The Original, page 29
“This flight is something I have to do,” Howard says.
“It’s dangerous,” Randolph says. “But you know that. What if you fall asleep and go slap bang into a mountain?”
“If I crash into a mountain, it will make more noise than ‘slap bang.’ ”
“Cary, say something,” Randolph says. But Howard and Randolph know that Cary goes long periods these days without saying anything. More animated than ever onscreen, Randolph says Cary has adopted a deep quiet at home. Randolph has told Howard that sometimes he goes to watch Cary on set, just to hear him talk. Cary has told Howard that he wishes Randolph could understand that it is nothing to do with him, or with them, that for now, he just needs to be home and still when he is not out there being Cary Grant, but Randolph has parents and so can’t understand.
* * *
—
Later, when Cary is in the kitchen, Howard tries to explain to Randolph.
“Cary has a parent,” Randolph says. “He lost his father but regained his mother. Why would that not make him happy?”
“No. Cary lost twenty years with one parent because the other took her away.”
* * *
• • •
He will change the route. After months of planning, Howard decides he’ll begin and end his round the world flight in New York and not Los Angeles. It will mean hauling the equipment and the ground crew and the spare crew to the other coast and putting them all up while they test engines and the weight. Ode will not like it. He thinks the sky in New York is too cluttered to enjoy flying. Noah is worried about the cost. Howard is resolute. The thing has to begin and end in New York.
It is where Kate will be.
Los Angeles
July 1938
It’s a cheap shot. She doesn’t even have a new film out. It is not a particular performance, it is just her. Garbo and Crawford, fine. They can take it. They are powerful old hands and their careers have weathered worse. Even if they never make another picture, the world will not forget Garbo and Crawford. They know how to keep away and wait it out until they’re beloved again. But Kate Hepburn? Seems cruel. The Independent Theatre Owners Association meant to wound when they took out a full page in The Hollywood Reporter to tell the world that Kate Hepburn is box office poison.
Kate
Hancock Park
Kate reads it alone. He leaves her sitting on the sofa in her study, legs tucked under her. Howard understands that she needs to read it the first time in private. On another day, she would love that he understands that about her. Today, she is reading the article. Howard did his best to warn her about what it says before he left for the airfield, but nothing can prepare her for seeing her name, despised in tall, black letters. Despised by people she has never met.
She can hear the telephone ringing. It has been ringing all afternoon, but Kate is still reading the article.
Joanna sticks her head into Kate’s study.
“Myron, again,” Joanna mouths.
Kate shakes her head no.
Myron, Irene, Cary, Laura, her mother, Luddy, George. No. Kate does not want to speak to anyone.
She is never going to leave this sofa. Waiting for them to take her back will never work. She has to do something.
Buy low. Sell high.
Kate stands, stretches her legs and then goes to call Myron. She is going to get out of this town.
* * *
• • •
She goes to see Cary on his day off. He is the only one she knows who has done it. Randolph opens the door and takes her down to the pool. Cary is sitting up on a yellow sun lounger, his script for Gunga Din open in front of him. The pages are covered in Cary’s penciled notes.
“I thought you were off book with that script?” Kate says, dropping into the chair beside him. Kate knows Cary has been preparing for this film for months.
“I switched parts. Have to start all over.” He leans across to kiss her cheek.
“Switched parts? With whom?”
“Doug Fairbanks. Now I’m playing Cutter and he gets to marry Joan Fontaine onscreen.”
“Yep. They tossed a coin for it,” Randolph says, pouring lemonade for Kate. “Now, Cary is the lead.”
“The director agreed?”
“The director suggested the coin toss,” Cary says. “Last resort, I would have walked.”
“No contract. No studio. No agent.”
“No contract, no studio, no agent,” Cary says, understanding her right away. “He had to negotiate with me.”
* * *
• • •
When Kate tells Myron she wants to buy herself out of her studio contract, he begins speaking of their relationship in the past tense. As if she is buying herself out of his representation as well, but she isn’t ready to make that leap. Cary says life is easier once you are a free agent. But Cary is wanted. An unwanted free agent is just an outsider.
She will go home. Howard even says he’ll fly her there if she likes. Irene has been talking about New York lately and it has made Kate hungry for her house. She tells George she is going. Not right away, but soon. George wants her to find a script. She has no idea how to do that. Where to look. She will go to New York and watch plays. Actors acting right in front of you, no safety net, no second take, no drops in the eyes to fake the tears. Stage acting is the real thing. Kate only wants to be near real things.
She will hole up in her beautiful city house and figure this thing out. She can’t think in this low, flat town where she is not wanted anymore.
Howard
Hancock Park
What did Randolph say? “So she will go to bed with you?” He would break the record for flying around the globe if it meant she would go to bed with him, and it would be worth it, but thank god, he doesn’t have to. Bed is the only place the press can’t get at them, which is fine as bed is where they like to be anyway. Even when nights go by and nothing much happens there, they are still bound by that frontier spirit of adventure when they lie down together. Together is where he is happy; it is where he wants to be.
At first, he moved the date up to distract Kate from the national opening for Holiday. Now, it is to fix something else. When the Independent Theatre Owners Association take out a full-page advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter and call the woman you love box office poison, it’s time to change the national conversation.
* * *
• • •
“Are you moving it up so they will stop writing about me?” Kate asks.
“Beating the World Record for flying around the world just to change the subject?” Howard says. “Who would do that?”
“You. You would do that. You darling crazy man.”
“It will work, and if not, we’ll think of something else,” he says, kissing her.
He doesn’t notice that she does not answer.
* * *
—
Yes. He would do that. And he will do that. It is not only to stop the press from tearing into her; it’s also just to do something. Move the air, the rumors, the story. When he comes back from the airfield, she is angled over a notebook, writing something. She does not want to talk about how to fix the problem. He can’t be still and do nothing. He has to break the siege. If it will make her think about something else, even if the something else is whether or not he will fall asleep, or run out of oxygen, or if his engine will fail or he will get pulled down by the g-force. Whatever will make her forget these small people and want to live forever in this house, with him, he will do it.
He understands why she takes it hard. She was let down by the people who promised to protect her and back her, always. None of the others on the list are taking it as badly. Garbo shrugged it off and Joan Crawford was just offered a huge loan-out by MGM. But not Kate. Bringing Up Baby flopped when it should have hit and Holiday is smash material, but the studio has already decided to pull it from most theaters in the South and the Midwest. These pictures are good—really good. Howard can see it. The studios can see it. But, Kate can’t.
* * *
• • •
The timing is not perfect but it can be done. He will make it work. She is scheduled to go back to New York mid-month and his flight is now scheduled for the end of July. Noah and Ode just confirmed with the airfields. Ideally, Howard would have done more test flights and met with the ground crews before announcing, but there is no time. Kate is booked onto The Super Chief and he wants to be there when she arrives. He has offered to fly her but she says she is taking too much luggage. Howard has to fly the navigator and engineer, so it saves him a trip, but he would have done it for her. He would have even reinstalled the seats he’d just removed if it would make her more comfortable.
Howard understands packing heavily for a trip; he likes his own things when he travels.
Part Ten
Someone Else
Kate
New York City
July 1938
He’s done it. Howard and his four-man crew, in a Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra. The radio reported that there were some dicey moments but Howard Hughes never lost confidence. What does the radio man know? Howard has just touched down. He told her once that one day, he would die in a plane. “But not this plane,” he said when he left her New York brownstone four days ago. The radio man says the ticker tape parade will start before Howard has even left the airfield. Too many people are gathered on the streets already. The police don’t want to wait. The radio man doesn’t know where Mr. Hughes is going but he’s sure that he will arrive at the parade soon.
Kate knows where he’s going. He called her from the airfield and is on his way to her, in a car Noah rented. A car that looks like all the other cars. Howard said that first, before he showers or sleeps, he wants to come here, to her brownstone. She is touched that to see her, he will be late for his own parade.
She knows he designed his arrival back in New York to coincide with the nationwide opening of Holiday. Extravagant but pointless. It won’t help and he doesn’t see it. All the noise and celebrity he cooks up only make it worse. He cannot get her out of this mess by being faster, louder, more. And, if he could get her out, it wouldn’t count. She has to dig her own way. Anyway, how does breaking a world record help her? Yes, it keeps them in the papers but their balance is gone. That force that kept them stable, evenly matched. She has lost her footing.
* * *
• • •
He is dirty, worn and thinner than she has ever seen him. The radio man was wrong. They were not dicey moments; they were catastrophic. It spills out of him in a rush. Engine failure, g-force, dizziness, running out of gasoline, landing unexpectedly on foreign runways with no warning, running out of oxygen, blacking out. My god. He is shaken by the risk. But, he did it.
“Proud of me?”
“Proud of you.”
“That’s better than a parade.”
“You’re already late.”
Howard
New York City
Why would she want to be here? She is right to stay away. People screaming, trying to touch him. Dust, exhaust, horse manure. They call it ticker tape but really, they are throwing everything at him. Flowers, notes, coins, paper airplanes. He does not like to touch things other people have touched. Howard is sure she is listening on the radio. It is enough.
When he told her about the flights, the stories felt stale. He could not capture the fear of a stalled engine nor the exhilaration when it found an extra drop of fuel and restarted. Those terrible moments were silent and now do not fit into words. They replay in his head. He cannot make her part of it the way he wants to.
Instead, he told her that these are stories they will tell their grandchildren one day. But that didn’t bring her closer either.
Laura
New York City
She goes to the parade even though she knows Kate won’t be there. Why would she go? More speculation if she stays away. That’s their game, isn’t it? Eluding the press so the press will chase harder? Kate doesn’t need a parade to see him. They will celebrate tonight, alone.
Laura tries to picture herself happy. Isn’t that what that doctor said to do? He’s probably a quack. Anyone who charges seventy dollars an hour must be a quack. She leaves before Howard’s float passes by. She does not want to see him. Only her.
Los Angeles
July 1938
Like everyone else in America, John Ford is listening to the radio. That man has done it. Stayed awake for ninety-four hours, nearly died from lack of oxygen, kept going. Goddamn. He deserves her. When John Ford sailed the Araner to Mexico after filming with Kate Hepburn he stayed drunk for three weeks. And then he sailed home to his wife.
Kate
New York City
She listens to his parade on the radio. Howard, the best airman in the world, waving, smiling, catching roses from pretty girls. Kate is sure it’s awful for him. So many people. All that noise. He must not be able to hear a thing.
She switches off the radio. He’s leaving Battery Park, moving up Broadway toward City Hall. It will be more of the same. He will tell her about it when he gets home. Home. Her home, not their home. But that is what she needs now. Her home. She is better here, sturdier. In her own house, in her own city. Stories to tell their grandchildren. Kate has to tell him.
But she already knows she won’t.
* * *
—
While Howard is at the parade, Kate has her second telephone call with the playwright Philip Barry. When she first called him, she asked if he was surprised to hear from her after so long.
“Not very. I knew you would want to come back here eventually and I knew someday you would want a play.”
“Not very. My eye.” They crackle together. She can hear it.
He agrees. He will write something, someone for her. She just needs to tell him who she wants to be and he will write her a story to turn her into someone new. She will tell Howard when he comes back. She knows he will be happy for her.
George was right. She needed to find the right script.
Howard
New York City
August 1938
The date is arbitrary. Yes, last week he booked the airfield and the ground crew to fly back tomorrow morning but one phone call to Noah and all that is undone. Gone. Why is he leaving on this day rather than another day? Another later day after they have had more time together? He doesn’t need to be back. He can work here. He can do it all on the telephone, just as he did when he followed her on tour. Then, he didn’t wait for her invitation, he just told Noah to make the bookings. What’s changed?
* * *
• • •
It doesn’t happen the way he planned. He had wanted to fly her home to California and then give it to her when they landed. He imagined that it would be sunrise; she reminds him of morning, but the landing time would have depended on the wind speed.
Instead, he gives it to her in her bedroom in her townhouse in the city that is not his own.
“Have you had it all this time?”
“All this time.”
“Those news articles?”
“Yes, someone at the jeweler’s leaked it; the owner was mortified.”
He should have given it to her yesterday, when they still had the night to spend together, when they could have curled together in her big white bed and made plans, talked about the places they would fly and the family they would make. But he had wanted the contrast of the gray pink dawn and the deep green emerald and it rained yesterday. Sound is compromised so light and color are important to Howard.
She said she loves it, didn’t she? Loves it. Loves him. That is what matters.
Neither of them used the word “marriage.” But, it is understood. Spelling it out is reductive.
* * *
• • •
She goes with him to the airfield. He drives her car. Or not really her car, Luddy’s car, parked around the corner from the townhouse. That lump leaves it there in case she needs it. It irritates Howard. Kate tells him that she will drive it back, as if he cares where Luddy’s car ends up. He tries not to be bothered by driving the ex-husband’s automobile. He wishes it were not such a good car.
“You will come home, when the script is done?” Home to his house, that has become their house.
“But then there will be the rehearsals?”
“You could come home for a while before the rehearsals?”
“Yes, maybe before the rehearsals.”
“You don’t have to do this play,” he says.
“Yes, I do.”
He has said it all and will not say it again. He has never said it to a woman before. Not like this, outright, flat. At the kitchen table of that tall city house, he told her he would take care of her, that she could have her own money, her own account, her own car. Whatever will make her forget it all comes from him. It is not the money, he knows that. He wishes he didn’t understand so well. It is the weight and counterweight between them. And she is doing exactly what he would do. She is creating opportunity where none exists. She is making herself valuable. It is exactly why he loves her. How he loves her.
But, it is not enough to bring her back.
* * *
—
