With the death of his father in 1924 and just two years after his mother’s passing, Howard Robard Hughes Jr took over a million-dollar business at barely 18 years old. He was studying engineering and not overly enthused to run a company manufacturing drill bits for the oil industry. But he was keen to make the most of his fortune and freedom. Buying out his relatives’ shares and putting savvy businessman Noah Dietrich in charge of day-to-day dealings, the young Hughes set off to pursue his passions: movies and planes.
In 1925, he moved with his new wife Ella Botts Rice from his home state of Texas to be a filmmaker in Hollywood. Since money was no object, he immediately delivered a string of hits as a producer, including the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, before starting work on Hell’s Angels, a World War I epic featuring a huge fleet of aircraft in stunning dogfighting sequences.
An aerial obsession
It would be his magnum opus, albeit a troubled one. A compulsive need for perfection over every miniscule detail cost him over $3m and three years on production, while the dangerous aerial stunts cost several lives. When finally released in 1930, the movie had been re-shot from a silent to a talking picture; the leading lady replaced; and two directors had given up, with Hughes himself taking the reins. Still, it was a blockbuster smash.
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From a shy loner as a child struggling with partial deafness, Hughes became the talk of Hollywood, famed as an opulent spender – not content with one suit or car, he would buy dozens at once – and a playboy. Ella had grown weary of being ignored and filed for divorce by now. Among the myriad movie stars that he dated were Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, and he proposed to Joan Fontaine. His later movies made headline-grabbing news too, such as when Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1943) ran afoul of the censors for violence and women’s revealing outfits respectively.
Simultaneously, Hughes was making his name as an aviator. Despite crashing on the set of Hell’s Angels performing a manoeuvre deemed, rightly, too risky by the stuntmen, he had a deep love of the thrill and solitude of being airborne. In 1932, he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company and set about creating and meticulously refining planes. Soon, he was breaking speed records in his H-1 Racer and, in 1938, circling the world in a new quickest time of 91 hours and 14 minutes.
Priorities changed during World War II as Hughes turned his full attention to his lucrative military contracts, but that was when his impossibly high and eccentric standards became a problem. None of the projects, including the XF-11 reconnaissance plane and H-4 Hercules, were finished by the time war was over. He also badly crashed during a couple of test flights, one resulting in broken bones, a collapsed lung and burns. To cover a scar on his lip, he started growing a moustache.
Hughes kept working, fixatedly needing to complete the Hercules: a giant flying boat with eight engines and a 98-metre wingspan capable of carrying more than 750 troops or tonnes of equipment. Nicknamed the Spruce Goose as it was made of wood, it took so long that Hughes ended up being called before a Senate committee over misusing government funds. The surest way to silence his detractors was to fly it, which he did – only once, and covering just a mile – on 2 November 1947.
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Crashing down to earth
The high-flying, fabulously wealthy business tycoon is half the Howard Hughes story. The other half relates to his mental state: his severe germaphobia and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). His behaviours had long been dismissed as eccentricities, such as washing his hands until they bled and burning his clothes if he had been near someone ill. Once, he locked himself in a darkened room for four months, sitting naked on a chair watching movies and keeping his urine in jars.
But they worsened until, in 1950, he went into complete seclusion. There he stayed for his last 26 years. His businesses kept operating – he even established a new one, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – and he kept getting richer. He could still spot an opportunity too: when asked to leave the penthouse he was holed up in at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, he responded by buying the hotel, followed by huge swathes of land around the city that he developed.
By the end, however, he cut a drastically different figure: emaciated, addicted to the painkillers he took for the injuries from his crashes, going days without sleep and rarely bathing, and sporting a wiry beard, curling fingernails and tissue boxes on his feet. Hughes died of kidney failure on 5 April 1976, aged 70, while travelling on board a plane to receive medical treatment in Texas. Without a valid will (inevitably, several forgeries and fakes were put forward), it took years to resolve his billion-dollar fortune.
This article first features in the December 2022 edition of BBC History Revealed