Howard Hughes: A chronology
Born in Texas with a silver spoon in his mouth, Howard Hughes spent his young adulthood as a swaggering movie mogul and daring aviator. This chronology reveals all the American billionaire’s triumphs and disasters, then charts his descent into madness, squalor and death.
1905
24 December: Howard Robard Hughes Jr is born in Houston, Texas. His mother is Allene Gano Hughes and his father is Howard Robard Hughes Sr, founder of the Hughes Tool Company and inventor of the ‘rock eater’, a drill bit that revolutionised oil drilling and was the source of his wealth.
Hughes Jr’s mother disapproves of his making friends because she believes other people are disease-carriers. If her son sniffles or coughs, she rushes him to a doctor and lavishes attention and sympathy on him.
1917
One of the US's worst race riots breaks out in Houston, Hughes’ home town, leaving 17 dead. Some believe that this made the future tycoon a racist.
1922
29 March: Hughes’ mother dies.
Hughes attends the Thacher School in Ojai, California, 85 miles north of Los Angeles. He also spends time with his uncle Rupert Hughes, a screenwriter for Samuel Goldwyn, who inspires his later interest in film-making. He never graduates from high school, but his father arranges for him to sit in on classes at Cal Tech by donating money to the university.
1923
Hughes returns to Houston and enrols at the Rice Institute (now Rice University).
1924
14 January: Hughes’ father dies.
The 19-year-old Hughes, having inherited much of the family estate, drops out of the Rice Institute.
His uncle Rupert begins to supervise Hughes’ share of the estate plus his interest in the Hughes Tool Company, a duty that is supposed to last until the younger Hughes is 21.
Family quarrels result in Hughes instructing company lawyers to buy out his relatives, all of whom he has alienated.
26 December: A Houston judge and friend of Hughes’ father grant Hughes legal adulthood, allowing him to take over the tool company.
1925
Hughes writes a will that, among other things, provides for the creation of an institution to support medical research.
1 June: Hughes marries Houston socialite Ella Rice. They move to Hollywood so that he can pursue his interest in making films. He keeps Ella isolated at home for weeks on end.
Hughes hires Noah Dietrich, a former race-car driver turned accountant. Most experts agree that it is Dietrich who turns Hughes into a billionaire. Says Robert Maheu, later Hughes’ chief adviser, ‘He was delivering Howard profits of $50 to $55 million a year. Big bucks in those days.’
1927
Hughes and his team of Noah Dietrich (head of the movie subsidiary of Hughes Tool Company) and director Lewis Milestone make the silent comedy Two Arabian Knights.
Hughes meets film star Billie Dove (‘The American Beauty’) and becomes obsessed with her. She is married to (though separated from) director Irwin Willat. It is rumoured that Hughes pays Willat a huge sum – quoted variously as $35,000, $300,000 and $325,000 – in return for Willat agreeing to a divorce (which is finalised in 1929). Then Hughes buys out Dove’s contract from First National Studios and signs her to his own studio, Caddo Pictures, for $50,000 a movie. However, both films in which she stars for him – The Age of Love and Cock of the Air – are financial failures, and by the time the second reaches the screen in 1932, Hughes has lost interest in Dove and they part.
1928
The film The Racket, produced by Hughes, is nominated for an Oscar.
His marriage failing, Hughes becomes involved with a string of actresses, which would eventually include Jean Harlow (the star of Hell’s Angels, see below), Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Jane Greer, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Janet Leigh, among many, many others. An equal opportunities lover, he was also romantically linked to Richard Cromwell, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power and Randolph Scott.
1929
Hughes is divorced from Ella Rice. She returns to Houston.
Two Arabian Knights wins an Oscar for best director of a comedy picture.
1930
Hughes writes and directs Hell’s Angels, which is about World War I aviators. It is the most expensive movie of its time, costing $3.8 million, and loses $1.5 million at the box office. Despite the film’s lack of success, it establishes Hughes as a major Hollywood player.
While making Hell’s Angels, Hughes earns his pilot’s licence and develops a lifelong passion for aviation. One reason for this is the fact that, as a result of a childhood illness, he suffers badly from tinnitus (ringing and noises in the ears). It is only in a plane’s cockpit that the noises cease.
1931
The film The Front Page, produced by Hughes, is nominated for an Oscar.
1932
In a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, Hughes starts the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, to carry out the expensive conversion of a military plane into a racing aircraft.
Scarface: The shame of the nation is finally released. Hughes is the uncredited producer (Howard Hawks, the director of the picture, gets the onscreen producer credit). It was actually made in 1930, but its release was delayed due to Hughes' squabbles with industry censors over the film’s sensationalism and glorification of gangsters. The film’s subtitle is added to help get over this. The film does badly at the box office and Hughes finally withdraws it. It is rarely seen in the US until reissued in 1979.
1933
Hughes lobbies the US Department of Commerce to lower his pilot’s licence number from 4223 to 80.
Hughes signs on as a co-pilot for American Airways under the name Charles W Howard. His disguise is quickly discovered and he resigns.
1934
Hughes wins the All-America Air Meet in Miami flying the H-1 Racer, the world’s most advanced plane, which he has built and test-piloted himself. Hughes calls it ‘my beautiful little thing’.
1935
13 September: Hughes sets a new speed record of 353 mph with a streamlined H-1.
1937
19 January: Hughes sets a new record flying an improved version of the H-1 (see 1935) from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. His average speed is 332 mph.
Hughes buys into Transcontinental & Western Air (later TWA).
1938
10-14 July: With a crew of four, Hughes pilots a Lockheed 14-N Super Electra – named New York World’s Fair 1939 – on a round-the-world flight. On the way, he cuts Lindbergh’s New York-to-Paris record in half, and finishes the entire journey in 3 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes. As a result, Houston’s William P Hobby Airport is renamed in his honour. (It is later changed back when protests are made about naming it after someone who is still alive – perhaps a wise move.)
1939
7 August: Hughes is awarded the Congressional Gold Medal ‘... in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world’.
Jack Frye, president of TWA, is bitterly feuding with board members who are against new plane purchases. At Frye's urging, Hughes quietly buys up a majority of TWA stock (for less than $7 million) and takes over the company.
Now that Hughes owns TWA, federal law prohibits him from building his own planes. Seeking one that can perform better than TWA's current fleet of Boeing Stratoliners, Hughes approaches Boeing's competitor, Lockheed. He has already established a good relationship with the manufacturer, since it had built the plane he used in his record flight around the world in 1938. Lockheed agrees to Hughes' demand that the 40-passenger airliner be built in absolute secrecy. The end result is the revolutionary Constellation.
1941
Another of Hughes’ film productions, The Outlaw, is released. It becomes controversial for its sexually explicit advertising and content, both featuring the barely covered bosom of its star Jane Russell. During the production, Hughes was obsessed with a minor flaw in one of Russell's blouses, and wrote a detailed memorandum on how to fix the problem. He contended that fabric bunched up two seams, giving the distressing appearance (to Hughes, at least) of two nipples on each of Russell's breasts. He designs a complicated cantilevered bra to show them off to best effect, but unbeknownst to him, she never wears it because it is so uncomfortable.
1942
July: Industrialist Henry Kaiser approaches Hughes with his idea for a fleet of flying transports to safely move troops and materiel across the Atlantic. They form the Hughes Kaiser Corporation and obtain an $18 million US government contract to construct flying boats.
1944
Hughes flies a Constellation from coast to coast in a record seven hours. His co-pilot is TWA president Jack Frye.
1946
Hughes meets starlet Jean Peters at a party in Newport Beach, California. He invites the 19-year-old and her date, war hero/actor Audie Murphy, to fly with him to Catalina Island aboard his private plane. According to some accounts, Hughes and Peters immediately embark on an unpublicised romance and are rumoured to have become engaged before splitting in the mid-1950s. There are also persistent rumours that Hughes and Peters had an illegitimate child in 1954.
7 July: Hughes undertakes the first flight of his XF-11 experimental twin-engined photo-reconnaissance plane. An oil leak forces one of the counter-rotating propellers to reverse direction. Hughes tries to save the plane by landing it on the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but after clipping three houses in Beverly Hills, it crashes into a fourth. The fuel tanks explode, setting fire to the house and surrounding area. Hughes, lying beside his burning airplane, is rescued by a Marine master sergeant who is visiting friends next door.
The injuries Hughes sustains in the crash, which include a crushed collar bone, six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a fractured skull and third-degree burns, affect him until his death. Many attribute his long addiction to opiates to the large amounts of morphine he is prescribed now. The trademark moustache he wears in later life is an attempt to cover a minor facial scar from the crash.
His difficult nine-month convalescence is overseen by Dr Verne R Mason, who becomes a lifelong friend and with whom Hughes has conversations about medical research. He later appoints Mason chair of the Hughes Tool Company’s medical advisory board.
Chair of the US Senate War Investigating Committee, Senator Owen Brewster announces that he is very concerned that the government has given Hughes millions for the development and production of two aircraft that have never been delivered. According to Brewster, in 1942 President Franklin D Roosevelt overruled his military experts in order to hand out the contracts to Hughes for the F-11 and the H-4 (later known as the ‘Spruce Goose’; see 1947). Brewster also reveals that Hughes provided ‘softening-up parties’ for government officials. He paid starlets $200 to attend these parties, their duties including swimming nude in Hughes' swimming pool. Julius Krug, the chief of the War Production Board, often attended the parties, and a congressman who was also a frequent guest says: ‘If those girls were paid $200, they were greatly underpaid.’
1947
The US Senate War Investigating Committee (SWIC) investigates Hughes’ failure to complete his wartime contracts (see 1946). Among those tarred by Senator Brewster’s brush is Elliott Roosevelt, the son of the late president, who, Brewster says, Hughes bribed by supplying him with girls. The investigation also exposes the expense accounts of Hughes’ press agent, which show that he paid $132 for nylons for Elliott Roosevelt’s wife, the actress Faye Emerson.
Hughes tells journalists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson that Brewster is being paid by Pan American Airways to cause trouble. According to Hughes, Pan Am is trying to persuade the US government to set up an official worldwide aviation monopoly under Pan Am’s control. As TWA’s owner, Hughes poses a serious threat to this plan. He claims that Brewster approached him and suggested he merge TWA with Pan Am. When he refused, Brewster began a smear campaign against him.
Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson begin their own campaign against Brewster. They report that Pan Am provided Brewster with free flights to Hobe Sound, Florida, where he stayed free of charge at the holiday home of Pan Am vice president Sam Pryor.
These charges are repeated by Hughes when he appears before the SWIC. Brewster denies the allegations, but they help to divert attention away from the charge that Hughes wasted millions of government dollars.
2 November: To prove that he had indeed produced at least one seaplane, Hughes flies the giant H-4 – also known as the Hercules and, more familiarly, as the ‘Spruce Goose’ because it is constructed largely of wood (birch, however, rather than spruce). Built at his Westchester, California facility, it remains the biggest aircraft ever built, with a wingspan of 320 feet (98 metres), eight massive engines and 17ft (5.2m) propellers, and weighs 300,000 lb (136,080kg). Hughes flies it for about a mile across the harbour at Long Beach, California, a flight that takes less than a minute and reaches an altitude of only about 70ft (21.3m). Although it never flies again, Hughes continues research on it until 1952 and, throughout his life, maintains it at a cost of $1 million a year. Initially displayed at Long Beach, near the Queen Mary, it is now at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. In 1977, the US Navy seriously considers test flights with the H-4 as part of research into low-altitude transoceanic flight, but finally decides against it.
The SWIC never completes its report on the non-delivery of the F-11 and the H-4. The committee stops meeting and is eventually disbanded.
1948
Hughes purchases 929,000 shares in RKO Studios. He cuts staff from 2,500 to 600. His ‘micro-management’ of the studio and his absurd behaviour – for instance, he shuts down the operation for weeks at a time to try to control dust or to redraft his will – will eventually lead to its downfall (see 1955).
Former starlet Terry Moore later claims that this is the year in which she is secretly married to Hughes on a yacht in international waters off Mexico, never to be divorced.
