instincts from her. But Howard got her the best palliative care money could buy. I could never have afforded the things he did for her. He sent two specialists from New York. Another from L.A. When I think of Howard Hughes now, I think of his kindnesses to Mama, his sweetness, not the fights we had.”
Howard Hughes was the first thing to come around after Mick. He came around about five minutes after I filed for divorce, as a matter of fact.”
“Did you know him?” I said.
“I knew of him, of course. He was one of the most famous men in America. But I’d never met him.”
“He called you out of the blue?”

“Yes and no,” she said.
“What does that mean, Ava?” Pinning her down could often be a struggle.
“Nothing was ever an accident with Howard,” she said. “He had people meeting every plane, train, and bus that arrived in Los Angeles with a pretty girl on board. He had to be the first to grab the new girl in town. It was a matter of pride for him. When he read the story of my divorce in the papers—it was all over the papers, on the radio; Mickey’s name made it headlines, not mine—Howard decided I was the new girl on the loose.”
“On the phone, I thought he’d said his name was ‘Howard Hawks.’ That was another thing about Howard Hughes: he mumbled a lot.

Howard Hughes was very charming. He must have been because I invited him around for a drink—I had a little place on Franklin Avenue. That was where I still occasionally entertained Mickey after we split.
“With hindsight, I should never have gotten involved with Howard. He could be damn nice but he was seventeen years older than I was. He was a low-key guy sexually. He was a real slow-burner romantically. Well, after Mick he was. Mick and I were still kids. You have to remember, I was eighteen when I met Mick, nineteen when I married him, and twenty when we split. With us, everything was fun and games—and fast. It was always Party Time.
“Howard could sometimes be heavy-going, except when he talked about planes. His passion was flying—he was always trying to break some airspeed record or other—and women, of course. He was passionate about them.

He always liked to have a few on the go at the same time. He had them stashed all over town. Lana Turner told me he was once engaged to her and Linda Darnell at the same time. She thought it was hilarious, but I couldn’t have put up with that shit.
“He was filthy rich, of course. He inherited a fortune from his Daddy. Daddy owned the Hughes Tool Company in Houston.

When Daddy died, Howard got the lot, the whole kit and caboodle. I think he was twenty, twenty-one when his father passed. ‘That’s when I realized that women found me attractive,’ he once said to me. I still haven’t figured out whether he was that naive about women! I don’t think he was being funny
“Anyway, he always had plenty of women to console him. Lana, she did a good job for a while; she really expected to marry him. Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers. Jean Peters—he married her. Kate Hepburn. Linda Darnell. Oh, my God, he had so many women. Jean Harlow, Jane Russell. They were all beauties, too. Kate Hepburn wasn’t a great beauty but I’m told she could turn guys on. Kate’s what now? She must be at least eighty?”
“About that,” I said. “Apart from Howard’s wealth, was he attractive?” I didn’t want to be sidetracked.

She thought about that for a while before answering.
“He was a skinny guy, not bad-looking, tall, well over six feet, maybe six-foot-four. He reminded me a lot of Daddy,” she said slowly. “He had a kind of remoteness about him like Daddy had, and that’s always attractive in a man. He was partially deaf, of course. That may have accounted for the longueurs in his conversation, and probably explained his shyness, too. Anyway, he never talked much. He was no raconteur; I called him the Quiet Texan.
“I’m talking about a time before he became that crazy basket case holed up in a Las Vegas hotel surrounded by ****ing Mormons, and as mad as a hatter. I never knew that Howard Hughes, thank Christ. That Howard made me sad. I’m pleased I never met him.

“When I first knew him, he’d made Hell’s Angels, a helluva picture about pilots in World War I. It was the blockbuster of its day. I bet it still stands up. He was a pilot himself; he had an obsession with flying; he was what they’d now call an ‘action hero.’ He was badly injured showing the stuntmen on Hell’s Angels how it should be done. I think quite a few pilots died on that picture, too. He was a demanding sonofabitch. But he had plenty of guts, you have to give him that.
“A couple of months after we started stepping out together, he was in a serious plane crash in Nevada. I’d flown to Las Vegas with him and some of his people. He was going to pick up an amphibious aircraft he’d designed to put it through its water trials. He dropped me off in Las Vegas and went on to Lake Mead, where the plane crashed, killing a couple of the engineers on board.

“Howard was badly injured. He called me from the hospital to tell me what had happened. ‘I want you to know I just killed a couple of my guys,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry kid, I’m going to be okay.’
“I read that he grew a mustache while recovering from the burns—he said the burns on his face made shaving too painful. That was probably the truth of it, but he told me he grew it because I was a fan of Clark Gable, and Clark had a ’stache! I’m sure that was a load of applesauce, but it did make me laugh, and old Howard didn’t do that too often.”
She stopped and smiled at me. “What else can I tell you?”
“I don’t know? What else can you tell me?” I said. It had been a good session and she was looking tired. I didn’t want to push her. I was happy to wrap it up for the night.

“We shared the same birthday: December 24. We were both Christmas Eve Capricorns,” she said.
“Apart from that, we didn’t have much in common. I was a good dancer, he was bloody awful. I don’t know why he always insisted on dancing with me. I dreaded it. In fact, apart from Mick, who wasn’t bad but a bit lacking in the height department, none of my husbands was any good on the dance floor. Frank and Artie both had two left feet.
“What else? He was born rich. I wasn’t. He was a WASP. I definitely was not. He was a racist. You know I’m not. When I told him that my closest childhood friend, Virginia, was black, he didn’t call me for about six weeks. I think he was sulking! He could be a sulky bastard. I didn’t give a damn. Fuck him! He wouldn’t employ blacks in his aircraft plants? Fuck him! Fuck all bigots.”
She lifted her glass in a toast to scorning bigots.

“The amazing thing is, Howard was in my life, on and off, for more than twenty years but I never loved him. I don’t think he ever really loved me, although he was a dogged sonofabitch.
He wanted me to marry him so much. He was driving me crazy. I thought, Shit, I’ll marry the man and be done with it. I mean it was not a bad move marrying Howard Hughes, the richest man on the planet. I was still waiting for my California divorce from Mickey to come through. That was going to take a year, I reckoned.

“Howard didn’t want to wait that long. He wanted me to go to Nevada to get a divorce. I went up to see Louis Mayer—I was still a good little MGM starlet—and told him I wanted a quickie divorce. It was no skin off his nose. But he was still in his Catholic phase and gave me another stern lecture on marriage being sacrosanct. ‘Wait the year, show some respect to Mickey!’ he said.
“Anyway, we never did tie the knot. He stayed loyal and generous. He was always keen. But I eventually drifted out of the marriage zone, I guess “It’s a pity—we might have had such a damned good time together,” .

"Howard Hughes never cared much about what he wore, or what he looked like. Maybe on our first dates he did—or sometimes when he had to be presentable he would make an effort—but he went downhill pretty fast after that. He was never really aware of his personal hygiene even then, and I’m told it got worse. He definitely got crazier, that’s for sure.”
“Howard wouldn’t piss on a black man to put him out if he was on fire. That’s a fact, nothing I say can change it, and if I’m going to remember things as they really were, I have to face it. I told you about the doctors Howard flew to Mama’s bedside when she was dying, didn’t I?”
I said she had.
“Anything Ava wanted,” she said, “Ava got. Anything.”
“You should have married him,” I said.

“Marry Howard Hughes? Jesus Christ! Are you kidding me?” I nearly whacked the bastard.”
“Whoa, you nearly killed Howard Hughes?”
“I hit him with an ashtray. I think it was onyx. Anyway, it was heavy. I practically had him laid out on a slab. We fought all the time but I nearly put a lily in his hand that night.”
The memory of it made her laugh until it became a cough. She said she’d tell me the story later. It was worth a whole chapter, she said. “It’s funny now but Louis Mayer nearly had kittens when he heard about it. He was convinced I’d killed the guy.”
“Tell me more about The Barefoot Contessa,” I said.
“It could have been called Howard and Ava, it was so ****ing obvious. But Joe swore till he was blue in the face that it was based on Rita’s life. Howard was a friend of his—most of those guys stuck together like shit—but he was on to him like a ****ing tiger once he’d read the script. I didn’t give Howard the script, but I know that Howard got it from Johnny Meyer, although Johnny denied it,”

"Howard had a weakness for newly divorced women. He’d moved in on Kate Hepburn immediately after her divorce from Luddy Smith, he pursued Lana Turner straight after she split with Artie. I’m sure there were plenty of others. We had been seeing each other on a regular basis since he read in the newspapers that I had started divorce proceedings against Mickey. “Wet decks,” Johnny Meyer called us, God knows why, although knowing Johnny, I’m sure it had some sexual, if not downright dirty, connotation.
Howard’s appeal was the opposite of Mickey’s. He was an older man and he was infinitely more serious and smarter and sophisticated than anyone else I’d dated up to then. He was richer, too, of course.