Noah Dietrich
Encyclopedia
Noah Dietrich was an American business executive, who acted as Chief Executive Officer of the Howard Hughes
empire from 1925 until 1957, when, according to his own memoir, he left the Hughes operation over a dispute involving putting more of his income on a capital gains basis. The manuscript of his eventual memoir, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, may have been a key, if inadvertent, source of novelist Clifford Irving
's infamous fake autobiography of Hughes.
, to Lutheran minister John Dietrich and the former Sarah Peters. Trained as an accountant, in 1910 he started in business in Maxwell, New Mexico
, and later moved to Los Angeles
and New York City
before moving back to Los Angeles. There he passed the CPA
exam.
from other family heirs. Started by his father, Howard R. Hughes, Sr.
, Hughes Tool Company---or Toolco, as it was known inside the Hughes empire---manufactured oil drilling equipment, especially the multiple-edge, revolving-teeth roller cutter drill bits the elder Hughes invented.
Dietrich began by running the tool company for Hughes, allowing him to pursue his interests in the movie and aircraft
businesses. In his memoir, Dietrich observed Hughes had little interest in Toolco beyond its being a source of wealth and investment. "The tool company," he quoted Hughes as saying, "was my father's success. And it always will be."
In time, however, Dietrich came to serve as an executive for most of Hughes's enterprises, including Trans World Airlines
(TWA), RKO Pictures
and Hughes Aircraft
.
Some got Dietrich caught in the middle during disputes with members of Hughes's family. During a period when Hughes chose to stay out of sight, refusing to talk to anyone outside a few business associates if that, Dietrich recalled, a Hughes aunt accused Dietrich---who turned out to have been kept in the dark about Hughes's exact whereabouts himself---of covering up Hughes's death in order to claim the Hughes empire for himself. When Hughes returned, Dietrich wrote, he made a special point of calling this aunt. "I didn't want her to continue thinking I was taking over the Hughes empire while keeping her nephew in the deep freeze."
A few years later, while Hughes was recovering from injuries he sustained in the crash of his experimental F-11 aircraft, and Hughes refused to allow the same aunt and uncle to see him or speak to him, the uncle turned to Dietrich and said, "Now I know your problem dealing with him. I don't understand him at all."
Dietrich also discussed in considerable detail the real impetus behind the government's investigation of Hughes Aircraft
following World War II. Ostensibly, the probe involved Hughes's failure to deliver the infamous flying boat
, the Hercules, a military transport aircraft, to the government on time. Dietrich wrote, however, that the real purpose of the probe may have been neutralising Hughes, owner of TWA, while rival Pan Am
---whose president Juan Trippe
had implored Maine Senator Owen Brewster
to carry it---pushed for a federal law establishing only one official American carrier of international air traffic, and Pan Am becoming that carrier.
Dietrich discussed the famous Hughes counterattack before the Senate committee investigating him---and revealed that both his own and Hughes's hotel suites had been bugged during the hearings, allegedly at the behest of Brewster and Trippe, a bugging confirmed by columnist Jack Anderson in Confessions of a Muckraker. The hearings, and Hughes's legendary triumph (among other things, Hughes said famously that if the flying boat failed to fly, "I will leave the country---and I mean it"), helped end both the legislation that would have frozen all American airlines but Pan Am out of the international air market and Brewster's political career, when Dietrich on Hughes's orders poured money into a challenger's campaign a few years later.
By the mid-1950s, however, Dietrich by his own recollection was exhausted. In his memoirs, Dietrich recorded: "If an executive had to be fired, 'Noah can do it.' If a starlet had to be placated, 'Noah can do it.' If millions had to be raised overnight, 'Noah can do it.' Noah was getting tired of doing it."
At the same juncture, Hughes, Dietrich recalled, also did everything in his power to stop Dietrich's long-planned African safari with his two sons, the first long vacation Dietrich had taken in decades of working for Hughes.
Dietrich returned from Africa, he wrote, and finally agreed to go to Texas to implement the plan---on condition that Hughes finally implement the capital gains agreement. When Hughes refused ("Noah, you're putting a gun to my head," Dietrich quoted Hughes as saying), Dietrich immediately quit---stunning Hughes. ("Noah, I cannot exist without you!")
Hughes didn't let him go without a fight. After pleading failed, Hughes tried to strong-arm Dietrich into reconsidering, going so far, Dietrich recorded, as locking Dietrich's offices---a practise Hughes had followed any time top executives were fired or otherwise departed the Hughes operation, Dietrich recalled ("Lock up his office!" Those words, so often said about others, were now applied to me"). Hughes also sued Dietrich over oil leases the two shared (Dietrich wrote that he surrendered his interest just to be rid of Hughes at last, a move he later regretted slightly since the leases turned big profits eventually), and forced Dietrich to get a court order in order to reclaim many of his personal possessions from his old offices.
(the same illness that killed shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis
), did Dietrich finally retire in full.
Among many other revelations, Dietrich revealed how he transported Hughes's Prohibition-era liquor stock by disguising them in packaging marked exposed, undeveloped film, shipping them by rail in an old cotton car—--and bribing a California agriculture inspector to look the other way while the parcels were removed from the car for spraying, as California agriculture law required at the time to protect cotton from contamination. Hughes, Dietrich wrote, thought practically nothing of the risk Dietrich took—--including to his own freedom—--to move the booze to Hughes's new home. "It was," Dietrich wrote wryly, "just another affirmation of Howard's belief that 'Noah can do it'."
's first wife Susan Brewer.
Toward the end of Howard, Dietrich wrote that, no matter how their relationship ended, he never regretted his career with Hughes. "I much preferred the exciting life," he said, with the benefit of many years' hindsight. He said he wrote the book to leave his children and grandchildren a record of the role he played in one of America's most fascinating business stories as well as of what can happen when wealth is misused or abused. But he also admitted he'd have been tempted if Hughes should have called him one more time in the dead of night pleading for help: "And do you know what I'd say? 'OK, Howard, tell me what it is, now'."
Time
revealed in 1972 that a copy of an early draft of the manuscript for Dietrich's memoir, ghost-written by journalist James Phelan, may have fallen into Clifford Irving's hands, and identified the draft as a key element in Irving's being able to convince publishers and others that his hoax Hughes autobiography was genuine. "The instances of duplicated material are numerous," the magazine wrote. "In some cases, the books are virtually identical in detail. In others, they are substantively the same, although the Irving manuscript has been reworded and otherwise disguised. One curiosity: the writing in the Irving manuscript is much better than that in the hastily drafted Phelan version. It is ironic that Irving may be more convincing as a forger than as an author in his own right---just as Elmyr de Hory, Irving's Ibiza
friend and the main character in his book Fake!, is much better at doing Picassos and Modigliani
s than he is at doing De Horys.
Dietrich and Phelan eventually settled for $40,000, after Dietrich became dissatisfied with Phelan's work, and turned the project over to another journalist, Bob Thomas, who finished the Dietrich memoir within six weeks, Time noted.
Ed Flanders
played Dietrich against Tommy Lee Jones
as Hughes in the 1977 mini-series The Amazing Howard Hughes
. Released one year after Hughes' death, Dietrich's role is highlighted from his commencement with Hughes as Accountant, his subsequent contribution in restructuring Hughes Empire, and his later departure.
John C. Reilly
played Dietrich against Leonardo DiCaprio
as Hughes within the 2004 movie The Aviator. A criticism of this adaptation was that it downplayed the role Dietrich played in helping Hughes amass his fortune.
Nonagenarian actor Eli Wallach
played Dietrich in the 2006 movie The Hoax, about author Clifford Irving
's faked Howard Hughes autobiography.
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
empire from 1925 until 1957, when, according to his own memoir, he left the Hughes operation over a dispute involving putting more of his income on a capital gains basis. The manuscript of his eventual memoir, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, may have been a key, if inadvertent, source of novelist Clifford Irving
Clifford Irving
Clifford Michael Irving is an American author of novels and works of nonfiction, but best known for using forged handwritten letters to convince his publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive businessman Howard Hughes in the early 1970s...
's infamous fake autobiography of Hughes.
The preacher's son
Dietrich was born in Madison, WisconsinMadison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
, to Lutheran minister John Dietrich and the former Sarah Peters. Trained as an accountant, in 1910 he started in business in Maxwell, New Mexico
Maxwell, New Mexico
Maxwell is a village in Colfax County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 274 at the 2000 census. Unlike nearby Springer, the village has been losing population due to the rural exodus. Maxwell was established in 1879 as a railroad town on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe...
, and later moved to Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
and New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
before moving back to Los Angeles. There he passed the CPA
Certified Public Accountant
Certified Public Accountant is the statutory title of qualified accountants in the United States who have passed the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination and have met additional state education and experience requirements for certification as a CPA...
exam.
Enter Howard
In 1925, at the age of 36, Dietrich met Hughes, then 19 years old, who had just wrested majority ownership of Hughes Tool CompanyHughes Tool Company
Hughes Tool Company was established in 1908 as Sharp-Hughes Tool Company when Howard R. Hughes, Sr. patented a roller cutter bit that dramatically improved the rotary drilling process for oil drilling rigs. He partnered with longtime business associate Walter Benona Sharp to manufacture and market...
from other family heirs. Started by his father, Howard R. Hughes, Sr.
Howard R. Hughes, Sr.
Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. was an American entrepreneur, best known as the father of Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., the famous aviation pioneer and film producer. Hughes, Sr. created the fortune that Hughes, Jr. inherited when he turned 18.-Early years:Hughes, Sr...
, Hughes Tool Company---or Toolco, as it was known inside the Hughes empire---manufactured oil drilling equipment, especially the multiple-edge, revolving-teeth roller cutter drill bits the elder Hughes invented.
Dietrich began by running the tool company for Hughes, allowing him to pursue his interests in the movie and aircraft
Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...
businesses. In his memoir, Dietrich observed Hughes had little interest in Toolco beyond its being a source of wealth and investment. "The tool company," he quoted Hughes as saying, "was my father's success. And it always will be."
In time, however, Dietrich came to serve as an executive for most of Hughes's enterprises, including Trans World Airlines
Trans World Airlines
Trans World Airlines was an American airline that existed from 1925 until it was bought out by and merged with American Airlines in 2001. It was a major domestic airline in the United States and the main U.S.-based competitor of Pan American World Airways on intercontinental routes from 1946...
(TWA), RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures is an American film production and distribution company. As RKO Radio Pictures Inc., it was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chains and Joseph P...
and Hughes Aircraft
Hughes Aircraft
Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded in 1932 by Howard Hughes in Culver City, California as a division of Hughes Tool Company...
.
"Noah can do it"
Dietrich became Hughes's most indispensable executive---"Noah can do it" was, according to Dietrich's memoir, a frequent Hughes expression whenever difficult, if not impossible, wants or needs needed to be met. Some---such as the time Dietrich arranged a stock ticker to be installed in a Hughes home---were merely difficult, as also the half million Hughes invested in developing a steam-powered car he ultimately scrapped; others---such as the time Dietrich arranged the shipment of Hughes's large private liquor stock from Texas to California during Prohibition---dangerous to the point of possibly subjecting Dietrich himself to prison time.Some got Dietrich caught in the middle during disputes with members of Hughes's family. During a period when Hughes chose to stay out of sight, refusing to talk to anyone outside a few business associates if that, Dietrich recalled, a Hughes aunt accused Dietrich---who turned out to have been kept in the dark about Hughes's exact whereabouts himself---of covering up Hughes's death in order to claim the Hughes empire for himself. When Hughes returned, Dietrich wrote, he made a special point of calling this aunt. "I didn't want her to continue thinking I was taking over the Hughes empire while keeping her nephew in the deep freeze."
A few years later, while Hughes was recovering from injuries he sustained in the crash of his experimental F-11 aircraft, and Hughes refused to allow the same aunt and uncle to see him or speak to him, the uncle turned to Dietrich and said, "Now I know your problem dealing with him. I don't understand him at all."
Dietrich also discussed in considerable detail the real impetus behind the government's investigation of Hughes Aircraft
Hughes Aircraft
Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded in 1932 by Howard Hughes in Culver City, California as a division of Hughes Tool Company...
following World War II. Ostensibly, the probe involved Hughes's failure to deliver the infamous flying boat
Flying boat
A flying boat is a fixed-winged seaplane with a hull, allowing it to land on water. It differs from a float plane as it uses a purpose-designed fuselage which can float, granting the aircraft buoyancy. Flying boats may be stabilized by under-wing floats or by wing-like projections from the fuselage...
, the Hercules, a military transport aircraft, to the government on time. Dietrich wrote, however, that the real purpose of the probe may have been neutralising Hughes, owner of TWA, while rival Pan Am
Pan American World Airways
Pan American World Airways, commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal and largest international air carrier in the United States from 1927 until its collapse on December 4, 1991...
---whose president Juan Trippe
Juan Trippe
Juan Terry Trippe was an American airline entrepreneur and pioneer, and the founder of Pan American World Airways, one of the world's most prominent airlines of the twentieth century.-Early years:...
had implored Maine Senator Owen Brewster
Owen Brewster
Ralph Owen Brewster was an American politician from Maine. Brewster, a Republican, was solidly conservative...
to carry it---pushed for a federal law establishing only one official American carrier of international air traffic, and Pan Am becoming that carrier.
Dietrich discussed the famous Hughes counterattack before the Senate committee investigating him---and revealed that both his own and Hughes's hotel suites had been bugged during the hearings, allegedly at the behest of Brewster and Trippe, a bugging confirmed by columnist Jack Anderson in Confessions of a Muckraker. The hearings, and Hughes's legendary triumph (among other things, Hughes said famously that if the flying boat failed to fly, "I will leave the country---and I mean it"), helped end both the legislation that would have frozen all American airlines but Pan Am out of the international air market and Brewster's political career, when Dietrich on Hughes's orders poured money into a challenger's campaign a few years later.
By the mid-1950s, however, Dietrich by his own recollection was exhausted. In his memoirs, Dietrich recorded: "If an executive had to be fired, 'Noah can do it.' If a starlet had to be placated, 'Noah can do it.' If millions had to be raised overnight, 'Noah can do it.' Noah was getting tired of doing it."
Falling out
In 1957, after working for Hughes for 32 years, Dietrich left the Hughes organization over a capital-gains dispute: Hughes had promised to make more of Dietrich's income on a capital gains basis. At the time of the falling-out, Hughes was trying to finance jets for TWA and decided the key was to inflate Hughes Tool profits in order to sell the company to pay for the jets, since Hughes had rejected all other financing solutions because they threatened to dilute his TWA ownership.At the same juncture, Hughes, Dietrich recalled, also did everything in his power to stop Dietrich's long-planned African safari with his two sons, the first long vacation Dietrich had taken in decades of working for Hughes.
Dietrich returned from Africa, he wrote, and finally agreed to go to Texas to implement the plan---on condition that Hughes finally implement the capital gains agreement. When Hughes refused ("Noah, you're putting a gun to my head," Dietrich quoted Hughes as saying), Dietrich immediately quit---stunning Hughes. ("Noah, I cannot exist without you!")
Hughes didn't let him go without a fight. After pleading failed, Hughes tried to strong-arm Dietrich into reconsidering, going so far, Dietrich recorded, as locking Dietrich's offices---a practise Hughes had followed any time top executives were fired or otherwise departed the Hughes operation, Dietrich recalled ("Lock up his office!" Those words, so often said about others, were now applied to me"). Hughes also sued Dietrich over oil leases the two shared (Dietrich wrote that he surrendered his interest just to be rid of Hughes at last, a move he later regretted slightly since the leases turned big profits eventually), and forced Dietrich to get a court order in order to reclaim many of his personal possessions from his old offices.
Life after Hughes
Dietrich later served on several corporate and financial boards as a well-respected financial and executive adviser, as well as traveling to many speaking engagements. His 1971 memoir, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, provided many with the first genuine inside look into the world of Howard Hughes, including and especially his occasional lack of concern that things he wanted done often required breaches of ethics or even the law. Only when he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravisMyasthenia gravis
Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune neuromuscular disease leading to fluctuating muscle weakness and fatiguability...
(the same illness that killed shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis
Aristotle Onassis
Aristotle Sokratis Onassis , commonly called Ari or Aristo Onassis, was a prominent Greek shipping magnate.- Early life :Onassis was born in Karatass, a suburb of Smyrna to Socrates and Penelope Onassis...
), did Dietrich finally retire in full.
Among many other revelations, Dietrich revealed how he transported Hughes's Prohibition-era liquor stock by disguising them in packaging marked exposed, undeveloped film, shipping them by rail in an old cotton car—--and bribing a California agriculture inspector to look the other way while the parcels were removed from the car for spraying, as California agriculture law required at the time to protect cotton from contamination. Hughes, Dietrich wrote, thought practically nothing of the risk Dietrich took—--including to his own freedom—--to move the booze to Hughes's new home. "It was," Dietrich wrote wryly, "just another affirmation of Howard's belief that 'Noah can do it'."
Personal life
Dietrich was married three times (he held Hughes' near-suffocating demands on his time responsible for the collapse of his first marriage) and had five children and two stepchildren, including Peter FondaPeter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...
's first wife Susan Brewer.
Toward the end of Howard, Dietrich wrote that, no matter how their relationship ended, he never regretted his career with Hughes. "I much preferred the exciting life," he said, with the benefit of many years' hindsight. He said he wrote the book to leave his children and grandchildren a record of the role he played in one of America's most fascinating business stories as well as of what can happen when wealth is misused or abused. But he also admitted he'd have been tempted if Hughes should have called him one more time in the dead of night pleading for help: "And do you know what I'd say? 'OK, Howard, tell me what it is, now'."
Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
revealed in 1972 that a copy of an early draft of the manuscript for Dietrich's memoir, ghost-written by journalist James Phelan, may have fallen into Clifford Irving's hands, and identified the draft as a key element in Irving's being able to convince publishers and others that his hoax Hughes autobiography was genuine. "The instances of duplicated material are numerous," the magazine wrote. "In some cases, the books are virtually identical in detail. In others, they are substantively the same, although the Irving manuscript has been reworded and otherwise disguised. One curiosity: the writing in the Irving manuscript is much better than that in the hastily drafted Phelan version. It is ironic that Irving may be more convincing as a forger than as an author in his own right---just as Elmyr de Hory, Irving's Ibiza
Ibiza
Ibiza or Eivissa is a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea 79 km off the coast of the city of Valencia in Spain. It is the third largest of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain. With Formentera, it is one of the two Pine Islands or Pityuses. Its largest cities are Ibiza...
friend and the main character in his book Fake!, is much better at doing Picassos and Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
s than he is at doing De Horys.
Dietrich and Phelan eventually settled for $40,000, after Dietrich became dissatisfied with Phelan's work, and turned the project over to another journalist, Bob Thomas, who finished the Dietrich memoir within six weeks, Time noted.
TV/movie adaptations
Noah Dietrich has been portrayed within several adaptations.Ed Flanders
Ed Flanders
Edward Paul Flanders was an American actor best known for his role as Dr. Donald Westphall in the television series St. Elsewhere.- Biography :...
played Dietrich against Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive....
as Hughes in the 1977 mini-series The Amazing Howard Hughes
The Amazing Howard Hughes
The Amazing Howard Hughes is a 1977 television movie about American aviation pioneer and filmmaker Howard Hughes, based on the book by Hughes' business partner Noah Dietrich. The film starred Tommy Lee Jones, Ed Flanders, and Tovah Feldshuh....
. Released one year after Hughes' death, Dietrich's role is highlighted from his commencement with Hughes as Accountant, his subsequent contribution in restructuring Hughes Empire, and his later departure.
John C. Reilly
John C. Reilly
John Christopher Reilly, Jr. is an American film and theater actor, singer, and comedian. Debuting in Casualties of War in 1989, he is one of several actors whose careers were launched by Brian De Palma. To date, he has appeared in more than fifty films, including three separate films in 2002...
played Dietrich against Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is an American actor and film producer. He has received many awards, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Aviator , and has been nominated by the Academy Awards, Screen Actors Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television...
as Hughes within the 2004 movie The Aviator. A criticism of this adaptation was that it downplayed the role Dietrich played in helping Hughes amass his fortune.
Nonagenarian actor Eli Wallach
Eli Wallach
Eli Herschel Wallach is an American film, television and stage actor, who gained fame in the late 1950s. For his performance in Baby Doll he won a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer and a Golden Globe nomination. One of his most famous roles is that of Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...
played Dietrich in the 2006 movie The Hoax, about author Clifford Irving
Clifford Irving
Clifford Michael Irving is an American author of novels and works of nonfiction, but best known for using forged handwritten letters to convince his publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive businessman Howard Hughes in the early 1970s...
's faked Howard Hughes autobiography.