Those of you that know me well, know that I had a relationship with Howard Hughes — not a personal relationship, but one in which he was influential in a project I was involved in a number of years ago.
Howard Hughes has been called many things — gifted, eccentric, crazy, and reckless, among others. His life was, to say the least, different. He was brilliant — and a billionaire. He made his fortune in the movies and aviation, but his entire life consisted of bizarre personal habits and activities.
Howard Robert Hughes, Jr. was born in a suburb of Houston Texas in 1905. His father was an entrepreneurial oil baron — his mother was very domineering. His father pioneered a revolutionary oil drill-bit and made a fortune with his Hughes Tool Company. His mother was hung up on illnesses and she constantly feared sickness for Howard. She rushed him to the doctor at the slightest hint of illness. If residents in their neighborhood suffered from bouts of colds or flu, she would bundle Howard off to a safe distance until the aliments had passed. Probably for this reason, Howard would be possessed by a fear of germs all of his life.
When Howard was 14, he took his first flying lessons — that triggered his lifelong love affair with aviation. He showed an interest, and proficiency, in math and engineering and briefly attended classes at Caltech in California and Rice University in Texas. His parents’ unexpected deaths in the early 1920s left him rich — and alone — before his 20th birthday.
Even though Howard was extremely gifted with engineering skills, his true dream was to produce movies in Hollywood. He married a young woman named Ella Rice and the couple moved to Los Angeles.
Even though he had a lot of money and enthusiasm, that didn’t guarantee success in the movie business. His first film production, Swell Hogan, was so bad it was never released, even though he invested $60,000 in the film. His next two films, Everybody’s Acting and Two Arabian Knights, saw moderate success and that led to his first epic production, Hells Angels in 1930. Hell’s Angels cost nearly $4 million — it was by far the most expensive movie that had been made up to that time. The movie was loaded with Hughes’s favorite subject — airplanes. Although his movie making cost a lot of money, there was also another cost — his wife divorced him because she couldn’t deal with his tendency to work up to 36 straight hours at a time and she felt completely left out of his life.
Hughes was a tall and handsome Texan and after his divorce he spent time with lots of Hollywood beauties. He eventually married actress Jean Peters — they were divorced in 1971.
Howard Hughes was devoted to aviation. Despite being a self-educated pilot and engineer, he designed and built record-setting airplanes. His H-1 racer broke the airspeed barrier of 352 miles per hour in 1935, with Hughes at the controls. He set the transcontinental speed record — flying from Los Angeles to New York City in just under six and a half hours. He was never able to secure a military contract to build his H-1 Racer, but there’s a lot of evidence that the Japanese Zero, German Focke-Wulf and the American Hellcat fighter planes were heavily influenced by the Racer’s design.
Hughes also designed the XF-11 spy plane and the U.S. Army Forces ordered 100 of them, but the order was canceled when the war ended. The very first test flight of the XF-11 prototype crashed with Howard at the controls, destroying several homes in the Beverly Hills area and seriously injuring Hughes. He suffered a broken collarbone, numerous fractured ribs, a collapsed lung, and multiple third-degree burns — he was bedridden for five weeks.
He proposed another contribution to the World War II effort — the Hughes Hercules H-4 cargo plane. With a wingspan of more than 300 feet and a height of nearly 80 feet, the eight-engine seaplane would be the largest ever built. The plane became known as the “Spruce Goose,” but the H-4 was actually built from birch wood because metal was extremely hard to get during the war. The Hercules was cancelled when the war ended, but Hughes took it out for a test flight in November of 1947. The huge “flying boat” lifted off for nearly a mile, cruising at 135 miles an hour a mere 70 feet above the waters of Long Beach, California. It was the only time the Spruce Goose ever flew.
During his lifetime, Hughes owned Trans World Airlines (TWA) and RKO, a prominent movie studio. But about the time he reached age 60, he started to shun his businesses and live in luxurious hotels in America, Central America, and the Caribbean. He usually took the top-floor penthouse and he would often buy the hotel.
Around this time, his germ phobia — along with a longtime addiction to codeine and other painkillers — led him to bizarre habits and rituals. His diet consisted mostly of fresh whole milk, chocolate bars with almonds and pecans and bottled water. He refused to touch anything unless he used a tissue as barrier between his hand and the object.He also wouldn’t meet with anyone except his closest aides. That made it all the more remarkable that he was willing to discuss, and participate in, our project. By 1970, his health had deteriorated to the point that he weighed less than 100 pounds. Howard Hughes was 6’ 4’’ tall. When he died of kidney failure, in April 1976, he was aboard a private plane en route to his hometown of Houston.
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