There is a movie coming up that might be great to see: The Aviator, about the life and work of Howard Hughes. Since Hughes is played by Leonardo DiCaprio and it comes from Hollywood, I thought I’d better tell you some truth about that extraordinary man, so you don’t get spoiled by the movie. If you want to be excited about extraordinary accomplishments, read the first part. If you want to get insight into the life of a truly eccentric billionaire, fast forward to the second part.
HOWARD HUGHES (1905-1976)
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"I am by nature a perfectionist, and I seem
to have trouble allowing anything to go through in a half-perfect
condition. So if I made any mistake it was in working too hard and in
doing too much of it with my own hands." |
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (1905-1976) was arguably the
most secretive and self-destructive man ever to win fame in Southern
California’s two glamour industries --- movies and aviation. Hughes was
certainly an American original, and to many he represented the ultimate
unconventional Californian.
The peaks and valleys of his life were startling. As an
aviator, he once held every speed record of consequence and was hailed as the
world’s greatest flyer, "a second Lindbergh." At various points in
his life he owned an international airline, two regional airlines, an aircraft
company, a major motion picture studio, mining properties, a tool company,
gambling casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, a medical research institute, and a
vast amount of real estate; he had built and flown the world’s largest
airplane; he had produced and directed "Hell's Angels," a Hollywood
film classic.
Yet by the time he died in 1976, under circumstances
that can only be described as bizarre, he had become a mentally ill recluse,
wasted in body, incoherent in thought, alone in the world except for his doctors
and bodyguards. He had squandered millions and brought famous companies to the
financial brink. For much of his life, he seemed larger than life, but his end
could not have been sadder.
Hughes was born in Houston, Texas, the son of a
flamboyant oil wildcatter, Howard Hughes Sr. Four years after Hughes Jr.’s
birth, his father patented a rotary drill bit with 166 cutting edges that
penetrated thick rock, revolutionizing oil drilling worldwide. Hughes Sr. and a
partner formed what would become the Hughes Tool Company and began leasing the
rotary bits to drillers for as much as $30,000 per well. They also bought up
patents for other rock bits and devised new drills for the oil industry. The
Hughes family was now wealthy.
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He was raised by an obsessive mother with
neurotic strange cleaning rituals, including daily dousings in mineral
oil. He was also told to stay away from the other, germ-ridden children.
Howard had no choice than to become different. His mother died when he was
16.
Hughes Jr. grew up an indifferent student with a liking for mathematics, flying, and things mechanical (he once built a motorcycle from parts taken from his father’s steam engine). Nevertheless, during school he was better in golf than classwork. He dropped out of Rice Institute in Houston and, through his father’s influence, audited math and engineering classes at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. He never finished highschool formally. |
Upon his father’s death in
1924, the 18-year-old Hughes inherited an estate valued at almost $900,000,
including 75% of Hughes Tool Company, whose control he assumed a year later. As
Otto Friedrich writes in City of Nets, a book about Hollywood in
the1940s: "So it was the Hughes Tool Company’s control of an
indispensable oil drilling bit that enabled Howard Hughes to imagine himself one
of the kings of Hollywood. No matter what
he did, no matter how much money he wasted, the Hughes drilling bit would always
pay his bills, would always protect him from harm."
Although shy and retiring, Hughes became enamored with
the motion picture industry and moved to Los Angeles in 1925. The city was
already the world capital of film production. Hughes financed three films of
varying quality (one of them won an Academy Award for director Lewis Milestone)
before undertaking an epic movie about Royal Air Force fighter pilots in World
War I. The film was "Hell’s Angels," which Hughes came to direct as
well as produce.
Undeterred by the cost, he acquired the largest private
air force in the world -– 87 vintage Spads, Fokkers and Sopwith Camels -–
for $560,000, then spent another $400,000 to house and maintain them. He even
bought a dirigible to be burned in the film. Hughes personally directed the
aerial combat scenes over Mines Field (what is now LAX). Three stunt pilots died
in crashes during the filming; Hughes also crashed in his scout plane and was
pulled unconscious from the wreckage, his cheekbone crushed. With expenses
already exceeding $2 million, Hughes was forced to re-shoot large segments of
the film with dialogue to accommodate the advent of talking pictures.
| And because the female star, Greta Nissen, spoke
with a thick and inappropriate Norwegian accent, Hughes cast about for a
replacement, finally deciding on a bit actress with platinum blonde hair
named Harlean Carpenter, also known as Jean Harlow, the first Hollywood
"Blond Bombshell."
The film cost Hughes $3.8 million, a record for the time, and the crew had used up 1000 kilometers of film. Released in 1930, "Hell’s Angels" was a runaway success and set box office records, but it never recovered its costs. ("Hell’s Angels" is now regarded as a Hollywood classic. Among the other films made by Hughes, two receive high marks from critics -- "The Front Page" and "Scarface." His most sensational film, "The Outlaw," starring Jane Russell, was described as "more to be pitied than censored.") In their 1979 book, Empire: the Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes, Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele summarize the typical Hughes movie as "rich in entertainment, low on philosophy and message, packed with sex and action." |
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A boyish Hollywood legend, these were halcyon years for
Howard Hughes. As Otto Friedrich writes in City of Nets: "No
photographic record of that period would be complete without a picture of the
tall, scarred and inarticulate millionaire ambling into some neon-lit nightclub,
outfitted in Hollywood’s black-tie uniform and displaying a beautiful blonde
on his elbow." Hughes kept company with such stars as Ava Gardner,
Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Terry Moore and Lana Turner, who once
described him as "likable enough but not especially stimulating." (He
eventually married, and divorced, actress Jean Peters.)
He also built the Texas Theater, the movie house in the
Oak Cliff Section of Dallas in which Lee Harvey Oswald, another famous Texan,
was arrested in the 1963. Some people still like to link Hughes to the CIA. A
rumour says that for two month he hired as staff hand at American Airlines,
carrying luggage for 250 Dollars a week.
Throughout his Hollywood years, Hughes maintained his
passion for flying. Like the movies, aviation was booming in Southern
California, making the region a center for new technology. Hughes was in the
thick of it, but unlike other aircraft entrepreneurs, he preferred spending his
time in a cockpit rather than a boardroom.
In 1934 he won his first speed title flying a converted
Boeing pursuit plane 185 miles per hour. He and a young Caltech engineer, Dick
Palmer, then built a plane called the H-1 (featuring a unique retractable
landing gear) which Hughes piloted to a new speed record of 352 mph near Santa
Ana, Calif. This was in 1935, the year that Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft
Company as a division within Hughes Tool Company, operating out of a hangar in
Burbank, Calif.
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the infamous H1 |
In 1937 he flew from L.A. to Newark, N. J., in 7 hours and 28 minutes, a new coast-to-coast record. That same year he won the Harmon International Trophy as the world’s outstanding aviator and was honored by President Roosevelt in the White House. The following year, 1938, he set an around-the-world record of 3 days, 19 hours and 17 minutes; in the process he cut Charles Lindbergh’s New York-to-Paris record in half. (Radio equipment developed by Hughes Aircraft engineers for this flight would later serve as an entry into the electronics field.) Upon his return, Hughes was given a ticker tape parade down Broadway in New York City. He was at the height of his popularity. |
The years of World War II were frustrating years for
Hughes, who hoped to transform Hughes Aircraft into a major airplane
manufacturer after winning government contracts for two experimental aircraft.
All around him, Southern California aircraft manufacturers were producing fleets
of new planes. As it turned out, Hughes Aircraft produced armaments, but not a
single plane for the war effort.
One contract was for a photo-reconnaissance plane, a
prototype of which (the XF-11) crashed in Beverly Hills shortly after the war
during a test flight with Hughes at the controls, almost killing him. The other
contract was for a plane with which Hughes is forever linked in the public mind
-- a troop and cargo carrier made of wood and known by various names (the H-4
Hercules, the Hughes Flying Boat, the "flying lumberyard"), but most
popularly as the "Spruce Goose."
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the even better known H4 "Spruce Goose" |
When Howard Hughes thought he thought big and he
never hesitated to take new directions. Conceived when German U-boats were
ravaging Allied shipping in the Atlantic, the "Spruce Goose" was
built primarily of birch -- not spruce -– in response to a wartime metal
shortage. It had eight engines and the capacity to carry 700 troops or a
load of 60 tons. In terms of wingspan (320 feet, which is longer than a
football field) and weight (400,000 pounds) it is still the largest plane
ever built. The war ended before it was completed. But it was flown
-- once -- in Long Beach Harbor on Nov. 2, 1947.
With Hughes at the controls, the Flying Boat achieved a top speed of 80 mph, lifted 70 feet off the water, and flew a mile in less than a minute before making a perfect landing. |
The plane was then towed to a Terminal Island dry-dock,
cocooned inside a giant hangar, and never seen again by the public during
Hughes’ lifetime. Hughes’ Summa Corporation spent close to a million dollars
a year for the lease and maintenance. After his death, the Flying Boat was put
on exhibit in Long Beach Harbor beside the Queen Mary; it has since been moved
to McMinnville, Ore., for display in an aircraft museum.
Other visionary gambits of Hughes included ordering
hundreds of technicians and scientists to build Arthur C. Clarke’s dream of
geostationary satellites via which people all over the world could communicate.
At the time such a satellite would have been as big as a small city and would
have required millions of radio tubes. It needed the transistor to build
workable satellites and the energy and prowess of Howard Hughes to push
scientists to come up with ideas.
"It was as if he was missing the gene for
corporate success," write Bartlett and Steele in their biography of Hughes.
In 1948, he bought a controlling interest in RKO Radio Pictures, which he almost
brought to ruin with his aberrant management style. He did much the same with
Trans World Airlines (TWA), whose controlling interest he bought in 1939.
Although he did much to transform TWA into a major international carrier, his
secretive ways and quixotic decisions nearly plunged the airline into
bankruptcy. In 1966 he was forced to sell his TWA shares after losing a lawsuit
that charged him with illegally using the airline to finance other investments.
The sale netted Hughes over half a billion dollars. To many, it seemed more like
a victory than a defeat. During the Sixties and early Seventies the various
Hughes corporations also supplied to the US-military as contractors, netting in
vast sums.
That same year, 1966, Hughes moved into the Desert Inn
Hotel in Las Vegas, which he proceeded to buy (rather than be evicted), along
with four other Las Vegas casinos, a radio station, and other Nevada properties.
He hired an ex-FBI agent, Robert Maheu, to protect his privacy and keep him out
of court, even when his own legal interests were at stake. This Robert Maheu had
directed a plot to kill Fidel Castro during his time in the secret services.
Hughes also began to conduct all his business affairs via middlemen, usually
mormons, the only people he considered clean enough to be around him at times.
He had become "the hermit gambling entrepreneur of Las Vegas."
Even before moving to Nevada, while he was living at
the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hughes had exhibited alarming behavior. In 1958, he
apparently suffered a second mental breakdown, the first having occurred in
1944. Of his days at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which he bought so he would not be
in contact with other people, Bartlett and Steele write: "Hughes spent
almost all his time sitting naked in [his white leather chair] in the center of
the living room – an area he called the ‘germ free zone’ – his long legs
stretched out on the matching ottoman facing a movie screen, watching one motion
picture after another." He mainly watched one local station, that broadcast
old movies. When the station started to bring alternative programming in the wee
hours, he bought the station so he could direct the programming.
The same pattern was repeated in Las Vegas, made worse
by a drug habit that included both codeine and Valium. (The codeine had first
been prescribed to alleviate pain from injuries incurred in the XF-11 plane
crash years earlier.) The remaining people to meet him in person, which is
mainly his own entourage, were ordered to wear white cotton gloves and masks and
had to perform various cleaning rituals before they entered his rooms.
Although Hughes managed to attend to business and had
many periods of lucidity (he held a telephone conference call with reporters in
1972 to repudiate a book by Clifford Irving purporting to be Hughes’ taped
reminiscences), his physical health had turned precarious. A doctor who examined
him in 1973 likened his condition to prisoners he had seen in Japanese prison
camps during World War II. That same year, ironically, Hughes was inducted into
the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio. He was represented by a member of his
1938 around-the-world flight crew. One of the inductees defended Hughes, calling
him "a modest, retiring, lonely genius, often misunderstood, sometimes
misrepresented and libeled by malicious associates and greedy little men."
In the final chapter of his life, Hughes left Las Vegas
for the Bahamas where he stayed until he moved to Mexico, reportedly to have
greater access to codeine.
(X-rays taken during the Hughes autopsy show fragments
of hypodermic needles broken off in his arms.) He died of apparent heart failure
on an airplane carrying him from Acapulco to a hospital in Houston. He was 70
years old and weighed 90 pounds at 6’4”. He left estimated $2 billion.
"Such was the mystery and power surrounding his
life that when he was pronounced dead on arrival at Methodist Hospital in
Houston, Texas, on April 5, 1976, his fingerprints were lifted by a technician
from the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office and forwarded to the Federal
Bureau of Investigation in Washington," write Bartlett and Steele.
"Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon, for federal tax purposes,
wanted to be sure that the dead man was indeed Howard Hughes. After comparing
the fingerprints with those taken from Hughes in 1942, the FBI confirmed the
identity." He had not been seen publicly or photographed for 20 years.
Howard Hughes’ greatest legacy to Southern California
is the family of Hughes companies founded during his lifetime. These include
Hughes Aircraft Co. (1935) and Hughes Space and Communications Co. (1961), a
unit of Hughes Electronics Corp. Based in Westchester, Calif., Hughes Space and
Communications is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial satellites,
the designer and builder of the world’s first synchronous communications
satellite, Syncom, and the producer of nearly 40% of the satellites now in
commercial service. Hughes Electronics is owned by General Motors. Hughes
Aircraft merged with Raytheon Company in 1998 and is now called Raytheon Systems
Co. Prior to the merger, Hughes Aircraft was a world leader in high technology
systems for scientific, military and global applications.
All the technological prowess of these Hughes companies would almost certainly have pleased their founder, who always had a passion for building things.
There is a lot of good further reading on the man around, if I got you interested. I know some other people that would also deserve an essay like this. Maybe I'll start a series. Expect to hear about Buckminster R. Fuller, Hagbard Celine, Douglas Adams and others here in the future.
