By clothing-bag, 30/11/2022

Howard Hughes, the richest man on earth: wild love, an obsession with microbes and a macabre death

He wanted to be the best aviator in the world, the richest man on earth, and the biggest producer in Hollywood. Howard Hughes , whose death is 45 years old today, achieved his three purposes and also that his own legend reached the movies. He was one of the most astonishing, intriguing and controversial figures of the twentieth century: the first billionaire, a brilliant inventor, a daredevil pilot, a visionary movie and star maker, a playboy who conquered the greatest queens – and kings – from the golden age of the big screen, a lobbyist with obscure political ties, one of the owners of Las Vegas, and a man tortured by his obsessive-compulsive disorder who ended his days in seclusion and alone, and died in a macabre and mysterious way.

He was born in Humble, Texas, in December 1905 and inherited his fortune from his father, oilman Howard Robard Hughes, who died when he was just 18 years old. His mother, Alene, had died two years earlier from complications of an ectopic pregnancy. Alene also suffered from mysophobia (fear of dirt and microbial contamination) and had always been overprotective of her son to the point of isolating him from all environmental germs and bathing him daily with disinfectants. Losing her so soon was devastating. for the young Howard, who according to his biographers, inherited his obsessions and could never get rid of the melancholy that worsened with the death of his father.

He then concentrated on multiplying his wealth. And he coined two maxims: “I can buy all the men in the world”, and “Everyone has their price”. He was willing to pay it. In those young years he developed the work method that he would maintain throughout his life: discover and hire the most talented in their field, generously raising them up in exchange for their absolute loyalty.

Once he was wealthy enough, he was able to focus on his main passions: movies, aviation, and women. In that order. He moved from Texas to Hollywood, where his screenwriter uncle lived, and began financing his first films at age 20. In 1927 he produced Brothers in Arms. And then, against the advice of his family, from whom he bought out his share of the family business, he invested a then-record $3.8 million in the World War I epic aerial drama Hell's Angels. Three directors passed through the set before he took the job himself. But when the film finally came out, in 1930, it was a critical and commercial success that made blonde Jean Harlow the star of the day and Hughes one of Hollywood's great players. .

In 1932, he produced Scarface, inspired by Al Capone, and then directed the western The Outlaw, the filming of which left behind an anecdote that revealed his obsessive personality. Disturbed by a wrinkle in the blouse worn in one scene by the lead actress, Jane Russell, Hughes designed a special push-up bra to make it completely smooth: “This is a problem of engineering, we have to exploit Jane's lead to the maximum”, he said then, according to his biographer Peter Harry Brown in Howard Hughes: The untold story. The critics weren't kind to the film this time, but it was a box office success: with Jane Russell, the young mogul had discovered a star once again. Los Angeles's most attractive women had many reasons to want to be close to Hughes.

Her list of lovers is endless. It is said that she was bisexual, and that everyone from Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn and Rita Hayworth, to Elizabeth Taylor, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, to Elizabeth Taylor, surrendered to her charms. Ida Lupino, Lana Turner and Jean Harlow herself. She also Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Russell Gleason and Richard Cronwell.

But above all, two were the women who stood out in his love life, although none of them became his wife –he was married to Ella Rice and Jean Peters–. The first was Ava Gardner, “the most beautiful animal in the world” –as Frank Sinatra called her–, although the actress repeatedly insisted that their relationship was never sexual. One version says that, upon learning that Ava had spent the night dancing with a Mexican bullfighter, Hughes slapped her jaw dislocated. The actress defended herself by hitting him with a bronze statuette: she knocked him out. To make peace, the tycoon gave her a Cadillac. They were friends for 22 years but, despite the millionaire's insistence, who proposed to her on multiple occasions, Ava was adamant.

Hughes liked temperamental women. His other great love was none other than Katherine Hepburn , the first woman to wear pants in Hollywood, who shared with the millionaire his indomitable spirit and her extravagant character. Introduced by Cary Grant in 1935, Hughes did everything possible to win her over. Hepburn fell for her charms; years later he would reveal that he seemed “very handsome with his aviator glasses”. They flew together, played golf, tennis, rode horses andwere passionate in bed: "With Howard I never felt self-conscious, because he wasn't at all," she would recount in her memoirs.

Last year, letters in which Hepburn called him her “field mouse” and “the most wonderful boss in the world” were up for auction. In one, he writes to her: “You are the sweetest and wildest man, the most unpredictable and brilliant”, “When I look into your eyes, with that sad look of yours, I see in they the past and the future, as well as the present: I see America”. Their romance lasted four years. Hughes' continued infidelity ended the relationship and Kate returned to the arms of Spencer Tracy.

At the end of 1947, he locked himself in a Hollywood projection room for a movie marathon that lasted until the spring of the following year. At that time, he was about to buy the mythical film production company RKO. In an image that would later portray Martin Scorsese in the film The Aviator (2004), with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of the billionaire, Hughes would spend four months naked in a from the seats in the projection room, feeding on chocolates and relieving themselves in jars. A year earlier he had suffered a plane accident and the movies distracted him from the pain caused by the sequelae of his injuries.

He sold the studio in 1955 so he could concentrate on aviation. Scorsese's film reproduces some of Hughes' aerial adventures: his purchase of TWA airlines to compete with Pan Am; the transcontinental airspeed record; the round-the-world flight that made him a national hero in 1938; and his construction of the world's largest wooden seaplane, the Hercules, which only flew once. But his passion for aviation cost him dearly: after four accidents, 75% of his body was affected by burns, his heart was displaced and his frontal cerebral lobe, which governs the human emotional center and the control of personality, was affected forever.

He had been staying at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas for weeks, in 1966, when the hotel manager asked him to vacate his suite so he could accommodate other guests who had booked it for Christmas. Hughes then applied his maxim: instead of leaving, he bought the hotel, from which he did not move until four years later. He was already addicted to morphine and codeine since his 1946 accident, and now lived in isolation.

When he learned that Las Vegas hotels were tax-reduced, he bought as many properties as he could from his suite and became one of the big investors in the new boom in Sin City. During his confinement, he also realized that the television channels did not broadcast 24 hours a day, so he decided to buy one of the channels to spend sleepless nights watching his favorite movies. he . Or even pick up the phone and order them to repeat one of their favorite scenes. “You went back to your room, you turned on the TV at two in the morning and they were playing the movie Zebra Polar Station. At five, it started again. And so almost every night. Hughes adored that film”, says the singer Paul Anka in his memoirs.

But nothing, not even the movies he loved, managed to distract him from the phobia of microbes that his mother had instilled in him. Sometimes, he would wash his hands until they bled, he would burn all of his wardrobe if he thought there were too many germs, and he would give precise instructions to the hotel staff about cleaning his room. All her life she had suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, among other mental illnesses. Many of his biographers – about a dozen books have been written about his life and several films have been filmed – maintain that OCD contributed to his success: if he had not suffered from this condition, perhaps he would not have lived under the feverish perfectionism that applied from Jane Russell's underwear to the wings of the world's fastest plane. But in his later years, his emotional instability and the deafness he had suffered from since childhood worsened, and he increased his use of medication.

Hughes withdrew more and more from public life and locked himself up in different hotels, usually always in front of the same movies, which he watched in the dark and continuously, in the middle of a cloud of morphine.

In 1970, he secretly left with a group of collaborators for the Bahamas, and from there to Managua, from where he fled the earthquake that destroyed the city, heading for London. At the age of 67, he pilots a plane for the last time to Acapulco, where he will live surrounded by Mormons until his death . Although he was not religious, he was convinced that only members of that community were trustworthy. They were the ones who embarked him, already dying, on a private flight to the Houston hospital on April 5, 1976. He did not reach the ground alive: it was only fair that the aviator died in the clouds. He was 72 years old.

The doctors who certified his death found “a human wreck”: the elderly billionaire weighed no more than ninety pounds, wore a forty-inch beard and was long Nails that hadn't been cut for years. He had five broken hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms through which he injected codeine; prolonged use of narcotics had destroyed his kidneys. The FBI had to take his fingerprints to make sure it was really Hughes. He was buried two days later in Houston's Glenwood Cemetery in front of just six people.

He had bought all the men in the world, but he ended his days all alone.

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