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The Bizarre Billionaire – Secret World of Howard Hughes

Howard Robard Hughes was already a legend by the time he was 30. A successful movie producer and daring flying ace, he was also one of the richest men in the world – with a lifestyle that was glamorous beyond dreams.

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He was to spend the last years of his life as a crazed eccentric and to die in squalor, degraded and completely isolated.

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Howard Hughes was born in 1905. At the age of 18 he inherited the Hughes Tool Company from his father, who had patented the only effective bit for oil drills. Worth $750,000 on paper when Hughes took over, the company had made accumulative profit of $745 million by 1972. By then his empire included a number of hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and Bahamas; mining interests; real estate; and the Hughes Aircraft Company – the ninth largest military contractor in the United States. Trans World Airlines (TWA) had been sold for $546 million 1966.

Public and Private

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It was not only for his wealth that Hughes was famous. In 1942 he designed and built the largest airplane in the world: a cargo plane nicknamed the Spruce Goose because spruce was used in its construction. He took great pleasure in flying, and insisted on being the test pilot for the Hughes Aircraft Company. Hughes broke a number of aviation records; in 1938 he flew around the world in record time, returning to a hero’s ticker-tape welcome in New York.

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His exploits in other areas were equally noteworthy. Hughes became a Hollywood movie producer, with success such as Hell’s Angels, Scarface, and The Outlaw. It was while making The Outlaw, with actress Jane Russell, that he designed a special, cantilevered brassiere for her. He also frequently made newspaper headlines because of his considerable reputation as a playboy.

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Then, in 1958, at the age of 53, Hughes mysteriously went into hiding.

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His desire for privacy was absolute. From then on he saw no one from the outside world. All his messages were passed through a “palace guard” of personal aides – to whom he wrote often than he spoke. Even daylight was too much for him. The drapes in the hotel room where he lived were always black and taped shut. When he moved into the ninth-floor penthouse of his Las Vegas hotel, the buttons on the elevators were altered to indicate only eight floors. Hughes managed to travel the world without a passport, thanks to the ingenuity of his aides – the same ingenuity that had kept his 1949 marriage to the actress Terry Moore out of the official records.

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Strange Obsessions

Hughes had curious eating habits. Sometimes for weeks on end he would eat nothing but canned soup. It would take him hours to get through just one can, since he would repeatedly send the soup back to the kitchen to be reheated. At other times he ate only steak sandwiches – and occasionally he ate nothing at all.

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For months Hughes insisted on having banana – nut ice cream with every meal, and his aides panicked when they discovered that the manufacturer had discontinued the flavor.

The solution was one that only great wealth made possible: the manufacturers were asked to make up a special batch. They agreed, but the minimum order would have to be 350 gallons. Hughes’s staff could breathe again, even if they had to find somewhere to store the ice cream.

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The next day Hughes finished his habitual two scoops of banana-nut and then said: “That’s great ice cream, but it’s time for a change. From now on I want French vanilla.”

Perhaps his greatest and strangest obsession was with germs – or what he called “contamination.” Hughes once wrote his staff a three-page memo-one of hundreds concerning hygiene – detailing the nine separate steps he wanted taken in opening a can of fruit so that no germs would come in contact with the contents.

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Long before his retreat from the world, Hughes had ordered that any document for his personal attention should be typed by a secretary white cotton gloves and handed to him by someone similarly clad. Toward the end of his life, anything an aide handed to him handed to him by someone similarly clad. Toward the end of his life, anything an aide handed to him had to be wrapped in 8, even 15 or 20, layers of paper towel. The aide himself first had to undergo a 30-minute cleansing ritual. Hughes put paper towels on the floor rather than walk on the carpet, and the sheets on his bed were covered in more paper.

Riches to Rags

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For all his wealth, Hughes did not surround himself in his later life with the trappings one might expect. When he died his wardrobe consisted of an old bathrobe, some pajamas, a Stetson hat, and several pars of drawstring shorts. Sometimes he did not bother to wear clothes at all.

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Despite his obsession with cleanliness, Hughes was living in appalling squalor. His blacked-out bedrooms were never cleaned, the bed sheets rarely changed; dust, dirt, and wastepaper were every-where. He seldom bathed and never brushed his teeth. In 10 years his full-time barber gave him only three haircuts. The nails on his fingers and toes were inches long, leading one of his aides to remark that he “looked like a witch’s brother.” He was also addicted to codeine and injected it with a hypodermic that was never cleaned.

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Hughes had four doctors in his entourage, yet refused to let them treat the sores that developed from sitting – and frequently sleeping – all day in an old lounging chair. Toward the end of his life, the sores were so widespread that the shoulder bone kept breaking through his weakened skin.

On April 5, 1976, Howard Hughes died of kidney failure. In his prime he stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 160 pounds. At the time of his death he had shrunk three inches and weighed only 90 pounds. With an estimated fortune of between $1.3 and $2 billion, he died the richest man in the United States – and probably the loneliest.

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High Flyer Howard Hughes, a billionaire and eccentric obsessed with flying; regularly piloted his piloted his private airplane. In 1942 Hughes designed the largest aircraft ever built: the Spruce Goose (above). Built as a World War II freight carrier, it flew only once. Today it is a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California.