HUGHES, HOWARD 19O5-1975

Adventurer, aviator, celebrity

Legend

Howard Hughes led a remarkable and bizarre life. There is as much legend to his life as there is reality, which leads to his larger-than-life image. From Hughes's compulsive worries about germs to his links to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, he has been idolized, trivialized, and despised all at one point or another. Obviously there is going to be much mystique surrounding a man who purportedly was seeing Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant while living with Katharine Hepburn and dating Bette Davis. In the 1930s, however, Hughes truly was an American hero and an innovator in the aviation field. In this decade Hughes's internal demons did not prevent him from achieving many remarkable feats.

Background

Hughes was born in Humble, Texas, on 24 September 1905. His father was the outlaw oil wildcatter Howard Robard Hughes and his mother was a neurotic heiress, Allene Gano. The elder Hughes built up a large fortune by making oil drill bits and founding the Hughes Tool Company. Hughes's parents were extremely overprotective and knew how to manipulate the boy. Hughes spent his childhood being shuffled from one private school to another. He often engaged in strenuous physical activity as a boy and excelled in mathematics, physics, and golf. Tragedy struck Hughes early when both his parents died at an early age, his mother while in surgery and his father of a heart attack. Thus, at age eighteen, Hughes inherited a million dollars and his father's empire. To prove that he was old enough to run his father's business, Hughes married Houston socialite Ella Rice in 1924. They had a terrible marriage due to his infidelities and the fact that he beat her.

Motion Pictures

In the early 1920s Hughes entered the world of motion pictures through his uncle, Rupert Hughes, the famous author and movie producer. Hughes, in his compulsive manner, learned every aspect of the motion picture business, including operating cameras, lighting, and editing. The public was generally receptive to Hughes's movies, although since he was an outsider the big movie companies such as M-G-M and Paramount hated him, also due in part to his anti-Semitism. The movie Hells Angels made Hughes the most famous movie producer in the United States. It was a colossal picture about aerial death and dogfighting in World War I. After years of fighting censors over the sexual nature of his films and dealing with the large motion picture companies, Hughes abandoned filmmaking in 1932.

Empire

One of Hughes's greatest moves was to hire a young accountant named Noah Dietrich to run the Hughes Tool Company. Dietrich turned Hughes's $1 million inheritance into a $75 million empire between 1925 and 1930. Dietrich's success with the company allowed Hughes to indulge in other pursuits, including aviation and attempting to break the world land-speed record.

H-l Racer

Hughes became interested in aviation while filming Hell's Angels. Often, when his hired stunt pilots would refuse to risk death for the movie, Hughes would take a plane up himself and do the maneuver. In the early 1930s Hughes hired two men, Richard Palmer and Glenn Odekirk, who helped him realize his dream of breaking the airspeed record. The men began in 1934 to build a plane that would be the fastest in the world and possibly interest the army. By 10 August 1935 the new plane, known as the Hughes 1-B racer, or the H-l , was completed. The plane was completely aerodynamic, and each screw on the plane's surface was tightened so that the slot was exactly in line with the airstream. It was a dream plane, and Hughes decided to go for the record immediately.

Setting Records

Hughes tried for the record on 13 August 1935, ominously a Friday the thirteenth, as Amelia Earhart officially flew cover to make sure he did not break the rules. Hughes set the record by flying 352.388 miles per hour, crushing the old record set by France's Caudron racer. Hughes's next goal was to fly the H-l nonstop across America. He had Palmer and Odekirk redesign the plane and add new fuel tanks, navigational equipment, and oxygen. On 19 January 1937 Hughes left for New York. He left at 2:14 A.M. and traveled eastward using oxygen and riding the airstream at incredible speeds. The plane touched down in Newark seven hours and twenty-eight minutes later. On the flight Hughes averaged 327.1 miles per hour, and his record stood until 1946. Hughes won the Harmon International Trophy for best aviator of the year in 1937 from President Roosevelt at the White House and decided to attempt an around the-world record.

America's Idol

Hughes left for Paris from New York on 10 July 1938. He made it to Paris in half the time it had taken Charles Lindbergh. He landed in Moscow the next morning and prepared for the treacherous flight over Siberia. With his wings iced over and running out of fuel, Hughes made it to Alaska in one piece. He flew on to New York, completing his trip in which he flew 14,716 miles in three days, nineteen hours, and eight minutes. Immense crowds greeted Hughes in New York City as he led a tickertape parade, and he instantly became an American hero of a type that others could only portray on film.

Legacy

After the world flight Hughes was worth approximately $60 million. He worried, however, that Hughes Aircraft was being outpaced by every other aircraft company. In 1938 he took interest in TWA and began buying stock, eventually acquiring 78 percent of the company. His flight around the world paved the way for the infant commercial airlines, and TWA became one of the first of this kind. Hughes's interest in aircraft design also set the standard for many others to follow. Engineers borrowed from his thinking to improve many planes.

Downfall

Hughes had a lifelong passion for movies, planes, and beautiful women. He fulfilled his nihilistic pleasures and later in life became a pitiful drug addict and recluse, At the time of his death, Hughes's estate was valued at over $650 million. In the 1980s, however, the empire was destroyed as GM bought Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Tool Company was sold. One cannot view Hughes without seeing his seedier side, but in the 1930s he was a pioneer and an American hero. Few would have believed that Howard Hughes was destined for such a tragic life.

Sources:

Timothy Foote, "A Silver Speedster from the 1930s Evokes the Golden Age of Flight, a Pair of World-Class Speed Records and the Early Triumphs of Howard Hughes' Ultimately Tragic Life" Smithsonian, 25 (February 1995);

Charles Higham, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: Putnam, 1993).

HUGHES, HOWARD 1905-1976

Tycoon

The Eccentric Eclectic

Over his lifetime billionaire Howard Hughes pursued a variety of interests: he was a test pilot, a manufacturer of aircraft, a longtime majority owner of Trans-World Airlines (TWA), a movie producer, a hotelier, and a real-estate developer. He is best remembered, however, for his increasingly bizarre behavior beginning in the mid 1950s, when he completely dropped out of society. His desire to avoid all publicity and his proclivity for seclusion only heightened the public's interest in Hughes, his whereabouts, and his activities.

Of Tools and Movies

Howard Hughes was born in Houston in 1905. His father had pioneered drilling equipment for the oil industry and built up a successful firm, Hughes Tool Company. When his father died in 1924, Hughes, a freshman at California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), dropped out of school to run the inherited tool firm. After soon discovering that Hughes Tool did not seem to need his leadership, the twenty-one-year-old Hughes moved to Hollywood to make movies. In the 1930s and 1940s he made such notable films as Hell's Angels (the most expensive movie made until 1941), Scarf ace (which featured Hughes's discovery Jean Harlow as the female lead), and The Outlaw (which Hughes also directed and which introduced Jane Russell). His continuing interest in the movie industry led him to purchase a controlling interest in RKO Pictures Corporation in 1948.

Of Airplanes

Meanwhile, Hughes formed an aviation company that ultimately became Hughes Aircraft. Besides owning the firm, Hughes tested many of the aircraft himself. Over the course of the 1930s he established several speed and endurance records. In September 1935 he set a speed record of 352 miles per hour in a plane of his own design. Three years later he circled the earth in record time, ninety-one hours. But his most famous airplane was the all-wooden, eight-engine Spruce Goose, intended to carry up to 750 passengers. Hughes flew this giant on its maiden and only flight in 1947. While the industrialist was testing planes or making movies, Hughes Aircraft grew to be a major manufacturer of aircraft. It experienced great expansion during World War II, and by 1979 it was the nation's sixth largest defense contractor. Hughes's interest in airplanes also led to his involvement in the airline business—in 1939 he purchased control of TWA; over time he increased his interest in the company to 78 percent. He sold his TWA stock in 1966 for $546.5 million.

Of Seclusion and Controversy

By the time Hughes divested himself of TWA, he had not been seen in public for years. During the 1960s he became quite active in Las Vegas real estate and the gambling industry. He purchased, for example, the Desert Inn, the Sands Hotel, and the Frontier as well as a Las Vegas radio station and Alamo Airways. These new properties, combined with Hughes Tool, Hughes Aircraft, and real-estate holdings in Arizona and California, gave Hughes an estimated net worth of $1 billion at the end of the decade. Increasing interest in the recluse led to scandal. In 1971 writer Clifford Irving claimed to have the memoirs of Hughes. Irving said he and Hughes had collaborated on the autobiography. Hughes denied the story, and in 1972 the manuscript was discovered to be a forgery. In the last years of his life the wealthy hermit grew stranger and stranger. Seen only by a few male aides, he shuttled in secrecy between quarters in luxury hotels in Las Vegas, Mexico, the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Canada, and England. Apparently becoming deranged from a poor diet and large doses of drugs, he died, oddly enough, in an airplane taking him to Houston for medical treatment in 1976. Even after his death, controversy continued. With his estate estimated as high as $2 billion, several different "wills" surfaced, one showing up in the Mormon church offices in Salt Lake City. All ultimately proved to be forgeries, and no authentic will has been located.

Sources:

Donald Bartlett and J. B. Steele, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes (New York: Norton, 1979);

Michael Drosnin, Citizen Hughes (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985);

Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz, and Robert Levering, eds., Everybody's Business (New York: Harper & Row, 1982);

New York Times, 6 April 1976.