Howard Hughes

NAME Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Howard Hughes was a polymath of American industry, becoming a billionaire tycoon, record-breaking aviator, film director, and eccentric recluse. He is best known for producing controversial films like Hell's Angels and The Outlaw, controlling Trans World Airlines (TWA), and building the "Spruce Goose," the largest flying boat ever constructed. In his later years, he became a symbol of reclusive obsession and germaphobia.

BIRTH Howard Hughes was born on December 24, 1905.  His exact birthplace is disputed: a 1941 affidavit birth certificate states he was born in Harris County, Texas, while the Motorsports Hall of Fame lists his birthplace as Humble, Texas, and other sources cite Houston. His certificate of baptism, recorded on October 7, 1906, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa, lists his date of birth as September 24, 1905, adding further uncertainty. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Hughes was the only child of Howard Robard Hughes Sr. (1869–1924) and Allene Stone Gano (1883–1922). His father was a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri who patented the two-cone roller bit in 1909 — a device that revolutionised rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible locations — and founded the highly profitable Hughes Tool Company that same year. 

His mother's family were considered "monarchs of Dallas society." (2)

His uncle was the celebrated novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes. 

Hughes had English, Welsh, and some French Huguenot ancestry, and was a distant fifth cousin once removed of the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, through John Gano's sister Susannah. 

CHILDHOOD Hughes was a curious, inventive child with a strong aptitude for science and engineering. He built Houston's first "wireless" radio transmitter at age 11, became one of the first licensed ham-radio operators in Houston (callsign W5CY), and at 12 was photographed for the local newspaper as the first boy in Houston to have a "motorised" bicycle, which he had assembled from parts of his father's steam engine. He also showed an ability to build things with wires and scraps of metal from an early age. (3)

 He took his first flying lesson at the age of 14.

His mother Allene died in March 1922 from complications of an ectopic pregnancy; his father Howard Sr. died of a heart attack in 1924. 

Hughes in April 1912

EDUCATION Hughes attended Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1921, followed by a brief stint at The Thacher School in California, where the principal's son, Anson Thacher, reportedly described Hughes as "the brightest student in physics the school had in years." (2) 

He went on to study mathematics and aeronautical engineering at Caltech.Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father's death in 1924. (3) 

On his 19th birthday he was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his inherited fortune and business interests. 

CAREER RECORD 1924 Following the death of his father, Hughes took control of the Hughes Tool Company at age 18. He soon moved to Los Angeles to enter the film industry. 

1927 Produced his first financial successes, Everybody's Acting and Two Arabian Knights, the latter winning the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture. 

1930 Released the epic Hell's Angels, which he directed. It was one of the most expensive films of its time and showcased his obsession with aviation.

1932 Founded the Hughes Aircraft Company. During this decade, he also produced the controversial gangster film Scarface. 

1935 Set a world airspeed record of 352 mph in his H-1 racing landplane. 

1939 Began quietly purchasing a majority share of Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA), eventually transforming it into a global powerhouse.

1947 Piloted the H-4 Hercules ("Spruce Goose") on its only flight, traveling one mile at an altitude of 70 feet. 

1948 Gained control of RKO Pictures, one of the "Big Five" Hollywood studios. 

1966 Sold his shares in TWA for $546 million and moved to Las Vegas, where he began a massive acquisition of hotels and casinos. 

APPEARANCE Hughes stood 6 ft 4 in tall. In his youth and prime he was considered strikingly handsome, lean, and athletic. (2) 

Howard Hughes in 1938

In his final years his reclusive lifestyle and neglect of his health left him dramatically wasted: when he died his tall frame weighed barely 90 pounds, and his hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails had grown extremely long. The FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body. (3)

A trademark moustache he wore from the mid-1940s onwards hid a scar on his upper lip sustained in the 1946 XF-11 crash. 

FASHION In his youth and during his Hollywood years, Hughes was known as a dapper and stylish dresser who moved comfortably in the highest social circles. (2) 

As his OCD worsened in later life, his relationship with clothing became increasingly obsessive: he developed elaborate contamination rituals around handling clothes and objects. In his final years he wore virtually nothing, having descended into a state of extreme physical neglect. 

CHARACTER As a teenager, Hughes declared that his three goals in life were to become the world's best golfer, the world's best pilot, and the world's best movie producer. (3) 

Driven, bold, and brilliantly inventive, he possessed exceptional technical aptitude and a ferocious competitive streak. He was also a loner who could be imperious, secretive, and deeply controlling in business dealings. 

His worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder — which manifested in phobias about contamination, elaborate rules for handling food and objects, and compulsive rituals — gradually overwhelmed his personal life and contributed to his complete withdrawal from public view from around 1950. 

SPEAKING VOICE Hughes spoke with what contemporaries described as an occasionally quavering Texas drawl — a voice characterised by soft, quiet delivery and distinctive Southern verbal mannerisms. When seven journalists who had previously known him personally questioned a voice claiming to be Hughes during a 1972 telephone press conference, they unanimously agreed that the drawl, the verbal habits, and the sometimes rambling descriptions of aviation minutiae "could only have come from Hughes" — a verdict later corroborated by his former aide Noah Dietrich, who had known him intimately for 32 years. 

Hughes also suffered from progressive deafness in his later years, which contributed to his social withdrawal. Rather than meet his staff in person, he communicated primarily through extraordinarily long, detailed written memos or by telephone, using both as a buffer that allowed him to maintain total control while keeping people at a physical distance. (4)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Hughes had a taste for audacious practical jokes and an irreverent streak, reflected in his deliberate provocation of censors with films like Scarface and The Outlaw. He once took a job as a baggage handler for American Airlines under the alias "Charles Howard" and was eventually promoted to co-pilot before his true identity was discovered. (

RELATIONSHIPS On June 1, 1925, Hughes married Ella Botts Rice, socialite daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston, and great-niece of William Marsh Rice, for whom Rice University was named. In 1929, after four years of marriage, Ella returned to Houston and filed for divorce.  (3)

Hughes went on to date many famous women, including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, and Gene Tierney. When Gene Tierney's daughter Daria was born deaf, blind, and with a severe learning disability as a result of Tierney's exposure to rubella during pregnancy, Hughes ensured that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.

On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters, described by associates as the only woman he ever truly loved. They divorced fourteen years later. (3)

Jean Peters in the 1950s

Hughes never had children. 

BUSINESS CAREER Howard Hughes did not so much have a career as conduct a prolonged experiment in seeing how many industries one human being could reasonably collect before lunch. Oil tools, aeroplanes, motion pictures, missiles, casinos—if it involved machinery, money, or mild peril, Hughes tended to have a go.

It all began, as these things often do, with a rather good idea from someone else—his father. The Hughes Tool Company was built on a two-cone roller drill bit patented in 1909, which proved so useful to the النفط business that it might politely be described as indispensable. When Hughes inherited the company at the age of 18 in 1924, he displayed the rare wisdom of immediately hiring someone competent—an accountant named Noah Dietrich—to run it. Dietrich obligingly turned a $1 million inheritance into $75 million in about five years, which is the sort of financial growth that makes modern hedge fund managers lie down in a darkened room. Hughes would eventually sell the oil-tool side in 1972 for $150 million, by which point it had done quite enough heavy lifting.

Having secured a steady river of money, Hughes turned to Hollywood, because where else does one go when one has both ambition and a dangerous surplus of cash? Beginning in 1926, he financed and produced films, culminating in Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932), which announced him as a serious player—if a somewhat extravagant one. In 1948, he bought RKO Pictures for $8.8 million, becoming the first person since the silent era to own a major studio outright. His tenure there was widely regarded as a masterclass in how not to run a film company. He bought out the remaining shareholders for $24 million, then sold the whole enterprise less than a year later, somehow emerging with a $6 million profit, which suggests that even his missteps had a curious tendency to land on their feet.

Meanwhile, in aviation—his true love—Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, initially to build racing planes because ordinary planes were evidently too pedestrian. During and after the Second World War, the company blossomed into a defence giant, producing everything from radar systems to spacecraft components, and even the first working laser, which is not the sort of thing one casually knocks together in a shed. In 1953, Hughes donated the entire company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning a weapons manufacturer into a tax-exempt charity—an arrangement that must have raised at least one thoughtful eyebrow. After his death, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $5.2 billion, which gives some indication of how far the enterprise had travelled from its tinkering origins.

Not content with dominating the skies, Hughes also set about acquiring an airline. By 1944, he had quietly amassed a 78% stake in Transcontinental & Western Air—later Trans World Airlines—and played a pivotal role in developing the elegant Lockheed Constellation, an aircraft so stylish it looked as though it might ask you to dress for dinner. Unfortunately, Hughes’s aversion to appearing in court led to his losing control of the airline in an antitrust case. In 1966, he sold his shares for $546.5 million, the largest single payout of his career, which probably softened the blow.

With this windfall, Hughes did what any sensible billionaire might do: he went to Las Vegas and bought a good portion of it. Arriving in 1966, he embarked on a spending spree that would make a lottery winner look restrained, acquiring hotels, casinos, an airline, a television station, vast tracts of land, and even a respectable number of mining claims—just in case. Over four years, he spent roughly $300 million and, in the process, helped nudge Las Vegas away from its mob-inflected adolescence toward something approaching respectability, or at least a more polished version of impropriety.

Throughout all this, Hughes accumulated real estate on a scale that suggested he might be planning to misplace a small country. Acres in Culver City, thousands more in Tucson for missile production, and an impressive spread near Las Vegas were eventually gathered into what became the Howard Hughes Corporation. Among its developments was Summerlin, Nevada—a carefully planned community, which is perhaps the closest Hughes ever came to doing anything in a modest, orderly fashion.

In the end, Hughes’s business career reads less like a résumé and more like a particularly ambitious shopping list—one in which the items include “Hollywood studio,” “defence contractor,” and “city, lightly used.”

MONEY AND FAME Hughes inherited substantial wealth at 18 and grew it into one of the largest fortunes in the United States.  In 1966 the sale of his TWA shares alone brought him $546,549,771. 

During his Las Vegas years he spent an estimated $300 million acquiring hotels, casinos, and real estate, becoming the largest employer in the state of Nevada. 

During the 1940s and 1950s he was one of the most famous men in the world, receiving a ticker-tape parade in New York City after his 1938 round-the-world flight. 

In later decades his reclusive behavior generated enormous speculation, and a 1971 fraudulent "authorised biography" by Clifford Irving — exposed as a hoax — illustrated the extent of public fascination with him. (5)

FOOD AND DRINK Hughes had highly particular and at times obsessive eating habits. He kept a ruler in his hotel room to measure any peas he ordered, sending back those that were deemed "too big." 

 His aides once shipped 350 gallons of his favourite ice cream — Baskin-Robbins' banana nut flavour — from Los Angeles to the Desert Inn. A few days after it arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla. The Desert Inn ended up distributing the banana nut ice cream free to casino customers for a year. (3) 

MUSIC AND ARTS As a film producer Hughes was a significant patron of the visual arts of cinema. He spent lavishly on production values: Hell's Angels (1930) cost $3.5 million and featured spectacular aerial sequences, and he pursued authenticity with a perfectionist zeal. 

He bought every available copy of the ill-fated film The Conqueror (1956), which was shot near a nuclear test site, after many of its cast and crew developed cancer, and reportedly watched it at home every night in his final years. 

LITERATURE Howard Hughes suffered from chronic constipation and filled his many hours on a toilet by reading heaps of books and magazines, often looking for stories to adapt into movies. (3) 

NATURE Hughes spent considerable time outdoors during his aviation years, flying over vast landscapes and crash-landing in remote terrain — most famously in a California beet field after running out of fuel during a speed record attempt in 1935. (3) 

In his later reclusive phase he cut himself off almost entirely from the natural world, living in sealed, blacked-out penthouse suites. 

PETS He was not particularly known for keeping pets especially in his later years, due to his extreme germaphobia and the sterile environments he demanded.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Hughes was an excellent golfer from a young age, often scoring near-par figures and holding a handicap of two or three during his twenties. He played frequently with top professionals including Gene Sarazen, and for a time aimed at a professional golf career. Hughes regularly played at the Lakeside Golf Club, the Wilshire Country Club, and the Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, partnering with George Von Elm and Ozzie Carlton. 

Image by ChatGBT

Hughes was also a boxing enthusiast: he once asked heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey to spar with him, reportedly wanting to find out "what it would be like" — and Dempsey knocked him out. (3)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Hughes was a gifted engineer and scientist from childhood, building Houston's first wireless radio transmitter at age 11. At Caltech he studied mathematics and aeronautical engineering.

After the near-fatal XF-11 crash in 1946, and despite his serious injuries, Hughes designed from his hospital bed a customised six-section hospital bed operated by 30 electric motors with hot and cold running water, specifically to alleviate the pain of moving with severe burns. He never used the finished bed himself, but it served as a prototype for the modern hospital bed. (3)

 In 1953 he founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with the express goal of understanding, in his own words, "the genesis of life itself," and it grew into one of the world's largest biomedical research organisations with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of June 2018. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Hughes was baptised in the Episcopal faith on October 7, 1906, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa. He does not appear to have been publicly devout in later life. His obsessive-compulsive rituals and his lifelong drive to test the limits of human and mechanical performance suggest a character oriented more towards a secular, empirical worldview — defined by an almost Promethean belief in the power of technology and individual will. 

POLITICS Hughes was a powerful behind-the-scenes political operator. He cultivated high-level connections in Washington throughout his career, using them to advance military contracts and secure airline route rights for TWA. 

During the Red Scare of the late 1940s, after acquiring RKO Studios in 1948, Hughes ordered investigations into the political leanings of every studio employee and refused to approve completed pictures for release unless he was satisfied that stars had no suspect affiliations. 

He worked with the CIA in 1972 to provide cover for the covert raising of the Soviet submarine K-129. 

SCANDAL Hughes was summoned before the Senate War Investigating Committee in 1947 to account for why $22 million in government contracts had produced only two XF-11 prototypes and the incomplete H-4 Hercules. He turned the hearings to his advantage by exposing the political manoeuvring of Maine senator Owen Brewster, and the proceedings were widely seen as a victory for Hughes. 

In 1971 author Clifford Irving announced what he claimed was an authorised biography of the reclusive Hughes — which proved to be an elaborate fraud, leading to Irving's criminal conviction. 

Hughes was also indicted in connection with the leveraged buyout of Air West, accused of conspiring to drive down the airline's stock price; the charges were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge, who called the indictment one of the worst he had ever seen. 

MILITARY RECORD Hughes had no formal military service record. However, during and after World War II he turned Hughes Aircraft Company into a major U.S. defence contractor, producing aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, missile systems, the first working laser, and spacecraft vehicles. His experimental XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft was developed under a USAAF contract, and he was at the centre of politically contentious congressional hearings about wartime defence procurement. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In his youth and prime Hughes was athletic, a near-scratch golfer, and a physically bold aviator who survived four aircraft crashes. He suffered increasingly severe injuries in the July 7, 1946, XF-11 crash: a crushed collarbone, multiple cracked ribs, a crushed chest with collapsed left lung (his heart was pushed to the right side of his chest), and numerous third-degree burns.  Many historians attribute his subsequent long-term dependence on opiates — specifically codeine prescribed as a painkiller during his convalescence — to this crash. 

Hughes also suffered from severe, progressive obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic constipation. His later years were marked by dramatic physical decline: by the time of his death he weighed barely 90 pounds and was also suffering from serious kidney failure. 

HOMES Hughes grew up in the upper-crust Houston society; his teenage home at 3921 Yoakum Blvd. in Houston still stands, now known as Hughes House on the grounds of the University of St. Thomas. 

After his first marriage in 1925 he moved to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. 

From 1966 onwards, in the last decade of his life, Hughes lived exclusively in hotel penthouses in various cities, beginning with the two top floors of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas — which he purchased for $13.2 million, paying half in cash, when management asked him to vacate. He subsequently moved through penthouse suites in Las Vegas, Boston, Nassau, Managua, Vancouver, London, and Acapulco, always occupying the top floor.

TRAVEL Hughes was a globe-trotting figure in his prime. His aviation career took him across the United States on record-breaking transcontinental flights. Hughes 1938 round-the-world flight took him from New York City to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis before returning to New York. 

Hughes with his Boeing 100 in the 1940s

In his later reclusive years, however, travel became a form of flight from scrutiny rather than adventure: he moved between international hotel penthouses, rarely venturing outside. 

DEATH Hughes died on April 5, 1976, of kidney failure, at 1:27 p.m., on board an aircraft en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. 

He left no valid will, and after protracted legal battles his estate was divided among cousins and other heirs. 

Howard Hughes is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, next to his parents.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Hughes has been depicted in numerous films and television productions. Most notably, Leonardo DiCaprio played him in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), for which DiCaprio received widespread critical acclaim.

The 1980 film Melvin and Howard dramatised the story of a man who claimed to have given Hughes a lift and been named in his will. 

Hughes also featured extensively in the fraud scandal surrounding Clifford Irving's fake biography, dramatised in the film The Hoax (2006) with Richard Gere. 

Hughes has been a subject of numerous documentaries exploring both his aviation legacy and his mental deterioration. (1)

ACHIEVEMENTS Set the world landplane airspeed record of 352.46 mph on September 13, 1935, in the Hughes H-1 Racer — the last time a privately built aircraft set the world airspeed record. 

Set a new transcontinental airspeed record on January 19, 1937, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds. 

Flew around the world in 91 hours, 17 minutes on July 14–17, 1938, shattering Wiley Post's 1933 record by almost four days. 

Won the Harmon Trophy twice (1936 and 1938), the Collier Trophy (1938), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1939). 

Piloted the H-4 Hercules — the largest flying boat in history and the aircraft with the longest wingspan of any plane from 1947 until 2019 — on its one and only flight on November 2, 1947. 

Founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1953, which grew into one of the world's largest biomedical research charities, with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of 2018. 

Inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973. 

Designed a prototype hospital bed following his 1946 crash that served as the basis for the modern hospital bed. 

Transformed Las Vegas from an organised-crime-run frontier town into a legitimate cosmopolitan city during his Las Vegas years (1966–1970). 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Spartacus Educational (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia (4) Time Magazine (5) Wisconsin Historical Society