Citizen Kane : Shot by Shot

[Jeff Bernstein]

81

Camera panning left frames this image first : note the dollar signs. The caricature of the octopus. (The second octopus we have seen now. But let's keep going.) Kane seems a symbol to the public of Tyranny.

We can never know what this truly means, though. Who can say this demonstration wasn't a psy-op staged by, say, a media competitor of Kane's Empire? It certainly reminds us of how the general public demonstrates about this today, and about that tomorrow, and about nothing at all most of the time, according to the manipulation of Tyranny. And that is because each individual that composes our Society of now-and-then demonstrators haven't thoughts of their own that motivate them, but pluck "issues" from the media headlines : they are Inhuman. (That word again : we are getting closer to a definition.)

 

"Don't Read" : a chilling phrase. (And the next trademarked catchphrase of a video streaming service?)

The Hanged Man. Frontier Justice. But it's just a dumb-show. The public doesn't do such things.

 

Once more the remark may be made that Charles Foster Kane really made people mad, and really brought out the worst in people in their hatred for him, over and over again. This Situation, however, shot 81, can never be truly understood. Is it genuine rage from a public existentially concerned for its future, or a psy-op from a business competitor, or political chicanery, or some of these, or all of these, or who knows what else. It's public life taking place and people choosing to have something to say on the whatever, or not.

 

Note the professional polish of both the octopus caricature and the rectangular Kane placard. Note that they seem to have been produced by the same source. (Yes, this is a movie called CK with property masters and crew, but we are also considering the simulacrum of a life-event here.) The manufactured quality of the crowd's placards suggests a psy-op, or maybe it doesn't. Perhaps civilian organizers paid graphic designers to create the eyecatching designs to reinforce strength. Who knows? Who cares? Time is passing.

 

The fire recalls the heated liquid gold of 64.

An apocalyptic vision.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

82

Note the head falling off the effigy as the shot begins. Pretty creepy.

Might it resemble—a primate? The first living being visible in CK? Also recalls, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), 39:41?

Anyway, it's "pretty creepy", as Rosanna Arquette would say (After Hours, 27:59).

 

83

Human beings participating in a primal rite : ritual immolation. There's the Bad Guy! (Wait, we just saw Kane beaming beside a broadly smiling ecstatic Teddy R. Our beloved hero and Kane are friends. Oh, just keep going.) Burning of the effigy : the ancient world on our contemporary streets. We pigeonhole the past into “history” and “tourism”. The joke’s on you, humanity. Anyway, other jokes abound. Look at the urban guy watching the flames : Will it cross his mind that he might be next?

 

The Newsreel lavishes two shots of an effigy of a hanging Kane destroyed by flames.  

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

81

(8:18–8:22) A strong image : Kane hanged in public, an effigy dangling by a noose round its neck, strung up there by some stranger just as the panning camera brings it all into shot. A crowd here is lively, with a number of men in hats : this is not the overt criminal element, but outwardly sensible-looking citizens of society. They seem to support capital punishment, or something like it. Another way of putting it : The ordinary, sincere folk who keep our holy city running are vengeful when the electric lights go out. What's the Truth happening here? That is to say, How much Truth is here? Too much? Obviously : Art is infinite and the Spectator's time is finite.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Geometry of 78–83

 

78 : stationary camera, right-to-left movement

79 : stationary camera, right-to-left movement

80 : stationary camera, forward-to-back (train retreats)

81 : right-to-left camera pan, crowd movement to-the-left

82 : stationary camera : a circle of folk around the vertical effigy going up in multidirectional flames

83 : stationary camera (minor pan down) : chaotic, frame-assimilating flames

An efficient transition from stability to chaos in six shots in five seconds. Six shots of violence :

 

78 : Spanish-American War

79 : WWI

80 : Propaganda (mental violence)

81 : Frontier Justice (hanged man)

82 : Kane name and effigy in flames

83 : Closer on flames.

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

77

This card is followed by six shots capturing degrees of social violence from reckless to extreme to absurd to catastrophic.

[Jeff Bernstein]

bwee

 

The bully bullies you with the word "bully".

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

WORLD WAR II

 

There is Howard Hughes riding in the back of an open convertible down Fifth Avenue, waving to an adoring crowd with a gobsmacked smile on his face, watching himself being cheered by over one million New Yorkers who have stopped everything to hail their new American hero, a hysteria of confetti raining down from the skyscrapers upon him. Howard Hughes, front and center at one of the biggest parties New York City had ever known. Similar citywide celebrations took place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles, as Hughes made his way back west. His remarkable popularity was immortalized in a song entitled “Howard Hughes”, written and performed by American folk and blues legend Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter on his 12-string guitar; the refrain goes: “Get up in the morning/And put on your shoes/And you can read about/Howard Hughes.”[1]  Hughes had produced a high-profile cinematic blockbuster; he had won for himself a series of world records in aviation; he commanded the headlines of newspapers around the globe and had won the adulation of an entire world—but at the center of it he was as lonely and restless as ever. There would be no satisfying the man and the dreamer. (Hughes had  planned on attempting a second record-breaking round-the-world flight in his Boeing Stratoliner 307 but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 had scuppered his plans.[2]) In the media, Hughes had claimed the status as “motion picture producer”, “aeronautical engineer”, “millionaire sportsman”, and “aviation record-holder”, but in terms of Howard Hughes the Tycoon, his work had only just begun[3]

 

Yet circumstances were never again going to be so highhearted for Howard Hughes the man. Between the 1930s and the 1940s it will seem as if there is a break in the film of Howard Hughes’ life. It will seem as if a new Hughes has been spliced onto the old, a Hughes whose behavior will puzzle and disturb those with whom he comes in contact. The 1940s will offer incontrovertable evidence that Hughes, once seemingly ‘totally with it’, was losing his grip on himself. Outwardly out of America’s brightest lights, a darkness was opening up within him. His mind and behavior will begin exhibiting strange manifestations as he edged deeper into his thirties. Minor ‘character quirks’ of years past—fastidiousness, long silences, self-involvement, hypochondria—would grow into full-blown personality disorders.

 

With the advent of the war years, a division of Howard Hughes’ life has come to a close. 1905 to 1938 was his ascent as a man from withdrawn boy to American hero. There is, however, no word for Hughes’ trajectory of the next division of his life: he will be soaring steadily up in wealth and power and descending steadily down in emotional and physical comportment—simultaneously. Howard Hughes-the-man will be caught in an implacable, drawn-out descent into a nightmare scenario of psychological torment. And yet the 1940s to the 1970s will be the ascent of Howard Hughes-the-Tycoon, who will eventually attain the stature of America’s richest citizen.

 

The 1940s for the multidimensional Howard Hughes included moviemaking, planemaking, moneymaking, plane crashes, a torrent of lovers, and encroaching madness. In the background, the Hughes Tool Company, of which Howard Hughes was Chairman of the Board and sole stockholder, would become more and more profitable by the year.[4] By 1940, Hughes himself will be personally pocketing upwards of $2 million a month from the Tool Company.[5] Concurrently, Hughes Aircraft will experience hypertrophic growth from a backroom operation into one of America’s largest munitions manufacturer during World War II. Meanwhile Hughes will also purchase a controlling interest in Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA), the industry trailblazer in the development of the technology of commercial aviation. Business move by business move, Howard Hughes the Company President, Industrialist, and Entrepreneur will be parlaying his fortune into a force of great power. But no one on the outside could have imagined just how powerless the man himself would eventually become.

 

For a while in the twentieth century Howard Hughes proved himself to be “the fastest man alive” and “one of the most famous Americans that ever lived.” Yet if Howard Hughes was one of the brightest spots in the public eye, his private life would be one of resolute darkness. It is the darkness of Hughes’ life that tips the scale of his life from ‘fascinating’ and ‘extraordinary’ to ‘unreal’ and the truism ‘truth is stranger than fiction’.

 

*

 

Following the countrywide party at Hughes’ arrival back on American soil, he vanished from the public eye. He engulfed himself in a galaxy of starlets, debutantes, stars; there will be dalliances on his yacht; at love-nests spread out citywide. His two major love affairs of the last decade, Hollywood stars Billie Dove and Katharine Hepburn, had each unceremoniously ground to a halt. Now a vortex of women will spiral through Hughes’ life with ever increasing speed in an attempt to fill the emotional void of being left behind. The treadmill of ‘love ’em and leave ’em’ will contribute toward his increasing mental instability—yet he will remain insatiable for his ever-varying female ‘fix’ with unbroken fervor for the next fifteen years. 

 

Case in point: Hughes spent New Years’ Eve 1939 out on the town in Hollywood with Olivia de Havilland, James Stewart, and Errol Flynn. He proposed marriage to De Havilland while skirt-chasing after her sister, actress Joan Fontaine, at the same time.[6]

 

Hollywood actress Ava Gardner recalled the Hughes of the 1940s as a “six-foot-three beanpole” who was “a gallant Texas gentleman”, but also “painfully shy, completely enigmatic and more eccentric, honey, than anyone I ever met.” Adding, “He was enthusiastic about only four things: money, movies, aircraft, and beautiful young women with beautiful breasts. Which, obviously, is where I came in.”[7]

 

What Ginger Rogers recalled about Howard Hughes in her autobiography could very well have been written by far too many of Hughes’ conquests:

 

Howard Hughes was extremely possessive and terribly jealous. He always wanted to have his own way, whether it was outlining a trip or in ordering a meal. He liked to call the shots. I began to get the feeling that someone was reporting to him on my doings, particularly my phone calls. He brooded when I talked to other people on the telephone and lapsed into a morbid silence, even if I was conversing with someone as innocent as my Aunt Jean.[8]

 

*

 

Hughes was situated, some of the time, at his Muirfield mansion in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. He kept a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He also leased a mansion at 619 Sarbonne Road in Bel Air, an affluent community of private roadways and unidentified cul-de-sacs just west of Beverly Hills. Two other of Hughes’ leased houses were located on North Rossmore and Doheny Drive.[9] Sometimes Hughes stayed at Cary Grant’s Beverly Hills mansion.[10] Hughes will continue to maintain an elaborate variety of points of rest hidden throughout the urban sprawl of Tinseltown and environs. A rumor arose that many of Hughes’ leased homes were built in an identical layout initially approved by Hughes, so that he would feel at home wherever he might be hiding out.[11] At some of these addresses Hughes organized meetings with Hughes Aircraft employees, usually in the early hours of the morning.

 

*

 

AMBULANCE. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York City accepted a gift on behalf of the Canadian Red Cross of a brand-new four-passenger ambulance from Howard Hughes in a ceremony at the Manhattan Municipal Building on the morning of March 22, 1940. Representing Hughes was Albert I. Lodwick, who had served as flight operations manager and New York press representative for Hughes’ round-the-world flight.[12]

 

The ambulance was thenceforth shipped to the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital located on the Cliveden estate, the country home of Lord and Lady Astor, at Taplow in Buckinghamshire in England. The immensely wealthy Lord and Lady Astor (who was American-born) were prominent figures in the British government. Lady Astor, in fact, was the first woman to hold a seat in the House of Commons, and remained a Conservative member in Parliament until 1945.

 

Early in 1938, Hughes had flown to London to confer with the British government during his final preparations for his round-the-world flight. The ambulance was Hughes’ thanks for England’s cooperation in his flight. Hughes’ charitable donation made it onto page 3 of the Washington Post and page 4 of the New York Times.[13]

 

Later in the year, in August, Glenn Odekirk sold the Super Electra to the British government, who put the plane into war service.[14]

 

*

 

THE OUTLAW. In 1940, a year before America entered the war, Howard Hughes-the-filmmaker was back in Hollywood. Flush with his astounding success in the air, he was fired up to hit it big in the glamour capital of the world once more. His feet were back on the earth but his head was still in the clouds. He started production of a ‘sex western’ entitled The Outlaw, his sensational return to feature films, and the film debut of shapely screen siren Jane Russell.

 

Hughes had explained to his film publicist Russell Birdwell that he wanted The Outlaw to be the Gone With the Wind of westerns, that is to say, an overblown cinematic “event”.[15] Just as Hughes had raised the bar for action sequences with Hell’s Angels, and had pushed the boundaries of violence with Scarface, so Hughes would push the boundaries for celluloid sex with The Outlaw. Its groundbreaking presentation of the female shape and sexual themes would kick off what one Hollywood journalist described as a nationwide “mammary madness”.[16] Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw would be the occasion of the most overblown censorship battle in Hollywood history. As a result of its “sexploitation” notoriety and interminable censorship conflict, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw became one of the most infamous Hollywood films of the 1940s.

 

The war years would be a boom-time for the Hollywood film industry, the eleventh largest industry in America at the time. Close to sixty million Americans were going to the movies each and every week.[17] The opportunities were too great for Hughes to pass up. In most cases after a Hollywood player had dropped off the Hollywood map, only a miracle could restore the displaced individual to former glory. Hughes, however, as the man with the money, could withdraw and then re-enter the fray at will, beholden to none of the vicissitudes of the studio system. After eight years away from the film business, Hughes-the-independent-producer-director was back and no-one could get in his way.

 

Hughes hired renowned Hollywood professional Howard Hawks to direct the picture, but Hawks quit after two weeks, complaining of Hughes’ ongoing and niggling interference. We have seen this circumstance before on the production of Hell’s Angels thirteen years earlier. Once more would Hughes occupy the director’s chair himself—and in the process exhibit the same propensity for Kubrickian meticulousness that he’d shown in the making of Hell’s Angels. Obsessed with “getting it right”, Hughes would not shrink from demanding more than one hundred takes for a single scene. He would dump whole days of footage if he was unhappy with the lack of clouds in the background of scenes.[18] Such excesses are unheard of in Hollywood past or present, except for those rare exceptions such as Kubrick. While most Hollywood films of the era were pumped out within a couple of months, The Outlaw would be three years in coming and then some. All the while Hughes would have other pursuits in mind simultaneously—romancing legions of Hollywood women, steering airline giant TWA, and canvassing for war manufacturing contracts for Hughes Aircraft.

 

THE BRASSIERE. The moviemaker Hughes’ most delightfully whimsical moment in the cinema comes during the production of The Outlaw. At one point Hughes complained to his crew, “We’re not getting enough production value out of Jane’s breasts!”[19] In an impromptu moment of inspiration, Hughes took a pencil and drawing board and designed a brassiere specific to show off Russell’s prodigious assets to best effect. He dreamt up the first cantilevered bra, a garment that lifts and separates the breasts, achieving a perfect wedding of fashion and fit. Not only will the name of Howard Hughes enter into the histories of Hollywood, aviation, U.S. defense, and spaceflight, among others—Howard Hughes enters the timeline of the history of the brassiere! “Just a very simple engineering problem,” he remarked at the time.[20] “What he was trying to do was get a smooth look, a no-bra look,” Russell later explained. “And as usual, Howard was right. He was ahead of his time.”[21]

 

Howard Hughes proved himself a star maker in the case of Jean Harlow, and he would do the same for Jane Russell. Following The Outlaw’s reissue in 1946, Russell’s bullet-busted figure became all the rage. 4.5 million “breast pads” or “falsies” were sold to American women in 1948 alone.[22] Russell became the ideal of American beauty for more than a decade. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield would uphold—or uplift—the tradition in the 1950s. The Maidenform company mass-produced upwards of 100 million brassieres reminiscent of Hughes’ design through the 1950s. In 1956, Swank magazine observed the phenomenon of “Our national emphasis on the female chest in recent years.”[23] Howard Hughes’ movie The Outlaw initiated a countrywide bra-boom!

 

The story of the production and controversial release of The Outlaw is so involved and protracted, and Hughes’s 1940s so full of incident, that the story must be told in a chapter of its own, “Jane Russell and The Outlaw”, later on in this account.

 

*

 

TRANSCONTINENTAL AND WESTERN AIR, INC. Contemporaneous with the initial rise of Howard Hughes in Hollywood was the emergence of Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA), a private airline company which became one of the air passenger industry’s great successes of the twentieth century.

 

The history of America’s major airlines began with the Air Mail Act of 1925, which reassigned the responsibility for carrying air mail from the U.S. post office to private carriers. The continental United States was divided up into twelve zones, and the Federal government awarded contracts for air mail routes to small-scale commercial airlines, which included ancestor airlines of American, United, Delta, and TWA. 

 

Western Air Express (W.A.E.), a Los Angeles company founded in 1925, won Air Mail Contract No.4, the link between Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. W.A.E. began commercial service with wooden, open-cockpit biplanes in April 1926—coincidentally the same month that the 20-year old Hughes had relocated from Houston to the pleasureland of Los Angeles. While Hughes made Hell’s Angels between 1927 and 1930, W.A.E. had expanded its operations, absorbing a series of western airlines including Standard Airlines, whose president was William John “Jack” Frye, who subsequently went to work for W.A.E. and would prove to be one of the company’s most significant acquisitions. By the summer of 1930 W.A.E. was the largest airline in America, operating a substantial network of air mail and passenger routes from the west coast as far inland as Kansas City. On July 24, 1930, while Hell’s Angels was barnstorming through America’s cinemas, W.A.E. merged with Transcontinental Air Transport, and the new company called itself Transcontinental and Western Air, Incorporated. Charles Lindbergh, as chief technical consultant to TWA, mapped out a complex network of coast-to-coast routes, leading to TWA becoming known as “The Lindbergh Line”. In October 1930 TWA began advertising its 36-hour transcontinental passenger and mail service (using Fokkers and Ford tri-motors)—the first “all-air” coast-to-coast service in America. For the next four decades TWA would set the standards in passenger air travel.

 

TWA’s primary domestic competitors emerged as American Airways, established January 25, 1930; and United Air Lines, established July 1, 1931. Rounding out America’s “Big Four” airlines was Eastern Air Transport, established July 10, 1929.

 

In 1932 Frye entered talks with the Douglas Aircraft Company to build all-metal trimotored transport planes for TWA; the resulting design was the landmark DC-1, introduced in 1933. In December 1934 Frye, aged 29, becomes president of operations at TWA and in the same period becomes good friends with Howard Hughes. Vice president of operations at TWA was Paul E. Richter, who had worked as a stunt pilot on Hell’s Angels.

 

In the 1930s TWA was the glamour airline. Its silver planes with the red insignia and twin red horizontal stripes were the transports of choice for the Hollywood elite on the Los Angeles-New York run. Dedicated customers included such Tinseltown players as Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures; and Darryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox.[24]

 

TWA and Hughes had crossed paths significantly in the 1930s. In 1935 Hughes gained valuable flying experience by sitting in the cockpit of TWA’s newly delivered DC-2s on transcontinental runs. In January 1936 Hughes bought TWA’s original DC-1, before selling it a couple years later. The pivotal year in the relationship of Howard Hughes and TWA was 1939. In that year their interests began to merge. Eventually owning 78 percent of the company, Hughes will pilot TWA through the airline industry’s boom years of the 1940s and into the jet age of the 1950s. In the forties and fifties passenger air travel enjoyed a level of esteem unmatched by the corporate climate of the present day; a country’s major airlines were considered “flag carriers”, advertisements of the country on the world’s stage. Hughes presided over TWA in the decades when air travel was romantic—even, at times, elegant—and always news. Hughes owned many important companies throughout his lifetime but TWA would be his greatest love and, of all of his companies, the focus of his most concerted devotion.

 

Early in 1939, Jack Frye[25], president of operations at TWA, asks his friend Howard Hughes if Hughes is interested in buying some of TWA’s routes. (Frye was a genial personality, well-liked at TWA and a great leader; as a man with vision, enthusiasm, and an adventuresome spirit, he was a perfect associate for Hughes.[26]) Frye needs an influx of cash—$1.6 million—to follow through with an order for six of Boeing’s new four-engine passenger transport, the Stratoliner.[27] Hughes, never one to do anything ‘on the small’, decides to buy the whole TWA company—or at least controlling interest; and immediately announces that he will initiate the designing of a plane that will far outstrip Boeing’s Stratoliner and every other passenger aircraft, including Douglas’ new DC-4, to which United and American were favorably inclined. Moreover, Hughes will not waste any time in getting into a tussle with Pan American Airways over the rights to overseas routes. (Eventually, Hughes changes the name of his company from Transcontinental and Western Air to Trans World Airlines.) Instead of taking it slow with TWA and getting his bearings, Hughes jumps right into the deep end. If Hughes bought TWA, then TWA would have to become the greatest airline of them all, a global airline having the fastest and most advanced airplanes in existence.

 

The Boeing 307B Stratoliner, of which only 10 in total were built, was the first commercial passenger plane with a pressurized cabin. Howard Hughes acquired the first one off the production line for $315,000 in early 1939. Hughes’ model (license number NC19904) had been custom-built for him, and he proceeded to extensively modify it. Hughes’ Stratoliner, the only SB-307B, first flew on July 13, 1939.[28] Boeing’s production of the Stratoliner had to be discontinued following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The four-engined Stratoliner was able to fly coast-to-coast in fourteen hours, though two stops en-route were needed. There were seats for 33 ticketed passengers. Its cruising speed was 220 mph; its range, 2,390 miles. Flying above the weather at 20,000 feet, the Stratoliner cut down on turbulence and passenger sickness.[29]But Hughes wanted a plane that would fly higher, faster, and further than the Stratoliner.

 

Hughes, ever the dreamer, visualized a superior aircarrier that would take advantage of all of the streamlining experiments Hughes Aircraft had accomplished on his H-1 and Lockheed Model 14 which had won for him world records and international fame on a par with Charles Lindbergh’s of a decade earlier.

 

To make his vision a reality he carried out meetings with the top men of the Lockheed Aircraft Company throughout 1939 at his Muirfield home, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, at 7000 Romaine Street. The Lockheed ‘Constellation’ would be the first mass-produced airplane with full pressurization capability, allowing for a cruising altitude of at least 20,000 feet, which was above the weather, affording a smooth ride for the passengers. It would also be Lockheed’s first attempt at a large transport plane.

 

Hughes remained in close contact with the top management of TWA during the early development of the Constellation. He wanted an active role in bringing the hyper-modern aircraft to fruition. It was not unusual for Hughes to keep Jack Frye on the telephone for an unbroken eight hours while they hashed out details.[30] Hughes  wanted to know absolutely everything and obsessed over all of the technical data, sometimes writing comments on blueprints submitted to him and returning them to make his views clear.[31] Nothing was beneath his observation and input, including the design of the lavatories. Johnny Guy was an engineer at TWA who was assigned as a go-between for Hughes and Lockheed during the development of the Constellation. Guy recalled, “He’d call at two a.m., wanting to talk to me about some design detail or data I had sent him. His main areas of interest were the cockpit layout and the cabin décor—colors and so forth.”[32] Jack G. Real, an engineer at Lockheed at the time and later one of Hughes’ close associates, recalled, “Hughes had been the inspiration for Lockheed’s airliner, the Constellation, and had even been active in helping to design it.”[33]

 

The new Hughes Mystery Plane would come to fruition at the Lockheed plant in Southern California under the auspices of Hughes’ determined, inspired eye; and chief engineer Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson’s design genius.[34] Typically for Hughes, the design and construction of the Constellation was shrouded in such secrecy that most of TWA’s executive board had no idea that any deal had even been made.[35]

 

Hughes put up $18 million of his private funds to buy the first 40 Constellations off the production line for TWA. It was the largest commercial aircraft contract in aviation history up to that time.[36]

 

Hughes and TWA were a perfect fit. Since its inception back in 1930, TWA had been devoted to sponsoring the development of new aircraft designs. Following the advent of Howard Hughes as principal stockholder assuming control of TWA, the company intensified its role as the industry leader in aircarrier technology. Hughes was going to push the technology of aircarriers forward with the sheer force of his will. If he said he was going to do it, it was going to happen, and it did. At the time of its introduction in 1943 the Constellation was the most complex passenger plane in the world.

 

*

 

DETAILS OF THE TWA BUY: TWA had been losing money at a steady rate since 1935 and was ripe for take-over.[37] In January 1939 Jack Frye sent Hughes a list of the stockholders in TWA. By April 1939 Hughes had bought 163,800 shares of TWA stock at $5 a share, out of a total of 830,846 shares. The Hughes Tool Company owned just under 20 percent of TWA.[38] In 1939, TWA achieved a net income of a mere $107,133, yet a farseeing Hughes remained confident in the airline.[39] On March 2, 1940, Hughes bought an additional 119,154 shares at $14 each, for a total of $1,668,156; and Hughes now owned 30 percent of TWA.[40] (Hughes was making many millions of dollars annually from the Hughes Tool Company, and if he didn’t invest his profits he would be liable to a big bite from the taxman, citing excessive profits tax; so Hughes kept plunging cash into TWA, which Hughes had organized as a division of Hughes Tool.[41]) TWA subsequently acquired five Boeing Stratoliners in May and June of 1940.[42] Hughes will keep on buying; by the end of 1940 he owned 42.1 percent of TWA’s stock.[43] The airline lost money in 1940-41, then achieved consistent profitability during the war years.[44] As a measure of Hughes’ interest in TWA, Jack Frye, unlike all of Hughes’ other executives, would be allowed to bypass Noah Dietrich and report directly to Hughes.

 

Looking ahead. In 1944, Hughes will increase his investment in TWA to 5,221,301 shares out of TWA’s 6,674,155 shares oustanding, paying an average of $12 a share.[45] TWA will drop back into the red from 1946-49.[46] By the end of the decade, Hughes will have increased his ownership of TWA from 46 percent to 76 percent.[47] (TWA’s balance sheet, however, will be just as erratic in the 1950s.) By 1959 Hughes will own as much as 78.2 percent of the airline.[48] Meanwhile TWA will have more than 10,000 minority shareholders.[49]

 

Throughout all of his years at TWA Hughes will be the only operating chief of a major American airline who also owned majority interest in it. Juan Trippe, for example, the president of Pan Am, owned less than 1 percent of Pan Am.[50]

 

In all, over the years Hughes will invest some $80 million for his little-more-than-three-quarters interest in TWA.[51]

 

*

 

By the time of World War II, the American commercial airline companies were at the cusp of major technological development and marketplace expansion. Hughes buys into TWA at the onset of the great “air age” of the 1940s and 1950s. Aircraft manufacturers will be producing one groundbreaking plane after another while the commercial passenger airlines were undergoing significant growth. The young Hughes as TWA chief was right there in the midst of it all, or rather, he rushed to become the head of the pack, the only place where he ever wanted to be.

 

In 1932, America’s airlines carried less than 494,000 passengers. In 1940, that figure had risen to 3,185,000 annually.[52] Put another way: By 1938, only a little more than 1 percent of the American population had flown on a passenger airplane. By 1956, that figure had risen to 10 percent—some 20 million passengers flying America’s airlines annually.[53]

 

In 1938 TWA had 1,100 employees on the payroll. By 1945, TWA had over 11,000 employees. By 1955, 19,000 employees. By 1960, 20,000 employees.[54]

 

*

 

L-049 CONSTELLATION. In the 1940s the story of Howard Hughes the aviator involves the story of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Burbank, located in the east San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Into and through the early 1930s Hughes frequented the Lockheed plant, learning everything there was to know about aircraft design.[55] Hughes and Lockheed cooperated first in the custom-built Super Electra which Hughes flew around the world in 1938, and then in the design of the Constellation passenger transport, which first entered commercial service at TWA in 1946. The relationship between Hughes and Lockheed proved to be an immensely fruitful one.

 

Eyecatching and distinctive with its curvaceous fuselage and triple-finned tail, the Constellation was originally built to compete with the Douglas DC-4 and the Boeing Stratoliner. These three aircraft were all-metal, propeller-driven passenger transports designed for the commercial airline industry as well as for military service. The DC-4 was unpressurized while the Stratoliner was partly pressurized, allowing it to cruise above the weather at 14,000 feet. The Constellation’s cabin was fully pressurized and cruised at 20,000 feet, the first airliner with this ability, at 298 mph for a range of 3,000 miles.[56] The Constellation also outstripped its rivals in the amount of passenger seats and crusing speed[57], giving the Constellation L-049 a commercial edge up to 1951, when the Douglas DC-6B was introduced.

 

Hughes’ association with Lockheed on the Constellation project would be a mutually beneficial relationship. Hughes urged Lockheed in a design direction which eventuated in one of Lockheed’s most successful aircraft, the Constellation. This is not to say that Hughes drafted detailed blueprints for Lockheed to realize; rather, the company’s able design team sought to achieve Hughes’ goals, and under Hughes’ critical eye the Constellation came to fruition. Hughes didn’t design the Constellation wholesale but he was a primary motivating force of the process which produced the plane. It was not in Hughes’ character to settle for something; if the Constellation hadn’t been to his specifications TWA wouldn’t have accepted delivery of 84 L-049s between 1944 and 1950; 47 L-049G Super-Constellations between 1952 and 1958; and 29 L-1649A Starliners (originally named the Super Star Constellation) between 1957 and 1959. In total TWA purchased 160 Constellations from Lockheed.[58]

 

The Washington Post reported on August 24, 1942, that Hughes conceived and planned the design of the Constellation.[59] Howard Hughes himself told the Senate War Committee in August 1947 that “I have personally designed the Constellation for TWA and I have devoted a great deal and time and effort to build it up.”[60] As late as 1970 the New York Times believed that Hughes had “played a major part in the design of the Constellation.”[61]

 

“One story has it that Hughes and Jack Frye sketched out its shape on one of Dave Chasen’s tablecloths, in his swank Beverly Hills restaurant,” aviation writer Don Dwiggins noted.[62] However, in his autobiography More Than My Share of It All, Kelly Johnson refers with what sounds like consternation to the “myth” that Howard Hughes and Jack Frye, president of TWA, had designed the Constellation. “His specifications had consisted of half a page of notes on the size, range, and carrying capacity he wanted,” Johnson wrote.[63] However, it is evident from Johnson’s autobiography that Hughes rubbed him the wrong way. While certainly true that Johnson was an aeronautical genius who needed no help from Hughes, still and all Hughes had been the inspiration for the Constellation, Lockheed’s first large-sized transport. Hughes’ design specifications urged Lockheed into a new direction which would be all for the good of the company.

 

In the famous telephone interview of January 7, 1972, Hughes recalled that he and Kelly Johnson “used to lock horns” at the Lockheed plant; Hughes then went on to give a detailed account of his, Hughes’, participation in the design of the aircraft.[64] During the mock-up stage of the aircraft, Hughes recalled, “I changed the arc of the entire movement of the elevator control so that in its forward position it went closer to the floor and came up more as it was drawn aft. I changed that entire cockpit geometry.”[65] Hughes recounted the long battles he had had with the Lockheed designers over the configuration of the Constellation’s windshield, which, in the early models of the aircraft, offered too small a field of vision, Hughes contended. According to Hughes, Lockheed finally came around to his way of thinking with the expanded windshield design of the Super Constellations.

 

One of Hughes’ original design stipulations was that the Constellation should be the most passenger-friendly plane in the skies.[66] Raymond Loewy, the foremost industrial design genius of the twentieth century, was hired to design the interior. He later recalled, “We made the interior cheerful and colorful to relax and reassure the many passengers who at that time were afraid of flying.”[67] Many commentaries on the Lockheed Constellation refer to its comfortable and tastefully designed interior.

 

Robert Gross, president of Lockheed at the time that the Constellation came to fruition, later remarked to an aviation reporter that “Hughes contributed a lot to the cockpit configuration, the control boost system (the 0-49 was the first transport to have fully hydraulically boosted controls like power steering on an automobile) and a number of interior details. One of the interior details involved the curtains of the sleeping berths; Lockheed was going to install them with zippers until Hughes objected and demanded that they use large buttons.”[68]

 

Regardless of the precise amount of his participation in the design of the Constellation, Hughes was a motivating force in the development of the Constellation which became one of Lockheed’s great success stories. Between 1943 and 1957 Lockheed produced 856 aircraft of the Constellation series, the first forty of which went to the Hughes Tool Company (for TWA) at $425,000 each between 1946 and 1948.[69]

 

*

 

In early 1940, Howard Hughes, now TWA’s principal shareholder, temporarily left behind the film set of The Outlaw to visit TWA’s base of operations in Kansas City.[70] There, he met with ace TWA test pilot Daniel Webb Tomlinson IV to trade data on high-altitude flying.[71] Later, Tomlinson remembered the meeting this way:

 

When the man came into my office, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He looked like a tramp with long hair and dirty fingernails. He sat down opposite my desk. After some discussion, I was amazed at his knowledge and interest. He knew what he was talking about, and he knew how to ask the right questions. He was pretty damn smart.

            When he finally left, I could hardly wait to get to Jack Frye’s office. I said, “I just met with this fellow Hughes for several hours. He asked every question under the sun. Do I really have to put up with him?” Jack looked at me and said, “Tommy, he owns the airline.”[72]

 

Robert W. Rummel, an engineer who became a close Hughes associate during Hughes’ TWA years, echoes Tomlinson’s assessment of Hughes’ penchant for brain-draining:

 

Howard had a consummate, unquenchable interest in airplane design. His questions concerning broad design concepts as well as details were crisp, comprehensive, and usually exasperatingly detailed. He wanted to know everything. Working with Howard required exhaustive preparation; but no matter how well prepared I might be, he would frequently probe areas requiring further study. And he had a memory that made the proverbial elephant look like a dunce.[73]

 

Many would comment on Hughes’ remarkable memory over the years. Echoing Rummel, Hughes Aircraft pilot Ed Bell said of Hughes, “He has a memory like an elephant.”[74] Fortune magazine said as much in 1953, describing Hughes as having “the memory of an elephant.”[75] Also Edward West, Jr., Hughes Aircraft engineer: “Howard had a mind like an elephant.”[76]

 

TWA employee John Guy, a test pilot, mechanic, and representative of TWA in the Los Angeles area, remembered his boss similarly:

 

I always felt at ease with him. I always called him “Howard”, and I’m not a brash person. I would never have called Jack Frye, “Jack” . . . With Howard it just seemed to come naturally. He had a lot on the ball. He was terribly demanding, but wasn’t hard to work with. He had a good time and at one time had a memory like an elephant. He never forgot anything. You couldn’t cross him up. When he said this is the way it was, you could go back over the mark-up notes, and that’s the way it was. I never caught him. His memory was absolutely phenomenal.[77]

 

Over the next two decades Howard Hughes was a prominent presence looming over TWA. He treated the airline as one of his private playthings, an approach which will leave the company in disarray at times, but all the same Hughes was deadly serious about his airline. The world of aviation was Hughes’ first and greatest love; according to one of Hughes’ closest associates at TWA, “Building better airplanes was in Howard’s blood.”[78]

 

Hughes’ dedication and enthusiasm during his early years at TWA was evident to all of the employees who came in contact with him. He read obsessively technical specifications and manuals for airplanes, engines, and aircraft parts. His in-depth conversations with mechanics and engineers lasted for many hours at a time.[79]

 

Steve Rolle, an official in the United States Civil Aeronautics Authority’s Western Region office in the 1940s, later recalled his impressions of Howard Hughes with respect to Hughes’ engineering genius:

 

From time to time I wondered about his ability as an aircraft designer. After all, he had virtually no formal education in the field. But one afternoon all my doubts were dispelled. We had been talking about the fuel system on a Boeing Stratoliner that he was modifying. After a while he asked me for a pencil and paper. . . . Then he sat down and on the spot drew the plans for a very well thought-out dual fuel-flow system that in case of failure would adjust automatically without ever letting the engines know that something had gone wrong. That’s when I realized that he was a very capable engineer and talented designer.[80]

 

At first Hughes was the primary stockholder of TWA, giving him control in the TWA boardroom, yet not legal control of the company.[81] By 1950 he will own close to 76 percent of the company shares and thereby also enjoy legal control of the airline.

The management rule of thumb during Hughes’ reign at TWA was simple. There were two rules which were never to be broken. First, Hughes demanded full control of all points regarding corporate financing. Second, Hughes demanded full say in all aircraft procurement because, simply, he loved dedicating his mind to every last detail of airplanes. (Hughes even stipulated that he alone would choose the propellers for TWA’s planes.[82]) Over the years to come, whenever TWA’s managers attempted to make decisions on either of their points on their own, Hughes summarily fired them.[83]

 

While Hughes served as a powerful presence lording over TWA, he was somewhat of an “invisible man” in the boardroom. While he demanded the right to make the most sensitive management decisions, he never took upon himself the title of president of the airline. Moreover, Hughes never even became an official member of the board. Furthermore, while Hughes will be making the ultimate decisions, “he seldom, if ever, signed key letters, contracts, or other documentation,” according to Rummel.[84] Such details didn’t bother Hughes, who subverted the established corporate structure of the airline whenever he felt like it, making decisions on this and that without care of the hierarchy or formal configuration of the company.[85] This is a side of Hughes we will come to know well: resolutely independent; indomitably self-centered; having a disregard for rules; following his own inclinations come what may; feeling he has a natural right to interfere, since he owns controlling interest.

 

Though Hughes will be a visible presence, some of the time, to those in the upper echelons of TWA, at strategic moments in the company’s fortunes, Hughes’ primary mode of interaction with his employees will be via telephone. Hughes’ telephone has been described as his “lifeline” and his “king’s scepter.”[86] Rummel recalled telephone conversations with Hughes stretching over an exhausting and unbroken eight hours and more. When you worked for Hughes, Rummel mused, “A good night’s sleep became a precious commodity.”[87]

 

Employees at TWA had to get used to the Hughes management style to which executives at Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft were already accustomed. No-one spoke to Howard Hughes directly unless he gave the go-ahead. If anyone from any of Hughes’ business concerns needed to speak to him, the call had to be routed through Hughes’ center of operations, an innocuous beige stucco building at 7000 Romaine Street, a few blocks below Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Romaine Street had offices for Hughes’ right-hand-man Noah Dietrich; some of Hughes’ lawyers; secretaries; and a variety of other employees including an archivist, meteorologist, and drivers. Hughes himself was never seen there. Every phone call to Hughes was logged and all words spoken between caller and secretary were set down verbatim for the records, which were kept assiduously down through the years. If the call was important enough, Hughes would phone back at a later date—usually later rather than sooner. Some of Hughes’ own phone calls were recorded and transcribed as well. Rummel and others at TWA called those on the other line at Romaine Street “The Boys in the Back Room.”[88] From the 1940s on, no matter who you were, if you had to deal with Hughes in whatever capacity, you had to deal first with “The Boys”.

 

Some of Robert Rummel’s recollections regarding telephone conversations with Hughes: 1940: “The call lasted eight hours or more.” 1949: “Exasperating detailed telephone reviews, including several all-night telephone sessions.” 1950: “The conversation lasted about four hours.” 1957: “Except for one 10-minute relief break, the call lasted . . . ten hours.” Rummel’s conclusion is that “Howard’s unconscionable telephone habit is probably one for the record books.”[89]

 

From the outset, Hughes as Airline Entrepreneur demanded not only the most competitive airplanes in the airline industry but also the safest.[90] Hughes’ dedication to safety was no mere lip service; he stressed safety concerns over and again throughout his tenure at the airline. The greatest airline had to be the safest.

 

Since building TWA into one of the world’s greatest airlines became a motivating obsession for Hughes, Hughes thought those around him should share his dedication to the cause. Rummel, as Hughes’ main go-between at TWA, endured a work week averaging over seventy hours for eighteen years.[91]

 

Along with Hughes’ assumption that his employees were there for him 24/7 365 days a year, another quirk of Hughes’ was his obsession with absolute secrecy in all corporate matters. Rummel recalled, “Howard’s proclivity for secrecy was legend throughout the industry.”[92] From beginning to end, Rummel’s memoir of his days at TWA is rife with directives and actions by Hughes regarding Hughes’ insistence on complete secrecy in all projects and negotiations, even for those details which were already in the public domain. Such secrecy included: pseudonyms for employees when on business trips; the destroying of documents, sensitive or otherwise; soundproof rooms for company meetings. Sometimes important company business was held in innocuous places such as park benches in the middle of an commonplace public space. Hughes’ actions at TWA over the years ran the gamut of cloak-and-dagger. Some of the pseudonyms used in company paperwork for Hughes himself were “tool”, “principal”, “an authoritative source”, the “west coast”. Sometimes Jack Frye was “Jesus Christ” and Howard Hughes was “God”.[93]

 

*

 

From 1940 on Howard Hughes will have many balls up in the air at the same time. The production of The Outlaw and the myriad concerns of TWA were but two of his obsessions.

 

*

 

Howard Hughes wouldn’t kowtow to anybody, not even top officials of the U.S. military who could potentially grant him many millions of dollars in aircraft manufacturing contracts. His insensitive behavior with respect to the Air Force in the years before the United States entered World War II would come back to haunt him. Not long after achieving his triumphant transcontinental flight speed record back in January 1937, Howard Hughes made an appointment to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver P. Echols—at the time assistant chief of the Materiel Division of the U.S. Air Corps and soon to become General Echols, the top-ranking officer in charge of aircraft procurement for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Hughes was going to fly his H-1 Racer to Lt. Col. Echol’s headquarters at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio. Established October 12, 1927, Wright Field was the military’s center for aircraft research and development up to 1951.

 

Hughes was hoping the H-1 could be modified for use as a fighter plane in combat. He had made the appointment, and yet he remained unimpressed with Wright Field. Top brass left him unmoved. Stars and bars didn’t elicit Hughes’ automatic respect. At the time appointed for the meeting, Lt. Col. Echols and a delegation of Air Force officials were left standing by a Wright Field runway, waiting for an H-1 Racer which never emerged out of the clouds. Hughes had decided not to show up without communicating ahead his change of heart. Such behavior didn’t endear Hughes to the U.S. Air Force. Later in 1937 the H-1 was rejected by the U.S. Military as unsuitable for combat. A few years down the line, General Echols will do his best to deny Hughes Aircraft a production contract for the D-2.

 

THE D-2. One of the pet projects Howard Hughes was working on at Hughes Aircraft at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) was the D-2 airplane. The plane was over three years in development and two prototypes were built. The D-2 has entered the annals of American military history as one of the most hush-hush aircraft projects of the war years. Details regarding the mysterious D-2 are lacking in the public record. No photographs of a complete or incomplete D-2 would be released by Hughes Aircraft for the whole of Hughes’ life.[94] Hughes told the Senate War Committee in 1947,

 

I decided to build from the ground up an entirely new airplane which would be so sensational in its performance the Army would have to accept it. I designed and built that airplane behind closed doors, without even letting the Army in to see it.[95]

 

Regarding all of the airplanes associated with Hughes and Hughes Aircraft, “Hughes not only made all decisions relating to external appearance and size, but also was involved with power plants, flight controls, and instrument panel design,” wrote Charles Barton. “He spent much time on the hydraulic system, less on the electrical system.”[96]

 

Construction of the D-2 commenced in total secrecy at the Hughes Aircraft hangar at the Union Air Terminal in Burbank in September 1939.[97] Stanley Bell was project manager, presiding over an engineering team which quickly grew from six to over 100 men.[98] In early December 1939, Hughes sent a letter to the Army’s aviation R&D headquarters at Wright Field in Ohio, soliciting for a contract for the sum of $50.00 to prepare and submit for the Army’s consideration a report on the D-2 project. At this time, the plane was described as a military interceptor. It would have a twin-engine, twin-boom design and would be made of birch plywood, using the Duramold Process pioneered by the Fairchild Corporation. Duramold is a method of forming streamlined composite structures by bonding together layers of laminated wood with adhesives and molding shapes using steam; the resultant structure is lightweight and stronger than metal.[99] The military top brass agreed that building an airplane out of wood was a good idea, insofar as a manufacturing effort for a major war was sure to eventuate in a light metals shortage.

 

On December 5, 1939, Hughes Aircraft sent a letter to Wright Field announcing the development of a top secret military plane—the D-2. Not long after, Brigidier General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, became interested in having a look at the D-2 under development at the Hughes Aircraft hangar at the Union Air Terminal in Burbank. General Arnold was only a year away from his promotion to Commanding General, Army Air Force, becoming the man who would oversee the development of America’s modern air force during World War II. General Arnold led a group of top brass to the Union Air Terminal but Hughes’ employees refused them entry. Hughes had not given his permission to allow anyone access and Hughes was nowhere to be found. “Sorry, no exceptions,” one of the guards said.[100] General Arnold, whom many who knew him remembered as an extraordinarily forceful presence who could really see red when angry, drove off with the party of military officials, affronted and unhappy. “You can imagine,” Hughes told the Senate War Investigating Committee in 1947, “that caused an explosion the like of which you have never heard, and that also did not enhance the feeling of the Army officers toward me and my company.”[101]

 

In another context Hughes said, “I suppose this is the only time the chief of the United States Army Air Corps has been denied admittance to an airplane factory. Naturally, this incident was not intentional. I had simply left instructions that no one was to be admitted. I was unaware that General Arnold had any intention of paying a visit.”[102]

 

By mid-1940, the D-2 was now the Hughes Duramold Bombardment Airplane, Air Corps project number M-106-40. An ever-secretive Hughes refused to speak with anyone from the Army except for two go-betweens which the Army could appoint; though this arrangement was highly unorthodox, Hughes got his way.[103] By the spring of 1941—during the time of the shooting of The Outlaw—the design had changed yet again. The D-2 was now the Experimental Long Range Multi Gun Fighter.[104] The Army would be hard pressed to understand what exactly was in the works, since Hughes—in yet another unconventional move—refused to supply specifications.

 

In the coming years Hughes will have trouble drumming up official support in the military for the D-2, which will end up costing him more than $6 million of his own money.[105]

 

*

 

The city of Los Angeles—the fastest growing city in America since the turn of the century—would thrive during World War II. The sleepy farm town of 1900 was now a metropolis of over 1.5 million residents, America’s fifth largest city.[106] Following the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, hundreds of new industrial plants appeared in L.A. almost overnight, many of them replete with smoke stacks spreading noxious fumes into the atmosphere.[107] Los Angeles rapidly became a major industrial center for America’s war effort.

 

On May 16, President Roosevelt stated in a presidential address broadcast live on American radio that he expected the U.S. aircraft manufacturers to produce no less than 50,000 planes a year to help facilitate an Allied victory.[108] That’s at least 4,000 planes a month. The aircraft industry’s total output of airplanes, military and civil, was 5,856 aircraft in 1939. In fact, only 44,436 planes in total had been produced in America between the years 1922 and 1939.[109] The Federal government financed many millions of dollars of immediate plant expansions for manufacturing companies working for the war effort.

 

While the decade of the 1930s had seen the rise of small civil aircraft, the 1940s would be the beginning of the rise of military and large-scale passenger aircraft. It was during the war years that America’s aircraft industry became the largest single industry in the world.[110]

 

At the outset of 1940, 45 percent of America’s aircraft industry was located in Southern California.[111] The major Los Angeles airframe manufacturers included, first and foremost: Consolidated-Vultee (Downey); Douglas (Santa Monica, El Segundo, and Long Beach); Lockheed (Burbank); Northrop (Hawthorne); and North American Aviation, Inc. (Inglewood, Downey, and Long Beach). In Los Angeles at the same time were hundreds of companies making components for airframes.

 

Workers flowed into Los Angeles County to find gainful employment on the twenty-four-hour-a-day assembly lines.[112] The whole city was abuzz with purposeful activity.

 

HUGHES AIRCRAFT IN CULVER CITY. The war years would tax the patience of businessman Howard Hughes. Hughes Aircraft would struggle unsuccessfully to win contracts for warplane manufacture. If first Hughes had fashioned himself into a Hollywood filmmaker, and then into a world famous aviator, now he sought to attain the stature of Mighty Industrialist. He envisioned Hughes Aircraft—which at that time was a small concern of 200 employees operating in rented quarters at the Union Air Terminal in Burbank—as an aviation leader on the level of Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed.[113] Yet the various designs for military airplanes Hughes had been submitting to the U.S. Air Force since 1937—including the H-1 and the D-2—had been continually rejected. Hughes, however, remained undaunted.

 

Instead of throwing in the towel, he proceeded to build a brand-new massive manufacturing plant for Hughes Aircraft on a thousand acres of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the western end of Culver City in Southern California.[114] There were already at least eight key aircraft companies in the region; might there be room for another one? Glenn Odekirk had found the location, for which Hughes would pay an average of $2,000 an acre.[115] For upwards of a year Hughes spent around a million dollars a month on the expansion of Hughes Aircraft.[116] Hughes’ attitude was, “If I build it, they will come.” The new Hughes Aircraft facility was built while Hughes shot The Outlaw. By the time the facility was up and running on July Fourth, 1941, Hughes Aircraft was in the process of hiring hundreds of new employees, more than doubling the size of its workforce by the end of the year.[117] 

 

While Hughes never paid much mind to the Hughes Tool Company, his father’s company, even though it was the fount of cash that facilitated his every whim, Hughes Aircraft would be Hughes’ own production.

 

At first only four buildings were built, including the main factory, which was air-conditioned and humidity controlled; an engineering department; a machine shop; a chemistry laboratory; photographic laboratory; foundry; and office space.[118] Hughes had the buildings painted chartreuse—a polite way of saying bile green.[119] A U.S. military report on the plant from January 1942 commented, “It is completely modern in every detail.”[120]

 

The plant featured the longest private runway in the world (9,000 feet).[121]

 

When Howard Hughes decided to build a new Hughes Aircraft plant in Los Angeles County, he was right in the middle of the action. California was the center of America’s aircraft industry, and the aircraft industry was experiencing incredible growth as a result of wartime exigencies. The building of new assembly plants was the theme of the hour at the time that Hughes devised his own plan for a greatly-expanded Hughes Aircraft. Through 1940 and 1941 all of the major aircraft manufacturers—including North American, Douglas and Lockheed, among others in L.A.—undertook elaborate and expensive expansion of their facilities. After all, President Roosevelt was calling for the manufacture of 60,000 airplanes in 1942 and 125,000 and 1943.[122] Existing factories were enlarged and new plants were built. Some of the major companies’ total floor space increased more than fivefold into the millions of square feet. Hundreds of ‘feeder shops’—subcontractors building parts for aircraft companies—appeared, or experienced change and augmentation. The work force in the aircraft industry was 63,000 in 1939, 347,000 in 1941, and 1,345,600 in 1943.[123]

 

This was the period of the birth of America’s military-industrial complex. Between 1922 and 1939, U.S. military budgets averaged roughly $740 million a year. After 1940, many billions would be spent annually on America’s war machine (even in peacetime).[124]

 

By augmenting the Hughes Aircraft Company Howard Hughes sought to go with the flow and surf the tides of war.

 

For the duration of the 1940s the Hughes Aircraft Company would remain a small fish amid the big fish. Yet, as the ensuing decades proved, the expansion of his aircraft company turned out to be one of Hughes’ most fortunate business decisions. In time, the Hughes Aircraft Company became just as significant a company as the Hughes Tool Company that he had inherited. Over the decades-to-come Hughes Aircraft will spawn an ever-expanding series of units and subsidiaries, such as Hughes Space and Communications, Hughes Research Laboratories, and Hughes Electron Dynamics, three high-technology companies at the forefront of satellite and spacecraft production, laser research, and ion-propulsion engine development. By the 1960s Hughes Aircraft will be a major player in the aerospace industry, a significant cog in America’s war machine.

 

*

 

Though Hughes experienced one disappointment after another during the war years, finding himself unable to entice the War Department with his aircraft designs, Hughes Aircraft was not entirely dead in the water. Both Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Tool became busy manufacturing equipment and supplies for the war effort. As a part of the mass production effort of the aircraft industry in World War II, Hughes Aircraft was employed as a subcontractor of aircraft components and supplier of weapons parts, rather than as a fabricator of airframes or manufacturer of engines. In 1941, the government helped foot the bill for an enlargement of the Hughes Tool Company in Houston for Hughes to manuafacture hydraulic shock-absorber struts for airframes.[125]

 

The machinery and parts manufactured by Hughes’ companies for the war effort included: A new flexible machine gun feed chute, which ended up on the majority of U.S. bombers; 89,512 electric booster drives for aircraft machine guns; 19,958 cannon barrels; 939,320 artillery shells; 14,766 landing gear struts for the B-25 bomber; 5,576 wings and 6,370 fuselages for the Vultee BT-13 trainer; 18,733 aircraft seats.[126]

 

During the war, Hughes Aircraft grew to become one of the largest suppliers of weapons machinery in America. Hughes testified in 1947: “One of the principal contributions was the flexible feed chute, which was used in practically all of the B-17 bombers and saved the lives of many of the waist gunners. It was a very substantial contribution.” He explained, “It eliminated the necessity for reloading the gun or stopping in the middle of a battle with the enemy, and it was used throughout the entire balance of the war, not only in the B-17 Flying Fortress, but in many other types of airplanes. As a matter of fact, it was used in the B-17, B-29, B-50, B-25, P-51 Mustang and 42 other different types of airplanes.” Hughes’ ammunition feed chutes doubled some weapons’ rate of fire.[127] As for the electronic booster drives, Hughes remarked, “[They] made machine guns more reliable and less apt to jam.”[128]

 

The Hughes Tool Company and the Hughes Aircraft Company handled more than $200 million worth of contracts for war matériel during World War II.[129]

 

Hughes the Industrialist might have become the ‘war baron’ he fancied himself becoming, but he wouldn’t be satisfied with the production of such small-scale products as machine gun parts. He became obsessed with capturing big aviation contracts such as what major aircraft manufacturing companies were enjoying. 300,317 military aircraft were built during the war years by Bell, Boeing, Consolidated-Vultee, Curtiss-Wright, Douglas, Lockheed, Martin, North American, Northrop, Republic, Ryan, Vega, and others.[130] The U.S. government spent more than 7 billion dollars on aircraft contracts for Los Angeles companies alone.[131] In all, 52 North American companies built airplanes that flew in World War II—but Hughes Aircraft wasn’t one of them.[132] Hughes Aircraft did not build a single airplane that saw combat in World War II.

 

Failing time and again to secure the contracts he wanted, and then failing to deliver on time those airplanes he would eventually be contracted to produce, made Hughes suffer the first professional failures of his life, and would contribute to the mental strain pushed him over the edge in 1944. Howard Hughes was not a man who could accept not getting what he wanted. The pressure of being thwarted would ratchet his internal pressure to breaking point.

 

*

 

The war years were the beginning of the end for Howard Hughes’ peace of mind. He began exhibiting incontrovertible signs of the mental illness that would increase in intensity as the years progressed, an illness that would reduce the scope of his life from the heroic to the tragic. His heyday from 1927-38 when he was one of the brightest spots in the public eye was over, though he would always be news and remained one of the more well-known of Americans up to the time of his death in 1976. There were new military pilots gaining renown in the air. (Hughes himself had escaped being drafted as a pilot because he was deemed a “military supplier”.) New young rich handsome movers and shakers were cruising through Hollywood. (Fleeing the flighting in Europe, international socialites, aristocrats, and all manner of social butterflies were flooding into Los Angeles to wait out the war.[133]) Furthermore, Hughes Aircraft was a pipsqueak compared to the manufacturing powerhouses of Lockheed and Douglas who were supplying the bulk of the airplanes that America needed to win the war. The 1940s were shaping up as a grim comedown after the high point of the 1930s.

 

Throughout 1941 the signs of Hughes’ inner turmoil were becoming evident to his closest advisors. First, in April, Hughes got a rash on his hands and was diagnosed with syphilis.[134] Not satisfied with the penicillin treatment, which was the widely accepted cure, Hughes opted for concurrent injections of colloidal silver and arsphenamine, an arsenic derivative with questionable benefits.[135] When his physician informed him that the disease might be spread by germs transmitted via the hands, Hughes went off the deep end at the thought. He cleaned out Muirfield of his entire wardrobe and linen. All of his shoes went into the scrap heap. Noah Dietrich was assigned the job of hauling it all away. Also, Hughes sold off his automobiles. The yellow Duesenberg was converted to a fire truck for Hughes Aircraft.

 

In his closet, he left one black suit, one black tie, one black belt, and two pairs of chino slacks—purchased new from Sears, Roebuck & Co, plus one pair of shoes, a stained terry-cloth robe that Mrs. Dowler [the maid] was told to “hang in the sunlight to sanitize,” five new white cotton dress shirts, and his lucky fedora. The remainder of his entire wardrobe fit into a single dresser drawer in his bedroom, and consisted of freshly washed socks, underwear and several handkerchiefs monogrammed HRH.[136]

 

In May, during a hiatus in the making of The Outlaw, Hughes spent weeks off by himself in self-imposed exile at his house, living a hermetic existence in darkened and silent rooms, waiting for the visible signs of his STD to disappear, letting the medicine take its queasy course. He had the mementos of his past, which were distributed throughout the house, wrapped and packed away in storage. He sold Muirfield in the winter of 1942.

 

(Such venerable names as Astor, Carnegie, Du Pont, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Woolworth—America’s ‘dynastic families’—had owned palatial homes and vast estates across the country, as befitted their wealth and position as the richest citizens in America. Howard Hughes came naturally to reject the manners of the “old-style” mode of multimillionaire. He had no wish to occupy an ostentatious mansion full of priceless treasures. He was destined to be a rootless ghost upon the landscape.)

 

When Hughes snapped out of his self-imposed exile he hit the town with one of his many girlfriends.

 

*

 

WOMANIZING. Back in May of 1940, when Hughes was thirty-four, he met Faith Domergue, a voluptuous fifteen year old starlet with dark hair and dark-blue eyes. He fell hard for her, just as he would fall hard for hundreds of women over the years.

 

He met her at a daytime party held on a rented luxury yacht that had been organized by his publicity men and fellow skirt-chasers Pat De Cicco and Johnny Meyer. These parties of Hughes’, regularly populated with young female hopefuls newly arrived in Hollywood without a clue, were, to put it baldly, “meat markets” designed for the multimillionaire to take his pick of the new “talent”, innocent, needy, and ripe for wooing. Hughes, the handsome man of mystery, might sit apart from the crowd without saying a word to anyone for hours, yet he would actually be paying close attention, sizing up his amorous prospects.

 

Domergue was a buxom beauty out of New Orleans with a sultry Latin look. If the two marriages in his life were any indication, Hughes preferred dark-haired women. His money and power enchanted Domergue, as it would so many naïve starlets new to Filmland and in need of a guiding hand. Though Domergue had won a contract with Warner Brothers, she had yet to appear in a film, which was perfect for Hughes’ purposes. He dazzled her by promising to make her a star.

 

Through 1940 Hughes was often with Domergue when he wasn’t with one of his many other romances. He took her for drives; threw parties for her; accompanied her to private film showings organized just for the two of them. He bought her contract for $50,000 from Warner Brothers, part of his campaign for total control, and went on to buy a new Lincoln car from a dealership owned by Domergue’s father Leo. He persuaded her parents to move with their daughter into a house just blocks away from Muirfield. Amid all this, Domergue discovered that she had lost her heart to Hughes. Soon he rented a house for her in Bel Air. Banishing one of his lovers to her own home was one of Hughes’ most overused strategies, which had begun with his treatment of his first wife Ella Rice. He even gave her father a job at Hughes Aircraft.

 

Like scores of hopeful starlets in the 1940s and 1950s, Faith Domergue was put completely in Hughes’ control. He was the composer orchestrating her daily life. He enveloped her in the Hughes Productions’ total “package”. Domergue was plunged into an intensive schedule of drama lessons, style consultations. She was assigned a car and driver so Hughes could keep tabs on all of her movements. He gave her a private number to contact him at Muirfield, where Hughes had a series of phones, each assigned to specific women-of-the-moment (a clever strategy in the days before Caller Display). Hughes felt pangs of desire and affection for Domergue, yet he would be mentally and emotionally incapable of remaining focused and faithful. He was able, however, to keep his inexorably straying ways a secret from Domergue—at first.

 

One evening during a party at the Palm Springs Racquet Club in October 1940, Hughes worked his magic on his innocent young devotee. He let her away from the thick of the crowd onto a secluded terrace, where, under the operatic outlay of a three-quarters moon, he proposed marriage, gracing her hand with a diamond engagement ring. “You are the child I should have had,” he said weirdly. At some point he added, “You belong to me now, so don’t even look at another man.”[137]

 

Over the next three years Domergue would stick it out with Hughes her “father-lover” (as she put it) through his infidelities with his ever-growing parade of girlfriends and her ‘exile’ in the sixteen-room house he leased for her on Sarbonne Road in Bel Air. Domergue’s times with Hughes were stormy with tantrums, walkouts, purposeful car crashes, and much making-up. Domergue later described Hughes:

 

He is one of the most emotional men I ever met. He can give of himself. He can make you feel as if were were the only girl in the world. There was never a doubt with Howard. He is a man, a real man.[138]

 

Of course Domergue was but one of Hughes’ many lovers. Ginger Rogers finally stormed out of Hughes’ life for good in October 1940 after a seven-year on-off relationship because she was exasperated with his philandering ways. When Ginger discovered that Hughes was two-timing her, she returned the engagement ring he gave her and dumped him.[139] Noah Dietrich reported that when Ginger dumped Hughes, it was the “only occasion when I ever saw Howard Hughes cry.”[140]

 

As the 1940s progresses Hughes will be pursuing stormy romances with, among others, Hollywood’s reigning sex symbols of the day. Supreme love goddess Rita Hayworth, alluring red-head with a strong thirst for alcohol. Ava Gardner, voluptuous and tempestuous brunette, strong-willed glamour queen of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who gained a reputation as a notorious hard-drinking playgirl. Lana Turner, the sensual blonde pin-up girl in tight cashmere sweaters, and just as dazzling in her elegant gowns, her life complicated with gangster connections. The ups-and-downs of contending with a bustling crowd of forthright women would take its toll emotionally and physically on Hughes.

 

*

 

THE TROUBLOUS D-2. On October 3, 1941, Noah Dietrich, on behalf of the Hughes Aircraft Company, met with Major General Oliver P. Echols, who at the time was Chief of the Matériel Division at Wright Field, making him the top-ranking officer in charge of aircraft procurement for the U.S. Army Air Force. More than 300,000 planes would be manufactured for the American war effort from 1940 to 1945, but General Echols did not want the D-2 to be one of them.

 

General Echols told Dietrich that the Air Force was unmoved by the idea of the D-2 photo-reconsaissance plane. It was absurd of Hughes to build a plane for the military without first receiving a military specification. Dietrich heard how Hughes’ obsession with secrecy over the preceding two years had left military officials exasperated with their inability to learn exact details about the aircraft. According to Dietrich, General Echols told him, “So far as I am concerned, I will not do business with Howard Hughes. I dislike him.”[141]

 

On the same day, an official letter signed by Brigidier General George C. Kennedy argued against dealing with Hughes for a D-2 production contract.[142]

 

When Howard Hughes received the unhappy news from Dietrich, Hughes immediately allowed the USAF access to the D-2. Within the month the USAF evaluated the D-2 at its aviation research lab at Wright Field. The conclusions were potentially devastating for Hughes. The first plane from the new Hughes Aircraft plant was determined to be a bust. In a report from Wright Field to Noah Dietrich, dated November 7, 1941, the Wright Field engineers concluded that, as it stood, the D-2, if reconfigured to incorporate required military features, would be too heavy and too slow for use as escort for bombardment airplanes. Moreover, the landing gear was judged “inherently weak according to Air Corps Standards”. Furthermore, the plane as originally designed lacked armor plate to protect the crew members.[143] In short, the D-2 was worthless as a military aircraft. An internal USAF Wright Field memorandum of January 26, 1942, concluded:

 

It is the opinion of this office that this plant is a hobby of the management and that the present project now being engineered is a waste of time and that the facilities, both in engineering personnel and equipment, are not being used to the full advantage in this emergency. . . . The Air Corps should discontinue any further aircraft projects with this organization.[144]

 

But even if General Arnold and General Echols remained adamant against the project,  Hughes wasn’t going to give up until he got his way. His engineers kept perfecting the D-2. According to Glenn Odekirk, early in 1942 Hughes Aircraft had 200 engineers working on the D-2.[145] Meanwhile, Hughes employed his publicists, including Russell Birdwell, to drum up support for the D-2 project in Washington, D.C. any way they knew how.[146]

 

*

 

On December 1, 1941, Hughes hired John W. Meyer to oversee public relations for his film company now named Hughes Productions. Meyer, who had known Hughes since the mid-1930s, was a consummate industry mover-and-shaker, described variously as “plump”, “fast-talking”, and “affable”.[147] His work experience included public relations work for CBS, for the La Congo nightclub in Hollywood, and for Warner Brothers.[148] Actress Myrna Dell remembered him a man of “great charm and wit” who always referred to Hughes as “The Genius”.[149]

 

Meyer was a highly significant player in the Hughes phenomenon. Within two or three weeks of his appointment, he was transferred to the Hughes Aircraft Company as “Public Relations Director”. In the summer of 1942 he became “Assistant to the President and Public Relations Director” at Hughes Aircraft, at a salary of $10,400 a year. Meyer also did some work for TWA. As a result of his association with Hughes, Meyer received six draft deferments during World War II.[150]

 

Regardless of his official job title, Meyer’s primary job for Hughes was to gather together girls for Hughes’ delectation. The tall and lanky Hughes, still boyish-looking in his mid-thirties, remained immensely attractive to women. He was a mysterious figure of great charm and magnetism which changed the dynamic of a room when he entered.[151] Yet he never felt comfortable chatting up a woman. He preferred to have his dates arranged for him. He began running with a party-going Hollywood crowd which included Meyer; Pasquale (Pat) De Cicco, press agent and notorious lady’s man; Johnny Maschio, talent agent; and Alex D’Arcy, contract player at Warner Brothers.

 

“Basically,” D’Arcy recalled, “we would go from club to club, helping Howard to get girls.”[152] The girl-chasing routine involved one or more of Hughes’ minions setting up a date for Hughes, then driving her on the appointed evening to a nightclub, where they would sit at a table for an hour or more waiting for Hughes to arrive. If Hughes did appear, which wasn’t always the case, sometimes he was greeted with the sight of a group of three or four young women gathered at the table, an embarrassment of riches for Hughes to chose among.[153] Suzanne Finstad noted, “To be summoned by Hughes was a status symbol in the starlet community, so most of the objects of his attention accepted breathessly.” [154] For decades Hughes’ standards never varied: he wanted his women young, beautiful, and willing. Maschio reported, “He wanted quick lays”[155]

 

*

 

Hughes’ night time prowls through the funhouse world of Hollywood were not exclusive to the most glamorous spots in town. He sometimes appeared in joints off the beaten path for the city’s privileged, including Shepp’s Playhouse, a nightclub for African-American singers in the Little Toyko area of Los Angeles north of Central Avenue; also seedy ballrooms in the roughest parts of town.[156]

 

*

 

Following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, everyone in Hollywood wanted to be seen doing his and her part for the war effort in a big way. All of movieland’s biggest stars were starring in war-themed movies, as well as going on the road to appear in bond rallies across America, raising money for the overseas military operations while cheering up the population.

 

Carole Lombard, 33, was one of the bright lights of Hollywood who was on the road doing her share, in her case selling war bonds in her home state of Indiana. Back in Los Angeles in 1925-26, Lombard, as a starlet hoping for her big break, once had a passionate affair with the married Howard Hughes.[157] A few years later, when Lombard, still a bit player at the time, was trying to move up the ranks of Hollywood, she was given a screen-test for Hell’s Angels, but Hughes remained unimpressed.[158]

 

Fiesty and enthralling, Lombard had recently graced the screens in the edgy comedy Mr. And Mrs. Smith (1941), one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best pictures. Her latest film, To Be or Not to Be, was about to open. She enjoyed a fairy tale marriage to Clark Gable, Hollywood’s most popular male star, renowned as the ‘King of Hollywood’.

 

Lombard raised more than $2 million in war bonds during her midwest junket and was eager to return to Hollywood. In Indianapolis on the morning of Friday, January 16, 1942, Lombard boarded Transcontinental and Western Air flight 3, intending to return to Southern California.[159] With her was her mother and her press agent, Otto Winkler. Lombard’s mother had a superstitious dread of the flight. Winkler flipped a coin to decide the issue.

 

Flying westward, the TWA plane encountered a clear night across Nevada skies, perfect flying weather. At 7:23 pm, 35 miles southwest of Las Vegas, the DC-3 slammed into Mt. Potosi, killing all twenty-two persons on board. The plane had been flying 400 feet too low and 6.7 miles off course.[160] The accident was caused by pilot error.

 

The TWA plane—the demolished fuselage, shattered tail section, shattered wings—was reduced to debris strewn across a sheer cliff 8,300 feet up. Lombard was identified only by a diamond and ruby clip she had worn, a gift from Gable. It was reported that this most beautiful screwball comedienne had been decapitated.[161]

 

It would be the most highly publicised plane crash of Hughes’ TWA career. Soon after the crash, Hughes began thinking about ways his airplanes could avert another such disaster. His thinking would bear fruit before the end of the decade. As of 2005, some of the wreckage—rusted bits of engines, a rusty landing gear, small pieces of aluminium—still remains at the crash site.

 

*

 

CONSTELLATION DAWNING. Meanwhile the Lockheed L-049 Constellation was in the process of construction in Plant B-1 at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s plant in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley. Considering that Lockheed was one of America’s primary warplane manufacturers, for the duration of World War II the entire plant was cleverly camouflaged with green and yellow tarpaulins to look like a sleepy residential area when seen from the air.[162] Sometimes Hughes appeared at the Lockheed plant to check on the progress of the Constellation, which the nation’s press referred to as the Army’s Mystery Plane; on one such trip Faith Domergue accompanied him.[163]

 

The Constellation project had remained a total secret until Hughes and Jack Frye finally announced the project to the world in February 1942.[164] TWA’s flagship plane would advertise the cutting-edge technology of the time. Just as the young Hughes sought to do everything he did with style, so the Constellation would have a handsome, distinctive, instantly-recognizable look. The fuselage was the state-of-the-art for streamlining. Instead of a ‘flat-top’ airframe, making an airplane look somewhat like a tube with wings, the Connie’s top edge swept back from the cockpit in a sinuous upwards swell to the midsection then swooped down tapering toward the tail, in a shape reminiscent of a dolphin. Its ‘swooping’ shape allowed air to flow smoothly around it, thereby reducing flight time that little much more. Instead of employing a single tail fin (or ‘vertical stabilizer’), the Connie had a ‘triple-tail’, three vertical fins spaced at intervals along the tailplane (or ‘horizontal stabilizers’), an uncommon design which was one of the plane’s most distinctive and memorable features.[165] Hughes’ passenger plane had red stripes painted on for pizzazz. For twenty-five years, one would not mistake the sight of the Connie for any other airplane in the air.

 

*

 

THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES. The City of Angels underwent its own form of hysteria in the early hours of February 25, 1942. Just two nights earlier, a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara had fired 25 five-inch shells at the Ellwood petroleum refinery, and fear and paranoia had swept through a population terrified of a Japanese invasion. After all, it was just a couple of months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. In the night in question all hell broke loose at 3:12 a.m. The thick blue beams of powerful searchlights swept across the starry sky while calamitous anti-aircraft fire began reverberating through the long city streets. Angelenos—there were close to 1.5 million of them—awoke to the nightmarish noise of battle as the early morning air was suddenly animated with orange-red artillery bursts. Defense gunners of the Army’s 37th Coast Artillery Brigade had commenced firing at a fixed point in the sky over Culver City, home of the Hughes Aircraft Company and MGM. Army anti-aircraft batteries located in Inglewood and Santa Monica fired thousands of rounds of 12 pound, high explosive shells at a target area that seemed to be moving south toward Long Beach. Lethal shell fragments whistled down upon the pitch-dark streets, damaging buildings. There would be five deaths due to traffic accidents and heart attacks during what became known as the Battle of Los Angeles. The anti-aircraft guns were silenced at 4:14 a.m., and air raid sirens gave the all-clear three hours later. The exact cause of the commotion was never determined. Plane? Blimp? Balloon? U.F.O.? In Washington, D.C, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox attributed the commotion in Los Angeles to “jittery nerves.”[166]

 

*

 

ORIGINS OF THE FLYING BOAT. Late in 1942 Hughes finally got the opportunity he had sought for five years, a contract to build planes for the war effort.

 

The U.S. military was desperate to devise a strategy to deal with the Nazi menace in the oceans. German U-boats snaking through the depths of the Atlantic Ocean were plaguing the allies on the surface. In 1942 alone the German U-boats sank twenty-nine U.S. destroyers, seven U.S. submarines, five heavy cruisers, four aircraft carriers, three mine sweepers, and two anti-aircraft cruisers.[167] Moreover, dozens of American freighters a month were being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic. By mid-1942 American shipping losses in tonnage exceeded the rate of shipbuilding production.[168] Going down with the ships were not only precious U.S. soldiers but also huge amounts of materials vital for the European war effort.

 

Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser was the owner of the shipyards which were producing many hundreds of ill-fated cargo ships for the U.S. military. Kaiser was a household name in the 1940s, a superstar capitalist who was the progenitor of the quotation, “Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.”[169] His construction companies built Hoover Dam and the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, as well as a series of other massive engineering feats; Kaiser was accustomed to thinking big. On July 19, 1942, Kaiser presented to the Senate Military Affairs Committee his idea for a ‘flying freighter’, an enormous aircraft which would carry a comparable amount of freight to the ocean-bound cargo ships but without the threat of being torpedoed to the bottom of the ocean. In an attempt to whip up support for his ‘flying cargo boat’, Kaiser enthused, “Our engineers have plans on their drafting boards for gigantic flying ships beyond anything Jules Verne could have ever imagined.”[170] The heads of the major aircraft manufacturing companies at the time, including Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, and Glenn L. Martin, thought the idea ludicrous.[171]

 

On Friday, August 21 Kaiser met with Howard Hughes in Hughes’ suite at the first-class Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco. Typically, Hughes had checked in under an assumed name, in this instance Jones.[172] Kaiser appealed to Hughes’ patriotism, then pointed out that America’s aircraft companies were unanimous in their revulsion of the flying boat project. When he was told the industry word—the Flying Boat couldn’t be built—Hughes became interested.

           

Kaiser was impressed with how Hughes had carried out his record-breaking flights of the 1930s. (As of 1942 Hughes’ Los Angeles to New York transcontinental speed record still stood.) Talking to Hughes, Kaiser became greatly impressed with Hughes’ knowledge of aircraft design and aerodynamics.[173] By August 23 Kaiser had persuaded Hughes to ‘come on board’ and help build what would be the largest plane yet built.

 

On the evening of August 23, the Kaiser-Hughes venture was formally announced to the world. Kaiser described the project to newsmen as “the most ambitious aviation program the world has ever known.”[174] Three days later, the Washington Post, describing Hughes as “a super-eccentric with simple taste in clothes and choice tastes in girlfriends”, marveled at the secrecy surrounding “the strange young man” and his ventures. When the Post telephoned Nadine Henley, Hughes’ private secretary at 7000 Romaine Street, for a comment on the Flying Boat, she replied, “I don’t know where Mr. Hughes is. We haven’t seen him in two months!”[175]

 

Though at no time had Kaiser submitted to the military any detailed plans of his flying boat proposal, only flamboyant public statements and simple artist’s sketches, Colonel Roy B. Lord wrote to Donald M. Nelson, the Chairman of the War Production Board, on August 31, 1942:

 

With the strong tie-up between Kaiser Co., Inc. and Howard Hughes who has one of the best reputations as a designer in the industry, and with the general public as favorable to Kaiser as in indicated by the public polls and in the newspapers, I feel that it would be a grave mistake not to at least let Kaiser design and construct several of the large planes.[176]

 

Though officials of the Army, the Navy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA), and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) all frowned upon the practicability of the flying boat project, all acquiesced to the will of Donald Nelson, whom the media called America’s “arms czar”, who approved a production contract of three flying boat prototypes for Kaiser-Hughes on September 10.[177]

 

The War Production Board was the top-level government agency which supervised the general direction of America’s military procurement and production programs. It oversaw the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which, among its powers, had established the Defense Plant Corporation to finance certain operations of aircraft manufacturers. The DPC was the specific government bureau which would give Kaiser-Hughes the money for the project.

 

Perhaps the fact that the White House itself was on Howard Hughes’ side had contributed to Donald Nelson being so favorably inclined toward the HK-1 project. Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce for President Franklin Roosevelt, told Kaiser in September, “You are safe in proceeding with Howard Hughes. I have known him since he was a boy—and I knew his able father before him—and I know of no more capable and reliable man than Howard Hughes. . . . He is thorough and he is a genius.”[178]

 

The DPC sent a letter of intent for the development and construction of the “superflying boat” to Kaiser and Hughes on September 17, 1942. As usual, dealing with Hughes meant having to follow unorthodox procedures. It was the only time during WWII that a letter of intent for the manufacture of an aircraft was issued by the DFC. Moreover, the military wasn’t allowed to have any say in the approval of the designs and engineering of the flying boat. Rather, technical specifications would be approved by officials of NACA and the CAA. It would be the government’s only aircraft contract of the war years to be handled in such a hands-off manner. (Much later, an official investigation suggested that the War Production Board had sought to distance itself from Kaiser’s flying boat in case public criticism had led to the complete rejection of the project.[179])

 

Kaiser and Hughes arranged for the Hughes Aircraft Company to build the flying boat. All of the engineering and construction would be done under the direction of Howard Hughes.[180] In order to get the planes built, the Kaiser-Hughes Corporation was incorporated in California on October 7.

 

On November 16, Kaiser-Hughes signed the contract with the U.S. military to produce three Flying Boats, referred to by the military as the HK-1, at $6 million each. The contract with the military stipulated that neither Kaiser nor Hughes were to make a profit off the HK-1.[181]

 

There were other conditions as well. Kaiser-Hughes had to make do with as little strategic materials as possible, meaning aluminium, which was scarce due to the exigencies of the war years. Kaiser-Hughes could not drain the plants of other aircraft manufacturers for skilled personnel to get the planes made. Kaiser-Hughes had to remain within the $18 million budget. Also, Kaiser-Hughes had to show results within 24 months.[182]

 

The plane, known informally as the Hercules, would be made entirely of wood, to capitalize on the research and development Hughes Aircraft had carried out on the mysterious D-2. Though no specific completion time for the project was mentioned in the contract, it was generally understood that the first ultralarge flying cargo boat would be due for delivery to the military in December 1943, the second in May 1944, and the third in October 1944.[183]

 

The HK-1 would be a plane like no other, entirely state-of-the-art in design and size. The single hull design that Hughes decided upon would, according to Charles Barton in Howard Hughes and His Flying Boat, “invite new torsional, wing flutter, vibration, deflection, and control problems never before tested.”[184] The largest airplanes in the sky during the time of World War II were the Martin flying boats, including the Model PBM-1, of which the U.S. Navy had 20 by April 1941. The Martin JRN-1, an advancement on the PBM series, was completed and ready for delivery to the Navy in June 1945. The JRN-1 had a wingspan of 200 feet, an area of 3,685 square feet, and an empty weight of 82,000 pounds. The Hughes Flying Boat, meanwhile, promised a projected wing span of 320 square feet, a projected area of 11,430 square feet, and an empty weight of 280,700 pounds.[185] Hughes was proposing to build the most remarkable airplane ever built!

 

A gigantic hangar for the HK-1 was built at the Hughes Aircraft plant in Culver City at a cost of some $2 million, paid for by the DPC.[186] Designated Building 15, the oversized hangar, made entirely of redwood, measured 750 feet long, 250 feet wide and 100 feet high, and covered an area of a little over four acres.[187] What Hughes Aircraft employees called simply the “cargo building” was widely described at the time as the largest wooden construction ever built.[188] It overshadowed the small scatter of buildings on the Culver City site.[189]

 

With respect to the other work Hughes Aircraft was doing for the war effort, such as the manufacture of flexible feed chutes and booster guns, Hughes will say in 1947,

 

When this contract [HK-1] was taken we moved that other work bodily out of the Culver City plant. We rented other facilities—one was a furniture company, for example—and we did this extraneous work outside; and, to the greatest extent possible, we confined the Culver City factory to this one project and to nothing else.[190]

 

At face value, the Hughes Aircraft Company seemed eminently suited for the undertaking of such a vast and complex project as the HK-1. Hughes had the enthusiasm, and he had on his payroll some of the best aviation minds in the business. According to Robert A Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, in a memo dated September 12, 1942, “It is our information that the Hughes organization already has over 100 engineers and aircraft designers.”[191]

 

Yet the production of the 200-ton plane would proceed by baby steps. Though Hughes had entertained a vision of Hughes Aircraft becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, Howard Hughes the Company President would have a dreadfully laissez faire attitude towards the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts of running his business. Just as the Flying Boat project was supposed to be getting up to speed, Hughes was often off-site, putting the finishing touches on The Outlaw, for example.[192] Moreover, production at the Culver City plant proceeded with virtually no supervision by government officials at all.[193] The responsibility of representatives of the DFC who visited Hughes Aircraft did not extend beyond the disbursement of funds for construction costs. It was Hughes who, according to the DFC, had “sole decision as to design, materials, and method of construction.”[194] A DFC representative assigned to the L.A. area later testified that in the four years of service at the Hughes plant during the construction of the flying boat he had met with Howard Hughes exactly once.[195]

 

Though absent for long periods of time from the Hughes Aircraft plant, Hughes kept apprised of its operations through employees known as “Hughes spies”.[196]

 

As early as December 1942, the flying boat project was already in disarray. “Things have slowed down terrifically,” observed a government engineer, ascribing the problems to a lack of “centralized authority” at Hughes Aircraft.[197]

 

After a long and involved history, only one of these planes would be built—only completed after the war was over, and at a cost of (some say) $50 million. It would be known throughout the world as the ‘Spruce Goose’. It was the plane that would bring Howard Hughes world-wide aviation fame all over again—and for the last time.

 

*

 

RECKLESS AND REMOTE. Through 1942, after the completion of the shooting of The Outlaw and while negotiating for the HK-1 contract, Hughes personally carried out more than two-dozen taxi tests in the mysterious D-2 aircraft at the Culver City plant. During one taxi test, Hughes lifted the plane around twenty feet into the air to evaluate a detail of the landing gear. While the D-2 was flying level over the runway, Ray Kirkpatrick, a “line boy” (and later mechanic) at the plant, lay in the belly of the plane, peering through a hole, inspecting the nose wheel strut. Glenn Odekirk, sitting with Hughes in the cockpit, became increasingly agitated as the D-2 was quickly running out of runway. Hughes landed the 28,000-pound plane with a thud and skidded round in the grass beyond the end of the runway.[198] This mishap was a harbinger of things to come. Over the next eighteen years many a Hughes co-pilot will experience Aviator Hughes’ heart-in-the-throat recklessness.

 

Late in 1942, around the time that Kaiser-Hughes was awarded the HK-1 contract, the top secret D-2 was moved to Hughes Aircraft’s new D-2 Desert Test Facility at Harper Dry Lake, a desolated region of the Mojave Desert located around 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 18 miles outside Barstow. A large, wooden, windowless, temperature-controlled hangar was built at a cost of $3 million, along with a barracks to house fifty Hughes Aircraft engineers and mechanics.[199] The flat, arid, remote area was marked by desert wind and tumbleweed; coyotes and scorpions; and bald eagles and hawks circling overhead.[200] The location satisfied Hughes’ obsession with secrecy.

 

*

 

“THE HUGHES COUNTRY CLUB”. From 1941 up to 1943, if Hughes Aircraft employees such as Kenneth Ridley and Rea Hopper, Hughes’ chief engineer and chief designer, respectively, needed to confer with Hughes, they often had to travel to Muirfield Road, and then Sarbonne Road, to see their boss. Hughes’ mercurial ways dictated that meetings came intermittently and at no set time. Meetings might take who knows where and at godawful times, such as in the middle of the night at Goldwyn Studios, where he was making The Outlaw.

 

The one place Hughes was almost never seen was the Hughes Aircraft Company. Throughout this narrative there will be much occasion to recount Hughes’ exploits in test-flying planes at the Culver City site. These appearances of Hughes will always be exceptional first and foremost because of his flesh-and-blood presence on-site.

 

Through 1943 Hughes remained absent for extended periods of time from the operations of his Hughes Aircraft Company, which was busy with the construction of the D-2, the early design of the HK-1, as well as the various manufacturing jobs for the war effort. Hughes had given the job of general manager to Glenn Odekirk, but, as usual with Hughes, refused to give Odekirk the power to make significant decisions without Hughes’ approval. Hence, if Hughes was away and out of contact yet vital issues needed to be addressed, chaos ensued at Culver City. Hughes Aircraft was a company of over 500 employees and growing, carrying out vital defense work, but Hughes relentlessly treated the place as a hobbyist might, coming and going when he felt like it to tinker with this and that. Since Hughes’ concentration was divided by so many different major projects in the pipeline at the same time (The Outlaw, TWA, womanizing), it’s no wonder that at least one of his concerns suffered his inattention. Charles Higham described with a flair for the dramatic the condition of Hughes Aircraft in the absence of the company president: “workers were slack and uncontrolled, inefficiency prevailed, each individual vice president criticized every other one, several went to Hughes behind each other’s backs.”[201] Executive tension at Hughes Aircraft will be a running theme through the 1940s and into the 1950s.

 

One high-level Hughes Aircraft employee explained his boss this way:

 

We’d give him everything that looked fine to us and if he had any reason in the world for not making a decision at that time, he would not make it. And so we’d . . . either try some other design or twiddle our thumbs until we heard from him again and he accepted something. And practically everything required his approval, down to pretty fine nuts and bolts. He used to hold us up a lot by not making decisions. All of us had to contend with that damn foolishness.[202]

 

Whenever Henry Kaiser, Hughes’ partner on the HK-1 project, needed to speak to Hughes, he had to go through the switchboard at Romaine Street. Not only would the operators have no idea where Hughes might be, but they had no idea when Hughes might be able to return Kaiser’s call. Not being able to get to Hughes easily caused Kaiser increasing consternation.[203] Many Hughes associates over the years would agree to the wisdom of his Uncle Rupert’s quote: “I can get through to the Almighty by dropping to my knees, but I don’t know how to get in touch with Howard.”[204]

 

A lackidasical president coupled with a mostly powerless management led to the manufacturing industry’s mocking nickname of Hughes Aircraft—“The Hughes Country Club”.[205]

 

*

 

Carl Babberger, the chief aerodynamicist at Hughes Aircraft during the development of the D-2 and the HK-1, recalled that meetings with Howard Hughes could come at any hour of the day or night. He might be summoned at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday; or he might be woken out of a sound sleep by a telephone call at 2 a.m. requesting his immediate presence at one of Hughes’ L.A. hideouts. “He never raised his voice—didn’t have to,” Babberger recalled. “He was a quiet, soft-spoken fella.”[206] Babberger witnessed Hughes’ behavior sometimes lapsing into strangeness. During a conference Hughes might “sit in a room for a long time and look at the walls.”[207] Hughes always had absolutely no thought of hospitality for his guests. Though design meetings might go on for more than four, eight unbroken hours at a time, Hughes never offered his employees so much as a glass of water. This quirk was not because he was stingy, it was just that he simply did not think about food. When employees finally said point-blank that they were hungry, Hughes would give the go-ahead for them to go dine at a restaurant on Hughes’ own nickel. Many employees at Hughes Aircraft remembered this particular quirk of Hughes’.[208]

 

“One time when he was cutting film on The Outlaw in rented space at the old Goldwyn Studios he called and asked me to come up,” recalled Edward West, Jr., an aeronautical engineer at Hughes Aircraft. “It was 12:30 or 1 o’clock in the morning, something like that. . . . [He] talked to me until two in the morning. Out in the back alley, where I parked, was a car with a young, gorgeous-looking chick sitting there with her hands folded. When I came out she was still there waiting for him.”[209]

 

Some of the employees came to learn Hughes’ rhythms: he’d talk on the phone until the early hours of the morning then sleep until noon.[210] Babberger, for one, recalled: “Hughes talked on the phone practically eighteen hours a day, all the time he wasn’t sleeping, and to anybody anywhere. I’ve been there when he got long distance calls from Europe and India.”[211]

 

*

 

The construction of the mammoth Pentagon building, headquarters of what became America’s heavily-centralized multi-billion-dollar military machine, was completed in Washington, D.C. on January 15, 1943. In years to come Hughes Aircraft will become one of the Pentagon’s prime defense contractors, and in the process Howard Hughes will become one of the world’s richest men.

 

*

 

1943 was a watershed year in the ongoing deterioration of Hughes’ mental health. His behavior was becoming increasingly strange, erratic, and dangerous. His intimates could see that Hughes was a man ‘not in his right mind.’ That Hughes himself was sometimes aware of his failing mental powers made him suffer all the more, and he feared for his freedom, recognizing the threat of being committed to a psychiatric hospital against his will. This terror of being ‘put away’ was the grounds for his withdrawal into his darkened rooms back in 1941 as well as his infamous disappearance for five months in late 1944; and also those disappearances that would come over the next three decades.

 

Hughes had been overextending himself. Working and reworking the ill-starred D-2, designing it and then putting it through its paces in the sky; as well as dealing with the design and construction of the Constellation and the HK-1 flying boat[212]; as well as conducting company business at TWA in person and on the telephone; then interacting with his emotional women in the evening; and then editing the 450,000 feet of The Outlaw—that’s 85 miles of footage—on its interminable way down to 10,200 feet through the night.[213] Sometimes Hughes would not surface from the editing rooms at the Goldwyn Studios at 7200 Santa Monica Boulevard for two, three days at a time.[214] Moreover the U.S. Government’s Aircraft Production Board was angling for the abandonment of the HK-1 project from October 1943 onward, intensifying the stress on Hughes’ nerves. Something had to give.

 

*

 

The first bad sign of 1943 came early in the year, when things seemed to be looking up. The Outlaw received its world premiere in San Francisco on February 5.[215] The Production Code Administration had awarded Howard Hughes’ film a seal of approval only after he removed a total of a half-minute of material out of the film, a series of trims here and there from shots which were much too audacious with Jane Russell's bosom. One of the many eye-catching billboards advertising the picture stated, “Sex has not been rationed.” “Mean, moody and magnificent!” shouted another. Yet another pointed out, alongside a representation of its voluptuous female star, “Two good reasons to see The Outlaw.”

 

The reviews were devastating. Hughes’ $2.5 million production was deemed by Time magazine as “a strong candidate for the flopperoo of all time.”[216] “Nothing happens worth mentioning,” decided the San Francisco Chronicle.[217] The Hollywood Reporter didn’t even give the film a review.[218]

 

But the film was a box-office smash. For eight weeks in a row its ticket sales broke records in San Francisco.[219] Hughes had reshot scenes over and again to bring out Russell’s figure to best effect and censors all over the country were in an uproar. Church groups were attempting to ban the film. The publicity against the film was, ironically, helping the film’s popularity. The Outlaw was, as its movie posters proclaimed, “the picture that couldn’t be stopped.”

 

Then, weirdly, for reasons no one can ascertain, Hughes, at the height of The Outlaw’s fantastic success, withdrew the film from circulation and let it gather dust on the shelf. Rather than give his film a national release, he buried it for the time being. It goes without saying that this was a most awful business decision by the man who had financed the film entirely on his own.[220]

 

*

 

CHANGES. By the beginning of 1943, Hughes had moved out of 211 Muirfield and into the mansion he was leasing for aspiring actress Faith Domergue on 691 Sarbonne Road. In one sense he was putting the 1930s behind him. Muirfield was full of bad memories. Women who had lived there for a time included Ella Rice, Billie Dove, and Katharine Hepburn, the first a failed marriage, the other two failed romances. Then there had been the syphilis scare in the spring of 1941 which confirmed Hughes’ disaffection with the house. The place was full of germs.

 

Furthermore, Hughes was haunted by the threat of income tax. He chose to sell the property in order to avoid being deemed a resident of California and therefore liable to state income taxes. Though Hughes had been living exclusively in Los Angeles since late 1925, he argued that, as paraphrased by Bartlett and Steele, “he was a resident of Texas and was in California on business.”[221]

 

Hughes will never own a house again, but is going to lease many. For the rest of his life, wherever he was, he was only ever “passing through”. In years to come Hughes the American Patriot will apparently use every trick in the book to dodge Uncle Sam’s tax collectors.

 

*

 

There will be other changes to the man. No longer will Howard Hughes drive around in fancy cars, the Rolls Royce, the Duesenberg, the Cadillac. From now on he kept to banal, mid-range chevrolets, cars that didn’t stand out in any way. Some people were surprised to see the multi-millionaire pulling up in a jalopy.

 

He kept to casual dress: loose slacks, white button-down shirt open at the collar, sometimes a jacket (usually blue), no tie, leather loafers or sneakers.[222] The sneakers were sometimes green. Later in the decade Hughes told newsmen, “I used to be well-groomed but now I am too busy to bother.”[223] He explained himself further in a subsequent interview: “There is nothing mysterious about me. I have no taste for expensive clothes. Clothes are something to wear and automobiles are transportation. If they merely cover me up and get me there, that’s sufficient. In a Chevrolet, I can go where I want without being noticed. I can drive up to the curb without getting Hail the Conquering Hero.’”[224] Hughes stressed, “I want to be unobtrusive.”[225]

 

His daily meal was steak, peas, and ice cream. He drank neither milk nor water, but sometimes tomato juice. Year in, year out, this was his invariable menu. For this reason Noah Dietrich called Hughes’ eating habits “astonishing”. Sometimes Hughes went all day without eating, then, round midnight, sat down for his usual meal and ate three steaks at one sitting. The steaks were to be done either rare or medium-rare according to Hughes’ precise taste. Sometimes he ate salads instead of steak and peas. Hughes would always have a sweet tooth, and liked caramel sauce on his ice cream, as well as cookies and apple pie. “Bizarre to the point of absurdity,” was Ava Gardner’s opinion of Hughes’ eating habits.[226]

 

Hughes never read books. Other than company documents, aircraft technical manuals, and screenplays, the only material he reads were newspapers, magazines, and comic books.[227]

 

No longer did he indulge in athletic activities of any kind. He lived exclusively in his head. He followed his own hours according to his own biorhythms; he never carried a watch.

 

He never carried a wallet, nor, most often, any cash at all. He used aliases whenever he checked into a hotel—and even when he used tailors.[228]

 

“Howard Hughes has grown old without changing his little boy’s fascination for airplanes, movies, and girls,” remarked Charles J. Kelly in The Sky’s the Limit. “To the tired, middle-aged ethos of our business world, Hughes’ intrigues and eccentricities are an enigma—but any small boy would instantly understand and appreciate the secret night negotiations and delight in his complicated dealings. Unpressed, unshaven, tieless and in dirty sneakers, Howard Hughes is the Huck Finn of American industry.”[229]

 

*

 

In 1943, Eddie Alexander, proprietor of a barbershop in Hollywood, was hired as Hughes’ personal barber. Every now and then over the next seventeen years Alexander cut Hughes’ hair at Hughes’ bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel as well as at other Hughes hide-outs. One of the requirements of the job was that Alexander had to bathe himself frequently. “He said he didn’t want me bringing other customers’ germs into his presence,” Alexander recalled.[230]

 

Hughes wanted his barber on call 24/7 just in case he felt like a trim. “He was a busy man, he told me, and he wanted me on standby,” Alexander recalled. “Sometimes, after I had been waiting three or four days at home, he would call at 2 a.m. and say, ‘Just checking, Eddie, just checking. I wanted to see if you were standing by.”[231]

 

*

 

Simple farm girl Ava Gardner[232] and popular Hollywood star Mickey Rooney were married on January 10, 1942; they divorced May 21, 1943. Ava was a minor actress at the time, not yet the superstar she became. “Hughes first made his presence felt early in 1943, when I’d separated from Mickey but still hadn’t gotten my divorce.” Ava is introduced to the theme of Howard Hughes via a couple of his intermediaries who suggested that she meet with the Mysterious Multi-Millionaire. Ava is curious. Hughes shows up at her doorstep one night; they go to dinner at an out-of-the-way restaurant. In 1943, Hughes was thirty-seven years old, Ava twenty. She was a shapely brunette with green eyes. They took a shine to one another, in a friendly sort of a way, as she recalled it, and the two friends went on to meet from time to time over the next fifteen years or so.

 

AVA. In certain ways Ava Gardner was Howard Hughes’ alter ego. (1) She was as much a man-eater as Hughes was a womanizer. Around the time that she and Hughes became an item, Gardner was seen out and about at Hollywood’s hottest night spots with a variety of men, including Greg Bautzer, L.A.’s foremost celebrity attorney and close Hughes associate. Hughes, for his part, was implicated with a variety of women at the same time. (2) Just as the tomboyish Jane Russell made a significant impression on Hughes’ heart, so Gardner said that she herself was a tomboy when she was a girl.[233] (3) Like Hughes, Ava didn’t stand for ceremony.

 

Ava was as unpretentious in her private life as Howard Hughes. She had grown up a simple country girl in rural tobacco-growing land in North Carolina. Neither put on “airs”. She once showed up at a Beverly Hills party in evening gown and dirty bare feet.[234] When the two of them went on dates, they usually ended up in non-fashionable eateries off the beaten path. Sometimes they were visible at Hollywood’s most fashionable nightclubs. As usual, Hughes employed his tried-and-tested seduction technique of flying his lover in one of his planes—over the years he took Ava to Mexico a number of times.[235]

 

In the early 1940s Ava Gardner was not yet the voluptuous, throaty, captivating international film star she eventually became by 1953. She was an up-and-coming actress under contract to MGM at a paltry $300 a week and still hoping for her big break in a dynamic role. Hughes saw her as one more component in his empire of women and offered to buy her a house on Mulholland Drive, yet Ava, located in an apartment in Westwood at the time, refused. There was a streak of independence in Ava Gardner that could twist Hughes in knots. What the vampish Patricia Arquette tells Balthazar Getty in David Lynch’s Lost Highway could very well have been a saying of Ava’s: “You’ll never own me.” Still, Hughes did his best to assert his control. He employed a bodyguard to protect as well as keep tabs on Ava twenty-four hours a day. When Hughes’ attention got too oppressive the two of them had flaming rows then make up with nights of intimacy as well as gifts of expensive jewelry, which, for Ava’s part, didn’t impress her in the slightest.

 

Gardner recalled in her autobiography that at one or another of Hollywood’s night spots Hughes sometimes paid an orchestra to stay overtime so he and Ava could dance until dawn on the dance floor otherwise deserted of patrons.[236]

 

Hughes and Ava shared the same birthday. When she turned twenty-one in 1943, Ava asked Hughes facetiously for a “big tub of orange ice cream” as a birthday present. Hughes duly dispatched his functionaries to deal with the assignment, and later in the day a stretch limousine delivered the personal gift to Ava’s doorstep.[237]

 

IN HER OWN WORDS. In her autobiography Ava Gardner remembered Hughes as “A male man. Secure. Private. But a nice smile in a long, serious face. He reminded me a bit of my father.

            “He was a straightforward, no-bull Texan, direct and terribly helpful in practically every way you could imagine. As soon as he heard that Mama was very ill with cancer, he told me he’d get the best cancer specialist in the U.S.A. to visit her. And he kept his word.

“He was a brilliant man, brilliant in a dozen ways, with courage and self-confidence to burn. But he did things, shall we say, differently . . .

“Nothing was ever ordinary when Howard Hughes was involved.

“When Howard Hughes wanted something, he went after it with tunnel vision. He could be determinedly vengeful if anyone crossed or opposed him.

“One of Howard’s least charming traits was the way he insisted on scrutinizing everyone, putting a “watcher” on people he cared about so he would know what was going on with those he considered his property.

“Howard Hughes knew all about everything. The goddamn CIA could have done worse than hire Howard to oversee its operations. If there was anything to be discovered, Howard could ferret it out.

            “His spies had me watched from the very first time he met me. Spying was one of Howard’s continual preoccupations. He spied on and learned things about people. That gave him power to exert leverage. At times, as I was to find out, Howard Hughes was not a very nice man.”[238]

 

*

 

Through 1943, Ava Gardner recalled that Hughes was getting more and more lost in a mental fog. Her lover went through periods in which he lost his self-perspective and powers of judgment and was unaware of his bizarre behavior.[239]

 

Faith Domergue recalled an episode from early in the year. The two of them were driving through the desert north of Los Angeles when Howard saw a jackrabbit by the side of the road.

 

Without a word he stopped the car and ran back to the small animal. He knelt down and gently placed his hand on the rabbit’s neck. Then he returned sadly to the car.

“What was it, Howard?” Faith asked. “Didn’t you think it was dead?”

“I wasn’t sure,” he answered. “If it wasn’t, I couldn’t leave it by the side of the roadway.” She noticed that for the remainder of the journey he held his left hand out the window.

Upon reaching their leased cottage, he ran to the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and began washing his left hand with a bar of strong surgical soap he always carried with him. Moving his hands rhythmically, almost in slow motion, he performed the ritual for more than an hour until his hand was raw and bleeding. Then he tumbled into bed, leaving the contaminated hand hanging down toward the floor.[240]

 

Jane Greer, an eighteen year old starlet who was coming to prominence in Hollywood at this time and was yet another of Hughes’ romantic conquests during the war years, witnessed a slew of strange actions on Howard’s part.[241] One incident—related to the one just above—looked forward to one of Hughes’ worst obsessions of his latter years. Greer was left waiting alone at a table in a nightclub while Hughes stood in the men’s room waiting for someone else to come in or leave so he wouldn’t have to touch the door handle himself.

 

Aviator Hughes had defied death over and again, including surviving two significant air crashes. Aviator Hughes had the courage to serve as test pilot for hitherto untried planes; had crossed the darkest and remotest regions of the globe—but, standing on his own two feet on stable ground, he was afraid of an ordinary doorknob in a public place? It is as if a screen was pulled down over his mind, closing him off from reason.

 

Hughes won’t shake hands with people or touch a bathroom doorknob but will put his hand on a dead rabbit on the side of the road? If there was a tarot card for Hughes, it would be the Man of Contradictions.

 

*

 

One spring evening in 1943, in the time when the nation was tapping its feet to the song “Ration Blues”, millionaire playboy Howard Hughes was out and about on the streets of Hollywood. He was driving a Cadillac down Sunset Boulevard, with a dolled-up Ava Gardner beside him in the passenger seat. A car approached from the opposite lane, its headlights whelming in Hughes’ eyes; it was a convertible roadster coming his way. Hughes recognized that car. The roadster passed by then went into an alarming U-turn. Hughes laid on the speed; the roadster kept pace. Their bumpers touched. The roadster cut round the Cadillac and sped up alongside, the two of them window to window speeding down the city street. It was Faith Domergue at the wheel of the roadster and her expression was ugly. She spied Ava Gardner’s presence. Hughes swerved his car into the parking lot of the Farmer’s Market and slowed to a halt, anxious over what his next move should be. The roadster kept coming, it was headed straight for the Cadillac’s passenger door. There was a terrific smash. Hughes and Gardner bounced around like rag dolls. Still the roadster’s engine screamed; Faith backed her crumpled car up then put it in drive. Flooring the accelerator, the hysterical seventeen-year-old slammed into Hughes’ car a second time. A passing driver slowed down to assay the situation. Silence reigned for a moment, save for the sounds of anxious breathing and idling cars and the hiss of steam escaping from the roadster’s mangled engine. The concerned citizen happened to be Sherman Fairchild, coincidentally a pioneer in the aviation business and an old friend of Hughes’, and his august presence defused the situation.[242] Fairchild spirited Gardner away into the night, and Hughes was left to make sense out of his disgruntled teenage lover. The Cadillac, leased to Hughes Tool, was a write-off.

 

The relationship between Hughes and Faith Domergue continued. After all, she was still waiting for her big break into film which Hughes had promised her back in 1940. In between bouts of Hughesian psychodrama, Faith wrote in her diary,

 

There is a strange quirk in Howard, stranger than all of his other peculiarities. Once he has become involved with a project or a person, he can not let them get away from his control. Once owning something, he has to own it for always, and this is so strong in him, I believe it is unconscious. It is so much a part of his presence that it is like his brown-black eyes, his high-pitched voice, it is him. And it is the most self-destroying element in his character.[243]

 

*

 

Hughes’ erratic behavior had more serious consequences than just upsetting his legions of women. Though the HK-1 (the future ‘Spruce Goose’) was in development at this time, Hughes was involved with other planes before the HK-1 became a reality. With Howard Hughes at the controls in the cockpit, his increasing mental instability would put his life—and others—in jeopardy.

 

PANIC IN THE SKIES. Once the “greatest pilot in the world”, Hughes’ powers of judgment had eroded to the extent that in one incident, when Hughes was test-flying Lockheed’s newest design triumph, the long-range, piston-driven, 40-to-60 passenger Constellation, the airplane that would be the flagship of TWA, the controls had to be wrested out of his hands, the worst embarrassment a pilot can suffer.[244] It was April, 1943. On board the Connie that day were Hughes and Jack Frye for TWA; and for Lockheed, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, chief designer of the plane; Milo Burcham, pilot; and Dick Stanton, flight engineer.

 

In his autobiography More Than My Share of It All, Kelly Johnson, undisputed aeronautical genius and American aviation legend, recalled that flying with Howard Hughes proved to be “a terrifying experience.”

 

It began when Hughes asked Milo Burcham to show him how the airplane stalled. Assessments of the stalling characteristics of a new airplane are routine and addressed in the Flight Manual. However, as “A stalled aircraft loses height rapidly and brings control problems to the pilot,” explains How Airliners Fly. “Clearly the stall is something to be avoided at all costs.”[245] Testing the Constellaton, Burcham carried out a textbook stall, slowing the plane down by lowering the flaps and landing gear while pulling the airplane up. (The higher the wing’s angle of attack, the lower the airspeed.) In the event Burcham brought the plane into and out of a stall gracefully and with no danger to his passengers.

            “Hell,” Johnson, who was standing in the cockpit, recalled Hughes saying, “that’s no way to stall.”

            Burcham yielded the controls to Hughes.

In the pilot’s seat 3,000 feet up, Howard Hughes assessed the stalling characteristics of the Lockheed Constellation in his own inimitable way. He lowered the flaps on the trailing edge of the wings, gunned the engines, and pitched the aircraft nose up, way up, pointing the wings up to and beyond the stalling angle, disrupting the airflow and in the event bringing the Constellation to the utter brink of aerodynamic calamity.

“Never before nor since have I seen an airspeed indicator read zero in the air,” Johnson explains. “But that’s the speed we reached—zero—with a big, four engine airplane pointed 90 degrees to the horizon and almost no airflow over any of the surfaces except what the propellers were providing.”

The Constellation hinged at the point of plunging tail-first into the ground. While floating up to the ceiling, Johnson was worried that the plane might break apart. “Then the airplane fell forward enough to give us some momentum,” he recalled. “Just inertia did it, not any aerodynamic control.”

The plane dropped 1,000 feet closer to the hills below before Burcham regained control of the airplane. Johnson later wrote, an understatement, “I was very much concerned with Howard’s idea of how to stall a big transport.”[246]

 

The Constellation had come out of its hair-raising stall high over the Southern California landscape, but the dangerous Howard Hughes was still in the cockpit. The plane was flown to Palmdale Airport, where, on the runway, Burcham yielded the pilot’s seat to Hughes, who practiced ‘touch and gos’ (takeoffs and landings). Johnson recalled that each of Hughes’ six takeoffs was more “atrocious” than the last. “He had great difficulty in keeping it on a straight course,” he recalled. “He used so much thrust and developed so much torque that the plane kept angling closer and closer to the control tower.” Hughes seemed to have some mania for speed, if not a death wish, insofar as he had been well apprised in advance of the acceptable speeds for takeoffs and landings. It got to the point that Johnson, whose company still owned the plane, finally demanded that Burcham fly them back to Burbank. Hughes, looking anguished, gave up the controls.

 

Burcham later sent a memo to an executive at TWA: “Your man’s losing it. We had to take control of the plane away, and even then he remained in a fog.”[247]

 

Johnson offered a postscript to the episode, illustrating Hughes’ changing states of mind. “On his next time in the airplane, Hughes changed his attitude considerably. He followed instructions carefully.”[248]

 

*

 

During the war years Hughes indulged in yet other aerial exploits both dangerous and audacious. He had his own personal style of flying into the Army Airfield (originally Daugherty Field) at Long Beach, a base of operations for the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Air Transport Command. Since Hughes was manufacturing equipment for the Air Corps’ airplanes, he evidently considered himself persona grata at the base. Instead of following the customary practice of radioing the air traffic control tower to request permission to land, Hughes, if the weather conditions were clear, completely ignored the control tower and came in for a landing on one of the runways without first receiving landing instructions. At the time the Long Beach Army Airfield was the busiest military airport in America.[249]

 

*

 

CRASH! At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon on May 16, 1943, at Lake Mead, Nevada, Hughes flew his way into a spectacular plane crash. He was at the controls of his own Sikorsky S-43 amphibian, showing it off for two representatives of the military, which was intent on appropriating it for the war effort. The Army Corps of Engineers wanted the plane for use in Reykjavik, Iceland.[250]

 

The silver S-43 was a parasol monoplane, consisting of a fuselage attached via a series of struts underneath a one-piece wing; and just over the cockpit spun two sets of large propellers. Hughes had carried out close to two-dozen modifications to the plane inside and out, fine-tuning it into the best of its kind in the world.[251] The fuselage had been reconfigured to utilize the flush-riveting technique originally used on his H-1 Racer. The pair of 750 hp P&W Hornet engines were replaced with 1,100 hp Wright Cyclone R-1820 engines. Larger fuel tanks were installed, allowing for flights of more than 1,000 miles nonstop. The main cabin was plush and luxurious, replete with leather couch, a flying bachelor’s pad. As a result of Hughes’ technical modifications, the S-43 had been assigned an “X” license (for experimental) from the Civil Aeronautics Agency, and the plane was restricted to flying in daylight.[252]

 

Lake Mead, located just east of Las Vegas, is the largest lake in Nevada. Its placid blue water is surrounded by a desert landscape of cacti and ancient geological rock formations. The Peregrine Falcon flies overhead, while the desert tortoise suns by the shrubs on the banks.

 

Hughes had been experimenting with take offs and landings with his Sikorsky on Lake Mead since acquiring the plane in 1937, sometimes carrying out more than 100 touch-and-goes in a single day.[253] Occasionally Hughes had even had motion picture cameramen in speedboats skimming alongside filming the S-43 during his tests.[254] In 1942-43 alone, Hughes made anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 take offs and landings on Lake Mead; nothing should have surprised him.[255]

 

Hughes, however, wasn’t in his right mind. On the morning of the crash, he awoke disquieted and disturbed in his suite in a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Among the notes he jotted down on one of his yellow legal pads was the bizarre reminder, “Remove hair, right nostral [sic].”[256] He dressed himself in unfussy, comfortable clothing, not caring about his appearance: white button-down shirt, roomy tan trousers, tennis shoes.[257] No longer was he the dapper aviator of years past.

 

Hughes had four passengers with him in the doomed S-43: C. W. Von Rosenberg and William Morrison Cline, two CAA officials; also Gene Blandford and Richard Felt, two Hughes Aircraft engineers. If anyone had noticed anything strange about Hughes’ behavior prior to the flight, nobody felt bold enough to stop him from manning the cockpit controls. “Hughes was the expert,” Von Rosenberg said later. “We all felt supremely confident that we were in safe hands.” [258]

 

Hughes lifted the S-43 off Lake Mead without any problem. In the air, the plane performed like clockwork. But when Hughes brought the 10-ton plane in for a landing upon the surface of the lake, the nose suddenly pitched forward and plunged into the water. The plane’s center of gravity had been too far forward—but the pilot had discovered this much too late. “We’ve had it now,” thought Von Rosenberg.[259] The plane spun around like a top at eighty miles an hour then started skidding along the lake, breaking apart. One of the propellers snapped off, sheared through the fuselage, and cleaved open Richard Felt’s head. William Cline’s seat was torn out of the plane with Cline still buckled in; both disappeared under the water.[260]

 

The S-43 reduced to inert wreckage filling with water. Von Rosenberg received what would be permanent spine injuries yet was still conscious. Gene Blandford miraculously come through almost untouched, and struggled toward Felt’s stricken body.

 

Hughes was concussed in the pilot’s seat. There was a gash in his forehead and blood was trickling down his face.[261] He was dazed and glassy-eyed and didn’t respond when Von Rosenberg shook him.[262] “Come on, Howard!” he shouted. “Let’s get the hell out of this thing!”[263] Hughes remained unresponsive. His limp body had to be pulled out of the sinking plane.

 

A pleasure boater who had witnessed the crash sped up to give assistance. Blandford and Felt were taken aboard the motorboat and rushed to shore.[264] Von Rosenberg helped bundle Hughes into a rubber raft. Just as they were safely in the raft—eight minutes had elapsed since the crash—what was left of the wrecked S-43 sank under the surface of the lake.[265]

 

The injured were rushed to Boulder City Hospital. Hughes was placed in the same automobile as the dying Richard Felt. “I had this man’s head in my lap all the way to the hospital and I knew he didn’t have a chance,” Hughes later told newsmen.[266] Both Felt and Cline died in the accident.

 

Glenn Odekirk, now the superintendent of the Hughes Aircraft plant in Culver City, met Hughes at the Boulder City Airport in the hours following the crash.[267] His boss looked wrecked in body and mind and was hysterical. “It’s my fault, my fault,” Hughes raved. “You could see it from the air. How could I have let it happen?”

“Howard, let’s get you to a hospital.”

“No, no, no! They’ll put me in a locked ward.”[268]

 

The FBI sent a teletype from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C. on May 20, 1943: “Crash believed to due to inherent fault of Sikorsky S-43, the nose of which is said to drop too low and too fast on slow approach when landing, together with improper load distribution. Above information obtained from [blacked out] who was detailed by Hughes to assist in recovery of instant plane and investigation of crash.”[269]

 

The Hughes employee who spoke to the FBI had only hinted at the precise cause of the crash. When Hughes replaced the S-43’s original engines in favor of Wright R-1820s, the plane’s center of gravity was shunted forward, so ballast was installed in the plane’s tail to even out the weight front and back. But prior to the fateful flight, the ballast had been removed by Army technicians who had planned to place radio equipment in the tail.[270] When Hughes carried out a pre-flight inspection of the plane, he failed to confer with his ground grew regarding the lack of ballast in the tail. Aviator Hughes failed to notice that the plane was a potential death trap. It was a glaring oversight on Hughes’ part, though Hughes was never accused of pilot error.[271]

 

“A federal investigation determined that the crash resulted from a mix-up between Hughes and his ground crew,” noted Barlett and Steele.[272] Charles Higham was harder on Hughes: “Hughes’ old problem of loading had done him in; the excessive number of cameras, cargo items, and gadgets had thrown the plane hopelessly off balance.”[273] R. S. Tripp noted in Plane & Pilot, “He should have at least seen that a 100-pound toolbox wasn’t in its usual place.”[274]

 

Hughes himself went on record as saying, “The wind direction changed 90 degrees and instead of being a tail wind, it changed to a cross-wind, and that caused the plane to turn and I lost control of it.”[275]

 

Hughes covered the medical bills for his crewmembers as well as funeral expenses. Richard Felt’s widow received $48,000. William Cline’s wife and son each received $250 a month and Cline’s mother $150 a month for many years.[276]

 

It subsequently took U.S. Navy divers a couple of days to pinpoint the wreckage 180 feet down. Hughes had his Hughes Aircraft engineers salvage the plane. He spent upwards of $440,000 to recover and rebuild his S-43 back to airworthiness.[277] The fact that the war had caused a shortage of aircraft parts and materials did not stop Hughes from carrying out his inessential wartime project.[278]

 

*

 

Though Aviator Hughes was exhibiting spectacularly reckless behavior on an increasingly frequent basis, he could still be his old self, exhibiting all the skill that won for him his aviation achievements of a decade earlier. Nevada aviation pioneer Florence Murphy operated the North Las Vegas Airport in the 1940s, and Hughes often flew into the airport during the decade. One evening in 1943 Hughes phoned Murphy, requesting to land at the airfield in the middle of the night. Since the runways had no lights at that time, Hughes told her to set up a line of cars with their headlights turned on. “He landed fine,” Murphy recalled. “We charged him what we charged everyone—one dollar.”[279]

 

*

 

Extensive wind-tunnel tests on a sixteen-foot-long scale model of the HK-1 were completed by early June 1943. Pleased with the data from the tests, the War Production Board assigned the HK-1 project Special Priority status, and put Hughes Aircraft on the fast-track to acquire essential materials to build the three planes. On June 9, 1943, the New York Times reported that the HK-1 “will take to the air early next Spring, at least two months ahead of schedule.” It turned to be a wildly over-optimistic estimate.[280]

 

*

 

THE D-2. Though the Army Air Corps had concluded that the D-2 project was “a waste of time” back in January 26, 1942, Hughes hadn’t given up on it.[281] Early in June 1943, at Hughes Aircraft’s Desert Test Facility at Harper Dry Lake, Hughes carried out a rigorous series of taxi tests of the plane.[282] A D-2 prototype took to the skies for the first time, with Hughes at the controls, on June 20. He’d suffered through the catastrophic S-43 accident one month earlier, but Aviator Hughes was irrepressible, you just couldn’t keep him out of the cockpit.

 

While the D-2 was originally designed around the Wright 2160 Tornado liquid cooled engines, Hughes had decided upon two Pratt & Whitney R-2800-49 Double Wasp air cooled engines, each turning a set of three-bladed propellers.[283] Introduced at the time that the D-2 was in development, the “Double Wasp” was America’s first 18-cylinder radial engine. As it was the state-of-the-art in powerplants at the time, the most powerful on the market, Hughes, unsurprisingly, had to have it. The D-2 featured an innovative hydraulic system for operating the flight controls (ailerons, elevators, and rudders); as well as an intricately designed landing gear in which the nose wheel and two main wheels retracted wholly into the airframe.[284] The wingspan of the twin-boom plane was 66 feet.

 

Designing a plane of the future didn’t come easy. The two short test flights that Hughes took on June 20 revealed basic aerodynamic problems with the D-2. “It nibbles,” Hughes said, cryptically, to one of his engineers.[285] He had discovered an aileron flutter, and ordered the wingtips and ailerons removed and redesigned.[286]

 

Hughes flew the D-2 up to four more times over the coming weeks to confirm his original negative assessment. During one of the test flights Hughes was accompanied in the cockpit with Bill Dickman, a representative of Hamilton Standard, the company that had supplied the plane’s propellers. An enthusiastic Hughes laid on the speed for one pass of the D-2 facility. Ever secretive, he covered the airspeed indicator with his hand so Dickman couldn’t read it.[287]

 

When the series of flight tests came to an end, Hughes remained disappointed with the D-2. Yet another comprehensive redesign was needed. First a pursuit plane, than a bomber, then a fighter, the D-2 would end up as none of them.[288] Yet, though the project was scatterbrained and rife with problems, nothing would stop Hughes from trying to sell his plane to the military by any means necessary.

 

SELLING THE D-2. Back in the first half of 1942, Johnny Meyer, Howard Hughes’ Assistant to the President and Public Relations Director at Hughes Aircraft, had prepared a brochure on the D-2 and submitted it to Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones, who was a long-time Hughes family friend as well as sometime business associate of Noah Dietrich.[289] Early in July 1942, Jones passed on the D-2 brochure to President Franklin Roosevelt. On July 7, 1942, President Roosevelt sent the brochure to General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Force, along with a memorandum with the simple question: “What is there in this?”[290] There would be no development of the question for a year.

 

In the Spring of 1943, Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, was advised by Air Force commanders in the European theatre that the military was in immediate need of the next generation of high-speed, long-range, high-altitude photo-reconnaissance planes for combat use.

 

On July 1, 1943, Hughes, his ear properly to the wind, officially submitted to the Air Forces changes in the design of his D-2, which would now be larger, made with metal wings and metal tail, and serviceable as a photo-reconnaissance airplane. Redesignated the D-5, it was the fourth incarnation of the D-2 project.

 

Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the head of the reconsaissance aircraft section for the European forces of the U.S. Army during the war years, and the third child of President Franklin Roosevelt, was reassigned from Europe to Washington, D.C. where he was given orders to inspect and assess the Hughes D-5 plane.

 

Luckily for Howard Hughes, Elliot Roosevelt was ripe for business. At face value Hughes and Elliott Roosevelt were simpatico. Four years younger than Hughes, Roosevelt was the product of a similarly unspectacular formal education, and has been described by one of FDR’s biographers as “rebellious” from a young age.[291] He lived in Texas for much of the 1930s, and had served as a member of the Texas delegation at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. Over the years he maintained close links with the aircraft industry and was good friends with Jack Frye at TWA. Elliott Roosevelt was infamous for his questionable associations, unsavory business transactions, and financial chicanery carried out during his father’s tenure in the White House (1933-45). In May 1934, he canvassed his father’s administration on behalf of the Reynolds Tobacco Company to get taxes on tobacco reduced. In 1936 and 1937, while Elliot served as vice president of William Randolph Hearst’s southern radio chain, the Roosevelt administration urged the Federal Communications Commission to grant licenses for Hearst’s new radio stations. Time and again the President personally intervened whenever his son encountered financial difficulty with creditors, and dad always smoothed things over. According to the Chicago Tribune, Elliott earned an estimated $100,000 for every year his father was President, and all as a result of the White House connection, even though Elliott had said early in 1933, “I knew when my father became President that it was going to be tough.”[292] Elliott’s eyesight was less than perfect, yet he rose rapidly through the ranks of the Army Air Force during the war years. Entering military service in 1940 as a Captain and assigned to the procurement division at Wright Field, he rose first to Major, then Colonel in 1943. No stranger to controversy, and with a soft spot for cash, women, and Texas, Elliott Roosevelt got along swimmingly with the Hughes organization.

 

On August 8, 1943, Colonel Roosevelt and an inspection party of four military officials flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Ambassador Hotel. All of their hotel bills were paid for by Hughes. The government dignitaries visited, first, the Lockheed Aircraft Company in Burbank; then the Hughes Aircraft plant in Culver City, where they had a conference with Hughes and his executives.[293] During their three days in Southern California, Colonel Roosevelt and his fellow officers were wined and dined during glitzy parties organized by ultra-publicist Johnny Meyer.

 

On August 11, the Roosevelt inspection party traveled up from Los Angeles to Hughes Aircraft’s flight testing grounds at the remote Harper Dry Lake region of the Mojave Desert. There, for an hour and twenty minutes, they inspected the D-5, which was in a state of partial disassembly in its air-conditioned hangar. Hughes was present in leather flight jacket and fedora and the military brass responded enthusiatically to his salesmanship.[294] Hughes promised that the D-5 would be the state-of-the-art, with the capability of flying faster, higher, and longer than any other airplane of its kind. The plane would fly 433 miles per hour at an altitude of 28,000 feet for a range of over 2,000 miles.[295] Commander D.W. Stevenson of the Royal Air Force, who was one of the officers accompanying Roosevelt, expressed to Hughes, regarding the D-5, “I have never seen anything more magnificent that could do a better job.”[296]

 

If Hughes Aircraft was awarded a manufacturing contract for the D-5, Hughes promised that, as Roosevelt recalled, “In the event that the aircraft does not live up to specifications, he would then be willing to bear all costs in connection therewith.”[297] Furthermore, Hughes advised that the contract could include penalty clauses if Hughes Aircraft was late in delivering the planes.[298]

 

Leaving Burbank on August 12, the Roosevelt party flew to a Lockheed plant in Dallas, Texas. Lockheed was hoping Colonel Roosevelt would fancy its XP-58 over Hughes’ D-5 as the best photo-reconnaissance plane. (Coincidentally or not, the D-5 and the XP-58 “Chain Lightning” would be very similar in design.[299]) Colonel Roosevelt, however, remained unimpressed with the XP-58. Not only did the plane fail to conform to military specifications, but Lockheed’s projected production schedule was unacceptable for wartime needs.[300]

 

Meanwhile, wheels were turning against Hughes in official circles. On August 13, General Oliver Echols, then Chief of Air Staff, Matériel, Maitenance & Distribution, drafted a memorandum to General “Hap” Arnold, Commander of the Army Air Forces, expressing his antipathy to the D-5, grumbling that the plane “shows so little promise in the future.”[301] A report from Wright Field issued the same day was similarly unimpressed with Hughes:

 

This office recommends against any further action tending to encourage the development of, diverting facilities to, a project which has not progressed favorably to date and which so little promise in the future.[302]

 

On August 17, Colonel Roosevelt returned to Washington, D.C. He prepared a report for General Arnold, requesting the authority to negotiate with Hughes for the D-5 plane.[303] The report stated that Hughes could have a D-5 ready for flight testing in 5 months.

 

On Friday, August 20, Colonel Roosevelt arrived in New York, where Meyer organized a series of parties and entertainment over the next four days. Roosevelt was wined and dined at El Morocco, the Copacabana, the Stork Club, the 21 Club, among other places. “There were always in my party 18, 20, or 25 people, moving in and out at all times,” Meyer later explained.[304] While in Manhattan Meyer introduced Roosevelt to actress Faye Emerson, whom Roosevelt subsequently married in December 1944. Meyer later testified that he spent $5,083.79 on “entertainment” for Elliott Roosevelt in the month of August 1943.

 

Meanwhile, on August 21, Brigidier General B.W. Chidlaw, Chief of the Matériel Division of Matériel Maintenance and Distribution of the Air Forces, drafted an internal memorandum at Wright Field advising the squelching of any development of the Hughes D-5 plane. But political pressure from Washington, D.C. was already turning the tide in Hughes’ favor. On the same day, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt was appointed Chief of the Reconnaissance Branch, Requirements Division, Air Force Headquarters. At the same time, General Arnold sent a memorandum to General Echols, instructing him to prepare a contract for the Hughes D-5. General Echols objected strenuously and General Arnold lent a sympathetic ear. Though both men had legitimate grievances against Hughes and the D-2/D-5, they actually had no choice in the matter. The word had come down from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself: Get That Hughes Airplane.

 

On August 27, Colonel Roosevelt arrived in Washington, D.C. via a train ticket paid for by the inexhaustible Johnny Meyer, who entertained Roosevelt at the Jungle Room in the Carlton Hotel and the Embassy Room of the Statler Hotel during Roosevelt’s stay in town.

 

On September 2, General Echols sent another memo to General Arnold, presenting his case against the Hughes D-5 one last time. But it was too late for the Anti-Hughes faction. The next day, Colonel Roosevelt issued official specifications for a photo-reconnaissance airplane required by the Air Force. The specifications conveniently resembled in a great many details the Hughes D-5.

 

Air Force engineers at Wright Field had designed their own photo-reconnaissance plane whose specifications better conformed to what the Air Forces called “regular characteristics” for photo-reconnaissance planes. The D-5 did not conform to these regular characteristics. Instead, Colonel Roosevelt’s specifications were marked “special”.[305]

 

On September 3, General Echols, on orders from General Arnold, advised the Matériel Command at Wright Field to initiate action for a contract for Hughes D-5 photo-reconnaissance planes.[306]

 

Later in September Elliott Roosevelt was back in Los Angeles where Meyer continued his campaign of entertainment, footing the bill for Roosevelt at such glitzy Hollywood nightspots as Chasen’s, Romanoff’s, and the Mocambo.

 

At Wright Field on September 17, 1943, Brigidier General F. O. Carroll, Chief of the Engineering Division of the Army Air Forces, wrote an inter-office memorandum to the Commanding General, Matériel Command, in which he stressed,

 

It is the opinion of the Engineering Division that the production of the [D-5] airplane is a mistake and further consideration should be given to the modification of the [Lockheed] XP-58 airplane.[307]

 

On October 9, 1943, General Bennett E. Meyers, Deputy Chief of Staff for Matériel, Maintenance and Distribution at Wright Field, sent a memorandum to General Arnold, the top man in the Army, in which he strongly urged against the Hughes plane.

 

It is concluded . . . by this office that we would be derelict in our duty were we to fail to call to your personal attention the many uncertainties connected with this project, as well as the amount of money involved. This might, at a later date, draw Congressional attention and public criticism upon the Army Air Forces.[308]

 

On October 11, 1943, Hughes Aircraft accepted a letter of intent from the Air Force to produce 101 photo-reconaissance airplanes to be designated the (X)F-11 by the military (‘x’ for experimental).[309] It was a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract. The estimated cost of the planes was $48,555,000, exclusive of a fixed fee for overages not to exceed four percent. Hughes had to deliver a flyable plane in one year, with production reaching ten planes a month after that, and full delivery should be completed by September 1946.[310] Hughes offered the grandiose claim that his XF-11 would fly at 488 miles an hour at 30,000 feet for a range of 3,600 miles.[311] General Arnold recalled his reasons for accepting the Hughes plane in his memoir, Global Mission: “At that point it was the Hughes plane or nothing. So, much against my better judgment and against the advice of my staff I gave instructions to buy the famous (X)F-11 airplane.”[312]

 

If Hughes the industrialist was pleased to have won a aircraft production contract, he was not about to violate the time-honored tenor of his hard-as-nails business side. Negotiations over details would drag on for ten months. Hughes would end up not with a contract worth $48,555,000 but $70,274,666.86 for the same number of planes. Also, the financial penalty for late delivery clauses were left out of the contract.

 

Hughes also demanded that the $3,300,000 he had spent on the development of the D-2, which he described as the prototype of the F-11, should also be paid to Hughes Aircraft. Wright Field met this claim with scepticism. “The Hughes Aircraft Company’s contention that the D-2 was a prototype for the F-11 airplane is ridiculous,” concluded an Army report. “The only thing the D-2 has contributed to the F-11 is Hughes’ aircraft knowhow.”[313] Finally, by May 1944, Hughes and the Federal government (on the recommendation of General Bennett E. Meyers) arrived at a compromise figure of $1,900,000 for the D-2 development.[314]

 

General Meyers? The same General Meyers who in October 1943 had advised against the contract in the first place? The one and the same. In between October and May the Hughes Aircraft Company sponsored a trip for General Meyers and his wife to Southern California. Hughes Aircraft picked up all expenses, which eventually amounted to $3,314.07. During the trip to Hughes-land, the General experienced a change of heart about the virtues of Hughes’ photo-reconnaissance aircraft.[315]

 

Meanwhile, during the wrangling over the D-2 remuneration from late 1943 through to the spring of 1944, Hughes had surprised the military by changing the design of his plane yet again. In January 1944 Hughes on his own initiative presented plans for an all-metal F-11.

 

The contract for the 101 F-11 planes was signed on May 5, 1944. General Bennett E. Meyers approved the contract on behalf of the Air Force on May 13, 1944, and forwarded it to the Office of Under Secretary of War. The contract for the F-11 was formally approved on August 1, 1944. By that time Colonel Roosevelt had flown back to Europe to resume his previous duties.

 

There would be a fitting coda to the original D-2 aircraft: a spectacular demise. The D-2 was one of Aviator Hughes’ professional failures. Not only had it experienced a dizzying series of considerable design changes after construction had already begun, but the two prototypes eventually built by Hughes Aircraft did not perform as expected and had to be scrapped. When Hughes started from scratch with the XF-11, the wooden D-2s were relegated to their nondescript wooden hangar at the Desert Test Facility in the Mojave Desert. On November 11, 1944, a clear and bright day, a conflagration reduced both hangar and planes to ash. What was the cause of this disaster? “That thing was struck by lightning,” a Hughes employee told Charles Barton.[316] “The story stretches the imagination,” writes Walter Boyne, “but most ex-Hughes workers swear that it is true.”[317]

 

There would be a further fitting postscript to the D-5/XF-11 affair as well. Elliott Roosevelt returned to the U.S. for personal business late in the year. On December 1, 1944, Roosevelt borrowed $1,000 from Johnny Meyer. On December 3, 1944, Roosevelt married Faye Emerson at the El Tovar Hotel by the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. It was already Roosevelt’s third marriage of his young life. Jack Frye, president of operations at TWA—who was also on the Hughes Aircraft payroll as “Technical Advisor on Aeronautics to Howard Hughes” at $1,000 a month[318]—had thrown a party for Roosevelt and Emerson prior to the wedding, then had personally flown them to Arizona in a TWA plane. He also paid for some of the wedding expenses, such as the wedding breakfast, the minister, the wedding cake, and the hotel rooms.[319] Frye also stood as Roosevelt’s best man.[320] Moreover, as if the Hughes connection wasn’t already overwhelming enough, Johnny Meyer gave the bride away at the ceremony. Furthermore, Howard Hughes subsequently paid for rooms at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the newlyweds moved on to Los Angeles. On December 27 Roosevelt returned to Europe where he remained until April 13, 1945. In May 1945, Roosevelt repaid Meyer $1,060 for the December 1944 loan.[321]

 

From an FBI report on Howard Hughes filed in the spring of 1945: “It is alleged Roosevelt and Emerson wedding was engineered by Meyer in order to help TWA obtain lucrative trans oceanic routes in post war aviation which are currently being bid for by Pan American.”[322]

 

The Air Force’s acceptance of Hughes’ XF-11 photo-reconnsaissance plane turned out to be only a momentary triumph for Hughes. The construction of the XF-11, while good news at the time, would—along with the Elliott Roosevelt wining-and-dining—return to haunt him in 1946-47.

 

*

 

THE TROUBLOUS HK-1. Contemporaneous with the D-2/XF-11 saga was the slow, if not torturous, progress of the construction of the magnitudinous Flying Boat. The HK-1 proved to be just as controversial as the D-2. It became as unpopular to the Federal government as the D-2 had been to the U.S. military.

 

From the outset of the HK-1 project (November 1942) and for the first seven months of engineering and production at the Culver City plant, Howard Hughes served as the general manager of the project. The various department heads were accountable directly to Hughes, who reserved the right to make whichever major and minor decisions attracted his fancy. Howard Hughes, however, was an erratic presence at Hughes Aircraft Company through 1943.[323]

 

Hughes Aircraft was home to many of the most competent mechanics and engineers in the aircraft industry. The plant itself was elaborate and state-of-the-art, as engineer John Glenn recalled: “We had the best of machinery, machine shops, everything else. There was no scrimping on anything.”[324] “Anything we needed we got,” said Carl Babberger. “That’s the truth.”[325] Though Hughes Aircraft had everything going for it, Hughes’ obsession with total control was mucking up the works.[326] “I got worried because the [HK-1] project was getting so far behind schedule, and actually it was because Hughes wouldn’t relinquish control of things to his people out there,” recalled Dick Morrow, a Hughes aerodynamicist in 1943. “He would spend all night worrying about the most minute details that any young engineer was quite capable of handling. He insisted on digging into details way beyond what he should. We’d spend sessions up there in the middle of the night and then have to be at work at 7 o’clock wartime in the morning, and it was driving us crazy.”[327]

 

“Hughes insisted on personally initialing every single drawing and blueprint,” related John Keats in Howard Hughes, “of which there were literally thousands.”[328] “He’d come down and stay all night,” confirmed electrical engineer Jim Dallas. “Go over every drawing on the drawing board.”[329]

 

“He really was a perfectionist,” recalled engineer Dave Grant. “There was the primary difficulty of his weird hours and the fact that if you didn’t agree with what he had to say it took quite a few hours of discussion to get to the final conclusion.”[330] Electrical engineer Christopher Reising elaborated, “People would make suggestions and he would review those and throw in his own ideas. If he liked an idea that came up he would so indicate it. He wasn’t hard-nosed about it. He wanted to talk about it. He wanted to come up with the best design regardless of who suggested it and he didn’t care how long it took.”[331]

 

While Hughes demonstrated a woeful lack of talent for efficient management at Hughes Aircraft, none of his employees found fault with the man’s intellect and keenness. “He never went into a meeting or a conference that he didn’t spend a lot of time preparing for so he knew everything up and down more than all the rest of the people there put together,” Jim Dallas explained. “That was actually the secret of his control.” Power plant mechanic Al Geverink agreed: “He was smart enough to get all the answers before he asked questions. He always knew what he was talking about.” “He knew his business, was very much interested in the details, and was very persistent,” recalled hydraulics mechanic Bill Noggle.[332] Aviation was Hughes’ first and greatest love, and he responded to it—most times—with the full weight and depth of his being, thus impressing others with his natural intelligence and capability.

 

Years later, Hughes Aircraft employees working on the flying boat in Building 15 spoke of their boss with admiration and respect. “Hughes certainly was good to work for,” recalled John Glenn. “I think that we were the highest paid overall in the aviation industry when I worked for him.” Jim Dallas described his boss as “The finest mind of any person I’ve ever worked with. He was a friendly guy.” Bill Noggle recalled, “He was very soft-spoken. He wasn’t bossy at all.” Chris Reising agreed: “He was very kind, very considerate.”[333]

 

Most of the work on the HK-1 through 1943 was devoted to the building of various airplane parts, such as wing ribs, stringers, nacelles, wing-tip floats, elevators, stabilizer, and smaller parts. The pace at the plant remained slow. The major manufacturing work to be done on the airplane was still in its early stages.[334]

 

Hughes often caused consternation and confusion by circumventing the Hughes Aircraft hierarchy. Instead of issuing orders at the top and letting them travel down through the pipeline from an executive to a manager to a foreman to the employees on the floor, Hughes simply strode up to the particular employee and told him what to do.

 

“Then he would disappear for weeks at a time and nothing could get done,” said Morrow. “It was kind of ridiculous.”[335] Hughes was running his company of 2,200 employees like a private hobby he would dabble in or put to one side at will.[336]

 

Hughes Aircraft employees began jumping ship after getting their fill of Hughes’ chaotic work practices. 21 engineers resigned from the plant in May.[337] Both the Head of Production Engineering and the General Superintendent of Manufacturing resigned in June.[338]

 

Finally Hughes decided to make a constructive management decision. Edward T. Bern was hired as general manager of Hughes Aircraft on July 1, 1943. Bern would serve as works manager of the HK-1 Hercules Flying Boat project. Yet, no surprise, Hughes resisted yielding his obsessional control. Hughes still wanted to be the one to make the ultimate decisions and push the HK-1 project forward. After all, it was his plant, his company. Bern would be nothing more than a powerless figurehead. Bern very quickly got fed up with Hughes’ unavailability and errant ways of running his company. Bern quit on August 27 after only eight weeks on the job. During his entire time at Hughes Aircraft, Bern had seen Hughes in the flesh exactly once.

 

A highly disgruntled Edward Bern telephoned Donald L. Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board, on August 30, 1943. “We have a terribly chaotic situation out here,” Bern revealed. “The Hughes people are running it like a bunch of schoolkids would do.”[339] Government costs on the HK-1 project were rocketing upwards due to mismanagement and inefficiency. Bern complained that Hughes was running the aircraft company “by remote control”, “always making his decisions from his home.”[340] However, at another time Bern would admit that “It is my understanding that many times at two or three o’clock in the morning Howard would come in there with a ham sandwich and a glass of milk and work all night, but I did not see him.”[341]

 

H. Robert Edwards, the Defense Plant Corporation’s supervising engineer on the HK-1 project, echoed Bern’s criticisms, sending a letter to the WPB highly critical of the attitude of the supervising officials of Hughes Aircraft, describing the Culver City plant as having a “country-club atmosphere.”[342] In the four years that Edwards was assigned to the Flying Boat project, he, like Bern, saw Hughes in the flesh at the Hughes Aircraft Company only one single time.[343]

 

According to a subsequent government report, “Bern reported that the friction and bickering between the two main departments—production and engineering—resulted in chaotic conditions at the plant. This interdepartmental friction and resulting disorganization continued after Bern’s resignation.”[344]

 

On September 7, 1943, the Civil Aeronautics Administration issued a report in which it stated, regarding the production schedule and organization of Hughes Aircraft’s HK-1 project: “There has been extremely poor coordination between the various departments and therefore planning of the type of equipment required, designing and scheduling of manufacture of the same has been unsatisfactory.”[345] The CAA estimated that the first flight test of the Flying Boat would probably not come before September 1945. In other words, the project was not even a year old yet was already a year behind schedule, as the first flight test had been originally scheduled for December 18, 1943.

 

From late August 1943 until September 1944, Hughes Aircraft was “flying blind.”[346] The Flying Boat project had no official manager at all. Administration at the plant was left to the various department heads, who from time to time received instructions from Hughes.[347]

 

Years later Hughes commented on this unorthodox state of affairs: “In the case of the flying boat and in the case of the XF-11, I think I personally carried out the design to a higher degree than is customary in the industry for any one man, but don’t let me pretend that I have done everything with my own two hands. That is impossible, but I think I have done more than the chief engineer usually does, and I have been criticized for doing too much.”[348]

 

Howard Hughes had pulled off the large-scale, multifaceted production of Hell’s Angels in the late 1920s, but a decade had passed and Hughes had changed. Hughes proved to be a terrible administrator of the HK-1 project. In years to come, over and over again, Hughes will bring his companies to the brink of chaos as a result of his miserable management skills.

 

*

 

DAYLIGHT DIM-OUT. For upwards of a hundred years Los Angeles had been a sleepy Spanish farming settlement in a subtropical desert landscape. Then the twentieth century came to the west coast and everything changed. Streetlighting began appearing shortly after 1900.[349] The Automobile Club of Southern California was established in 1910. Water poured into the area via the Los Angeles Aquaduct from 1913. Municipally-generated electricity flowed for the first time in 1916. Oil pumps and power poles spread like weeds across the region. By the 1920s Los Angeles was the terminus of three major transcontinental railroad systems, while gasoline-powered automobiles were rolling into the city in ever-increasing numbers. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century the developed land area of Los Angeles quadrupled in size. The once spacious city was now crammed with inhabitants. While L.A. had had around 102,000 residents in 1900, by 1939 the city’s population had swelled to 1.5 million.[350] Commercial and municipal development continued apace. Streets were paved and immense parking lots began appearing alongside crowded streets such as Wilshire Boulevard. The train system servicing Southern California—the Pacific Electric Railway Red Cars—was rapidly becoming an anachronism as a result of the rise of the Motor Age. In 1940 the first freeway in Southern California was opened, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (now known as the Pasadena Freeway), a six-mile artery of six lanes joining Pasadena with the heart of Los Angeles. After America entered World War II, thousands of industrial factories appeared in Los Angeles, many of them spewing noxious fumes into the atmosphere. The complexion of the city was changing, becoming gritty and urbanized. Beverly Hills was no longer a country town. Hollywood was turning seedy. Blue skies were becoming a thing of the past. The sky above Los Angeles had become so befouled by smog that the city experienced a “daylight dim-out” on Wednesday, September 8, 1943. The Los Angeles Times reported, “Thousands of eyes smarted. Many wept, sneezed and coughed. Throughout the downtown area and into the foothills the fumes spread their irritation.”[351]

 

Automobile exhaust, oil refinery smoke, chemical plant gases and fumes. . . . Petroleum woes. The downside of growth and progress. One couldn’t get a breath of fresh air in Los Angeles anymore. It was all getting too much for Howard Hughes, who in years to come would complain more and more of L.A.’s smog problem. He reached the point where he obsessively kept his car windows firmly closed whenever he drove through the city.

 

*

 

The day-to-day operations of the Flying Boat construction was just one of Hughes’ headaches. On top of all of his other responsibilities and commitments, Hughes had to put up with interminable bureaucratic wrangling over the very future of the HK-1 from September 1943 to March 1944. The Army, the Navy, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics were all against the continuance of Hughes’ flying boat program.[352]

 

The War Production Board, which had originally approved the construction of the HK-1 aircraft, began to experience cold feet. Costs were proving to be higher than orginally planned, the specifications had changed, and the plane was already outrageously behind schedule. Much of the plane’s engineering had yet to be worked out. Should the plane go ahead? Would the plane go ahead? Wood or metal?

 

One year of work had passed and nearly $10 million had been spent, but the plane was only 5 percent complete![353] Many top officials questioned the practicability of the flying boat as a war project. One official report issued in September cited “the miscalculating of time needed and cost” and questioned the “desirability of the project from here on.” A second negative report came from a CAA inspection team, also in September: “It is our considered opinion that further work on this project would have very doubtful value if the construction of the aircraft is to be considered a war project.”[354]

 

In November 1943 Hughes had to fly to Washington, D.C. to defend the Flying Boat project before an array of government officials. He reported that the plane would be ready to fly before the end of 1944. According to Time magazine, “WPBsters were shaken by Howard Hughes’s ice-cold confidence.”[355] Hughes had saved the project—for the time being. But bad news would follow.

 

The Federal government’s Aircraft Production Board sent a report highly critical of the HK-1 project to the WPB on January 15, 1944. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) sent its own negative opinion of the HK-1 project to the WPB on January 27, 1944: “The continuance of this project of constructing the Hughes-Kaiser Flying Boat serves no useful purpose in the interest of advancing the American aviation art.”[356] By February 1944 close to $13 million of the $18 million budget had been spent and not even one of the three planes were close to being ready. Many in the government was understandably not pleased with Howard Hughes.[357]

 

On February 16, 1944, Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones (also serving as the Federal Loan Administrator), acting on a recommendation from the War Production Board chief Donald Nelson, decreed that the original Hughes-Kaiser Flying Boat project was cancelled. Cancelled, unless Hughes agreed to build the plane in metal. The fate of the ultra-large wooden cargo plane seemed sealed. The Aircraft Production Board was against the HK-1, NACA was against the HK-1, the Civil Aeronautics Administration was against the HK-1, the Army was against the HK-1, the Navy was against the HK-1.

 

But Jesse Jones was actually a strong ally of Hughes. Jones, a native Texan and self-made millionaire, once described Hughes’ father as “one of the great men of his day.”[358] HK-1 mastermind Henry J. Kaiser once quoted Jones describing Hughes, Jr. as “a genius.”[359] Jones had been the visiting dignitary who had introduced Hughes to the assembly at New York’s City Hall during Hughes’ welcoming celebration following his round-the-world flight. In July 1942 Jones had ensured that information on the D-2 ended up on President Roosevelt’s desk. “He was very proud of his association with Howard,” Kaiser recalled.[360]

 

On Friday, February 18, 1944, Jesse Jones spoke privately with President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, explaining that the military’s technical experts had advised the War Production Board to cancel the HK-1 project. President Roosevelt, however, decided that the project would go ahead. According to Jones, “the president stated that he thought the experience to be gained by completing one plane would be of too much value to throw away the money already expended and that the contract should not be cancelled.”[361]

           

On March 27, 1944, Donald Nelson of the War Production Board was duly notified that a new contract with Howard Hughes was to be drafted by the Defense Plant Corporation. The contract called for only one flying boat to be built with the $18,000,000 which had been originally allotted for three planes. While the government would remain the owner of the Flying Boat, Hughes would be able to lease it for $37,500 a month.[362]

 

Exasperated with the government’s decision to cancel the assembly line contract, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser bowed out of the project. Howard Hughes, never one to give up, would go it alone, and on his own nickel. The Hughes Tool Company would be the prime contractor of the Flying Boat.

 

*

Howard Hughes in the 1940s is a mosaic of a man. While there are those who speak of his eccentricities and lapses into absurd behavior, others remember him as mentally-sound and sharp as a tack. Howard Hughes is a many-sided image. Different people saw different sides of the man. Though Hughes’ encroaching madness might at times infect even his aviation concerns, at other times he was received as a completely healthy-minded man deserving of the highest respect, concentration, devotion, and praise. From now on Hughes’ story will alternate between times of clarity and times of darkness; with the passage of time the darkness grew stronger and more pervasive.

 

*

 

One night during the war years Ava Gardner blows off a request from one of Hughes’ flunkies to meet with Hughes at an airport. She hangs up the phone. Later, in the dead of night, as Ava recalls, her bedroom light is switched on. Hughes is there looming over her bed. Words are spoken. Hughes lashes out in a suspicious jealous rage, slapping her across the face. No way Ava is going to take such abuse—not from any man! “I was going to kill the bastard—stone dead,” she recalled. Her hands grab a heavy bronze bell, she hurls it at his face. Hughes slumps to the floor in a heap. Ava has knocked him unconscious. His face is split open. His jaw is splintered. Two teeth are knocked out. He requires a hospital stay to recuperate. (His injuries were officially listed as stomach trouble.)

            As one of Ava’s friends once said, “You don’t cross Ava.”

But Hughes—now fitted with partial dentures—won’t give up. “Howard never took no for an answer,” Ava recalled. “Believe me, there was something scary about Howard’s stop-at-nothing determination.”[363]

 

*

 

Red-headed actress Arlene Dahl shed some light on the Hughes-Gardner relationship. She said,

 

As for Howard Hughes, the main thing that threw her off, and me, too, was his body odor. Howard never bathed, he never used a deodorant. And I’m sure he never cleaned his clothes. They were always dirty, and he never bothered to change. I remember standing next to him at Ciro’s one night, and I smelled him before I knew who it was. I turned around and saw his shirt, he had dirt on his collar and around his neck, and I had to excuse myself. . . . Ava told me Howard was besieging her with calls and setting up traps for her, and it was always a challenge to get out of those assignations. She couldn’t get past the body odor, and neither could I. We laughed about that.[364]

 

*

 

Late in 1943 Hughes flew a Constellation on a demo flight to Las Vegas amid great fanfare; his co-pilot was Colonel Clarence A. Shoop, a test pilot for the Army Air Forces at the time and later Hughes Aircraft employee (from 1947).[365]

*

 

A host of pressures and problems brought Hughes to the breaking point in 1944. The production and interminable editing to final cut of The Outlaw, and then having to battle against the censors for its unedited release, had worn him down. The construction of the Flying Boat was another colossal weight on his shoulders. When he appeared at Hughes Aircraft he worked on the plane obsessively for twenty-four hours without pause, and his mind and body would suffer the punishment.

 

*

 

Circumstances went downhill for Howard Hughes the man in 1944. “It was during the war years that Howard began to evidence behavioral patterns that I found disturbing,” Noah Dietrich recalled. “The oddities that made him so fascinating could eventually become disabling, and that was what I feared was happening to Howard as the pressures bore down on him.”[366] Lapses in concentration and judgment on Hughes’ part, both in the air and on the road, eventually led to terrible consequences for him in years to come.

 

*

 

On February 15, 1944, Hughes was high in the sky, piloting a TWA Constellation loaded with VIP passengers. It was a demonstration flight from Los Angeles to New York, organized to whip up media interest in his airline. The passenger cabin was full of passengers, including high-level government officials as well as members of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Jack Nicols, TWA vice president of operations, was also onboard, and felt a fright as the plane became shuddering horribly over the Rocky Mountains.

When Nichols rushed into the cockpit he discovered a Hughes who had passed over into a strange mind-state. Either because he was playful, antagonistic, or simply because of a death-wish, Hughes had cut off two of the plane’s four engines. “You’re scaring everybody,” Nichols stressed.

            Hughes told him he was about to cut a third engine. “That’ll show them,” he said, cryptically.

            Nichols was terrified. It was not the right time to be test-flying the plane. Nichols endeavored to talk Hughes out of it. If the airplane crashed, he said, the consequences would be disastrous for TWA. The airline might be ruined by the adverse publicity.

Hughes saw the wisdom in this and gave up on his thrill ride. He turned the two quiescent engines back on.[367]

 

*

 

Hughes traveled to Washington, D.C. yet again, once more to fight intensely to save the flying boat project, later in February 1944. He checked in to the Carlton Hotel, where he remained for five weeks. He carried out a relentless series of meetings behind closed doors with top level military and government officials, and successfully saved the flying boat from cancellation. The jist of the negotiations have never been made public.[368]

 

*

 

ESTABLISHING ANOTHER WORLD RECORD. Hughes flew a Constellation across the country, this time from Burbank to the National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Monday, April 17, 1944. He was off to lobby for a version of his plane to be used as a transport by the U.S. military for the war effort. The Constellation was the state-of-the-art, the fastest of the contemporary planes in 1944. Crusing speed of Boeing’s 307 Stratoliner was 220 mph and Douglas’ DC-4 was 215 mph, while the Constellation 049’s was 298 mph. The Constellation was fully pressurized and had a cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, while the DC-4 wasn’t pressurized at all. The Constellation was designed to carry up to 64 passengers nonstop for 3,000 miles. Simply put, at the time of its introduction, the Constellation flew higher, faster, longer, and with more passengers than any other airplane in the skies. American Hero Howard Hughes would deliver his plane to the War Department in Washington, D.C. with his customary razzmatazz.

 

With Hughes flying the plane alongside Jack Frye in the co-pilot’s seat, the Connie took off at from Burbank at 3:56 a.m., a suitable time for the night-owl Hughes. The plane carried Hughes, Frye, and fifteen passengers, including a number of TWA and Lockheed executives, for some 2,400 miles at a cruising altitude of up to 19,000 feet at an average speed of 355 mph.[369] Clarence L. Johnson recalled, “On the flight, as he was approaching Denver, Hughes encountered a big thunderstorm that had not been predicted. Instead of flying around or over it, and perhaps adding to the flight time, he plowed right through it.”[370]

 

At the National Airport, the party of Air Corps dignitaries had assembled to welcome the flight. They were chagrined to see the Connie fly into sight decked out in the eye-catching red and white livery of TWA. Not only was Hughes bringing the plane to the military, but he was also advertising his airline in the process![371] The landing was described by the news media as “perfect”.[372]

 

The Constellation became the first passenger airliner to fly nonstop coast-to-coast, and in just under seven hours no less, shaving more than three hours off the previous record for a transcontinental transport flight set in 1935.[373] Exact time for the record-breaking flight was 6 hours 57 minutes 51 seconds. “From then on,” Clarence Johnson noted in his memoir, “the “Connie” established records every time it first flew from point to point.”[374]

 

The New York Times covered the record-breaking flight on its front page, describing the plane as “a new giant of the air paths” and the event as “the shape of things to come in air transportation.” Hughes was described as “an outstanding figure in aviation as well as a motion-picture producer.”[375] Time magazine marvelled, “Lanky Howard Hughes shrank the U.S. continent this week.”[376]

 

Jack Frye told newsmen, “It is a perfectly marvelous ship. . . . it flies like a dream,” and said that the plane’s four 2,200-hp Wright R-3350-35 Double Cyclone engines with their four sets of 15 foot 3 blade propellers had “purred like kittens all the way.”[377] The Double Cyclone, one of the most powerful radial aircraft engines ever produced in the United States, is commonly described as “the ultimate piston engine”.

 

To publicize the Constellation and celebrate its record-breaking flight, Hughes and Frye hosted a party for 1,500 guests in the presidential dining room of the Statler Hotel on the afternoon of April 19. “Hughes shook so many hands at that gala gathering,” noted the Washington Post’s society columnist, “that a less sturdy person would still be groggy from the effects.”[378]

 

While in the nation’s capital Hughes took some government officials for a ride in the plane, including Senators Barkeley, Brewster, Ferguson, Truman, and Vandenburg, as part of his hard-sell technique.[379] The War Department, however, had already chosen to go with the DC-3 and DC-4 for use as military transport planes, renamed the C-47 and C-54 for military service. Still and all, the War Department accepted fifteen of Lockheed’s Constellations and designated the plane the C-69.[380]

 

The long-range C-69, with a gross weight of about forty tons and a payload capability of over fourteen tons, was able to carry 100 soldiers with full equipment; or a light tank and its troops, non-stop across an ocean. The New York Times noted, “It should prove a highly valuable piece of additional equipment.”[381]

 

*

 

During the war years Hughes could be as much a danger on the ground as in the air. One of his starlet girlfriends  referred to Hughes’ driving as “kamikaze driving”.[382]

 

First, back in late 1940, Hughes had driven himself into a serious automobile accident and had to be taken to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital where he was treated for concussion, a four-inch cut in his forehead, and various cuts and bruises, then went home.[383]

 

In May 1944, he suffered an even more serious accident. Hughes was driving in Noah Dietrich’s car and turning left off Beverly Boulevard when he cut off an oncoming car which plowed straight into him. Hughes knocked his head forcibly against the windshield. His head injury was severe, but Hughes remained conscious. Fearing the hospital and the subsequent publicity, he got himself brought to one of his private residences, where he was tended to by his private physicians. “I visited Howard and found him incoherent and semiconscious,” Dietrich recalled. “That condition lasted a couple of days.”[384]

 

“A single head injury, even if there is no apparent structural damage, can affect psychological functioning seriously and may exacerbate existing emotional problems,” noted psychologist Raymond Fowler. “A series of traumas, such as Hughes had, greatly increases the probability of brain damage. The accidents, particularly those that occurred between 1939 and 1944, may have been both a cause and an effect of his increasing emotional disorder.”[385]

 

*

 

Hughes concerned himself with Washington politics in another way midway through 1944. It was an election year and President Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for his fourth term of office. When his vice president, Harry S. Truman, arrived in California to campaign for the re-election bid, Hughes and Neil McCarthy, his attorney, organized a meeting with Truman at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. According to Noah Dietrich, McCarthy met with Truman and handed over a campaign contribution for the Democrats to the tune of $12,500 cash. Hughes, who had been waiting in an adjoining room, suddenly burst into the meeting and announced, “I want you to know, Mr. Truman, that is my money Mr. McCarthy is giving you.”[386] Hughes remained unfazed at the embarrassment he caused to himself and to the others.

 

Over the next three decades, Hughes parceled out anywhere between $100,000 to $400,000 a year to political candidates at all levels of government and regardless of their politicial affiliation. Democrat, Republican—it was all the same to Hughes, who never personally cast a vote in any election.[387]

 

*

 

While Hughes had dodged the bullet of the flying boat’s cancellation earlier in the year, now he suffered problems with his other large-scale aircraft project. The production of the XF-11 was delayed due to design changes and the difficulty of acquiring raw materials in wartime. The delay caused consternation back in the nation’s capital, whither Hughes once more had to fly in August, his third time in 1944, this time to defend the XF-11 project.

 

*

 

Compounding Hughes’ aggravation, Neil S. McCarthy, Hughes’ personal lawyer of fifteen years, quit his job in August. He later explained, “The basic reason why I left Howard was that I probably would have been dead today if I had stayed with him. Howard works until way early in the morning, two and three o’clock in the morning, and he never hesitates to call you at any time he wants to, and he himself went into a nervous breakdown about that time, and I would have done the same thing. I decided that I would rather not practice law that way and wrote him and told him so.”[388]

 

*

 

At one point in 1944, Hughes is on the telephone with Noah Dietrich.

 

“Noah, I want you to look into the matter of. . . .” and he mentioned a minor bit of business for me to investigate. A minute later he remarked, “Noah, I want you to look into the matter of. . . .”[389]

 

To Dietrich’s increasing amazement, Hughes repeated the same instructions thirty-three times in a row over a half-hour. Dietrich counted.

 

In a memo prepared in the same year, Hughes dictated “a good letter should be immediately understandable” over and over again as if in a tape loop, and then did the same with a second phrase, “think your material over in order to determine its limits”.[390]

 

Hughes’ repetition compulsion reminds of Jack Torrance’s manuscript of “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The allusion is apt here, as Hughes was the inspiration for ‘Horace Derwent’, the owner of the Overlook Hotel, in the film’s source material, Stephen King’s The Shining.[391]

 

At times Hughes suffered attacks of tachycardia, in which his heartbeat accelerated to over 200 beats a minute—not uncommon during a panic attack. He had been experiencing such attacks since the 1930s.[392]

 

Hughes complained of being awake for sixty hours at a time. No doubt his tinnitus was part of the problem; the noise in his head kept him awake; only when he was dead tired could he overcome the imposition of those ongoing noises.

 

Ever fearful of disease, he avoided anyone with a cold. He gargled regularly.[393] At this time, “His hypochondria sometimes took strange forms,” Dietrich recalled. “Once he was convinced that something bad was happening to his throat. For a week he uttered not a word; he communicated with those around him by writing notes.”[394]

 

*

 

Most everyone who came in contact with Howard Hughes in 1944 recognized that something was amiss with the (then) fourth-richest man in America. Hughes would repeat the same sentences over and over again without awareness of the repetition. He would move obscurely through his conscious hours in a daze, as if sleepwalking. Hughes sometimes recognized that he was suffering something serious and it terrified him. Noah Dietrich—his closest business associate—as well as Hughes’ doctors were concerned that their boss would have to be committed to a psychiatric hospital in order to keep Hughes from killing himself from a fatal misjudgment of some kind.

 

*

 

Robert Rummel, a young bespectacled engineer hired by TWA in 1943, recalled a series of incidents regarding his boss during the later war years which struck Rummel as strange.

 

First, Hughes’ enthusiasm for TWA projects fell off sharply after 1943. It was as if Hughes’ concentration had snapped, just like that, and the man receded into the background. To Rummel, “This recondite behavior was unwelcome and mystifying. . .”[395] The sea change in Hughes’ attitude would not bode well for TWA. Obviously, Hughes had his plate full with his flying boat and XF-11 projects, allowing him no time for his airline.

 

Second, Rummel recalled the curious way in which Hughes hosted his private parties. Romaine Street phoned Rummel and communicated an invitation to join Howard for dinner at “Howard’s place”. It turned out to be neat, nondescript white house off Sunset Boulevard, one of the properties Hughes rented solely for entertaining business guests. Rummel and an associate joined the six other guests on the night in question. Hughes himself never arrived. The guests shared a wonderful dinner between themselves. Hughes kept sending notes forgiving his absence. “This is the fifth time I’ve eaten here during the past two months,” a Hollywood studio executive remarked to Rummel. “Each time, it’s the same story: Howard doesn’t show up.”[396]

 

Third, Rummel recalled being present at the Burbank Air Terminal when Hughes was introduced to Jack Franklin, TWA’s vice president of engineering. When Franklin extended his hand to shake Hughes’, Hughes extended his own hand, but palm up. “Jack,” he asked, “can you let me have a nickel? I want to make a phone call.” Franklin, amused by the situation, replied, “Here, Howard, have two.” Hughes took the change and disappeared to a telephone booth.[397] Hughes evading another’s touch so as not to contract foreign germs became a character trait that others will witness in Hughes over the next decade.

 

As for the borrowing of the two nickels from Jack Franklin, Howard Hughes the multimillionaire was infamous for never carrying any money on him. Not infrequently he would ask a counterpart for a coin or two. In 1935, famed aircraft designers Gordon Israel and Benny Howard recalled meeting Hughes at the Burbank Airport, and being asked to lend Hughes a dime.[398] When CAA offical George W. Haldeman met Hughes for the first time at an airport in Seattle in the summer of 1939, Hughes’ first question was, “Have you got any money? I want to pay for the cab.”[399] “He never has any money,” multimillionaire businessman Floyd B. Odlum once mused about the Hughes of the 1940s, going on to say that Hughes was often asking for a dime for a telephone call or thirty cents for gas. Odlum’s wife Jackie Cochran also referred to this eccentricity of Hughes’ regarding money. CAA official Steve Rolle recalled Hughes of the 1940s: “He never carried anything with him, not even money.”[400] U.S. Air Force General Harold George, general manager of Hughes Aircraft from 1948-1953, lent his boss nickels and dimes from time to time. Various co-pilots of Hughes’ in the 1940s and 1950s got used to the fact that their boss never carried any cash on their trips.[401] “He never carried any money around with him,” Dietrich confirmed in his memoir, “and the legends multiplied about how he paid taxi drivers with IOU’s and borrowed dimes from friends for telephone calls.” (However, a contradictory legend made the rounds, to the effect that Hughes kept several thousand dollars in the inner lining of his fedora.[402]) One of his girlfriends recalled, “He never carried much cash and was quite absent-minded about money.”[403] The simple explanation why Hughes never carried any money on him was his self-professed fear of being mugged. Since he was publically known as an immensely wealthy man, he thought himself a target for the criminal element. When Hughes went out on the town with his women, he would sign “H. Hughes” to the bottom of all bills, which were subsequently sent either to the Hughes Tool Company headquarters in Houston or 7000 Romaine Street.[404]

 

*

 

During the year Hughes had been sporadically interviewing upwards of twenty applicants for general manager of Hughes Aircraft.[405] In September Hughes hired Charles W. Perelle (ex-production manager of Consolidated) at a salary of $75,000 plus living expenses, but it didn’t work out; Perelle lasted only 14 months.[406] Late in the year the employees at the Hughes Tool Company joined the United Steel Workers and went on strike, rounding out another turbulent business year for Hughes.

 

*

 

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER. On October 19, 1944, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), the Government agency which regulated America’s commercial airline industry, gave its approval for Howard Hughes to officially control TWA, even though Hughes had enjoyed practical control of the airline since the end of 1940, when he owned just over 42 percent of its shares, making him the majority stockholder of the company.[407] Hughes, however, wouldn’t be around to celebrate this good news.

 

*

 

Howard Hughes disappeared. From October 1944 to May 1945, he was incommunicado. Dietrich at Hughes Tool, his employees at Hughes Aircraft and TWA, his family relatives back in Houston, his many lovers in Hollywood—no one knew where he had gone. It was yet another of Hughes’ infamous vanishing acts. For every year since at least 1931, Hughes would be deemed by one or another of his enterprises as officially missing for at least a dozen days a year.[408] This time, he was in the process of suffering a nervous breakdown. Fearing for his freedom, he fled. He hid out with two employees of his from Hughes Aircraft, flight engineer Joeseph Petrali and flight mechanic Dick Beatie, moving between Las Vegas to Palm Springs to Reno by plane (the rebuilt Sikorsky S-43), staying in hotel rooms under assumed names.[409] As for the public at large, the word on the street was that Hughes had vanished to carry out vital work for America’s war effort.[410]

 

Joe Petrali is one of the legendary heroes of the sport of motorcycle racing. In the 1920s and 1930s He made a name for himself as one of America’s greatest motorcycle racers of all time. He won a slew of national titles, mostly on Harley-Davidsons, including 49 American Motorcycle Association championship races, an achivement that wouldn’t be bettered until 1992. Petrali’s triumphs on land emulated Hughes’ in the sky. In the mid-1930s, while Hughes was the fastest man in the air, Joe Petrali was the fastest motorcyclist on land. As a capstone to his amazing career as ace racer, Petrali set a land speed record of 136.183 mph on a modified Harley-Davidson “Knucklehead” on March 14, 1937, two months after Hughes captured the transcontinental flight speed record in his H-1. Petrali, an ace mechanic, was hired by Hughes Aircraft not long after retiring from the racing circuit in 1938. By 1944 Petrali’s job title was Chief of Services and Flight at Hughes Aircraft. As a measure of Hughes’ respect for him, Petrali will be one of the seventeen crewmembers aboard the Hughes Flying Boat during its one flight in 1947.[411]

 

Three decades went by before Petrali went public with his description of Hughes’ disappearance of 1944-45 in an interview with reporter Maury Green just before his (Petrali’s) death in 1973, finally clearing up this mystery period in Hughes’ life.[412]

 

When Hughes flew into Las Vegas, he damaged the landing gear and dented part of the fuselage of the S-43, leading Petrali to carry out a month’s worth of repairs.

 

During his disappearing act with Petrali and Beatie, Hughes never knew when he would be struck with the compulsion to move on to the next clandestine location. So, every day like clockwork from October to December, Hughes and his confrères checked out of their hotel rooms. Only then would Hughes decide either to check back into the same hotel or travel elsewhere. This compulsive activity necessitated an ongoing, tedious process of packing and unpacking of luggage. At one hotel in Las Vegas, Hughes and his men checked out and then checked right back in 22 days in a row.[413]

 

Petrali was not only in charge of Hughes’ luggage but his finances as well. Hughes funds running in the thousands of dollars would be wired to Petrali who thereupon handed the cash over to Hughes. As well as servant and money-man, Petrali was also a cover for Hughes, who never signed his name to a hotel register.

 

In December 1944 Hughes vanished again and further. Now even his two cronies had no idea where their boss had gone. Hughes hid out with Cary Grant, who was himself fleeing an unsalvageable marriage to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, as well as fleeing a series of misfires at the box office.

 

Hughes reappeared in Vegas in February 1945, meeting up with Petrali, one of his two ‘partners in hiding’ who had waited there for him to return. Hughes, in his motel room, handed Petrali an envelope. “You are to read these instructions in exactly this manner,” a disheveled and wound-up Hughes ordered. “Study them for two hours. Rest for two hours. Study them for two hours. Rest for two hours . . .”[414] Hughes was shouting; he was, of course, hearing-impaired, and perhaps his tinnitus was experienced as exceptionally loud at that time? When Petrali returned to his own room and opened the envelope, he was taken aback to read the single sheet that Hughes had handed him. The message, which Petrali was supposed to study for forty-eight hours, read: “Do not convey, communicate, or telephone any message from me to anyone in California unless I repeat that message ten times.”[415]

 

Compounding the lunacy, Petrali, as Hughes’ baggage handler, had to keep an eye on a huge cardboard box—Brown and Broeske describe it as 6 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 150 pounds—bound up with string. The box contained old clothing, comic books, a baseball bat, and a collection of douche bags.[416]

 

Early one morning in February Hughes and Petrali boarded the S-43 and took off for who knew where. “We’ll probably go to the East Coast or Florida,” Hughes said.[417] They flew eight hours nonstop together in the cockpit and a sullen Hughes didn’t say a word. He put his head in his hands. He was a desolated sight to behold.

 

They ended up in Shreveport, Louisiana. Just down the road was Oil City, where a young Howard Hughes (age two) had lived with his parents back in 1907-8. The Hughes Tool Company maintained a plant there.

 

This next moment during Hughes’ long vanishing act illustrates well the duality of the man. That night in Shreveport, a policeman came upon a suspicious character standing in a dark and deserted gas station. It was raining. The man had a two-day-old beard and wore a worn-out suit. He was holding a bag of chocolate cupcakes and a quart of milk. The cop was struck by the man’s unkempt and scruffy look, and thought he “was an escapee from a nearby prisoner of war camp.”[418] The man had some paper with him. He was writing down complex technical specifics of the XF-11.[419]

 

The mysterious man wasn’t talking, so was led to the police car. At the police station the chief of detectives found that the man had no identification but was carrying quite a sum of money in his pocket. According to the account, either a $500 bill, $1,200, or $3,500 cash.[420] This was in the day when the average yearly wage for an American family was $2,500.[421]

 

The oddball said his name was Howard Hughes. The policemen erupted in laughter. The manager of the Hughes Tool Company plant in town was phoned, woken up, and summoned to i.d. the curious vagrant, even though he had never met Hughes. “Yeah, that’s Howard Hughes,” the plant manager said, recognizing his boss from photographs.[422]

 

When Hughes returned to the New Jefferson Hotel, he couldn’t have been happy with Joe Petrali, who had missed the entire event, having gone to the movies. Petrali left Hughes’ side soon after and was subsitituted with Hughes Aircraft mechanic Ray Kirkpatrick.[423]

 

Over the next six months Hughes and his strange cardboard box appeared in Louisiana; in various cities of Florida[424]; and in New York City, where, on June 14, 1945, Hughes registered at the first-class Waldorf-Astoria Hotel under the name “Crane Gartz”.[425] Perhaps it was an event in this period which inspired this reference in the New York Times thirty years later: “His business dealings were consummated at odd hours and at places as uncommon as a men’s room in the Waldorf-Astoria.”[426] In Manhattan Hughes began to emerge from the shadows. He bought new clothes and was spotted at nightclubs with lovely Broadway showgirls on his arm. He also embarked on a highly-publicized romance with film actress Yvonne De Carlo. At the time of Hughes’ sojourn in Manhattan, New York Post columnist Earl Wilson wrote, “Howard Hughes wears tennis shoes around New York proving something fascinating about men’s fashions: If you’re Howard Hughes, it doesn’t matter.”[427]

 

 

---

[1] Recorded in Washington, D.C. on August 11, 1940.

[2] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 55.

[3] See “Airline Shares Go To Howard Hughes”, New York Times, March 22, 1940, p. 39; “Hughes’ Purchase of TWA Approved”, New York Times, October 20, 1944, p. 23.

[4] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 191; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 91; [HH:US], p. 127.

[5] See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 107.

[6] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 294-5; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 22; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 347; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 12.

[7] Gardner, Ava, Ava: My Story (London: Bantam Press, 1990), p. 66-7; 70. 

[8] Rogers, Ginger, p. 199-200.

[9] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 137; War Hearings, p. ?.

[10] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 218-9; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 354.

[11] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 80.

[12] Officially he was an officer of the Hughes Tool Company. See “Biographical Sketch”, the Albert I. Lodwick Photograph Collection, at the Lakeland (FL) Public Library home website. ¶ Lodwick had drafted letters nominating Hughes for the Harmon Trophy and Collier Trophy, two prestigious aviation awards. Hughes received the Harmon twice, for the years 1936 and 1938; and received the Collier once (“Howard Hughes and His Crew”), for 1938. See Albert I. Lodwick Papers, Series IV: Howard Hughes, 1936-1941, at the Lakeland (FL) Public Library, information available online.

[13] See “Hughes Gives War Ambulance”, Washington Post, March 23, 1940, p. 3; “Hughes Gives Ambulance”, New York Times, March 23, 1940, p. 4.

[14] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 228.

[15] See Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76. ¶ Birdwell, a Texan, was one of the foremost talent agents in Hollywood. Back in the late 1930s, Birdwell had been hired by David O. Selznick to mastermind the search for actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939). He has been described as flamboyant, brash, cynical. His reputation was formidable. An FBI memo from August 6, 1943, reported, “He handles a great number of accounts at the present time, among them Celotex, Certain-teed, Henry J. Kaiser-Howard Hughes cargo planes, some motion picture concerns and some foreign governments.” See Finch, Gone Hollywood, p. 282; Sennett, Hollywood Hoopla, p. 111; Friedrich, City of Nets, p. 19; Thomson, Selznick, p. 212; Letter from unnamed source to J. Edgar Hoover, dated August 6, 1943, included in FBI Howard Hughes File #62-33783-376. ¶ For Birdwell, Hughes and The Outlaw, see Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 79-80; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 160-1; 345.

[16] See Schumach, Cutting Room Floor, p. 71; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 160.

[17] See Rosten, Hollywood, p. 3; 373; 379. 

[18] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 148-9; [HH:US], p. 145.

[19] Quoted in Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 164; Fay, Hoax, p. 33; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 77; Medved, Harry and Michael, The Hollywood Hall of Shame (London: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1984), p. 42; [HH:US], p. 147. See also Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 26; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 29; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 13.

[20] Quoted in Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 153. See also “The Mechanical Man”, Time, July 19, 1948; Stern, Laurence, “Melodramatic End”, Washington Post, April 7, 1976, p. 6.

[21] [HH:US], p. 147. ¶ There are three interesting resonances with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) here. First, Barbara Bel Geddes is sketching a brassiere similar to the one designed by Hughes in her first scene with James Stewart. She will say that the bra was designed by “an airplane engineer down the coast.” Second, Bel Geddes had been a contractee at RKO when Hughes bought that studio in 1948; Hughes had terminated her contract almost immediately because he reportedly didn’t like her looks. Third, Kim Novak, the female star of Vertigo opposite James Stewart, was a Hughes-discovered starlet whose first two roles were in the Hughes produced RKO productions, The French Line (1954) and Son of Sinbad (1955).

[22] See Rosen, Majorie, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & The American Dream (London: Peter Owen, 1975), p. 267.

[23] See “Why Nice Girls Abandon Underwear”, Swank, vol. 3, no. 1, 1956, available online.

[24] See Serling, Robert, Howard Hughes’ Airline: An Informal History of TWA (New York: St. Martins/Marek, 1983), p. 59-60.

[25] Frye was born in Sweetwater, Oklahoma on March 18, 1904. In the early 1920s he was a daredevil pilot with the “Thirteen Black Cats”, a group of stunt pilots located in Hollywood. From 1926 to 1930, Frye was president of Standard Airlines, a small service flying Fokkers between Los Angeles and various points in Arizona. On February 18-19, 1934, Frye and Eddie Rickenbacker flew across the country in TWA’s DC-1 in 13 hours 4 minutes, a new speed record for coast-to-coast U.S. mail delivery. On April 30, 1935, Frye broke his own record, flying the DC-1 coast-to-coast in 11 hours 30 minutes.

[26] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 19; Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 33.

[27] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 51; Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 76; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 40. Some sources say Frye needed $15 million for TWA in 1939, for example, “Mr Howard Hughes”, The (London) Times, April 7, 1976, p. 16; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 29 (which says Frye asked for the money in 1936—“In the ensuing months he and Frye spent their nights in old hangars in West Los Angeles, knocking back Puerto Rican rum, dreaming of planes.”).

[28] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 40-2; 117; Pomata, Anthony, E., “Boeing 307 Stratoliner Pressurized Airliner—A Snapshot History”, March 25, 2002, at www.historylink.org; “Boeing 307 Stratoliner” at the Aviation History On-Line Museum.

[29] See Davies, TWA, p. 45.

[30] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 91.

[31] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 60-3.

[32] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 89.

[33] See Real, Asylum, p. 34.

[34] A giant in the field of aviation engineering, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson (1910-1990), born in Ishpeming, Michigan, designed planes at Lockheed Aircraft, becoming Chief Research Engineer in 1938. He was the pioneer of the legendary “Skunk Works” outfit at the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California (and now located in Palmdale). Always an innovator, winner of forty-four U.S. patents, Johnson designed and built a series of groundbreaking planes over his long career, including: the F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first jetfighter; F-94 Starfire; F-104 Starfighter; Lockheed U-2 spyplane; C-140 JetStar; and the mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird. In March 1990 an SR-71 flew coast to coast across America in sixty-eight minutes! Aircraft Johnson contributed to include: Model 14 Super Electra; P-38 Lightning; Model 18 Lodestar; B-37 Bomber, and the C-130 Hercules. In all Johnson would be associated with the design and construction of forty signifcant airplanes. In later years he was bestowed with a series of Presidential awards, including the Medal of Freedom (1964) and the National Security Medal (1983). In his lifetime he would be presented with over fifty awards, including the distinguished Collier Trophy twice.

[35] See “Super-Transport”, Time, March 9, 1942.

[36] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 87; Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 60-3; “Howard Hughes Joins Kaiser Plane Project”, Washington Post, August 24, 1942, p. 1 (says $20 million);  “Fabulous Team”, Time, August 31, 1942 ($20 million); Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 10 ($25 million).

[37] See Bedingfield, Robert E., “Hughes Squeezed By Needs Of T.W.A.”, New York Times, December 16, 1960, p. F13.

[38] See “Airline Shares Go To Howard Hughes”, New York Times, March 22, 1940, p. 39; Murphy, “The Problem of Howard Hughes”, p. 164. ¶ 200,000 shares at $8 a share equaling $1.6 million for 25 percent of the stock, says Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 76; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 40. ¶ Hughes spent $6 million for control of TWA, says “The Team Breaks Up”, Time, March 3, 1947.

[39] See Bedingfield, “Hughes Squeezed By Needs Of T.W.A.”, p. F13.

[40] See “Airline Shares Go To Howard Hughes”, p. 39; “Hughes Increases T.W.A. Holdings by $1,668,158”, Washington Post, March 23, 1940, p. 20.

[41] See Tinnin, David B., Just About Everybody Vs. Howard Hughes (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1973), p. 13.

[42] See Davies, TWA, p. 45.

[43] See “Hughes’ Purchase Of TWA Approved”, New York Times, October 20, 1944, p. 23.

[44] See Bedingfield, “Hughes Squeezed By Needs Of T.W.A.”, p. F13.

[45] See Bedingfield, Robert E., “Surprise Shown Over T.W.A. Suit”, New York Times, August 9, 1961, p. 47.

[46] See Bedingfield, “Hughes Squeezed By Needs Of T.W.A.”, p. F13.

[47] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 127; Murphy, “The Blowup at Hughes Aircraft”, p. 117. ¶ Yet in 1956: “Mr. Hughes 72.4 percent of TWA stock.” Witkin, Richard, “Hughes Plans Jet Of Longer Range”, New York Times, May 11, 1956, p. 1. Then in 1957: “Mr. Hughes . . . owns 74.1 percent of T.W.A.’s outstanding stock.” “T.W.A. President Relinquishes Post Over Policy Disagreement”, New York Times, December 27, 1957, p. 25.

[48] See Murphy, “The Problem of Howard Hughes”, p. 164; Tinnin, Everybody v. Hughes, p. 13.

[49] See Tinnin, Everybody v. Hughes, p. 13.

[50] See “The Eccentric”, Time, April 15, 1966; Murphy, “The Problem of Howard Hughes”, p. 166.

[51] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 229; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 50; Murphy, “The Problem of Howard Hughes”, p. 164 (says $65 million); Tinnin, Everybody v. Hughes, p. 13 (says “some $90 million).

[52] See Sobel, Age of Giant Corporations, p. 147.

[53] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 67; 186.

[54] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 68; 115; 267; 256.

[55] See [HH:HLM], p. 76.

[56] See Johnson, More Than My Share of It All, p. 82; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 51.

[57] DC-4: 44 seats, 215 mph; Stratoliner: 33 seats, 220 mph; Constellation: 44-64 seats, 298 mph.

[58] See Davies, TWA, p. 53-55; 57.

[59] See War Hearings, p. 24429.

[60] War Hearings, p. 24322.

[61] See Turner, “Fight For Hughes Holdings Emerges in His Absence”, p. 77.

[62] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 50-1. See also Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 51.

[63] Johnson, More Than My Share of It All, p. 92.

[64] See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 11.

[65] Quoted in Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 11.

[66] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 65.

[67] Loewy, Raymond, Industrial Design (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 111. See also Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 58; 72; 89; Jodard, Paul, Raymond Loewy (London: Trefoil Publications, 1992), p. 97; a TWA brochure from 1939, brought to my attention by the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield, England.

[68] Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 91.

[69] See Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 22; Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 62-3; Davies, TWA, p. 54.

[70] Hughes stayed in a suite at the Continental Hotel in Kansas City when he visited TWA headquarters. See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 100.

[71] Tommy Tomlinson was one of the bright lights of TWA from its earliest days. When the Douglas Aircraft Company delivered its DC-1 to TWA in July 1933, it was Tomlinson, fearless test pilot, who put the new aircraft through its paces. In 1935 and 1936 Tomlinson experimented with high-altitude flying, first in the DC-1 and then in a Northrop Gamma known as the ‘Experimental Overweather Laboratory’. During his exploratory flights Tomlinson discovered the jetstream—the winds blowing up to 150 miles an hour from the west-northwest above 30,000 feet. Tomlinson’s work led Jack Frye at TWA to search for a plane which would cruise at 20,000 feet, above most of the weather—a search which led to the  development of the Lockheed Constellation L-049.

[72] Quoted in Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 54.

[73] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 5.

[74] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 164.

[75] See “RKO: It’s Only Money”, p. 126.

[76] Quoted in Barton, Flying Boat, p. 248.

[77] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 67.

[78] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 131.

[79] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 232.

[80] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 244-5.

[81] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 121.

[82] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 214.

[83] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 3-4.

[84] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 5.

[85] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 3; 127; Tinnin, Everybody v. Hughes, p. 13.

[86] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 5; Matheson, Weird Ways, p. 41-2.

[87] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 64.

[88] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 73.

[89] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 58; 168; 178; 331; 6. See also “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972.

[90] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 154.

[91] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 7.

[92] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 6.

[93] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 61; 208-9.

[94] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 48; Barton, Flying Boat (has photo of D-2 from July 1943).

[95] Quoted in Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 39.

[96] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 61.

[97] See War Hearings Report, p. 251; Mollenhoff, Clark R., The Pentagon: Politics, Profits and Plunder (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), p. 99; Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 49-50.

[98] Project engineer was Kenneth Ridley; chief designer was Rea Hopper. See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 46; [HH:HLM], p. 119.

[99] In the mid-1930s, pioneering aeronautical engineer Colonel Virginius Evans “Ginny” Clark designed the Duramold F-46 airplane for Fairchild Aviation. Colonel Clark brought the process to Hughes’ attention and was hired as a consulting engineer at Hughes Aircraft in 1938. See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 48; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 44; “In Memoriam: Virginius Evans Clark”, August 1948, available online; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 39.

[100] Quoted in Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 162. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 56.

[101] War Hearings, p. 24370.

[102] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 132-3.

[103] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 52; War Hearings, p. 24259.

[104] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 48.

[105] See War Hearings, p. 24267; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 58; Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 55; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 47.

[106] See Rosten, Hollywood, p. 371.

[107] See Holley, jr., Irving Brinton, Buying Aircraft: Matériel Procurement For The Army Air Forces (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1964), p. 325; Bilstein, Enterprise of Flight, p. 68; Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 143; Caughey, Los Angeles, p. 359.

[108] See Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 108; 117; Simonson, G. R., “Conversion to Wartime Production” in Simonson, G. R. (ed.), The History of The American Aircraft Industry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 119.

[109] See Holley, Buying Aircraft, p. 10.

[110] See Simonson, “Preface”, in Simonson, American Aircraft Industry, p. vi; Reginald M. Cleveland and Frank P. Graham (eds.), “The Aircraft Industries Association of America”, in Simonson, American Aircraft Industry, p. 163; 164; Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 108; 169. ¶  Total aircraft industry means: 1. airframe; 2. engines and parts; 3. propellers and parts; 4. other components and equipment.

[111] See Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 10; 11; 92; Bilstein, Enterprise of Flight, p. 36.

[112] See Crouch, Southern California Metropolis, p. 165-6.

[113] In 1940 the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation acquired the Union Air Terminal. 

[114] Culver City (incorporated 1917) is situated just south of Beverly Hills and west of downtown Los Angeles, facing Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey and the white sand beaches of the Pacific coast. In 1947 the land area of Culver City was 3.250 square miles; in 1961, 4.101 square miles. The M.G.M. studio lot was located in Culver City, as were Hal Roach Studios and Selznick Pictures. ¶ Noah Dietrich will point out that the Culver City site was “about 5 miles from the ocean.” War Hearings, p. 24295. However: “two miles from the sea”, says Murphy, “The Blowup at Hughes Aircraft”, p. 118. ¶ According to a U.S. Military Report from November 1941, the mailing address of Hughes Aircraft Company was “Florence and Teale Streets”. See War Hearings, p. 24494.

[115] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 141; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 57; 257; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 45; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 163; 244.

[116] See Hack, Hughes, p. 128. ¶ “$35 million, the sum Hughes had invested originally in the Culver City plant.” Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 266.

[117] By the end of 1941 Hughes Aircraft will have more than 500 employees, including a hundred engineers. The company newspaper was called Hughesnews. See War Hearings, p. 24495; [HH:HLM], p. 108; 172; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 46. [HH:HLM], p. 118, contracts itself, saying Hughes Aircraft only had “a few hundred people” in 1942. See also Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 129.

[118] See War Hearings, p. 24495; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 165 [HH:HLM], p. 107-8; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 45, 230.

[119] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 78.

[120] See War Hearings, p. 24495.

[121] The east-west runway was 9,000 feet, according to “Hughes Tames Duplicate of Crash Plane”, Washington Post, April 6, 1947, p. 11; War Hearings, p. 24495; [HH:HLM], p. 108; but 8,000 feet, according to Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 119.

[122] See Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 142.

[123] See Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 126; 149; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 16; 19.

[124] See Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 69-70.

[125] See Holley, Buying Aircraft, p. 318.

[126] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 157; 158-9; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 163; 164; Bell, Howard Hughes, p. 113; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 41; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 58-9; “Hughes Tool: A Gusher of Money”, p. 174.

[127] See Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 42.

[128] War Hearings, p. 24298; 24314; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 28.

[129] See Lee, “Hughes’ Empire Facing A Crisis”, p. 11; Sloane, Leonard, “Hidden Assets Build A.B.C. Merger Appeal”, New York Times, July 7, 1968, p. F-11; Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 42 (says $100 million). ¶ “The Hughes Tool Company . . . As of November 30, 1943, its capital and earned surplus aggregated nearly $21,500,000. Its current assets aggregated more than $22,000,000, against current liabilities of approximately $10,770,000.” See “Hughes’ Purchase of TWA Approved”, p. 23.

[130] See Cleveland, “The Aircraft Industries Association of America”, in Simonson, American Aircraft Industry, p. 163; 165; Cleveland, Reginald M. Reginald and Frank P. Graham (eds.), “Aircraft Manufacturing Today in America”, in Simonson, American Aircraft Industry, p. 143; 145; Douglas, Donald W., “One Big Assembly Line”, in Caughey, Los Angeles, p. 374-8.

[131] See Caughey, Los Angeles, p. 359.

[132] See Holley, Buying Aircraft, p. 576-9.

[133] See Heymann, Poor Little Rich Girl, p. 173.

[134] Syphilis is a sexually transmitted bacterial infection (Treponema palladium). It progresses through four stages: primary, secondary, latent, and tertiary. A blood test can diagnose the disease. The bacteria migrate through the body. The rash on Hughes’ hands revealed that he was suffering the most common symptom of secondary syphilis, which develops anywhere from two weeks to six months after the primary stage. The secondary stage may also include neurological symptoms (for example, erratic behavior). Primary syphilis causes a chancre to develop, sometimes around the genitalia or the mouth, which lasts anywhere from three to eight weeks before healing and disappearing on its own. Obviously Hughes had ignored any original symptom he may have discovered. Syphilis is curable. In the primary and secondary stage the disease is easily treatable with a course of penicillin injections. By World War II the medical profession was well aware of this. If left untreated, however, syphilis can lead to organ damage, heart trouble, blindness, paralysis, insanity, and death. Though Hughes’ doctor at the time told Hughes that the disease was communicable through touch, the medical profession in later years has determined that the syphilis bacteria is too fragile to be spread through casual contact. Syphilis cannot be contracted via clothing, linen, or doorknobs. There were 100,000 reported cases of syphilis in the United States in 1940 (compared to 6,100 in 2001). In less than 10% of patients in the primary and secondary stage of syphilis, the bacteria might invade the nervous system, causing neurosyphilis, a disorder that may lay dormant for up to 20 years before causing symptoms such as mental illness or insanity.

[135] Arsenic administered by injection—the so-called “magic bullet”—had been used to treat syphilis since the turn of the century. But not only was the preparation potentially toxic, it was not a reliable cure, and many patients experienced relapses after the treatment. Various preparations with arsenic derivatives were tried following 1910, such as arsphenamine, but the results remained unpersuasive and most physicians considered arsphenamine an inadequate treatment. Injections of colloidal (‘tiny particles’) silver was a treatment for various ailments of the human body up to the 1940s, when it was abandoned by the medical profession in favor of antibiotics such as penicillin.

[136] Hack, Hughes, p. 133. See also “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972.

[137] See [HH:US], p. 150-2; Hack, Hughes, p. 128-9; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 295-6.

[138] Quoted in Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 266.

[139] See Ginger, p. 199-201. 

[140] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 116. ¶ Much later, in 1975, when Hughes (Summa Corporation) owns the Desert Inn Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Rogers will appear there with her nightclub act, playing the Crystal Room for six weeks.

[141] See War Hearings, p. 24268; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 163; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 101; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 59-60.

[142] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 52.

[143] War Hearings, p. 24494; see also [HH:HLM], p. 109; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 49.

[144] Reproduced in War Hearings, p. 24495; also War Hearings Report, p. 253; Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 99; [HH:HLM], p. 109.

[145] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 159.

[146] Birdwell would publicize the D-2 in Washington, D.C. from June 17, 1942 to July 16, 1942. See War Hearings, p. 24271.

[147] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 157; Friedrich, City of Nets, p. 307.

[148] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 157; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 76; Friedrich, City of Nets, p. 307.

[149] See Dell, “The Howard Hughes I Knew”, p. 13.

[150] See War Hearings, p. 23869-70; 23872-3.

[151] See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 100; Hack, Hughes, p. 139.

[152] See [HH:US], p. 82.

[153] See Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 24.

[154]  Finstad, Heir, p. 30.

[155] See [HH:US], p. 82.

[156] See Hoskyns, Barney, Waiting for the Sun (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 7; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 113-5.

[157] See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 36; Porter, Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart, p. 262.

[158] See Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 47.

[159] See “End of a Mission”, Time magazine, January 16, 1942; Swindell, Larry, Screwball: The Life of Carole Lombard (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1975), p. 298.

[160] See Crosby, Gregory, “Tales of Vegas Past: the death of Carole Lombard”, Las Vegas Mercury, March 6, 2003; Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 105.

[161] See Harris, Warren G., Clark Gable (London: Aurum Press, 2002), p. 250-2; Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 105.

[162] See “Salesman at Work”, Time, January 14, 1946; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 18; Friedrich, City of Nets, p. 103.

[163] See Connor, Francis J., “Army’s New Mystery Plane Ready for ‘Shakedown’ Flight”, Washington Post, September 20, 1943, p. 5; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 165.

[164] See “Liners into Transports”, Time, March 2, 1942; “64-Seat Airliner Developed To Give U.S. Rule of Airways”, Washington Post, May 22, 1941, p. 18.

[165] Aerodynamic principles behind the Connie’s design are given in Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 51. ¶ “The elegant, triple-tailed Constellation epitomized the era’s most advanced trends: pressurized cabin, tricycle landing gear, ultra-modern cabin appointments, and so on. The early prototypes featured designer-type interiors that boldly displayed a world map against the rear cabin bulkhead to signify the plane’s suitability for global routes.” Bilstein, Enterprise of Flight, p. 62.

[166] See “Army Says Alarm Real”, Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1942, p. 1; Memorandum from General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, February 26, 1942, available online.

[167] From a list at www.uboat.net.

[168] War Hearings Report, p. 245.

[169] Kaiser (1882-1967) established companies in, among other things, automobiles, aluminium, cement, chemicals, gypsum, soda-ash, shipbuilding, insurance, and steel. His shipyards produced more than a thousand cargo ships for the U.S. military during World War II. iHis

[170] Quoted in Barton, Flying Boat, p. 14.

[171] See War Hearings Report, p. 245-6. See also “Appointment in Washington”, Time, September 21, 1942.

[172] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 38. McDonald, Hercules, p. 32, says St. Francis Hotel.

[173] See “Howard Hughes Joins Kaiser Project”, p. 1 (reprinted in War Hearings, p. 24429). ¶ For Hughes-Kaiser meeting, see also War Hearings, p. 23602; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 38-9; [HH:HLM], p. 115-6;  [HH:US], p. 156-9; Hack, Hughes, p. 136-7.

[174] See “Howard Hughes Joins Kaiser Plane Project”, p. 1. 

[175] See Myers, “Kaiser Will Find in Howard Hughes A Shy, Retiring Airplane Genius”, p. 3. 

[176] Quoted in Barton, Flying Boat, p. 57.

[177] See War Hearings, p. 26474; see also Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 96; Egan, Charles E., “Kaiser Wins Fight For Air Freighter”, New York Times, June 9, 1943, p. 15.

[178] War Hearings, p. 24439; 23620; 23632; also quoted in Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 102-3.

[179] See War Hearings Report, p. 246-7; Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 96-7.

[180] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 60.

[181] See War Hearings, p. 24674; 24433-37.

[182] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 58; Real, Asylum, p. 27.

[183] See War Hearings, p. 24673; 24674; also Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 97.

[184] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 64.

[185] See War Hearings, p. 24418; also various Martin flying boat websites.

[186] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 165; War Hearings, p. 24294; 24674.

[187] See [HH:HLM], p. 120; “Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator”, DVD documentary. Sterngold, James, “Vast New Dreamworks Film Lot”, New York Times, December 14, 1995, p. C11, says 720 feet long, 240 feet wide, and 73 feet high.

[188] See [HH:HLM], p. 120; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 50; 139.

[189] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 165; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 45.

[190] War Hearings, p. 24314. See also Hack, Hughes, p. 137; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 58.

[191] War Hearings, p. 24433.

[192] See Hack, Hughes, p. 137.

[193] War Hearings Report, p. 247. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 44-5.

[194] War Hearings Report, p. 248.

[195] War Hearings Report, p. 250.

[196] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 57.

[197] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 44-5.

[198] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 47-8; Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 47; 55.

[199] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 47; 52; War Hearings, p. 24267.

[200] See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 39; also Barton, Flying Boat, p. 232; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 47-8.

[201] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 101.

[202] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 63.

[203] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 59.

[204] See Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 17; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70; Finstad, Heir, p. 306; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 59; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 321.

[205] See[HH:HLM], p. 131; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 101.

[206] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 63.

[207] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 238.

[208] See the appendix to Barton, Flying Boat, “Working with Howard Hughes”.

[209] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 246.

[210] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 239.

[211] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 61-2.

[212] Hughes will be present at a series of meetings regarding the HK-1 early in 1943, including: January 29; Feb 18, 20, and 25. See McDonald, Hercules, p. 43-4.

[213] See “Hughes’s Western”, Time, February 22, 1943; Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 14; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 71; Hack, Hughes, p. 131; and Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 11, which also says that Hughes “rescored the music six times.”

[214] The 18-acre Goldwyn Studios, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and North Formosa Avenue, was founded in 1919 as the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, then renamed The United Artists Studio in 1928, then renamed the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in 1940, though independent producer Goldwyn wouldn’t own the place outright until the 1950s. George Lucas re-shot some of the Cantina sequence from Star Wars at the Goldwyn Studios in 1977. Warner Bros. bought the Goldwyn Studios in 1980 and renamed it Warner Hollywood Studios, only to sell out in 1999 to a private company, which renamed the site “The Lot”, which, with seven sound stages and high-tech post-production services, is going strong today.

[215] In town for the premiere, Hughes stayed in a luxury suite at the Fairmont Hotel. His stars Jane Russell and Jack Buetel had their own suites on lower floors. ¶ “By the time Hughes was ready to release The Outlaw, Twentieth Century-Fox, the company scheduled to distribute the film, had cancelled its agreement.” Stanley, Celluloid Empire, p. 200-1.

[216] “Hughes’s Western”, Time, February 22, 1943; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 172; [HH:US], p. 167.

[217] See [HH:US], p. 167.

[218] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 172. ¶ Of all the advance notices, only Louella Parsons in the Hearst newspaper chain gave the film a positive review. See “Hughes’s Western”, Time, February 22, 1943.

[219] “The picture, in spite of bad reviews, showed nine times a day for nine weeks to packed houses.” Russell, Autobiography, p. 71. [HH:US], p. 167, says eight record-breaking weeks. ¶ Parish, RKO Gals says seven record-breaking weeks. (p. 710). ¶ A photo in [HH:HLM], p. 111 illustrates that the Geary Theatre in San Francisco featured three shows daily of The Outlaw. ¶ Another Outlaw poster tag-line: “Tall . . . Terrific . . . and Trouble!” Yet another: “Howard Hughes’ daring production The Outlaw introducing Jane Russell.”

[220] “To Noah Dietrich, it seemed as if Howard’s mind was “shorting out emotionally,” resulting in amnesia-like episodes of bizarre behavior.” [HH:US], p. 167. ¶ “By late March, that brief single-theater run had grossed $158,000; should that record figure snowball during a general release, Hughes could recover his $2.5 million investment by late summer. In April, though, the producer withdrew The Outlaw from exhibition.” Leff, Leonard J. and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), p. 125. ¶ According to Thomas Schatz, Hughes sold the rights to Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not to Howard Hawks’ independent film company (H-F Productions) in 1943 for $97,000. Hawks then sold it to Warner Bros. for $108,500 plus 20 percent of the film’s gross up to $3 million. See Schatz, Thomas, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999); see also McBride, Joseph, Hawks on Hawks (London: University of California Ltd., 1982).

[221] [HH:HLM], p. 119.

[222] See Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 50; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 18; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 342; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 60; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 24; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 26; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 65.

[223] See “The Mechanical Man”, Time, July 19, 1948.

[224] See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 250-1; Fadiman, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 250; Fay, Hoax, p. 40; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70.

[225] See Garrison, Omar V., Howard Hughes in Las Vegas (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1970), p. 12.

[226] See Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 50; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 61; Matheson, Richard, His Weird and Wanton Ways: The Secret Life of Howard Hughes (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1977), p. 9; 122; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 247; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 70; Heymann, Poor Little Rich Girl, p. 153; Gardner, Ava, p. 66; Hack, Hughes, p. 233; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 66; 168-9.

[227] See Matheson, Weird Ways, p. 120; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 19.

[228] See Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; “The Mechanical Man”, Time, July 19, 1948.

[229] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 337-8; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 20.

[230] Quoted in Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 175. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 304-5.

[231] See Thompson, “Riddle of an Embattled Phantom”, p. 26.

[232] Ava was born in rural Grabtown, North Carolina on December 24, 1922, into a family with six siblings. She grew up in a house without electricity surrounded by tobacco fields. Dad was a sharecropper. Money was always tight. (“My upbringing was totally Victorian; I grew up an old-fashioned, God-fearing girl, taught that marriage and motherhood were honorable achievements.” She admits that until 1945 she had read just one book in her life, Gone With the Wind.) When she came of age Ava studied to become a secretary. But a visit to her older married sister in New York City brought unexpected results. Her brother-in-law, a photographer, placed a glossy photograph of Ava in his showcase window fronting the city sidewalk, where it was seen by a minor employee of MGM’s New York offices. A screen test ensued and Ava was awarded a contract. The simple farm girl arrived in Hollywood in August 1941. From 1941 to 1946 she made minor appearances in seventeen films. She married Mickey Rooney on January 10, 1942; they divorced May 21, 1943. She married Artie Shaw October 17, 1945; they divorced October 7, 1946. By 1946 the Hollywood Reporter singled out Ava Gardner as a smooth young screen siren. The Legion of Decency threatened to ban her movies following headlines of her affair with a married Frank Sinatra in the late 1940s. She married Sinatra November 7, 1951, they divorced two years later. By 1953 she will be an international movie star. A veteran of more than 60 films, Ava’s credits include The Killers (1946), Mogambo (1953), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and Earthquake (1974). Ava Gardner passed away in London on January 25, 1990. There is an Ava Gardner museum in Smithfield, North Carolina. 

[233] See Flamini, Ava (London: Robert Hale, 1991), p. 28.

[234] See Flamini, Ava, p. 67.

[235] See Flamini, Ava, p. 69.

[236] See also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 110-11.

[237] See Flamini, Ava, p. 70.

[238] Gardner, Ava, p. 67-9; 127-28; 158-59; 204; 205; 207. ¶ Elsewhere Ava is on record as saying that Hughes was “cold and ruthless, although with me he was always gentle and concerned.” Quoted in Taraborrelli, J. Randy, Sinatra: A Complete Life (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1997), p. 103. ¶ However, Ava’s long-time friend Lucille Wellman is on record as saying, “Howard Hughes, who used to hit her.” Quoted in Taraborrelli, Sinatra, p. 325.

[239] See Gardner, Ava, p. 70-81; [HH:US], p. 167-9; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 111.

[240] [HH:US], p. 169.

[241] Born in Washington, D.C., in 1914, Bettejane Greer, a tough-looking, calculating-seeming brunette, entered the picture world in 1945 and hit the big time in the RKO picture Out of the Past (1947), co-starring with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. She retired from the screen in 1953 to raise her children, then ended up on the nighttime soap Falcon Crest in the 1980s. ¶ Greer would be involved with Hughes from 1940 to 1944. ¶ “Hughes had her trained by a drama coach in “enunciation and poise.” He had, according to Greer, some twenty other girls, none of them emerging as famous, in the same stable.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 135.

[242] Sherman Fairchild (1896-1971) was a canny inventor and successful company director. He formed the Fairchild Aerial Camera and Instrument Corporation in 1920; became a director of IBM in 1925; was on the board of the aircraft company that eventually became Pan Am, in 1925; formed both the Fairchild Engine Corporation and the Fairchild Airplane Manufacturing Corporation in 1925, also Fairchild Aircraft Limited in Canada in 1929; formed the Fairchild Recording Equipment Corporation in 1931; and much more. He was a pioneer of aerial mapping. A radio compass developed by one of Fairchild’s companies would be used by Hughes in Hughes’ Round-the-World flight of 1938. Moreover another of Fairchild’s companies will invent the Duramold process which Hughes will use to construct his Hercules Flying Boat. Fairchild’s aircraft companies built many thousands of aircraft for commercial and military use over the years. In the 1960s Fairchild will build satellites for NASA. He has thirty patents to his name. There is a Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology. ¶ “The two men were good friends and in frequent contact with each other from about 1931 to the 1950s when Hughes began his publicized retreat from public view. Their personalities were similar . . . Both were wealthy, attractive, single, and shared an interest in beautiful women. Both were fascinated by, involved with, and had high aptitude for technology, particularly that associated with aviation. The two men would appear at the Stork Club or El Morocco [in Manhattan] with their dates and immediately become engrossed in some discussion of, say, the latest aircraft navigation equipment, while their dates sat staring into space.” Barton, Flying Boat, p. 47.

[243] See Hack, Hughes, p. 141.

[244] The first flight of the Lockheed Constellation had taken place on January 9, 1943. See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 51; Johnson, More Than My Share of It All, p. 84.

[245] See Evans, Julien, How Airliners Fly (Shrewsbury, England: Airlife Publishing Ltd, 2002), p. 38-9.

[246] See Johnson, More Than My Share of It All, p. 86-7.

[247] See [HH:US], p. 170.

[248] See Johnson, More Than My Share of It All, p. 87-8. See also Barton, Flying Boat, p. 105-6; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 51-3.

[249] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 343; Grobaty, Tim, “Wings over Long Beach”, Pasadena Star-News, December 11, 2003, available online.

[250] See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 103.

[251] See [HH:US], p. 171.

[252] Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 54; Petrali, Joe, as told to Maury Green, “‘O.K., Howard’”, True, March 1975, p. 28. ¶ Hughes usually kept his Sikorsky S-43, as well as his Boeing Stratoliner and a twin-engine Beechcraft, among others, in a private hangar at Grand Central Airport in Glendale, where the H-1 had been built in the 1930s. See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 231.

[253] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 55.

[254] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 54.

[255] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 68; [HH:US], p. 171;Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 40.

[256] See Hack, Hughes, p. 144; [HH:US], p. 171.

[257] See Hack, Hughes, p. 144.

[258] See [HH:US], p. 171.

[259] See [HH:HLM], p. 122.

[260] See [HH:HLM], p. 123; Hack, Hughes, p. 145; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 55. ¶ Cline’s seat eventually floated to the surface of the lake, but his body would never be found.

[261] See “Howard Hughes Hurt in Crash”, New York Times, May 18, 1943, p. 25; “Hughes Recovering From Injuries”, Washington Post, May 20, 1943, p. 15; [HH:HLM], p. 122.

[262] See [HH:HLM], p. 122.

[263] See [HH:HLM], p. 122; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 104; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 55.

[264] See Frehner, Rudy and Chuck Waldron, Howard Hughes and Me (Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing, 2002), p. 120. [HH:HLM], p. 122-3 gives a slightly different account.

[265] See Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 120; [HH:HLM], p. 123.

[266] See Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 121.

[267] In sources Odekirk is variously referred to as superintendent, or general manager, or Director of Service and Flight, at Hughes Aircraft’s Culver City site.

[268] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 172.

[269] FBI teletype from Salt Lake City to Washington, D.C., dated May 20, 1943, included in the FBI Howard Hughes File #98-20355.

[270] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 54-5.

[271] See [HH:US], p. 173;

[272] [HH:HLM], p. 123.

[273] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 104.

[274] Tripp, “Howard Hughes”, Plane & Pilot.

[275] See Frehner, Hughes and Me, p. 119.

[276] See [HH:HLM], p. 123; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 255; Hack, Hughes, p. 145.

[277] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 71; Hack, Hughes, p. 145; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 168.

[278] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 71.

[279] See Koch, Ed, “Las Vegas aviation pioneer recalls early days of flight,” Las Vegas Sun, December 16, 2003, available online. ¶ “During the 1940s, Hughes was a frequent visitor of Vegas, usually staying at the Frontier as well as other residences that people guessed he owned. He also struck up a friendship with Del E. Webb, where they would golf late at night. Hughes would give Webb construction jobs which purportedly earned Webb over $1 billion.” See “Visionary Backgrounds: Howard Hughes” on the Welcome to Las Vegas home website.

[280] See Egan, Charles E., “Kaiser Wins Fight For Air Freighter”, New York Times, June 9, 1943, p. 15.

[281] See War Hearings, p. 24495; War Hearings Report, p. 253; Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 99; [HH:HLM], p. 109.

[282] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 53.

[283] See War Hearings, p. 23855; 24490; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 43.

[284] See “Hughes XP-73”, online; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 43; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 40.

[285] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 48-9.

[286] See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 40; [HH:HLM], p. 126; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 48-9.

[287] See Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 53.

[288] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 46-7.

[289] See War Hearings, p. 24439; 23632; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 102-3; Anderson, Jack with James Boyd, Confessions of a Muckraker (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 53.

[290] War Hearings, p. 24445; also quoted in Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 100; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 59;  Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 42; [HH:HLM], p. 110.

[291] Morgan, Ted, FDR: A Biography (London: Grafton Books, 1986), p. 458.

[292] See Flynn, John T., The Roosevelt Myth (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1956), p. 244; Morgan, FDR, p. 459.

[293] The four members were Lt. Col. Karl L. Polifka, Lt. Col. Harry T. Eidson, Major W. R. Boyd III, and Squadron Leader D. W. Stevenson.

[294] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 56.

[295]  See [HH:HLM], p. 126.

[296] Quoted in War Hearings, p. 23968; also in [HH:HLM], p. 126.

[297] War Hearings, p. 23889.

[298] War Hearings Report, p. 254.

[299] See War Hearings, p. 24491; also Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 252-5.

[300] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 64.

[301] War Hearings Report, p. 254-5; see also Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 101.

[302] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 61.

[303] Reproduced in War Hearings, p. 23887-91.

[304] War Hearings, p. 24017.

[305] See War Hearings Report, p. 255; also Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 101.

[306] See War Hearings, p. 24487-8; [HH:HLM], p. 127.

[307] War Hearings, p. 24491.

[308] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 84.

[309] War Hearings Report, p. 252.

[310] See War Hearings Report, p. 256-8; Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 102; Connery, George, “Elliott Roosevelt Helped Hughes Sink U.S. Millions In Plane Experimentation”, Washington Post, October 1, 1945, p. 2. 

[311] See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 40.

[312] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 127.

[313] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 72.

[314] See War Hearings, p. 23506; War Hearings Report, p. 256-7; also Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 102; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 83-4; [HH:HLM], p. 130; Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 55.

[315] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 84.

[316] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 130.

[317] Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 47. See also Real, Asylum, p. 24. ¶ Both Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 61 and Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 55 report that at least one Hughes employee, Ray Kirkpatrick, thought that a diesel generator in the warehouse had malfunctioned.

[318] Frye had been “employed” by the Hughes Aircraft company since May 1, 1942. See War Hearings, p. 24032-3; “Hughes’ Purchase of TWA Approved”, p. 23.

[319] See “2 Hollywood Girls Subpenaed In Hughes Aircraft Inquiry”, Washington Post, July 23, 1947, p. 1; Spargo, Mary, “Krug Testifies He Attended Big Parties of Howard Hughes”, Washington Post, July 24, 1947, p. 3.

[320] See War Hearings, p. 24053; 24630.

[321] See War Hearings, p. 24001.

[322] See FBI Howard Hughes File #62-6282.

[323] See War Hearings, p. 24462.

[324] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 240.

[325] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 78.

[326] See McDonald, Hercules, p. 71; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 51.

[327] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 73. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 47; Hack, Hughes, p. 148.

[328] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 178.

[329] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 80.

[330] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 80.

[331] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 80.

[332] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 80.

[333] See Barton, Flying Boat, including p. 78-81; 240.

[334] War Hearings, p. 24460.

[335] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 73.

[336] See War Hearings, p. 24487. But Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 65, says that by the end of World War II Hughes Aircraft had “about seven hundred employees altogether”.

[337] War Hearings Report, p. 258; see also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 67.

[338] War Hearings, p. 24462.

[339] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 45.

[340] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 45.

[341] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 72.

[342] War Hearings, p. 24674.

[343] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 47.

[344] War Hearings Report, p. 258.

[345] War Hearings, p. 24461.

[346] War Hearings Report, p. 258.

[347] See War Hearings Report, p. 258.

[348] War Hearings, p. 24365.

[349] Operated by private electricity companies run by steam generating plants supplied by petroleum. See Crouch, Southern California Metropolis, p. 40.

[350] In 1900 L.A. wasn’t much larger than sixteen square miles. By 1915 the developed area of L.A. county was 107.62 square miles. By 1927, 441.10 square miles. By 1947, 735.305 square miles. The county’s total population in 1940 was counted at 2,785,643. By 1947 the county’s total population was 3,747,962. See Crouch, Southern California Metropolis, p. 156; 161; 226; 276.

[351] See John Anson Ford, “Smog Settles Over Los Angeles”, in Caughey, Los Angeles, p. 383; also Banham, Los Angeles, p. 216.

[352] See War Hearings Report, p. 248.

[353] See War Hearings Report, p. 248; Mollenhoff, Pentagon, p. 97; McDonald, Hercules, p. 52-3.

[354] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. ?

[355] “Up in the Air”, Time, November 8, 1943.

[356] War Hearings, p. 24674; War Hearings Report, p. 248. See also NACA report of September 7, 1943, reprinted in War Hearings, p. 24458-65; “Kaiser and Hughes Cargo Ship Project May Be Abandoned”, Washington Post, February 5, 1944, p. 3; “The Kaiser Week”, Time, February 28, 1944.

[357] See War Hearings, p. 24673.

[358] See Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 25.

[359] See War Hearings, p. 24439; 23620; 23632; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 102-3.

[360] War Hearings, p. 23631.

[361] War Hearings, p. 24444; 24675; also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 50; [HH:HLM], p. 130.

[362] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 50.

[363] Episode occurred in late 1943 or maybe early 1944. See Gardner, Ava, p. 79-81; 158; Taraborrelli, Sinatra, p. 102; “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 112; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 11.

[364] Quoted in Gardner,  Ava, p. 113. ¶ Yet Robert Rummel recalled that in the time he, Rummel, joined TWA in 1943, Hughes “always seemed to be physically clean.” Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 7.

[365] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 56; 79; 81.

[366] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 176.

[367] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 113; [HH:US], p. 183.

[368] See [HH:HLM], p. 128; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 100.

[369] See “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 230; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 22.

[370] Johnson, More Than My Share Of it All, p. 89.

[371] See Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 112; “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 57.

[372] See “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1.

[373] See “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, New York Times, April 18, 1944, p. 1.

[374] Johnson, More Than My Share Of it All, p. 89.

[375] See “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1; “6 Hours 58 Minutes”, New York Times, April 19, 1944, p. 22.

[376] “The U. S. Shrinks”, Time, April 24, 1944.

[377] See “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1. The New York Times article mistakenly says Wright Whirlwind engines, but Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 221-2, correctly identifies the engines as Wright Double Cyclones.

[378] Miller, Hope Ridings, “Hughes Smiles Through Long ‘Constellation’ Party”, Washington Post, April 21, 1944, p. 14. 

[379] See War Hearings, p. 24126; 24134. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 90-1.

[380] Only 15 Constellations, as compared to 10,368 C-47s and 1,162 C-54s. See Holley, Buying Aircraft, p. 551; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 24; Davies, TWA, p. 53-4; Serling, Howard Hughes’ Airline, p. 94; War Hearings, p. 24672; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 51 (says Air Force took the first 20 Constellations off the assembly line).

[381] “6 Hours 58 Minutes”, p. 22. See also “Airliner Crosses Country In 7 Hours, Setting A Record”, p. 1.

[382] See Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 136.

[383] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 164; Garrison, Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, p. 195; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 99; [HH:US], p. 136-7; Hack, Hughes, p. 130.

[384] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 176-7 (episode undated).[HH:US], p. 183, says 1944. Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 59, says May 7, 1944.

[385] Fowler, “Psychological Autopsy”, p. 29; see also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 104.

[386] Quoted in Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 241. See also “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 34.

[387] See “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 34.

[388] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 105.

[389] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 177.

[390] See [HH:HLM], p. 132; Fowler, “Psychological Autopsy”, p. 30.

[391] See chapter 18, “The Scrapbook”.

[392] See [HH:HLM], p. 615.

[393] See Fowler, “Psychological Autopsy”, p. 28.

[394] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 183.

[395] Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 100.

[396] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 109.

[397] See Rummel, Hughes and TWA, p. 102.

[398] Reportedly “for cigarettes.” See Boyne, “Speed Merchant”, p. 12.

[399] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 41-2. Haldeman was later to become CAA’s technical advisor of the Hughes Flying Boat project. See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 90-1.

[400] See Barton, Flying Boat, p. 244-5.

[401] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 114; 118; 197.

[402] See “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972.

[403] See Tierney, Gene with Mickey Herskowitz, Self-Portrait (U.S.A.: Wyden Books, 1978), p. 29.

[404] See Cochran, Jackie, p. 65; 149; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 239-40; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 343-4; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 55. ¶ For more references to this money theme, see Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; Garrison, Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, p. 28; Murphy, “The Problem of Howard Hughes”, p. 81.

[405] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 86-7.

[406] See War Hearings, p. 23558.

[407] “Hughes’ Purchase of TWA Approved”, p. 23.

[408] See [HH:US], p. 92.

[409] This story is told in [HH:US], p. 185-92, Hack, Hughes, p. 151-4; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 120-1; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 60-2.

[410] See Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 4.

[411] See “Joe Petrali” [1904-1973] on the American Motorcyclist Association home website; company timeline at the Harley Davidson U.S.A. home website; “The Petrali Racer”, 2003, at the Hippodrome Studio home website.

[412] See Petrali, Joe, as told to Maury Green, “O.K., Howard”, True, February and March 1975.

[413] See [HH:US], p. 186.

[414] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 188.

[415] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 188.

[416] See [HH:US], p. 187; 192; Hack, Hughes, p. 153; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 121.

[417] See Petrali, “‘O.K., Howard’”, p. 29.

[418] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 190. See also Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 179-80.

[419] See [HH:US], p. 190.

[420] Petrali, “‘O.K., Howard’”, p. 32, says $500; Hack, Hughes, p. 153; and Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 180, say $1,200; [HH:US], p. 190, says $3,500.

[421] See Halberstam, David, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), p. 131.

[422] See Petrali, “‘O.K., Howard’”, p. 32. See also Barton, Flying Boat, p. 111; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 120-1; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 342.

[423] See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 65.

[424] For a reference to Hughes’ relationship with a waitress in Florida at this time, see Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 4.

[425] See document dated July 3, 1945 in the FBI Howard Hughes File #62-6282.

[426] See “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70.

[427] See Hack, Hughes, p. 153-4.

[Jeff Bernstein]

The Black Dahlia (2006), 29:15

 

Marquees can date a scene, too :

Paper Moon (1973), 10:24  /  Steamboat Round the Bend (1935)

The Irishman (2019), 24:26  /  Three Faces of Eve (1957)

57:09  /  Party Girl (1958)

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

Fireflakes?

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “Spoke for millions of Americans. Was hated by as many more.”

 

Not “Loved by millions . . . and was hated by as many more.” The word “Loved”, we theorize, would have been too irritating for the Newsmen to employ. But why not, just here, for fun, substitute the word “Loved by” in place of “Spoke for”?

 

What might it mean to be loved by millions—or hated by millions? Nothing much. Who you are to strangers means nothing—since your true self cannot be revealed to them. Their love or hate doesn’t touch your own heart directly. Being loved by millions—or hated by millions—might generate or intensify what negative feelings? Let’s theorize : Loneliness. Isolation. It’s sad (ridiculous, futile) to be “loved” when people have no idea what they’re loving. They don’t love the man Charles Foster Kane, they love whatever it is they think “Charles Foster Kane” represents to them. Attention generates alienation when founded on misunderstanding. All this “loved by millions”—just as “hated by millions”—emphasizes distances. Charles Foster Kane will never be known, neither by himself nor by anyone else. In this he is no different from anyone else.

 

Sean Penn answering a question in The Thin Red Line (1998) : “You ever get lonely?” “Only around people.”

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

85–88

This set of shots, following a bridge shot of newspapers in production (84, we’ll get to it), is the one entirely enigmatic portion of the Newsreel, for one specific reason : the Spectator never gets a further peek into this aspect of Kane’s life. Every other bullet-point of Kane’s life in the Newsreel is expanded upon in CK, except the shots in this section. We do not see Charles Foster Kane interacting with world leaders in CK. What were the meetings like? What was said? Such a peek into the highest corridors of power promises fascination. But this aspect of Kane’s life is withheld from the Spectator in CK. One might say : ruthlessly withheld. Just here only one among many points is being stressed on 85–88 : a person will always be more than we understand. Here that concept is made plain by the storyteller : we see a side of Kane’s life we never return to in CK : his interactions with Power.

This raises a question : What other aspects of Kane's life does the Spectator never see?

[Jeff Bernstein]

behind the scenes

 

Following upon the previous post : a film that shows aspects of a man that CK does not show :

Phantom Thread, 1:34–1:53

[Jeff Bernstein]

Reminder

 

The most so-called "documentary realism" storytelling technique is no more full of Truth than the most surreal presentation of information. Silliness is the sincerity of solemnity (so goes one of the recent mintings from yours truly). The flipside of that is : Solemnity is the tool of Tyranny. In short : CK’s far-out film technique is no less full of truth than any other information dissemination. In fact, to anyone who has reached this far, it is obvious that the mega-dense Citizen Kane is indeed shaping up to be the so-called “greatest film of all time.” Absolutely no question. Only imbeciles would think otherwise. Why? Ask yourself this question, geniuses : Why do you celebrate birthdays and anniversaries?

 

Unrealistically, CK shows imbeciles too much Truth.

[Jeff Bernstein]

A work of Art is silly.

 

No matter how serious a work of art attempts to present itself to be, a work of Art is silly. First-rate storytellers, knowing this in advance, work with this fact while they create their artwork. Artists explore what it means to communicate in an Artful way. Creation is momentous for all concerned : (a) an Artwork comes into being; (b) through the creation of the Artwork the Artist comes to learn things about oneself; (c) the Artwork is now a prayer-ground for a Spectator to devote time for the effort of Revelation.

 

Why is Art silly? What about the sheer manipulation of it all? Geometry, editing, music : everything calculated to dazzle, like a magic trick : but this is emotional manipulation. Isn’t that a crime, in some definition or other?

 

Stories manipulate; you celebrate them. People manipulate; you call it victimization. (We'll continue this later.)

 

What does it mean to “communicate”? Take away technical writing, nothing much. How do I know this? Look at the state of the world in 2023. Yet Art exists to Save Everyone, in the manner of the promises of Religion, which for thousands of years has tried to seal the deal and fix the world, but has failed up to now. Art saves a person here, a person there, and that’s that. Anyway, who knows what Destiny has in store for us? An Artist creates an artwork that eventually inspires one person deeply enough to . . . to do what? What if there’s fallout?

 

So a work of art “makes light” of itself.

 

Art is silly. Generally speaking, people do not dedicate the time required to understand the Artwork. People glance, but never enter into the doorway of art. The Artwork is just “one more thing”, an object like a toaster or a fashion accessory.

 

Art is silly because everything is already known and has already been said.

 

Why Create Art, for no remuneration of any kind, over, say, a thirty-year period? It fills the time, yet not always pleasantly. But Revenge is like anything else. It isn't entirely pleasant.

 

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

84   continuum aspiring upward

[Jeff Bernstein]

84

NEWSREEL NARRATOR : “For 40 years appeared in Kane newsprint no public issue on which Kane papers took no stand.”

 

It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. In fact, everyone changes their mind about this and that. But the Newsreel is giving a priority to Kane’s changing of his mind. Maybe the Newsreel has a point here. Charles Foster Kane, as publisher of a Media Empire, had a responsibility to produce considered content, not manipulative rubbish. The young Kane himself idealized : “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. . . . People will know who’s responsible.” (28:29).

 

Media Responsibility.

The one lone review in London. Does that make sense to anyone? The reviewer used the author’s own words against him as the title. Who was Emily Wilson to this first-time-published author? He had never heard of her. Now she has heard of him.

(28:29)

 

 

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

Lens flares : One Hour with You (1932)

(3:12)

(3:18)

[Jeff Bernstein]