Today, it could be said that all the troubles of Howard Hughes, America’s first trillionaire, all-round successful eccentric and the world’s most notorious recluse for the last 25 years of his life, began in his primary family. Howard Sr. loved his wife Allene, 14 years his junior, but he could not imagine spending time with her and being faithful to her. He travelled around in search of a quick buck, and she passed the time by worrying about germs when she wasn’t scared out of her wits by smallpox, yellow fever or typhoid fever, although even these were bearable compared to the panic she felt when she saw cats in the street.
When she found out she was pregnant in the spring of 1905, she couldn’t bear the thought of her child growing up in such unsanitary conditions as those in Houston, and she and her husband had to move to nearby Humble. It is not clear exactly when little Howard was born, but it was probably around Christmas. Allen’s hypochondria only intensified with the birth. Among other things, she regularly checked her son’s nappies for tapeworms.
Meanwhile, her husband has made a big throw. In August 1909, he applied for two patents for a drilling device for extracting oil and, with his partner Walter Sharp, founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company. The company, which earned just over $12 million in its first year, became Howard’s wholly-owned subsidiary in 1913, when he changed its name to Hughes Tool Company.
Now Allene, the daughter of a prominent judge, was finally living the luxurious life she was used to at home, but still alone. Her husband had not only settled down because he was finally rich, but she was filling her time with her son. She was fostering in him a sense of superiority. She dressed him in the best clothes and bribed those she had to so that he would receive accolades. They were constantly late for school. Every morning she bathed him, checked him carefully for parasites or infection and gave him a complete physical. She dropped him off at school and came looking for him.
Except at school, he was constantly under her supervision. When her peers were on their own, he would ride his bike up and down in front of the house, so she could see him at any moment. At home, he would take her diamond rings and give them to classmates he liked. One mother returned some of her gifts. Allene had not even noticed her son’s actions until then. She reminded him to take rings with a smaller stone next time.
She gave him a horse for Christmas. He named him Coon, which was an extremely derogatory term for an African-American in his time. He remained a racist all his life. At the age of 11, he wanted to go to an eight-week wilderness camp set up specifically to toughen up rich boys. He knew his mother would say no, but by then he had learned to manipulate people. He told his friend to ask his father for help, his father called the camp leader and the camp leader wrote to Allene telling him how good the experience would be for the boy. Against all expectations, she immediately agreed. Too quickly.
After reading about polio in the newspaper, she demanded that her husband bring their son home immediately. He didn’t want to. The camp administrator wrote to her to tell her how well her son was doing, but after six weeks she could take it no more. She just wanted to see him, for a few minutes, just enough to calm down. She came to visit and took her rebellious son home.
The next time she refused to let him go to camp, Howard miraculously fell ill. He stopped eating. For four days he ate nothing. Allene panicked. Doctors kept passing the hook, but none found anything. Someone advised that he could benefit from fresh air. Allene immediately thought of the camp and her son recovered almost immediately after she allowed him to leave.
He was only somewhat free of his mother at the age of 12, when his father flirted so blatantly with the 18-year-old Eleanor Boardman in front of her that she could no longer turn a blind eye to the state of her marriage. She didn’t run away, she decided to improve it. Her son was allowed to crawl out of her bed, where he had been sleeping, because the couple had had separate bedrooms throughout their marriage. He was allowed to play with his friends, and not even just outside the house, and she was quite happy for him to sleep over at Dudley Scott’s, the son of Howard’s former business partner.
Howard, who was already passionate about engineering and mechanical design, worked with Dudley to build what was probably the first radio transmitter in Houston. He appeared in the newspapers when he built a bicycle engine from parts of his father’s old steam engine, resulting in a kind of moped. When they moved when he was 13, his room was full of various electronic devices so he could explore.
Now he could easily wrap his parents around his finger. Before one holiday, when he heard his mother telling his father to come home and he didn’t want to, he suddenly couldn’t walk anymore. It was the same story with the doctors, only now, suspected of polio, panic gripped the father as he called the leading researcher into the disease to come and see the child. He sent a colleague in return for a donation to the Rockefeller Institute worth about 190 000 dollars today.
Of course, he found nothing, but Allene and her sister Annette took the boy to Michigan to help him get some fresh air. He got out of his wheelchair as soon as his father arrived. He celebrated his miraculous recovery by going sailing with his parents.
At the age of 15, he fell in love with films. His uncle Rupert Hughes was quite successful in Hollywood. When Howard visited him on film sets while he was at school near Los Angeles, he talked to all the technicians he could find. And, of course, with starlets. They remained his passion until his mental breakdown.
Woman for decoration
He was finally living a normal life when his mother died when he was 16. While shopping, she felt severe pain in her abdomen, after which she started bleeding profusely. She had to be operated on. They gave her an anaesthetic, but her heart stopped before they could even cut into her. The cause of the bleeding was an ectopic pregnancy. She was 39 years old.
A shocked Howard did not shed a tear. He completely detached himself from the trauma he had experienced, as if it were happening to someone else. He never mentioned his mother’s name again. After three days he returned to school and lived as if nothing had happened. Before the end of the school year, his father remembered that they could have spent more time together and he withdrew him from school. Then he travelled to Europe, leaving his son with Aunt Annette to play golf and watch films being made all day.
He got his father to raise his monthly allowance to $70,000 today, or what was then the annual income of the average American family of four. Not long afterwards, Aunt Adelaide, Rupert’s wife, hung herself. He loved her, but once again he faced the loss in an unhealthy way. Because she had hung herself with a belt, he became so excited about the physical laws of belt-hanging that his father asked Annette to hide all his belts.
No sooner had the atmosphere calmed down than Howard senior collapsed on the floor during a meeting on 14 January 1924. A few minutes later, he was dead. He was 54 years old. Cause of death: blockage of a coronary artery. During the funeral, the 18-year-old Howard did not speak a word, he wanted his will to be read immediately. He inherited three quarters of his father’s estate, but was unable to manage it until he was 21.
In Houston, he started playing golf with a local referee. He noticed that the young man kept asking him about a section of the law that allows him to become an adult at the age of 19, but was nevertheless surprised to see Howard in court just after his 19th birthday. The boy had studied the law so well that he had to be declared legally an adult.
Howard had previously bought out his relatives’ shares in his father’s company, the problem was that now he didn’t know what to do with his life. He made a wish list. Under the first item he wrote that he wanted to be the best golfer in the world, under the second a pilot, and a few days later he added a third item, the most famous film producer. He pinned the list on his bedroom wall so that he would not forget it.
He started with the third point and incidentally scored the first. He had money, he was tall and handsome, but he was just a little too young to be a serious producer. He had to correct his first impression. What would have given him more credibility? Marriage.
Ella Botts Rice was two years behind him at school and in love with another boy, but he didn’t care because he didn’t choose to marry for love. His aunt Annette was pleased because she hoped Ella would be able to handle him a bit in Hollywood, but Ella’s family decided that Howard was the best Ella could get. She was “sold”. Three days before the wedding, Howard made a will, providing not only for her, but also for her brothers and sister.
They married on 2 June 1925, when Howard was 19 and a half years old. Ella didn’t expect much, but she didn’t expect what she got. For Howard, the ideal relationship was one that required no more time and attention than a regular annual car service. Three honeymoons in New York and Long Island were all Ella had of marriage and the longest break Howard had ever taken from his business. That they had separate bedrooms on their honeymoon, as his parents had once done, was, of course, obvious.
In Los Angeles, they each had their own Rolls-Royce, separate accounts and separate hotel suites. Spending time with Ella was a necessary evil for Howard. By November, he had had enough. He began to manipulate her as he had once manipulated his parents. He sent her to Houston, telling her to get their home ready for Christmas, then calmly ignored her calls and telegrams to come home. It was only Aunt Annette who dragged him to Houston, and even then he only came on business.
Holidays meant nothing to him, nor did he remember them. So Noah Dietrich, a 36-year-old accountant, thought he would earn $138,000 a year as a personal secretary because he would have to work during the holidays, when Howard’s chauffeur brought him a job offer on Thanksgiving Day. It turned out that he had hired him to run his Howard Tools company for the next 32 years, the profits of which financed his other ventures. The company was only successful because Howard never got involved.
The first attempt to become the best producer ended in failure. Green director Ralph Graves made a film that sucked so badly that Howard had the film tape burned, even though the film had thrown more than a million of today’s dollars out the window. He was more careful with his second film. He chose an established director, but ended up a million dollars in the red. He only succeeded in the third time, when his accountant Noah gave him the script. Two Arabian Knights grossed nearly $9 million and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director of a Comedy in 1927.
Howard achieved two of his three goals: he was an excellent golfer, even though he never played in a tournament, and he produced a successful film. The only thing left was flying. As a rule, he did not know how to choose his collaborators. With Noah, he was just lucky, and so was his flight instructor. He wanted one who, when he was playing golf, would fly over the course and flap his wings at the golfers. He offered him 1400 dollars a day to teach him to fly. Howard turned out to be a natural.
Angels in Hell
But he had no talent for married life. Ella had to stay with her mother in Houston, and if he ever relented and she was allowed to join him in Los Angeles, she had to sleep in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in her room at the end of the hall. When she was not there, he was happily entertaining starlets and paying the hotel gardener a weekly wage to keep his mouth shut. Ella passed the time by travelling with her sister, and in the second half of 1927 he decided to realise his dream project. He would make Hell’s Angels, an epic tale of World War I pilots.
He interfered in the filming by having two directors cancel one after the other and ended up directing the film himself. Obsessed with detail, he insisted on historical accuracy and, because nothing was ever good enough, they could not finish the film. He bought 87 planes for it, including original British and German planes and a zeppelin. Thus, in 1928, he owned more aircraft than many countries.
Of course, he violated all safety standards when filming the flights, but it was not only experienced aerobatic pilots who were forced to perform daring stunts. He got his pilot’s licence on 7 January 1927, but when they couldn’t do something, he did it. He did it, but he couldn’t balance the plane and it skidded to the ground with him. The crew pulled him out of the wreckage, he was babbling something about golf. He had a fractured skull and a fractured jaw and, of course, quite a few bones in his body. He fell into a coma in hospital. After several operations, including plastic surgery, he was back on his feet.
Upon hearing the news, Ella immediately flew to Los Angeles. He nagged her why she was coming without permission. Her suggestion that he give up filming and make time for her prompted him to announce two more films. Now Ella has decided to force a public admission that she is his wife. She threw a party and invited the most prominent people, including those who could be of business use to him. She was sure that he would not want to embarrass himself in front of them and would politely play the part of the husband she wanted him to be.
She received guests alone. They were about to have dinner when Howard arrived, all neglected and tired after a day on the set. Without saying a word, he mixed all the food he could find on his plate and hastily shoveled it in. Then he retreated to his study. When the last guest had left, Ella packed her things and left without telling him she was leaving. He hadn’t even noticed she was gone. His true love was the film Hell’s Angels and now he was in trouble.
The time of silent films was running out, and he feared that his own would be outdated before it hit the screens. He had to bring in dialogue, and to do that he had to find a new lead actress and shoot additional footage. All this again took time, but of course not so much time that he couldn’t play the playboy. By now he had a reputation for getting into bed with just about every starlet in existence, although hardly any of them made a mark on his life, except perhaps the later star Carole Lombard, with whom he was seeing around 1929.
And he really fell in love with actress Billie Dove. He couldn’t even speak in her presence. Of course she was married and of course there was a scandal when she moved into his home. She had her own bedroom too and she didn’t have much from him either. He had shot 16 hours of material for Hell’s Angels and now he had to edit it himself. He worked night and day. One morning at the end of May 1929, his housekeeper found him unconscious on the floor. He was barely breathing. She called the ever-reliable Noah and he informed the doctor.
He declared Howard to have bacterial meningitis. As antibiotics were not yet available, he was at risk of death. After three days of deteriorating health, the doctor instructed Noah to inform Ella that her husband’s end was near. He was 24 years old. Ella immediately jumped on a train, hoping that her husband had realised his mistake in his last hours, and rushed across America to see him.
It turned out that Howard had only a severe form of flu, which was rampant at the time. Furious, he sent a telegram to Ella telling her not to come, but Ella overheard him. Billie, who had been at his bedside the whole time, only sneaked out the back door when Ella was standing in the front doorway. Howard told her to leave without preamble in the bedroom. Ella saw Billie’s feather on the chair.
Three minutes later, she was racing out of the house. In Houston, she filed for divorce because of “excesses and cruelty”. She was awarded almost 16 million today in severance pay, to be paid in five instalments. Howard agreed without objection. He was happy to have bought his freedom so cheaply. Now Billie wanted it too. Her husband asked for about 7 million dollars today, Howard settled for almost 5.
In the meantime, he has completed his debut film Hell’s Angels. It took him three years and about 58 million dollars. The film was the most expensive in film history to date. He spent an additional $600,000 for its premiere in June 1930. He wore his mother’s wedding ring on his little finger for good luck. After the premiere, which Charlie Chaplin described as “the greatest night in show business”, he received a standing ovation for 23 minutes, and the reviews were positive. In the end, the film earned twice as much as he had invested in it and earned him an Oscar nomination for cinematography.
Now he’s even more drawn to film. He started buying the rights to films Billie could star in, cinema halls and a colour editing studio. He travelled to Europe with Billie, but continued at his old pace as soon as he returned. For every 24 to 36 hours he worked, he was home for 1 hour. In 1931, he made four films simultaneously, including Scarface, which was reportedly the subject of a death threat from Al Capone himself. He reportedly disliked the intransigence of Scarface and the title of the film. Howard corrected him a little, and had to correct him even more when he ran into a committee deciding whether there was anything objectionable to public morality in the film and whether it was fit to be screened.
When it was all too much, Howard simply ran away. He was sailing with Billie in the Caribbean when he was informed that, despite many compromises, the film was still not fit to be screened. Now he was cracked. He returned home immediately. He would screen the original film with the original title, he decided, but the premiere would be in New Orleans because Louisiana had no censors.
In the name of free speech, he brought activists, courts and the public to their feet across the country and then screened the film. He received ovations and legal victories in New York and Pennsylvania. Now the censors have had to relent, and over time the film has reportedly endeared itself to Al Capone.
Howard was worshipped by everyone but Billie. She packed her bags and broke off the engagement. Her daughter later said she wanted a family and a home. It was clear to her that she and Howard would never have them. As usual, he immediately destroyed any trace that she had ever existed and threw himself into work as if nothing had happened. He never grieved or processed the losses of those close to him.
But now he was completely penniless. During the Great Depression, people drove less, so they sold less petrol and oil, and his company Hughes Tool’s profits fell. Howard’s extravagant lifestyle and entrepreneurial ventures left him so deep in debt that he could not pay his ex-wife’s instalment. Naturally, she seized the opportunity for revenge and he lost just over 25% of the company’s shares.
A star in the sky
But he also lost interest in films. He was sucked back in by airplanes. While Noah handled his business and finances, he took a job at American Airlines under a false name so he could fly every day. He was kindly checking tickets and helping passengers carry their luggage until the company realised he was working under a false name and fired him.
Noah, meanwhile, came up with a great idea to solve Howard’s financial problems. With the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, Prohibition was repealed and he allowed the company to start distilling alcohol. Money started flowing in again, but Noah preferred to leave Howard believing that he was in financial straits and sold some of the planes he had bought for the filming of Hell’s Angels. He kept a Boeing model plane, which the company had made exclusively for the US Air Force. Howard claimed that he had obtained it through the Department of Commerce, which he claimed to know nothing about.
To realise his dream, he founded Hughes Aircraft Corporation and recruited Glenn Odekirk, or Odo, to disassemble the Boeing and transform it into “the fastest plane in the world”. After winning a speed contest with it, he wanted to start building his own planes. The duo were joined by Richard W. Palmer, who almost couldn’t graduate from Caltech because his designs were so daring, but for Howard, who wanted to surpass anything ever known in aviation, it was perfect. The trio began building a “secret craft”, later called the Hughes H-1 Racer.
Of course, despite all his commitments, Howard always had time for starlets and fun. One day, he met rising star Cary Grant at one. He became one of his few friends and one of the few people Howard gave up work for. So one day, not yet 30 years old, he flew to Grant’s house for lunch in a twin-engine Sikorsky. It was “nerve-wracking and a little bit romantic”, as Katharine Hepburn described the arrival. Howard spotted her immediately and was immediately taken with her. Over the next months, he planned his next step towards her as thoughtfully as he planned his planes.
Of course, he thought about it in those moments when he wasn’t worrying about how to break the speed record of 505 kilometres per hour in an aeroplane. When he finally took up the challenge, after four official attempts, he flew three more times in enthusiasm. He was having so much fun that the seventh time he forgot to refuel and fell to the ground rather than landed on it. He broke the record with a speed of 566 kilometres per hour.
Now he wanted to break the speed record in transcontinental flight. He had spent months preparing his Gamma in such secrecy that armed guards stood guard outside the hangar 24 hours a day. On 13 January 1936, despite a radio malfunction, he smashed the old record with 9 hours, 27 minutes and 9 seconds. He did not think it was fast enough. He wanted to rebuild his H-1 aircraft for a new attempt.
When he wasn’t working, partying or sharing beds with starlets, he liked to hang out with teenage girls. On 11 July 1936, Nancy Belle Bayly was with him when he ran a pedestrian to death. Howard was taken into custody. A witness said he was driving too fast and carelessly. He said that he hit the pedestrian when he was standing properly on the side of the road. Later, the witness changed his mind, saying that the pedestrian had unexpectedly stepped into the road.
The police found Nancy, whom Howard wanted to protect from investigation. She confirmed what the eyewitness had said and Hughes was released without charge. He gave the deceased’s family about $175,000, but never saw Nancy again.
It had been a year since he met Katharine Hepburn and it was time to win her over. She was beautiful, intelligent, direct and independent. She wasn’t looking for a man to hang on to, she was only in a two-way if the partner was an equal. There were few, but Howard was one of them. In October 1936, he landed by plane on the golf course where she was playing. The plane had to have its wings removed so that it could be transported back to the hangar on a truck. Kate liked a good show, but he made quite an impression on her.
Both were different. Both lived by their own rules and both defended their independence. Both craved fame, but only because it was a confirmation that they had achieved something. At the same time, they both wanted a private life at a distance. She was naturally affectionate towards people close to her, he wanted to control everything, including people, yet he longed for a woman who really loved him. They met in October, and he was about to marry her in December.
She was in no hurry to get anywhere. In January 1937, Howard attempted to break the old cross-continental speed record. He took his H-1 racer to a height of 6100 metres, a record in itself. He ran out of oxygen. He wanted to put on an oxygen mask, but it refused to come off. He cut the hose and breathed the oxygen in through it. He flew on and corrected the old trans-Oceanic time by two whole hours. A year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented him with the prestigious Harmon Trophy in the Oval Office on behalf of the International League of Pilots. Only Charles Lindbergh and Wiley Post had won it before him.
Meanwhile, his Katharine Hepburn got into trouble because she was labelled money poison and they refused to screen her film Bringing up Baby. Howard bought it, distributed it at his own expense and saved her career, but not their relationship. It is true that they lived together in considerable style in his home, and for the first time since childhood Howard felt he had a home. It is also true that Kate never reproached him when he disappeared on his boat or plane, but she did not accept other women and he was unable to give them up. In the spring of 1938, she packed her things and returned home. From then on, they saw each other occasionally, until they were just friends.
He was back to work, only now he was trying to break the round-the-world speed record. He didn’t want to be a hero, he was more interested in how you build a plane to withstand such a feat. He was aware of the dangers. He completed his will and threw Ella out.
Ode spent two months modifying the Lockheed aircraft, but on 4 July 1939, when it was due to take off with the crew, there were problems. The flight was postponed for a week. Having previously studied everything there was to study about it, Howard turned his attention to food. He researched the nutritional value of 14 types of bread in order to make optimal sandwiches, in which he himself put roast beef and Swiss cheese. On 10 July, Katharine Hepburn helped him wrap them and the adventure began.
The flight took a little longer due to turbulence, but 16 hours and 38 minutes after take-off in New York, they landed in Paris. They had to fly over Germany to get there. Hitler gave Howard permission to fly over as long as the plane did not drop below 3,600 metres above sea level so that he could not spy, and gave him an escort. So he flew to Moscow, where they were supplied with food and caviar sent by Stalin, and continued on to Yakutsk to refuel.
They were supposed to take off at night, but were delayed until the morning. Shortly after take-off, the navigator started screaming in panic. All five crew members saw a mountain in front of them. According to their information, it should be 1980 metres high, so they planned to fly over it at 2100 metres. Now, standing in front of them was a giant, just under 3000 metres high. Howard lifted the plane with extreme effort and flew over the mountain just 6 metres above the summit. They arrived in Alaska exhausted. If they had taken off as planned in Yakutsk, they would not have seen the mountain in the middle of the night. They would be dead now.
They returned to New York 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes and 10 seconds after they left. The enthusiastic crowd was guarded by 1000 police officers. For every one policeman, there were 20 fans. The next day, schools and shops were closed for a procession in honour of the hero. Howard refused to take part in the procession until everyone who had contributed to his success was included. He went on to win a second Harmon Trophy and the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the two highest civilian honours. He was preceded by the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh.
The turning point called silifis
Howard was so busy with himself, and Noah made sure he always had enough money to do that by running all his businesses. Howard, meanwhile, was helping Kate, who was now more of a friend than anything else. When she was in a play called The Philadelphia Story, he persuaded her to take a cut of the profits instead of a salary, which was unthinkable at the time, and helped her buy the rights to make the film. Because they were hers, she starred in the film, even though she would not have been chosen for the role, and earned herself an Oscar nomination.
The Philadelphia story also brought Howard back to film, although in 1939 he bought 25% of the shares of the aviation company we know today as TWA. Within a few years, he was the majority owner. Money was again plentiful. The war was taking its toll on oil, so Hughes Tool was doing well and Hughes Aircraft became a contractor to the US Army.
The cooperation with the government ended in failure, and the relationship with Jane Russell was no better. “I don’t think Howard is capable of loving anything that doesn’t have a motor in it,” she described him. He hired her for his new film The Outlaw because he was completely obsessed with her bust. He felt that it wasn’t as lush on film as it was in real life, so he designed a bra for her, a kind of precursor to today’s push-up bra, but he made the support and the cups out of steel. It was so uncomfortable that after a few minutes, Jane secretly took it off and stuffed cotton balls into her regular bra. Howard didn’t notice the difference.
He had a lot of energy. After 1940 he was also constantly in a serious relationship, of course with two or three women at the same time, and no one counted simultaneous one-night stands. He was considered a good catch: he was rich, he was a hero, he was attractive and he could be cavalier when he wanted to be.
When he liked a woman, he immediately declared his love for her, showered her with jewels and pampered her on an exotic holiday. He was so generous with marriage proposals that he was often engaged to several women at once. Almost none of them stayed in his memory, but Gene Tierney did. In 1943, while pregnant, she contracted rubella and gave birth two months prematurely. Her baby girl had a severe genetic defect and was deaf and partially blind. When Howard learned of her problems, he paid the exorbitant hospital costs and hired specialists to care for the girl.
Katharine Hepburn has also remained close to him. Once, when she was in Houston, he wrote to Aunt Annette asking her to show her around his former home and the Hughes Tool factory. It was remarkable that he allowed her to see into his past, but he was also still concerned about her. He instructed his aunt to make sure Kate was at the hotel by 16.30, as she needed to rest before the show. “This is extremely important because she refuses to look after herself and is on the way to total exhaustion.”
He could love his fellow man sincerely, but he felt passion only for a woman he had yet to conquer. At that moment he was ready to put aside both power and pride. He threw himself at the woman’s feet, offering himself and the world to her, and perhaps even believing himself when he declared that he truly loved her. In truth, he gave her the world more easily than himself. As soon as she was his, his gaze was already fixed on the future.
The older he got, the more he preferred women who were completely subservient to him, so few of the many he had actually enriched his life. Katharine Hepburn did, and Ginger Rogers came close. He saw her briefly in 1932, but when she was famous six years later, he was tempted again. She turned him down, but that made him want her even more.
While he was chasing her, he was spending time with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland was in his bed. When Ginger did not give in, he started calling her mother, so that she started pressuring him. Victory was assured, and he bought her a five-carat emerald engagement ring at Cartier.
She accepted him, not knowing that he was still seeing de Havilland and some others, none of whom, of course, knew he was engaged. As if the women were not enough, he also began to declare his love for Joan Fontane, Olivia de Havilland’s sister. He urged her to break off the engagement and in return offered her marriage to him. She went mad and immediately told Olivia. Olivia left him immediately, but Joan was also accused of complicity and the already bad relationship between the sisters deteriorated.
Although he had a reputation for lavishing his conquests with jewels, cars and exotic holidays, the most precious thing to him was the time he had to invest in winning a woman. Ever since he discovered with Ginger Rogers that he could win a woman faster and cheaper if he could get her mother, he had been targeting moms, but since his female peers generally did not live with their moms, he had moved on to teenage girls.
So, at the age of 35, he fell in love with 15-year-old Faith Domergue and became engaged to her shortly after she turned 16. Of course, he didn’t tell her that he was also engaged to Ginger Rogers. She found out about his new engagement from others. On his way to the dentist, she stuffed all his presents in a bag. At that moment, his secretary told her that Howard had been in a car accident and wanted to see her.
She arrived at the hospital. He collapsed. He explained how he had bumped into her because they had had a fight before, but that he was now ready to forgive her. She listened calmly to the end of his monologue. Then she threw a gift bag on his bed and hissed, “Faith Domergue needs this more than I do!” She stuck her emerald engagement ring in it and she was gone. Howard was in complete shock. Years later, Noah said it was the only time he or anyone else had ever seen him cry. The next day, he had the car he had given her impounded and, as always, went straight back to work.
All this time, his 200 engineers were trying to build the Hughes D-2, which he intended to sell to the government. He developed it at his own expense, because they demanded a prototype before they would order it. From late 1940 and throughout early 1941, he worked 18 to 20 hours a day. When he was not supervising the production of the aircraft, he was editing the film The Outlaw.
Now his exhaustion was evident on both his face and his body. In the summer of 1941, he noticed a dropsy on his hands. He thought he was allergic to a chemical, but it turned out that he was suffering from the second stage of syphilis. Having been obsessed with hygiene all his life, he now had syphilis. He was lucky that penicillin came on the market that very year, but it only treated the physical signs of the disease, it had no effect on the mental ones. Thirty-six-year-old Howard had reached a fateful turning point.
He was eccentric before, but had no problems in society, although he was constantly washing his hands, didn’t like to shake hands and didn’t like to touch people, except of course women during sex. After his syphilis diagnosis, every object he came into contact with became a carrier of the bacillus. He looked at the hand offered to him by his interlocutor with visible reluctance. He feared the common germs as others fear the plague.
Even though he knew exactly that silicosis is transmitted by physical contact, Noah had to come all the way from Houston to help him clean the house. He threw away all the sheets, including those from the guest rooms that were not being used, and all the clothes. They stuffed them in sacks, tied them up, and burned them. He used to wear only the most expensive clothes, but now he bought a pair of double trousers from a department store. He sold his precious cars and started driving around in a five-year-old Chevrolet. Later, when he bought a Pontiac, he immediately sent it to Houston to have an air-conditioning system installed to purify the air.
Although penicillin was good for syphilis, he wanted arsphenamine from his doctor just in case, but it was abandoned because it was harmful. He developed a high temperature, stomach cramps, was dehydrated and disoriented, but refused to abandon the treatment.
During all this time he was struggling with his D-2 and, from 1942, with the HK-1 or Hercules, which he was building with Henry J. Kaiser. The Hercules had a better chance of ever coming to life because Kaiser was in charge of the project. When Howard was at the helm, his picketing made things go nowhere, and he usually chose someone else as his right-hand man who was at least unsuitable, if not incompetent.
He spent two years editing The Outlaw and lost his contract with the distributor. He decided to distribute it himself. The film was bad, but he was a better promoter. He artificially encouraged a boycott of the film to raise interest in it and actually got people into the cinemas. The critics tore him apart and he would have sued them if his lawyer had not convinced him that he had no grounds for doing so.
Nervous breakdown
He was a little comforted when his gaze landed on Ava Gardner, “the most beautiful animal in the world”, as she was called when she was not called the Taj Mahal of beauty. In 1941, when he met her, she was 18 years old. Yet, neither his money nor his fame interested her, she became the ideal trophy for him. He pursued her for the next two decades. In the end, they were together occasionally and he occasionally proposed to her, but she regularly said no. She was the last woman in his life with a will of her own, because now he found it increasingly difficult to tolerate rejection or disapproval.
One evening, he and Ava had a fierce argument about another man. When he snapped, he gave her a slap so hard it knocked her jaw off. He is not known to have hit a woman before. Ava grabbed an ashtray and pounded on it until it stopped moving. His blood was everywhere: on the walls and curtains, on the floor and on her. He was unconscious. She was sure she had killed him. She called the MGM studio. They quickly sent someone to clean the room. When she visited him in hospital, he asked her again. Again she said no.
She was never in love with him and told him so several times, but he just kept pushing on, even though he was also engaged to Faith all the time. She once saw him in a car with Ava, followed him in hers and made a scene in the middle of the road. They remained engaged, but in the spring of 1943, Ava was one of the guests watching the test flight of an aeroplane similar to the one he was going to build for the government.
Howard wanted to see how his plane would take off from the water. The take-off was successful, but the landing was not. The plane banked and the wing hit the water. The force of the impact was such that the plane began to disintegrate. One crew member drowned, one died because half his head was blown off, one spent three months in a plaster cast because he broke his back, and two escaped with minor injuries.
Howard was one of them. He paid for the medical expenses of everyone involved and made an extremely large donation to the widow of the late Richard Felt. He also paid so much for his plane to be raised from the seabed and restored.
Howard took it cheaply physically, but not mentally. After the accident, he became very tense. At night, he paced the hangar of Hughes Aircraft, talking to himself. He knew something was wrong with him, but he didn’t care. Instead, he was preparing to sell Elliott Roosevelt a D-2 that had never even flown. He decided that the best way to do it would be to have his spokesman take him to Hollywood and introduce him to the big stars.
At lunch, actress Faye Emerson happened to join them. She and Elliott took an instant liking to each other. After a week of gallivanting around New York, paid for by Howard, Elliott recommended to the government the purchase of 100 aircraft, renamed XF-11, at a total cost of $48 million. He did not ask whether Howard was capable of producing them. Elliott later married Faye. She was given in marriage by Howard’s spokesman.
Howard, however, could not get either the XF-11 or the Hercules into the air because his precision hampered the work process. His mental health continued to erode. He still returned home every night, but he and Faith no longer ate in the dining room, but in a small, barely furnished bedroom. He burned all the letters and photographs, including those of Mum, Dad, Elle, Billie Dove and Kate. His childhood photographs also went up in flames. He had previously inflated his past, but now he erased it and started to invent a new one.
At the same time, he started repeating sentences. The more he repeated one, the more stressed he became. Everyone around him knew he needed help, but he refused to listen to anyone. When he was almost out of control and became a hindrance in all areas, Noah asked him to call a doctor. He decided to take this drastic step when a phrase was repeated to him 33 times.
The doctor concludes that she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and needs immediate rest. He suffered a panic attack in the office and fainted. He woke up in a sweat in the evening. Now he was ready to give in. He informed Noah that he was leaving, but did not say where or for how long.
He disappeared for 11 months and wandered around the country. When he returned in September 1945, aged almost 40, he looked better, but now a different cloud was gathering. The war was over, America had a new President, and the government had cancelled the order for 100 XF-11s, which it still had not built. The engineers, when not hindered, did finish Hercules, but too late. The government had paid for three of the planes to be used during the war, and now they were useless to it.
The FBI was looking for something to charge him with for not building the planes it ordered. They wanted to accuse him of bribing Elliott Roosevelt or someone else for a contract for 100 XF-11s. Howard knew nothing about this when he finished The Outlaw in 1946. It was a mediocre film, it made a loss, but he quickly forgot about it, as he forgot about Feith, who disappeared before he disappeared the year before. Only then did she learn of the whole battalion of women he had by his side.
In 1946, Ava Gardner finally ended their casual relationship. She married and he consoled himself with Lana Turner until he met Jean Peters in the spring. He was attracted to her because she was sweet and cheerful, not hungry for success, and smart enough to be pleasant, but not so much so as to antagonise him. She seemed to him the most natural and virtuous creature he had ever met. During their first meeting he only kept silent and fed on her happiness and the enthusiasm that bubbled up from her.
Of course, she was one of the few friends who accompanied him when he test flew the new XF-11.He instructed the engineers to fill the tank with twice as much fuel as would be allowed for the test flight. Before landing, the wheels refused to come off. The aircraft banked hard to the left. Howard unbuckled his seat belt to see what was happening to the plane through the side window. He was unable to establish communication with the control tower.
Seeing nothing, he decided to land on a nearby golf course. The plane was rapidly losing altitude and now he was flying over the rooftops of the most expensive houses in Los Angeles. He braced himself for the inevitable collision. Before it did, it blew off the roof of a dentist’s house, scratched the wall of the bedroom of actress Rosemary DeCamp, who was changing in it at the time, with its wing, and finally broke through the wall of the house of Colonel Charles Meyers. The impact was so violent that one of the engines flew 180 metres into the air.
The plane and the Meyers home were engulfed in fire. The badly injured Howard managed to pull himself out of the wreckage, then became unconscious. He was pulled to safety by William Durkin, who happened to be nearby. For three hours, the fire was extinguished and no one could believe Howard was still alive.
His left lung wing collapsed and his heart shifted from the left side to the right, along with several broken bones. He was conscious when he was brought to hospital. “I’m Howard Hughes,” he told doctors before slipping into unconsciousness. He had to be given a transfusion, which he was later unhappy about because it transmitted germs.
The physical trauma caused him to break down again mentally. When he came to, he did not want to see anyone, not even Aunt Annette, even though she had travelled from far away. He became obsessed with money, which he never was. He developed an obsession with orange juice, thinking it would cure him, the only problem was that a man with gloves had to squeeze it out of fresh oranges in front of him.
The accident also resulted in allodynia, which caused him to feel pain all over his body at the slightest touch. The condition worsened over time and he started taking morphine. Slowly, he replaced it with codeine, which gave him indigestion. Nevertheless, he continued to take it for the rest of his life.
In hospital, Jean Peters lightened his mood. On her 20th birthday, he was going to propose to her, again with an emerald Cartier ring. He left the hospital and moved in with Cary Grant. The two friends spent a month ‘vegging and eating oatcakes’, as Grant reported.
In September, of course, Howard was already on the plane and a series of women passed through his bed again. Lana Turner was among them again. When one of his employees told him that she had syphilis, he immediately had himself tested. The result was negative, but he nevertheless repeated the cleaning of his home that he had carried out years before. He never wanted to see Turner again.
In this state, he became embroiled in political struggles. His company, TWA, found itself in a dispute with Pan Am, which until then had enjoyed primacy on international routes to Europe and the Middle East. Of course, it used its connections in the government to keep its position, and the government was already keen to punish Howard for alleged bribes. On top of that, TWA was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Howard declares war on the Senate. After great agony, the Senate persuaded him to appear before the Commission of Inquiry, but then Howard’s manipulativeness surfaced again: he accused those who had accused him of bribes of a conflict of interest, after having schemed to make sure they had indeed got a bit entangled. He emerged victorious from the war, and was even offered the chance to run for the presidency. He turned them down.
The path to the abyss
In October 1947, he and his staff watched the film in his home cinema. When it finished, they left the room, but he did not for the next four months. He ate only chocolates and drank milk. He stopped taking care of his personal hygiene. He used to do his washing in a bowl. Most of the time he was naked, probably because touching the textiles hurt him. There were boxes of tissues everywhere. He wrote long instructions to his subordinates on yellow business sheets. He also wrote down how they should behave around him. For example, no one was allowed to look him in the eye and no one was allowed to speak to him first.
He retreated completely into himself. The man he once was has become inaccessible. In the spring of 1948, he left the room without explanation, just as he had closed himself in. He bought a majority stake in RKO, the third largest film studio, and in one year made a loss of 57 million today. Noah pragmatically concluded that this was a cheap way to trick him into staying out of more lucrative businesses that were making more than $400,000 a day in profit. Howard’s empire flourished because Noah took care of it.
He spent two years living with Cary Grant, but now he wanted a home of his own. He chose Bungalow 19, which was part of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He began to retreat into it, only this time more slowly and less visibly, just as he had retreated into the home cinema. He hid for a day or two and then reappeared to fly and chase starlets.
He asked employees to hand him each item with a handkerchief to avoid contamination. He constantly told his doctor about his health problems. At the age of 44, he was aware that he was suffering from leprosy. He imagined, for example, that the FBI was listening in. He was not, but he was indeed being monitored for “unexplained and eccentric” behaviour.
His doctor has assessed that he is again showing signs of a nervous breakdown. He suggested medication, although he also made a note in his notes that Howard might be sinking forever into something much darker than a nervous breakdown. He warned him that he was losing control of himself, but this only angered him, even though Howard had noticed changes in himself. He could no longer remember his mother’s face. The doctor was right. Soon there was no trace of Howard. He had completely withdrawn from himself.
The last years of his life were reconstructed only after his death, based on his accounts and notes. He no longer allowed himself to be approached, but still demanded that his former public image be maintained in public. Soon, he refused to speak to his colleagues even on the telephone, and only wrote instructions. He gave up his former allies and hired new people, such as Bill Gay. The latter created his own circle, later known as the Mormon Mafia, because they were Mormons.
In 1952, Howard was invited by his aunt Annette to her daughter’s wedding. Noah encouraged him to go, but Howard told him that all they wanted was an expensive present, but they wouldn’t get it because then other people would expect presents. “It’s sad that the poor man has become so cynical and no longer shows any affection for his relatives, in fact, for anyone anymore,” Noah wrote back.
This year, Howard cut off almost all contact with his former life. It was the last time his Aunt Annette tried to get close to him, the last time he went to the doctor or the dentist, the last time he was in court and the last time he was photographed in public. He also ended his friendship with Cary Grant, once “my only friend” and one of the few people who never expected anything from Howard.
He started to delete alleged communists from the RKO studios. It was the time of the Cold War and the witch-hunt, except that he hated not only communists, but all those who were sympathetic to the left-wing political point of view. Soon it gave him the greatest pleasure to stir up strife. When he lost control of himself, he wanted control of his surroundings: people, businesses, the public and the government. On the rare occasions when he was threatened, he became stubborn and vindictive, and he was successful in this.
When he was told by the relevant ministry what to do with his sinking Hughes Aircraft company, he set up the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and transferred the company to it. This ensured that he would never be personally responsible for the company’s operations, and that the government would be criticised if it gave him the finger because the revenues were funding scientific research.
In 1954, he bought all the shares in RKO to get access to the Starlets. He made a list of teenage girls with their exact body measurements, descriptions of their appearance, personal preferences and those of their mothers. He didn’t want to admit to himself that he was getting old. Of course, he still had Jean Peters and Kathryn Grayson. When Jean got married, everyone thought he was going to break down, and he proposed to Kathryn that same night. The couple even made it to their wedding day, and it was on that day that Kathryn’s nephew drowned in the pool and, luckily for her, the wedding fell through.
When Jean Peters and Ava Gardner were divorcing, he got involved with both of them again. He told Ava that he knew she didn’t love him, but that in time she might learn to love him. She thought it over, said no and went back to her husband. Jean found his company comforting. She moved into the house next to his bungalow and lived a “quiet life”. Their relationship was peaceful until 1957, when everything went wrong.
At the end of 1956, Howard’s doctor called Noah and told him it was time to declare Howard unfit for duty. The request could be justified by his irrational business moves and a series of obsessions. For example, he employed one man just to open doors for him so he didn’t have to touch the handle. He completely excluded former loved ones from his life. He resented them for even trying to contact him.
Noah knew he should have been declared incapacitated, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He put the responsibility on the doctor. Before either of them could act, Howard found out about their plans at the 1957 launch. In his mind, it was a coup d’état. He was losing his mind, but he still had enough to resist.
He called Kathryn Grayson. Would you marry him? But she must marry him immediately. I need time to think, she told him when she came to see him. He slapped her. He called Jane Peters. Would she marry him? Yes. And he did, on 12 January 1957. So he put the responsibility for his health in her hands, and she was in complete control. The opportunity to help him had passed.
He and Jean moved briefly to Palm Springs, where they were accompanied on walks by armed security guards, but this life became too stressful for him and they returned to their bungalow, although Howard promised his wife that they would live together.
By the summer, Hughes Tool was on the brink of financial collapse because Howard had pulled out $400 million to build planes for TWA. Noah wanted to talk to him. When he arrived, Howard evaded him and finally called him to say that they couldn’t meet because he was under CIA surveillance. That in fact they were not allowed to talk about the company’s business at all.
After 32 years of working for Howard, during which he never took more than a week’s holiday a year, 68-year-old Noah had had enough. He was hoping to retire, and Howard was sending him back to Houston to sort things out. As a condition, Noah demanded that Howard fulfil his long-standing promise to turn his salary into a profit share. Even though Howard was a multimillionaire because of Noah, he said no. He moaned that he was forcing him to do something he didn’t want to do, and that he felt as if a gun had been put to his head.
Noah burst. He gave his answer. Howard couldn’t believe it. “Jesus, you’re not serious, are you, Noah? I don’t exist without you,” he told him. But this time he went too far. Noah was gone, and with him, Howard’s last chance to dig himself out of the quicksand he was sinking into. He had fallen prey to the hyenas.
Howard reacted to the loss as he always does – he erased Noah from his life. As soon as he hung up the phone, he ordered the locks on all the office doors to be changed. In the end, Noah had to sue him to get his hands on the personal belongings he kept in his desk.
Drugged and addicted
Now there was no one left to stand up to Howard. He was increasingly afraid of light and fresh air, both of which were thought to carry germs. He preferred to be alone in the dark cinemas of his home. He ate only chocolates and American nuts and drank milk. He no longer dined with Jean and refused to see his other girls.
He lost so much weight that he looked like a skeleton. He sat on the toilet for more than 24 hours to do the needful. He was constantly cleaning. It took two hours, 84 handkerchiefs and a pot of boiling water to clean the telephone wire. By 1959 he was present and at least partially functional on the telephone for two hours a day.
He and Jean moved into their own home and enjoyed the illusion of a family idyll. He allowed her to sleep on his side of the double bed, and she accepted that his secretaries, who hardly left the room, were sitting at her feet. They watched television together. Once he didn’t want it because he was afraid of the radiation, but when Jean forced it, he didn’t turn it off.
At the end of 1961, he started dissolving codeine in water and injecting it into his muscles, while his new doctor prescribed Valium for sleep. After being forced out of his own company, TWA, a few years earlier, did extremely well and he became America’s first trillionaire. He was very proud of this from behind the scenes, while Robert Maheu represented him in public. Because he was earning so well, he wanted to pay off his debts early in order to regain control of the company, but he was not allowed to. Out of stubbornness, he sold his shares and made a fortune, but he would have had to pay high taxes. To avoid them, he moved to Boston.
He and Jeanne were now just roommates in the same bedroom. He didn’t even tell her that he was going to move or where, let alone invite her to come with him. Wrapped in a blanket, he left without saying goodbye to her. Jean finally found him at the Ritz-Carlton and fought her way through his assistants to his room. He refused to let her in because she might have infected him with germs. She explained to him in front of the closed door that she was leaving, and he told her to think again. He promised her a life together again, but this time she just turned and walked away without even being able to look him in the eye.
Since he did not allow anyone to see him in the state he was in, he was probably still aware of what was happening to him. Robert Maheu never saw him in person, although he represented him in public.
Suddenly, Howard remembered that he wanted to move to Las Vegas because he imagined it as a Monte Carlo, which it really wasn’t at the time. After staying in the hotel for a few weeks, he bought it because he was asked to leave the suite because they needed it for guests who had booked it earlier. Over the next few years, he bought every hotel, casino or local television station he could get his hands on and became the biggest employer in the State of Nevada. Because he was so obsessive in acquiring previously competing hotels and casinos, the government began to investigate him for possible violations of antitrust law.
Shopping awakened his competitive spirit, and it revitalised him. He used significantly less codeine than before and was present for longer. This lasted until April 1968, when he learned that a nuclear test was about to be carried out on US soil near Las Vegas. He wrote long letters to Robert Maheu instructing him to do everything possible to prevent this. His request even reached President Lyndon B. Johnson. In reply, he advised Maheu to keep Howard’s demands private, so as not to appear unbalanced in public.
Howard has collapsed in on himself again. He was now taking six times more codeine than before and wanted more political influence, but he backed the wrong horse and lost. Around 1970 he received a letter from Jean informing him that she was divorcing him. They had not had physical contact for nine years. He did not reply to her. He took his frustration out on Maheu, who was the one on duty to blame for everything, but was also the only one who started to resist him.
At the same time, power struggles between Howard’s assistants, especially between Gay and Maheu, were heated. Howard had no control over his finances, and the appetites of those around him were great. In the end, Maheu authorised a bribe worth four million dollars without his permission. Howard sacked him, Maheu sued him, and the opportunistic Bill Gay, whom Howard disliked, took over the reins of Howard’s empire.
Howard now weighs less than 50 kilograms. His hair was grey and long. Untrimmed fingernails wrapped around his fingers, and underneath were mushrooms. His teeth were rotten and his skin was covered with sores and scabs. He had the eyesight of an old man, and although he was 65 years old, he could hardly hear anymore. Nevertheless, he was in good condition, given that he had to be carried everywhere if he went anywhere, and he refused to drink, which caused his liver to fail.
He came back to life a little when Clifford Irving claimed to have written his autobiography with him. Howard chose seven media representatives and made a statement in a telephone conference. That was the last time he communicated with the media.
The last four years have been marked by its manipulation. With a number of lawsuits hanging over his head, including TWA and Maheu’s, he agreed that the best thing to do was to flee the country. Gay moved him to the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Vancouver, Canada, and back to Nicaragua. He spent his days on a hospital bed that had been moved to each of the hotel suites, constantly watching television.
While living as a nomad, Bill Gay and his co-conspirators remembered that they had sold Hughes Tool and used the profit to pay off the compensation they expected to receive for selling their shares in TWA. Howard had never really been interested in business, but Howard Tools had always financed all his activities and, above all, it was the one constant that had run through his life. It tied him to his parents, Houston, his first wife Ella, Hollywood and the glory days of flying, and now, under pressure from Guy, he agreed to give it up. His only condition was to be nice to his employees. At first, potential buyers didn’t even believe the company was for sale, but it was.
Meanwhile, Nicaragua is struck by an earthquake. He did not stir, probably because his system was too full of sedatives. When Gay decided to be moved again, he was unable to resist. His head was covered to prevent him seeing the devastation and he was taken to London via Florida. They were assisted by an engineer, Jack Real, Howard’s professional adviser since 1957, who by 1972 had become the closest thing Howard had to a friend.
In London, Gay’s brother-in-law took charge of Howard’s health. He ordered opiates in large quantities from pharmaceutical companies to keep Howard as heavily intoxicated as possible. Nevertheless, somewhere deep down inside, he was still alive. When the court ruled in his favour in the dispute between TWA and him, he laughed and celebrated, Jack Real reported. It was then that Howard, as they talked, wanted to experience the intoxication of his great love once more: he wanted to fly.
Gay was strongly against. He preferred the stunned and addicted Howard, vegetating in his room. Real insisted, and this time Howard did too. Real bought him the clothes he used to wear, and Howard was bubbling over with excitement. He even had a chicken sandwich made for him the year before.
He immediately undressed in the pilot’s seat because the touch of the fabric must have hurt him. The pilots next to him were a bit uncomfortable at first, but then became scared when Howard, after a decade of vegetating, tried to take off for the umpteenth time and finally got them up in the air, even though his eyesight was already very poor. Nevertheless, they repeated the trip several more times in the following weeks. Each time, Howard was transformed from a distant old man into a joyful young man.
The happy period ended with a fall in the bathroom, a broken hip and surgery. Now more addicted to opiates than ever, he appointed Jack Real to head his empire. Gay did everything he could to stop Real getting access to Howard, who slowly but steadily withered away. He was flown to Acapulco, where he would have easier access to drugs and be kept in a state of total dependence, and finally put on a plane to be flown to a hospital in his native Houston. He died on board the plane on 5 April 1976, aged 70. At the morgue, the FBI reportedly took his fingerprints because he was no longer identifiable by appearance alone.
His body was laid in the grave of his parents and the slaughter for his inheritance began. As he had been unresponsive in his last years, the court ruled that he had left no will, so Aunt Annette, cousins and cousins inherit. The Mormon Mafia, led by Bill Guy, produced Howard’s will, which he supposedly wrote in 1967, and was extremely generous to them. After seven months of litigation, experts concluded that it was forged, as were hundreds of wills submitted by others. Nevertheless, it took William Lummis, Aunt Annette’s son, a few more years to oust the Mormon Mafia from the Howard businesses, gain full control of the finances and expose their financial fraud.
