CHAPTER 13

INSANE ERA

By the time he was twenty-five years old, Howard Hughes had already made an Oscar-winning film, Two Arabian Nights (1927). Three years later, in Hell’s Angels—a tribute to World War I combat pilots—Hughes dazzled theatergoers with astonishing aerial photography. He had designed the dogfights himself and directed them airborne, by radio. When his pilots balked at an especially dangerous scene, Hughes switched from the director’s seat to the cockpit and, predictably, crashed his plane, requiring facial surgery.

Hell’s Angels was a critical and financial success, earning $8 million—the equivalent of about $120 million today. Hughes had two more hits with The Front Page (1931), a screwball comedy of newspaper life based on the Broadway play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and Scarface (1932), a thinly veiled version of the life of Al Capone and his Chicago mob, directed by the esteemed Howard Hawks. Various censorship entities had found the screening cut of Scarface immensely objectionable, due to a liberal amount of bloodshed and overtones of incest. Hughes, a gifted manipulator of public opinion, successfully fought back, calling these entities “self-styled guardians” who were “a serious threat to the freedom of honest expression.”

Hughes had inherited a lifetime fountain of liquidity from his father, who patented a revolutionary bit for oil drilling that could bore through solid rock. This invention was the basis for the formation of the eternally profitable Houston-based Hughes Tool Company. When Howard Hughes Sr. died in 1923, Junior was only eighteen years old, but he took over ownership of Hughes Tool, which made him instantly a millionaire. Hollywood immediately beckoned.

In their biography of Hughes, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele write, “Hughes cast himself into a life-role that he was ill-equipped to play. On the one hand he aspired to greatness. But on the other, as one who hated to make decisions, who lived in fear of making a mistake, who agonized over options to the point of exhaustion, he did not have the mental and emotional toughness necessary to survive in his chosen areas.”

Attempting to be a legend in his own lifetime, Hughes sensibly determined that he could make a quick splash in the sexy worlds of movies and aviation. In 1935, as was his habit, he courted disaster in the air. Hughes set a world airspeed record of 352 miles per hour in his H-1 racer while willfully oblivious to his gas gauge. The plane conked out, but he was able to make a serviceable landing in a beet field. In 1938, Hughes flew around the world in a record three days and nineteen hours and, after landing in New York, received a ticker tape parade attended by a million people. He had become legendary by age thirty-three.

What mostly followed, however, were gargantuan failures. Counterbalancing this record, his very able public relations machine made sure that in large measure the media kept printing the legend for the rest of his life.

As World War II began, Hughes said he would build a seven-hundred-passenger flying boat called the Hercules—nicknamed the “Spruce Goose.” It was meant to be an alternative to transporting troops and armaments by ships, which were highly vulnerable to German U-boats. Only one example was completed, and it wasn’t capable of sustained flight. Hughes also told the Air Force he could mass produce photoreconnaissance planes, but the war ended before he had finished even one.

On July 7, 1946, Hughes was piloting a prototype of the XF-11, the high-speed twin-engine spy plane he had been promising the Air Force. The plane experienced engine failure and crashed into a Beverly Hills neighborhood, slicing through the roof of a home and breaking apart on impact, littering a lawn with chunks of twisted metal. Newsreel viewers saw black-and-white imagery of the scattered wreckage. The only person injured was Hughes. He had a lacerated scalp, a broken nose, his collarbone had been crushed, his ribs were cracked, one lung had collapsed, his heart was moved to the right side of his chest cavity, and he had numerous third-degree burns. Hughes was still young at the time, in his early forties, but following the crash he was irretrievably broken, beginning a steady decline, beyond the capacity to even ask for the psychiatric help he had always needed, now ever more desperately so.

During his recovery, Hughes became addicted to Valium, Demerol, and codeine. He was left with lasting nerve damage. Eventually, he remained nude on most days. It has been theorized that even wearing clothes may have been painful to him. Already beset by a raging case of obsessive-compulsive disorder and a militant germophobe, Hughes eventually vanished altogether from public view and began a vagabond existence hiding in the biggest rooms on the top floors of various hotels around the world. As Barlett and Steele note in their biography, he would create “his own asylum.” He let his hair, fingernails, and toenails grow for months, refused to bathe, urinated in jars, and lived in mortal fear of infection. Doors and windows had to be sealed with masking tape. Papers or objects handed to him had to be wrapped in layers of Kleenex. Layers of paper towels were used to “insulate” his bed, chairs, and bathroom floors. Though impossibly moody, incredibly capricious, terribly malnourished, and eventually a complete shut-in—called eccentric, but more accurately psychotic—Hughes nonetheless was relatively coherent often enough to regularly insert himself into the ongoing Cold War narrative.

When Hughes took over RKO Pictures in 1948, the studio ranked third in total receipts behind MGM and 20th Century Fox. RKO had been the home of such film treasures as King Kong, Citizen Kane, and Notorious. But in the three years following its purchase by Hughes, during what the authors of The RKO Story would call “the most insane era in the company’s history,” this Hollywood mainstay—one of the “Big Five” production shops—would be run into the ground. The gutting of RKO would also coincide with Hughes becoming a very outspoken anticommunist.

Many who knew Hughes doubted he had any ideology. One associate said he was apolitical and “cared nothing about candidates or issues—unless they had some effect on Howard Hughes.” He never voted, and in all likelihood used anticommunism as a convenient distraction. Mary McCall Jr., at the time the president of the Screen Writers Guild, said, “Howard Hughes [threw] a mantle of Americanism over his own ragged production record.”

One of his first projects was highly personal. It was a bid to recreate the wow factor achieved by Hell’s Angels. Hughes acquired the rights to a story called Jet Pilot and signed John Wayne, one of Hollywood’s most outspoken anticommunists, to play the pilot who chases a female character who checks all the Cold War boxes as (a) a fellow test pilot, (b) a Soviet, and (c) a spy. While Hughes obsessively waited for the cloud patterns he desired, a repeat of the demand he made during the filming of Hell’s Angels, production was repeatedly delayed, 150,000 feet of film was shot (about twenty-five hours), and Jet Pilot wasn’t released until 1957. Wayne had aged a decade during the shooting, turning fifty, and most of the aerial sequences had to be cut because the planes used in the film were so clearly obsolete. Jet Pilot lost millions. A critic called it “silly and sorry.”

In RKO’s originally titled I Married a Communist, “society girl” Nan Lowry unwittingly marries a secret communist, shipping executive Brad Collins. The plot thickens when Brad is pressed by the party to use his job at the docks as a cover to commit acts of sabotage. In an effort to exploit the temperature of the late 1940s, Hughes considered having the film introduced by Elizabeth Bentley, “the Red Spy Queen,” who had turned informant and during the HUAC hearings was fingering other alleged U.S.-based spies. In the same vein, Hughes asked J. Edgar Hoover for permission to use newsreel footage of the FBI director saying, “I hate communism because it is the enemy of all liberty, all religion, and all humanity.” Hoover said no.

When I Married a Communist began shooting, Hughes screened all the footage and supplied a stream of notes. He was dissatisfied with two kissing sequences, noticed something on the nose of an actress, and thought two of the actors needed to be sent to a target range because they flinched when they shot their guns. A fan of explicit violence, Hughes also wanted a real actual person to be used in a scene where a Communist Party member is tossed off a wharf. Actor Paul Lukas was signed to play the lead, paid $50,000, and not used. One RKO veteran said that working for Hughes was like “taking the ball in the football game and running four feet only to find the coach was tackling you from behind.”

Audience Research Inc., used by RKO to calculate “the national want to see” of upcoming films, reported a lukewarm rating for I Married a Communist. Preview audiences told RKO that the picture was mediocre. First released only in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the film grossed about 50 percent below average. The notion that Hughes was using anticommunism only when it suited his purposes is supported by what happened next. On October 14, 1949, he announced a delay in the national release, a search began for a new title, and on January 16, 1950, I Married a Communist became The Woman on Pier 13. However, the film remained, as Daniel Leab writes, “crude, lewd, simplistic, and formulaic.” It lost an estimated $700,000.

In 1951, RKO hired Paul Jarrico to write the screenplay for The Las Vegas Story, in which Jane Russell was to play a sultry nightclub singer whose life is at a crossroads. On March 23, 1951, before completing all the work on the script, Jarrico was subpoenaed to testify at the second round of HUAC hearings on subversion in Hollywood. His Communist Party membership had been revealed to the HUAC by his cowriter on Song of Russia, Richard Collins, a fellow party member. Hughes fired Jarrico immediately and barred him from the studio.

On April 12, 1951, in Washington, Jarrico invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked at the hearings if he was ever a member of the Communist Party. He took the Fifth because of the experience of the “Hollywood Ten,” who, by refusing to answer on First Amendment grounds, left themselves open to contempt of Congress charges. Asked if he would help uncover anyone who was “subversive in their attitude toward the constitutional form of government in our nation,” Jarrico replied that he considered the Committee on Un-American Activities to be one such subversive organization. When California Democrat Clyde Doyle asked Jarrico if he had any suggestions for legislation to help the committee be more effective in finding subversives, Jarrico said to Doyle, “You might revise your guide to subversive organizations and publications issued by this committee. It includes, for instance, the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and, without wishing to embarrass you, Congressman Doyle, perhaps you remember that that committee contributed to your campaign and wrote speeches for your campaign. It is listed here as a subversive organization.”

Ten months later, a gala premiere was held for The Las Vegas Story, in Las Vegas. As the credits rolled, Jarrico’s name was missing, as Hughes had commanded. Since the final script had used a substantial amount of Jarrico’s work, the Screen Writers Guild objected. As per the agreement between the guild and the studios, the issue went to arbitration. Hughes intensified the battle. On March 17, 1952, he filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming Jarrico had violated the standard morals clause in his contract by refusing to answer the HUAC’s questions. Hughes also announced that he would ignore the result of any arbitration.

Hedda Hopper, Hearst’s influential Hollywood gossip columnist, immediately lined up to support the hardball tactics of the RKO studio chief. In the lead of her next column, she wrote, “I applaud the stand of Howard Hughes in his refusing to submit to any more pressure from Paul Jarrico or any other sympathizer of the Communist creed.… I have said for many years, let’s stand up and fight instead of coddling them, let’s clean them out… let’s get rid of every one of them. One rotten apple in the barrel can affect the other apples.” The Los Angeles Times praised Hughes for “showing a spirit too seldom exhibited in Hollywood.” Richard Nixon—who by this point had artfully maximized his anticommunist zeal to win a Senate seat—said Hughes had “shown the way for all industry to stamp out subversion and reaffirm the principles of American free enterprise.”

As the Screen Writers Guild contemplated a strike against RKO, Hughes taunted them openly in a statement: “My determination that I will not yield to Jarrico or anyone else guilty of this conduct is based on principle, belief and conscience.… All I want is a simple answer to a simple question: Are you going to strike or aren’t you?”

Hughes continued to drive the news cycle, even if it meant sending his film studio over a cliff. He told a Hearst columnist that it was necessary to have “everyone in a creative position or executive capacity” screened for communist sympathies. While this screening was taking place, Hughes said it would be necessary to suspend production “until the Communism problem is solved.” With the studio effectively shut down, he decided to lay off a hundred RKO employees.

Although Hughes was now rarely making public appearances, he agreed to be honored by American Legion Post 43, where he gave a speech claiming that “there were a substantial number of people in the motion picture industry who follow the Communist Party line.” He left his cocoon again to testify in his case against Jarrico. Superior Court judge Orlando Rhodes ruled that anyone taking the Fifth Amendment when asked about communism was disgraceful and therefore no other contractual rights mattered. The judge also dismissed a $350,000 damage suit Jarrico had filed against Hughes.

As all this was taking place, RKO was in free fall. It lost $10,178,003 in 1952, which brought the cumulative losses in the four years of Hughes’s control to $22,324,538, a stunning total and testimony to his relentlessly horrific management. Next, an attempt by Hughes to sell the studio turned into a gigantic scandal.

A deal had been made with what turned out to be an outrageously corrupt syndicate headed by a sleazy Chicago businessman named Ralph E. Stolkin. Not long after Stolkin’s group signed an agreement of sale in Hughes’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, on September 23, 1952, the Wall Street Journal informed the world that Stolkin and his associates had been selling fraudulent mail-order games, called punchboards, which promised prizes to winners that were rarely or never delivered. The Journal cited Better Business Bureau reports in which parents told of their children being cheated by the scam. The paper also looked at the books of a Stolkin-run charity called the National Kids’ Day Foundation. The charity had raised $650,626.50, but administrative costs were $652,585.32. The Journal did the math before its readers had to: “The public had chipped in nearly two-thirds of a million dollars, but the foundation appeared $1,958.82 poorer.”

The sale to the Stolkin group went poof. Hughes wouldn’t be able to get rid of RKO Pictures until 1955, when General Tire and Rubber Company agreed to make the largest cash purchase in Hollywood history: $25 million. Production at RKO ceased altogether in 1957.

As Hughes cashed out of the movie business, he also removed himself from any further role in the Cold War military-industrial complex. In 1955, the Internal Revenue Service had denied him tax-exempt status for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a bogus charity born of a fantastical press release that was a hysterically obvious multimillion-dollar tax dodge. But following a $205,000 loan made by Hughes to Donald Nixon, brother of the then vice president, the IRS had a change of heart. As a result of the byzantine maneuvering concocting the charity, the Hughes Aircraft Company was “donated” to the new medical institute, which severed the weapons-making arm of Hughes’s empire from his personal portfolio.

Absent any regular input from its maniacal namesake, Hughes Aircraft began to soar, becoming one of the nation’s top ten defense contractors, eventually employing the largest workforce in California (peaking at eighty-four thousand) and reliably earning billions. The company supplied surveillance systems for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the multilayered early warning system against Soviet attack, established in 1957, and also developed guided missiles, communications satellites, the first laser, and, in 1966, the first U.S. spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the moon, Surveyor 1.

As the workaround for his self-imposed seclusion, Hughes hired a front man, Robert Maheu, who ran an independent investigation agency. One of Maheu’s clients was the CIA, which hired him for cutout jobs—missions involving illegal activity that were best handled by people not directly affiliated with the U.S. government. Maheu’s first assignment for the world’s richest recluse was spying on movie star Ava Gardner, who’d had a tempestuous relationship with Hughes, including a brawl during which Gardner’s jaw was dislocated and she knocked him out cold with an ashtray.

More than two decades after Gardner’s death, more details about the incident emerged in a 2013 book by Peter Evans, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. Fearing she’d killed Hughes that night, with blood on the walls and the furniture, the actress made a panicked call. “[MGM boss] Louis Mayer nearly had kittens,” Gardner told Evans. “He was convinced I’d whacked the bastard. His boys got me out of there so fucking fast, my feet didn’t touch the Orientals.” After the knockout, and suitably recovered, Hughes proposed. Gardner said no thanks—but she then became one of many ex-girlfriends he routinely surveilled, another perverse compulsion.

Hughes was soon a complete hermit, stuck in a nest atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, curtains drawn shut, his six-foot-one body dwindling to a hundred pounds. In addition to his unaddressed psychological issues and long-standing addiction to painkillers, Hughes was battling the effects of tooth decay, hearing loss, arthritis, constipation, and hemorrhoids. Although Maheu only communicated with him by phone and they never met in person, he nonetheless assisted Hughes with a never-ending torrent of wheeling and dealing—acquiring gold and silver mines, a regional airline, and a fifth of the real estate in Las Vegas, including a half dozen “mobbed up” hotels on the Strip. Maheu also arranged for the purchase of the local Las Vegas TV station, KLAS, so Hughes could dictate which of his favorite films should be programmed.

“We knew when Hughes was in town,” wrote singer and songwriter Paul Anka, one of the first pop stars to perform at the Las Vegas casinos. “You’d get back to your room, turn on the TV at 2 a.m. and the movie Ice Station Zebra would be playing. At 5 a.m., it would start all over again. It was on almost every night. Hughes loved that movie.”

The film was a Cold War thriller starring Rock Hudson that was based on the real story of an experimental satellite that went missing in the Arctic. It was estimated Hughes watched Ice Station Zebra 150 times.