Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving

night there with these two girls in a little shack. Kind of crowded, just one room with the four of us. An odd experience for me. I’d never gone in for orgies. It made me feel kind of funny, the four of us in one room. And we each had our own girl, and then we switched the girls.
    I really don’t want to talk about this incident anymore. I’m sorry I brought it up. The details of sex are either vulgar, boring or repetitious.
    L et’s talk about the air crashes that took place during the making of Hell’s Angels.
    Three men were killed. Al Johnson was first, and then Clem Phillips. The third man wasn’t a pilot, he was a mechanic named Phil Jones. He was in that Gotha that Frank and I flew. Frank didn’t want to fly it that day – he probably had a hangover. So there was another pilot, Al Wilson, who went up with Jones, and they were running smoke pots to simulate a burning plane. They were supposed to go into a spin, bail out, and let the plane crash. Wilson bailed out at a thousand feet, but for some reason the mechanic didn’t. I was flying above them in a scout plane. I landed in the field next to the crash and tried to pull Jones out of the wreck. But there wasn’t much left of him. And he could never tell us why he didn’t bail out.
    Those were the only deaths, but not the only crashes. The pilots themselves were calling it ‘The Suicide Club.’ I suppose the funniest crash, if you can call it funny when you’re facing death that way, was when Al Wilson bailed out over Hollywood. He was in a Fokker coming back to the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles was socked in with fog and he decided he was over the mountains to the north but he had no idea which way to go. He was scared to ease her down, so he bailed out. He didn’t know it, but he was right over Hollywood Boulevard, and the Fokker cracked up the backyard of a producer named Joe Schenk. Schenk and his wife, Norma Talmadge, the famous actress, were there, and some other people, and they had a hell of a scare because a plane doesn’t hit the ground like a creampuff.
    The propeller hit Hollywood Boulevard and nearly took some woman’s head off. That was good publicity in one way and not so good in another. We had a fair amount of complaints. Al Wilson himself landed on some guy’s roof. He was a lucky son of a bitch, more than once.
    A few years later, around 1931, I made another picture about flying. That was Sky Devil , with Spencer Tracy and William Boyd. We started looking for the guys who had flown in Hell’s Angels , and it turned out that eight or nine of them were dead. That’s not including the ones who were killed when we were shooting the picture. They’d all crackedup in just those few years. Lyn Hayes was dead, piled into a mountain somewhere. Ross Cook was dead, and Mory Johnson, Burt Lane, five or six others. All killed flying. It was a dangerous profession in those days – still is, only now you have to watch out for Arabs and hand grenades. But when I heard about this, I was very shaken up.
    But it didn’t make you stop flying?
    Nothing could have done that.
    Did you think you had a charmed life?
    I didn’t even think about it. I just kept flying. You read in the newspapers every day that thousands of people are killed in car accidents, but you don’t say to yourself, ‘I’ve got a charmed life, I’ll keep driving.’ You just keep driving because you need to get somewhere in your car. I needed to get somewhere in my plane. And I loved to fly. It was simple. Also, remember – I was young. A kid. I had many millions of dollars, but I was still a kid. If I was going to stop risking my life I would have stopped after I’d cracked up three or four times myself, but I didn’t. That never occurred to me.
    I had one scene in Hell’s Angels where the Germans are forced by their commander to jump from their Zeppelin. The Zeppelin is being overtaken by the Allied planes, and in order to lighten the load the men have to jump. Being