Howard Hughes

Manufacturer

  • Born: December 24, 1905
  • Birthplace: Houston, Texas
  • Died: April 5, 1976
  • Place of death: In an airplane en route from Acapulco, Mexico, to Houston, Texas

American aviator, businessman, and filmmaker

Hughes was a record-breaking pilot, a film producer, and a successful entrepreneur who formed an aerospace company that made him a billionaire. Emotional illness later in life turned him into a recluse, and he spent the last ten years of his life hidden from the public.

Areas of achievement Aviation and space exploration, business and industry, film

Early Life

Howard Hughes was born to Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., a freewheeling oil prospector, and southern debutante Allene Gano Hughes. His parents were reckless but also cautious, two traits that were to mark young Hughes’s life. His father had left behind a staid lawyer’s life to seek fortune in the Texas oil fields. Hughes’s mother, after surviving a difficult childbirth, became obsessed with protecting her only child, both coddling and isolating him with her daily health rituals and her constant worry about germs. Her fears set the stage for her son’s lifelong fear of germs. Hughes’s father secured the family fortune when he invented an oil-drilling bit with multiple cutting edges. The company he founded, Hughes Tool Company, would provide his son with an income for life.

Hughes was a painfully shy and awkward boy with few close friends but remarkable mechanical ability. He busied himself with hobbies that included a wireless radio set, and he invented gadgets, such as the motorized bicycle he built at age twelve. Perhaps hoping to make his sheltered son more independent, Hughes’s father sent him away to school: first to Fessenden School in Massachusetts and then the Thacher School in Ojai, California. Hughes was sixteen years old and at Thacher when he learned that his mother had died during a seemingly routine operation. Less than two years later, Hughes, Sr., suffered a fatal heart attack in his office. Hughes, Jr., was eighteen years old, without parents, and a millionaire.

Life’s Work

After his father’s death, Hughes’s relatives thought he should complete his education, but he had other plans. He declared his independence by buying out his relatives’ share in Hughes Tool and by marrying a Houston socialite, Ella Rice, in 1925. The marriage seemed ill-advised, as they had little in common. Hughes had no interest in becoming part of Houston society. He was far more eager to pursue his real loves, flying and filmmaking.

As a self-taught filmmaker, Hughes was a flop. However, after hiring an experienced cast and crew, he made several hits. He took flying lessons and prepared to make what would be his most ambitious film: Hell’s Angels (1930), a tale of World War I flying aces. The film took four years to make and cost four million dollars, as Hughes assembled his own fleet of aircraft, then crashed them in extravagant battle sequences. Once, when a stunt pilot said a maneuver was too dangerous to try, Hughes insisted on doing it himself and he crashed. As movies changed from silent to sound, the film had to be shot again. Its new leading lady was a Hughes discovery, Jean Harlow. The Hollywood establishment mocked Hughes, but he persisted, and the hugely successful Hell’s Angels premiere silenced the critics. Its flying sequences remain among the most spectacular ever filmed.

Meanwhile, Hughes’s neglect and infidelity drove his wife back to Houston, and they were divorced in 1929. Hughes courted actresses Billie Dove and Ginger Rogers and convinced them to star in two classic films, The Front Page (1931) and Scarface (1932), which he produced. He then turned his full attention to flying, competing in air races, but was disappointed to find no plane fast enough to suit him. Characteristically, he built his own, founding Hughes Aircraft Company in the process. His new company designed a sleek, aerodynamic aircraft made to his own specifications. The plane, dubbed the H-1 racer, was all that Hughes had imagined. With it, he set the world speed record, and in January, 1937, he set a cross-country speed record that stood for nearly ten years. These feats were accomplished alone, but for his most ambitious flight, around the world, Hughes used a larger plane and took a crew. Flying almost nonstop for nearly four days, Hughes cut the existing record in half and became a national hero. Hughes and his amazing flight were front-page news although some journalists were more interested in whether Hughes would marry his current love, Katharine Hepburn.

As the United States moved into war, Hughes became involved with commercial aviation, purchasing a large share of Trans World Airlines (TWA). He landed government contracts to build the XF-11, a reconnaissance fighter, and the HK-1 Hercules flying boat, later dubbed the Spruce Goose, designed to be a troop transport. Hughes still found time to produce a new film, The Outlaw (1943), and had to battle censors because of its risque content with star Jane Russell.

Hughes began to show signs of personal stress, and his phobias and obsessions became more intense. The end of the war brought more trouble. During a test flight of the XF-11 in 1946, he crashed and suffered injuries so severe he almost died. He was left with lingering pain and an addiction to codeine. Hughes also found his government contracts under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee in 1947, investigating his company over his use of defense funds for the lingering Spruce Goose project, which fell through. However, he eventually flew the world’s largest airplane, which his detractors had claimed would never fly. It was a moment of triumph for Hughes, but it was also short-lived.

During the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s, Hughes’s life took a darker turn, as his eccentricities grew more pronounced. He signed pretty young actors to film contracts, housed them in rented homes, then literally forgot about them. He conducted business meetings in parked cars, lived out of hotel rooms, and wrote long memos on oddities such as the proper way to open cans of fruit so as to avoid the spread of germs. Hughes married a long-time girlfriend, Jean Peters, in 1957, but he seldom spent time with her. Business pressures, including what became a long court battle with TWA, drove him to an emotional breakdown in 1958. He never fully recovered.

Once tall and handsome, and often compared to film star Gary Cooper, Hughes became gaunt, unkempt, and prematurely aged. After an unsuccessful attempt at sharing a house with Peters, he left for a nomadic, isolated existence. In 1966, asked to vacate his penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Hughes instead bought the hotel. This triggered a Monopoly-like buying spree, making Hughes the biggest employer in Nevada, and, according to Fortune magazine, the richest person in the world.

Peters soon divorced him, and he had employees but no friends. In a rare 1972 telephone interview that Hughes gave to discredit a faked autobiography written by Clifford Irving, he told reporters he was “not very happy.” By this time Hughes was never again seen in public and he used increasing doses of drugs to blunt his physical and psychic pain. He relied on a small circle of personal aides, who eventually took control of his daily existence. In his last years, Hughes was a frail, emaciated shell of his former self, shuttled from one darkened hotel room to the next. In April, 1976, he died of kidney failure compounded by drug abuse and neglect aboard an airplane en route to his native Texas.

Hughes’s lonely death touched off a decade-long legal battle for his estate, as no updated will could be found. There ensued a flurry of fake wills and claims such as that of actress Terry Moore, who claimed to have been secretly married to Hughes. Ultimately, Hughes’s remaining relatives, mostly distant cousins, shared what was left of the estate. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, funded through Hughes Aircraft, has since become one of the leaders in biomedical research in the United States. Given that Hughes’s first will, written while he was in his twenties, left most of his fortune to fund medical research, it seems an appropriate ending to the Hughes story.

Significance

Years after his death, Hughes continued to fascinate. His mysterious, almost mythic quality has inspired authors and filmmakers. Perhaps Hughes’s life is best defined by its paradoxes: great wealth yet seeming indifference to the comforts of wealth; compulsive “collecting” of women yet an inability to sustain close relationships; death-defying courage in the air yet terror of contamination on the ground. Ironically, Hughes may be remembered more for the eccentricities he spent his later life trying to conceal than for his accomplishments in aviation, which he considered his only true legacy.

Whatever drove Hughes, and whatever demons he battled, one cannot deny that Hughes was an American maverick. While many struggle to succeed in one career, Hughes found success in several: filmmaker, pilot, aircraft manufacturer, entrepreneur. At a young age Hughes determined to leave his mark on the world. In many ways, he did.

Bibliography

Barlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. One of the most well-researched and comprehensive biographies of Hughes, with a focus on his business and political dealings and the building of his empire.

Brown, Peter Harry, and Pat H. Broeske. Howard Hughes: The Untold Story. New York: Penguin Dutton, 1996. A complete biography, with a focus on Hughes’s personal life and psychology. The authors take a balanced view of Hughes’s achievements and failings. Includes illustrations, a filmography, and a bibliography.

Keats, John. Howard Hughes. New York: Random House, 1966. This early biography covers only part of Hughes’s life, yet remains valuable for its thoughtful study of the mythic qualities that made Hughes a legendary public figure.

Marrett, George J. Howard Hughes, Aviator. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004. For those primarily interested in Hughes’s role as a pilot and plane designer, this book, written by a Hughes Aircraft test pilot, details his historic flights and the development of Hughes Aircraft.

1901-1940: 1908: Hughes Revolutionizes Oil Well Drilling; 1924-1976: Howard Hughes Builds a Business Empire.

1941-1970: 1946-1960: Hollywood Studio System Is Transformed.