It started because he didn’t want to leave his room. In December 1966, the Hughes entourage began to occupy the penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Howard would remain in that suite of rooms for another four years.
Hughes had checked into the penthouse on a whim, and after a few days the staff needed him to vacate for a prebooked reservation. Hughes wouldn’t answer the in-room phone, so the only way for hotel management to communicate with him was to slip notes under the door. When they slipped through a note asking him to please leave to make way for a new guest, Hughes scrawled a note of his own.
“How much would I have to pay to stay if I bought the hotel?”
The answer came back: “$13 million”—possibly an attempt to outprice even Howard Hughes.
Hughes wrote back, “Sold.” With half a billion dollars to play with thanks to the TWA deal, he began buying up real estate in Las Vegas.
His life was now conducted entirely from bed. He watched TV, had aides project movies, injected and swallowed drugs (which he and his aides referred to as “goodies”), handwrote and dictated voluminous memos, and talked on the phone. He barely ate; it would regularly take him eight hours to finish a can of soup. The nourishment of food couldn’t compete with the fulfillment he got from the same source that had been providing it for him for decades: Hollywood movies, starring Hollywood women.
“He would eat a spoonful and then get interested in watching a movie on his projector,” remembered aide Gordon Margulis. “Often a movie he had already seen twenty times. The soup would cool down and he would send it back to be reheated. It had to be heated carefully so that it would be hot enough but not too hot. He would eat another spoonful or so, get involved in the movie again and send the soup back to be reheated. There were times when I reheated the same can of soup ten or twelve times.” When he came off his marathon canned-soup diet, Hughes switched to the hotel’s vegetable soup. “Now this is only a trial period,” Hughes said, “because I want it just the way I like it and it has to be right.”
Howard talked to Jean on the phone every day. Mainly, they discussed when she would move to Vegas to be with him.
“I had no interest in moving to Las Vegas,” she later said. “It is not my kind of town.” Still, she would have compromised if Howard would have done the same. “I wouldn’t go unless he would move out of the hotel. I was not going to live in a Las Vegas hotel.”
There had been a time when the couple had shared the same conception of their dream home. They had fantasized, Jean said, “to one day have a ranch that would have everything on it that would make him happy and would make me happy.” Shockingly, given the total duplicitousness that had marked his approach to marriage previously, Howard actually attempted to make good on this promise. One day he called Jean from Vegas and said, “I bought you a ranch.” It was thirty minutes southwest of the Desert Inn, outside of town. Hughes told her he was going to have an airstrip installed for him, and that there would be plenty of room for her to keep horses. He had bought the ranch from heiress Vera Krupp, the original owner of a 33-carat blue-white culet-facet, 1920s diamond that Richard Burton would buy for Elizabeth Taylor in 1968.
“He sent me pictures of it,” Jean said of the Krupp Ranch. She was not impressed, by the land or its location. Howard had told her, Jean recalled, that “it was 25 miles out of town and the road was very bumpy, so I had visions of myself being stuck on a ranch 25 miles out of Las Vegas.” This was the big difference between Hughes’s Krupp purchase and Burton’s Krupp purchase: a ranch, located miles away from where your husband clearly intended to spend most of his time, was not the same as a diamond ring that would sit right on a woman’s finger, reminding her of her husband’s love all the time.
Still, Jean would have moved . . . if he had moved in first. But Howard would not leave his hotel. Unable or unwilling to see his wife in person, Hughes began calling KLAS, a local Las Vegas TV station that showed movies at night, to request that they start playing more features starring Jean Peters. This wasn’t his only complaint: why not run more westerns, more aviation pictures? And how come they went dark at 1 A.M.?
Finally, one night in 1968, the owner of KLAS, a local hero named Hank Greenspun, answered the phone and told Howard that if he owned his own TV station he could do whatever he wanted. So Hughes bought KLAS. He had the station send him a list of potential movies every week, and at night when he was ready to watch, he’d have an aide call up and make requests. Fifteen minutes before a movie was about to end, the station would get a call telling them what the next movie needed to be. His most frequent requests, by far, were the movies Robert Mitchum had made for him at RKO—which, of course, also starred Jane Russell, Ava Gardner, Faith Domergue, and other actresses who had been the subject of Hughes’s obsession.
Operations received frequent requests from reporters who wanted to write about Jean Peters. Hughes ordered that all of these journalists receive no cooperation from his wife or anyone around her. But the Hughes camp couldn’t stop reporters from tracking Jean down and following her around Los Angeles. In a syndicated article on Peters, Vernon Scott, the first man to profile Jean as Mrs. Hughes, reported that the tycoon’s wife went out in public constantly, unrecognized, accompanied by a bodyguard. He described her as a fan of baseball, basketball, and football who spent many days voluntarily recording books for the blind at the Braille Institute, and nights at UCLA attending classes. Scott also claimed, erroneously, that Peters often flew to Las Vegas on the weekends to spend “two or three days with her busy husband.”
Reporter D. L. Lyons tracked Peters down at UCLA and sat in on one of her night school classes, which she attended incognito. There he witnessed her silently taking in a discussion on capitalism, with her classmates apparently unaware that she was the wife of America’s “most mysterious capitalist.” Among other things, Lyons noted, “Jean Hughes is at once married and unmarried—the latter in the sense that there is no record of her having been seen in public with her husband since their marriage more than 11 years ago. During their married life, they have never been photographed together, to the best of anyone’s knowledge.” Lyons also reported that he had heard that Peters spent weekends in Vegas with Howard, though he quoted a Desert Inn employee as saying, “I’ve been here for more than a year and I’ve never seen the lady. At least I’ve never recognized her.”
Hughes biographers Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske would later claim that Scott and Lyons were the same person, and that “[f]or his expose [of Jean Peters], Scott used the nom de plume D. L. Lyons.” If true, Scott wrote about Peters under both his real name and his pseudonym, and used the assumed name more than once to write about Peters. And yet it does seem clear that, as opposed to the extremely sanitized Scott story, the initial Lyons story included facts that Hughes would have been less pleased to see in print, such as the absence of evidence that the married couple spent time together in Vegas. However, the Hughes camp was no doubt happy about the way the Lyons story ended: first with anonymous friends denying that Jean ever felt “isolated, lonely or hidden away,” and then by describing “secret trips” that Mr. And Mrs. Hughes were said to have taken, “off for Peru or some such place on one of his jets”—making the privacy of the relationship feel wildly romantic instead of claustrophobic. A “Hughes employee” was given the last word: “Mrs. Hughes leads as interesting a life as any woman in the country. And I can tell you this: Howard loves her more than anyone else in the world.”
These last two sentences may have been true, but the Hughes-Peters marriage had never been fully functional, and now it was all but over.
By the end of the 1960s, Hughes wasn’t feeling well. He told Jean he was contemplating a return to Los Angeles to get medical treatment.* She wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with him. Mentally, she believed, he was all there, despite the fact that he clearly “was taking too much Empirin codeine.” Other than that, “I knew he didn’t eat correctly. He didn’t exercise, and his whole lifestyle had ruined what was once a magnificent physique.”
He owned the mansion across the street from where Jean still lived in Bel Air—he kept it to house his ongoing surveillance operation on his wife—and she suggested he live there while getting medical treatment. Hughes suggested he move back into Jean’s house and send Jean to the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“I didn’t want to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Jean explained later, “and I was afraid if Howard ever got in my house I would never get him out.”
They did not resolve this conundrum. In January 1970, news broke that Jean Peters was leaving Hughes.
“This is not a decision made in haste, and is done only with the greatest of regret,” Jean was quoted as saying in the official statement announcing their separation. “Our marriage has endured for thirteen years, which is long by present standards. Any property settlement will be resolved privately between us.”
“She will retain an affectionate loyalty toward Howard Hughes,” predicted Vernon Scott, “a man who treated her kindly, showered her with riches and affection and gave her everything but a happy marriage.”
It was widely presumed around Hollywood that Peters would be paid untold riches in order to keep the details of the marriage private. In March, comedian Jack Carter joked of the divorce, “I can see him handing her a check for $980,000,000 and saying, ‘Would you mind not cashing this until Wednesday?’”
Privately, in a letter to aide Bob Maheu, the former CIA man whom Hughes had originally hired to investigate Peters’s first husband, Stuart Cramer, Hughes blamed the “complete and, I am afraid, irrevocable loss of my wife” not on his own illnesses and isolation, but on his aide Bill Gay, whom Hughes had assigned to lie to and placate Peters.
That spring, the first new photographs of Jean Peters in thirteen years began to appear in newspapers. She made her return to public life at the Oscars, which she attended with Stanley Hough, a widowed 20th Century Fox executive and former professional baseball player, and Hough’s young daughter Christina. News of Peters’s relationship with Hough was already public by that point: on February 22, in his nationally syndicated “Personality Parade” column, gossip writer Walter Scott noted that it had been an open secret ever since Jean and Stan had appeared together at a performance of Hello, Dolly. Still, Howard was interested in controlling Jean’s return to public life, just as he had controlled her retreat. A memo was prepared for him detailing former RKO publicist Perry Lieber’s thoughts on how to best manage photographic evidence of Hughes’s soon-to-be-ex-wife on a very high-profile date with another man. Perhaps they could have photos taken of her in her dress, before the ceremony, and leak them the night of the awards, with innocuous captions, and a request the press run these instead of any photos snapped at the awards dinner of the new couple together?
In the end, these suggested preceremony photos didn’t materialize, but neither did a photo of Jean and Stan. Instead, on April 9, two days after the awards, the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of Jean sitting at the Oscars after party with Stanley’s daughter Christina. The caption referred to Jean as “the former Jean Peters” and “Mrs. Hughes.” It did not mention Stanley Hough at all.
Totally coincidentally, in early 1970 Terry Moore separated from Stuart Cramer, Peters’s first husband. The split changed Moore’s financial status considerably, and this was a tough transition for Terry. “It was the first time I hadn’t had servants,” she later recalled. “I had been a movie star since I was 8 years old, I’d always had everything taken care of. I’d never even had to mail a letter myself, and suddenly I was like everybody else. I went from yachts and racehorses and airplanes to worrying about how I was going to pay the bills every month. Suddenly I was in the mainstream of life, and it was sink or swim.”
According to Moore, right after her separation, Howard made an attempt to get back into her life. He had a driver pick her up and bring her to the Hotel Bel Air, where dinner had already been ordered for her—or maybe it was the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the bungalow was filled with flowers and champagne was on ice—Terry remembered the story differently at different times. No matter which hotel it was, Terry waited there for Howard, but he didn’t show. Eventually Hughes called the driver and ordered him to take Terry home and tell her he’d call her there, so she went home. Howard didn’t call until quite late that night. He asked her how she looked, a decade since they had last seen each other. She asked him how he looked. The two spoke for about ten minutes, about “silly things,” Terry recalled. “It was just personal.”
If that call happened (in one of Terry’s versions of the story, it didn’t), it was the last time they spoke, but Hughes continued to be on her mind. In May 1970, Rona Barrett reported on her radio show that Terry was writing a book about her “intimacies” with Hughes, “starting at age 14.” Barrett added, “14 going on 24.”
In 1972, Jean returned to acting for the first time since before marrying Hughes, appearing in a public television production of Winesburg, Ohio. She was asked about her retirement from the screen after her marriage to Hughes. “I wasn’t convinced that being a motion picture actress, under contract to a studio, was the way I wanted to spend however many years a film career would have lasted.”
As she slowly began wading back into the public eye, she refused to offer specifics about her time with Hughes, and in late 1972 she even gave a press conference to talk about the fact that she was not planning to talk about her second marriage. “I’m not so naive as to think your only reason for being here is your interest in my career,” she said, “but my life with Howard Hughes was and shall remain a matter on which I have no comment.”
This did nothing to diminish curiosity. Indeed, reporters were only getting hungrier for any scrap of news about Hughes, because such scraps were increasingly so hard to come by. Between 1972 and 1977, Hughes would shuttle between Nicaragua, Vancouver, London, the Bahamas, and Acapulco. He would become so isolated, so elusive, that, as Time magazine would report, “only his death gave proof that he had still been alive.”
“Am getting many wild tips that Howard Hughes is dead,” reported The Hollywood Reporter’s Rambling Reporter, “but fact of the matter is he’s still on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and healthy enough to make many cheery calls to his estranged wife Jean Peters.” Thirteen months after announcing the end of their marriage, Peters still hadn’t filed for divorce. A month later, the IRS started sniffing around her, demanding she answer a twelve-item questionnaire, the most pressing question being, “Why have you not filed a tax return during marriage to HRH?” The answer was that she hadn’t worked at all during the marriage, and thus, “My income was such that no return was required.” (Thanks to the Medical Institute and other forms of creative accounting, Hughes himself had managed to avoid paying personal income taxes for seventeen years, from 1950 to 1966.)
D. L. Lyons returned to the Peters beat, knocking on her door unannounced. She would speak to him without opening it, their voices muffled by the barrier of wood. When he identified himself as the reporter who had tracked her down on the UCLA campus three years earlier, Peters exclaimed, “Go away!”
“Do you hate me, Jean?” the reporter responded.
“Of course not. Just go away.”
“She sounded,” Lyons claimed, “as if she were choking back laughter.”
Lyons interpreted Peters’s refusal to talk to him as proof “that her 64-year-old husband is still alive—a matter of considerable conjecture recently.” In an article discussing Jean’s fate, Lyons added that Hughes’s aides had made concerted efforts “to prevent publication of this article. While it was being written, a man known to have represented Hughes in the past offered to buy this story for $25,000. When I declined, another man rapped on my door and offered to trade a glittering new Mercedes-Benz 380SE for my old Mustang.”
Lyons further noted that Jean had been seeing Stanley Hough for about a year. An anonymous friend declared in the story that it is “quite romantic” that Jean and Stan had hooked up, as he had developed a crush on her twenty years earlier when serving as an assistant director on the Fox lot.
In June, the Hughes-Peters divorce was finalized. The agreement stipulated that Peters would collect an annual income of $70,000 (roughly $434,000 in 2018 dollars) from Hughes for the next twenty years.
IN DECEMBER 1971, REPUTABLE publications started to report that Howard Hughes had dictated an autobiography to author Clifford Irving, to be published by McGraw-Hill in March 1972. From the beginning, Hughes’s reps vehemently denied that the book was legit. In order to prove that his “autobiography” was a hoax, in January Hughes agreed to participate in a conference call with seven reporters who had spoken to him in the past and were deemed to be able to judge the authenticity of his voice.
On the day of the call, Hughes, who had set up camp in a hotel in the Bahamas, injected himself with a massive dose of codeine and watched several films: Gunfight in Abilene, Midnight Lace, Daring Game, Once Upon a Time in the West. He watched the first three films two times each, but after viewing the Sergio Leone movie, Hughes told his aides the print could be returned—and ordered them not to show him any more Italian westerns. He was similarly unimpressed by Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring petite-chested Audrey Hepburn, but when an aide put on Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, featuring German brunette beauty Karin Dor, he was happy. “I like this one,” he said. He watched it twice.
Despite this unconventional method of preparation, Hughes’s performance on the conference call was masterful. The reporters came away convinced that the man calling himself Howard Hughes was in fact who he claimed to be, and that he had not participated in the book purporting to be Hughes’s autobiography. More than that, Hughes was able to put forth the illusion that something remained of the charming American iconoclast whom much of the American public had thought they had gotten to know so many years earlier. Even at far less than full physical strength, he was still a world-class spinner.
When asked to explain his seclusion over the previous fifteen years, Hughes said, “I don’t really know. I just sort of slid into it, but I will tell you one thing. I am rapidly planning to come out of it. In other words, I am not going to continue being quite as reclusive.”
The only time it got really weird was when Vernon Scott asked if Hughes had left his current hotel in the previous six months. “Well, you are getting into a pretty touchy area there,” Hughes responded. “Let’s say I haven’t left the Bahamas. . . .”
Thanks in part to the press conference, Irving’s book was proven to be a total hoax, and the “author” eventually went to prison. But the press conference did more than out the autobiography as a fraud: it also proved to the world that Hughes was alive. Several months later, he decided to give up his birthright: he sold Hughes Tool. His remaining businesses, which now included seven casinos, a couple of TV stations, a mining company, and a helicopter outfit, were reincorporated as the Summa Corporation.
IN 1973, HUGHES WENT to London. There he flew a plane for the last time, accompanied by pilot Jack Real. Real would later recall that when he returned with Hughes to his hotel, the aides who were waiting there for Hughes told Real to leave the Boss alone. They didn’t like it that Real was “getting him alive again.” Soon these aides got the submissive Hughes they preferred: in his London hotel room, Howard fell and fractured his hip. The hip was successfully repaired, but Hughes refused to submit to the follow-up treatment he needed. When Dr. Wilbur Thain offered to hire a “cute little physical therapist,” Hughes said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.” Hughes would never walk again.
After that, he stopped watching television, which was his last link to the news or current events. He ceased keeping track of the outside world. His aides continued projecting movies for him. He liked the Sean Connery James Bond pictures, produced by his old friend Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. He liked The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Klansman (a notoriously misbegotten exploitation drama about race and rape featuring the film debut of former football player O. J. Simpson). He loved a Cold War thriller called Ice Station Zebra, starring Rock Hudson. He watched it regularly.
One night in the spring of 1976, entertainment columnist James Bacon picked up his ringing phone and found Hughes, now in Mexico, on the other end. Bacon had known Hughes since the early 1950s. “It wasn’t too hard to know him [then],” Bacon would write. “You just had to keep late hours. He usually could be found around the old El Rancho Las Vegas around 4 A.M. eating breakfast.” But Bacon hadn’t seen Hughes since 1953, so he was surprised to hear from him, especially at “2 A.M. Los Angeles time, four o’clock in the morning at his suite in the Princess Hotel in Acapulco.” It was, Bacon said simply, “a happy call.”
In early April, Terry Moore, her mother, and a journalist met for drinks at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Howard Hughes became the topic of conversation. Moore explained Hughes’s isolation as a privilege: “With all that money he doesn’t have to go anywhere. He brings everywhere to him. He’s right in Acapulco, if you want to know.” When asked if she still saw Hughes, Moore demurred. “That is something I can’t answer.
“Howard told me he’d only been in love with three girls in his life,” Terry boasted. “Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Terry Moore. I went with him for eight years, except for one marriage—I married Glenn Davis, the football player, you know, for three months.” To Terry, the eight years, about which she was happy to reminisce, were the good old days.
In Acapulco, Hughes’s weight had dropped down to 100 pounds, and it became apparent to his aides that he was dying. A Dr. Montemayor, an army lieutenant colonel, was brought in to examine Howard in his hotel suite. The doctor took notice of a system, consisting of multiple movie projectors and two screens, in front of a hospital bed. Howard apparently spent his every waking moment lying in bed, operating the projectors by remote control.
In addition to marveling over Hughes’s entertainment system, Dr. Montemayor confirmed that Howard’s condition was not good, and that he should be moved to the United States to receive the care he needed. His aides loaded his body onto one of his planes. On April 5, 1976—with the plane still in the air, half an hour away from the Houston airport—Hughes’s personal physician Dr. Wilbur Thain pronounced him dead.
On April 7, the results of the autopsy were released. The official culprit was kidney failure, described by the New York Times as “a common cause of death.” There were, however, plenty of uncommon details. The Treasury secretary made a public statement stressing the urgency of positively identifying the corpse, so that the IRS could start taxing the Hughes estate posthaste. Hughes’s face was so withered away that the FBI ran the corpse’s fingerprints to make sure it was really him. He had a separated-shoulder injury that looked recent, and a head trauma that looked as though it had gone untreated. There were broken-off hypodermic needles in his arms. He was dehydrated and starving, and had possibly overdosed.
After the autopsy, the body was claimed by Howard’s relatives, including Aunt Annette Lummis, who was now eighty-five. An eight-minute Episcopal ceremony was attended by Annette and Howard’s eight surviving cousins and their immediate families, about twenty people in all. Hughes hadn’t seen or spoken to most of these people since 1938 at the latest. He was buried in an unmarked grave beside his mother and father in Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery.
“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out,” said the priest who presided over the service. There were no vestiges of Hughes’s Hollywood life at his funeral. No actresses were in attendance.