Citizen Kane : Shot by Shot

[Jeff Bernstein]

[Jeff Bernstein]

Clue to Kane’s character

Law-enforcement officers Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth very obviously despise the subject of their book, Ted Bundy : The Only Living Witness. However, at times the authors are unable to ignore various Truths about the man which in other contexts might be received as favourable. One example from the prologue :

 

“He . . . was a superb rationalizer.”  

 

What might “superb” mean in this context? What does it mean to be extremely adept at circuitous thinking? It means Ted Bundy had—when he was in his best health (so to speak)—an extremely fast, sharp, and agile mind. So much is evident : when healthy in mind, TB eluded law enforcement in the most fantastic and elaborate of ways for years, driving around in that yellow VW bug of his that struck terror in millions of Americans in the 1970s.

 

Ted Bundy had an extremely fast, sharp, and agile mind.

 

yet :

 

“Emotionally, Ted struck us both as a severe case of arrested development. . . . He might as well have been a 12-year-old, a precocious and bratty pre-adolescent.”

 

Ted Bundy had the ornery stubbornness of a child.

 

One may come to find these same two fundamental character traits in Charles Foster Kane.

 

. . . but not in the Newsreel.

 

 

 

 

Edited February 5, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Five Degrees of HH

 

1. Who owns the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining?

 

Horace Derwent, a character based on Howard Hughes.

 

2. Who gave Kubrick his start?

 

Howard Hughes’ RKO.

 

3. What was one of Welles’ story ideas before CK—with some ideas recycled for CK?

 

A biopic of Howard Hughes.

 

4. What contemporary Hollywood genius has written an unproduced screenplay of Howard Hughes?

 

Christopher Nolan.

 

5. BONUS : Who wrote a 2,000-page biography of Howard Hughes back in 2003? Your humble author. So what, right? Blacklists are very much alive. Worse, worthless newspapers exhibiting Kane's "yellow journalism" are thriving in the cesspool of London ("Every single one of them?").

 

Citizen Kane is as relatable today as ever!

[Jeff Bernstein]

Commercial Break  :  The Making of Hell’s Angels (1930)

 

Hughes’ highest-profile movie in these early days, the good old days of Hollywood, was Hell’s Angels, an action film eventually starring Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde, whom Hughes made an international movie star. The story, which takes place in Germany, England, and France, concerns two Oxford University students beguiled by the same alluring woman who become pilots in the British Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. The film will include two fantastically shot and genuinely exciting set-pieces, a German zeppelin raid on London and an aerial dogfight above France. Hughes hired one director (Marshall Neilan) and then another (Luther Reed) for his aerial epic but both would bow out after a taste of Hughes’ aggressive meddling in every aspect of the production. Hell’s Angels would be a labor of love; before principal photography got underway Hughes himself assumed the role of director.

 

A producer-director is the “top-brass” on the movie set—the general, the man in charge, the man with the last word. A producer is oriented toward the business end of the film venture, organizing the production at the outset, dealing with the money, hiring department heads and crew supervisors, and generally overseeing the million-and-one details of embarking on a film shoot. When the film is underway, the producer ensures that the production is moving along at an efficient and economical pace. While the producer is most often no more than a business administrator, the director is the primary creative force on the film. The director confers with the cameraman regarding the placement of the camera and coaxes performances out of the actors. The producer controls the flow of money while the director spends the money in the process of making on-set creative decisions. While in theory the director is the guiding light of the creative process, in studio-made films of this era the producer, controlling the purse strings and acting as a mouthpiece for the studio heads, unfortunately reserved the right to override a director on a film set. Hughes, however, was an independent making the movie on his own nickel so there would be no studio interference. As the producer-director of Hell’s Angels, Hughes was the Ultimate Power on the set and had to answer to no one. There was absolutely no one with any responsibility to contradict him for whatever reason.

 

The aviation-themed silent film Wings was released by Paramount to great acclaim in January 1927 and Hughes’ primary goal was to surpass that production by committing to film the most exciting aerial sequences ever shot. If Howard Hughes was going to make the film himself then naturally it would have to be the greatest film ever made.

 

Filmmaker Hughes was certainly keyed in to the zeitgeist. Following Charles A. Lindbergh’s groundbreaking solo transatlantic flight in the single-engine monoplane Spirit of St. Louis on May 20-21, 1927, flying from New York to Paris in 33 hours, 30 minutes, America became inflamed with the romance of the skies. Lindbergh became an international hero and a posterboy for all that was best about America—vision, courage, technological acumen, ‘can do’ brio. Returning from Paris in a naval cruiser, Lindbergh was welcomed by an American population gone mad with pride and admiration. Overnight Lindbergh became one of the most famous men alive, and in the process did a world of good for the airline industry. Suddenly air travel became the latest “thing” and the U.S. aircraft industry experienced its first boom. If in 1927 total American aircraft sales will be $21 million, by 1929 that figure will have risen to $71 million.[1] On Wall Street in the same period investment in the aircraft industry will rocket from $15 million to $125 million.[2] Between 1927 and 1930 a series of small airlines will begin amalgamating together and eventually develop into the industry leaders of Eastern Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines, TWA and Pan American Airways. The American public was entranced with the theme of flight.

 

Hell’s Angels would be a spare-no-expense production. Hughes bought 87 vintage World War I aircraft, fighters such as Curtiss Jennys, SE-5s, Sopwith Camels, Spads, Snipes, and Fokkers, from the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, at a cost of over $500,000. The World War I aircraft were simple affairs, lightweight biplanes of wood and metal, with open cockpits, open-air water-cooled engines, unretractable landing gear, and a cruising speed of 100 mph. Hughes’ fleet for Hell’s Angels was roundly hailed as the largest private air force in the world.[3] To restore and service the planes Hughes hired a ground crew of aircraft mechanics, either around thirty or over a hundred of them, according to the source, and placed Harry Reynolds in charge.[4] J.B. Alexander, Hughes’ flying instructor and barnstormer in his own right, became Hughes’ “Chief of Aeronautics” and assembled the group of no less than 137 pilots who would fly for Hell’s Angels, including such famous stunt pilots as Roscoe Turner, Frank Tomick, and Frank Clarke.[5] Hughes built a private air field for his fleet on a parcel of agricultural land in the San Fernando Valley close by the intersection of Balboa and Roscoe Boulevards, near the Los Angeles Metropolitan (now Van Nuys) Airport. He named his private airport Caddo Air Field.[6]

 

Howard Hughes would manufacture his film as much as direct it. Filmmaking is a collaborate art, and Hughes would bring his vision to life by hiring some of the best technicians in the business. Photography, sound, set design, costumes—all are top notch in Hell’s Angels. Hughes the director was exacting in his demands to his craftsmen. He had an engineer’s love of the fine and intricate detail and it shows on the screen in the design of each and every shot. There would be no mistaking Hell’s Angels for anything but a state-of-the-art, meticulous ‘A’-list production.

 

After six months of preproduction, filming of the complex and originally silent production began at the Metropolitan Studios on October 31, 1927.[7] First came the interior scenes. Howard Hughes would preside over a technical crew of up to 167, a cast of 34, and 1,700 extras.[8] At age 21, Howard Hughes the rich kid was now “Howard Hughes the Movie Director”—the first of his many and varied incarnations in the public sphere over the course of his mature life.

 

Right off the bat Hughes will reveal himself lacking in one quality essential to maintain a streamlined production. He considered the daily schedule, which was crucial if costs were to be kept low, as a mere trifle, if not an inconvenience. The production of Hell’s Angels would be an on again off again affair, dependent on the whims of its Creator. Howard Hughes lived according to his own impulse, his own method, and his own time. It was not uncommon for the film shoot to shut down for a couple of days when Hughes simply failed to show up to make the decisions and push the production forward. According to Noah Dietrich, who recalled visiting the Hell’s Angels set at Metropolitan Studios from time to time, “The set workers grew accustomed to Howard’s pace. They spent most of the day playing cards on Stage 5—sometimes all day, for days at a time. But when Howard drove his car through the studio gate, Stage 5 was alerted. The crew dropped their cards and swung into action.”[9]

 

As a film director Hughes was fanatical about “getting it right” and wouldn’t quit filming a scene until the stubborn perfectionist inside him was satisfied. His single-minded pursuit to get what he wanted sometimes left his cast and crew bewildered and exhausted. Hughes shot one interior scene over and over again no less than one hundred times.[10]

 

If, however, he wasn’t on the movie set, he might be relaxing on the golf course. Alternatively, he might be at one or another airfield, practicing his flying in private planes. And then there was ever and always the love nest. Between 1927 and 1930 Hughes’ personal map of Los Angeles featured these four cardinal points.

 

At this time and for the rest of his working life, Hughes became notorious for staying awake for up to 48 hours or more at a stretch. Hughes called these blocks of consciousness his “awake periods”. He never carried a watch and seemed not to notice the difference between day and night. Clock time meant nothing to him. When he wanted to do something, or talk with someone, or eat, he did so, regardless of the hour. The thought that other people might wish to adhere to normal hours seemed never to cross his mind—as, for example, his film projectionists would learn when they were summoned in the early hours of the morning to run film for their boss. “The work habits of Howard Hughes were unorthodox, to say the least,” Noah Dietrich once remarked.[11]

 

Howard Hughes was one of the original night owls. The mature Hughes will always prefer the silence of the starlight hours when the majority of the population lay asleep. It was to Hughes “the clean time of the night”, the time when he was best able to concentrate.

 

In the daylight Hughes was scarcely seen at Muirfield when his wife Ella was around. More than forty years later, Aunt Annette recalled, “He was making Hell’s Angels, and he wasn’t home at all. He would come home for two hours in the daytime and get a sandwich and he would go out and fly. . . . In the first place, Howard did not want Ella to meet any of the movie people he had. He thought she shouldn’t associate with them. I don’t think he thought they were her equal. I think he tried to keep Ella where she belonged, in the Pasadena social group, and he was mixed up with all the movie people. It was a very difficult situation.”[12]

 

Sometimes Ella left town altogether, meeting with her sister on the east coast or her family in Texas.[13] When Ella was away, Hughes would come home to have quick, forgettable sex with the hopeful starlets he had met during his nighttime prowls of the nightclubs.[14]

 

The young Howard Hughes of this period was definitely a snappy dresser when he wanted to be. His suits were expensive, well-tailored, classic in style. He cut a dashing figure. He might have modelled men’s suits for a living. In photographs of him out on the town his hair is always perfect; he probably got a trim once a week. Hughes’ good looks and immaculate presentation would have melted many a woman’s heart.

 

*

 

The world of aviation—wholly apart from Hell’s Angels—was always there for Howard Hughes as a primary theme for his concentration. We can assure ourselves that Lucky Lindy’s triumphant transatlantic flight of May 1927 had set Hughes thinking about similar glory in the skies. In fact, the 1920s was chockablock with notable national and international aviation firsts, including the first non-stop flight across North America (May 1923), the first round-the-world flight (April-September 1924), the first U.S. transcontinental air mail service (July 1924), and the first flight over the North Pole (May 9, 1926).[15] These and other significant aviation events of the decade would have been firing aviator Hughes’ imagination. So while at one point we see Hughes endeavoring to live it up wining and dining and romancing with the best of Hollywood, and while at another point we see him producing and directing an expensive film production, at yet another point in the same time period we see him flying almost every type of plane then in existence.

 

Before the production of Hell’s Angels commenced in October 1927, Hughes had begun rigorous flight training with Charles Lajotte, an Army-trained pilot, at Clover Field in Santa Monica.[16] Hughes soon hired another instructor, J. B. Alexander, who rated Hughes as one of the most natural, capable pilots Alexander had ever met.[17] Just when the production of Hell’s Angels was getting up to speed, Hughes the pilot was nearing the end of his flight training course. A lot of Hughes’ time was spent up in the air, circling in a biplane over tranquil Los Angeles County. If Hughes wasn’t flying one of his own planes, he was borrowing others’, including, for example, those of renowned stunt fliers Pancho Barnes and Paul Mantz.[18] Noah Dietrich recalled the time in this period when Hughes, flying Mantz’s Stearman, encountered a fuel tank problem and was forced to make an emergency landing on a fairway of the Bel Air Country Club, an event which cost Hughes $1,000 to placate the golf course’s management.[19]

 

Many reasons can be enumerated for Aviator Hughes’ love of flying: comfortable being alone and away from it all; his natural flair for adventure and style; his love of technology. While often anxious and withdrawn among people down below, up in the air he felt exquisitely at home at the flight controls. He loved sitting solitary on top of the world, looking down at everything under his feet. “When he was in the air, he was an entirely different man from the one that people knew on the ground,” Dietrich explained. “He seemed greatly at ease with nothing to concern him but weather and engine and maps.”[20] In this period Hughes often flew out over the ocean at night to enjoy the spectacle of the illuminated city spread out in the distance.[21] Hughes once remarked, “There’s no better place to think straight than when you’re flying.”[22]

 

Whenever Howard Hughes purchased an airplane for his private use, he would have it extensively modified to his exacting standards. Greater safety and faster speed were his strict objectives. By January 1928 he had bought a Waco 10, at the time one of the most popular biplanes for “barnstorming”. The plane was swift and stylish, and also technically advanced—it was the first small aircraft to have a shock absorber landing gear. If the factory model was powered by a war surplus Curtiss OX-5 90-horsepower engine capable of a top speed of 96 mph, Hughes’ Waco 10 used a Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine capable of 220-h.p. There could be no other engine for Hughes—the air-cooled, radial J-5 was the most advanced of its kind at the moment, the power plant that Lindbergh had used to fly his Spirit of St. Louis on his monumental transatlantic run. On instructions from Hughes, the Douglas Aircraft Company of Santa Monica altered the configuration of his Waco’s cockpit and the design of the wings. The bill for the modifications came to twice the price that Hughes had originally paid for his plane.[23] The Waco 10 was Hughes’ first private plane and its advanced technical specifications were a harbinger of things to come for the young aviator.

 

Of Hughes’ exacting standards one of his aircraft mechanics will later remark: “I’ve seen him sit out there in his plane for hours, moving his hand to one of the controls over and over to be sure he could find it without looking in an emergency. Then he’d have it changed to fit him, and the change was always an improvement.”[24]

 

Late in 1927, Hughes passed a written exam and a check ride (in his customized Waco 10) with a Civil Aeronautics Administration inspector and received his private pilot’s papers on January 7, 1928. (Hughes was originally issued with license number 4223, but Hughes, liking the idea of a low number, eventually persuaded the Department of Commerce to give him number 80.)[25] He becomes a maestro of stunt flying and wins medals at air shows. He is the real thing, a ‘great pilot’. His friend Jack Real once remarked, “I’ve been with people . . . flying’s in their blood. But never as deep as Howard.”[26]

 

Hughes’ private pilot’s license will be followed by a series of “upgrades”. Check rides with inspectors for advanced ratings will become increasingly rigorous but Hughes proved to be a master of flying’s complexities. He will receive his commercial rating, allowing him to earn a living as a pilot if he so desired. He will be rated for multiengine planes, and will also receive his instrument rating, this last confirming Hughes’ proficiency in flying in poor weather conditions.[27] He will also receive his rating as a transport pilot, the highest class of licensed pilots, allowing for professional operation of multiengine aircraft in an instrument environment.[28]

 

The control he maintained over his airplanes would bleed over into his obsession with getting his cinematic vision on film, and then later in his eerie overbearing dealings with women. Total control—and yet throughout Hughes’ life he would repeatedly crack up in his planes, his women, his movies.

 

*

 

CRASH! As mentioned above, the interiors of Hell’s Angels, the easy scenes, had come first, and were shot from October 1927 to January 1928.[29] Then came the aerial sequences. On January 10, 1928, Hughes performed a dangerous aerial stunt for the movie cameras in a Thomas Morse Scout biplane, showing off with a perilous dive which eventuated in a major crash when Hughes couldn’t lift the nose of the aircraft in time.

Many of the pilots working on Hell’s Angels were among the best in America but none of them had wanted to perform the low-altitude banking maneuver that newly licensed pilot Hughes had designed for the cameras.

“It can’t be done,” one of the stunt flyers told his boss. Everyone knew that the Morse biplane was one of the most difficult of its kind to control upon take-off, yet Hughes wanted a flamboyant banking movement to be carried out as soon as the plane was in the air.

“Ridiculous,” Hughes said. “I’ll show you it can be done.”[30]

Chief Pilot Frank Clarke tried to talk Hughes out of the reckless stunt. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “The gyro forces will throw you into the ground in a left turn. It’s a graveyard stunt.” [31]

Hughes was adamant that he was right. Just as he crashed nose-first into the ground, Clarke’s first thought was, “We just lost our meal ticket.”[32]

Clarke rushed to pull Hughes out of the wrecked biplane with Reggie Callow, a general assisant on the Hells Angels shoot. Fifty years later Callow recalled Hughes was “a bit out of his head” as he was carried from the burning plane, mumbling, “That’s another par hole I made. I shot a four on that one.”[33]

Hughes was battered, dazed, a physical disaster. He had to spend no less than five days in the hospital.[34] His skull was cracked. One of his cheekbones was crushed. His chin necessitated reconstructive plastic surgery. Hughes would never be the same again physically. Hughes had already been hard of hearing, and following the airplane crash he began hearing ringing in both of his ears all of the time.

Frank Clarke recalled, “If he had been one foot higher, he would have made it.”[35]

 

The Hell’s Angels crack-up would be the first of many. Howard Hughes would end up in upwards of fourteen major and minor airplane and automobile crashes in his life! During the autopsy on the body of Howard Hughes carried out on April 6, 1976, the pathologists will find shards of old metal lodged deep in Hughes’ skull.

 

*

 

As Howard Hughes’ first airplane crash exemplified, the making of Hell’s Angels would be an adventure in itself. And if his film crew thought that Hughes the pilot would be less reckless in future, Hughes would prove them mistaken. Later on during the months of shooting, Hughes designed a sequence in which an airplane was to carry out a deadly bombardment of a machine-gun nest located on a ledge of a cliff wall in a canyon. As before, his stunt pilots shook their heads at Hughes’ audacity, telling him that it was impossible for an airplane to dive-bomb into the canyon and then pull out without crashing against one of the walls. Hughes, for whom the word “no” would always be anathema, climbed into a cockpit and pulled off the stunt perfectly while his crew watched breathlessly, heart in its collective throat. When the cameraman admitted that he had inadvertently failed to capture the feat on film, a fearless Hughes pulled it off one more time, diving into the canyon with dramatic flair then pulling out at the last possible moment.[36]

 

The aerial sequences were filmed at several Los Angeles sites and up and down the Pacific Coast, including air fields in Inglewood, Chatsworth, Encino, Glendale, Oakland, Riverside, and Santa Cruz.[37] Hughes’ private air force was often whirling in the air over the San Fernando Valley. A Caddo Company press release will report that the total air miles Hughes’ planes tallied up to create the aerial battles was “exactly 227,000 miles”.[38]

 

The Hell’s Angels shoot progressed at a snail’s pace. Director Hughes became fascinated with filling the film frame with clouds, considering a shot of a wide blank sky abhorrent and something to be eschewed at all costs. Thus was Hughes often flying off by himself through the sky over the San Fernando Valley looking for pleasing vistas to serve as suitable backdrops for his aerial scenes, while his pilots and film crew waited back at Hughes’ Caddo Airfield, where a posted sign wryly observed, “War Postponed—No Clouds.”[39]

 

Hughes’ pilots called him Sonny, Kid, Junior, Skinny, Punk, and Boy.[40] They sometimes lightened the daily boredom of a film shoot by performing practical jokes on each other. Once, when Hughes was relieving himself in the outhouse, a pilot rolled an airplane up alongside, its propeller blowing the rude shack over and exposing an embarrassed Hughes caught with his pants down. The outhouse was subsequently the site of another salvo of humorous behavior. Three holes, each suggestive of a male penis, were drilled through one of its wooden walls. There was a big one, a medium one, and a small one. Each was labelled with the name of a pilot. The small one was identified “Howard Hughes”.[41] This joke may have been at the expense of the truth, if we are to believe a series of accounts which describe Hughes’ more than adequate endowment.[42] At any rate, Hughes didn’t find such jokes funny.

 

Weeks and months passed while Hughes waited for the appearance of pleasing cloud formations to grace his picture. He assigned scouts up and down the coast to telephone him with weather reports. Meanwhile the sluggish production of Hell’s Angels was costing him $5,000 a day.[43] When news was favorable, Hughes would gather his pilots by yelling through a megaphone (with “Caddo Co.” printed on it) and his air fleet would take to the skies in an excited flurry of propellers and wings.[44]

 

*

 

While the shooting of Hell’s Angels dragged on, the indefatigable Howard Hughes simultaneously produced two more feature films—black and white and silent—for the Caddo Company. The two films would demonstrate what would be Hughes’ two favorite cinematic themes: sex and violence. The Mating Call (1928) was a story about a marriage of convenience that ends happily for all concerned. According to Tony Thomas in his Howard Hughes in Hollywood, “It was considered to be pretty hot stuff, with its scenes of sexual passion and frustration.”[45] Hughes broke even on a $400,000 investment. The Racket (1928), a story of bootlegging mobsters involved in big-city corruption, was one of the very first Hollywood gangster thrillers. In order for the film to be released, Hughes was forced to comply with the Hays Office—Hollywood’s censorship organization at the time—and edit down the most violent scenes.[46] The Racket was a sensation at the time, and its scenes of policemen and public officials succumbing to bribery and graft caused the film to be banned in Chicago. The film was a box-office and critical success. Variety, Hollywood’s foremost trade journal, wrote, “It grips your interest from the first shot to the last, and never drags for a second.”[47]

 

Film producer Hughes wasn’t above carrying out dalliances with members of his cast. Actress Lila Lee, friend of Marie Prevost, a perky brunette who specialized in playing seductresses and who featured in The Racket, recalled how Hughes “liberated” Prevost “sexually” during the making the film.[48] Alluring French actress Renée Adorée, who described Howard as “the handsomest man I’ve ever seen,” had a similarly short dalliance with him when she was cast in The Mating Call.[49] Evelyn Brent, a leading actress typecast as a hard-as-nails “shady lady” who also featured in The Mating Call, was yet another Hollywood player who fell for Hughes hard. Five decades later, she was still angry at the man. “That bastard Hughes promised me everything,” she fumed. “He claimed he was going to sign me to a personal contract and star me in five major motion pictures, paying me one-hundred thousand dollars per picture.” Brent slept with Hughes, thinking it a canny career move. She had soon noticed warning signs. “While Howard was making love to me,” she recalled, “he wasn’t even there. It was like he had drifted into some far and distant place.” [50]

 

Provost, Adorée, Brent—all three of these women were major silent film stars at the time. Noteworthy is the fact that they were all older than Hughes, the sultry Brent by six years, the sensuous Adorée seven, and the beautiful Prevost a remarkable twelve. ‘Remarkable’, precisely because in years to come Hughes will exclusively favor the charms of young women. While he aged, his women would get younger and younger.

 

*

 

Hell’s Angels includes two spectacular action set-pieces, a 21 minute German Zeppelin sequence that concludes the first half of the film and a climactic 24 minute aerial sequence that is the high point of the film’s second half. These have often been described as two of the greatest action sequences from the golden age of cinema.

 

ZEPPELIN SEQUENCE. In the film, a German zeppelin attempts to carry out a night-time bombing raid on the city of London. Four British military biplanes attack the German airship, which finally explodes and plummets to earth before the eyes of the audience. The episode was based on true events during World War I.[51]

 

Filmmaker Hughes couldn’t have been more up-to-date in this respect. In August 1929, the 21-day around-the-world flight of the German Graf Zeppelin was one of the notable events of the year, and the aviation event of the year, closing a decade of major aviation milestones. In 1930, the year of the release of Hell’s Angels, the Graf Zeppelin will embark on a ‘Europa-Pan American Round Trip’, setting off from, then returning to, Lakehurst, New Jersey. It was an enormous silver ship, and for those Americans on the ground who were able to watch its progress across the sky, they probably never forgot the sight. U.S. airmail stamps bearing the image of the Graf Zeppelin were issued at the time, commemorating the event. 

 

For Hughes’ stunning zeppelin sequence, miniatures were used with remarkable photographic skill. A special effects shop was set up in a U.S. Army aircraft hangar in Arcadia. Two 60-foot-long models of zeppelins were filmed gliding through artifically-created clouds. The results were eerie and atmospheric. To capture a series of shots of the burning wreckage on the ground, Hughes bought an actual Zeppelin and torched it.[52]

 

AERIAL DOGFIGHT. For the spectacular daylight dogfight between British and German air forces over France, Hughes put more than forty airplanes into the air simultaneously.[53] It goes without saying that in these early days of Hollywood there was no such thing as CGI; Hughes created an air battle by staging well-nigh the real thing and in the process captured astonishing footage of death-defying stunt flying.

 

Hughes found endless enjoyment in envisoning complex aerial battles. He watched old newsreel footage of airplanes in World War I. He laid out designs for trajectories and patterns on paper and on blackboards. He built a structural model in which he could suspend model airplanes in various positions, allowing him to plan camera angles. He worked tirelessly for days at a stretch, obsessed with his creative dreams, then spent more days communicating what he wanted to his pilots.[54]

 

Filming the climactic dogfight went on and on, from October 1928 to February 1929.[55] Hughes would have up to twenty-four cameras running simultaneously to capture his mini-war.[56] Imagine dozens of biplanes darting through clouds, swooping past one another in a mad medley, like specks of dust whipped up in a high wind and mingling; with Hughes up in the air along with the rest of his pilots, piloting his Waco 10, directing the action via radio and hand signals, perfectly at home in the eye of the crazy storm.[57] It was one of the few times in Hollywood in which filming the movie was as breathtaking as watching it.

 

Hughes told newsmen during production, “We’ve got scenes that nobody else will ever duplicate.” [58] Time has proved him right.

 

Whenever Hughes went through periods of non-stop, obsessive work on Hell’s Angels, he ceased to pay attention to his appearance and hygiene, and will teeter back and forth between well-dressed heartthrob and slovenly derelict. Elmer G. Dyer, one of the film’s expert aerial cinematographers, recalled his quirky boss: “Howard always ran the daily rushes at 5 o’clock in the morning. He used to sit there with his shoes off, wrapped in a dirty old overcoat, holes in his socks, unshaven. Imagine—a guy worth millions!”[59]

 

Filming the aerial sequences would remain turbulent from first to last. Many of Hughes’ pilots had to make forced landings at one time or another. When the propeller suddenly fell off the engine of his Fokker D-7, pilot Al Wilson bailed out and the plane plunged into West Los Angeles, crashing two blocks away from the newly built Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Wilson floated with his parachute down onto the rooftop of a private residence.[60]

 

Hughes and Wilson survived their Hell’s Angels crashes. Others on the film set would not be so lucky. Two pilots and an airplane mechanic died during the dangerous filming.[61]

 

Two pilots, Al Johnson and C. K. Philips, died in separate incidents, when their airplanes encountered trouble in the air en route to the film shoot, while the incident of the third death to occur during the production of Hell’s Angels was caught on film on March 22, 1929. At seven thousand feet, pilot Al Wilson put a Sikorsky S-29A (dressed to look like a German Gotha) into a dramatic dive for the airborne cameras, while mechanic Phil Jones, positioned in the rear of the plane, released black smoke (flour and lampblack) to simulate a direct hit. Wilson was unable to recover from the dive and bailed out, but for whatever reason Wilson remained in the plane when it crashed nose-first into the earth. The first few seconds of the footage remain in Hell’s Angels.[62]

 

Regarding Hughes’ complex dogfights, film historian Kevin Brownlow has observed, “Today it seems inconceivable that there weren’t crashes by the score.”[63]

 

TECHNICOLOR. Hell’s Angels will not only be dramatically thrilling. Technically, the film was the state-of-the-art for movie making. An early use of remote control cameras were used during aerial sequences.[64] More strikingly, Hell’s Angels features two early uses of Technicolor in a major motion picture, in this instance up to two colors at once. A lavish ballroom sequence contains gradations of green and orange, while the doomed German zeppelin soars through a cloudy blue midnight before exploding into fiery orange wreckage. Four other scenes of the film are intensified by color tints.

 

Modern audiences may find it strange that Hell’s Angels turns from black and white into color and then back again. In fact, silent black and white films featuring successive scenes in different colors were extremely common. Between 1895 and 1930, an estimated 80 percent of so-called black-and-white films were actually projected with a variety of tints. Prior to Technicolor, color was applied to the original B&W strips of film via hand-painting, stencil coloring, tinting, or toning. A specific color was used to represent a location; a self-contained scene; sometimes an emotion. A film audience was entirely used to seeing a monochrome film suddenly turn amber, brown, or red, and then back again.[65]

 

Two different colors occupying the same shot was, however, a novelty. Hell’s Angels was one of the first all-sound (music, sound effects, and dialogue) Hollywood features to use Technicolor’s new System 3 process.[66] (The first full-length Technicolor film wouldn’t come until Becky Sharp in 1935.) Hughes’ first directorial effort was at the vanguard of color processing in filmmaking. No surprise—Hughes loved emergent technology; and he certainly loved to be at the forefront of “where it’s at”.

 

*

 

 

A cameraman snapped a photo of Howard Hughes entering the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard on the evening of May 16, 1929. Hughes was en route to the Blossom Room for the gala presentation of the first Academy Awards.[67] It was a relaxed, sit-down dinner affair for two hundred and seventy distinguished Hollywood players. Just as today, the awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a great venue for self-publicity.

 

The night was a wonderful one for Howard Hughes and the Caddo Company. Two Arabian Knights won Best Comedy Direction for Lewis Milestone (the only time this award was given). The Racket was one of the three nominees for Best Picture of 1927-8, but lost to Paramount’s Wings. Still, to be nominated for Best Picture was fantastic enough, considering that Hollywood released more than 700 films that year. After a shaky start with Swell Hogan, Howard Hughes had proved himself to be a Hollywood player to reckon with.

 

Rupert Hughes was present as well, having received a nomination for the screenplay of The Patent Leather Kid, adapted from his own novel. Alas, Rupert lost to Ben Hecht for Underworld. Perhaps a filament of glee went through Rupert’s nephew at his uncle’s loss.

 

*

 

Hell’s Angels was shot and virtually completed as a silent picture in the spring of 1929—just as synchronized sound was becoming cinema’s newest talking-point. Oops. Following the phenomenal success of The Jazz Singer for Warner Brothers in 1927, most movie theaters across America were by now wired for “talkies” and audiences were giving up on silents.[68] Hughes recognized the sea change in the industry during an unsuccessful audience preview of the rough cut of his film in Pasadena. His Uncle Rupert remarked, “It was a silent picture, and the audience received it in silence.”[69] Hughes immediately decided to rewrite then reshoot most of the picture to accommodate the cinema’s crucial technical advance in audio, pushing more of his own money into the pot, and this after he had already reshot a lot of the picture for this reason and that.

 

At this time it was by no means uncommon for a seventy or eighty minute movie to go into production one month, be completed and previewed the next month, and released widely the third month. This rapid production schedule was run of the mill for the ‘quota quickies’. The average for middlebrow productions was four months from production to release; and six months for first rate productions. Hell’s Angels, however, had already been in production for eighteen months (including pre-production).

 

The Hollywood gossip generated during the interminable filming was analogous to the unhappy buzz around Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. During its unprecedented years of production, Hell’s Angels was referred to by many in Hollywood as “Hughes’ Folly.”[70] Tinseltown columnist Hedda Hopper recalled, “For years Howard Hughes was known as the chump of Hollywood. Any man who risks his own money backing his own beliefs will always be called that here.”[71] Screenwriter Ben Hecht called him “the sucker with the money”.[72] Film journalist Harry Lang observed in 1930, “Once, all you had to do to get a laugh in Hollywood was to say, “Howard Hughes”.[73] There were many in Hollywood waiting with glee for Howard Hughes to fail spectacularly.

 

Hughes had already spent $2 million on his silent aviation film and now he was prepared to spend a further $2 million for a sound version. A flustered Noah Dietrich, powerless to stop Hughes, complained, “Hell’s Angels will drive Toolco to financial ruin.”[74]

 

In June 1929 a new screenplay had to be written for the dialogue scenes. Harold Estabrook was brought in to transform Harry Behn’s silent script into a “talkie”. James Whale, a young theatre director newly arrived in Hollywood from London, was hired in mid-June as a “dialogue director” to assist Hughes in reshooting up to 60 percent of the picture.[75] Joseph Moncure March, a popular author who shared the same agent as Whale, got the job of augmenting Estabrook’s effort, and produced a successful draft in ten days.[76]

 

The elaborate action sequences that had been filmed could be dubbed with sound effects without much problem. To capture some of the aerial sound effects, the Hughes production launched a balloon with microphone attached high over Caddo Field and had pilots perform flybys until Hughes was satisfied.[77] One of the pilots Hughes hired was Florence Lowe “Pancho” Barnes, the first woman stunt pilot in Hollywood. Barnes flew past studio sound trucks at Muroc Dry Lake, a desert landscape north of L.A. Months later she will capture the women’s world speed record (196.19 mph) in her low-winged black-and-red Travelair Mystery Ship.[78]

 

But would the film’s silent players be able to act adequately in a sound production? The two male leads, Ben Lyon and James Hall, playing the two pilots out of Oxford University, passed muster wonderfully well. Greta Nissen, however, as the female love interest, spoke in a thick Norwegian accent and was axed.[79]

 

Hughes held casting sessions at Metropolitan Studios for Greta Nissen’s replacement. This turned out to be a fun experience for Hughes. All he had to do was show up for a work and a long line of aspiring beauties would line up for a chance to win his heart. “Every actress in Hollywood wanted the part of Helen,” one of Hughes’ associates recalled.[80] Hughes would have had a great time with the women, which explains in part why the search dragged on. Hughes became overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches showing up at the casting office and finally instructed his assistants to show him only “the most beautiful and the sexiest.”[81]

 

Some of the starlets that Hughes took a shine too ended up in his arms without much ado. One such aspirant, June Collyer, an exquisite brunette, recalled that her screen test “began our hot, torrid affair which lasted about as long as it takes a candle to burn down.”[82] Another was Carole Lombard, a beautiful blonde who also bedded Hughes yet failed, like Collyer, to win the role, though she would go on to become a superstar on her own steam.[83] Ben Lyon looked on amused while Hughes played the field. “Many of the girls wanted to bed this shy, rich, and handsome Texan, even if they didn’t get the damn part,” he recalled.[84]

 

Sometimes Hughes brought a woman to Muirfield and screened early examples of pornographic films, some of them featuring Hollywood stars before they were famous, such as Joan Crawford. He will run the Crawford film over and again over the next twenty years, in part to show her up, as she would be one of the few Hollywood players to elude his grasp—as she found him spooky, and so sexually active, if not perverse, that he would have sex with, as she once put it, “a tree”.[85]

 

*

 

It was during the search for an exciting blonde actress when sex sensation Jean Harlow, aged 18, entered the picture. Born Harlean Carpentier in 1911, the daughter of a dentist, Harlow had come from her home in Kansas City to Southern California in the summer of 1927. As a child she had gone to private academies of high social standing as well as a strict convent boarding school; there was, then, a sophistication to her movements, but she would be anything but prim or conventional. The full-figured young woman hated to wear a bra or panties under her dresses. She was 5’ 2” in height, her measurements a shapely 34-24-35. In years to come she would become one of the Dream Factory’s biggest stars, her image on the silver screen fermenting ecstatic physiological responses in thrill-hungry audiences. At this time however, she was a total unknown with virtually no acting experience at all, only minor screen experience as an extra. Her talent agent was Arthur Landau, who also represented Ben Lyon and Greta Nissen. Many different Hollywood players have subsequently taken the credit for introducing Harlow to Hughes; what isn’t disputed is that she was given a screen test.[86]

 

James Whale, Hughes’ dialogue assistant, directed Harlow’s three minute camera test, in which the aspiring actress, wearing a baggy dressing gown which did nothing for her, played out a scene with Ben Lyon. She was nervous throughout, her acting halting, and the contours of her figure were hidden from the camera lens. Then it was up to Hughes to make a decision.  “How’s she in the bomb department?” Hughes asked Landau. “Big enough! Believe me!” replied the agent.[87] Going on intuition, Hughes hired Harlow. There was “something about her” and there was no time to waste, his expensive behemoth of a film was devouring dollars by the day.

 

Hughes closed the deal with Landau with his customary tough-as-nails style of negotiation. Considering that Harlow was an unknown, Shulman accepted that he hadn’t much leverage in this instance. Hughes would pay Harlow $1,500 in total for six weeks of work on Hell’s Angels. (Greta Nissen had been receiving $2,500 a week for the same role.) Harlow would also sign a three-year contract with Hughes’ Caddo Pictures at $250 a week (working) and $200 a week (not working), with an annual $50 raise as a sweetener.[88] The triumvirate signed on the dotted line. “I guess Howard Hughes got tired of looking at all the blondes in Hollywood and went for me,” Harlow told newsmen.[89] Hughes may not have known it at the time but by hiring Jean Harlow into his picture he was about to create America’s latest outrageously popular sex fantasy. Harlow’s appearance in Hell’s Angels will act as a stimulus to the nation. Jean Harlow will have the most celebrated breasts of the 1930s.

 

In Hell’s Angels Jean Harlow speaks one of the most famous lines in Hollywood history: “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?”

 

With Harlow now on the scene, an enthusiastic Hughes devoted himself to certain details which a producer-director usually left to his craftsmen. He worked closely with a costume designer to design a racy gown for Harlow which revealed much of her cleavage as well as most of her back down to the swell of her buttocks. Hughes will also personally oversee the snapping of sexy photographs of Harlow for publicity purposes.[90]

 

Making Hell’s Angels would not be easy on Harlow. She would break three bones in her foot during production, but worse was the affliction of so-called “klieg eyes” she contracted. Color cinematography was still in its rudimentary phase in 1929. To get suitable color images on screen, the cameraman had to flood the film set with dazzlingly bright light from an elaborate array of large arc lamps. Harlow had to stare into a wall of scorching artificial light to perform her close-ups for the ballroom sequence, which took two uncomfortable days. “Each night I went home with inflamed eyes and a headache,” she explained in an interview with Screen magazine in 1934. “Soon my vision began seriously troubling me. Finally I went to see a doctor. His diagnosis was almost unbelievable. My eyes were burned.” Her physican deemed it a rare and unusual case. Her conjunctivae were curling up and peeling off the surface of her eyeballs. She was lucky not to have lost her sight altogether. When the shooting of Hell’s Angels was completed late in 1929, Harlow submitted to an operation; the damaged transparent layer, turning hard and crusty, was fully removed from each eye. For the next year she was constrained to wear dark glasses as much as possible while a new film grew into place over her tender eyes. Harlow blamed no one in particular. “It was an accident pure and simple,” said Harlow, whose eyes were eventually cured.[91]

 

Harlow once recalled Hughes in an interview: “He’s got a lot of charm in his own funny way. But he never mixes business with pleasure. As far as I’m concerned, I might be another airplane. He expects you to work the same way—never get tired, give your best performance at any hour of the day or night, and never think about anything else. The nearest he ever came to making a pass at me was offering me a bite of a cookie.”[92]

 

Rumors abound, however, that Hughes got Harlow pregnant, who subsequently had an abortion in Mexico, in 1930.[93]

 

*

 

SAN SIMEON. During the late 1920s, during the protracted production of Hell’s Angels, Hughes became a regular at the elegant dinner parties at San Simeon (or ‘Hearst Castle’), a 100-room complex of buildings atop la cuesta encantada (‘the enchanted hill’) amid 300,000 acres of private land along the Pacific coast two hundred miles north of L.A.

 

It was the grand West Coast base of the newspaper magnate and real estate tycoon William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) and his glamorous mistress Marion Davies (1897-1961), one time showgirl and Hollywood star. In the 1920s Hearst was the most well-known and gossiped-about multi-millionaire in America. As the chief of a country-wide publishing empire of more than two dozen newspapers and more than a half-dozen magazines, he was, by the way, the world’s biggest user of paper at the time.[94] His sensationalist press cornered the market on irresponsible, hysterical, propagandistic, and at times just plain false news reporting. As America’s foremost media tycoon, Hearst was a vital man for Hughes to befriend.

 

Almost as soon as Hughes, would-be movie mogul, arrived on the Hollywood scene, a place for dinner was set for him at Hearst’s fabulous San Simeon estate. Hearst and Hughes got along swimmingly, as did Hughes and Davies.

 

In her memoir The Times We Had, Davies recalled, “We were always having parties—costume parties, birthday parties. . . . At the slightest drop of a hat, any occasion at all, we would say, “Let’s make a costume party. . . . Then the telephones would start ringing . . . and carloads of people from Hollywood would arrive.”[95] Only the most notable personalities of Hollywood were to be seen at San Simeon. “A weekend at San Simeon came to be the dream of cinema hopefuls,” wrote Hearst biographer W. A. Swanberg. “Once they made it they were in a special class. Hollywood was divided into two castes—people who had been guests at San Simeon and those who had not.”[96]

 

The driveway was six miles long and the site had its own aircraft landing strip, as well as a private zoo replete with water buffalo, emus, leopards, and an elephant. San Simeon had a vast and ornate interior chockfull of priceless works of art strewn throughout the floor plan in the manner of a museum. Rooms were based on medieval French, ancient Roman, Renaissance Italian motifs. There was a movie theater; two swimming pools filled with mountain spring water, one indoors, the outdoors one heated; Greco-Roman sculptures adorning the gardens tended by two dozen gardeners; tennis courts; a stable of riding horses. As a pleasure dome for the Hollywood set, San Simeon was the forerunner to Hef’s Playboy Mansion. An ordinary weekend there would see place settings for anywhere from thirty to fifty guests.

 

Film director Raoul Walsh in his autobiography Each Man in His Time recalled a typical night from 1929 when the guests at San Simeon included Winston Churchill, General Douglas MacArthur, Howard Hughes, Somerset Maugham, J. Edgar Hoover, Will Rogers, John Barrymore, Clark Gable, and the cream of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses, including Joan Bennett, Gloria Swanson, and Ginger Rogers.

 

During the making of Hell’s Angels Hughes was carousing up a storm with Ben Lyon, his actor in Hell’s Angels and self-proclaimed “Lothario of Hollywood”.[97] They bedded gorgeous women by the score—at Lyon’s house, at Hughes’ secret party house, in shared hotel rooms, and at San Simeon as well, where, according to Charles Higham, “their sexual bouts were interrupted by loud roars . . . from the lions housed in the ranch’s zoo.”[98] One night at Hearst Castle, Hughes will share a bedroom with Jean Harlow.[99]

 

Howard Hughes had effortlessly reached the inner sanctum or highest point of the Hollywood social structure. Yet in some of the photographs taken during Hearst’s lavish parties, Hughes looks glum and withdrawn.[100] However, there is one in which he is standing smiling among a group of women. How does Hughes look? Like the cat who got the cream.[101]

 

Hearst had also caught the film bug, producing a series of fabulously expensive cinematic spectaculars showcasing Marion Davies, and would lose millions of dollars from his dilettantish celluloid efforts. With Hell’s Angels, Hughes the newcomer would surpass Hearst in the Hollywood hoopla sweepstakes and show the old-timer how it was done.

 

William Randolph Hearst would influence Hollywood in a way more profound than the reception of any of his pictures or parties. His newspapers around the country ran the syndicated column of Louella Parsons, the ridiculously influential movieland gossip columnist based at his Los Angeles Examiner from 1922. However outrageously unfairly, a word from Parsons might make or break a career. Her ways and means were often grotesque. She would stick her public nose into stars’ private lives, offering advice and pronouncing judgment, such as the time she counselled Rita Hayworth in print to drop her dalliance with Hollywood lothario Victor Mature. Later, Parsons would be a scourge of Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, contributing to the destruction of their careers in Hollywood.

 

Parsons will have competition in Hedda Hopper at the Los Angeles Times from 1937. “Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, unassailably the two most powerful gossip columnists in the world,” recalled actor David Niven. “With their seventy-five million readers all over the world, they wielded, and frequently misused, enormous power. . . . Hedda and Louella had power out of all proportion to their ability and a readership out of all proportion to their literacy.”[102] Actress Lana Turner explained, “Let’s face it. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons dominated Hollywood. God help you if they ever got mad at you.”[103]

 

From the very beginning Hughes will make it a point to flatter Louella Parsons and his kindness towards her (and Hopper) will know no bounds. While most people will discover it almost impossible to get Hughes on the phone, he made it a point to maintain long-term contact with the two women. In years to come, Hughes will leave instructions for his secretaries: “Whenever either of these people call, we are not to hold them on the line while trying to reach HRH. Find out where they are going and then make every effort to locate HRH and give him the call.”[104] According to one of Hughes’ lovers, who overheard him talking on the phone, “If he was all smiles and saying “darling” all over the place and oozing charm, it was Louella Parsons [on the phone].”[105] After Hughes buys into TWA, he will ensure that Parsons and Hopper always had free seats on his airline’s airplanes. In the 1950s, Hughes will foot the bill—TWA plane tickets, private cars, and more—for a four-week trip to Europe for Louella Parsons and her friends.[106]

 

Louella Parsons, the prattler whose columns were read by many millions of Americans for decades, will ever and always be in Hughes’ corner. Down through the years, Hearst newspapers will always favor Howard Hughes. And by the late 1930s, not Hearst but Howard Hughes will be the most talked-about multi-millionaire in America.

 

*

 

While Hell’s Angels was being revamped for sound, Hughes had begun carrying on with one of the silent screen’s most beautiful and sexiest stars, Billie Dove. In the 1920s Billie Dove was billed as “the American Beauty”. Having started her career as a dancer in Florenz Ziegfeld’s chorus line in New York City, Dove was Tinseltown’s highest paid performer in 1929.[107] Bille Dove was up there with such movie queens as Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Louise Brooks. Hollywood memoirists remembered Dove as “ravishing” and “one of the most glamorous and voluptuous of the current stars.”[108] Billie would be the first peak in Hughes’ fever chart of high-profile love affairs over the following twenty years. Katharine Hepburn would be another peak later later in the 1930s. Hughes’ lovelife will eventually have more peaks than the Himalayas.

 

When they first met at the Starlight Ballroom at the Biltmore Hotel in L.A. early in 1929, Billie was surprised by the young Hughes’ bashful and embarrassed demeanor. Sometimes he was so shy he seemed socially backward. “Here was a noted ladies’ man, famous figure who escorted the most beautiful and famous women in the world,” Noah Dietrich explained. “Yet he couldn’t make the first date. Someone else had to ask the girl if she would like to go out with Howard Hughes.”[109]

 

“He just looked at me, not saying a word,” Billie Dove recalled. “I thought that this couldn’t be the man everyone was raving about. The millionaire.” She thought him an “over-grown schoolboy” who acted like a “zombie”.[110]

 

In days to come, Hughes followed Billie from party to party, and began lavishing her with dazzling jewelry, veritable crate-loads of flowers, and expensive haute couture clothing.[111] Without much ado she succumbed to his charms.

 

Hughes’ romance with Billie Dove commenced before Hughes was legally divorced from his wife. Billie was a married woman herself at the time. Her husband was Irwin Willat, a successful film director with over thirty credits to his name, and a man infamous for a violent temper and jealousy. When he had shot films in Cuba around 1914, he had kept a loaded .45 nearby in case of trouble.[112] A brutish man’s man, he would not be brushed aside so easily by Hughes. Willat sniffed a rat and put a private dick on the lovers’ trail.

 

Dark-haired and dark-eyed like Hughes, but only five feet five inches in height, Billie was two years older than Hughes and light-years ahead in worldly experience. Whatever Hughes could do, she could do better. While he would be continuing with his short-term love affairs, so Billie will have her own affairs—including one with actor George Raft.[113] Hughes, a control-freak who wanted to know everything about his new lover, assigned two of his own private detectives to follow her around, and began to learn of her extra-curricular activities.[114]

 

According to actor Kenneth MacKenna, Hughes caught Billie in a compromising position with a young Humphrey Bogart at Bogart’s apartment in 1929. Bogart was not yet the film legend he was to become; he was a newcomer to Hollywood and hoping to get a break. Hughes suddenly appeared with a photographer who snapped a photograph of a stark-naked Bogart, the future tough-guy of the movies and star of Casablanca, scurrying for cover.

 

Soon after the unhappy scene, Bogart was persuaded to go for a flight with Hughes in one of Hughes’ small planes. Hughes, out of revenge and mischief, put the plane through its barmstorming paces, causing Bogart to weep in fear in his seat.

 

With the photo of Bogart in his possession, Hughes would be able to blackmail Bogart into running errands for him in future (such as passing messages on for him).[115] If the photograph was released to the press, a sex scandal would have possibly destroyed Bogart’s chances for a career in Hollywood.

 

As for Billie Dove, Bogart wouldn’t be her only affair which an increasingly annoyed Hughes would discover.[116] One night Noah Dietrich received an excited telephone call from Hughes’ housekeeper, summoning him to Muirfield. When Dietrich arrived, he found a completely unbalanced Hughes in the basement, stewing in anger amid a wasteland of broken glass. After Billie had stormed out on him after an argument, an enraged Hughes had taken out his frustration by destroying most of his store of contraband liquor. “In a bad state mentally” is how Dietrich later described Hughes. Dietrich had to phone for one of Hughes’ private physicians to sedate him.[117] Hughes and Billie subsequently made up, but the incident didn’t augur well. The stress of dealing with high-maintenance women will lead Hughes to carry out similar episodes of psychodrama in the years to come.

 

Even with their problems, Hughes was entirely taken with Billie and would see to it that no one would get in his way. Something had to be done about an irate Irwin Willat. Hughes arranged for Noah Dietrich to pay her husband the enormous sum of $325,000 in $1,000 bills. Dietrich recalled that no bank in Los Angeles could supply him with 325 thousand-dollar bills, so he had to take a cashier’s check to the Federal Reserve Bank headquarters in L.A. to get the cash. “You can bet I was nervous as hell,” he wrote, “when I traveled across town with $325,000 in my pocket.”[118] Willat subsequently acceded to a divorce from his wife of seven years, who in the legal papers charged him with extreme cruelty as well as physical beatings.[119] Hughes paid her legal expenses, which amounted to $25,000.[120]

 

By this time Ella Rice Hughes had already stormed out of the Murifield mansion and returned to Houston. In 1929, after enduring four years of a marriage only in name, Ella had to suffer the social indignity—at that Entirely Moral Time—of filing for divorce from her husband who had existed as a phantom in her life. His affair with Billie Dove had acted as the proverbial last straw. Ella divorced him on the grounds of “excesses and cruel treatment.”[121] Howard Hughes was described in the suit as “irritable, cross, critical, fault-finding and inconsiderate.” Also, he had “steadily neglected her.”[122] Hughes did not contest any detail of the divorce. Ella received a settlement of $1,250,000, payable in five installments. (The divorce was finalized on December 9, 1929.) Ella Rice returned to Houston and married a man who had been romancing her up to the time Hughes had entered the picture back in 1925. There is no record that Ella Rice ever spoke about Howard Hughes in public again. After she left California Hughes locked the door to her bedroom at Muirfield. It would remain locked for the next thirteen years.[123]

 

Billie Dove moved into Muirfield. She was seen driving around Hollywood in a nickel-plated Rolls Royce.[124] For $350,000 Hughes bought an eighty-foot luxury yacht and paid for an extravagant refit of the interior. The young Hughes evidently thought a yacht was a necessary accoutrement of the fabulously wealthy. Naming it the Rodeo, the yacht became their love nest.[125] Hughes will buy Billie’s film contract from Warner Brothers for $500,000.[126] The lovebirds will speak of marriage.

 

The stellar pair were the talk of the town. Their romance was featured in gossip columns and movie magazines and scandal sheets. The wealthy young man was living the fairy tale, he had one of Hollywood’s biggest stars on his arm.

 

*

 

In October 1929, during the American presidency of Herbert Hoover, the U.S. Stock Market plunged precipitously, devaluing the Dow-Jones industrial average by upwards of 40 percent. The worst day of panic trading was Black Tuesday, October 29, when rich men became abject paupers between morning and night. Stockbrokers in expensive suits were seen weeping in public. Newspapers reported businessmen leaping off high-rises to their deaths. Thousands of businesses across America were wrecked and their workforces suddenly unemployed. Shockwaves were felt throughout the world. The economic disaster plunged the country into a depression which would progressively worsen before the turnaround beginning in the later 1930s. At the time, Howard Hughes had only dabbled in stocks and shares, so his own fortune had not suffered much by the downturn. Nor had Hughes been borrowing money from banks to maintain his lifestyle, since Hughes Tool, his private company, had been supplying enough to serve his every whim. His own bank account would not be hurt much by the crash (he did lose $5 million).[127]

 

The stock market crashes while Hell’s Angels is being pieced together, but nothing is going to put a dent in Hughes’ plans. The last scene was filmed in December 1929, and it was magnificent—a single shot of 1,700 extras costumed as fighting soldiers charging across a battlefield.[128] In all Hughes had employed the services of no less than 35 cameramen to capture his aerial epic on film![129]

 

Twelve film editors worked on Hell’s Angels in around-the-clock shifts. While an ordinary motion picture is between 8,000 and 15,000 feet long, Hughes exposed close to three million feet of film—five hundred and sixty hours worth.[130] The shooting ratio was an unbelievable 250:1. The film director Hughes could rival Charlie Chaplin or Stanley Kubrick for the amount of takes he tallied for a single shot. Post-production of Hell’s Angels finally came to an end early in May 1930.[131]

 

Hughes could also rival Kubrick in the length of time required to get one of his cherished productions into the theatres. While ‘A’ list pictures usually took no more than six months from the first day of shooting to the general release of the final product, Hell’s Angels was in production for three years.

 

Finally Hell’s Angels is released widely in the summer of 1930 in an extravaganza of hype. Produced and then marketed at a cost of $4 million, it was the most expensive film yet made.[132] Hell’s Angels was also a hefty two hours and fifteen minutes long.

 

Hughes had a natural flair for Hollywood hucksterism and his beloved film was launched on the world on the grandest of scales. The premiere alone set Hughes back $40,000, the cost of a low-budget film, and more than four times the cost of the average Hollywood premiere. Hughes orchestrated a virbrant evening of hoopla with master showman Sid Grauman and Frank Whitbeck, a specialist in outdoor lighting systems. Opening in the heart of Hollywood on June 7, 1930 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (the one with the shapes of hands and feet of stars immortalized in cement), Hell’s Angels attracted a crowd of over fifteen thousand curious movie-fans to Hollywood Boulevard.[133] 250 arc lights illuminated Hollywood Boulevard which had been roped-off for ten blocks, about a mile, with cutouts of the various planes featuring in the film suspended overhead all the way down the line.[134] Searchlights mounted in the nearby Hollywood Hills focused colored beams of light at the theater.[135] A squadron of Hughes’ fighter planes criss-crossed the sky to the spectators’ delight. Some flyboys parachuted in.[136] “Hollywood went completely off its nut in honor of the occasion,” reported the Washington Post.[137] The movie poster proclaimed:

 

HOWARD HUGHES’ Thrilling Multi-Million Dollar Air Spectacle

 

Hughes had been intent on presenting his film in the most dynamic way possible. Picture-wise, Hell’s Angels was projected in a widescreen format known as Magnascope.[138] Sound-wise, Hughes had personally overseen the installation of a new, state-of-the-art audio system at Grauman’s theater specifically for Hell’s Angels.[139]

 

1,024 guests attended the premiere screening. The audience was a who’s who of Hollywood royalty, including Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, and Lionel Barrymore. Tickets had gone for an unprecedented $11 each and had been sold a week in advance.[140] It was the hottest ticket in town at the time; speculators had scalped some of the tickets at an incredible $50.00 each—which was more than a week’s wages for ordinary Americans.[141] A 46-piece orchestra played while the guests found their reserved seats in the theater.[142] Hughes arrived in a Duesenberg limousine with Billie Dove and was greeted by a tumult of cheers from the crush of spectators in the street.[143]

 

Hughes printed an (incomplete) breakdown of the budget in the 32-page leather-bound souvenir program distributed prior to the screening:

 

$225,475 for film stock and development. $562,000 for airplanes. $754,000 for salaries of pilots. $389,000 for rental of locations and yet more airplanes. $408,000 for salaries of aerial scenes technicians (including mechanics, cameramen). $520,000 for sets and costumes. $328,000 for salaries of actors. $220,000 for salaries of interior scenes technicians (including directors, cameramen). $460,000 for zeppelin sequence.[144]

 

Each one of these figures was sufficient to fund a major “A”-list film in 1930![145] Hughes published his Hell’s Angels budget not to show off but to answer rumors that he had squandered money. Though Hell’s Angels was the most expensive film Hollywood had yet attempted, Hughes would play down the enormous cost of his film. As it happened, Hughes wouldn’t have to worry about bad press for Hell’s Angels—far from it.

 

Following the premiere screening, the thousand-strong audience hailed Hughes’ blockbuster with a standing ovation. For years—until Gone With the Wind in 1939—the Hell’s Angels opening would be remembered as the biggest Hollywood premiere that ever was.[146]

 

The day after the premiere, Charlie Chaplin wired Hughes:

 

THE ZEPPELIN SEQUENCE IS THE MOST DRAMATIC EPISODE I’VE EVER SEEN.[147]

 

Hell’s Angels went on to play for an impressive nineteen weeks at Grauman’s, easily breaking attendance records in the process.[148]

 

The film opened in another spectacular and unprecedented manner in Manhattan in August. Hughes premiered Hell’s Angels at two different cinemas at the same time (the Criterion and the Gaiety), advertised the film with an elaborate display of immense electric signs in Times Square, and footed the bill for a non-stop, 72-hour cocktail party for journalists at the swank Hotel Astor.[149]

 

The reviews in the major American newspapers were magnificent. If certain of the critics took issue with the merit of the dialogue scenes, the aerial battle sequences were unanimously acclaimed as the greatest ever committed to film.

 

“His film is absorbing and exciting.” (New York Times). “The air shots are awesome, thrilling and impressive; they make the picture a sensationally exciting one.” (New York Daily Mirror). “Hell’s Angels justifies the vast sums of money which are said to have been spent on it, in the sheer opulence of its aerial photography.” (New York Post).[150] “The most extraordinary output ever to emerge from the motion picture studios. An achievement in picture drama that will stand for a long time as a model to aim at. A sensational success—it has virile drama linking together its spectacles, and in the variety of its appeal with suspense and humor it is electrifying.” (Los Angeles Express). “Superlatives which are ordinarily extravagant may be justly used in describing this picture, particularly the sequences made in the air.” (Film Daily).[151] “Hell’s Angels stands out above any picture on aviation ever produced. Its air scenes can never be duplicated, because that many 1917 type ships can never be secured again.” (Washington Post).[152]

 

“The most beautiful shots and thrilling action the movies have yet conceived,” wrote one Hollywood critic. Another enthused, “Beside its sheer magnificence, all stage spectacles and colossal circuses become puny”.[153]

 

“A magnificent picture.” (Los Angeles Times). “It is immeasurably picturesque and awe-inspiring.” (Los Angeles Herald). “Beyond doubt, the air shots are the surpassing achievement of air photography to date and are fully as spectacular as the wildest rumors you have heard about them.” (Los Angeles Record). “There has never been a picture which has created the expectation of Hell’s Angels and there never has been a picture which fulfilled and exceeded public expectation to the degree that this Howard Hughes epic of the air has succeeded.” (Hollywood Citizen). “A wheelbarrow load of adjectives couldn’t describe this marvelous contribution to cinema history.” (Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News). “A film that will be taked about for years.” (Hollywood News).[154]

 

Variety, the film industry’s most respected trade journal, gave Hell’s Angels a glowing review, exemplifying the movie industry’s attitude toward Hughes’ supreme effort. “As an air film it’s a pip . . . a release that’s going to get a load of money.” As for the spectacular zeppelin raid on London sequence: “No film has yet had anything like it.” Technically, “Sound for the picture is unusually fine . . . . Photography is also aces.” The original review also pointed out, “After three years with it, Hughes was in the last row of the Chinese on the second night, accompanied by his secretary, who was jotting down cuts.”[155]

 

After a characteristically protracted period of negotiations that had lasted months, Hughes had entered into a customarily complex deal for United Artists to distribute his film across the country.[156] Hell’s Angels would be a major media event in every city it opened and became a box-office smash.[157] Attendance records were broken at cinemas coast to coast.

 

When Hell’s Angels hit the screens, Hughes’ Hollywood hypemeisters went into overdrive concocting hip descriptions of Jean Harlow to titillate the public. Blonde Bombshell. Platinum Blonde. Platinum Venus. Jean Harlow became a media and social phenomenon. Audiences went wild for her. She became America’s latest and most sensational sex-queen. Blonde, witty, salacious, shapely, she was the spiritual predecessor to Marilyn Monroe. While Monroe was confectionary-sweet, a ditzy blonde with a powder-puff manner and bubble-gum interior, Harlow was like a shot of whiskey, her presence concentrated and red-hot. She was a sharp-thinking Midwesterner as opposed to Monroe the dreamy Angeleno who had grown up for a time across the street from the RKO Studios backlot. Harlow was much quicker and wittier in interviews than Monroe, though like Monroe Harlow’s saucy, suggestive remarks intensified her sexual charisma, an intentional strategy to play the game expected of her.

 

Harlow went on a tremendously successful ten week tour to movie theaters across America to promote the film. She stood before the audience and spoke for fifteen minutes before the film show began, and was paid $3,500 a week. More than a hundred Jean Harlow fan clubs quickly appeared across America.[158] Her look inspired a fashion; drug stores around the country sold great quantities of peroxide to dye hair white-hot blonde.[159] Though Hughes hadn’t originally planned for it, his aviation epic gave birth to a Hollywood legend, Jean Harlow who electrified the silver screen for the next seven years.

 

United Artists distributed a silent version of Hell’s Angels in Europe to further acclaim and financial success.[160] On October 29, 1930, the day following its gala premiere at the London Pavilion, the London Times reviewed the film as “a memorable and exciting spectacle. . . . The photography is brilliant, many of the scenes are exceedingly beautiful, and the narrative is firm and swift.”[161] “The greatest masterpiece the screen has ever known,” enthused the London Daily Express.[162] “London was thrilled as never before,” claimed the Sketch.[163] In one fell swoop Jean Harlow entered the Hollywood pantheon as one of its most popular international stars.

 

The cinematography of Hell’s Angels, which was shot by no less than six credited cinematographers, would be justly nominated for an Academy Award. Pictorially Hell’s Angels is magnificent.

 

In its first run, Hell’s Angels grossed some $3 million. In 1930, movie theatres across the country generally charged 10 cents for matinees and 20 cents after 6 p.m. That means that Hell’s Angels sold more than 15 million tickets, which is a tremendous amount, but not out of the question, considering that cinemas were selling over 70 million tickets a week.[164] In today’s prices Hell’s Angels would have been a $100 million blockbuster. Eventually grossing upwards of $8 million, Hell’s Angels recouped its $4 million production cost and then some.[165] The Hollywood outsider, the Texas gambler, the millionaire independent producer, had made good. Howard Hughes had proved himself to be a master showman of the mass medium of the cinema.

 

*

 

A HOLLYWOOD STATE OF MIND. In the one-industry town where status was based on money and power, wealthy independent movie-maker Howard Hughes was a continuous center of attention. In the closed community where everyone knew of everyone, Howard Hughes was a name on everyone’s lips. Hughes was duly covered in the gossip columns as if he were himself one of the stars of the silver screen. All of a sudden, the shy boy had become akin to the “homecoming king”. Everyone wanted to meet him. Hughes evidently enjoyed his position as a big fish in the small pond; L.A. County remained his home base for forty years.

 

Hollywood was a 24-hour town of ostentatious peacocks and birds of paradise, big-shots, megalomaniacs, temperamental artists, sycophants, innocent starlets. It was an insecure place where one’s position was perpetually endangered. Anyone’s job—even the greatest of the screen stars—was at the mercy of the whims of the capricious studio executives. It was a here today, gone tomorrow business. The atmosphere of the self-enclosed movie world was thick with gossip, envy, greed, lust, ecstasy, spite, desperation, disappointment, melancholy, and more envy. The participants were a medley of hubris and insecurity. (In later years the filmmaker Paul Schrader characterized the heady experience of living in Hollywood using the metaphor of the ongoing physical sensation of falling.) Many anonymous persons were sucked into the black hole of the industry and were never heard from again. For every rags-to-riches story there were thousands of never-made-its and exploited-egregiously stories. Earthquakes were not the only reason for unstable ground under one’s feet. The spice of the illicit, the desperation for the lucky break, the tenuousness of one’s established position—all this added to the excitement of Tinseltown. In this unstable environment of uncertainty, risk, tension, frustration, anxiety, and hysteria, the man with the money was regarded as a bedrock. The man of wealth doesn’t have to hope for a “break”, he doesn’t need luck—He is the one who doles out the luck. The man of great wealth is the only player with a secure footing in Hollywood.

 

The movie colony was a community of cliques, and Hughes, by virtue of his fortune, was welcomed everywhere. He was the proverbial kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Howard Hughes basked in the continuous sunshine of the world of daydreams.

 

“Hollywood is nouveau riche,” wrote Leo C. Rosten in Hollywood: The Movie Colony. “Its people are characterized by notoriety, not pedigree; its position rests on money, not birth; its fame depends on publicity, not ancestry.”[166] This would make Howard Hughes a patron saint of Hollywood, considering that he exemplified the first, has plenty of the second, and became a virtuoso of the third.

 

Howard Hughes fit in effortlessly with the prevailing climate of the Hollywood film industry. His wealth and beauty explains his friendly reception. His survival in Hollywood can be ascribed to his intelligence; his cool, self-confident temperament; and his love of the art of the deal.

 

---

[1] Rae, John B., Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920-1960 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1968), p. 49.

[2] Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 34.

[3] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, Washington Post, May 25, 1930, p. A4; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 122; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 16; [HH:HLM], p. 62; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 171; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 20

[4] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 41; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 40; [HH:HLM], p. 62; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 122; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[5] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 24; Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 14; Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 10; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129; McClain, Stan, “History of Hollywood’s Aerial Cinematography”, The Operating Cameraman, Spring/Summer 1996, available online; MCA Universal home video box for Hell’s Angels; Variety’s original review of Hell’s Angels from January, 1930, available online.

[6] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; McClain, “History of Hollywood’s Aerial Cinematography”. ¶ The site of Hughes’ old air field was virtually the epicenter of the devastating January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake.

[7] “This One Has Only Covered Three Years In The Making”, Washington Post, January 19, 1930, p. 46; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 29; Hack, Hughes, p. 67; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 162.

[8] Hack, Hughes, p. 67; “This One Has Only Covered Three Years In The Making”, p. 46 (says 20,000 extras in all); Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 171.

[9] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 51.

[10] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 48; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 177.

[11] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 120; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; Thompson, Thomas, “Riddle of an Embattled Phantom”, Life, September 7, 1962, p. 26; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 26; Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 18; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 306-7; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 171-2; 184.

[12] Finstad, Heir, p. 28.

[13] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 128; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 38.

[14] Hack, Hughes, p. 66.

[15] Gibbs-Smith, Charles H., The Aeroplane (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960), p. 103.

[16] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 122; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 57; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 40.

[17] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 69; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 57; Hack, Hughes, p. 64; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 40; Marrett, George J., Howard Hughes: Aviator (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2004), p. 6; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 127.

[18] Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 7-8.

[19] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 71; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 8.

[20] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 132.

[21] [HH:HLM], p. 76.

[22] Matheson, Weird Ways, p. 27.

[23] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 69-70; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 6-7. ¶ The Waco 10 was built by the Advance Aircraft Company (later the Waco Aircraft Company) and introduced in 1927. The factory price for a Waco 10 was $2,460.

[24] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 24; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 32.

[25] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 58; HH:HLM], p. 76; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 6; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 163.

[26] “Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator”, DVD documentary.

[27] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 25; see also Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 31.

[28] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 58; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 8.

[29] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 36-7.

[30] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 71-2. See also Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 9-10; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 16.

[31] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 172-3.

[32] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 34; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 123; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 41; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 173; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[33] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 41; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 173.

[34] Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 10; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 3; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 174.

[35] McDonald, Hercules, p. 25.

[36] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[37] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; [HH:HLM], p. 62-3; McClain, “History of Hollywood’s Aerial Cinematography”; Bell, Jerry with Gary Burk, Howard Hughes: His Silence, Secrets & Success! (U.S.A.: Hawkes Publishing Inc, 1976), p. 94.

[38] “This One Has Only Covered Three Years In The Making”, p. 46; “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4.

[39] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 123-4; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 45; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 43; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 9; Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 10; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 178.

[40] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 33; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 124.

[41] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 42; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 190; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 124.

[42] Kistler, Ron, I Caught Flies for Howard Hughes (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976), p. 113; Hack, Hughes, p. 255; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 48-9; 129; 131; 136; 159; 260; 317; 431; 494; 582; 754; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 182.

[43] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 179.

[44] Variety’s original review of Hell’s Angels; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 30; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 16; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 42.

[45] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 33.

[46] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 44.

[47] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 32. ¶ Two Arabian Knights, The Mating Call, and The Racket were all thought to be lost until they recently turned up in a collection owned by Hart Wegner, Professor emeritus of UNLV. Turner Entertainment Networks provided funding for the restoration of the prints, which were seen for the first time since their original cinema releases on Turner Classic Movies on December 29, 2004. Everybody’s Acting is still lost. See “Lost Hughes pix surface”, Daily Variety, November 29, 2004.

[48] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 159-60.

[49] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 166-7.

[50] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 168-9.

[51] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 50.

[52] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 50; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 125; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[53] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 30; “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4.

[54] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 32; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 40-1; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 150; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 20.

[55] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[56] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 122; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 171.

[57] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 32; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[58] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[59] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 17-8; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 123.

[60] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 35; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 42; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 180.

[61] In addition, E. Burton Steene, one of the cameramen, died of a heart attack before the film was completed. See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 35; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 17; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 42; [HH:HLM], p. 63; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36. Four deaths, according to Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 49-50; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 43.

[62] Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 42-3; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34; 36; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 179-80.

[63] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 20.

[64] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 34.

[65] Gunning, Tom, “Colourful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Silent Cinema” in Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image before 1914, vol. 2, issue 2, Special Issue: Living Pictures Color, edited by Luke McKernan; ‘Disorderly Order’: Colors in Silent Film: The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, edited by Daan Her Toggs and Nico De Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996); Everson, American Silent Film, p. 10; Giovanna Fossati in “Session 1: Programme Notes”, Disorderly Order, p. 12. 

[66] “This One Has Only Covered Three Years In The Making”, p. 46; “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36; “Technicolor History” set of pages on the The American WideScreen Museum home website; “What? Color in the Movies Again?”, Fortune Magazine, October 1934, available online.

[67] Osborne, Robert, 65 Years of the Oscar (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), p. 18.

[68] Thomson, David, Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (London: Abacus, 1993), p. 82; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 364 

[69] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 28; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 126; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 204; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 183.

[70] “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3.

[71] Hopper, Hedda, “For Years He Was Known as ‘Chump of Hollywood’”, Washington Post, July 24, 1938, p. TT3.

[72] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 135; [HH:US], p. 36; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 151; 231; 267.

[73] See Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 20.

[74] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 183.

[75] Curtis, James, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 86.

[76] March, Joseph Moncure, “About Hell’s Angels”, Look Magazine, March 23, 1954, p. 14.

[77] Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 18; 35.

[78] www.aerofiles.com; Encyclopædia Britannica online.

[79] Born in Oslo on January 30, 1906, Greta Nissen was a beautiful blonde Ziegfeld girl who rose to prominence as a Hollywood leading lady during the silent era. After appearing in over thirty films in the 1920s and 30s, Nissen retired from the screen at the age of 31 in 1937.

[80] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 186.

[81] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 186.

[82] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 190; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 37; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 293.

[83] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 127; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 47; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 194-7; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 36; Porter, Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart, p. 262.

[84] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 184.

[85] [HH:US], p. 82; 193; Hack, Hughes, p. 121; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 191; 246; 348; 742; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 166-7; Crawford, Christina, Mommie Dearest (London: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1979), p. 97-8; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 657.

[86] “New Season”, Time, August 19, 1935; Strickling, Howard, “A Hollywood Observer Appraises Star Of Whose Nature Public Knows Little”, Washington Post, October 20, 1935, p. SS1; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 28; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 127; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 18; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 51; Shulman, Harlow, Chapter VI; Finch, Gone Hollywood, p. 85-6; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 45; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 199-200; Eisenberg, Dennis, Uri Dan and Eli Landau, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (New York & London: Paddington Press Ltd, 1979), p. 266.

[87] Shulman, Harlow, p. 81-2.

[88] Shulman, Harlow, p. 82; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 201.

[89] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 201.

[90] [HH:US], p. 69-70; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 202-3.

[91] Levin, Martin (ed.), Hollywood and the Great Fan Magazines (London: Ian Allan, 1970), p. 101-2; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 202; 239.

[92] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 292; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 22; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 48; “New Season”, Time, August 19, 1935; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 204-5.

[93] Porter, Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart, p. 387-90; 400-406; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 203-5; 241; 243-4; [HH:US], p. 69.

[94] Swanberg, W. A., Citizen Hearst ([New York:] Longmans, 1961), p. 368.

[95] Davies, The Times We Had (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), p. 68; 215.

[96] Swanberg, Citizen Hearst, p. 389.

[97] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 146.

[98] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 4;  Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 62-4; 163; 292.

[99] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 204.

[100] Finstad, Heir, p. 31.

[101] Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 34.

[102] Niven, David, Bring on the Empty Horses, in Silvester, The Penguin Book of Hollywood, p. 349-59.

[103] Turner, Lana, Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth (London: New English Library, 1983), p. 114.

[104] [HH:HLM], p. 213.

[105] Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 151; 199.

[106] Hack, Hughes, p. 239-40; Phelan, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels, p. 183; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 115; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 302-3; James, Scandals, Scamps and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 28.

[107] Swanberg, Citizen Hearst, p. 305; Griffith, Richard and Arthur Mayer, The Movies (London: Spring Books, 1957), p. 224-5.

[108] Baroness Ravensdale, In Many Rhythms, and Lester Cole, Hollywood Red, in Silvester, Penguin Book of Hollywood, p. 85; 134. Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 132; 293.

[109] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 113.

[110] Hack, Hughes, p. 74; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 206; [HH:US], p. 57; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 49-50.

[111] [HH:US], p. 57-8; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 208; 222.

[112] Brownlow, Kevin, Hollywood: the Pioneers (London: Collins, 1979), p. 55; 59.

[113] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 218; 232.

[114] [HH:US], p. 58; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 209; 218.

[115] Porter, Darwin, The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart (Staten Island, NY: The Georgia Literary Association, 2003), p. 296-302; 326-7; 347; 385-400; 473-5;  Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 218-21; 224-5; 241-4; 251-2.

[116] Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 6; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 237; 242.

[117] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 222.

[118] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 88; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 215-6.

[119] “Billie Dove Asks Divorce”, New York Times, June 13, 1930, p. 20; “Billie Dove Gets Divorce”, New York Times, July 2, 1930, p. 31; Hack, Hughes, p. 83; Porter, Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart, p. 345-8; 390-400; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 223-6.

[120] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 233; [HH:US], p. 75.

[121] Hack, Hughes, p. 78; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70.

[122] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 39; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 9; ; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 212; 216.

[123] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 39; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 47; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 351-3.

[124] “Hell’s Angels”, Time, June 9, 1930; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 233.

[125] [HH:US], p. 61; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 209-10 (says 175-foot).

[126] [HH:US], p. 75. Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 51, says $250,000 plus $85,000 for Billie’s agent. Dietrich says Hughes signed Dove to five pictures at $85,000 a picture. See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 84; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 233.

[127] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 105; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 115; 214.

[128] Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36.

[129] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129.

[130] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 42; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 52; [HH:HLM], p. 67; [HH:US], p. 70; Hack, Hughes, p. 79; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 209; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36.

[131] “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129.

[132] “This One Has Only Covered Three Years In The Making”, p. 46; “Latest News Of The Most Costly Film”, Washington Post, April 6, 1930, p. A4; “How Mr. Hughes Spent Four Million on “Hell’s Angels”, p. A4; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 30; “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3; Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 14; “Fabulous Team”, Time, August 31, 1942; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 42; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 52; Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 34-5; [HH:HLM], p. 67; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 52; Maguglin, Hughes His Achievements, p. 31; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 49; [HH:US], p. 71; Hack, Hughes, p. 81; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 209; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36; Variety’s original review of Hell’s Angels.

[133] Hack, Hughes, p. 80 (June 7);  [HH:US], p. 70, (June 30); [HH:HLM], p. 68 (June 30); Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 130 (June 1930); Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 53 (May 27); Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 51 (May 27); Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 229 (May 27); Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 29 (May 1930).

[134] Goodman, Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood, p. 352; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 130; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 229.

[135] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 130; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 229.

[136] “Hell’s Angels”, Time, June 9, 1930; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 52.

[137] “And Now All That Trouble Seems Not Half So Futile”, Washington Post, June 22, 1930, p. A2.

[138] Crafton, Donald, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound 1926-1931 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 349. ¶ Magnascope was developed by the Magnascope Company and Paramount Pictures in the mid-1920s. The film gauge is 65mm; aspect ratio is 2:18:1.

[139] Crafton, The Talkies, p. 349-50; Hack, Hughes, p. 80.

[140] “Hell’s Angels”, Time, June 9, 1930; “And Now All That Trouble Seems Not Half So Futile”, p. A2; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 130; Hack, Hughes, p. 80-81.

[141] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 29; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 230.

[142] Hack, Hughes, p. 81.

[143] [HH:US], p. 70; Hack, Hughes, p. 80; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 229.

[144] This equals $3,866,475. Adding on all postproduction costs, including editing (sound and picture) and advertising, pushes the final budget to over $4 million. See “Latest News Of The Most Costly Film”, p. A4; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 129; Hack, Hughes, p. 81.

[145] Shulman, Harlow, p. 216;  Mordden, Ethan, The Hollywood Studios (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 314.

[146] Day, Beth This was Hollywood, in Christopher Silvester, The Penguin Book of Hollywood, p. 271.

[147] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 43; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36.

[148] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 43; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 131; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36.

[149] Crafton, The Talkies, p. 350; Lasky, RKO, p. 215; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 231.

[150] Three quotes from Conway, Michael and Mark Ricci, The Films of Jean Harlow (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), p. 36-7.

[151] Two quotes from Crafton, The Talkies, p. 350; first quote, slighly different, also in “And Now All That Trouble Seems Not Half So Futile”, p. A2.

[152] “Four Million Dollars Went Into The Air”, Washington Post, December 28, 1930, p. A2.

[153] Two quotes from Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 29; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 43.

[154] All quoted in “And Now All That Trouble Seems Not Half So Futile”, p. A2.

[155] Variety’s original review of Hell’s Angels. ¶ For one bad review of Hell’s Angels, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert E. Sherwood, see Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 43-4; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 131; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 231.

[156] Crafton, The Talkies, p. 586; Balio, Tino, United Artists (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 110-12.

[157] Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 53.

[158] Shulman, Harlow, p. 90; 102.

[159] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 28; “New Season”, Time, August 19, 1935; Sarris, Andrew, “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film: History & Memory 1927-1949 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 424-5.

[160] Crafton, The Talkies, p. 586.

[161] “Hell’s Angels”, The (London) Times, Wednesday, October 29, 1930, p. 12; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 53.

[162] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 131; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 19; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 231.

[163] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part II, p. 29; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 131.

[164] Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 67.

[165] Production gross includes its re-release in 1937. The film will still be playing in some theaters as late as 1948. See “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3; “Hughes’s Western”, Time, February 22, 1943; “The Mechanical Man”, Time, July 19, 1948; “RKO: It’s Only Money”, Fortune, May 1953, p. 126; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70; Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 10; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 231; Kobal, John & V.A. Wilson, Foyer Pleasure: The Golden Age of Cinema Lobby Cards (London: Aurum Press, 1982), p. 60-1; Brownlow, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, p. 36.

[166] Rosten, Hollywood, p. 59.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Remembering the early days

 

       It has no boundary . . . It is a ribbon of dream.

                                                                                                                          ORSON WELLES, on the cinema.

 

    Movies are the bad habit that have corrupted our century.

 BEN HECHT

 

‘Hollywood’ was originally the name of a prairie ranch owned by a family named Wilcox in the 1880s. Hollywood was incorporated as an independent municipality in 1903, then was absorbed within the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County seven years later. Small film companies moved into the area around 1910, establishing temporary studios in random buildings such as a former Chinese laundry, a vacant carbarn, a grocery store, a tavern. At this time Hollywood was a small village drowsy under the dry California sun, not much more than one main street lined with low, unassuming buildings, surrounded by hills of lank weeds, sagebrush, yucca, and, beyond that, cactus and rattlesnakes and the Mojave Desert. The night sky was still visibly awash with millions of stars all the way down to the horizon. It was a place where nothing much happened, where people in the sunset of their lives, as well as tubercular patients, came to rest among the tranquil farmland. The San Fernando Valley just ‘over the hill’ to the northwest was undeveloped and barely populated. The incoming moviemakers rubbed shoulders with the cowboys, hillbillies, and Mexican locals dwelling in the city of Los Angeles a couple of miles to the east. Early film pioneers such as Cecil B. DeMille commuted to work on horseback, with a revolver in a holster around his waist.

Making silent movies in these early years was a catch-as-catch-can process: directors bellowing story points through megaphones while cameramen cranked the cameras, with the actors mimicking elemental emotions one after another at the snap of a finger, and everyone working for as long as the sun held out, which in Southern California’s temperate climate meant nine months of fourteen-hour shooting days. A production accumulated its footage by the seat-of-its-pants. The grammar of film language was being invented by the day. Professional films came into being in a manner not much different to teenagers of the present day improvising home movies with their digital cameras in their backyards. A ten-minute movie was completed in a few days.

            Why had the filmmakers come to the Pacific Coast in the first place? The reasons were not only related to the year-round warmth and sunlight. The early filmmakers had gone west to flee the inventor Thomas Edison and his autocratic Motion Picture Patents Company. Edison, one of the most brilliant of all Americans past and present, had over one thousand patents to his name, including the practical light bulb, the phonograph, and—expanding upon the basic ideas of other innovators such as the French Lumiére brothers—the strip kinetograph and the kinetoscope, otherwise known as the motion picture camera and the motion picture projector. Thomas Edison is often referred to—not entirely accurately—as the Father of Motion Pictures. His designs for a movie camera and a projector came to fruition in 1891, and he had a motion picture production studio in operation in New Jersey by 1893. In 1908 Edison was a driving force in organizing the Motion Picture Patents Company, which sought to maintain a monopoly on the movie business by forcing any filmmaker who wanted to use a movie camera or any exhibitor who wanted to use a movie projector to pay licensing fees to the MPPC or suffer the consequences of litigation and the confiscating of the equipment. Edison set out on a campaign of suing a slew of ‘illegal’ independent film companies for patent infringement. Those filmmaking outlaws who sought to elude the strong-arm tactics and industry domination of the MPPC by shooting their movies without licenses simply went as far away from the eyes of the Edison monopoly as possible—they fled to California, the westernmost end of the continental United States, three thousand miles away from Edison and his henchmen. Eventually, as late in 1915 the United States government ordered the disintegration of the MPPC’s monopoly on the motion picture industry. By that time the break-away independents were already unstoppable in their momentum anyway. Edison and his picture company in the east would be left in the dust. Hollywood was fast becoming the capital of the motion picture world.

            In the 1910s the ‘one-reelers’ and ‘two-reelers’ that the east coast studios and Hollywood pioneers were producing by the week were devoured by an American public hungry for the simple pleasures of flickering images.[2] The rudimentary films were shown in nickelodeons, most of them in rundown immigrant sections of cities. Admission to an hour-long programme of up to six shorts cost five or ten cents, depending on the region. Films were downmarket entertainment at first, something akin to peep-shows and freak shows at circuses and fairgrounds. As the decade of the 1910s progressed, running times elongated to up to five reels and more for prestigious pictures. D.W. Griffith’s landmark silent film Birth of a Nation, a breathtaking twelve reels long, was released in February 1915 and was a monumental artistic and financial success. His next film, Intolerance (1916), confirmed Griffith’s stature as the father of modern narrative cinema.

            In ten years the scatter of temporary studios in the shacks and garages of Hollywood expanded into a complex motion picture industry experiencing dynamic growth. The moviemakers knew they were on to a good thing when the profits started rolling in—more money than they could have dreamed of. The movie bug was catching. Following the end of World War I, they came by the thousands, Americans and Europeans alike, in search of a ‘happy ever after’ in the mecca of the movies. More than 25,000 persons were employed in the Hollywood film business by 1920. Bungalows for the movie people appeared everywhere in town, decorated with bougainvillea, geraniums, the smell of orange blossoms. Eucalyptus trees and palm trees were imported and planted up and down the dirt streets. Large hotels were built.[3] The small drowsy country town of the 1910s was a vibrant hedonistic playground by the end of the 1920s.

America became movie-mad. It turned out that the public would go to movie after movie as long as new movies kept coming. Hollywood produced more than 525 films in the single year of 1921. Through the 1920s more than two-dozen fan magazines devoted to the world of Hollywood appeared, such as Photoplay, Modern Screen, and Movieland. Hollywood hype grew exponentially. ‘Head shots’ of the stars proliferated by the millions. Advertising juggernauts and cross-promotions became the norm. Film personalities were sold as products, as brand names. During the twenties over ten thousand movie theatres were built across America. Each city had its own grandiose picture palace, opulent affairs with flowing velvet curtains and marble staircases. (Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened on Hollywood Boulevard in May 1927, and remains today a major tourist attraction—it’s the theatre with the shapes of hands and feet of stars immortalized in cement.) The premieres of the latest ‘A’-list motion pictures would be events in the major cities, with hundreds of spectators amassing at the front of the theatre in the hope of catching a glimpse of the glamorous and mysterious stars on their publicity rounds. The awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were first held in 1929 and, just as today, the Oscars were a great venue for self-publicity. Throughout America ‘the movies’ became a household word.

Into and through the 1920s the movie studios of the golden age of Hollywood began appearing. Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Fox, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia, RKO. The studios were founded by show-business entrepreneurs—managers of vaudevilles and nickelodeons and carnival sideshow attractions, producers of musical revues and theatre plays, hustlers of all manner of hucksterism—who had migrated west to tap into the unlimited potential of the newfangled industry of motion picture production. Movies were cheap to make and consumers were legion. The bottom line was no longer to be just the gross receipts of a single theatre or sideshow. Now in one fell swoop the whole nation was a marketplace all at once. Most of the major studios not only produced the movies distributed to the ticket-buying masses but operated the chains of movie theatres as well. By 1927 the studios were releasing an average of 700 silent features a year.

1920s Hollywood became a boomtown. The famous HOLLYWOODLAND sign was erected atop Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills in 1923.[4] As the saying went, There’s no business like show business. The motion picture camera was a miraculous money-making machine. There were many paid thousands of dollars a week in a time when income tax was negligible. Huge fortunes were being made. Conspicuous consumption became the name of the game. It was the time of the blossoming of enormous estates across the sun-baked landscape. Grand mansions with 100-foot swimming pools began appearing with regularity high on hills throughout the picture colony—in Malibu, Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades. Rolls Royces and Cadillacs rolled down Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue past the men on horseback, heading toward the hang-out spots and nightclubs and the nightly lavish parties at private estates. Hard-luck cases would come into town and recreate themselves into multimillionaires. Hollywood was the gold rush after the gold rush.

For those on the inside, Hollywood was a pleasure capital of the world. The various Hollywood scandals of the 1920s were indications that filmland's air was amorous with stimulations and intoxications of all kinds. (Scandals such as the sex case of comedian Fatty Arbuckle, the morphine overdose of actor Wallace Reid, or the murder of director William Desmond Taylor.) Here were America’s heartthrobs and America’s sweethearts. The human face became the primary focus of films—the tender face of the actor in love, the frightened face of the actress in peril—and the more beautiful the better. Here in Hollywood were ever-swelling crowds of beautiful faces and lovely bodies, a hodgepodge of personalities with persuasive sexual magnetism, with everyone willing to do anything to win a successful career. A ‘get-rich-quick’ hope and an ‘it can happen to you’ mentality prevailed, quickening the pulse, making one’s heart beat fast. Hollywood could even make animals into national celebrities—witness the tons of fan mail for Snowball the white horse and Rin Tin Tin the intrepid alsatian! It was fast segueing into the 1930s era of “anything goes”. An aspirant would do anything to get noticed. Hang-out spots such as the Cocoanut Grove (opened 1921) and the Brown Derby (1926) were essential facets of the industry. Going out on the town was never just about going out. Partygoing became the nighttime career after the daytime career. For an aspirant as for a Hollywood player, it was imperative to be seen. Being in the right place at the right time might mean an inroad to success. Partygoing was not strictly speaking a fringe benefit—it was a requirement of the job. Prurience was a by-product of the appetite for success. For women aspiring to make it in Hollywood, sex was one way to get ahead in the business, an unfortunate circumstance but true nevertheless. The spice of the illicit was an undercurrent omnipresent throughout the picture industry.

The Hollywood of the later 1920s was a 24-hour town. “Movies were seldom written,” recalled Ben Hecht, one of the screenwriters of Scarface (1932), “They were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games.”[5]

And all the while underneath the top tier of filmland Olympians lived the technicians of the industry. 1920s Hollywood became a company town. It might be the playground of the stars, but it was also the home of wig-makers, set designers, caterers, seamstresses, graphic designers, photographers, publicists, secretaries, drivers, special effects men, propmen, make up artists, the girls in the editing rooms, stand-ins, dialogue coaches, dogsbodies. Through certain eyes Hollywood might undulate with lusts and sensuality, while other eyes saw the dreary drudgery of the business working day.

By 1927 the bureaucratic film studios—tethered to the New York men-in-suits on Wall Street—dominated the production system and dominated the one-industry town. The creative movie-making process, which had started as a haphazard improvisatory venture, had evolved into a mechanistic assembly-line process. Hollywood was first and foremost a business, with debauchery a fringe benefit. The serious-minded Motion Picture Production Code, watching over the morality of Hollywood films by censoring whatever it deemed questionable, was in place by 1931.

---

 

[2] A one-reeler was 1000-feet and ten minutes long. ¶ At this time most films were shot at either 16 or 18 frames a second; and might be projected back at 16, 18, or 24 frames a second regardless of the original speed, according to the whims of a projectionist. 24 frames a second became the standard at the time of the advent of synchronous sound films in 1927.

 

[3] The Beverly Hills Hotel: 1912. The Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles: 1921. The Garden of Allah Hotel in West Hollywood: 1927. The Beverly Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles: 1927. The Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard: 1929.

 

[4] The “land” part disappeared in 1949. Hugh Hefner sponsored a fund raiser at the Playboy Mansion to restore the sign to its former glory in 1978.

[5] From his memoir Child of the Century (1954), quoted in Silvester, Christopher, The Penguin Book of Hollywood (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. xi.

This view of Hollywood derives from more than a dozen memoirs of those who lived through the period. The information on Edison comes from four internet sites devoted to him and his inventions. Three further books were consulted: Everson, William K., American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Henderson, Robert B., D.W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971); and Sennett, Robert S. Hollywood Hoopla (New York: Billboard Books, 1998). Wonderful photographs of the early days of Hollywood are found in Brownlow, Kevin and John Kobal, Hollywood: The Pioneers (London: St. James Place, 1979).

[Jeff Bernstein]

THE AMAZING YEAR : 1938

 

Aviator Howard Hughes had been named America’s Greatest Pilot for 1936, and had already proven himself to be America’s Greatest Pilot for 1937. But Hughes, described by the New York Times as “millionaire sportsman pilot” and “a playboy with a purpose”, wouldn’t be satisfied until he attempted the grandest aviation challenge of them all, the speed record for an around-the-world flight.[1]

 

THE ROUND-THE-WORLD FLIGHT OF 1938. After carrying out a series of rigorous flight tests, Hughes was certain that neither his DC-1 nor S-43 were suitable for a round-the-world flight, so he went looking for yet another passenger plane.[2] Thus would begin Hughes’ long and fruitful professional relationship with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Burbank, California. Hughes acquired a Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra twin-engine transport for $60,000 on May 20, 1938.[3]

 

Lockheed’s Model 14 first flew on July 29, 1937. More advanced than the DC-2 yet a little smaller, the Super Electra had a wing span of 65 ft 6 in; an area of 551 sq ft; and, ordinarily, its fuselage could carry up to fourteen passengers. It was the first production-line airplane to use Fowler flaps (which, when extended, increased wing area to allow for a shorter take-off distance; and which, when lowered, increased wing area to increase drag on approach).

 

The plane that Lockheed delivered to Hughes was custom-built to his specifications and given special model number 14-N2. Two extra fuel tanks had been set in the center of the fuselage to make six fuel tanks in total, more than doubling the plane’s fuel capacity to up to 1,844 gallons. The two Curtis-Wright GR-1820-6102 engines, each capable of 1,100 horsepower, had been built especially for Hughes’ plane.

 

The plane would be promptly refitted for a fifteen-thousand mile flight. From late May to early July, Glenn Odekirk oversaw the internal and external modification of the Model 14-N2 at the Hughes Aircraft Company site in Burbank. The operation was carried out amid great secrecy. The plane was changed to the extent that the only real resemblance to a Lockheed Super Electra that remained was the shape of the airframe. Before team leader Odekirk and Hughes’ other engineers at Burbank were through, Hughes’ Super Electra became the most technically-advanced private airplane in the world.

 

Hughes’ souped-up Model 14 had a potential cruising speed of 235 mph, with a range of 4,700 miles nonstop. The engines had been altered to hold 150 gallons of oil. A complex oxygen supply system was installed. The exterior paint was sanded down to cut down glare. Inside the cockpit, the navigation instrumentation installed by Hughes’ engineers was state-of-the-art. There were directional gyros and artificial horizons (built by Sperry); two radio compasses (built by Kolsman and Pioneer), one to home in on radio beams, the other to triangulate position using ship or shore stations; the Fairchild-Maxon Line-of-Position computer (built by Fairchild Aviation); and other navigation equipment (built by Longines). Only recently introduced, the “Sperry Gyro Pilot” was an early automatic pilot, automatically maintaining pitch attitude and precise direction when cruising at between 10,000 and 15,000 feet. The cockpit’s array of state-of-the-art piloting, navigation, and radio equipment was second-to-none. Time magazine called it “the most foolproof private plane that ever flew.” Once again had Hughes realized an airplane of the future. The Super Electra was given a nickname earlier used for Hughes’s thoroughly modified DC-1—the “flying laboratory”.[4]

 

Three years had been spent in meticulous planning for the globe-girdling flight.[5] Various countries of the world would have to be involved, most prominently Canada, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The flight would be as much an organizational feat as an aerial one.

 

Hughes and his meteorological team headed by W. C. Rockefeller had gathered maps, including some from the Navy’s Hydrographic Office, the United States Coast Guard, and National Geographic magazine, and traced out a route for the flight. Hughes would fly the “great circle course”, circumnavigating the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere.[6]  Through Albert I. Lodwick, Hughes’ flight operations manager and main representative for the project, permission was obtained to land in various countries such as France and Soviet Russia. Maps of Soviet territory were supplied by the Soviet Embassy. Permissions to land in other European countries were also arranged in case of emergency. A vast network of radio communications centers was coordinated throughout many of the countries of the northern hemisphere. Blueprints of his customized plane were sent to various foreign landing sites so native mechanics would have advance knowledge in case emergency servicing was needed. Extra fuel supplies were arranged to be available at the airstrips. For two weeks leading up to the flight, Rockefeller and his team of meteorologists collected and analyzed weather data from all points along Hughes’ northern route.[7]

 

Flying around-the-world was a dangerous prospect. Wiley Post had recently crashed and burned in an attempt to outdo his first solo global flight of July 1933. Two years after Post’s untimely death, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the South Pacific during her own attempt in 1937. Furthermore, Edwin Musick, another of the world’s most famous pilots—having flown from San Francisco to Manila, winning him the Harmon trophy in 1935, and then from San Francisco to New Zealand in 1937—was killed when his Pan American flying boat, the Samoan Clipper, exploded in flight over the South Pacific on January 11, 1938. Hence, before the flight, Hughes drafted a new will, once more leaving virtually his entire fortune to his proposed Medical Research Laboratories.[8]

 

In the days leading up to the daring flight the American media went into a frenzy of coverage. Howard Hughes the Aviator was big news. Several thousand spectators massed at Floyd Bennett Airfield in Brooklyn, New York, to witness Hughes fly in from Wichita, Kansas in the early evening of July 4. Opened in 1931, Floyd Bennett Field was New York City’s first municipal airport, and through the 1930s many pioneering flights began or ended here. When the Lockheed-14 landed at 6:48 p.m., the crowd cheered in admiration. Flying across the country from the west coast, Hughes and his crew had tested the plane’s fuel consumption, engine performance, radios, and other details. Hughes emerged from the cockpit in casual wear—“old gray coat, wrinkled trousers and a white shirt, badly frayed from wear, and a battered fedora hat”, according to the New York Times. The plane was stored in Hangar 7. Some fervent aviation fans camped out in sleeping bags and tents on the outskirts of the airfield, not wanting to miss the take-off when it happened.[9]

 

As a goodwill gesture to the people of New York, Hughes had christened the Super Electra the New York World’s Fair 1939. The theme of the international exhibition, which was in the process of construction in Flushing Meadows Park in nearby Queens, was “The World of Tomorrow”.[10]

 

Over the next week, Hughes’ ground crew—Carl Tieddemann, Gus Sidel, and Stanley Bell—went over the plane with an exacting eye. When the two engines were taken down and dismantled for inspection, it was discovered that the high-octane gasoline that Hughes had chosen had worn out the engines’ cylinders during the flight east, so all eighteen cylinders were replaced. A magneto on one of the engines was also replaced.

 

Hughes was staying at a suite at the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue. During his week in Manhattan he met periodically with Katharine Hepburn at her friend’s apartment on East 52nd Street. He also personally tested no less than 15 brands of bread to arrive at the most nutritious; then loaded the plane with ten pounds of ham and cheese sandwiches. Also a supply of canned goods; fifteen gallons of drinking water; three quarts of coffee; several quarts of milk; and frozen milk.[11] He had also sent the same kind of bottled water to all ten refueling stations along his global route so he and his crew wouldn’t have to worry about drinking water.

 

Accompanying him on the flight would be a four man crew, each an expert in his field. Richard N. Stoddart, 38, radio engineer, had already served in that capacity for at least one of Hughes’ experimental DC-1 flights of 1936-37. He took a leave of absence from NBC to join this latest adventure, and had built one of the transmitters for the Super Electra. Edward Lund, 32, engineer mechanic, had worked for Hughes since the outset of the proto-Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. Harry P. McLean Connor, 39, navigator, had served as navigator for some historic aircraft flights, including the first New York to Bermuda nonstop flight in 1930. He was working as a navigator for the Department of Commerce when he got the call from Hughes. Thomas L. Thurlow, 33, navigator, was a career Army man who, just prior to the flight, was stationed at the Army Air Corps’ base of operations at Wright Field, Ohio. He had innovated a special periscopic drift indicator to maintain aircraft position over water, as well as inventing what Hughes described as “the best type of sextant”, both of which were used on the flight. The crew called Hughes “the chief”.[12]

 

While Hughes diligently consulted and analyzed weather charts in the run-up to the flight, the entire plane was meticulously checked, fine-tuned, and readied-to-perfection. Supervising the mechanics, Glenn Odekirk worked for days without sleep. Finally the weather data suggested that the conditions were favorable for a flight. Before making his final decision, however, Hughes had awaited one final set of reports—which turned out to be favorable. To his crew Hughes commented, “Let’s get off before something else happens.”[13]

 

According to Hughes’ orders, fueling of the Super Electra began at 2 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, July 10, 1938. The plane’s fuel tanks were loaded with 1,500 gallons of gasoline, a little under capacity. On the morning of the flight, Hughes was driven with Hepburn in her chauffeur-driven family car to the airfield. “You’ll be hearing from me, kiddo,” he told her as he took his leave.[14]

 

An audience of ten thousand spectators had gathered to witness the event, many of whom had waited expectantly in place for over twenty-four hours, much of the time under a hot summer sun.[15] Grover A. Whalen, President and Commissioner General of the New York World’s Fair, 1939, Incorporated, said a few words in dedication prior to take-off, describing the flight as “a dramatic and glorious undertaking” and a “vivid symbol of the possibilities of international cooperation.”[16] Hughes addressed the respectful crowd during the pre-flight ceremony: “We hope that our flight may prove a contribution to the cause of friendship between nations and that through their outstanding fliers, for whom the common bond of aviation transcends national boundaries, this cause may be furthered.”[17]

 

Hughes, who had evidently planned to be dressed in his customary flight attire—gray double-breasted suit and tie, with lucky fedora on top—chose to forgo the jacket and tie for comfort’s sake. Photographers caught him looking casual and somewhat out of place in white shirt and dark trousers beside his four crewmembers all dressed in suits and ties.[18] He looked tired and his face was shadowed with stubble. The New York Times humorously described the millionaire’s appearance as “the despair of America’s tailors.”[19] Funnier still was this assessment by the Brooklyn Eagle: “He looked like a bum who’d fallen off the turnip truck.”[20] Adding to the idiosyncracy of the event, eighty pounds of ping-pong balls had been loaded into the hold of the Super Electra for ballast.[21]

 

The crew members said goodbye to their loved ones. “I’ll be seeing you,” Lieutenant Thurlow said to his wife, kissing her. Characteristically, no one close to Hughes personally was there to wish him well. Before the plane rolled away Mrs. Connor broke through the police cordon and stuck a wad of chewing gum to the tail. “For good luck,” she said.[22]

 

Hughes, Lund, and Stoddart were be positioned up front, forward of the two interior fuel tanks set in the middle of the fuselage, while navigators Thurlow and Connor sat aft of the tanks, behind the wings.[23] The Super Electra was outfitted with so much gear that its five passengers would have barely enough room to move around. The plane carried oxygen tanks; ethyl to mix with ordinary fuel just in case; a solar still (to make seawater drinkable); a kite (to raise an emergency radio antenna); parachutes, flares, sleeping bags, life rafts; fishing tackle; hunting knife; shotgun; even a snakebite remedy. An air-suction commode had been installed. While the normal gross load of the Lockheed Model 14 was 17,500 pounds, Hughes’ thoroughly modified version would carry an unprecedented 25,000 pounds gross load at take-off. The plane was so heavy that custom tires had to be supplied by Goodrich. Because the plane’s weight at take-off was so high, the Civil Aeronautics Administration had given Hughes’ aircraft an experimental registration, NX18973.[24]

 

The plane was also carrying some 300 letters addressed to various high officials of foreign governments contributing to the New York World’s Fair; Hughes would mail these when he reached Paris. The official letter by Grover Whalen began: “Mr. Howard Hughes, aeronautical adviser to the New York World’s Fair, on his epic-making transatlantic flight affords us an opportunity to send you this message of greetings and good-will . . .” Furthermore, Hughes was also taking with him up to 700 specially-stamped letters to be postmarked for philatelists duing his stops.[25]

 

Sitting in the cockpit, Hughes waved for the cameras and smiled as the two engines came alive. At 7:19:30 p.m. on July 10, the sleek, metal, twin-tailed Super Electra started down the 3,500-foot northwest-to-southeast runway, its silver fuselage glimmering spectacularly in the setting sun. The plane, carrying its 25,000 pounds of weight, lumbered down the runway and only slowly gained speed. “Daddy, good-bye, good luck, daddy!” yelled youngster Tommy, Jr., waving enthusiastically to his dad Lieutenant Thurlow.

 

Take-off would turn out to be a heart-in-the-throat moment. Runway was running out fast but the wheels were not yet lifting off. The heavy Super Electra ran off the end of the concrete runway and bumped along unpaved earth for 100 feet. The crowd of spectators held its collective breath. Amid a great cloud of dust the eight-ton plane lifted into the air, just over a field of red clover, at 7:20 p.m. The crowd broke out in cheers in admiration. The plane climbed slowly and banked northeast. Hughes dipped his wings toward Fenwick before heading out over the Atlantic.

 

Hughes said later that “taking off from Floyd Bennett Field” was, because of the heavy weight of the plane, “the most dangerous part of the flight. We had a wing load of forty-seven pounds to the square foot, the greatest wing load I have ever heard of.” Once up in the air, Hughes had to increase the speed from 125 to 175 miles per hour “to keep from ‘mushing’” (flying tail-heavy).[26]

 

If the flight had begun suspensefully at take-off, it would remain so for much of the first leg. Flying over eastern Canada by 10:00 p.m., Hughes and crew encountered thick mists and fog. Then one of the plane’s antennas broke, and communication was suspended between midnight and 1:36 a.m. while the crew installed a new exterior antenna using an emergency hand reel. At 2:30 a.m., 220 miles off Newfoundland, warm air temperature coupled with the heavy weight of the plane forced Hughes to crank up the engines to maintain altitude. Higher horsepower meant faster fuel consumption. “I hope we get to Paris before we run out of gas, but I am not so sure,” Hughes said into the radio.[27] As the weight of the plane lowered as fuel burned, Hughes throttled back the engine in increments accordingly. He remained in close contact with his flight control center at the New York World’s Fair throughout the tense ocean crossing. Compounding the tension was the temperature inside the plane—90 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, the weather would clear over the Atlantic Ocean and favorable tail winds of up to 35 miles an hour would hasten the plane along.

 

The Super Electra’s average speed between New York and Paris would be 220 miles an hour. Hughes remained at the controls for most of the time, while the other crew members took cat naps in turn. For much of the time the Super Electra flew above the clouds.

 

To reckon the position of the plane while flying over the dark Atlantic, Hughes remained in contact with more than a dozen transatlantic steamships at sea, including the SS Empress of Britain; SS Duchess of Richmond, SS Oslofjord; SS Empress of Australia; SS Batory; Ile de France. Hughes also kept in contact with the Radio Corporation of America’s short-wave station at Riverhead, Long Island; and CBS’s short-wave station at Wayne, New Jersey. Radio contact would be used to help reckon the plane’s position as well as communicate up-to-the-minute weather reports from all points along Hughes’ route. Saturn and Jupiter, prominent in the night sky, aided in celestial navigation, which was correlated to the radio data.[28]

 

By the latter stage of the Atlantic crossing, Hughes had dropped to 375 h.p. per engine, which managed to reduce the fuel intake from 45 gallons of fuel per hour per engine to 32½ gallons per hour per engine. “That’s the whole story,” Hughes said later. “It is the only way that plane could be stretched that far.”[29]

 

Other potential problems were afoot. With Hughes already well into the flight, German officials communicated to Albert Lodwick, Hughes’ flight operations manager stationed at the World’s Fair site, that Germany had changed its mind and was now refusing the Hughes plane to enter its airspace. Lodwick spent tense hours responding to Berlin via telephone and cable, and would finally bring the Nazis round to their original thinking.[30]

 

Sixteen hours and thirty-five minutes after taking off from New York City Hughes and his crew were on the ground at Le Bourget Airport in Paris. The plane had covered 3,641 miles with only 100 gallons of gas left in the tanks. Having followed almost exactly the flight path of Charles A. Lindbergh’s famous Atlantic crossing of 1927, Hughes had cut the time of Lindbergh’s flight by half. (Moreover this first leg of Hughes’ flight was the first successful non-stop New York to Paris flight since Lindbergh’s.[31]) Greeting the fliers at the Paris airport was an assembled crowd of dignitaries including United States Ambassador William C. Bullitt, with whom Hughes shook hands upon debarking from the plane. A crowd of civilian onlookers, including women in evening dress, welcomed Hughes warmly. There was also a gang of newspaper correspondents capturing the details. Hughes, wearing his wrinkled gray suit and lucky brown fedora, was all business, coming across as polite but distant to the assembled crowd. He had originally hoped to leave Paris within two hours, but eight hours in all would be lost at Le Bourget while a repair was made to the tail-wheel of the plane.

 

Hughes later admitted that the damage had occurred upon taking off from Floyd Bennett Field. Edward Lund and a U.S. Army mechanic named Cook who happened to be at the airport went to work on the tail-wheel. Replacement parts were lent by Air France. Engineers of the French military as well as the Royal Dutch Air Line helped to repair and fine-tune the plane, while airport personnel carried out the refueling.

 

The crew was able to eat, take a sponge-bath, and rest at intervals during the maintenance operation. Hughes, however, obsessed as always, remained visibly at work for most of the time, going over weather charts, receiving telegrams, and taking phone calls from New York. He did, however, eventually disappear inside an airplane hangar to eat a quick meal of onion soup and half a steak.

 

When the plane was airworthy once more and brought out of the maintenance hangar, it was protected by a phlanx of black-helmeted Mobile Guards carrying rifles. They surrounded and walked with the plane as it rolled from hangar to the head of the airstrip. It was 12:24 a.m. Greenwich time when the plane finally took off from the floodlit airfield at Paris. As at Floyd Bennett Field, the heavy Super Electra rose only slowly off the airstrip, but Hughes, masterful pilot, was able to gain altitude and recapture the favorable tail winds which would speed him on in the direction of the Soviet Union.[32]

 

Leaving Paris, the Super Electra encountered poor weather so thick that Hughes turned off the lights and used the cockpit instrumentation to blind-fly the way forward. At one point Hughes brought the plane up to 16,000 feet, requiring the use of oxygen. Ice began forming on the wings, which didn’t have de-icers. In a two-way broadcast with NBC, Hughes said, “We have flown blind from the moment we left Le Bourget. . . . We are using our oxygen supply very sparingly as the supply is limited.”[33]

 

Hughes, travelling between Paris and Moscow, showed great panache by flying over Nazi Germany. From the first, Adolf Hitler had been wary of Hughes’ flight, demanding that if Hughes flew over Germany he had to do so at the highest altitude possible. Hitler was paranoid that Hughes might take the occasion to take surveillance photographs of Germany’s military build-up. When the Super Electra entered Nazi airspace, Luftwaffe war planes ascended to surround and escort Hughes’ plane along a route selected for him by the German government.[34] Hughes was constrained to fly at around 12,000 feet for the duration of his progress over Hitler’s domain. Though intimidating, Germany proved to be helpful; for five-and-a-half hours the German Broadcasting System relayed communications to Hughes, including weather reports, via four short-wave stations.[35]

 

The Super Electra would enjoy good weather from Berlin onward. Halfway to Moscow, Richard Stoddart reported in a short-wave broadcast subsequently aired over America’s radio networks, that “We have just come through very heavy rain and icy conditions,” he said, adding that their plan was to fly 200 miles an hour at 13,000 feet.[36]  Hughes was able to take a two-hour cat nap during the second half of the Paris-Moscow leg.

 

The radio equipment on the Super Electra and the international communications network that the Hughes team had organized were the most sophisticated and elaborate ever used on an airplane flight up to that time. Onboard the Super Electra, three two-way radios allowed Hughes to remain in contact with land throughout the duration of the flight. The call letters for the plane’s standard radio was KHBRC. Hughes’ navigators could pinpoint the plane’s location at any time by using the data from special signals broadcast from radio stations around the world at regular intervals. There was a special radio, a never-before-used set only ten inches square built by the Hughes Tool Company; replete with dry-cell batteries offering four hours’ reserve power, it was waterproof in case of emergency. The Federal Communications Commission allowed Hughes to use the call letters KHRH for the special radio, which was powerful enough to be able to communicate with flight headquarters no matter the location of the plane during the flight. Hughes could transmit messages in 17 different wave lengths and maintained 30 radio channels for emergencies alone.[37]

 

Hughes’ flight headquarters were located in a room in the Business Systems Building at the New York World’s Fair site. The Trylon, a 700-foot obelisk and one of the centerpieces of the World’s Fair, doubled as an antenna for the time being. Four radiomen, head-sets affixed to their heads, remained in constant contact with Hughes and his crew, relaying weather information coming in from around the world and analyzed by the on-site five-man meteorlogical team. Heading the team of radiomen was Charles Perrine. W.C. Rockefeller headed the meteorological crew. Two other high-level Hughesmen monitoring the flight every step of the way were Glenn Odekirk and Albert I. Lodwick.

 

The flight operations room served as the hub of a global weather communications network. Stations in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Germany, and Soviet Russia remained on duty to receive and relay communications to-and-from the Hughes plane. Hughes’ continous international weather forecasting center was a milestone in aviation, an early progenitor of the Flight Advisory Weather Service (FAWS) and the Enroute Flight Advisory Service (EFAS), both of the National Weather Service.

 

The Hughes flight was shaping up as the main news story across America, and turned out to be one of the major media events of the year. The three major radio networks—NBC, CBS, and Mutual—were continuously supplied with programs and comments direct from the Super Electra, and aired news of the flight whenever it arrived, as well as at hourly intervals.[38] Newspapers across the country printed up-to-the-moment Hughes news on its front pages for the duration of the flight. The New York Times would print upwards of three dozen stories on Hughes’ round-the-world venture in July.

 

Howard Hughes was a clean-cut, if unlikely, media hero. He was described by the New York Times as “slightly deaf, extremely nervous and an indifferent dresser” and “one of America’s most unprepossessing millionaires”.[39] In appearance the 32 year old was tall, lanky, slightly stooped, shy in manner, reticent in speech; he was a non-smoker and less-than-moderate drinker; remote in comportment. But the life he was leading looked exciting and romantic, fit for an American fairy tale: Hollywood mogul; multimillionaire manufacturer; handsome heartthrob; conqueror of the heavens. The heroism in him was his courage, intelligence, vision, resolve, and independence. Through his aviation achievements in the 1930s he had proven himself to be much more than a “playboy pilot”, a multimillionaire “dabbling” in an aviation hobby—Hughes was a serious contributor to the advancement of world aviation. The New Republic extolled Hughes’ pioneering spirit, which proved that Hughes had “not allowed himself to be spoiled by inherited wealth.”[40] Hughes’ multifacted character contributed to his immense public appeal. Bartlett and Steele recalled the ambiguity of Hughes’ character at the time:

 

Was he movie producer or pilot, aircraft designer or playboy, shrewd capitalist or lucky heir? He defied categorization. Whatever he was, Hughes was leading a highly individualistic life.[41]

 

The NBC, CBS, and Mutual radio networks relayed the news that Hughes landed at the Moscow Central Airport in Moscow at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday (4:15 a.m. New York time).[42] Hughes had flown from Paris to Moscow in 7 hours 51 minutes. Actual flying time between New York and Moscow was 24 hours, 26 minutes.

 

Emerging from the plane, Hughes announced, “Please refuel as quickly as possible because we would like to leave in twenty minutes.”[43] Hughes and crew were greeted by Alexander C. Kirk, the United States Chargé d’Affaires, and other members of the embassy staff; as well as a number of Soviet officials, including the vice commander of the Soviet civil air fleet; and some famous Soviet fliers. The Soviets took photographs and marvelled at the plane. The crowd of spectators, however, was small. While the airplane was being refueled by the airport’s ground crew, Hughes and his crew ate breakfast in an airport building. For their American guests the Soviets had provided such American fare as Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, but Hughes requested to make do with a typical Russian breakfast, which included black bread. During the layover, Hughes made a radio broadcast for the United States and signed his name to a series of postcards to be sent back to America. He also delivered a letter from Constantine A. Oumansky, Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Washington, to Alexander A. Tryoanovsky, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, at the time on leave in his native country. The personal letter contained clippings from American newspapers regarding the recent Major League Baseball All-Star game (July 6, 1938) and the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling heavyweight boxing title rematch (June 22, 1938).

 

The Super Electra remained grounded at Moscow for 2¼ hours. The Soviets supplied Hughes with up-to-the-minute weather charts for upcoming points along the route. The crew accepted a case of mineral water but had to refuse a gift of caviar because, as one member of the crew said, “every pound counts”. When Hughes took his leave of the Russians and turned away toward his plane, the millionaire revealed a patch on the seat of his trousers, which amused the Russians very much.

 

Hughes started up the engines and taxied the Super Electra up and down the different runways for fifteen minutes until he decided on one. The crowd of onlookers shouted variations of “good luck” as the silver plane lifted into the air and flew off in the direction of the rising sun.[44]

 

7 hours and 30 minutes after taking off from Moscow, the Super Electra landed 1,380 miles away on a grass landing strip at the industrial city of Omsk in southwest Siberia. Between Moscow and Omsk Hughes had remained in constant radio contact with the ground as a result of what the New York Times described as the “unprecedented organization” of Soviet radio stations along the route, which broadcast special music at regular intervals to enable the plane to use its radio compass to maintain proper navigation. Hughes was in voice contact with the Soviets as well. A special code for communication between the English-speaking crew and the Russian-speaking communication stations had been established well in advance of the flight, so native languages wouldn’t matter in receiving weather information. An example of the code used: “15-BU-S-20-18-N-E.”—“Ceiling, 150 meters, broken clouds and showers; visibility 20 kilometers; wind velocity 18 kilometers; wind from northeast.”[45]

 

Upon landing at the Omsk Airfield, which Edward Lund described as “looking like a cow pasture”, Hughes asked the Soviet mechanics to immediately began refueling the plane. It turned out that Hughes and crew had to mix some of their own supply of ethyl with low-test gasoline, the only kind available to them at Omsk, in order to make fuel appropriate for their plane’s engines. As at Moscow, the Soviets supplied Hughes with the most recent weather forecasts. After a 4½ hour layover, the Super Electra took once more to the air at 4:37 a.m. Wednesday (6:37 p.m. Tuesday NY time).[46]

 

Hughes and his four man crew were now flying over some of the most forbidding topography on earth—the taiga forests and flat, barren tundras of the subarctic zone. This was the bleak outer reaches of the inhabited earth. Siberia contained well less than one person per square mile. Far below them, vast raindeer herds would have been moving across the thousands of miles of sparsely inhabited space.

 

Hughes flew the 2,177 miles to the next stop at an average cruising speed of 210 mph at 11,600 feet above the plains, forests, and mountains of the Russian landscape. The crew took cat-naps in turn on a sheet of canvas spread across the cabin floor.[47] The heroic fliers in their redoubtable Lockheed Model 14-N2 landed at the city of Yakutsk on the Lena River in eastern Siberia at 12:08 p.m. (5:08 a.m. in New York). The Omsk-Yakutsk leg had taken them 10 hours and 31 minutes.[48] Back in 1933 the lowest temperature for an inhabited area was recorded in this region: -68°C (-90°F).[49] Yakutsk had been a place of exile for Russian revolutionaries for more than two hundred years. In 1938, there were a series of notorious Gulags on the outskirts of the city. Harry Connor described the place as “having an air of unreality about it, like we’d left the Earth and were upon some remote outpost in the universe.”[50] Hughes and crew remained grounded at the edge of the world for three hours. Hughes will later tell newsmen that there had been only one person at Yakutsk who spoke English, a schoolteacher. He had to draw a picture to request airplane fuel.[51]

 

Back at Fenwick in the American Northeast, Katharine Hepburn had been paying close attention to Hughes’ flight every step of the way with a radio and a map.[52] Soon after the flight had begun he had sent her a cable, “See you in three days.” Flying over the Atlantic, he sent her: “All is fine.” Later, “The Irish coast is breathtaking in all its beauty. Will contact you from Paris.” All of the above signed off with “Love, Howard.” Soon after he landed in Yakutsk, she received: “Still safe, HH.”[53]

 

Taking off at 3:01 p.m. and heading eastward to Alaska, ahead of them loomed the huge jagged mountains of the Kolymsk region. Containing peaks over 9,000 feet high, it was an inhospitable granite wasteland laden with permanent glaciers brooding over the remote and severe regions below. Yet, “The prettiest sight we saw was on the takeoff from Yakutsk to Alaska,” Stoddart later recalled, “when we saw the sun and the moon at the same time.”[54]

 

Not long outside Yakutsk, the New York World’s Fair 1939 only just crested the Siberian Mountains. It turned out that the Soviet maps the fliers had been reading had measured the height of the mountain chain in meters instead of feet, a fact which they came aware of with increasing surprise. Hughes had to crank the Super Electra into a sudden heartstopping ascent. If visibility had been low just then, the plane would have slammed into the side of the 9,700-foot granite range and that would have been the premature end of the Howard Hughes story. Edward Lund later called this moment the most thrilling part of his journey. “I could see every rock up close,” Richard Stoddard recalled. They had cleared the crest by some 25 feet. A day later, a low-key Hughes will tell newsmen, “It was a good thing I didn’t try to fly out of Yakutsk at night.”[55]

 

Sigismund Levanevsky, a Russian flyer, had once said that the area around Yakutsk was rife with fog and high winds, making the region “the most dangerous flying country he had ever struck”.[56] Yet, after passing over the mountains, the Super Electra encountered little difficulty as it sped eastward, chasing the rising sun, toward the Bering Strait and the American state of Alaska. The Hughes crew commented that the weather on this fourth leg of the flight was “middling-to-fair”.[57]

 

Hughes was scrupulous in giving thanks to cooperative countries. Over the radio, he thanked Paris when he left Paris. Leaving German airspace, he thanked the Germans. Leaving Russia, he thanked the Soviets.

 

Just before noon on what the Hughes crew identified as Thursday, July 14, the Super Electra passed over the Bering Sea and in the process crossed the International Date Line. Just like that the fliers were pushed back to a little before noon on Wednesday again.[58]

 

12 hours and 17 minutes after taking off from Yakutsk, having covered 2,456 miles, the Super Electra was back on American soil in Fairbanks, Alaska at 2:18 p.m. (8:18 p.m. New York time) on July 13. The crowd of several thousand spectators having waited hours for the privilege cheered Hughes and the crew as they emerged onto the tarmac to direct the refueling operations.[59] The New York Times described Hughes as “in a smiling mood” at the “absence of autograph seekers.”[60] While Hughes would be going in and out of his plane, he stopped more than once to suffer his photograph being taken. Interviewed for American radio broadcast, Stoddart said that the crew was “a little tired, but we were pretty comfortable on the entire trip.” [61] Stoddart went on to explain that the runway at Fairbanks was only 2,800 feet, necessitating the removal of certain of the Super Electra’s load, including the life raft and other survival gear now unnecessary since there was no more ocean to cross. John Keats in Howard Hughes detailed, “A sack of pingpong balls was thrown out of the baggage compartment and broke open on striking the runway. For a moment all work stopped as Fairbanks natives scrambled after little white bouncing souvenirs.”[62] After Hughes and his crew carried out a final inspection of the exterior of the plane, they took off into the darkness, heading southeastward en route to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The layover at Fairbanks had lasted only 1 hour and 18 minutes, the shortest, most efficient stop yet.

 

One of the radio antennas (KHRH) was lost upon taking off from Fairbanks. In what is evidently pure coincidence, fluky communications problems plagued most of Hughes’ record-breaking flights in the 1930s. Hughes suffered either a malfunctioning radio or broken antenna during his first coast-to-coast flight; his Miami to New York flight; his Chicago to Los Angeles flight; and now not once but twice during his round-the-world flight. With KHRH down, Hughes would be unable to send messages directly to his communications center at Flushing Meadows for much of the latter stage of the flight.[63] During this second to last leg, the Fairbanks to Minneapolis route, which was a tremendous 2,483 miles, much of it over the sparsely populated forests of Canada, airfields in both Winnepeg and Edmonton remained on alert and kept a constant watch for Hughes’ plane.[64]

 

The plane encountered lightning and rain while flying over the Canadian Rockies. During this leg the crew’s meal consisted of canned fruit.[65] Every so often Hughes jotted down notes and figures in his flight log, which would eventually come to forty pages.[66]

 

According to the calendar, the Hughes flight would comprise four days. But Hughes and crew saw the sun rise not four but five times during the flight—over the Atlantic ocean; between Paris and Moscow; between Omsk and Yatutsk; between Yakutsk and Fairbanks; and between Fairbanks and Minneapolis. Flying in the direction that the earth was turning, Hughes had outdistanced the planet by a complete lap. According to a bulletin by the National Geographic Society issued on July 14, “Another interesting quirk in regard to time as it affected the Hughes flight is that their five ‘sun days’ each had an average of only about 19 hours.”[67]

 

Minneapolis and a cheering crowd of well-wishers were reached in the early morning of July 14 after a flight leg of 12 hours and 2 minutes, but Hughes didn’t stay on the ground long. Just 34 minutes after arriving, they were off again. Excitement was mounting as the plane streaked through American airspace. The Hughes flight dominated radio news broadcasts nationwide by the hour. Ace reporter Walter Winchell commented, “Hughes-mania is sweeping the country.”[68] “A Great Welcome Waits Hughes Here”, blazoned a headline in that morning’s New York Times, which had been printing a running log of the flight every step of the way. New York’s City Hall was busy organizing a grand celebration and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia was drafting an address of welcome. Many thousands of persons hoping to witness Hughes’ arrival began assembling at Floyd Bennett Field soon after sunrise on the 14th. The police department, preparing for the largest crowd ever to assemble at the airfield, assigned no less than 1,100 policemen to be present there; 35 police motorcycles were arranged to surround Hughes’ plane to protect it from an onrush of spectators. An iron fence was erected to keep the public back from the landing strip, along with rope cordons and wire barricades. Two large stands were set up, one for photographers, the other, under a tent, for journalists. The mediamen were arranging a forest of microphones at the airfield. More than 350 radio stations across America were expected to receive a live feed of Hughes’ return. It was, the Times reported, “the most elaborate and extensive radio set-up ever assembled to broadcast the welcome given an arriving personage.” [69] In fact, by this time the Hughes flight was the most prominent international news story in the media worldwide.[70]

 

Twenty-five thousand spectators were waiting under an overcast sky at Floyd Bennett Airfield in Brooklyn on the afternoon of July 14. Assembled notables included Mayor La Guardia and Major General Oscar W. Westover, Chief of the Army Air Corps. Odekirk, Lodwick, Rockefeller, Perrine, and their assistants at the flight operations center were ready to celebrate.

 

From out of the clouds in the west the Hughes plane swooped into visibility around 2:30 p.m. The tremendous crowd went wild with adulation. People clapped, cheered, shouted, honked automobile horns. Caught up in the excitement, policemen blew their traffic whistles and fire trucks set their sirens wailing. Hughes circled the airfield once, surveying the massive assembly awaiting him, then came in for a landing.

 

The wheels of the Super Electra touched down on the tarmac at 2:37 p.m. While Hughes applied the brakes as the plane shot down the runway, four automobiles gave chase, each with a cameraman and movie camera mounted atop the roof. A new level of excitement overcame the assembled crowd which would not be held in check. Caught up in the thrill of it all, the police cordon decided to remove the barricades and clear a path to the airstrip so the spectators could get closer to the Hughes plane, which looked as good as new. Hughes reduced the speed of the Super Electra to a slow roll and was forced to taxi the plane extremely carefully through the enthusiastic crush of bodies, heading slowly, foot by foot, toward the administration building.

 

The Lockheed Super Electra had set the new world speed record for an around-the-world flight: 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes, and 10 seconds.[71] Hughes’ plane, the New York World’s Fair 1939, had averaged 206 miles an hour over the 14,824 mile flight. Howard Hughes, at the age of 32, had won the greatest of all contemporary aviation records!

 

When Hughes finally emerged from the Super Electra, the crowd’s ardor reached a new intensity and became, in the words of the New York Times, “a mob. . . . Clothes were torn and feet were stepped on . . . all in good-natured enthusiasm.” The array of photographers’ flash bulbs looked like a mini-lightning storm. The multitude of well-wishers were overcome with happy hysteria and swarmed enthusiastically around the plane. Amid the crowd, Miss Elinor Hoaglund, 19 years old, who was engaged to crewmember Edward Lund, collapsed from the excitement.[72]

 

While his crewmen were happily reunited with their thrilled families, no one close to Hughes personally was there to greet him upon arrival. Microphones were shoved in his face. “All I can say,” Hughes announced to the newsmen jostling around him, “is that this crowd has frightened me more than anything in the last three days.”[73]

 

Not only were hundreds of American stations across the country broadcasting live news of Hughes’ arrival, but the Columbia Broadcasting Company transmitted programming to Europe, while the National Broadcasting Company relayed the broadcast to South America.[74]

 

Hughes, unshaven in his soiled and wrinkled gray suit, proceeded slowly through the thick press of spectators—amid the cacophony someone screeched, “Grab his hat off!”—and made his way to a greeter’s stand where he was welcomed by Mayor La Guardia and Grover A. Whalen, the World’s Fair President. “Seven million New Yorkers offer their congratulations for the greatest record established in the history of aviation,” said Mayor La Guardia. “Welcome home!”[75] But Hughes was not much in a party mood. He was exhausted. Between July 8 and July 14 he had had only “three or four hours of sleep” in total, he later told newsmen. He was meant to proceed to the press tent, but, amid what the Times described as “a bedlam of noise and confusion”, decided to jump into a waiting motorcar and flee the scene with the Mayor and Grover Whalen.[76] Hughes spent only a little more than twenty minutes with the welcoming crowd.

 

A police motorcade cleared the way along Flatbush Avenue and across the Manhattan bridge as Hughes was driven to Whalen’s home at 48 Washington Mews. There, while he sat relaxed in an overstuffed chair, he willingly gave the press the interview that he’d dodged at the airport. Hughes praised the achievement of Wiley Post’s solo round-the-world jaunt of 1933. “Imagine flying that route himself!” Hughes said. “It was beyond comprehension.” During the hour-long interview, Hughes extolled his four man crew, describing them as “the ablest assistants a man could have.”[77]

 

*

 

While Hughes, his crewmembers and their wives, World’s Fair officials, and journalists celebrated the aviation triumph inside Grover Whalen’s home, a crowd of several hundred spectators and well-wishers gathered outside the building. Two of the wives had remembered to bring fresh shirts for their husbands; a Chinese house servant rushed away to return with new clothes for Hughes (including a white shirt, size 15½). The fliers washed up then shared a Scotch-and-soda together. When it was time for Whalen’s guests to depart via the front door, Hughes surreptitiously left the building via a back exit and took a taxi to the distinguished Drake Hotel on Park Avenue, where he managed to make an inconspicuous entrance.

 

In the evening, he hailed a cab and was driven to Katharine Hepburn’s town house at nearby Turtle Bay (an enclave of brownstone townhouses) where he discovered a crowd of mediamen and fans had gathered. Instead of stopping, he decided to return to the Drake, where he phoned her then went to bed.[78]

 

*

 

The next day New Yorkers has an excuse to enjoy a magnitudinous party, the city’s largest celebration of the 1930s. Schools suspended their classes and businesses locked their doors because no one wanted to miss the tickertape parade celebrating Aviator Howard Hughes, American hero.

 

The crowd along the parade route began building at 10:00 a.m. under a hot July sun. Up and down the sidewalks the good-natured throng chanted, “We want Hughes! We want Hughes!” Many had brought hand-drawn signs, variations on “Welcome home!” American flags fluttered up and down the bustling streets. 2,500 policemen kept order along the route.

 

Typically, Howard Hughes would adhere to his own schedule. After picking up Hughes’ crewmembers at Hampshire House at Central Park South at 12:15 p.m., the whole motorcade—including Mayor La Guardia, police motorcyles—moved reluctantly onward to Columbus Circle, where it stood idling, waiting for Howard Hughes to arrive for his own parade. Everyone else was on schedule, but why hadn’t Hughes arrived at Hampshire House? Many hundreds of thousands of people along the parade route were waiting for him. Where was he? Though he had risen at nine that morning in his suite at the Drake Hotel, which was more than enough time for Hughes to wash, shave, and have a new suit brought to him, he would still be late for his own parade. Why? Because he couldn’t find a comb. At noon, the time the parade had been originally scheduled to start, a hotel employee had to rush out to find a fine-toothed comb. Finally Hughes appeared downstairs in the lobby of the Drake Hotel where he was greeted by a gang of reporters and photographers. A probably flustered Al Lodwick appeared on the scene and forthwith whisked Hughes first to Hampshire House, where they picked up Grover Whalen, and then to Columbus Circle, where the three of them took their place in the official car.[79]

 

Just after 12:30 p.m., the parade finally started, moving slowly up lower Broadway toward City Hall. At first “nervous and ill at ease,” according to the New York Times, the “shy and embarrassed” Hughes kept biting his lips, and he kept fussing with his lucky fedora (described as a “battered felt hat”), removing it then returning it to his head more than a dozen times.[80] The noisy spectacle Hughes was greeted by had reduced him to dumbstruck awe. This party put the Hell’s Angels Hollywood premiere in the shade.

 

Between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people had crowded onto Broadway to shout approval of Hughes and his associates as they rolled by. Many more hundreds of thousands of people cheered from windows overlooking the procession and tossed paper into the air. The amount of paper fluttering down between the skyscrapers—ticker tape, torn telephone books, strips of newspaper, telegram blanks—was incredible, like a snow storm in July.

 

Hughes sat at the head of the procession in an open-top car, between two less-well-known personages, Albert Lodwick and Grover Whalen. Hughes was dressed in a dark double-breasted suit which hung loose on his gangly frame; his hair was parted down the middle and slicked back. He looked distinctly boyish, no older than a teenager, as he took in the flattering sight overwhelming him. Sometimes he looked high up and waved, sometimes he looked back over his shoulder.

 

There were nine cars of honored personages in all; Hughes, no credit-hog, had ensured that his crewmembers and their wives, as well as Odekirk and all seventeen of the flight technical staff, remained prominent during the celebration. Following up the parade were seven cars of reporters and photographers.

 

Hughes “gradually relaxed”, and was finally “smiling broadly” as the procession proceeded up Broadway.[81] Some overly enthusiastic well-wishers eluded police and ran up to Hughes’ car and got the ordinarily fastidious Hughes to shake hands with them.[82] At City Hall, the Fire Department Band erupted in music when the procession was sighted. The immense crowd of spectators roared: “Ya-a-ay, Hughes!” “Howard! Howard!”[83]

 

On the steps of City Hall the Hughes party was welcomed by Mayor La Guardia and two former mayors of the city, James J. Walker and John Patrick O’Brien. Inside City Hall, Mayor LaGuardia presented a key to the city to Hughes and his crew. Jesse Holman Jones, chairman of the Federal government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, introduced Hughes, who, polite and low-key, stepped up to an array of a half-dozen microphones feeding a live broadcast to radio stations across the country.[84] In what the Times described as a “quiet, diffident voice,” Hughes read from a manuscript he had dashed off that morning in his suite at the Drake Hotel. (Time magazine described him as “fumbling with some sheets of paper.”[85]) It was an unpretentious, self-effacing speech, in which Hughes was more than willing to share the acclaim:

 

The most advanced and newest equipment developed by navigators and radio engineers furnished me with such accurate information as to the position of the plane at all times that I estimate for the total trip we traveled only twenty miles more than a direct course between the various points at which we stopped.

 

This point was one of the most remarkable aspects of the record-breaking flight. Hughes went on to cite the Hughes Aircraft Company, but modestly, without naming it as such:

 

The airplane was fast because it was the product of over 200,000 engineering hours. Young men trained mostly at the California Institute of Technology, working in a factory in California, put in 200,000 hours of concentrated thought to develop that machine.

 

Hughes said that he had in no way strained the Super Electra’s engines during the flight, which therefore demonstrated that long-range air passenger travel was now a thing of the present, not the future. This was an important point not only to the world of aviation but to Hughes personally—one year later he is going to buy in to TWA.

 

In public Hughes was never one to blow his own horn, which endeared him to the American people:

 

If credit is due anyone, it is due to the men who designed and perfected to its present remarkable state of efficiency the modern American flying machine and equipment. If we made a fast flight, it is because so many young men in this country went to engineering schools, worked hard at drafting tables and designed a fast airplane and navigation and radio equipment which would keep this plane upon its course. All we did was operate the equipment and plane according to the instruction book accompanying the article.

 

Yet Hughes, control-freak, did give himself a little pat on the back:

 

There is one thing about the flight which pleases me more than the actual time which elapsed—that is the fact that we made no unscheduled stops. We arrived at every destination within a few minutes of the time which we set as our arrival time.

 

Turning his thoughts to the bigger picture, Hughes described the international network of radio communications now available to pilots of all nationalities, and hoped that this cooperation between nations might contribute to an embracing of a universal brotherhood of mankind and world peace. However, Hughes, ardent American, made it clear where his best sympathies lay:

 

If this flight may have demonstrated to Europe the fact that American engineers and American workmen can build just as fine and just as efficient an airplane and its equipment as any other country in the world, then I certainly will feel it has been well worth while.

 

If Hughes had been dynamic in deed, his reserved speechifying left a little to be desired, as he well understood:

 

I suppose I haven’t put this very well. I get a little nervous here and don’t say just what I want to. But I hope you understand.[86]

 

Everybody understood. “He had the face of a poet and the shyness of a schoolboy,” described the New York Times.”[87]

 

Then the tickertape procession resumed. Fire stations along the route sounded their engines’ sirens in tribute. Hughes was brought up Fifth Avenue, where the crowds proved to be just as strong as earlier, numbering 500,000 people at least, reducing Fifth Avenue to half its width. The turn-out surprised the police department, which had assigned only 500 policemen to the area.

 

In all, the police department estimated that more than 2 million people cheered Hughes during his tickertape parade. The party outstripped the histrionic celebrations upon the return of Charles Lindbergh from his groundbreaking solo New York to Paris flight of May 1927. Deputy Commissioner William Powell subsequently announced that the Department of Sanitation had gathered only 1,600 tons in the wake of Lindbergh’s parade, while for the Hughes celebration 1,800 tons of paper had rained down from the heights to pile up in the streets.[88] Howard Hughes’ tickertape parade remained in the record books as New York’s biggest party until the return of General Douglas MacArthur from Korea on April 20, 1951.[89]

 

*

 

After the parade, Hughes and his crew went to a private luncheon, hosted by Grover Whalen, at the Metropolitan Club at Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street. Among the official guests at the luncheon were Mayor La Guardia, former Mayors Walker and O’Brien, and the Borough Presidents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. A crowd of 3,000 spectators stood outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fliers. The public couldn’t get enough of Howard Hughes.[90]

 

Lunch ended at 4:37 p.m., according to the New York Times, but Hughes apparently left in secret a short time earlier. According to William Randolph Hearst, Jr. in 1972, Hughes gave the slip to his associates and met with Hearst at the old N.Y. Yacht Club at the East River at 2:30 p.m. Hearst and Hughes went flying over Long Island Sound in Hearst’s small Aeronca plane. “At his insistence,” Hearst recalled, “I did the flying.”[91]

 

Hughes left Al Lodwick’s apartment at 65 East Fifty-fifth Street at 9:10 p.m.; his car, accompanied by a pair of police motorcycles, carried out cunning maneuvers and eluded pursuing reporters.[92] Hughes disappeared into the night to a rendezvous with Katharine Hepburn.[93]

 

---

[1] “Hughes, Riding Gale, Sets Record Of 7 ½ Hours in Flight From Coast”, p. 1; “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3; “Hughes Flies Here For Hop To Paris”, New York Times, July 5, 1938, p. 34.

[2] Hughes sold the DC-1 to Viscount Forbes, the Earl of Grandard, in June 1938. In December 1940, the DC-1, now in service for a South American airline, crashed at Malaga and was reduced to scrap. See Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 229-30.

[3] Cost is in Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p.  34. ¶ Though all sources agree that the plane Hughes flew around the world was the Lockheed Model 14, five sources mistake the name of the plane, which was the Super Electra, referring to it as the Lodestar, which was the Lockheed Model 18 version of the plane. Sources which get it right: Hack, Hughes, p. 111; Real, Asylum, p. 22; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 138; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 34. Sources which got it wrong: Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 97; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 137; Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 36; [HH:US], p. 117; and Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 63. [HH:HLM], p. 90 just says “Lockheed”; Bell, Howard Hughes, p. 40, says “Lockheed 14 monoplane”; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 77 says “L-14 Lockheed”; Boyne, “The Most Elusive Hughes”, p. 48, says “Lockheed Model 14”; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 385, says “Lockheed 14”; “Another for the Book”, Time, August 29, 1938, says “Lockheed 14-11”. Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft, p. 186, reports that the Lockheed Model 18 Lodestar wasn’t flown for the first time until September 21, 1939. Contemporary accounts of the flight in the New York Times identify the plane as “Lockheed-14” or “Lockheed Electra plane”.

[4] “Hughes Asks Flight License”, New York Times, August 14, 1936, p. 6; “Hughes Lands In Moscow; Flew To Paris In 16½ Hours”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 1; “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 26; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 148; Hack, Hughes, p. 102; Marrett, Howard Hughes: Aviator, p. 27.

[5] Barton, Flying Boat, p. 39; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 3; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, Washington Post, July 15, 1938, p. 7.

[6] For Great Circle flying chart, see “Hughes Roars Over Siberia After Moscow-Omsk Hop; Day Ahead Of Post’s Time”, New York Times, July 13, 1938, p. 1.

[7] “Hughes In Wichita On A Flight Here”, p. 15; Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 1; “Route Of Hughes Is Disclosed Here”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 3; “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15; “Staff of Nine Checking on Ocean Weather, Relaying Latest Reports to Hughes Plane” New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 3; “Hughes Explains Siberian Map Trouble”, New York Times, July 26, 1938, p. 3; Cramer, “Over in Four Days”, p. 5; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 77.

[8] The 1938 last will and testament will be missing at the time of Hughes’ death, but a codicil in Hughes’ handwriting from 1939 alluding to this document will be discovered among his papers. See Finstad, Heir, p. 18; [HH:HLM], p. 90-1; Hack, Hughes, p. 110-1; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 410.

[9] “Hughes In Wichita On A Flight Here”, p. 15; “Hughes Flies Here For Hop To Paris”, New York Times, July 5, 1938, p. 34; “Hughes ‘Loafs In’ From Coast; May Try World Flight”, Washington Post, July 5, 1938, p. X1; “Hughes Ready For Flight To Paris With Crew of 4,” p. 1; Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 1; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 144; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 409; 411.

[10] The New York’s World Fair opened April 30, 1939 and closed October 27, 1940. Situated in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, the international exhibition, with more than thirty nations participating, covered an area 1½ miles wide by 3¼ miles long and occupied 1,216 acres. Many of America’s largest companies sponsored pavilions exhibiting the latest design technology. Many of the dozens of buildings on site were extraordinary architectural visions. Centerpieces of the Fair included the Trylon, a 700-foot obelisk; the Perisphere, a 200-foot hollow ball with exhibits inside; and the remarkable Futurama, an enormous model diorama of a city of 1960. Raymond Loewy designed a “taxicab of the future”, a vehicle powered by electricity, which was exhibited at the Chrysler pavilion as a part of Loewy’s History of Transport exhibit. The Fair included a device which measured the thickness of a human hair; a scaled-down vision of superhighways; also a new invention called television.

[11] “Hughes Ready For Flight To Paris With Crew of 4,” p. 28; Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 1; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 26; Fadiman, “Can the Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 144; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 137; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 142-3; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 44; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 81; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 689.

[12] “Hughes In Wichita On A Flight Here”, New York Times, July 4, 1938, p. 15; “One New Yorker On Hughes Flight”, New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 3; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 7; Cramer, “Over in Four Days”, p. B4; “Bound ’Round”, Time, July 18, 1938; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 408.

[13] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 144.

[14] “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, p. 6; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 81; [HH:US], p. 118; Hack, Hughes, p. 112; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 409-11.

[15] “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, Washington Post, July 11, 1938, p. 6.

[16] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, p. 6; also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 144; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 412.

[17] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 144; [HH:HLM], p. 92.

[18] “Staff of Nine Checking on Ocean Weather, Relaying Latest Reports to Hughes Plane” New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 3; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3.

[19] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 1; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 145.

[20] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 413.

[21] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 137; Cramer, “Over in Four Days”, p. B4; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 63; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 408.

[22] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Bound ’Round”, Time, July 18, 1938; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 145; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 412-3.

[23] “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft since 1913, p. 138. 

[24] “Hughes In Wichita On A Flight Here”, New York Times, July 4, 1938, p. 15; “Hughes Prepares For Ocean Flight”, New York Times, July 6, 1938, p. 25; “Hughes Ready For Flight To Paris With Crew of 4,” New York Times, July 10, 1938, p. 1; Hailey, Foster, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 1; “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, New York Times, July 13, 1938, p. 15; Cramer, Robert S., “Over in Four Days, Hughes’ Flight Was Result of Three Years’ Strady Planning”, Washington Post, July 17, 1938, p. B4; “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 99; Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft since 1913, p. 135-9; Fadiman, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 245; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 137; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 142; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 39; 44; [HH:US], p. 117; Hack, Hughes, p. 111; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 79; 81; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p.  391; Rae, Climb to Greatness, p. 97.

[25] “Hughes Ready For Flight To Paris With Crew of 4,” p. 28; Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, Washington Post, July 11, 1938, p. 6; “Invitations To Fair Carried On Plane”, New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 2; “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15.

[26] “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p 1; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 1; 7; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 83; Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, p. 6; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 146; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 64; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; [HH:HLM], p. 93.

[27] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 1; “Log of Hughes’ Flight to Paris”, Washington Post, July 11, 1938, p. 6; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 147; Hack, Hughes, p. 114; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 414.

[28] “Hughes Flies Here For Hop To Paris”, New York Times, July 5, 1938, p. 34; “Hughes Prepares For Ocean Flight”, New York Times, July 6, 1938, p. 25; “Hughes Ready For Flight To Paris With Crew of 4,” New York Times, July 10, 1938, p. 1;  Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Staff of Nine Checking on Ocean Weather, Relaying Latest Reports to Hughes Plane” New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 3; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 7; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 148; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; McDonald, Hercules, p. 20.

[29] “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 1.

[30] “Nazis Almost Halted Hughes On 1938 World Speed Flight”, Washington Post, February 28, 1942, p. 8.

[31] “Flight Is Second Non-Stop From New York to Paris”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 2.

[32] “Paris Radios Warning of Wheel Broken in Take-Off”, Washington Post, July 12, 1938, p. 6; “Hughes Lands In Moscow; Flew To Paris In 16½ Hours”, p. 1; “Hughes Roars Over Siberia After Moscow-Omsk Hop; Day Ahead Of Post’s Time”, p. 1; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 7; Folliard, Edward T., “A Tired Young Man Comes Home”, Washington Post, July 15, 1938, p. 1; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 148-9; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 415-6.

[33] “Tells Of Using Oxygen”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 3; “Paris Radios Warning of Wheel Broken in Take-Off”, p. 1; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 7.

[34] “Reich’s Orders Slow Flight To Moscow”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 3; [HH:US], p. 121; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 84; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 323; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 416.

[35] “Hughes Aided By Germans”, New York Times, July 13, 1938, p. 15.

[36] “Hughes Lands In Moscow; Flew To Paris In 16½ Hours”, p. 1; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3.

[37] “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, p. 6; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 63; McDonald, Hercules, p. 20.

[38] Hailey, “Hughes Over Ocean On Flight To Paris; Fuel Is Going Fast”, p. 3; “Hughes Lands In Moscow; Flew To Paris In 16½ Hours”, p. 1; “CQ-KHBRC”, Time, July 25, 1938.

[39] “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3; also Daniell, F. Raymond, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 1.

[40] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 157; [HH:HLM], p. 96; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 418.

[41] [HH:HLM], p. 95-6.

[42] Name of airport in “Moscow Ready For Fliers”, New York Times, July 12, 1938, p. 2; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 149. Referred to as the Civil Air Fleet Aerodrome in Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 84.

[43] “Hughes Roars Over Siberia After Moscow-Omsk Hop; Day Ahead Of Post’s Time”, p. 15; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 150.

[44] “Hughes Lands In Moscow; Flew To Paris In 16½ Hours”, p. 1; “Hughes Roars Over Siberia After Moscow-Omsk Hop; Day Ahead Of Post’s Time”, p. 1; “Expect to Reach Yakutsk 11 Hours After Take-Off From Omsk”, Washington Post, July 13, 1938, p. 5; “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15;  “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 151; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 37; [HH:HLM], p. 95; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 84; Hack, Hughes, p. 115; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 417.

[45] “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15; Cramer, “Over in Four Days”, p. 5.

[46] “Hughes Roars Over Siberia After Moscow-Omsk Hop; Day Ahead Of Post’s Time”, p. 1; “Russian Aid Given Gladly To Hughes”, p. 15; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 151; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 418. ¶ Russia has eleven time zones. Omsk is three hours ahead of Moscow Time.

[47] “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6.

[48] “Howard Hughes’ World Flight Log”, Washington Post, July 14, 1938, p. 7. Yakutsk is three hours ahead of Omsk time.

[49] However, in the summer months temperatures at Yakutsk can crest +40 C (+112 F). Since 1991 Yakutsk has been the capital of the autonomous Russian Republic of Sakha (Yakutia in English).

[50] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 419.

[51] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, New York Times, July 14, 1938, p. 1; “Howard Hughes’ World Flight Log”, p. 7; Hack, Hughes, p. 115.

[52] “Hughes Plane Speeding Out Over Atlantic On Paris Hop”, p. 6; Leaming, Katharine Hepburn, p. 356; Hack, Hughes, p. 112-7; [HH:HLM], p. 98; 119-20; 123; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 81; 87; [HH:US], p. 123; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 314; 321; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 218; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 417.

[53] [HH:US], p. 120; 122; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 322; 324; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 414-5; 419.

[54] “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3.

[55] “Hughes Explains Siberian Map Trouble”, New York Times, July 26, 1938, p. 3; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 7; Cramer, “Over in Four Days”, p. B4; “Fliers Speeding Over Canada on Last Lap of Dash”, Washington Post, July 14, 1938, p. 7; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 420.

[56] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 10; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 85.

[57] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 1.

[58] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 10;  “Fliers Speeding Over Canada on Last Lap of Dash”, p. 7; “Sun Rose Five Times In 4 Days To Hughes”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 4.

[59] “Fliers Speeding Over Canada on Last Lap of Dash”, p. 1.

[60] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 1.

[61] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 1.

[62] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 111; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 85.

[63] “Flight’s Progress Recorded By Radio”, p. 4.

[64] “Hughes Flies Over Canada After Brief Fairbanks Stop; Due Back Today, Inside 4 Days”, p. 10.

[65] “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6.

[66] “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3.

[67] “Sun Rose Five Times In 4 Days To Hughes”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 4; “One Extra Sunrise Seen by Hughes in Race Around Earth”, Washington Post, July 15, 1938, p. 6.

[68] Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 421.

[69] “A Great Welcome Waits Hughes Here”, New York Times, July 14, 1938, p. 10; “Flight’s Progress Recorded By Radio”, p. 4; “Throng Breaks Down Barriers In Its Wild Acclaim to Airmen”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 1; “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6.

[70] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 152.

[71] Daniell, F. Raymond, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 1. ¶ At 3 days 19 hours 17 minutes, the original flight time announced to the press, the tires of the Super Electra had touched down on the landing strip at Floyd Bennett Field. At 3 days, 19 hours 8 minutes 10 seconds, the plane had flown over the airfield. This latter time became the official time. See “World Flight”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 15; “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6; Hack, Hughes, p. 117.

[72] “Throng Breaks Down Barriers In Its Wild Acclaim to Airmen”, p. 1; “Hughes, His Crew and His Plane Unscathed, End 14,824-mile Flight in Fine Condition”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 4; “Fliers Speeding Over Canada on Last Lap of Dash”, p. 7; “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 421-2.

[73] “Flight’s Progress Recorded By Radio”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 4; “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; Hack, Hughes, p. 109; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 86; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 423.

[74] “Flight’s Progress Recorded By Radio”, p. 4.

[75] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 153;“Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6.

[76] “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 1.

[77] “Hughes Describes Tense Time in Hop”, p. 3; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 154; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 423.

[78] “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 MPH for 14,824 Miles”, p. 6; “Millionaire Aviator Tells of Fighting to Lift Heavy Fuel Load”, p. 1; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 154; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 86; [HH:US], p. 123; Hack, Hughes, p. 118; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 325; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 423.

[79] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 1; “Hughes Delays Shave Till Last Minute; He Keeps Parade and Onlookers Waiting”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 3.

[80] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 3; [HH:HLM], p. 98.

[81] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 3; [HH:HLM], p. 98; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 86; Hack, Hughes, p. 118.

[82] Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 155.

[83] “Streets Jammed For Fliers’ Parade”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 3.

[84] “Flight’s Progress Recorded By Radio”, New York Times, July 15, 1938, p. 4 (includes great photograph of the procession and the throng along lower Broadway). Other photos are in [HH:HLM], p. 101.

[85] “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938.

[86] “Text of Hughes Address”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 3; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 156; Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 65-6; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 44.

[87] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 1; “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70; Barton, Flying Boat, p. 44; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 425.

[88] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 1; “Streets Jammed For Fliers’ Parade”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 3; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 120; [HH:HLM], p. 98; Phelan, James R. and Lewis Chester, The Money: The Battle for Howard Hughes’ Billions (London: Orion Business Books, 1998), p. 23; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 424.

[89] Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 26.

[90] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 3; “Hughes And Aides Guests At Luncheon”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 2.

[91] Hearst Jr., “Another Insight Into Howard Hughes”, p. 1.

[92] Daniell, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, p. 3.

[93] [HH:US], p. 124; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 87; Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 326; Porter, Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, p. 425.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Coming Soon  :  the Concept of the Recluse

 

Why Hughes’ retreat into the shadows? Is it explainable? Might we say that first and foremost it is the result of following the slippery slope of various lifelong character traits? Also the outcome of physical damage to his brain? Therefore the fact of his downward slide is not unfathomable to our investigative reason or obstructive to our urge to understand? Might we follow the trace of certain of these lifelong traits to where they link with his eventual madness?

 

It is obvious that Howard Hughes’ madness did not ‘come out of nowhere’ like a sudden reversal of fortune. (Like a safe falling out of the sky onto his head, or a crack suddenly opening in the earth and swallowing him up.) It is not saying nearly enough to say that Hughes’ mental deterioration was down to his narcotics dependency maintained by his aides, because signs of Hughes’ incipient madness predate by a half-dozen years or more his introduction to morphine and codeine (1946). Hughes’ eventual drug hell exacerbated the ill-effects of a pre-established state of mind. The mind-dulling drugs also divorced Hughes from his will to overmaster his downturn by reaching out to others for help, to his wife Jean Peters for example. The ongoing narcotics addiction would maintain Hughes in his malaise and therefore we must recognize it as a primary factor in his eventual powerlessness to think clearly or act. Yet his drug addiction will not be the cause of the madness but a facilitator of it.

 

Hughes’ madness would manifest itself in various ways at different times in his life. He might become drunk with an insatiable mania for acquiring things regardless of consequences. He might experience a blurring of his powers of judgment, thereby losing his capacity to assess the dangers of an act or situation. He might experience ‘mental intoxication’ in which he looked to be sleepwalking through his waking hours. He might suffer sudden blackouts. He might be overcome with a desire to engineer a psychodrama and play out a histrionic scene with one of his lovers. At its worse, his rational thought processes would break down and he would be unable to follow through with such simple tasks as dressing himself in clothing. At another time he might think himself entirely rational and ‘normal’ while carrying out irrational and abnormal behavior. During certain periods of instability he might be rationally aware of his irrational condition yet remain unable to assume control of his dual mind. Finally, by the ‘point of no return’ of 1958-59, his madness had arrived at one enduring ‘all-prevailing’ theme which would remain in force for the next two decades: his retreat from the eyes of the (germ-ridden) world into his own shadow-realm. With this retreat his madness attained a ‘fruition’ and a ‘stability’; this form of it came to exist as if with the weight of a concrete building : enduring, unmovable.

 

Here I have arrived at the unspoken question that I posed at the beginning of this theme. Why this particular madness? This stasis. Might we be able to trace the genealogy of this particular form of his madness?

 

Must we return to his mother? In his desire for stasis he would reach out for and regress back to the attunement of his early years when the world was new and everything was prepared for him and everything was ahead of him. Hughes the child was his own center of attention and he was his mother’s center of attention too. Might we say that he was a dual mind even then? The older Hughes could maintain a simulacrum of the time of the enclosed domestic life of his youth when his all-embracing mother had fulfilled all of his needs, in the organization of his aides who would come and go by his bedside and fulfil his every request without him lifting a finger. Propped up in his bed he would utter pronouncements which were taken down on paper then transmitted out into the world where his words altered the world. In his shadowy lair he maintained himself as the center of attention. He regressed back to the comfort he had felt when shadowed by his mother in their home. Once more he would lay in bed and be the center of the universe, and the center of everyone else’s universe too.

 

When Howard Hughes came of age, he determined that no one would ever tell Howard Hughes what to do. He was infamous for refraining from closing the deal, protracting negotiations over many months and repeatedly changing the playing field because he liked the game and liked writing the rules of the game. It might take Howard Hughes years to arrive at a decision that one of his companies would have been better off receiving years earlier, but he was going to wait until he arrived at the decision himself and no one could move him from his attitude and standpoint. If Howard Hughes was going to become a recluse, no one was going to meddle with his latest obsession. He was going to go mad this way and not another way.

 

The complex of factors contributing to the condition of his later years will include the following: He had been a lonely boy used to the solitude of his own thoughts and designs. Coming to maturity he became a steadfast firm-thinking individual who ‘stood alone’ and ‘flew solo’ and took only his own advice. When he came of age he began to distrust others around him—part of it was the paranoia that “everyone is only out to get something from me” that the fabulously wealthy experience; this suspicion was perhaps part of Hughes’ belligerent attitude toward his family relatives upon the death of his father and the passing of seventy-five percent of the Hughes Tool Company into the eighteen year old’s hands; such hard words were said between the family members that Hughes turned his back on his relatives and never looked back, now entirely on his own and alone in the world.[1] Later on, he would be ‘forced’ to remain inward-looking due to his hearing loss and tinnitus and periods of mental instability. And then the heyday of Hollywood was over. And then Aviation glory was past. Must he have eventually come to feel the heavy exhaustion of the loner with ‘nothing left to do’? He had all the money in the world yet had decided that there was nothing more ‘out there’ he wanted to experience? He had produced Hell’s Angels, he had flown around the world, he had created Hughes Aircraft and he owned TWA all because of the romance of the dream. Dreams had always been his greatest form of currency. In the end, by Vegas, all he came to be doing was maintaining the money. Talking on the telephone; then not talking at all. One of the signature traits of Hughes’ life is his penchant for escape—the vanishing act. In stasis Hughes could escape from the world and escape from his money into himself. He would vanish back to a past time when his responsibilities were few. His billion-dollar empire would maintain its dynamic financial returns primarily so that Hughes might maintain his passivity.[2] The reclusive Hughes sought to recapture the comfort of his early years when his ascetic and loving mother was there to comfort him in their orderly, quiet surroundings. She wanted her son always to be well; phantom illnesses would draw Howard into bed and she would look after him. In bed, he commanded her complete attention. The reclusive Hughes would regress in his mind to the childlike time when convalescence had been attractive to him—‘attractive’ not in terms of the allure of being sick, but in terms of the pleasure of withdrawing from the responsibilities of the world.[3] But perhaps ‘allure’ too, the allure of dolce far niente, ‘sweet doing nothing’. The pharmaceutical drug addiction intensified the euphoria of submission to passivity. (That the world in Hughes’ eyes didn’t show him sufficient love for himself and his dreams, he would withdraw from the world—out of spite? Is this part of his madness too?) He would quarantine himself from the killer bacteria and the germ warfare, sure, this battle was ongoing along with all the rest. For more than twenty years Hughes chose to block out the light of the world. He dwelt in dark recesses. The longer the retreat, the more difficult the return would be. Perhaps—decided that his ongoing battle with his mental instability was a hopeless struggle, finally he would reach out for and regress to an entirely powerless state, lost in the vicious circle beyond the point of no return. (Did he feel, underneath it all—defeated? Haunted by an old defeat? Death? Was the retreat into stasis another death-defying—meaning death-inviting—daredevil stunt? Or a death-fleeing?) Howard Hughes :  abdicating his right to life and light, like a clockwork mechanism winding itself down purposefully.

 

---

[1] One of the unsigned wills (from 1944-50) left at his death contained this Article: “I have intentionally omitted making provision for all of my heirs who are not specifically mentioned herein and I hereby generally and specifically disinherit each, any, and all persons whomsoever claiming to be or who may lawfully be determined to be my heirs at law, except such as are mentioned in this will.” [HH:HLM], p. 177.

              

[2] “In his last ten years, the cost of his travelling asylum and the back-up system for it ran to well over $1,500,000 a year.” Phelan, Hidden Years, p. 25.

 

[3] Thomas Mann plays upon this theme in his exemplary way in the character of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Coming soon : Mom!

Agnes Moorehead, here in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

and here in the Newsreel of Kane :

Mom : positioned close by her boy, a ghost in his ear, sternly conditioning his behavior. Perhaps the pressure of her presence or words or whatever is causing that frown on the young boy’s face? Note the congruence of wardrobe (a visual expression of the idea, “a meeting of the minds”). But is there love in the mother’s eyes and face? If so, how, then, did this mother give her child away?

 

Mom : a triggering sadness has moved into the mansion of Kane's mind for a lifetime : the sadness of abandonment.

 

 

 

Edited February 6, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Colossal Story Fundamental  : Courtesy of the Screenwriters

A character, wealthy as any person might wish to be, is abandoned by

 

(a) his mother

(b) his father

(c) his best friend

(d) his first wife

(e) his second wife

(f) the love of the American public at the polls

(g) and so on and so forth all the way down the line

 

Would you take great wealth with that outcome? Or would you say, Forget It?

 

The choosing of a humble, quiet life is a “go-to” sentiment of the ancient Greek and Roman authors.

 

Examples : “I favor contentment that rouses no envy.” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 471) / “Set me in an out-of-the-way spot, so in my leisure I might delight in quiet.”  (Seneca, Thyestes, 394–5)

 

 

 

 

Edited February 6, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Crew Names

Newsreel Coincidence? Art Director of CK : Perry Ferguson, Welles' closest associate on CK after the cinematographer. 

NBK (27:08) : Robert Richardson, cinematographer

 

 

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

To All Unpublished Male Authors in England Over the Last 20 Years.

The Paris Review
Editor
Emily Stokes

Managing Editor
Kelley Deane McKinney

Deputy Editor
Lidija Haas

Associate Editor and Production Director
Amanda Gersten

London Review of Books
Editors
Jean McNicol and Alice Spawls

Granta
Editor
Sigrid Rausing

 

Managing Director and Publishing Director
Bella Lacey

Guardian Books
Editor
Claire Armitstead

and so on and so forth.

 

Women occupy 99 percent of every phase of the trade publishing industry in the UK.

 

Hey, dudes, how's it looking in Hollywood?

 

Example : sequential Twitters on 17 January 2023 :

 

London Review of Books :

(11 hours ago) "Sarah Resnick reads... "

(4 hours ago) "Fredella", a story by Diane Williams...."

(4 mins ago) Leah Broad reviews a study of...."

 

Paris Review :

(18 hours ago) "Avigayl Sharp's story...."

(16 hours ago) "Marilynne Robinson...."

(15 hours ago) "Alice Munro...."

 

Times Literary Supplement :

(4 hours ago) "Alice... Enid..."

(1 hour ago) "Hannah..."

(25 minutes ago) "Annie...."

 

Granta :

"Ms Rachel Cooke speaks to . . ."

 

Your women-run media brought our part of the world the “Vulnerable Male” and “Cancel Culture”.

Not even Charles Foster Kane thought of these idiocies.

 

To my male readers : get some balls, then come back and continue reading. Perhaps I'll have one reader left in the United States and UK. Thank you.

 

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

On the Author of This Masterpiece

 

"What about his balls?" the patient reader might ask. Well, a couple weeks ago, an academic acted no different from usual, so I walked leisurely to his house, broke my way into there, and beat him up in front of his wife. True story, friends and neighbors. You might ask, Why didn't the cops do anything? The police in the UK don't give a f**k about anything. That's Awesome News for Men with Grievances. Especially Insane Men.

 

The entire story (as amazing as any Hollywood film?) may appear here at some point . . .

[Jeff Bernstein]

Example : On a Woman's Gratitude to Her Colleagues

 

"Working on Daniel Day-Lewis film was a ‘traumatising train wreck’, says co-star" Vicky Krieps

 

Who wrote this article in the Telegraph (UK) on 26 December 2022?!

 

By Anita Singh and Helen Brown

 

Hey, men, got the idea yet? Or are you still looking for that Kane between your legs?

 

 

[Jeff Bernstein]

Bye for Now, Howard Hughes : Childhood.

 

Born on Christmas Eve, 1905, in Houston, Texas, Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. spoke with a tell-tale region-specific twang, and in later years could turn on the Southern Charm at will.[1] His father had been nothing of note until he received two patents for the design of a drill bit, what would become known informally as the Rock Eater, on August 10, 1909. That piece of oilfield equipment, the two-cone rotary drill bit, which could drill through the hard underground rock underlying the Texas landscape without wearing itself down, made Howard Hughes, Sr.—hitherto a drifter and wildcatter out of Missouri—a multimillionaire in almost no time at all, and set in place his baby son’s destiny as future master of a billion-dollar empire.

 

Hughes’ parents, after their ongoing financial bonanza kicked in, became society fixtures in Houston and little Howard grew up in a comfortable, privileged environment. Howard’s mother was Allene Gano Hughes, a refined and cultured daughter of a Harvard-educated Dallas judge, and granddaughter of Confederate General Richard Montgomery Gano.[2] Her son would be her only child and he would never want for anything. She overawed him.[3] She was little Howard’s ‘best friend’ and I suppose you could say ‘soul mate’, as Hughes’ father was resolutely absent, on cross-country business trips and other adventures[4], leaving mother and son on their own in a brick house (no. 3921) on stately Yoakum Boulevard for long periods of time.[5]

 

Howard’s home life was as austere and soft-spoken as his mother’s bearing and behavior. The two of them, devouring mother and doting son, were left together in a spacious home with everything in its proper place and spotless. There must have been a whiff of solitary confinement to the staid Hughes household which may very well have felt like every day was Sunday at four in the afternoon.

 

Little Howard would stand naked in front of Allene while she inspected him from toes to head, leaving nothing out; his mother was fanatical about cleanliness and morbidly fearful of disease.[6] She was scrupulous enough to even examine his bowel movements—perhaps the daily practice of an incipient nutritionist or evidence of a manic-obsessive personality.[7] His father too could be as severe as he was kind, not to be mean or crude but to build his son’s character. One rule of the house, for example, was that Howard must leave his own toolshed and workspace absolutely spotless when he was finished tinkering for the day; otherwise Howard would be restricted from using the shed in future.

 

Hughes Sr. was as overbearing in his way as Allene was in hers. He was a charismatic and boastful man whose brash manner and well-knit physique gave him an authority that others submitted to willingly; and like many a self-made man, he was self-possessed and extremely stubborn. His son would say to Dwight Whitney, Time magazine’s Hollywood correspondent, in the 1940s:

 

My father was plenty tough. He never suggested that I do something; he just told me. He shoved things down my throat and I had to like it. But he had a hail-fellow-well-met quality that I never had. He was a terrifically loved man. I am not. I don’t have the ability to win people the way he did.[8]

 

Howard was left to his own thoughts from an early age. He found his greatest pleasure working on his own with his tools[9], spending much time devising inventions such as his wireless radio[10], motorized bicycle[11], home intercom system, telegraph system, a shock absorber for automobiles[12], and who knows how many other experiments now lost to the public record.[13] The father’s natural ability for things mechanical had been passed on—as if genetically—to the son.[14]

 

Due to his withdrawn and circumscribed existence maintained by his mother’s influence, Howard made only one real childhood friend—Dudley Sharp, the son of Walter B. Sharp, Howard Sr.’s prospecting and business partner until 1912.[15] Not often would Allene let her son play with other children, who in later years would remember little Howard Hughes as shy and isolated, riding his tricycle all by his lonesome in the front of his swell house. Picture a fragile boy in short-pants with a ‘bowl’ haircut, a saturnine expression on his face—almost the grim aspect of the offspring of a Mayflower Puritan.[16] Throughout his life Howard Hughes would never be the life of any party, even if later on at social occasions he might be a cynosure of attention. Little Howard Hughes would be remembered as a “sissy”. Allene indeed treated her son as a feminized, dainty thing.[17] When he was allowed to meet with other children at a birthday party or some such event, Howard would look up to his mother at the end of the day and say something to the effect of, “Thank you mother for letting me have so much fun today.”[18]

 

In 1916, when Howard was ten years old Allene relented and allowed her son to attend Camp Teedyuskung, a sleep-over wilderness retreat for boys in the Poconos Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.[19] But even with a thousand miles and more between them Mother was unable to let Howard breathe freely. She wrote letter after letter, worrying over her son.[20] Howard returned to camp the next summer as well and the phobic letters continued apace. A series of these letters, written by Allene to Daniel Carter Beard, the Camp Director, on the subject of germs and Howard’s physical condition, are in the public record, and reveal, or rather underscore, Allene’s dominance over her son and her fixation on his health:

 

I hope the doctor will keep an eye on him, watching his feet and teeth, and see that he takes his Russian [mineral] oil every night . . .[21]

 

I know my dear boy must be lonely for me, and I would appreciate it if you can help him over his homesickness for me and his super sensitiveness.[22]

                                                                       

I am trying hard to overcome too much anxiety over my one chick but don’t seem to make much headway . . .[23]

 

I am afraid you will find him pretty nervous this year. He was so much improved in that respect by last year’s camp that I hoped he was outgrowing it and his supersensitiveness but it seems to have all come back this spring since he has not been so well . . . I think you understand him well enough to help him over the many times he gets his feelings hurt . . . If you can help Howard to take the teasing without getting hurt and resentful we will surely be lastingly in your debt . . .[24]

 

Not to worry, the camp counsellors would write in reply, Howard her son is doing fine.[25] Mother wouldn’t hear of it. She obsessed over Howard’s “delicate constitution”. She couldn’t bear to be without him; couldn’t bear Howard’s imperilment in a world of germs threatening sickness and death. She worried over polio, influenza, and tuberculosis scares. The first year, Allene showed up in person at Camp Teedyuskung and withdrew Howard from camp prematurely, causing a scene humiliating for the ten-year-old son.[26] The young Hughes, just wanting to be one of the boys, was overcome and commandeered by his brittle mother. Mother’s love at that moment must have been torment, his mortification complete.

 

Journalist and novelist Darwin Porter published exceedingly strange Hughes ‘revelations’ in his biography of Katharine Hepburn, Katharine the Great, in 2004. According to Porter, who derived his information from a journal kept by one of Hepburn’s close friends, Hughes told Hepburn that he slept naked in the same bed as his mother from a very early age and continued to do so into his adolescence, whenever his father was away. Allene was so fussy about Hughes’ health that during her daily inspections of his body she would insert her finger into his anus, probing for haemorrhoids. Moreover she would pull back his foreskin to inspect the skin of his penis. Most incredible of all—according to Hughes’ account as reported by Porter—Hughes the teenager was not only still being bathed by his mother but during such times he would get an erection and she would masturbate him to give him relief.[27] While these details may be nothing more than “Hollywood fact”—a synonym for embellished rumor—the facts in the story of Howard Hughes will become so eerie and weird that nothing outlandish should be rejected out of hand summarily.

 

Howard Hughes was a child prone to phantom illnesses (with symptoms including headaches, indigestion, weight loss, chills, insomnia), most likely psychological repercussions from his mother’s smothering obsession with his health and welfare. If her child suffered from so much as a common cold, Allene was known to summon no less than three different consultants to examine him.[28] In 1919, Howard, aged 13, suffered a weird bout of “hysterical paralysis”, as his doctor at the time diagnosed it, in which he lost the use of his legs and remained immobilized for six weeks. His father saw this as the unhappy culmination of Allene’s obsession with germs and sickness and took immediate steps to get Howard away from his mother and into a new environment.

 

Allene was persuaded into allowing her son to attend his eighth grade at the Fessenden School, an exclusive boarding school for the sons of wealthy families, located in Newton, Massachusetts.[29] Leaving on a cross-country train for the east coast in the autumn of 1920, Howard, 14 years of age, would be away from his mother for nine months. Classmates later remembered him as awkward[30], shy and withdrawn[31]; but also as “a good mathematician”.[32] At Fessenden Howard was known for keeping his room immaculately clean.[33] He worked on the school’s newspaper, the Albermarle. He was a substitute tight end on the football team. He played his saxophone in the school jazz band.[34] But Howard would spend the majority of his time on the school’s own nine-hole golf course, perfecting his game. He would lose the school’s golf championship by a single stroke.[35]

 

At this time Howard was introduced to the futural world of flying machines. When his father came east to visit with his son and watch the annual Harvard-Yale boat race, Howard was attracted by a Curtiss seaplane floating in the Thames River in New London, Connecticut.[36] An entrepreneur was offering sightseeing rides in the war surplus plane for $5.00. The ten-minute flight that Howard enjoyed was time enough to persuade him to want to become a pilot. We can safely say that it must have been love at first sight: his attunement to isolation (‘flying solo’) married to his facility for engineering and mathematics (necessary for aeronautical dynamics), and as a fringe benefit he would show the world that he was no “mama’s boy” or “sissy”. He could get away from it all in intelligent style.[37]

 

For the next school year Howard was enrolled at another prestigious boarding school, the Thatcher School, in Ojai, California—a bit closer to home.[38] Located in the Santa Ynez Mountains, Ojai was only around 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles, where Hughes Sr. was spending a lot of time, having recently opened an office of the Hughes Tool Company.[39] Six weeks into the school year Allene wrote the headmaster:

 

I think it is awfully hard for an only child to adjust himself well in school and make friends as he should, and I am very interested to hear from you about him.[40]

 

Once more the diffident and undemonstrative student, Howard was often on his own by choice, riding his horse, Coon, over the sprawling grounds of the rusticated Thatcher School.[41]

 

While the son was away at school the mother died suddenly and unexpectedly at the young age of thirty-nine. On March 28, 1922, Allene entered Baptist Hospital in Houston for surgery (a curettement) following abdominal pains and a hemorrhaging, but never regained consciousness from the gas anaesthetic. Howard received a telegram from his grief-stricken father—“Mother is ill”—and returned to Houston; we wonder how hard the ‘mama’s boy’ must have taken his mother’s death.[42] Even if Allene had ‘made him crazy’ with her fussy concerns and obsessions, still she had loved him and cared for his needs like no one else on earth. The life and death of Allene Hughes would have illustrated for the son how cruel life could be: his mother had ‘done his head in’ with her stifling love and eccentricities then vanished forever, exiting the disaster area prematurely, like Lady Macbeth. Howard’s complex grief would be internalized.[43]

 

Hughes will never be a man to cry in front of others, always being too much of a stubborn individual to reveal, let alone share, his inner emotion with anybody. He became a man who liked to watch movies on his own. Keeping his thoughts and feelings to himself—a penchant for extreme secrecy—will become one of the overriding obsessions of Hughes’ later years.[44]

 

Howard Sr. took his wife’s death hard. Soon after the funeral Howard Sr. withdrew his son from school for good, to ‘bring him back into the fold’. (Howard Hughes would never receive a high school diploma.[46]) Howard Sr. persuaded Allene’s youngest sister, Annette, to assume the responsibility of looking after her nephew.

 

In the summer of 1922, the three of them left Houston, fleeing its bad memories, and relocated to Southern California.[47] Annette and Howard settled in tranquil Pasadena, situated on the northeast side of Los Angeles and known in the 1920s as the “Millionaire’s Town”.[48] Annette was 31 and Howard was 16. Howard’s father moved into the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood and consoled himself with living the high life, frequenting Tinseltown parties with beautiful film actress Mae Murray on his arm.[49] Then Howard Sr. departed for Europe on Hughes Tool Company business, and would remain away from his son for more than a year. Howard was abandoned to the care of his maternal aunt, who, much later, recalled her nephew at this time as “perfectly beautiful” and “a charming young boy.”[50]

 

In the 1920s Southern California was still a “Promised Land”. The air of the City of Angels was beautiful, as yet untainted by acrid pollution. In this long ago time the beneficial ozone layer was still intact. The healthful sun shone with diamond clarity, the sky a flawless blue.

 

Howard the teenager spent most of the next year living a relaxed life in Southern California. One might have spied the carefree Texan cruising in his yellow Duesenberg along the boulevards between palisades of palm trees under the tropical sky.[51] Filthy-rich and free of any and all pressing responsibilities, Howard played golf up to seven days a week at various country clubs such as the Los Angeles Country Club and the Wilshire Country Club, sometimes playing with championship golfers in the hope of sharpening his game, which was by all accounts magnificent.[52] Sometimes he played tennis. Howard became somewhat of a movie addict and was often at the cinema, according to a son-in-law of Mrs. Kitty Callaway, one of his cousins:

 

The story I’ve heard through the years and through the family is . . . he would go to movie after movie and he’d sit through the movies and say, ‘This stinks,’ and get up and walk out after just looking at it for about a half-hour.[53]

 

He visited Hollywood film sets, including that of Souls for Sale, a melodrama about the ‘reality’ behind Hollywood, written and co-directed by his uncle Rupert Hughes.[54] Rupert, a celebrated literary jack-of-all-trades (playwright, novelist, screenwriter, historian), was a Hollywood fixture, eventually serving as the first president of the Hollywood Writer’s Club (later the Screen Writer’s Guild); in later years he would refer to himself humorously as the “poor uncle of a rich nephew.”[55] Actually, in the 1920s Rupert was making more than $100,000 a year as a screenwriter, and his parties were among Hollywood’s most glamorous, no doubt putting stars in visiting Howard’s eyes.[56]

 

At the time, the well-connected Rupert, 50 years old in 1922, lived in a grand home on 2425 South Western Avenue. There, his young nephew mingled with Hollywood’s most beautiful and most popular leading ladies of the twenties, such as Colleen Moore and Eleanor Boardman.[57]

 

While Rupert Hughes the public personality was a perfect gentleman in appearance and style, the private Rupert Hughes was a man of exceeding mystery. Comfortable associating with a “fast crowd”, and one of America’s early vocal proponents of quickie divorces, Rupert led a strange, tangled, creepy, enigmatic, libidinous life. Rupert’s relationships with women were, in a word, eerie. Rupert’s estranged first wife Agnes Hedge, in testimony given during their divorce proceedings in July 1902, described Rupert as “utterly and totally depraved.”[58] Agnes later died in a hospital for the insane. Rupert’s second wife Adelaide Manola Mould, while on a world cruise with a woman companion, will hang herself in Haiphong, China in December 1923. Rupert’s third wife Elizabeth Patterson Dial will die of an overdose of barbituates in 1945.[59] Decades after Rupert’s death, a team of lawyers trying to unravel the mysteries of Rupert’s life questioned three distant Hughes relations who remained loath to express what they evidently thought were monstrous secrets in Rupert’s past. The lawyers will uncover evidence of a secret marriage; a daughter who might not have been his daughter; a mother-in-law who might have first been his wife for a time; illegitimate children.[60]

 

At any rate, Rupert’s parties in all probability buzzed with the self-satisfied sexuality and subtle power games of personalities who have been “around the block”—a heady atmosphere that went straight to Howard’s head. Aunt Annette described the Hollywood scene as “all those vampire movie people.”[61] Rather than feeling intimidated, Howard took to Hollywood like the proverbial fish to water.

 

While perched on the sidelines of film sets Howard scrutinized the minutiae of film production, jotting observations and notations in a pocket notebook for future reference.[62] Rupert Hughes recalled, “Howard spent hours on the set[s], in the projection room, in listening to story conferences and studying the entire business with insatiable interest.”[63] William Haines, touted in his biography as “Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star”, was one of the cameo performers in Souls for Sale, and befriended Hughes. In the twenties Haines’ star was in the ascendant and he was one of the familiar elements of filmdom’s party scene. Haines introduced Howard to the nighttime playground of Hollywood nightclubs.[64] It might very well have been Haines who introduced his new friend to Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, the “Royalty” of Hollywood whose “castle” was the fabulously opulent San Simeon.[65]

 

Hughes’ visiting of the film sets—as well as the Hollywood parties and nightclubs—was the genesis of what a few years hence would become his obsession with moviemaking.

 

Howard also attended engineering classes, informally, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, though he did not even have a high school diploma. Aunt Annette related, “Mr. Hughes bribed the school” so Howard could attend.[66] Hughes’ fascination with aviation engineering put him in a select group; there were less than 1,400 aviation engineering students enrolled in colleges across the United States at the time.[67] Founded as Throop University in 1891 and taking its present name around 1920, Cal Tech was an esteemed educational institution, attracting the brightest minds in the sciences, its undergraduate and graduate studies focusing primarily on physics, chemistry, and engineering. By the early 1930s Cal Tech would be a foremost center of scientific research in America and the world.[68] Through his association with Cal Tech Hughes met some of the men who would go to work for him later on his record-breaking aviation projects, such as Richard W. Palmer and William C. Rockefeller.[69]

 

One of Howard’s pet projects at Cal Tech was a design for a steam-powered car, for which he would eventually spend upwards of $500,000 on development, until he realized that an automobile accident might cause the driver to get scalded to death. Hughes had his car summarily destroyed.[70]

 

All the meanwhile the Hughes Tool Company (H.T.Co.) was getting richer and richer.[71] Richer and richer, because the tool company wasn’t selling its patented drills outright but leasing them each at up to $30,000 a year, with some oil companies leasing up to two thousand drills a year.[72]

 

Howard returned to Houston with his Aunt Annette in March 1923. During his stay in the Golden State he had received an education in golf, moviemaking, beautiful women, and engineering, and had enjoyed his time very much. But Annette had been adamant to return to Texas in order to marry the fiancé she had left behind, Dr. Frederick Rice Lummis. Annette, Frederick, and Howard moved in together to Howard’s childhood home on Yoakum Boulevard; it had been Howard Sr.’s idea.[73] Howard enrolled in classes at Rice University, where once again he excelled in mathematics classes, but the majority of his time was spent on the golf course at the Houston Country Club.[74]

 

The darkly handsome young man had grown into his mature height of 6 feet 3 inches and a half.[75] His allowance was $5,000 a month—in the time when the average yearly income for a working man in America would have been no more than $1,000. In adjusted dollars, $5,000 in this period would be roughly equivalent to $40,000 today.[76]

 

Hughes Sr. died suddenly from a heart attack at age fifty-four on January 14, 1924.[77] The Houston Post reported the news on its front page: “Howard R. Hughes, Noted Business Leader, Dies While at Work in Office.”[78] The son would have no chance to say goodbye to either his mother or his father. In both cases Howard was left suddenly abandoned.

 

The premature death of both parents had a profound psychological effect on Howard. Raised to believe in his own delicate nature and in the grave danger of being exposed to germs, he became obsessed about his health, and feared that he too was destined for an early death. The slightest change in his physical condition or the mildest illness now threw him into a panic. He began to take pills and resort to all sorts of precautions to insulate himself from disease and illness. It was an obsession that would grow with time.[79]        

 

Soon after the death of their oldest son, Felix and Jean Hughes relocated from Keokuk, Iowa to Los Angeles, settling into 204 North Rossmore Avenue in the wealthy Hancock Park area of the city. Howard was sent to L.A. where he moved in with his grandparents. Uncle Rupert became Howard’s nominal “guardian”.

 

What ensued would be the perennial conflict of youth vs. age. In 1924, Felix was 86 years old, Jean was 82, and Rupert was 52. Felix was an outspoken, self-professed “stalwart Republican” who preferred others to call him “Judge”. Jean Amelia Summerlin Hughes was strong-minded and temperamental, described by a relative as “straight-as-a-ramrod type of person”. Jean could also get uptight—she was remembered as having a phobia about “flies, bugs, moths, and that sort of thing.”

 

A distant relative later recalled that Jean soon got sick of all of young Howard’s “airplane talk”. Howard himself quickly tired of his grandparents and Uncle Rupert, too.[80]

 

With his father’s death Howard inherited three-fourths[81] of an extremely wealthy estate—at the time, the Hughes Tool Company was valued at $861,518, and was earning over $1 million a year.[82] But Howard was only eighteen years of age and therefore not yet an adult in the eyes of the law. The final fourth of the estate was bequeathed to Howard Sr.’s parents and his brother, Felix, Jr.[83] Both Uncle Rupert and Aunt Annette voiced their personal interests in overseeing the Hughes affairs—that is to say, the Hughes fortune—but Howard suddenly wanted nothing to do with any of his relatives. Free of the hegemony of his parents, Howard Hughes broke himself out of his shell.[84] He was self-possessed and headstrong for the first time in his life. Hard words were spoken; there was a family scene at Uncle Rupert’s house in Hollywood.[85]

 

Howard Hughes would not fully come of age until his parents, by dying, released some of their hold on his psyche. His manhood blossomed only when Howard Sr. and Allene fell away from him. The death of his parents was the price Howard Hughes paid for psychological liberty. Following their deaths, Howard no longer feared judgment by anyone on earth. Now, and for the rest of his sane life, it would be his way or no way. No one would tell him what to do ever again, not if he could help it.

 

Howard promptly bought out his relatives’ minority interest in the H.T.Co. for $325,000 and turned his back on them. Perhaps bewildered by Howard’s belligerent attitude, his grandparents had acquiesced without contention.[86] Roly-poly, cigar-puffing Uncle Rupert, who, perhaps because as a successful author he was financially self-sufficient, was not mentioned in his brother’s will, wrote Howard a stern letter on April 19, 1924:

 

You have good looks, wit and much magnetism. You had as a child and as a younger boy an extraordinary intelligence and imagination and ingenuity. Those last three qualities I have not found so marked in recent years. . . .

             

Calling his nephew “selfish”, Uncle Rupert was aghast that Howard had been so intent on getting his relatives to sell him their share of the Tool Company.

 

You were a lovable child and still have very lovable qualities, but then, as now, you have showed a tendency to give the least possible and take the maximum.

 

Uncle Rupert was also disturbed by a powerfully cold streak in the young man, whom he accused of having a “very immature brain”.

 

To my horror I have never seen an indication that the hour was tragic or in the least important to you. Since your father’s death I have never heard you say one word in his praise, make one suggestion of a memorial to him or show any desire to emphasize his greatness or the importance of his splendid achievements. You referred to him a few times the first night you were here, but always in a joking, almost contemptuous and patrionizing manner. . . . [87]

 

Howard sought sole control of the Hughes Tool Company.[88] As he was still a minor he would have to take it to the Probate Court to plead his case.[89] In the months leading up to his court appearance, Howard had spent time at the Tool Company plant, learning the ins-and-outs of the business; faced with questioning he would easily be able to prove his capability to run H.T.Co. His petition maintained that

 

Howard Hughes, Jr., represents himself as sober, studious, a non-drinker and smoker, and as moral. His chief desire is to build up his father’s business and help worthy enterprises and to assist in the education of deserving young men and women.[90]

 

Howard’s efforts to be deemed a legally responsible adult turned out well—the judge presiding, Walter Montieth, had been one of Hughes Jr.’s golfing partners at the Houston Country Club. On December 26, 1924, Howard won the right to assume sole control of his inheritance, specifically the Hughes Tool Company, and in the time it takes for the Judge’s gavel to resound, a confident Howard Hughes acquired the fount for more money than he could spend in his lifetime—and Hughes would be wildly extravagant.[91] 

 

He was now, at age nineteen, without parents, without brothers or sisters, standing alone, as sole custodian of an unlimited fortune promising him a lifetime of limitless opportunity. 

 

‘Alone’, but not quite. Hughes would prove to one and all that he was indeed a sensitive and right-thinking man in total control of himself—by marrying a proper sensible wife. So, sensibly, he married the premier social catch of the season, Ella Rice by name, a sophisticated, extroverted dark-haired beauty two years his senior, even though he didn’t give a hoot for her and wouldn’t give her the time of day—in the same way that Howard’s father had been pretty much a missing appurtenance to his own marriage and family.[92]

 

Hughes had never been one to go out on dates with women. He was as shy as a young man as he had been as a child. Throughout his entire adult life he would have trouble “chatting up” women, even if they all fell for him anyway. To win Ella’s hand, Hughes had enlisted his Aunt Annette to make the opening move in her nephew’s case.[93]

 

Howard had known Ella Rice since they were young children and attending kindergarten together at the Christ Church Cathedral School. Little Howard, aged just five, had adored Ella at that time and considered her his first girl friend. According to Aunt Annette, “She was his queen, and apparently he was in love with her from then on.”[94] However, as years went by, many suitors lavished attention on Ella and Howard was shunted into the background. For years he had to love her from afar. Once he came into his inheritance, however, Ella viewed him in a different light and gave him a chance. Howard, lucky young man, would woo and win the girl of his dreams.

 

The marriage of Howard and Ella took place at Ella’s sister’s house on Remington Lane on 7:00 p.m. on Monday, June 2, 1925 and was duly reported in the society pages of the Houston newspapers.[95] Hughes’ best man Dudley Sharp later remembered, “He was easily the best-looking man at the wedding, in the neighborhood, and in Houston—but was totally unaware of it.”[96]

 

Interestingly, Ella Rice resembled Allene Hughes both in physical features and comportment. She would be Howard Hughes’ ‘trophy wife’, his idea of what a rich man’s wife ought to be.[97]

 

If the nineteen-year-old Howard Hughes was going to play the mature man of wealth and position and marry into an artistocratic family and ‘old money’, then he would also prepare a last will and testament, an eminently reponsible act for the young man. The 1925 will would be the first of at least a half-dozen different wills he would draft over the next fifty years of his life. In the first will he left “$500,000 in first-class, high-grade securities” and an annual annuity of $50,000 for his wife; $10,000 to his one childhood friend, Dudley Sharp; provisions for his three maternal relatives[98]; a $20.00 weekly pension for life to his two “colored household servants”; and a small percentage of the H.T. Co.’s dividends to six of its executives. His paternal relatives were conspicuously absent. According to this 1925 will, the bulk of Howard’s fortune would be used to establish the Howard R. Hughes Medical Research Laboratories, which, in his own words,

 

shall be devoted to the discovery of ways, means, antitoxins, and specifics for the prevention and curing of the most serious diseases with which this country may from time to time be afflicted.[99]

 

The 1925 will is signed and executed but will be missing at the time of Hughes’ death; it is still missing today. Only an unsigned second copy presently exists, the first evidence of Hughes’ serious philanthropic goals, what would be a running theme through all of his wills. 

 

Though he had recently won the right to run the Hughes Tool Company, Howard had decided that he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life cooped-up in an office on-site. He left the running of the day-to-day operations of H.T.Co. in the hands of capable executives, whose consummate work rewarded Hughes with an income of around $2 million a year at this time.[100]

 

Howard Hughes and his wife moved out of Houston—following a three month honeymoon in New York—and headed to Southern California in October, setting up residence at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood.[101] Houston for Hughes was a thing of the past; he would never live in Texas again.[102] Los Angeles, the Land of Perpetual Spring, of Sun, Sand, and Surf, was more to his liking. Though a city on the move, Los Angeles was not yet the sprawling megalopolis that it would become just over a decade hence. In 1925 there was still more open space and undeveloped land in the city and environs than otherwise; Beverly Hills was still a country town and Westwood and the UCLA campus looked positively rural. The city streets, including Sunset Boulevard, were still only paved in part. Much of the region was a pastoral landscape comprised of bean fields and tracts of wild poppies. Merely travelling from Hollywood to downtown Los Angeles, a matter of a couple miles, was, according to a Hollywood player of the period, a “considerable trip”.[103] In the hot dry sunlight Hollywood was relaxed and somnolent, the sultry atmosphere tinctured with the aroma of eucalyptus and pepper trees. At this time many Angelenos still travelled to-and-fro on horseback. Otherwise, there was the “Red Car” trolley car system which linked together the far-flung districts of Los Angeles County. Mr. and Mrs. Howard Hughes, for their part, had two Rolls Royces at their disposal.

 

Dudley Sharp recalled the Hughes of this period:

 

He seemed to have an absolute mania for proving himself. He didn’t want to stay in Houston in his father’s shadow. I think he even disliked bearing his father’s name. He wanted to get out and find something he wanted to do. He didn’t know exactly what, but nothing was going to stop him.[104]

 

The 1920s was a boom-time for L.A.; more than a million newcomers will flood into the city during the decade.[105] Oil derricks infested the region from Pasadena to Long Beach, advertising the fact that one might get rich quick in Southern California. Restaurants, speakeasies, and nightclubs began appearing with regularity along Hollywood streets, catering to the fast crowd of the movie set. The Land of Sunshine was a place “on the rise”. New in town, Hughes arranged for a personal stock ticker to be installed in his hotel bedroom. The adult Hughes never celebrated holidays—Christmas included—but the movie colony would be one long festive season for the young man. Hughes had no religion to speak of and never stepped foot in a church—his marriage had taken place in Ella’s sister’s home—but he would worship the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown with the fervor of a zealot.

 

Once more Howard Hughes would spend much of his time on the elite golf courses of Los Angeles County.[106] For Hughes, newly arrived in Southern California, golf would prove to be the first obsession of his life.

 

THE GAME OF GOLF. The game of golf was the first fixation of Howard Hughes’ in which he became an expert. Introduced to golf at age 14 while at the Fessenden School, Hughes discovered himself to have a natural aptitude for the sport and would spend the next two decades perfecting his game. During the decade of the 1920s golf would be one of his fondest pastimes. Those who knew the young Hughes in Southern California recalled him spending up to seven days a week on the golf courses at the Los Angeles Country Club, the Bel-Air Country Club, and the Wilshire Country Club. At the time, and still somewhat today, golf was a game for the wealthy. The high annual fees for these country clubs meant that only the wealthiest Angelenos would be playing golf on these courses. Membership at the Wilshire Country Club, for example, cost $5,000 a year.[107] Also, only the wealthiest Americans enjoyed the leisure time to be able to play in the daytime during the working week.

 

Throughout his life Hughes would exhibit obsessional behavior whenever he became interested in a subject. Almost as soon as the Houston newlyweds had arrived in Los Angeles in 1925, Hughes announced, “My first objective is to become the world’s number-one golfer.”[108]

 

He coaxed and coerced his way into the city’s best foursomes, imported golf pros, and even had his practice sessions filmed—both at ground level and from above—in slow motion and pioneering Technicolor, using a blimp that circled overhead.[109]

 

With a handicap of one or two, depending on the source, the tall, lanky Hughes was indeed a championship-quality player. All accounts describe the twenty-something Howard Hughes as a remarkable golfer with the talent to play on the professional tour if he had so desired (the first American championship of the United States Golf Association was held in 1894).

 

Golf suited Hughes, the young man with a mathematical mind who was not a natural athlete. Golf is a sport of low-impact exercise in which, in writer John Updike’s words, “a rush of adrenaline does more harm than good.”[110] Golf is an analytical game. A professional golfer needs to be calm, confident, meticulous (if not obsessive), patient, sharp-thinking, with extraordinary hand-eye coordination as well as a profound power of concentration. Mind and body must act in subtle and concise concert. Golf involves a camaraderie between players in competition, of course; but the sport is also one in which each individual player plays against himself, so to speak. More so than any other sport perhaps, golf is a mind game. Updike, a self-professed mediocre golfer himself, has described the game as a “narcotic pastime” and “non-chemical hallucinogen”.[111] In all these respects golf suited Hughes, an inward-faced, remote, and deliberate man.

 

Motion picture production, and then Hughes’ various pursuits in the world of aviation, will take his eye off the golf ball in the coming years.[112] But at this time of his life Howard Hughes felt eminently comfortable in plain sight out in the open, thinking swing thoughts, walking the rolling landscape from tee to fairway to green. The game of golf became the fantastically wealthy young man’s only responsibility; far away, the Hughes Tool Company was generating tons of cash without Hughes himself having to lift a finger. The golf course was the young Hughes’ Shangri-la. Obsessed with making his mark as a golfer, with making his golf dreams a reality, Hughes seemed to care more about the hobby of golf than about anything—or anyone—else.

 

*

 

After only one month together in Los Angeles, Hughes sent his wife back to Houston where she would remain apart from her husband for the next seven months. Ella’s loneliness at this time is manifested in several dozen telegrams she will send her thoughtless husband, including pleas for him to accept her phone calls at the very least. From the beginning of their marriage to the end, Ella Rice will pass through Hughes’ life like a cloud on the horizon.

 

*

 

On Thansgiving Day 1925 Hughes hired Noah Dietrich, a certified public accountant with experience in the oil industry, as his business manager to act as his go-between with the Houston plant of the Hughes Tool Company to keep Hughes’ own involvement with H.T. Co. to an absolute minimum. With Dietrich in his employ, Hughes could devote all of his time to such private pursuits as golf, motion picture production, and intense womanizing.

 

*

 

Finally, for form’s sake, Ella arrived back in Hollywood in June 1926. Husband and wife moved into 211 South Muirfield Road, a seven-bedroomed house in the wealthy Hancock Park section of Los Angeles.[113] The house, referred to as “Muirfield”, stood adjacent to the golf course of the Wilshire Country Club. Though Ella was back in L.A., Hughes’ attention will be entirely taken up first with playing golf and competing in golf tournaments and then with the financing and organization of motion picture productions. The beautiful and sophisticated Ella will be left to linger lonely in the well-appointed home Hughes had acquired for her, in a manner reminiscent of Susan Alexander dwelling at the palatial Xanadu in Citizen Kane. When husband and wife were at home together at Muirfield, they slept in separate bedrooms—as had been the arrangement during their honeymoon.[114] From the very first the marriage had meant nothing to the frightfully insensitive Hughes. Eventually, in 1929, after enduring four years of a marriage only in name, Ella Rice had to suffer the social indignity—at that Entirely Moral Time—of filing for divorce from Hughes who had existed as a phantom in her life.

 

Ella divorced her husband on the grounds of “excesses and cruel treatment.”[115] Howard Hughes was described in the suit as “irritable, cross, critical, fault-finding and inconsiderate.” Also, he had “steadily neglected her.”[116] Hughes did not contest any detail of the divorce. Ella received a settlement of $1,250,000, payable in five installments. According to John Keats in his Hughes biography from 1966,

 

When she had gone, Hughes closed up her room just as she had left it. It was left sealed and unopened until he disposed of the house many years later.[117]

 

Following the divorce, Hughes is going to own Muirfield for at least another ten years. As for Ella Rice, there is no record that she ever spoke about Howard Hughes in public again.

 

The way Hughes treated Ella Rice set the tone for his dealings with women for the rest of his life. In a word, Hughes was monomaniacally self-centered. He married a woman, leased a house for her, left her there, and expected her to ‘toe the line’. He demanded absolute control over his women, when he eventually got around to paying any attention to them. Howard Hughes was immovably self-centered, even if at times he could be exceedingly sensitive and capable of empathy and acts of kindness.

 

---

[1] At the time of Howard Hughes, Jr.’s birth, Houston—located in southeast Texas, a port on the Gulf of Mexico—was a large town heading toward city status. Most of the streets were unpaved dirt tracks. One of the few downtown streets paved with stone was bustling Main Street, down which electric streetcars had been trundling alongside horse-and-carriages since 1897. In 1900 Houston’s population was 44,633. The population would grow exponentially following the discovery of oil—at 10:30 am on January 10, 1901—in the town of Beaumont eighty-five miles to the east. The oil field, named Spindletop, gushing over 100,000 barrels a day, was the first major oil strike in the United States. Other oil strikes around Houston followed with regularity. Wildcatters and lawyers flooded into the region. Syndicates flourished. Texaco was founded in Houston in 1905. Howard’s birthplace during his early years was one of the exciting places of America. Riding the crest of oil money the city expanded apace: a new City Hall, a sixteen-floor bank, a seventeen-floor hotel, the opulent Majestic vaudeville house; also hospitals, churches, libraries, free public schools, universities. By 1910 Houston was a boomtown crowded with comers of all kinds. Electric lamps lined the streets. Automobiles (since 1901) rolled through, keeping to the city speed limit of six miles an hour. The wealthy played golf at the Houston Country Club (est. 1908). The Standard Blue Book of Texas (first pub. 1896) was in force for the moneyed class. The majority of the Houston buildings built around the time of Howard’s birth were composed of the fussy, angular, late-Victorian architecture visible all over turn-of-the-century America. ¶ “By 1911, Houston had four theatres, six department stores, nine hotels, eight office buildings, nine banks and six schools. . . . .” McAshan, Marie Phelps, On the Corner of Main and Texas: A Houston Legacy (Houston, Texas: Hutchins House, 1985), p.114-15.

[2] “The Ganos were monarchs of Dallas society, rich from Kentucky horse farms, wheat lands, and city real estate.” Higham, Charles, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1993), p. 15. ¶ “Allene, born in 1883. . . . Tall, well-formed, and dark-haired . . . with a beautifully formed face set off by high cheekbones against rich, dark-brown hair . . . she was a quiet, soft-spoken, and refined young woman. A relative who remembered her years later said Allene “looked and acted like a queen.” Bartlett, Donald L. &  James B. Steele, Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 2003), p. 30. (Hereafter [HH:HLM]). ¶ Allene Gano was born on July 14, 1883, to William Beriah Gano, a Harvard-educated lawyer, and Jeanette de Lafayette Grissom. For her family, see Finstad, Suzanne, Heir Not Apparent (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1984), p. 114-6. ¶ “Howard’s father-in-law was a well-known Texas district judge, direct descendant of Reverend John Gano, the famous chaplain of the Revolutionary War.” Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 109. See also Hughes, Rupert, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, Part I, Liberty, February 6, 1937, p. 25-6. ¶ Allene married Howard Sr. at the Gano family’s home on Masten Street in Dallas on May 24, 1904. She was 20 and he was 34. The wedding was one of the events of the social season in Texas. ¶ Allene’s younger sister Annette said, much later, “My sister married for love in an era when few married for that reason.” Quoted in Brown, Peter H. and Pat H. Broeske, Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), p. 7.  (Hereafter [HH:US]). ¶ The couple’s first five years together would be trying, traveling with their newborn baby first to Keokuk, Iowa, where Hughes’ parents lived; thence to Oil City, Louisiana, where Allene and baby son were left alone for much of the time while the father wandered the southwest chasing oil strikes. Throughout the early years of the marriage there had been an undercurrent of frustration and desperation—Hughes Sr. wouldn’t strike it rich until he was thirty-eight years old. Once Hughes Sr. had arrived at the drill bit design that would revolutionize the oil industry and make him fabulously wealthy, he returned with his family to Houston in a swell automobile, in 1909, when his baby son was three.

[3] Hughes was called Little Howard, Sonny, Junior, or Son. See Demaris, Ovid, “You and I are very different from Howard Hughes”, Esquire, March, 1969, p. 76; Kemm, James O., Rupert Hughes: A Hollywood Legend (Beverly Hills, CA: Pomegranate Press, 1997), p. 1; 121; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, Newsweek, April 19, 1976, p. 26; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 26; Hack, Richard, Hughes (Beverly Hills: New Millennium Press, 2001), p. 25. 

[4] “Devoted to a lifestyle of lavish spending, Hughes [Sr.] traveled around the country in a private railroad car, with a separate car added to transport his growing wardrobe. He entertained oil men in the south and west with extravagant dinners and expensive presents.” Hack, Hughes, p. 29. ¶ Recalled one of Howard’s relatives, “He had the first car in Houston, a Pierce-Arrow.” Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 116.

[5] “In 1910, when profits from the tool company reached $500,000 a year, Hughes [Sr.] moved his family to a brick home on Yoakum Boulevard on the fashionable south side—an area of colonnaded mansions and rolling hills of lush green lawns. They joined the elite congregation of Christ Church Cathedral and became stalwarts of the Houston Country Club. . . . Hughes [Sr.] was soon lured into the rich old boys’ network that was helping to make Houston an industrial center.” [HH:US], p. 11. ¶ “two-story house on Yoakum Boulevard”, Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 146. ¶ “Designed by William Ward Watkin, first chairman of Rice University’s Department of Architecture, it was a handsome Georgian residence of fifteen rooms. The floors were marble, the furniture of Haitian mahogany. In the back there was a landscaped garden, alive with fountains and sculptures of naked Greek gods.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 22. ¶ By 1971, “Howard’s childhood home had been torn down, replaced by the St. Thomas School.” Irving, Clifford, The Hoax (U.K.: Lightning Source UK Ltd., 1999), p. 80.

[6] “neurotic Dallas heiress Allene Gano . . . high-strung, a hypochondriac, she was terrified of small animals, especially cats. She was obsessed with the perils of mosquitos, flies, roaches, and beetles.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 13; 15; see also [HH:HLM], p. 30. ¶ When he was five years old, “It was not Sonny’s fault that he arrived late to school most days. His mother had begun an elaborate pre-school ritual with the child that included a thorough washing with lye soap, inspection of his feet, ears, throat and teeth, and the constant examination of any toilet waste, still in search of tapeworms. She then dressed him, brushed his hair, and delivered him to the front door of the church. She was standing there again when school was dismissed.” Hack, Hughes, p. 28. See also Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 217-8. ¶ “Sonny was first enrolled in a kindergarten kept in Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Houston. Next came a private elementary school, Professor Prosso’s Academy, then South End Junior High School—a public school.” Keats, John, Howard Hughes (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 6-7; also Finstad, Heir, p. 116. Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 19, says “Dr. James Richardson’s exclusive school, Prosser’s Academy.”

[7] See Hack, Hughes, p. 25; Moore, Terry, The Beauty and the Billionaire (New York, N.Y.: Pocket Books, 1984), p. 2; Porter, Darwin, Katharine The Great (New York, NY: Blood Moon Productions, Ltd., 2004), p. 217-8.

[8] Quoted in Phelan, James R., “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1963, p. 22; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 198; Fadiman, Jr, Edwin, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, Playboy, December 1971, p. 244; Fay, Stephen, Lewis Chester and Magnus Linklater, Hoax: The Inside Story of the Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving Affair (London: Quartet Books, 1973), p. 32; “Mr Howard Hughes”, The (London) Times, April 7, 1976, p. 16; Phelan, James, Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years (London: Collins, 1977), p. 177; Barton, Charles, Howard Hughes and His Flying Boat (Fallbrook, CA: Aero Publishers, 1982), p. 22.

[9] “At three, he took pictures with a box camera and during his childhood spent every spare minute behind their Houston home tinkering with machinery. His mother once said of him: “He thought a puppy dog was a machine of some sort.” Fadiman, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 244. See also “The Mechanical Man”, Time, July 19, 1948. ¶ “His juvenile interests ran to woodworking, metal-working and amateur radio operation.” Hill, Gladwin, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, New York Times Magazine, August 17, 1947, p. 14.

[10] “When Howard was 12, he and a group of boys interested in shortwave radio formed a club that met in his room. This atypical involvement with other boys was interrupted when Howard became ill and had to stay out of school for much of the winter and spring.” Fowler, Raymond D., “Howard Hughes: A Psychological Autopsy”, Psychology Today, May, 1986, p. 25. ¶ “Hughes became one of the first government licensed radio ham operators, with the call letters 5CY.” See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 113. ¶ “As a boy of twelve Mr. Hughes was a radio “ham” in Texas.” “Hughes Prepares For Ocean Flight”, New York Times, July 6, 1938, p. 25. ¶ “At twelve, he made his first radio transmitter out of the family doorbell.” “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938. ¶ “He built one of the first licensed “ham” stations in Texas, using an old doorbell and an auto-ignition system.” “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976. ¶ “He built a radio transmitter as a boy, [and] joined the Radio Relay League.” “Billionaire Howard Hughes Dies at 70”, Washington Post, April 6, 1976, p. 8. ¶ The AARL was established in 1914. There were 5,000 licensed amateur radio operators in America in 1916. See “The History of Amateur Radio” at www.astrosurf.com. ¶ “He spent his evenings picking up messages from ships in the Gulf of Mexico.” Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 26.

[11] This feat put the young Hughes into the Houston Post on Thursday Morning, June 10, 1920: “14-Year-Old Houstonian Invents Lighter and Cheaper Motorcycle”. Under the photograph of Hughes with his invention is a caption explaining the mechanical parts, the electric motor and the storage battery. “Placing them on the opposite sides of the bicycle gives an even balance.” The accompanying article adds: “The machine was built entirely by young Hughes in the garage at his home at Brannard Avenue and Yoakum Boulevard and meets his requirement for a motorcycle which would be without jar, vibration or noise. The boy has shown a liking for machinery all his life and has built a fully equipped wireless outfit at his home, besides slowly assembling a thoroughly up-to-date machine shop. . . . The boy says he made the machine entirely for his own use with no idea of patenting it.” See the reproduction of the article in Maguglin, Robert, Howard Hughes: His Achievements and Legacy (Long Beach, CA: Wrather Port Properties, 1984), p. 18; also in Thomas, Tony, Howard Hughes in Hollywood (Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1985), p. 14. See also Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 83; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 26; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 26. ¶ By the way, aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright began their engineering careers as builders of bicycles; Glenn Curtis as well. 

[12] When he was 14. See Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 26; “Fabulous Team”, Time, August 31, 1942. ¶ “As a youth he designed and built his own steam-powered auto.” Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 18. ¶ For the story of a 14-year-old Hughes dismantling a Stutz Bearcat automobile, see [HH:US], p. 14.

[13] See [HH:US], p. 13-14; Hack, Hughes, p. 29; Dietrich, Noah, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1972), p. 31; [HH:HLM], p. 35. ¶ “When young Howard sat in the dentist’s chair he was by no means a passive patient. He gave Dr. Scherer, an outstanding dental surgeon in Houson, no trouble; he was just fascinated by the technology of it all. “He wanted to know exactly what I was doing,” recalls Dr. Scherer, “why I was doing it, what the amalgam was made of—everything.” Barton, Flying Boat, p. 22.

[14] Jack G. Real, renowned aircraft engineer and a friend of Hughes’ after 1957, recalled in his memoir of his days with Hughes, “Howard had a brilliant analytic mind. Even without formal training, he was intuitively an extraordinary engineer. Like his father, he had an exceptional ability to understand machines and how they work.” Real, Jack G., The Asylum of Howard Hughes (U.S.A: Xlibris Corporation, 2003), p. 18. ¶ “Hughes Jr. . . . loved to tinker with engines. He fixed the engine of an old car so that he could leave it parked on a Houston street while he stood some distance away and watched the startlement of pedestrians as the empty, motionless vehicle suddenly emitted a series of backfires.” “Hughes Tool: A Gusher of Money”, Fortune, January 1959, p. 83.

[15] “The boys were unlike in appearance and manner. Hughes was tall, thin, and pale, while Dudley was strong and healthy. Where Howard was shy and withdrawn, Dudley was talkative and extroverted. Howard envied Dudley’s ability to make friends and Dudley respected Howard’s determination and mechanical prowess.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achivements, p. 13. ¶ The two remained in intermittent contact until 1956, when Hughes inexplicably vanished from Sharp’s life.

[16] His Uncle Rupert’s stepdaughter Avis McIntyre, recalled the ten- or eleven-year-old Howard she had known: “A very attractive little boy . . . [though] rather a solemn little fellow.” Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 116. ¶ “He went to Baptist Sunday school and played first base on a school team.” Lee, John M., “Hughes’ Empire Facing A Crisis”, New York Times, June 24, 1962, p. 1. ¶ For Hughes’ childhood memory of riding his tricycle in his driveway, see Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 334-5.

[17] A photo taken when Hughes was three shows the boy dressed in a girlish white belted smock and black ankle-boots. See Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 12. ¶ In 1915, when Hughes was nine years old, Allene subjected him to a public humiliation: she arranged for her son to be named King of the May at the annual May Day celebration sponsored by Houston’s Christ Church Cathedral. A photograph of the young Hughes taken on this day shows a child obviously unhappy with his public exposure. Dressed in a fey, Elizabethan-like costume, little Howard is standing on the front steps of the Cathedral among some three-dozen youngsters. Standing on a high step above his “court”, little Howard looks somewhat distressed at being made a public spectacle, and in such a silly outfit. See Finstad, Heir, photo ii. ¶ “Howard is both tall and polite,” Allene wrote to the church rector, “and would make an excellent King of the May Fête. I feel the enclosed check for $250 might be used to ensure a successful day.” Hack, Hughes, p. 30. See also Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 218; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 6.

[18] For Howard’s quote, see [HH:US], p. 12.

[19] “When Allene came into her son’s room to kiss him goodnight, she found him shaking with chills. He stopped eating for the next four days and succeeded in staying out of school of the remainder of the month. Allene arranged daily house calls by the doctor, who was unable to find anything causing her son’s illness. It was only when she decided that the mountain air of Camp Teedyuskung might be a healing influence that Sonny suddenly recovered. Allene called it a miracle; her son, good planning. It was but the first of feigned illnesses that Hughes would use to his advantage.” Hack, Hughes, p. 34.

[20] “Typically, he put on a theatrical performance in letters to his mother, knowing how sensitive she was, and complaining, in a neurotic manner, of nightmares, insomnia, and exhaustion.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 23.

[21] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 42. See also Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 218.

[22] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 16.

[23] Quoted in Hack, Hughes, p. 34.

[24] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 43.

[25] One such correspondence to Allene ran: “Doctor’s report—Physical condition, bowels, feet, O.K. General appearance, better than when he first entered camp. Heart, much better now. First Aid Mark A.”  Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 40. ¶ Another, by Beard, ran: “I am glad to say that I have noticed very few of [Sonny’s] faults to which you have called my attention. However, I shall make every effort to rid [Hughes] of his sensitiveness as soon as possible.” Quoted in Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 23. ¶ Daniel Carter Beard went on to become one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America. ¶ For details of the camp’s rustic activities, see Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 21.

[26] The second summer featured its own problems: “On July 16, 1917, Howard and his good friends Dudley arrived at camp. But this year’s experience was not much fun for Hughes; a group of camp bullies made like miserable for the younger boys.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 14. ¶ The boys were happy when the summer ended. When Howard, age 11, returned from camp, Allene wrote Beard: “He is in better condition, I think, than he has ever been. His cheeks are round and fat and rosy and he is full of pep.” Hack, Hughes, p. 36.

[27] See Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 217-8.

[28] See Porter, Katharine The Great, p. 218.

[29] Hughes senior was also attempting to counteract the trend of his son’s lacklustre academic career at the South End Junior High public school in Houston, where Hughes had been enrolled in order to remain close to his mother. (Aunt Annette would remember the teenage Hughes as “a wondering body that had no thought for books.”) As for South End, “In the first ninety days of classes, he had twenty-eight absences, all approved by his mother.” Hack, Hughes, p. 41. ¶  As for Fessenden, an august brick-and-ivy establishment with Palladian windows, many notable American families have sent their sons to “Fessy”, as it is affectionately referred to by some alumni. Its students have included Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, and General George S. Patton. ¶ Howard’s father wrote a letter to the headmaster of Fessenden: “Please let Howard purchase anything which he may require and which is not against the school regulations. I wish him to uphold the subscriptions for anything which would serve to increase the prestige of The Fessenden School. So you may feel free to charge my account liberally for such and should some one or two boys not be in funds or need any assistance I would be more than pleased to help them through the year.” Quoted in Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 113; also [HH:US], p. 19. ¶ At Fessenden, the young Hughes “exhibited an entrepreneurial business flair; throughout the school year, Allene sent a steady supply of Texas grapefruit to Howard [presumably for the Vitamin C]; he kept a small number for himself and sold the rest to his classmates for a nickel apiece.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 14.

[30] “When called upon to recite poetry in class—a Fessenden essential—he stuttered and mumbled with hands trembling at his sides. On one occasion he chose Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “Old Ironsides”, the shortest poem he could find. He started out whispering, and when the teacher said, “Speak up, I can’t hear you,” Howard started shouting.” [HH:US], p. 19; see also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 114-5; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 25.

[31] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p 15. ¶ “Psychologists call this pattern of shy, anxious and socially uncomfortable behavior an “avoidant disorder”. Youngsters suffering from it have difficulty making friends, avoid new social contacts and experiences and fear looking foolish or being teased. They may want friends, but their anxiety and lack of self-confidence make them too awkward to initiate social contacts or to accept them when offered.” Fowler, “Psychological Autopsy”, p. 25.

[32] Hughes achieved one hundred percent on the winter term final exam in algebra. See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 113-5; also Barton, Flying Boat, p. 23. ¶ “At Fessenden, young Howard surprisingly applied himself to his studies. That June, he was commended for “outstanding industry and attention to study,” excelling in mathematics and working hard in languages, especially French.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 14. ¶ “he excelled at geology and physics” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 24. ¶ “When the school year ended, and Sonny brought his report card home, he had scored an 88 in Algebra, 74 in Bible, 75 in English, 62 in Spelling, 86 in Geography, and 77 in Latin.” Hack, Hughes, p. 42.

[33] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p 115.

[34] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 114; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 24. ¶ “Albermarle . . . He compelled his father to buy a full page on which to advertise the tool bit.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 24.

[35] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p 114; [HH:HLM], p. 47; and Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 15. ¶ Hughes’ relatives will recall that Howard was already playing golf by the age of 11 in 1916. His Aunt Annette recalled, “He was crazy about golf.” Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 116.

[36] He watched the Harvard-Yale boat race with his father, a Harvard man, who told him that if Harvard won the race, whatever his son wanted was his. When Harvard won, the elder Hughes was shocked to learn that his son wanted a ride in an airplane. ¶ As an adult, Hughes recalled the incident: “I asked to be permitted to fly with a pilot who had a broken-down seaplane anchored on the river in front of the hotel. My father finally consented. That was my very first contact with flying. I remember the airplane very well. It was a Curtiss flying boat. Not a land plane on pontoons but a single-hull flying boat, and the engine was overhead. It was a biplane and I am quite sure it was a pusher—the engine ahead of the propeller. If I remember right, it was an Ox-5 V-8.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 57. ¶ In 1919, “Two types of war-surplus flying boats were favored for passenger operations. The first to become available was the Curtiss HS-2L, developed from the HS-1 built in 1917. More than a thousand of these boats had seen U.S. navy patrol service. The HS-2L was a wooden aircraft, powered by a single 350-horsepower Liberty engine driving a four-bladed pusher propeller. . . .” Gandt, Robert L., China Clippers: The Age of the Great Flying Boats (Annapolis, Maryland: United States Naval Institute, 1991), p. 19.

[37] In 1947, Hughes tells the Senate War Investigating Committee that he first got interested in aviation at the age of 14. See War Hearings, p. 24365. See also “Sure Thing”, Time, July 25, 1938;  Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 14. ¶ When Hughes returned to Houston the following summer (1921) he may have enrolled in flying lessons without telling his parents. See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 9; also Fadiman, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 245. However, neither [HH:HLM], [HH:US], nor Hack, Hughes corroborate this.

[38] “The school itself was set on 200 acres of canyons, orchids, and pastures, with an administration building and three-story dorrmitory built in the Mission style, an informary, museum, laboratory, barns and shops.” Hack, Hughes, p. 43. ¶  “With an enrollment of only sixty students, Thatcher was smaller and more intimate than Fessenden, but this had no effect on Howard’s shy behavior.” [HH:HLM], p. 48.

[39] See Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p 115.

[40] Quoted in Hack, Hughes, p. 44.

[41] “Anson Thatcher [son of headmaster Sherman] recalls that Sonny was inventive and built his own radio transmitter, a copy of one he used at his house in Houston, which picked up ham signals from all over the North and South American continents.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 26.

[42] Telegram quoted in [HH:US], p. 24; also Hack, Hughes, p. 45. See also Porter, Katharine The Great, p.  219. ¶ Uncle Rupert was the one who had to break the news to his nephew. See Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 28; Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 15; [HH:HLM], p. 49.

[43] “However much anguish and pain his mother’s death caused him, Howard never discussed it.” [HH:HLM], p. 49. ¶ “The day after the funeral, Howard was visited by a casual friend, Elliott Cage, who was forced to pay his condolences by his mother. Cage remembered that afternoon with unexpected excitement. “We were alone in this big house, and spent the entire time in Sonny’s room, playing with his radio transmitter. I remember saying that I was sorry to hear about his mother, and he replied, “By turning this knob, we can hear Cleveland.” Hack, Hughes, p. 45.

[44] Later in life Hughes told a journalist, “I suppose I am not like other men. . . . I am not as interested in people as I should be, I guess. What I am tremendously interested in is science—nature and its various manifestations, the earth and the minerals that come from it.” Quoted in Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 22; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 73; “Shootout at the Hughes Corral”, Time, December 21, 1970; “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972; “The Secret World Of Howard Hughes”, p. 26.

[45] [HH:HLM], p. 45. See also Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 62.

[46] “He attended seven schools, graduated from none . . .” Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; see also “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, New York Times, April 6, 1970, p. 70.

[47] “Her all-pervading presence was too much. Howard Sr. packed up his closetful of hand-tailored suits, his gleaming Oxford shoes, his shores of Egyptian-made cotton shirts, his platinum and gold watches, and his sterling silver brushes and combs. He had to leave Yoakum.” [HH:US], p. 24. ¶ “Hughes senior had set up his tool company with excellent management and there was little need for him to be in Houston, which he now avoided as much as possible because of its reminders of his wife, over whom he obviously grieved.” Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 15.

[48] “By the turn of the 20th century, Pasadena [incorporated 1886] was a winter playground for the rich and famous. Surrounded by acres of orange groves and the 9,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains, the city was a popular resort area, dotted with elegant hotels on streets lined with attractive homes and picturesque gardens.” From the Pasadena Convention and Visitors Bureau home website. ¶ “The three moved to Pasadena, California, where Hughes rented a cottage for Howard and Annette at the Vista del Arroyo Hotel, while he took rooms at the Ambassador Hotel, his favorite Los Angeles residence.” Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 15. ¶ “Howard Jr. and Annette settled into a Spanish colonial bungalow surrounded by orchids and bougainvillea, tucked into the lush gardens of Pasadena’s Vista Del Arroyo, a hotel retreat for blue bloods and polo players. At night, waiters appeared, pushing carts piled with sumptuous dishes. In the morning, a full-time maid bustled about the rooms, changing sheets and bringing in fresh floral arrangements.” [HH:US], p. 26. ¶ The Vista del Arroyo hotel was located on 125 South Grand Avenue at the crest of a slope overlooking the grand Arroyo Seco canyon on the west, a wilderness lush with flowering plants and trees. First open for business around 1900, much of the original hotel was razed then rebuilt as a two-story building in the Spanish Colonial Revival style in 1920. The hotel grounds included bungalows for privacy. (In the 1930s the hotel was rebuilt yet again as a six-story building, which today is a U.S. Court of Appeals courthouse.)

[49] Of Howard Sr. at this time Annette recalled, “He was keeping an eye on us but he was really interested in the movies, movie people.” Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 118. ¶ A glamorous, vivacious, exotic beauty and former Ziegfeld dancer, the petite, blonde-haired Mae Murray (1889-1965) was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1920s, appearing in over forty popular silent films between 1916 and 1928. She starred as the legendary Rudolph Valentino’s love interest in The Big Little Person and The Delicious Little Devil, both in 1919. One of the silver screen’s early sex goddesses, Murray was famous as “the girl with the bee-stung lips”. At the time of her romance with Hughes, Sr., Murray was reaching the pinnacle of her great career. In 1925 she starred in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow, the highest-grossing Hollywood film of the year.

[50] Quoted in Fowler, “Psychological Autopsy”, p. 32. ¶ Katherine McLaurin (later Calloway), a first cousin of Allene and Annete, traveled from Dallas to Los Angeles to stay with Annette and Howard during this period. See Finstad, Heir, p. 117-8.

[51] In this period Hughes also owned a Stanley Steamer. See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 24; also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 33. ¶ The most popular of all the steam-powered automobiles, Stanley Steamers were manufactured between 1898 and 1925.

[52] See Hack, Hughes, p. 47; also Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 56-7; and Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 22.

[53] Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 27. ¶ “With Rupert’s stepson Rush and Dudley Sharp on visits from Houston and the East Coast, he spent countless hours in motion picture theaters.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 27.

[54] Souls for Sale (Goldwyn, 1923), an adaptation of Rupert Hughes’ own novel and co-directed by Lubitsch, starred Eleanor Boardman and celebrated vamp Barbara la Marr, and featured cameos from many luminaries of Tinseltown. While a critical triumph at the time, Souls for Sale generated lukewarm box-office.

[55] For quote, see Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 24; Curtis, James, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (New York: Limelight Editions, 1991), p. 198; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 252-3. ¶ After finding literary success with his stories, novels, and plays, and making a name for himself on the East Coast, Rupert Hughes relocated to Hollywood, where he hung out at the famous Hollywood Hotel at Hollywood and Highland in the early 1920s. The writer-director Preston Sturges remembers in his autobiography that Rupert Hughes was a member of the “Corned Beef, Cabbage and Culture Circle”, along with such filmmaking insiders as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, Ernst Lubitsch, and Sturges himself. ¶ Among Rupert’s more than sixty books and fifty Hollywood credits is a three-volume biography of George Washington, which brought him great notoriety in his lifetime. After suffering two strokes in the early 1950s, Rupert died in Los Angeles at the age of 84 on September 9, 1956.

[56] See Maguglin, Hughes: His Achievements, p. 16; also Helenthal, Francis J., Howard Hughes: The Keokuk Connection (U.S.A.: Francis J. Helenthal, 1976), p. 10; 26-8.

[57] See Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 122; 134; 166; also Finstad, Heir, p. 250.

[58] Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 380.

[59] See Finstad, Heir, p. 232, Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 29-30; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 143-6; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 13.

[60] Charles Higham reports an unsubstantiated rumor that Rupert Hughes sexually molested Howard when Howard was fifteen. See Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 26. ¶ For mysteries surrounding Rupert’s character, see the chapter “Rupert Hughes: A Man of Many Faces” in Finstad, Heir, p. 225-391.

[61] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 57; and Finstad, Heir, p. 2.

[62] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 31; also Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 9.

[63] Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 29.

[64] William Haines featured in a series of silent pictures from 1923 onward but his acting career slowed in the 1930s and he became an interior decorator to the stars.

[65] “There were certain members of “the crowd”, particularly the funsters such as Harry Crocker, William Haines and Gene Fowler, who could make Hearst break through his reserve.” Swanberg, W. A., Citizen Hearst ([New York:]: Longmans, 1961), p. 452.

[66] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 51; [HH:US], p. 26. See also Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 26. ¶ “The school has no formal record of Hughes’ attendance. The only indication that he even went there is a brief note in the school’s files that a Cal Tech upperclassman tutored Howard in solid geometry in 1923.” [HH:HLM], p. 51; see also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 29. ¶ Aunt Annette recalled, “Howard took regular upper-division classes.” Quoted in [HH:US], p. 26. ¶ “Howard . . . studied aeronautical engineering at CalTech.” Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 33. See also “Fabulous Team”, Time, August 31, 1942.

[67] “By 1929, a survey by one aviation magazine reported a total of 1,400 aeronautical engineering students enrolled in 14 colleges and universities across the United States.” Bilstein, Roger E., The Enterprise of Flight: The American Aviation and Aerospace Industry (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), p. 39.

[68] The Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory was established at Cal Tech in 1936, and renamed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1944. In the 1960s, the Hughes Aircraft Company and JPL, a part of NASA from 1959, joined together to build the first spacecraft to perform a controlled soft landing on the surface of the moon.

[69] See Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 12; 35; 37. ¶ In 1949, Hughes honored Caltech by establishing the Howard Hughes Fellowships in Creative Aeronautics, a pair of $5,000 research scholarships to be awarded annually to two aviation engineering students working toward their Ph.D. in Aeronautics or Physics at Caltech. The gift covered a student’s tuition and research expenses, as well as provided a salary for work experience at the Hughes Aircraft plant in Culver City. See “Aeronautics Fellowships Set Up at Cal. Tech”, Washington Post, January 23, 1949, p. L7; Lemon, Richard, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, Swank, January 1958, p. 72; Hack, Hughes, p. 190; also The Official Newspaper Of The M.I.T. Undergraduates, vol. LXIX, no. 3, January 14, 1949, available online.

[70] See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, Chapter VII, “The Hughes Steamer”; also Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 26-7. ¶ Around 100 different companies in America had been developing steam powered cars in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the 1920s virtually all automobile companies had switched to gasoline-powered internal-combustion engines. Around a half-dozen American companies manufactured successful models of steam cars in the 1920s but its heyday was past. Evidently Hughes’ idea for a steam-powered car was a nostalgic throwback to the decades of his youth. ¶ It is interesting that Hughes built a car to move on steam rather than petrol. You would think that Hughes would have had an involuntary affection for oil, considering it was the basis of his fortune. ¶ “Hughes had learned a costly lesson. Never leave a project to anyone without overseeing the development as it goes along.” McDonald, Hercules, p. 15.

[71] Hughes used the shorthand “H.T.Co.” throughout his copious memoranda to Robert Maheu in Las Vegas in the late 1960s; journalists and later commentators chose to refer to The Hughes Tool Company as Toolco.

[72] See “Shootout at the Hughes Corral”, Time, December 21, 1970; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 6; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 112; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; [HH:US], p. 10; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 43;  Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 28; Cole, “Hughes’s Properties Are Reported Worth $2 Billion”, New York Times, December 8, 1970, p. 30; and “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70. ¶ “Between 1924 and 1926, profits soared from $2.2 million to $8.4 million.” [HH:US], p. 126. ¶ Hughes once said, “We don't have a monopoly. Anyone who wants to dig a well without a Hughes bit can always use a pick and shovel.” See “Shootout at the Hughes Corral”, Time, December 21, 1970; Fay, Hoax, p. 32; Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 112; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 25; DuBois, Larry and Laurence Gonzales, “The Puppet and the Puppetmaster: Uncovering the Secret World of Nixon, Hughes and the CIA”, Playboy, September 1976, p. 180; Cole, “Hughes’s Properties Are Reported Worth $2 Billion”, p. 30.

[73] See [HH:HLM], p. 52; Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 146.

[74] “Sonny earned fair grades at Rice—except for his course in mathematics, in which he received the highest possible mark.” Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 11; see also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 116. ¶ “Father Hughes posted a sizable cash deposit with the Houston police in order to pay Sonny’s frequently fines for speeding.” Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 9.

[75] Some secondary sources say 6’ 2”, 6’ 3”, 6’ 3½”, others 6’ 4”. ¶ On an application to become a pilot for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation submitted to the National Defense Program on June 25, 1942, Hughes’ height is given as 6’ 3”. Also, on an application submitted by Hughes to the Federal Communications Commission dated May 27, 1952, Hughes’ height is given as 6’ 3”. Both documents are included in the FBI Howard Hughes File #95-179917. ¶ In Hughes’ last interview, given via telephone on January 7, 1972, Hughes described himself as “6 feet 3 ¾ inches tall.” See “Excerpts from Transcript of Newsmen’s Conversation with Howard R. Hughes”, New York Times, January 10, 1972, p. 22. ¶ According to Garrison, Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, p. 210, Hughes’ shoe size was 9½. ¶ Hughes’ hair was black, as is evident in photographs and confirmed by Daniell, F. Raymond, “Hughes Acclaimed Wildly By Crowds; Gets City Honors”, New York Times, July 16, 1938, p. 3.

[76] See Wickware, Francis Sill, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, Eye, July 1949, p. 9; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 24; also Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 11; Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; and [HH:US], p. 26. ¶ In 1925 America’s number one baseball player, Babe Ruth, was paid an annual salary of $52,000 by the New York Yankees. ¶ By 1929, “27 million families who filed income tax returns that year earned $1,500 or less, and another 6 million families received below $1,000, figures that placed well over half of the country’s households in a condition of economic hardship.” See Parrish, Michael E., Anxious Decades (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 82-3; 401. ¶ “$5,000 in 1920 would be the equivalent of $40,000 in 1998, while $5,000 in 1933 would be the equivalent of $62,850.” Watkins, T.H., The Hungry Years (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), p. 521-22. ¶ More figures: In 1929, “only 2.3 percent of American families had incomes of over $10,000 a year. Only 8 percent had incomes of over $5,000. No less than 71 percent had incomes of less than $2,500. Some 60 percent had incomes of less than $2,000. More than 42 percent had incomes of less than $1,500. And more than 21 percent had incomes of less than $1,000 a year.” Allen, Frederick Lewis, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950 (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1952), p. 144.

[77] Hughes Sr., a dandy, inveterate party-thrower and spendthrift, left behind him personal debts of $258,000. There were unpaid bills for Brooks Brothers suits, Cartier’s jewelery, a grand piano, a riding habit, and so on. See Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 13; also Fadiman, “Can The Real Howard Hughes . . .”, p. 244; and [HH:HLM], p. 53. ¶ “The claims against his estate at the time of his death in 1924 included gigantic sums spent weekly on jewels, flowers, and clothing.” Finstad., Heir, p. 108. See also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 116.

[78] “ . . . Big Howard’s huge desk in the Toolco building . . .” Dwiggins, Howard Hughes, p. 26. ¶ “He died of an embolism of an artery.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 30. ¶ “At his funeral Hughes [Sr.] was rightly eulogized as the man who had revolutionized the American oil industry and praised as a fine and admirable man.” Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 15. ¶ “On January 16, at the funeral held in the Hughes house on Yoakum, the rich and powerful of Houston turned out to pay tribute to the man who had revolutionized the oil industry with the rock bit. . . . “There is no man in the oil industry who was more endeared, no matter what his station or rank,” remarked one oil journal. That afternoon . . . Hughes Sr. was buried next to his wife at Glenwood Cemetery.” [HH:HLM], p. 52; see also Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 146-7. ¶ “Sonny sat restrained and unmoving through the service [at Christ Church Cathedral], but never actually visited his father’s grave.” Hack, Hughes, p. 50.

[79] [HH:HLM], p. 52. ¶ “He often worried that he might have a bad heart, as his father, and needed frequent assurances from his doctors that this was not the case.” Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 10.

[80] See Finstad, Heir, p. 2; 168-9; 172; 282; 298; 305-6; Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 29; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 4; 9; 36.

[81] “three-fourths” for Howard, say “Hughes Tool: A Gusher of Money”, p. 174, and [HH:HLM], p. 53; “75 percent” for Howard, says Hack, Hughes, p. 50; “three-quarters” for Howard, says Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 12; “75 percent” for Howard says Davenport, Hughes Papers, p. 32; “75 percent” for Howard says [HH:US], p. 29, which goes on to say that a revised second will, unsigned by Hughes Sr., would have given Howard only 50 percent. But there is a second version: “50 percent” for Howard and “one-sixth” each for the three relatives, says Finstad, Heir, p. 1; 50 percent for Howard and one-twelfth each for the other relatives, says Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 30. ¶ “three-fifths of the company, said to be worth $500,000 in 1923,” says “Fabled Mystery Man Howard Hughes”, New York Times, August 9, 1961, p. 43. ¶ 75 percent, suggests “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70.

[82] The total estate was valued conservatively, for tax purposes, at $861,518, say Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 12-13; [HH:HLM], p. 53; Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 30; Hack, Hughes, p. 50. ¶ The Hughes Tool Company was valued at $750,000. See, for example, “The Hughes Legacy: Scramble For The Billions”, Time, April 19, 1976. ¶ Yet “Hughes Tool: A Gusher of Money”, p. 174, says “his holdings were evaluated at $660,000.” ¶ “The [Hughes Tool] company’s value, about $650,000 in 1923.” Reckert, Clare M., “Borrowing Pact Signed by T.W.A.”, New York Times, October 8, 1960, p. 30. ¶ In 1946, a Hughes spokesman “set the Government-appraised value of the company in 1923, the year Howard Sr. died, at $650,000. . . . the shares [Hughes, Jr.] inherited totaled only $300,000.” Hill, “No-Man in the Land of Yes-Man”, p. 14. ¶ “Most of the estate was represented by 1,500 shares of stock in the Hughes Tool Company.” [HH:HLM], p. 53. ¶ If Howard’s stake was worth ‘only’ around $450,000 to $500,000 at the time, consider that in times to come the company is going to amass many millions a year. For example, Hughes will pocket $285,000,000 in profits from the Hughes Tool Company in one eight-year period, 1946-54. See Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 191. ¶ “His share of the estate was worth more than half a million dollars, a considerable sum for 1924, and the equivalent of what would be six million in turn of the century [2000] dollars.” Real, Asylum, p. 18. ¶  “early inheritance of something less than a million dollars . . . ” Boyne, Walt, “The Most Elusive Hughes . . . The D2/F-11 Recon. Bomber”, Wings, June, 1977, p. 46. ¶ Inherited a $17,000,000 fortune, say “Fliers Maintain Average of 161 M.P.H. for 14,824 Miles”, Washington Post, July 15, 1938, p. 6; “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, New York Times, July 11, 1938, p. 3. ¶ “$16 million inheritance”, says “The Eccentric”, Time, April 15, 1966. ¶ “inheritance of half a million dollars”, says “Rashomon, Starring Howard Hughes”, Time, January 24, 1972. ¶ “his interitance, stock in Toolco valued at $660,000.” Phelan, “Howard Hughes: He Battles for an Empire”, p. 18. Also Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 2; 8. ¶ “$325,000 inheritance”, says Egan, Jack, “Hughes as a Wheeler-Dealer”, Washington Post, April 11, 1976, p. F1. ¶ “$500,000 oil drilling company.” “Billionaire Howard Hughes Dies at 70”, p. 8. ¶ “Inheritance valued . . . between $500,000 and $650,000.” Egan, Jack and John R. Berry, “Hughes Bought, Sold Corporations As If They Were Toys”, Washington Post, April 6, 1976, p. 8.

[83] In the original will, dated April 25, 1913, the portion meant for Felix was originally given to Howard Sr.’s sister Greta, a professional opera singer. But after her untimely death from tuberculosis on February 21, 1916, Hughes added a codicil in 1919, naming Felix as a beneficiary of Greta’s share. ¶ Felix, Jr. ran a voice studio in Manhattan before moving to Los Angeles in 1924 to be close to his grieving parents. He opened a voice studio in Hollywood where he achieved great success, giving singing lessons to such luminaries as Jean Harlow. See Finstad, Heir, p. 179.

[84] “His money would change him “from an ill-at-ease male wallflower into a world-class Lothario.” Phelan, James R. and Lewis Chester, The Money: The Battle for Howard Hughes’ Billions (London: Orion Business Books, 1998), p. v.

[85] Howard Hughes would assume control of his inheritance “amid rumored counterplots engineered by his uncle Rupert to muscle in on the Hughes Tool Company.” Finstad, Heir, p. 2; see also Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 147-51. ¶ “He bedeviled his relatives to sell him their quarter interest. They didn’t want to sell, but Howard persisted in his efforts to persuade them. He became obnoxious about it, and once his Uncle Rupert grabbed him by his collar and the seat of his pants and ejected Howard from his house. But Howard returned. Finally the relatives acquiesced, simply to get rid of him.” Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 101; see also Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 8-9; Moore, Beauty and the Billionaire, p. 139.

[86] Consider Article 4 in the will of Jean Hughes (the mother of Howard Sr. and Rupert), who died at the age of 86 in Los Angeles on November 14, 1928: “I mention the name of my grandson, Howard R. Hughes Jr. to show that I have not forgotten him and that I purposely have not given him anything in my Last Will and Testament.” [HH:HLM], p. 55; also in Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 199; and Finstad, Heir, p. 173. The will had been executed nine months before she died. ¶ Howard’s grandfather Felix died at the age of 88 in Los Angeles on October 20, 1926. ¶ Felix and Jean are buried in Keokuk, Iowa. After Jean’s death, Howard’s uncle Felix, Jr. subsequently moved into the North Rossmore house.

[87] Letter quoted in Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 1-3; 149-50. See also Rupert’s letter to his mother, dated March 3, 1924, in which he refers to Howard’s “bald robbery” of grandparents Felix and Jean, and calls Howard “a miser and a selfish little beast”, in Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 148-9. ¶ Alston Cockrell, Jr., a nephew of Rupert’s third wife Patterson Dial, came to L.A. to stay at Rupert’s house (a new mansion at 4751 Los Feliz Boulevard) during the summer of 1925, then again in 1931, when he was 8 and 14 years old, respectively. He recalled that Patterson Dial “wouldn’t let Howard come in her house.” Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 287. ¶ Around 1930, Rupert Hughes remarked, according to screen actress Eleanor Boardman, “He’d throw his mother down the stairs if it was to his advantage.” Quoted in Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 205. ¶ “Nearly every aide who was with Howard R. Hughes, Jr., in the last decades of his life testified in his deposition that “the Boss” hated his uncle Rupert.” Finstad, Heir, p. 306; see also Hack, Hughes, p. 240.

[88] Even though his father’s will stated: “Should my death occur before the majority of my son Howard R. Hughes, Jr., I desire that the Houston Land & Trust Company, or some other solvent and conservative trust company, be appointed guardian of his estate to administer same for his benefit until his majority.” Quoted in Kemm, Rupert Hughes, p. 148.

[89] “A statutory provision of the Texas Civil Code stated that if a minor could convince the court that he had the ability to handle his own affairs he could be declared competent and thereafter enter into binding contracts.” Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 117.

[90] Quoted in Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 30-1.

[91] “Hughes’ $325,000 investment was soon multiplied by the oil boom of the Roaring Twenties. Toolco’s sales rose faster than a West Texas flash flood, from $2,992,000 in 1924 to $4,715,000 the next year and $8,465,000 in 1926. Pretax profit margins leaped, too, from 37 percent of sales to as high as 51 percent. In the four years ending with 1929, the company earned $20,578,000 before taxes.” Loving, Jr., Rush. “The View from Inside Hughes Tool.” Fortune, December, 1973, p. 173.

[92] “Howard Hughes was not in love. He saw in Ella Rice a functional prop who could provide him with the necessary illusion of maturity as he began his journey into adulthood.” Hack, Hughes, p. 57.

[93] Howard deeded the Yoakum house to Annette in 1926. Howard was adamant that his aunt and her husband Frederick live there. Years later Annette sold it to St. Thomas University. See Finstad, Heir, p. 124.

[94] Quoted in Finstad, Heir, p. 26; see also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 19.

[95] “Dudley Sharp was Hughes’ best man and his only friend at the ceremony. Other than his Aunt Annette, no other member of Hughes’ family attended his wedding.” Hack, Hughes, p. 58.

[96] Quoted in [HH:US], p. 33.

[97] “At twenty-two, dark-haired, thin, elegant, [Ella Rice was] the epitome of breeding and refinement.” Hack, Hughes, p. 56. ¶ “In Houston, there was no better name than Rice. The daughter of a wealthy businessman, Ella was a grand-niece of William Marsh Rice, the founder of Rice Instititute.” [HH:HLM], p. 56. ¶ “Ella Rice, dubbed by the press “the most sought-after debutante in Houston”, had made her debut during the season of 1921-22, but her world was more closely allied with that of Scarlett O’Hara and the genteel reminders of the Old South than with the anything-goes Jazz Age of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” [HH:US], p. 33. ¶ “Ella had been one of the most popular, sought-after women in Texas, quite literally the belle of the ball; a young woman with invitations to gentle homes throughout the South.” Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 38. ¶ “The union with Ella seemed to be exactly what it was: a marriage of convenience for Howard, who wanted to convince his relatives that he could be responsible. He displayed none of the affection you might expect from a young married man. Ella was a pretty girl and well brought up, but she was lacking in the qualities that Howard favored after his marriage; she was far from the extroverted, voluptuous actresses his name was later connected with.” Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 80.

[98] Uncle Chilton Gano ($15,000) and Aunts Martha ($25,000) and Annette ($100,000 and the Yoakum Street house). By this time Hughes’ maternal grandparents were already dead. In Hughes’ next will, of 1930, these and all of his relatives would be conspicuously absent.

[99] Quoted in [HH:HLM], p. 57; and Finstad, Heir, p. 17.

[100] See Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 24. ¶ At the time of Big Howard’s death, “efficiency experts were appalled by what they saw at the plant. There was no production line, and parts were carried from place to place in wheelbarrows. It was described as a “mess.” Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 14. ¶ As of 1925, “Howard had been receiving $50,000 annually from the Hughes Tool Company, as well as a $75,000 dividend in 1925.” Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 40. ¶ “In 1924 . . . the wealth poured in at an estimated rate of $5,000 a day.” Brownlow, Kevin, “Howard Hughes’s Maiden Flight”, American Film, November 1981, p. 20. ¶ Colonel Robert C. Kudell, a brilliant army engineer, was hired as assistant to the president after WWI and after Howard Sr.’s death served as general manager of the plant until 1938, resigning when Noah Dietrich took steps to assume ultimate control. See Hughes, “Howard Hughes—Record Breaker”, p. 28; “Hughes Tool: A Gusher of Money”, p. 172; Murphy, Charles J. V., “The Blowup at Hughes Aircraft”, Fortune, February 1954, p. 190; [HH:HLM], p. 52; 80.

[101] “He moved with Ella, requesting a twin-bedded suite, into the Ambassador Hotel.” Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 33. ¶ William Randolph Hearst, Jr. recalled that when he first met Hughes in the summer of 1927, Hughes kept two Dobel steamers (around $10,000 each) in the parking garage of the Ambassador Hotel. See Hearst Jr., William Randolph, “Another Insight Into Howard Hughes”, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 16, 1972, p. A-6. ¶ The Ambassador was one of the brighest spots during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Hughes kept a permanent suite at this top spot for the rich and famous which first opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1921. Broad and white-washed and perforated with rows of black windows, the Ambassador in shape and stature looks not unrelated to the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining. The Ambassador saw a lot of history over its seventy-year history. The Hotel housed the legendary Cocoanut Grove nightclub. In its heyday the interior of the Cocoanut Grove was decorated with artificial palm trees and was among the foremost places to be seen in Hollywood. The Academy Awards ceremony were held in the ballroom at the Ambassador through the 1930s and 40s. Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated there on June 5, 1968. Closed since 1988 and now owned by wheeler-dealer Donald Trump, the Ambassador Hotel can be seen in a number of Hollywood films such as True Lies (the hotel lobby), Apollo 13 (rooms used as apartments for the astronauts), and Pretty Woman (the ballroom). Others include Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Catch Me If You Can. It is reported that over a hundred productions a year are filmed there.

[102] “Though he would later, for income tax purposes, insist that he was always a Texas resident, Howard never lived in the state again [after 1925]. In fact, during the rest of his life, he made only one single, 24-hour visit to Texas [on July 20, 1938].” Real, Asylum, p. 19. ¶ “He did, however, maintain one connection with his home state throughout his life. His uninformative personal income-tax returns were filed regularly as clockwork in Austin, Texas. Even in the years when his companies were raking in megamillions, Hughes would submit personal income statements in the region of $20,000 a year.” Phelan, Money, p. 219. ¶ “Hughes Senior had never been greatly interested in the mechanics of running the Hughes Tool Company beyond making certain that it was well staffed and capable of virtually running itself. His son soon came to the same decision.” Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 17. ¶ “Even though Hughes now had full control of the tool company, he took no step to interfere in its day-to-day operations.” [HH:HLM], p. 56.

[103] Lasky Jr, Jesse C., Whatever Happened to Hollywood? (London and New York: W. H. Allen, 1973), p. 9.

[104] Quoted in Fay, Hoax, p. 32.

[105] “Between 1920 and 1924 at least one hundred thousand people a year poured into Los Angeles alone.” W. W. Robinson, “The Real Estate Boom of the Twenties”, in Caughey, John and LaRee, Los Angeles: Biography of a City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 277. ¶ “In the decade 1920-1930, 1,270,000 new residents swept into the County of Los Angeles. . . . In the early 1920s, Los Angeles, like the rest of the country, was beginning to experience a major boom. The post-war period, so full of restlessness, with its craze for entertainment and passion for frivolity, had already given birth to the Jazz Age. . . . It was a time for petting and necking; for flasks and roadside taverns; for movie ‘palaces’ and automobiles. . . . In near-by Hollywood, the movie colony was in its ‘purple period’, full of scandal and commotion. . . .  [The times were full of] nonsense, cynicism, credulity, speakeasy wit, passion for debunkery, sex-craziness, and music-hall pornography.” McWilliams, Carey, “Aimee Semple McPherson: ‘Sunlight In My Soul’, in Leighton, Isabel (ed.), The Aspirin Age 1919-41 (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 69; 70; 77.

[106] See “Hughes, 33, Holds Assorted Honors”, p. 3; Lemon, “Mystery Of The White-Sneakered Millionaire”, p. 23; Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 50; Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 56-7; 73; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 14; [HH:US], p. 41; Hack, Hughes, p. 55.

[107] See Robinson, “Real Estate Boom”, in Caughey, Los Angeles, p. 279.

[108] Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 73; Hack, Hughes, p. 55; Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 14.

[109] [HH:US], p. 41. For the filming of his golf strokes, see also Gerber, Bashful Billionaire, p. 306; Robert Maheu interview in “Howard Hughes: The Real Aviator”, DVD documentary.

[110] Updike, John, Golf Dreams (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 34.

[111] Updike, Golf Dreams, p. xiv; 13.

[112] “Just before a big tournament he tried to leap above a big fireplace to sit on the mantle during some horseplay. He cracked both elbows in the stunt and his golf game declined from then on.” Helenthal, The Keokuk Connection, p. 15.

[113] “Hancock Park continues to be one of the classier areas of Los Angeles and is today noted as the section in which the city’s diplomatic and consular corps choose to reside. In the late Twenties, however, it was a posh region for movie wealth, and for Hughes it had the added attraction of backing onto the fairways of the Wilshire Country Club, where he almost daily indulged his passionate affair with golf.” Thomas, Hughes in Hollywood, p. 25; 27. ¶ “The verdant landscape, thick with plants and trees, sheltered the house from the semitropical sun. First leasing the house, Hughes eventually bought it for $135,000.” [HH:HLM], p. 61. See also Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 79-80 (which suggests Hughes paid $185,000 for house and furnishings). ¶ “a sprawling, gloomy mansion in Hancock Park, a bastion of old Los Angeles society. Hughes had leased the mission-style estate at 211 Muirfield Drive, complete with furniture.” [HH:US], p. 44. ¶ “The house was a rather ominous-looking, Spanish style mansion with a slate roof . . .” Hack, Hughes, p. 65. ¶ The 6000-square-foot house, built in the 1920s, had wooden gates; a cobblestone driveway and courtyard; quarry tile entry; heavy brown beams; wood-paneled library. See Ryon, Ruth, “Howard Hughes in Hancock Park: His Happiest Years Were Spent There”, Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1981, sec. 8, p. 27 (which says he lived there 1929-44). ¶ For a complete description of the house, see Hack, Hughes, p. 64-6. ¶ “Oil. Its existence had long been known from the natural seepages at the La Brea tar-pits in what is now Hancock Park.” Banham, Reyner, Los Angeles (London: The Penguin Press, 1971), p. 34.

[114] “Whatever sexual curiosity occurred between the two virgins apparently took place in their compartment aboard the train to the east coast, for when the couple arrived at the Vanderbilt Hotel, they were booked not in the honeymoon suite with its canopied doubled bed, wood-burning fireplace and romantic claw-foot bathtub for two, but in the Cornelius Suite with two separate bedrooms, each housing a single bed.” Hack, Hughes, p. 58; see also Dietrich, Amazing Mr. Hughes, p. 80.

[115] Quoted in Hack, Hughes, p. 78; see also “Life of Howard Hughes Was Marked by a Series of Bizarre and Dramatic Events”, p. 70.

[116] Quoted in Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 39; also in Demaris, “You and I”, p. 76; and Wickware, “Howard Hughes: Fabulous Bachelor”, p. 9.

[117] Keats, Howard Hughes, p. 39; see also Higham, Howard Hughes, p. 47. ¶ “Tommy Thompson, the mysterious Time-Life man who hid Marguerite and Marina Oswald from press and police on the night of November 23, 1963, was (according to James R. Phelan) the real author of the Keats biography. Phelan quotes Keats as saying, “My role was confined to that of car washer. . . . The book was really written by another man.” Scott, Peter Dale, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), p. 63.

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Before and After the Newsreel

Charles Foster Kane was rejected by most everyone who ever got close to him. But it didn’t have to be that way. At the outset of his life, he was an ordinary boy living an ordinary life in an ordinary out-of-the-way place; then his parents obtained the deed to a supposedly worthless gold mine, and Kane’s life was changed forever. His mother, deciding that a young boy now facing the prospect of countless millions of dollars must have an education proper to the management of such a fortune, signed her son away to the guardianship of a worldly-wise banker who would instruct and prepare the boy for his life to come. As it turns out, this abandonment from his mother leads to at least two associated character traits in Charles Foster Kane : (a) the adult Kane demands everyone follow his every word (i.e., “to love him”), like a child who never grew up. Also, (b) this abandonment replays itself, as if in some sort of perverse repetition compulsion, all the way down the line of his life; so that by the end, with all the money in the world, he lives alone in the midst of his symbol of wealth, his tremendous castle—and Kane’s own flawed character brought all his pain on himself.

 

By the end of his life Charles Foster Kane has no one who shows him even an iota of love.

 

Why? Throughout his life Charles Foster Kane was simply being himself.

 

Simply being himself. Well, guess what? Kane’s character traits are the audience’s own.

 

So experiencing a commentary on Kane is uncomfortable.

 

Looking into Art is Looking into a Mirror.

 

If an audience is judgmental, it will say by the end of the film, “Poor bastard” or “He had it coming.” What audiences no doubt never remark is : “Wow, that guy was just like me, only intensified, because he was a character in a drama, so made larger-than-life.”

 

You are Kane. In most every way.

 

Except, possibly, one, hinted at here :

 

Licorice Pizza (2021) :  “Man. I like the sound of that.” (2:51)

 

 

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Commercial Break  :  Example

Courtesy of Bertelsmann, a private German company.

 

BONUS : Check out, say, the last ten or more issues of Variety. How many women are on the cover? Virtually all of them?

 

Are there any men left in Hollywood? Can one tell the difference?

 

 

 

[Jeff Bernstein]

Hidden in Plain Sight

The Newsreel incorporates resonances absorbed only retroactively. How clear, how ingenuous, how boyish Kane's happiness looks, at receiving love. How often do we see a smile like this one on Kane in CK? In fact, is this the most winsome smile of Kane's in the entirety of the film? And it appears in a throwaway Newsreel for a matter of seconds (10:11–10:15). We'll watch for Kane's smiles throughout CK.

[Jeff Bernstein]

The Media's Cruel and Perverse Output : the Newsreel

The very next shot : a juxtaposition of comeuppance.

[Jeff Bernstein]

Fundamental

Eight minutes of Newsreel : communicates nothing of the character of Kane but what We the Spectator endeavor to piece together out of the clues.

 

Two hours of CK : communicates nothing of the character of Kane but what We the Spectator endeavor to piece together out of the clues.

 

e.g., Newspaperman remarks at end of film (unwittingly denigrating his own tools, the moron) : “I don't think any word can explain a man's life.” (1:54:20)

 

By word, substitute the Homeric capital-W Word (“Complete Message”)—so the Newspaperman is communicating (unwittingly) : “I don't think any amount of storytelling can explain a man's life.”

 

or even

 

“I don't think any amount of words can explain a man's life.”

 

which leads to a Fundamental : A person is a mystery for life and ever after. 

 

 

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Jeff Bernstein]

Character as surrogate sacrifice

 

A main character often suffers so that the audience doesn’t have to suffer the same fate. Characters learn Truths so that the audience can thereby learn them as well. Consequently, both self and society should improve after absorption of Art. Charles Foster Kane, for example, has to suffer, so we in the audience might learn not to follow his path.

 

Example : Barry Lyndon (1975) : when your meek author was a teenager, I told myself, “I refuse to end up like Barry Lyndon at the end. What was his character flaw that brought him to his horrible final position? I know what he didn’t do. He didn’t think.” Hence Barry Lyndon as one of the most consequential movies in the life of this eminently law-abiding and society-loving author.

 

Or consider Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002). A woman has to suffer horror, so that the audience might not : the audience, in watching (or even in refusing to watch), is reminded to take care—especially at night, especially alone, and especially when drinking.

 

Or Sophocles’ Oedipus. He destroys himself by asking questions. Hence the audience says, “I’m not doing that! No questions!” Enough said on that subject. (Note : Comic relief.)

 

Characters are sacrifices so you might live more virtuously. But what if you’re not listening? Who loses?

 

 

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Stephen Perera]

now this is what I call a post!!!!

[Jeff Bernstein]

Kane and Kindness

 

Dear Stephen Perera,

 

Thank you for your kind encouragement. Obviously I know nothing of you and the other fine folks on this site, but it seems that for my entire life I’ve been suffering punishment for something of which I have no idea. This punishment simply will not stop, no matter what. I assume I’m not the only one with an inkling of this phenomenon. So a little kindness goes a long way.

 

Come to think of it—a little kindness at a chance encounter leads to Kane’s second marriage (not applicable in this specific circumstance).

 

Best wishes.

[Jeff Bernstein]

The Newsreel is composed of 128 shots

For the purposes of this commentary, the Newsreel shot-count is numbered herein as if were its own self-contained film, and its 128 shots will be added to the ultimate tally of CK’s shots when this commentary is over and men are controlling their lives again (thanks to sexual dimorphism and the first-time employment of a Kane and Balls)—and our limousines are on the road.

 

Also, when the study of the Newsreel is completed here, the final word on the subject (here) will be a numeral breakdown of shot-to-theme.

 

 

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein

[Stephen Perera]

totally fascination poster and post development.....we are ALL suffering in here that's for sure.....creation paints pictures all day every day and we seek to capture and display and to make even the slightest dent into the minds of the others....the people that don't see beyond their ambitions to accumulate money, possessions to show off and other such like soul-less ways of life....our illness is that we see whilst they merely....look

Edited February 9, 2023 by Stephen Perera

[Jeff Bernstein]

Shot 3 : Comic Obituary

1

2

3

Shot 3 : Comic Obituary

 

“Obituary : Xanadu’s Landlord”

 

Why would the Newsreel present its information in this way? Why “Xanadu’s Landlord” up front, as if Xanadu is the most important detail in the story? Apparently it is. From the standpoint of 1941, as a popular American personality Charles Foster Kane has long been forgotten by the public. The one remembrance of his life is the white elephant of Xanadu, the architectural curiosity that still draws peoples’ eyes and their pointing fingers, even if they have no idea, or cannot remember, with whom it is associated.

 

Kane’s death is announced here as if he is a mere formality in the situation : a “Landlord”. At the outset Kane is not identified for any achievement! For all of Kane’s hopes and dreams and efforts over his lifetime, it is the pointless American-eyesore Xanadu on Florida’s Gulf Coast for which is he best remembered by the public.

 

 Note the magic circle : Xanadu = Wealth = Colorado Lode = Mother.

 

Thus the obituary might be rewritten : “Obituary : Mrs. Kane’s Son”

 

Note the phrasing: “Xanadu’s Landlord”. Syntactically, “Xanadu” is the subject of the phrase, and uses the possessive, as if (so to speak) it is Xanadu that owns Kane, and not otherwise. Isn’t this Truth? Doesn’t a person’s life (possessions, responsibilities, etc.) own them? Don’t our possessions outlast us, we who made them? Aren’t we in thrall to everything that is not our own?

 

Thus the obituary might be rewritten : “Obituary : Xanadu’s Inmate.”

 

Media A******s : The “Obituary” card is a cruel dig at Charles Foster Kane. If, for example, a movie director or literary author dies, the obit runs : “____ : Great Moviemaker” or “____ : Esteemed Author”. But the death of Charles Foster Kane is announced as if he were some middle manager or accountant (“Nobody. Accounting.” No Country 1:30:56). As if all the data that follows in the Newsreel is nothing more than a formality to identify some forgotten Landlord.

 

(Example of how the Obituary might have begun : “Obituary : “Charles Foster Kane is Dead”. Would that have been too difficult to devise?)

 

The Newsreel is deliberately jeering Kane, for whom nobody at the newspaper feels any love.

 

Though the makers of the Newsreel care Zero for its content, still the makers of the Newsreel have to “sex up” their subject, cynical media a******s that they are. So they “make it interesting” by announcing the death of a person by referring to his noteworthy house.

 

Thus the obituary might be rewritten : “Obituary : the Owner of a House”.

 

Your Media's daily remit : "Let's make pointless junk as interesting as we can and fool the suckers in the audience!"

 

Which recalls an exchange in Joe Eszterhas' memoir of Hollywood, Hollywood Animal (ch. 7) :

 

Producer Marty Ransohoff, on Jagged Edge (1985) : "We're gonna scare the living s**t out of all the a******s out there."

"What a*******?" I said.

"The audience," Marty said.

 

The Media : no responsibility 24/7 except to its own wretched drives of greed and idiocy. Patient reader, remember : Social responsibility is one of the themes of Citizen Kane.

 

Citizen Kane has only just begun and our noses are being rubbed in the idiocy of media people. Now the Spectator is reminded of this horrible circumstance we’re in. “Vulnerable Male” and “Cancel Culture”—only dumb Clueless-like b*****s could come up with that, or are they ingenious : Cancel Culture puts a gun to men’s heads.

 

(Which recalls a line from Michael Herr’s Dispatches : “That’s an awful lot of gun for an itty-bitty woman.” 1.3)

 

Just as Kane “had it coming”, so does today’s Media of cruel and inhuman women who want your balls cut off, and to stay off, for the rest of your lives.

 

"Cancel Culture" and the "Vulnerable Male" : for the rest of your lives? Or do you grab a pair and run these c**** out of town? What are they going to do about it? Beat you up? Try it, women. See what happens. So, men, what are you waiting for? To grow a Kane?

 

Jack : "I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.” (Ooh, could this author tell you stories of dumb b****** in UK publishing. Twenty years of it. And not just dumb but inhumanly cruel. Coming attraction : Donald Trump's own Emily Rose Caroline Wilson, the most vile woman in the media on our planet : run out of UK academia, then run of the UK entirely, and now enabled by women of the US.)

 

Charles Foster Kane is kindly Santa Claus compared to the unfortunately very real evil media whore Emily Rose Caroline Wilson. Or shall I call her "Themily" (she changes her gender by the day)?

Yes, women of the media, this Kane is coming for you. This Kane can’t be cancelled, because this Kane has nothing to cancel, so enjoy your Dreamworld while you can, because you have a problem, you stinky-centered cracks of darkness.

 

Come on, men, over the hill! The last laugh is the sweetest.

 

Shot 3 of the Newsreel : evidence of the cruel and inhuman media, out only for themselves, with zero social responsibility. And they accuse Charles Foster Kane of the very same thing! Sounds womanish.

 

 

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by Jeff Bernstein