Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving

Author:Clifford Irving [Irving, Clifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781843582403
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-05-09T14:00:00+00:00

18

Howard buys RKO Pictures, joins the Communist witch-hunt, has lunch with Senator Richard Nixon, and offends a powerful woman.

I DECIDED TO go back into the movie business. I had some new ideas. I had learned that if you do something well and then stay away from it for many years – provided that you work on something else during those years of absence – you can go back to the original work and find that the accumulated experience of the intervening time is a tremendous plus. You don’t pick up where you left off. You pick up far ahead of where you left off. Your mental muscles are tougher and the problems that might have given you headaches ten or twenty years previously are problems that you can often solve, after all those years, with a snap of the fingers.

This time I wanted to go into the movie business on a large scale. I had the money, I felt I had the know-how. All I needed was the venue. It wasn’t a true creative urge and it wasn’t a calculated business decision. It was simpler than that. I liked making movies. It was a business I already knew well, and it was a business that I thought, if I got hold of the right people, could run itself.

I looked around. I had done some business previously with Floyd Odlum, who was the head of the Atlas Corporation, which had the controlling interest in RKO. Floyd had turned out a number of films that made a lot of money, but he was ready to get rid of RKO by then, partly because he had slow years in 1946 and ’47. I thought the big years were still to come.

I guess I hadn’t learned as much as I thought, because that goddamn company gave me nothing but headaches. RKO was a peanut-sized business compared to Toolco, compared to Hughes Aircraft and TWA, but it wasn’t as anonymous, at the time, as those other companies, and I wanted to put my own stamp on it, run it my own way. In 1948 I bought Odlum’s controlling interest in RKO for about $10 million, and got into trouble right away with the people in there who were running the show. We didn’t see eye to eye. The weight of the money counts, and out they went.

Peter Rathvon had been president of the company under Odlum, and I kept him on for a while. Dore Schary was head of production. Schary, of course, was an enormously talented and experienced man. He was a little too radical for my tastes, but I wasn’t running a political party, I was running a movie business, so I explained to him he could pretty much make the kind of films he wanted to. He was a shrewd man, because one of the first things he told me was that a man in my position, as rich as I was, who had bought a film studio and had previous film

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