IN a rare moment of lucidity a few days before his death in 1976, Howard Hughes told an old aviator friend that be feared biographers would focus old aviator friend that he want to be remembered for only one thing," he said. "For my contribution to aviation."
Yet today the career of this extraordinary man who changed the face of Hollywood, who broke record after aviation record and who brought air travel to the masses is eclipsed by the image, etched in the public imagination because of its Faustian horror, of the madman freak, the billionaire recluse who never cut his hair and whose toe nails were so long he couldn't walk, who for the final 20 years of his life was never seen except by aides and whose very existence was in queen.
What gives the story of Howard Hughes an uneasy edge, even today, is that his life and death mirror to an uncanny degree the dreams, obsessions and fatal flaws that made and marred the 20th century oil, moving pictures, aviation, sex, surveillance, psychosis, gambling, drugs.
Yet in many ways Howard Hughes was a hangover from an earlier age a renaissance man, a self taught, hands on genius who at 12 invented a motorised bicycle he, even invented a car that ran on water. His intuitive vision combined with solid engineering skills made him a crucial figure in the US aeronautical industry right through to the space age. Yet this was no back room boy. After Charles Lindbergh he was America's most famous pilot. When he broke the round the world solo flying record in 1937 (by one and a half days) his fame greatly exceeded that of his then fiancee, Katharine Hepburn. He was everything America required in a hero young, handsome, clever and rich.
Howard Robard Hughes Jnr was born on Christmas Eve 1905, to Howard Robard Hughes Snr and his wife Allene. His mother only just survived, but there would be no more children, and her obsession with her son's health would eventually destroy him. Allene came from a patrician Texan family, Hughes Snr did not. But by the time young Howard was born, the seeds of the Hughes family fortune were already in the ground in the shape of the only drilling bit that could grind through the layers of granite that lay between oil hungry Texans and the black gold beneath their feet.
Cleverly his father refused to sell these drills but only leased them, at $30,000 a well. Standard Oil used 15,000 in its first decade alone. This canny instinct for making money was inherited by his son and never lost.
His mother's place in society set young Howard apart from the other young petro-rich. He didn't mix, preferring to spend his time in the wood and the electrical workshop his father had kitted out for him back home, while every morning Howard's mother conducted a daily wash down of her naked son, with an antiseptic scrub. Germs were to be avoided at all costs. But it was the obsession itself that was catching and would eventually kill him.
His mother's death when he was only 17, followed closely by his father's, was followed equally closely by his marriage to a young woman of good family he barely knew. Arranged marriages were common among "good" Texan families, and his mother's sister hoped it would act as an anchor for her underage millionaire nephew. It didn't. His isolation as a child had led to two obsessions of his own. Movies and aeroplanes. Now he had the money to indulge both. His new wife and the family tool company were as good as abandoned.
Howard Hughes was Hollywood bound.
Photographs show a softly handsome young man in the Scott Fitzgerald vein, dark hair, dark eyes and a dimpled chin. Women fell before him as coin before a scythe, and it wasn't only the money, although his wooing would regularly consist of dozens of roses and $1 million in one go, which she returned in a brown envelope.
Others were less squeamish. When wooing Ingrid Bergman he bought up every commercial aeroplane seat from Paris to New York at a cost of $250,000 so that she had no option but to accept his offer to pilot her there himself in his own plane.
The roll call of his lovers reads like a Hollywood Who's Who. Hardly surprising perhaps, as his sex "habit" would average several women a week. More surprising however, is that so many succumbed. Lovers included Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland (at the same time), Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson and Jean Peters.
These were by no means one night stands but serious relationships marriage was usually suggested, many believed they were engaged, rings were bought and wedding dates set. But although Hughes would spend vast sums of money to see off rivals or turn husbands into ex-husbands on the signature of a fat cheque, he could never commit. The pattern remained constant. According to the latest Hughes biography, Howard Hughes The Untold Story in the late 1910s Hughes's sex card ran thus. A stay at home lover Faith Domergue, a flashy `out front' lover Ava Gardner, a `secret lover' Jane Greer, an occasional lover Rita Hayworth and a "hot new flame Yvonne de Carlo" Not to mention one night stands with teenage starlets. All on the go at the same time.
Breasts were Hughes particular predilection. He would scour newspapers, magazines and B pictures for likely candidates for the touch of the Hughes magic wand. Discoveries included Jean Harlow in his second World War air spectacular Hell's Angels and Jane Russell in Billy The Kid. Neither could act, but Hughes had identified the quality that would made them stars overnight. Sex.
In Hollywood he was a maverick tailoring his movies to no one else's cloth. It was his own money so he could do what he liked, and what he liked was sex. He was denied the official censors' Seal of Approval because he refused to make cuts. But cinemas showed them anyway, and the money rolled in. In doing so he changed the twin bedded, romance but no sex Hollywood puritanism for ever.
As with everything Hughes touched, obsession quickly set in. By the time he was running RKO, young hopefuls began to be imported, put into apartments, "educated" and virtually held prisoners for months, sometimes years. This "harem" was managed by a team of aides, drivers and spies who would control every movement of the women's lives their phones tapped, their rooms bugged (curiously mirroring the surveillance Hughes himself was under as a major US Defence Department contractor by the CIA). It was the beginning of a private surveillance army staffed by non drinking, no smoking Mormons whose power eventually superseded even Hughes's jurisdiction and whose greed for more probably killed him.
At one time Hughes had 154 such starlets under contract Few ever made it to the studio, let alone the screen, although most would eventually find themselves in bed with the big boss. All willingly wooed by his money, his charm and well documented skill and consideration as a lover. However, the close physical contact necessitated by the nitty gritty of sex was the last bastion of normality. By the 1950s his ever present fear of germs was spiralling out of control. It would today be described as an obsessive compulsive disorder and is eminently treatable with therapy. In those days it went unrecognised. He never saw a psychiatrist.
Things began to go wrong at his first serious crash in 1946 when test piloting a proposed spy plane commissioned for the US Government. A foolhardy exercise carried out above Beverley Hills to impress a prospective lover, he should have been killed. In addition to smashing his skull, he broke 54 bones, and had 75 per cent burns to his body.
Brain damage sustained in this and other crashes was never considered. It was not what he wanted to hear. But his syphilis, contracted beady in his bed hopping career, long before the discovery of antibiotics, could not be ignored. Its treatment with mercury was not only ineffective but is also now known to have serious side effects.
WHATEVER the reason, by the late 1950s his sanity was clearly in question and he knew it. He married the long suffering Jean Peters purely to avoid being sectioned. They never lived together and communicated only by phone which, like anything Hughes touched, could not be touched by anyone else. Anything from door handles to taps to cans of food were to be protected by six layers of Kleenex, each box of Kleenex to be opened with a new knife.
The young man who had revelled in the freedom of the skies, now saw nothing through windows blacked out with plywood and black cloth not to obscure the view but to prevent the entry of germs. Yet, with no one allowed to come in to clean, his living conditions became dirtier and dirtier, and he began surviving on a diet of sandwiches and milk, codeine and valium. Yet from these self imposed penthouse prisons he controlled not only his existing empire but continued to build, finally wrest ing control of Las Vegas from the Chicago hoods of its beginnings.
The rest we know. The money derived from the great icons of the 20th century oil, movies, gambling, air and space kept him apart from those who could have helped him and instead fuelled the drug ridden, paranoia driven 20 year descent into a living hell and finally tragic death of one of the great figures of the age and possibly the greatest philanderer the world has ever known.