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In Hollywood last week, Howard Robard Hughes was throwing his weight around at RKO. The more literate observers were reminded of that memorable scene in Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, when a huge cannon breaks loose on the gun deck of a ship in a rough sea.
Dore Schary, RKO's earnest, gifted executive vice president in charge of production, was out (TIME, July 12). Like a thousand bumblebees in a clover field, the buzz of Hollywood speculation hung on the question of who would succeed Schary. Secretive Howard Hughes would not say. "It will be," he said, "someone you least suspect, a shocker."
Said Hughes: "My life is not exactly going to be dull for the next two years. I'm really cooking at RKO and things are going to pop. I'll make news for you. The only thing that could stop me would be my death—and even that would be a story."
Hollywood had known something of the meteoric Howard Hughes story for two decades. He had always been an independent—a lone wolf, unpredictable and exasperatingly successful most of the time. Now he had stepped into control of a top studio. After trying (characteristically) to get the stock for two points less than the market, he had paid Atlas Corp.'s Floyd B. Odium a whacking $8,825,690 for 929,020 shares.
What did Hughes, the lone wolf, want with RKO? He takes great pains to hide his motives; but no doubt one motive was his hankering for theater outlets controlled by himself. RKO owns 124 theaters. Hughes has had great trouble distributing The Outlaw—that long and vigorously publicized mixture of sex, slapstick and violence—mainly because of censorship, but partly because independent exhibitors were simply afraid of it. To date, it has played only about 40% of its original contracts. In the face of derisive snorts from highbrow critics, Hughes firmly believes that, if distribution obstacles can be overcome, The Outlaw will bring in one of the fattest yields of all time. He may be right. Hollywood has learned not to sell Howard Hughes short.
166 Cutting Edges. What manner of man is this Howard Hughes—this tall, gangling, aging, sick-looking man of 42 whose life and eccentricities have built a lurid legend?
In his ancestry, there was plenty of force, vitality, toughness, love of action. His mother was descended from a doughty line of French Huguenots; one of them was a rifle-shooting chaplain with George Washington's army. Another was a hell-for-leather cavalryman in the Civil War.
By the time Howard Hughes's mother, Allene Gano, was born, the family was established in the top drawer of Texas aristocracy.
Howard's father, Howard Robard Hughes Sr., was not exactly a nobody, although he came from a place the Ganos had never heard of—Keokuk, Iowa. Son of a Harvard-bred lawyer, he was expelled from several schools, but got through Harvard and hung out his shingle in Joplin, Mo. The lure of oil drew him to Texas. He made a small stake, bought a long Peerless car, met Allene Gano, married her in 1904.