Howard Hughes

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, on December 24, 1905, the only child of Howard Hughes Sr. and Allene Gano Hughes ^[1]. His father had patented a two-cone rotary drill bit that could cut through hard rock, a tool that transformed oil drilling and made the family business, Hughes Tool Company, enormously profitable ^[2]. The company did not sell the bit outright; it leased the technology to drillers, which kept revenue flowing for decades.

As a boy Hughes showed a strong mechanical streak. Accounts of his youth describe him building a radio transmitter and motorizing his bicycle, early signs of the engineering curiosity that would define his career ^[3]. He attended private schools in Boston and California but never completed a formal degree, auditing courses for a time at the Rice Institute in Houston and at Caltech.

Both parents died within two years of each other: his mother in 1922 and his father in early 1924. At eighteen, Hughes moved to take control of his inheritance. A Texas court declared him a legal adult, and he bought out relatives to gain full ownership of Hughes Tool Company ^[1]. That decision gave him, before his twentieth birthday, an independent income that would bankroll everything he attempted afterward. Any Howard Hughes biography has to start with this fact: the fortune came first, and it purchased the freedom to pursue film and flight on his own terms.

Hughes arrived in Los Angeles in the mid 1920s determined to make movies. His early efforts drew skepticism from the industry, but he learned quickly. The comedy Two Arabian Knights, which he produced, won director Lewis Milestone an Academy Award at the first Oscars ceremony ^[4].

His most ambitious project was Hell's Angels, an aviation epic released in 1930. Hughes spent years and an unprecedented sum on the film, reshooting much of it for sound and directing portions himself after cycling through other directors ^[2]. The aerial combat sequences, staged with real aircraft and stunt pilots, set a standard for flying photography. The film also launched Jean Harlow toward stardom. Several stunt fliers died during production, a grim measure of how far Hughes pushed for realism ^[3].

He followed with the gangster picture Scarface in 1932, delayed by censorship battles that Hughes fought openly, and later with The Outlaw, a western starring Jane Russell that spent years tangled in disputes over its advertising and content ^[4]. In 1948 he bought a controlling interest in RKO Pictures. His management there was erratic; production slowed, personnel churned, and he sold his interest in the mid 1950s ^[2]. Even so, his Hollywood years established a pattern seen throughout Howard Hughes facts and records: immense spending, obsessive control of detail, and a taste for projects other people considered impossible.

Flying was the arena where Hughes earned his most durable fame. He founded Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932 as a division of Hughes Tool, initially to build racing planes ^[5]. In September 1935 he flew his own H-1 Racer to a world landplane speed record of 352 miles per hour over Santa Ana, California ^[5]. The H-1, with its flush rivets and retractable landing gear, influenced thinking about high performance aircraft design and now belongs to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum ^[5].

In January 1937 he broke the transcontinental record, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in under seven and a half hours ^[1]. The following year came his most celebrated feat: in July 1938 Hughes and a four man crew circled the globe in a Lockheed 14 in about 91 hours, cutting the previous record roughly in half ^[2]. New York gave him a ticker tape parade, and the Collier Trophy followed. For a stretch of the late 1930s he was arguably the most famous flier in America.

The war years brought harder chapters. In July 1946 Hughes nearly died test flying the XF-11 reconnaissance prototype, which crashed into houses in Beverly Hills and left him with severe burns and crushed bones ^[3]. Doctors did not expect him to survive. His largest wartime project, the H-4 Hercules, a flying boat built largely of birch and nicknamed the Spruce Goose, missed the war entirely. Hughes defended the program before a Senate committee in 1947 amid accusations of wasted government money, then personally flew the huge aircraft about a mile over Long Beach harbor on November 2, 1947, its only flight ^[6]. The Hercules, still among the largest aircraft ever flown by wingspan, is preserved at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in Oregon ^[6]. Taken together, these episodes anchor the list of Howard Hughes achievements in the air: records set, near death survived, and machines built at the edge of what the era allowed.

Hughes ran his holdings as a personal empire rather than a conventional corporation. Hughes Aircraft grew after the Second World War into a major defense electronics firm, producing radar systems, air to air missiles, and later satellites, though Hughes himself grew distant from its daily operations ^[2]. In 1953 he transferred the company's stock to a new charity, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an arrangement that critics called a tax shelter but that eventually became one of the wealthiest biomedical research organizations in the world ^[7].

His longest corporate battle involved Trans World Airlines. Hughes began acquiring TWA stock in 1939 and pushed the airline toward the Lockheed Constellation, an airliner he helped specify ^[1]. Control of TWA entangled him in years of litigation over financing for the jet age, and in 1966 he sold his shares for roughly 546 million dollars, at the time one of the largest checks ever written to a single person ^[3].

That sale funded his next act. Beginning in late 1966, operating from the Desert Inn hotel in Las Vegas, Hughes bought casinos, hotels, an airport, a television station, and large tracts of Nevada land ^[3]. His arrival was welcomed by state officials who hoped corporate money would displace organized crime from the gaming industry. He conducted all of it through memos and intermediaries, never appearing in public.

Hughes married twice. His first marriage, to Houston socialite Ella Rice in 1925, ended in divorce in 1929 as he immersed himself in Hollywood ^[1]. Decades later, in 1957, he married the actress Jean Peters in a quiet Nevada ceremony; they divorced in 1971, by which point they had lived apart for years ^[2]. In between, gossip columns linked him to many of the era's leading actresses, including Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner, and his romantic life became part of his public legend ^[3].

Behind the celebrity, Hughes struggled with worsening obsessive compulsive symptoms and chronic pain. The 1946 XF-11 crash left lasting injuries, and biographers document his dependence on codeine and other painkillers prescribed during his recovery ^[3]. A childhood shadowed by his mother's intense fears about germs, several serious head injuries, and progressive hearing loss all contributed to his retreat from ordinary social life ^[8].

He had no children. His household in later decades consisted of aides, drivers, and personal staff, several of them members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, whom Hughes trusted for their abstention from alcohol ^[3].

After November 1966, Hughes never again appeared in public. He lived in blacked out hotel penthouses, first in Las Vegas and then in the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Canada, England, and Mexico, moving by private plane at night ^[3]. His weight fell dangerously, his hair and nails went untrimmed for long stretches, and his instructions to staff grew fixated on rituals for handling objects and avoiding contamination ^[8].

His isolation invited exploitation and fraud. In 1972 the writer Clifford Irving sold publishers a purported autobiography of Hughes, complete with forged letters. Hughes broke years of silence with a telephone news conference to denounce the book, and Irving was convicted and imprisoned ^[2]. The episode showed how completely the man had vanished: journalists on the call had to verify his identity by quizzing him on old flying details.

Even in seclusion his name touched national affairs. A 100,000 dollar cash payment from a Hughes representative to a friend of President Nixon drew scrutiny during the Watergate era, and in 1974 the press revealed that the Hughes built ship Glomar Explorer had served as cover for a CIA attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine ^[3]. Hughes died on April 5, 1976, aboard an aircraft carrying him from Acapulco toward a Houston hospital ^[1]. He was so changed that fingerprints were used to confirm the body's identity. He left no valid will, and a forged document surfaced soon after; courts spent years distributing the estate among cousins ^[3].

The fortune outlived the man in productive ways. When Hughes Aircraft was sold to General Motors in 1985, the proceeds turned the Howard Hughes Medical Institute into a research philanthropy with an endowment measured in the billions, funding investigators whose ranks have included many Nobel laureates ^[7]. In Nevada, the planned community of Summerlin, developed on land Hughes assembled, carries his grandmother's family name.

His aircraft survive as museum centerpieces: the H-1 Racer in Washington and the Spruce Goose in McMinnville, Oregon, where visitors can walk beneath a wingspan longer than a football field ^[5][6]. Aviation historians credit his record flights of the 1930s with demonstrating what long range navigation, careful engineering, and meticulous preparation could accomplish ^[5].

Popular culture keeps returning to him. Martin Scorsese's 2004 film The Aviator, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, won five Academy Awards and introduced his story to a new generation ^[4]. The fascination endures because the arc is so stark: a young man who flew faster than anyone alive ended as an invalid hidden behind hotel curtains. That contrast, between public daring and private collapse, is why the question of who was Howard Hughes still draws readers, and why his life remains a case study in what wealth can build and what it cannot repair ^[8].