Millionaire businessman, film producer, film director, and aviator, born in Houston, Texas, USA. He studied at the California Institute of Technology, inheriting his father's machine tool company in 1923. In 1926 he ventured into films, producing Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1941). He also founded his own aircraft company, designing, building, and flying aircraft, and broke several world air speed records (19358). His most famous aircraft, the Spruce Goose, was an oversized wooden sea-plane designed to carry 750 passengers, which was completed in 1947, but flew only once over a distance of one mile. Throughout his life he shunned publicity, and after severe injuries in an air crash (1946) he became increasingly eccentric and reclusive, while still controlling his vast business interests from sealed-off hotel suites, and giving rise to endless rumour and speculation. In 1971 an authorized biography was announced, but the authors were imprisoned for fraud, and the mystery surrounding him continued until his death.
Howard Hughes|
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| Born: |
December 24, 1905 Humble, Texas, USA |
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| Died: |
April 5, 1976 |
| Occupation: | Chairman, Hughes Aircraft; film producer |
| Net worth: | US$12.8 bn (1958 Forbes 400) |
| Spouse: | Ella Rice, Jean Peters |
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was a pioneering aviator, engineer, industrialist, and film producer. He is famous for setting multiple world air-speed records, building the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 Hercules airplanes, producing the movies Hell's Angels and The Outlaw, owning and growing TWA, and for his increasingly eccentric behavior later in life.
Birth and upbringing
Hughes was born in Humble, Texas, on December 24, 1905, although it should be noted that his exact birthdate is debated by some biographers. According to NNDB.com, "Hughes claimed his birthday was Christmas Eve, but according to his baptismal records he was actually born on the more mundane date of September 24." His parents were Allene Gano Hughes and Howard R. founded Hughes Tool Company in 1909 to commercialize this invention. As a legacy of this business, Hughes allied with Baker to found the leader and most important drill bit company in the world "Hughes Christensen" (http://www.bakerhughesdirect.com/). At age 12, Hughes was photographed in the local newspaper as being the first boy in Houston to have a 'motorized' bicycle, which he had built himself. Less than two years later in January 1924, Howard Hughes Sr. Hughes dropped out of Rice University shortly after his father's death. In June 1925, at 19 years of age, Hughes married Ella Rice, and shortly thereafter they left Houston and moved to Hollywood where Hughes hoped to make a name for himself making movies. Hughes spent a then-unheard-of $3.8 million of his own money to make Hell's Angels, which he wrote and directed and which became a smash hit, along with his 1932 film Scarface which he produced. Hughes' best-known film may be The Outlaw which made a star of Jane Russell, for whom Hughes designed a special bra. According to Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Lucien Ballard, both of whom worked on The Outlaw, Hughes had turned to Jack Buetel sexually which also led to Bacon's replacement in the movie. Greta Keller, Vienna-born cabaret singer and actress and Bacon's widow, claimed later that Bacon wanted to get out of his contract with Hughes and had been prepared to reveal details about his alleged homosexual relationship with Hughes in order to secure a release from the studio.
Hughes kept his wife isolated at home for weeks at a time and in 1929, she returned to Houston and filed for divorce. Hughes was a notorious ladies' man who spent time with many famous women including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner and Olivia DeHavilland. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of Hell's Angels, but Hughes' longtime right-hand man Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship was strictly professional - Hughes personally disliked Harlow. In his 1971 book Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich also noted that Hughes genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell but never sought romantic involvement with her.
Aviator and engineer
Hughes was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast, pilot, and self-taught aircraft engineer. He set many world records, and designed and built several aircraft himself while heading Hughes Aircraft. The most technologically important aircraft he designed was the Hughes H-1 Racer. On September 13, 1935, Hughes, flying the H-1, set the airspeed record of 352 mph (566 km/h) over his test course near Santa Ana, California. A year and a half later (January 19, 1937), flying a somewhat re-designed H-1 Racer, Hughes set a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of 9 hours, 27 minutes).
On July 10, 1938 Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours (3 days, 19 hours), beating the previous record by more than four days. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, known at the time as Houston Municipal Airport, was re-named "Howard Hughes Airport," but the name was changed back after people objected to naming the airport after a living person.
Hughes received many awards as an aviator, including the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938, the Collier Trophy in 1939, the Octave Chanute Award in 1940, and a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 '...in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world.' According to his obituary in the New York Times, he never bothered to come to Washington to pick up the Congressional Gold Medal, and it was eventually mailed to him by President Harry S.
Near-fatal crash of the XF-11
Hughes was involved in a near-fatal aircraft accident on July 7, 1946, while piloting the experimental U.S. Army spy plane XF-11 over Los Angeles. Hughes tried to save the craft by landing it on the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but seconds before he reached his attempted destination the plane started dropping dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club. The injuries Hughes sustained in the crash — including a dislodged heart, crushed collar bone, six shattered ribs and numerous third-degree burns — affected him for the rest of his life.
Hughes H-4 Hercules ("Spruce Goose")
Possibly his most famous aircraft project was the H-4 Hercules, nicknamed to his dismay the "Spruce Goose" (although its frame was built of birch, not spruce), a massive flying boat weighing 190 tons completed just after the end of World War II.
Hughes was called to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain why the plane had not been delivered to the United States Army Air Forces during the war, but the committee disbanded without releasing a final report. Because the U.S. government denied him the use of aircraft aluminum, which had been rationed, Hughes built the plane largely from birch in his Westchester, California facility to fulfill his contract.
Hughes Aircraft
Hughes Aircraft Company was originally founded by Hughes in 1932, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, a division of Hughes Tool Company, to carry out the expensive conversion of a military plane into the H-1 racer. During and after WWII, Hughes fashioned his company into a major defense contractor. The Hughes Helicopters division started in 1947 when helicopter manufacturer Kellett sold their latest design to Hughes for production.
In 1948 Hughes created a new division of the company, the Hughes Aerospace Group. The Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division were later spun off in 1948 to form their own divisions and ultimately became the Hughes Space and Communications Company in 1961. The remainder of Hughes Aircraft was sold to Raytheon in 1998.
Airlines
In 1939, at the urging of Jack Frye, president of TWA, Hughes quietly purchased a majority share of TWA stock for nearly $7 million and took control of the airline. Upon assuming ownership of TWA, Hughes was prohibited by federal law from building his own airplanes. Seeking an airplane that would perform better than TWA's fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners, Hughes approached Boeing's competitor, Lockheed. Hughes already had a good relationship with Lockheed since they had built the plane he used in his record flight around the world in 1938. Pan American World Airways chief Juan Trippe sought to monopolize international air travel and had influenced powerful Maine Senator Owen Brewster to propose legislation securing Pan Am as the sole American airline allowed to fly overseas, at a time when Hughes planned TWA service to Europe with the Constellation. Noah Dietrich wrote of the investigation that Hughes beat the Senate committee by turning the hearings into an attack on Brewster. Hughes successfully exposed Brewster's dealings with Pan Am and later caused his re-election bid to fail by pouring considerable funds into the campaign of his opponent, Frederick Payne.
In 1956, Hughes placed an order for 63 Convair 880s for TWA at a cost of $400 million. Although Hughes was extremely wealthy at this time, outside creditors demanded that Hughes relinquish control of TWA in return for providing the money. In 1960, Hughes was ultimately forced out of TWA, although he still owned 78 percent of the company and battled to regain control. Dietrich remembered Hughes developing a plan by which Hughes Tool Company profits were to be inflated in order to sell the company for a windfall that would pay the bills for the 880s. Dietrich agreed to go to Texas to implement the plan on condition Hughes agreed to a capital gains arrangement he had long promised Dietrich. Dietrich stood firm and eventually had to sue to retrieve personal possessions from his office after Hughes ordered it locked.
In 1966, he was forced by a U.S. federal court to sell his shares in TWA due to concerns over conflict of interest between his ownership of both TWA and Hughes Aircraft. During the 1970s, Hughes went back into the airline business, buying the airline Air West and renaming it Hughes Airwest.
RKO
To the surprise of many, in 1948, Hughes gained control of RKO, a struggling major Hollywood studio, by acquiring 25% of the outstanding stock.
Hughes let go of the RKO theaters in 1953 as settlement of the United States v. A steady stream of lawsuits from RKO's minority shareholders, charging him with financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement became an increasing nuisance, especially as Hughes looked to focus on his aircraft-manufacturing and TWA holdings during the Korean War years. Anxious to be rid of the distraction, Hughes offered to buy out all other stockholders. Six months later, Hughes sold the studio to General Tire and Rubber Company for $25 million. Hughes retained the rights to pictures he had personally produced, including those made at RKO. For Howard Hughes, this was the virtual end of his twenty-five-year involvement in motion pictures;
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Hughes launched in 1953 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, formed with the express goal of basic biomedical research including trying to understand, in Hughes' words, the "genesis of life itself." Despite this, when he finally initiated the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, it was viewed by many as a tax haven for his wealth. Hughes gave all his stock of the Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, thereby turning the defense contractor into a tax-exempt charity.
The deal was the topic of a protracted legal battle between Hughes and the Internal Revenue Service which Hughes ultimately won. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is America's second largest private foundation and the largest devoted to biological and medical research with an endowment of $12.9 billion as of September 2005.
Glomar Explorer
In 1972, Hughes was approached by the CIA to help secretly recover a Soviet submarine which had sunk near Hawaii four years before.
Recluse
By the late 1950s, if not earlier, Hughes had developed debilitating symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). On January 12, 1957, Hughes married Jean Peters whom he had known for several years.
Hughes had displayed symptoms consistent with OCD his entire life. While producing The Outlaw, Hughes became obsessed by a minor flaw in one of Jane Russell's blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each of Russell's breasts.
Richard Fleischer, who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the famed tycoon.
Hughes eventually became a complete recluse, locking himself away in darkened rooms in a medication-induced daze. Though he always kept a barber on call, Hughes only had his hair cut and nails trimmed about once a year. Toward the end of his life, his inner circle was largely composed of Mormons because he considered them "trustworthy" — even though Hughes himself was not a member of their religion.
Hughes by this time had become severely addicted to codeine, valium, and a number of other prescription drugs and was becoming increasingly frail.
Hughes had contracted syphilis as a young man, and much of the strange behavior at the end of his life — his well-documented aversion to handshaking, for example — has been attributed by modern biographers to the tertiary stage of that disease. After receiving medical treatment for his symptoms, Hughes was warned by his doctor not to shake hands for some time, so he avoided doing so for the rest of his life.
His syphilis was also indirectly responsible for a bizarre episode in which Hughes burned all his clothes.
Later years
Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon was harmed by revelations of a $205,000 loan from Hughes to Nixon's brother that was never repaid. It has long been speculated that Nixon's obsessive need to learn what the Democrats were planning in 1972 was based in part on his belief that Donald Nixon had received another loan from Howard Hughes, and this led to the Watergate break-ins.
The aging Howard Hughes, accompanied with his entourage of personal aides, moved from one hotel to another, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse of each hotel. During the last 10 years of his life, from 1966 to 1976, Hughes lived at hotels in Beverly Hills; Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Managua Lake in Nicaragua when an earthquake damaged the city in December 1972. Many hotels in which he stayed were forced to undergo major renovations to repair the damage Hughes caused to the premises.
On November 27, 1966, Hughes arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada by railroad car, and moved into the Desert Inn. Refusing to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners of the hotel, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. Between 1966 and 1968, Hughes bought several other hotels/casinos (Castaways, New Frontier, The Landmark Hotel and Casino, Sands and Silver Slipper) from the Mafia, transactions which ultimately ended mob control of the city's hotels and casinos.
Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas from its mobsters in gaudy silk suits and thousand-dollar-a-night callgirls to a more glamourous image. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide: "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car". A chronic insomniac, Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV) so that there would always be something for him to watch in the early hours of the morning. Hughes once became fond of Baskin Robbins' Banana Nut ice cream, and his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him – only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of Banana Nut and wanted only French Vanilla ice cream.
As an owner of several major businesses in Las Vegas, Hughes wielded enormous political and economic power in Nevada and was often able to influence the outcome of elections. His aides never offered the bribes, reporting to Hughes that Johnson declined the offer and they were unable to contact Nixon.
In 1971, Jean Peters filed for divorce, as she had been married to Hughes since January 12, 1957, but the two had not lived together in many years. The surprised Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she declined it. Hughes did not insist upon a confidentiality agreement from Peters as a condition of the divorce; aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of Peters. Peters would state only that she had not seen Hughes for several years before their divorce, as his psychological problems forced him to stay in a separate room, talking with her only by phone.
In 1972, author Clifford Irving created a media sensation when he claimed to have co-written an authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes. Hughes was such a reclusive figure that he did not immediately publicly refute Irving's statement, leading many people to believe Irving's book was a genuine autobiography. Before the book's publication, however, Hughes finally denounced Irving in a teleconference, and the entire project was eventually exposed as a hoax.
Death and burial
Hughes died on April 5, 1976, at the age of 70 while on an airplane owned by Robert Graf, en route from his penthouse in Acapulco, Mexico to The Methodist Hospital in Houston. Hughes was in extremely poor physical condition at the time of his death.
Hughes is buried in the Glenwood Cemetery in Houston. The so-called "Mormon Will" gave $1.56 billion to various charities (including $625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute); Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said the man told him he was Hughes.
Hughes' $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 between 22 cousins, including William Lummis who serves as a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5 billion. In 1984, Hughes' estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed to have been secretly married to Hughes on a yacht in international waters off Mexico in 1949 and never divorced. Although Moore never produced proof of a marriage (and married five more times, while Hughes married Jean Peters), her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a best-seller. John Meier, a former Hughes employee, stated that Hughes left the Desert Inn Hotel on different occasions to visit mine sites in the area where Dummar claims to have picked up Hughes. Robert Deiro, a former pilot for Hughes Tool Company, stated that between Christmas and New Year's Eve during 1967 he flew Hughes in a Cessna 206 to a brothel called the Cottontail Ranch located in the area where Dummar claims to have picked up Hughes. While waiting for Hughes, Deiro fell asleep and later awoke to learn that Hughes had left the Cottontail Ranch. Unable to locate Hughes, Deiro flew back to Las Vegas alone, and learned later that Hughes somehow had made it back to the Desert Inn. The location where Dummar claimed to have picked up Hughes is 6 miles south of the Cottontail Ranch.
On June 12, 2006, based on the accounts of the three witnesses, Dummar filed suit in Utah against William Lummis, the primary beneficiary of the Hughes estate, and Frank Gay, the former chief operating officer of a number of Hughes entities, claiming that the two had conspired to defraud Dummar out of his rightful share of the Hughes estate by presenting perjured testimony and concealing evidence in the 1978 trial. Marrett - Howard Hughes: Aviator (2004) ISBN 1-59114-510-4, Naval Institute Press Richard Hack - Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters : The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire (2002) ISBN 1-893224-64-3 Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske - Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (1996) ISBN 0-525-93785-4, Penguin Books Robert Maheu and Richard Hack - Next to Hughes: Behind the power and tragic downfall of Howard Hughes by his closest adviser, HarperCollins (1992) Michael Drosnin - Citizen Hughes: In his own words, how Howard Hughes tried to buy America, Broadway Books Donald L. Steele - Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes (1979) ISBN 0-393-07513-3 Republished in 2003 as Howard Hughes: His life and madness Terry Moore - The Beauty and the Billionaire, New York (1984). General Publishing Group (1996) James Phelan - "Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years". Random House (1976) Jack Real - "The Asylum of Howard Hughes", Xlibris Corporation (2003), ISBN 1-4134-0875-3 Ron Kistler - "I caught flies for Howard Hughes", Playboy Press (1976), ISBN 0-87223-447-9 Noah Dietrich, Bob Thomas - "Howard The Amazing Mr. Hughes", Fawcett Publications (1972), ISBN 44902565150
Movies
The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), directed by William A. Graham and starring Tommy Lee Jones as Howard Hughes. Melvin and Howard (1980), directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jason Robards as Howard Hughes and Paul le Mat as Melvin Dummar. Focuses on the Melvin Dummar's claims of meeting Hughes in the Nevada desert and subsequent estate battles. The Aviator (2004), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and winning five, the acclaimed film takes the usual bio-pic liberties (Ella Rice is not seen or mentioned although Hughes was married to her during the making of "Hell's Angels"). There have been several attempts before The Aviator to create a biopic based on the life of Hughes. For years, director-actor Warren Beatty wanted to play Hughes and direct a big-screen film of the mogul. In the 1990s, producers with Touchstone Pictures wanted to do it with either John Malkovich, Edward Norton or Johnny Depp as Hughes, but due to climbing budget costs, that venture was also abandoned. The focus is on the story of the fake autobiography of Hughes in 1971 and how Irving was found guilty of defrauding the publishers McGraw-Hill, and making the whole story up.Fictional media inspirations
The following fictional characters appear to have been, at least in part, patterned after Hughes:
"Willard Whyte" of the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. In the film, Hughes had designed the rocket for use by military soldiers, regretted the project, and declined to manufacture any more rockets. Hughes appears in James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, White Jazz, American Tabloid, and sequel The Cold Six Thousand. Steven Carter's novel I was Howard Hughes is a "picture of a Hughes who might have been." Dean Stockwell plays Hughes in the Francis Ford Coppola's biopic of automaker Preston Tucker, Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The film introduces Hughes as a potential investor of Tucker's automobile line, although such claims are unsubstantiated. Melvin and Howard was spoofed on the sketch comedy series SCTV. The Sam Shepard play Seduced features a character named Harry Hackamore, modeled after Hughes. The character of Horace Derwent in Stephen King's The Shining is partially based on Hughes. Many Hughes researchers theorize that Hughes' company had no idea this film was made but many animation fans adore and honor this film as a testament to Hughes. In Norman Partridge's story "Undead Origami," Hughes is portrayed as a vampire, having become so during filming of Dracula in New Orleans. Maes Hughes from the anime FullMetal Alchemist is named after Hughes. (All of the characters are named after a plane or vehicle)
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