Skunk Works

So I really felt rotten when I finally worked up the courage to inform Kelly about Northrop’s offer to start up a fighter project. In his dealings with me, he appreciated the fact that I always provided him with alternatives when presenting him with a problem: I’d say, “Solution one will cost you so much money. Solution two will cost you so much time. You’re the boss. Which do you choose?” So often, others would come to him like errant schoolboys and moan, “Kelly, bad news. We broke that part.” And he’d get sore and shout, “Well, what in hell do you expect me to do about it?” Now I had no alternative to offer for the course of action I was taking. I was walking out on him.

During the time I spent at the main plant on the Navy sub-hunter project, Rus Daniell had to suddenly step into the breach and take over in place of Kelly, who was hospitalized with a serious abdominal infection. That brief stint running the Skunk Works for a couple of months in 1970 proved to be a personal disaster for Rus. He had signed off on a project proposal for the Air Force that included a glaring mathematical error. The Pentagon analysts who discovered the mistake couldn’t resist rubbing our noses in it, and a two-star general, who had probably waited for years to stick it to Kelly and his know-it-alls in Burbank, phoned him in his hospital room and raised hell about our sloppy work. Kelly was livid and ordered me back to the Skunk Works immediately, to take charge of the technical section. Rus Daniell had to obtain my approval on all technical matters. Since he was a vice president and the odds-on favorite to be Kelly’s successor, I’m sure he wasn’t delighted with that arrangement, but he handled it gracefully. From then on, when there was a critical meeting about deadlines or problems or an angry customer in Kelly’s office, I would be sent for to sit in, sometimes with Rus, but more often without him.

Kelly and I had grown close. He had lost his wife Althea in the fall of 1970, after a long struggle with cancer. She was his age and had been his secretary years earlier. Before she died, Althea told Kelly that he needed to remarry without much delay because he was not the kind of man who could live alone. She worried about his drinking and poor eating habits when left to himself. “I think you should marry MaryEllen,” Althea told him. MaryEllen Meade was Kelly’s secretary. She was a vivacious redhead, twenty-five years younger than both of the Johnsons, and had recently suffered a messy divorce. She had started her Skunk Works career several years earlier as my secretary, and both my wife and I got to know her well and were fond of her. She was in awe of Kelly and very devoted to him.

About six weeks after Althea’s funeral, Kelly sent for me. He seemed embarrassed and troubled, and I knew he was in a real quandary when he began confiding his personal problems, something very much out of character. But he told me about Althea’s deathbed wish that he marry MaryEllen and wondered what people would think if he carried out that wish any time soon. He fretted over the age difference and how awkward it would be if MaryEllen refused him.

My heart went out to him. “Kelly,” I said, “since when do you worry about what people think? All that matters is what you think. No one around here will think you’re a dirty old man, if that’s what you’re worrying about. We’ll all be secretly jealous as hell. I don’t have the slightest doubt that MaryEllen could make you very happy.” He thanked me and proposed to MaryEllen a few days later. When the couple returned from their Hawaiian honeymoon, in June 1970, he began inviting Faye and me to join them for dinner or to be weekend guests at Kelly’s 1,200 acre cattle ranch, near Ronald Reagan’s big spread, overlooking Solvang, California. Kelly had seldom socialized with any employees except at occasional company functions, or even more rarely, asking a couple of guys to join him for a quick round of golf at a local country club, where Kelly would breeze through eighteen holes using only a six iron, which he claimed was just fine for all shots, near and far. He was so musclebound from having been a hod carrier as a kid that his golf swing for distance was quite limited. But he was a skilled putter until occasional swigs from his back-pocket flask got the best of his aim.