The Sucker with the Money

Almost from the moment he arrived on the national stage in the late 1920s as a young bumpkin millionaire, Howard Hughes seemed to capture the American imagination, and for more than 50 years thereafter he never relinquished his role as the country's most legendary eccentric. He not only dominated headlines with his escapades, he inspired novels and plays; one movie, Melvin and Howard; and at least half a dozen other films that never got produced, with everyone from Warren Beatty to Jim Carrey considering the part. This month, nearly 30 years after Hughes's bizarre death in 1976, director Martin Scorsese has finally brought his story to the big screen in The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the enigmatic industrialist, giving testimony once again to Hughes's stubborn grip on America. Throughout his life and even after his death, Hughes was a man of abiding mystery. Of the many questions that swirl around him, the persistence of his legend may well be the most intriguing: How did someone of so little accomplishment, personal charm, magnetism, compassion and decency manage to captivate his country and become an enduring cultural icon?

One hint comes from Hughes's roots. When he emerged as a national figure, certainly part of his appeal derived from how quintessentially American he seemed and how much he confirmed his country's possibilities. Hughes was one of us. His father, Howard Hughes Sr., though from a privileged upbringing and having been a Harvard student before dropping out, became a roustabout and roamer, mostly wildcatting for oil before finally making his fortune fairly late in life by patenting and manufacturing a drill bit that could chew through rock to the oil deposits below. The bit made him a millionaire. Howard Jr., born in Houston, where his father had set up operations, was a neurasthenic youth, shy and sickly, and an unlikely successor to his overbearing namesake. But when young Howard's mother died after failing to recover from surgery and his father was suddenly felled by a heart attack less than two years later, the 18-year-old inherited the Hughes Tool Co. and the fortune that went with it.

His was an appealing story. A young orphan with money, he was a self-made man once removed, and he looked the part. He was tall--six-foot-four--and lanky, with a diffident air, and he was rustically attractive, a Gary Cooper type. There was nothing dandified about him. In Houston he was obviously a catch, and he quickly wooed and won a beautiful local heiress from the city's illustrious Rice family, marrying her when he was 19 and decamping with his bride soon after the wedding for Hollywood, where the Hughes legend really began.

Hughes was routinely described as shy, reclusive and private, a man who abhorred the bright lights, so Hollywood would hardly have seemed his likeliest destination. In fact, despite the image of reticence Hughes assiduously cultivated, his decision to go to Hollywood betrayed the grail he would seek all his life and the mechanisms that would help him get it. Money alone would have won him attention, especially when yoked to his homespun image and good looks. He could have played the rich naïf from the Southwest and made occasional appearances in the society and gossip columns, but he understood how paltry a fame that would be. Above all things, Hughes had an intuitive gift for fathoming exactly what propelled one into the headlines and into the American consciousness. Barely 20, he decided--perhaps as compensation for the attention he had been denied through his parents' premature deaths--to re-create himself as a celebrity, and in doing so he provided a template for everyone who harbored the same desire. In effect Hughes invented the modern idea of celebrity and then devoted his entire life to it by making himself into one of America's longest-running soap operas.

Of course, in going to California in 1925, Hughes was plugging himself into the largest publicity apparatus in the world: the movies. Though he had absolutely no connection to film other than an uncle who had become a successful screenwriter, he determined he would be a motion picture producer--not only a producer but, as he once confessed, "the most famous producer of moving pictures." His first effort, titled Swell Hogan, which he was snookered into financing by a marginal actor-director named Ralph Graves, was so inept it proved unreleasable. His second, a comedy called Everybody's Acting, made a small profit, and his third, Two Arabian Knights, a war comedy, was a major success and won its director, Lewis Milestone, an Academy Award. Hughes, however, got little recognition. "The sucker with the money," screenwriter Ben Hecht later called him.

With his fourth feature Hughes wanted to make a bigger splash. He'd had a longstanding interest in airplanes, so he decided to produce a film about World War I pilots that would feature dazzling aerial photography. Subsidized as he was by the Hughes Tool Co., money was no object. Neither, it seemed, was discipline. Hughes began shooting Hell's Angels in October 1927 and continued through 1930, when the film finally premiered, even recasting it at one point because he wanted to convert the silent production to sound and his lead actress had a thick accent. (The new role went to the then-unknown Jean Harlow.) By the time he finished, he'd spent not only three years but $4 million, an unconscionable sum in those days, and had shot 300 feet of film for every foot he used; the typical ratio was roughly 10 to one. The movie received a polite reception, with critics marveling at the dogfights, but that seemed beside the point. Hughes knew Hell's Angels was not so much to be seen as to be publicized, or at least to have its producer publicized, which made the runaway production worth whatever it cost. A film that would have sunk anyone else's career made Hughes a Hollywood luminary--the man who could afford to make Hell's Angels.

By this time, his young wife, feeling neglected, had returned to Houston and divorced him, but Hughes had discovered another surefire route to celebrity: romance. He'd begun an affair with actress Billie Dove, who was married at the time to a bullheaded, abusive director named Irwin Willat. It was soon common knowledge that Hughes and Dove, despite her marriage, were an item. But far from scandalizing the public, Hughes's relationship seemed to tickle it. Whatever status he had achieved as a young millionaire or profligate producer was elevated by his new role as playboy industrialist. Eventually, Dove left him, after he had paid off Willat handsomely to secure her divorce, but again marriage, love and even sex didn't seem to be the point. The point was adding to his saga and keeping himself in the public mind.

Hughes could have sailed along, producing films and squiring beauties, and in fact he did. Over the next 20 years his list of conquests would include Gloria Vanderbilt, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell and, perhaps most famously, Katharine Hepburn, with whom he would fly on his seaplane to Long Island Sound to skinny-dip. The problem, Hepburn later wrote, was that each of them wanted to be famous, and the mutual determination doomed their relationship by making it impossible for them to concede anything to the other. Indeed Hughes, with his uncanny sense of how to command public attention, seemed to realize that romance was no more enduring a form of celebrity than wealth. He needed more.

If the first scene in Hughes's life movie was of the naive heir, the second of the Hollywood mogul and the third of the romantic leading man, the next scene was of an adventurer. Enamored with airplanes since his boyhood, Hughes had gotten his pilot's license when he was only 22 and had even flown in Hell's Angels. By the early 1930s he had founded Hughes Aircraft to make plane equipment, and he was having planes redesigned so that he could fly them in competitions. (He grew his famous mustache to cover scars from an air crash.) At the time, after Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, aviators were among the brightest of celebrities, every bit as famous as athletes or actors and much more highly regarded--a fact that Hughes acknowledged by deciding, after serious consideration, to forgo a career as a professional golfer. Instead, effortlessly turning from Hollywood to the sky, Hughes decided to grab that ring.

With his resources it wasn't difficult. In 1935 he set an overland speed record for an airplane. In 1936 he set a record for transcontinental flight, racing from Burbank, California to Newark, New Jersey in nine and a half hours, and then broke that record a year later by two full hours. But what really made Howard Hughes a household name, not just to movie aficionados and devotees of gossip columns but to people across America, was his record-breaking three-day, 19-hour, 17-minute around-the-world flight in July 1938. Like Lindbergh in 1927, Hughes returned to New York a hero, feted with a ticker-tape parade and a cheering throng of 1 million--the first of several such celebrations around the country. Reporters commented on his bravery and also his modesty. He became a homegrown Odysseus who had succeeded in spanning two forms of American veneration that had increasingly diverged: celebrity and heroism.

As the new poster boy for flight, Hughes next embarked on becoming an air industrialist. He bought stock in Transcontinental and Western Airlines, which would become TWA. He began working on experimental aircraft for the military, and when war broke out he contracted with the government to make three huge flying transports, only one of which would be manufactured, and then a new reconnaissance plane. This activity constituted yet another phase in Hughes's ongoing life movie. From a celebrity and a hero he had suddenly become a dashing entrepreneur. Put another way, he had in short order transformed himself from Don Juan to Charles Lindbergh to Donald Trump.

In the end Hughes proved he wasn't even a Trump. Most of his schemes lost money, sometimes enormous amounts. He failed to deliver on many of his defense contracts, and he was forced to defend himself before the Senate War Investigating Committee. When he returned to film production and decided to buy RKO Pictures in 1948, he promptly ran it into the ground and was forced to sell it for a fire-sale price. In later years he was defrauded of millions of dollars by a con man, dropped $90 million by underpricing a helicopter he had designed for the Army and had a judgment for nearly $150 million rendered against him in an antitrust suit involving TWA. To support his other enterprises, he constantly had to raid his profitable tool company, until that too was drained.

Yet for all his incompetence, Hughes made his greatest claim on the American consciousness as an industrialist in the early postwar years. If he was a terrible businessman, careless and distracted, he was a good idea of a businessman--intrepid at a time of caution, iconoclastic at a time of bureaucratic conformity, flamboyant at a time of organization men in gray flannel suits. Men of wealth, power and celebrity typically appeal to a certain vicariousness, allowing the public to triumph through them. Hughes's vicarious appeal was especially potent because he exercised his power so willfully and wantonly and because he seemed obligated to follow no rules but his own. Hughes had everything. (continued on page 175)Howard Hughes(continued from page 74) He had money, women, control, connections, even a kind of manly courage that one could only envy. As Hepburn put it, "He could do anything he wanted."

Hughes wanted to build the biggest airplane in the world, and he did, though it was so absurdly large he could barely get it off the ground. He decided he wanted to advance the career of an inexperienced, buxom young actress named Jane Russell, and he did--by casting her in a film titled The Outlaw, displaying her assets by featuring her cleavage on the movie's poster and promoting the film incessantly, even though censors and critics reviled it. Indeed, this became the dominant theme of the lifelong movie Hughes had been constructing for himself and the one that seemed to strike a public nerve: He had absolute freedom.

The proof of just how thrilling an idea this was would come after Hughes, always of a fragile temperament, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 and another in 1958. The first forced Hughes into partial seclusion; no confirmed photograph of him taken after 1952 exists. The second forced him fully into a hermitage from which he never emerged. Still, however erratic and unpredictable he had become, Hughes continued to pull strings from his secret lair, which only reinforced the sense of power that had made him so fabled and fascinating to the public. He bought and sold companies. He impulsively moved to Las Vegas, commandeering the penthouse at the Desert Inn, and when the owner tried to evict Hughes after he'd overstayed his welcome, he parried by buying the hotel and launching a spending spree in Nevada that created a casino empire. He offered a $1 million payoff to President Lyndon Johnson to stop nuclear testing in Nevada and then secretly contributed $100,000 each to Richard Nixon's and Vice President Hubert Humphrey's 1968 presidential campaigns to win their support for a ban. He colluded with the Mafia. He even contracted with the CIA to provide a ship that would retrieve a sunken Russian submarine.

The difference between the new Hughes and the old one was that any kind of propriety or reason no longer limited him. If he had been "the sucker with the money" in his Hollywood days, he was now the madman with the money, or at least that was the image promulgated in the media. Accounts that leaked out had him addled by codeine, hidden behind thick drapes, sitting stark naked on a white Barcalounger watching old movies again and again and again. Or sitting on the toilet for a day at a time. Or demanding that everything he touched be handled with tissues because he was a germophobe. Or issuing elaborate rules for opening a can of fruit that included scrubbing the can thoroughly with soap and a stiff brush. Or commanding that all his urine be saved in bottles. Or simply wasting away to 100 pounds while his nails grew to talons and his hair fell to his shoulders. Even his once-vaunted romantic life was now shrouded in bizarre mystery. He had married actress Jean Peters in 1957, some believe as a way to prevent his company's executives from having him committed, but he and Peters lived together only sporadically, and it is unclear whether they had sex. Actress Terry Moore claimed Hughes had married her in a secret ceremony at sea, but that was also uncertain. What was incontrovertible: By the late 1950s Hughes had morphed from Donald Trump into Michael Jackson.

Though it is impossible to determine just how crazy Hughes was, if his intention had been to keep his saga going and his name in the papers, he could not have done a better job. In many respects he was even more compelling out of the public eye than in it, one of the benefits of scarcity. Yet even as a nutty recluse he seemed to tend to his image. When a Las Vegas newspaper referred to him as a millionaire, Hughes took umbrage, firing off a note to one of his aides that "it is a bad time for us to put out publicity referring to me as a mere millionaire." Hughes insisted he be called a billionaire. Similarly, when writer Clifford Irving claimed to have interviewed Hughes for an autobiography that was about to be published, Hughes held a telephone press conference to refute Irving's claim. If anyone was going to control Howard Hughes's image, that person was going to be Howard Hughes.

To some, no doubt, Hughes's demise was a parable of the limitations of wealth and power. Though he had his fortune and a large retinue, he nevertheless died of neglect on an airplane en route from Acapulco to a Houston hospital, with neither friends nor family in attendance because there were no friends and because Hughes had had almost nothing to do with what remained of his family. The death, however, would lead to yet another scene in the Hughes movie when various claimants fought over his fortune, among them a Utah gas station owner named Melvin Dummar, who said he had once given Hughes a lift in the desert and had come into possession of a will leaving him one sixteenth of Hughes's estate, apparently to repay the kindness.

Hughes certainly would have appreciated the frenzy. He was, after all, a master entertainer--even, it seems, after death. He always put on a good show. But he was also a master psychologist who knew what the show meant. Early on Hughes realized that people wanted to feel the rush of empowerment that he lived within and that they would identify with a man who could do anything, particularly if he was self-effacing and ostensibly modest rather than high-handed about it. What Hughes provided was a connection to something every American aspired to have: the ability to impose one's will on the world, whatever that will demanded. This made Hughes's claim on America that of an Everyman who seemed to have everything, which is why, even now, his story of omnipotence is so resonant. In Hughes, who traversed so many spheres and who effected his will in so many ways, the country got a glimpse of its own loony might.

Hughes had a gift for fathoming exactly what propelled one into the headlines and into the american consciousness.