CHAPTER 1

THE EARLY YEARS

THE FAMILY

ALL his life, Howard Hughes stood in awe of his father, the tall, handsome, flamboyant man who endowed him with a flair for the dramatic, a love of things mechanical, and one of the great industrial creations of the twentieth century. Springing from Hughes Sr.’s labor, ingenuity, and vision, the Hughes Tool Company was an achievement that shadowed Howard’s own career, even as the world sang his praises. In the eyes of the world he had more than matched his father’s stride, but in his own mind he never did. Perhaps, then, the best place to begin the story of Howard Hughes is with his remarkable paternal forebears.

The Hughes clan traced their origins in the New World to the very beginning of colonial America, when Jesse Hughes, of English-Welsh ancestry, settled in Powhatan County, Virginia, a few years after Jamestown was founded in 1607. They were a big-boned people with large ears and long, gangly limbs, often afflicted with hearing impairments, crippling arthritis, and irascible temperaments.¹ As America moved west, so did they—first to Kentucky, then to Illinois, and finally, in 1853, to northeast Missouri.

The federal government had given Howard Hughes’s great-grandfather, Joshua W. Hughes, forty acres in Scotland County, Missouri, for his services in fighting Indians in Illinois. On this rolling, but “none too prosperous” piece of land, Joshua built a simple log house and settled down to raise a family.² Felix, his oldest son, who was Howard Hughes’s grandfather, was expected to farm, but showing a determination that would guide him through life, he opted for another course—teaching school—and thus the family ties to the land were broken.

After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Felix returned to Scotland County to “read law,” and later to practice it, in nearby Lancaster, Missouri, population five hundred. He soon married Jean Amelia Summerlin, who, like Felix, had been raised on a Scotland County farm. Their marriage would last sixty-one years, but it was not without its tempestuous moments. Felix was a Yankee, but Jean held an “unconquerable loyalty to the South,” owing to her Virginia ancestry.³ She was in fact ashamed to have been born in Iowa, a hopelessly northern state. They were opposites in other ways too. Felix was practical, down-to-earth. Jean was dreamy, romantic, and eccentric, a girl who composed long novels in her head, who climbed on summer days into a big cherry tree on her parents’ farm and, “sitting among the branches, would think out elaborate chapters in an endless romance.”⁴

While Felix poured out his energies building a successful law practice, Jean lavished all her attention on their four children. Rural Missouri was not an environment conducive to a classical education, but Jean nevertheless raised her children “with artistic ideals and passions.”⁵ Mimi, as they called her, taught them “the names of Greek sculptors and Italian renaissance painters from infancy.”⁶ She also implanted in them a drive to excel. “My mother instilled the ambitions,” Rupert, her third-born, wrote later. “My father found the funds.”⁷

Felix “found the funds” by being Lancaster’s superintendent of schools, by trying both civil and criminal cases, and by gradually building himself into a pillar of the small town. By 1880, his adroit legal work on behalf of powerful railroad syndicates in Missouri earned him the presidency of the Keokuk & Western Railway, and the family moved seventy-five miles east to Keokuk, Iowa, then a thriving little city of fifteen thousand. Well on his way to becoming a moderately wealthy man and a respected civic leader (he would eventually be elected Keokuk’s mayor and a judge), Felix could now provide even more money for Mimi to educate their precocious children.

She sent them to the best tutors and schools. Greta, the oldest child, born in 1867, was determined to be an opera star, and she was sent to Chicago, then New York, and finally to Paris for the finest training. Rupert, born in 1872, dubbed “History” because of his scholarly face, wrote his first poem when he was seven, and after taking degrees at Adelbert College in Cleveland and at Yale, set forth on a writing career that made him internationally famous as an author of popular novels. Felix Jr., the youngest, born in 1874 and also musically inclined, was soon packed off to Europe to study.

Only Howard, the second of the four children, born in 1869, remained, seemingly a misfit, unable to find his niche. It was not that he lacked talent. He had, in fact, a “marked genius” for taking apart intricate mechanisms.⁸ He spent hours tinkering with watches, clocks, and engines of every sort “to see what made them go.”⁹ But for all his native mechanical ability, he seemed unable to channel energy constructively. Instead, he was restless and sometimes worse. He charged candy at the corner store, then failed to pay for it. Although he had been forbidden to do so by his father, he staged a cockfight behind the family home, then slapped his brother when Rupert tattled on him to their father. By the time he was a youth, Howard Hughes Sr. had earned an “unsavory reputation” in Keokuk.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the family stood by him—especially his mother. Jean Hughes had nothing but pride for her tall, handsome son. She blamed his troubles on others: “Howard was never expelled from a school that was worthy of him.”¹¹ As he approached college age, he temporarily buckled down and was accepted by Harvard College for the fall term of 1893. Felix Hughes had long hoped that his oldest son would follow him into law, and Harvard was a logical first step. But Howard botched that opportunity as well, dropping out after a year to return to Iowa. To soften this blow to the family, Howard enrolled in the law school of Iowa State University, but again the tedious demands of education proved unendurable. “Too impatient to await the course of graduation,” he immediately took the Iowa bar examination, passed it, and joined his father’s law firm without completing his studies.¹²

No sooner had Howard Hughes Sr. occupied a desk in his father’s downtown Keokuk law office than his spirit rebelled again. He quickly found the law “too-exacting a mistress.”¹³ Whatever Felix’s hopes had once been, he now realized that Howard was not cut out for the profession. By mutual agreement, Howard quit the practice and, apparently to his father’s relief, quit Keokuk as well sometime in 1895.

If Howard Hughes Sr. had a clear notion of what he intended to do with his life when he left home, it is not evident in the story of the next few years. His life followed the pattern of his adolescence. Abounding in nervous energy, he flitted from one hotbed of mining activity to the next—low-grade silver mining in the Colorado mountains, zinc mining in the wilds of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and lead mining in rural southwestern Missouri—seeking his fortune “under the surface of the earth.”¹⁴ He did not find it, but his wanderings were not a loss. “If I accomplished nothing more,” he wrote later, “I at least learned something of the art of drilling wells with cable tools.”¹⁵ It was a knowledge he would put to fabulous use.

In each place, Hughes Sr. plunged into the thick of mining, discarding his good clothes for the greasy uniform of a field worker, rubbing shoulders with the roughest, most hardened men of his time. Hughes saw himself as much an explorer as a fortune hunter. Robert E. Peary and men like him were finding the few undiscovered lands on the earth’s surface. For Hughes Sr., the new frontier lay not beyond the horizon but below it. The outermost ends of the world were being rapidly explored, but “the road towards the center is still Virgin soil.”¹⁶

While mining for lead near Joplin, Missouri, in January 1901, Hughes got word of a great discovery in Texas. On January 10, 1901, Captain Anthony Francis Lucas, a mining engineer, drilled into the Texas prairie near Beaumont and struck oil. With a mighty roar, it gushed forth in a 150-foot arc over the surrounding plain. For nine days the well ran wild before Lucas could cap it. Spindletop, as it was called, was the greatest oil well of its time, and dramatic evidence of the incredible wealth that lay buried in the Texas soil. Thousands of men, moved by the vision of the Lucas gusher, streamed into East Texas. Hughes Sr. later wrote about his reaction when he learned of the Spindletop discovery:

 

I heard the roar in Joplin and made for the seat of disturbance. Beaumont in those days was no place for a divinity student. The reek of oil was everywhere. It filled the air, it painted the houses, it choked the lungs and stained men’s souls. Such another excitement will not be seen for a generation. It will take that length of time to get together an equal number of fools and “come-on’s” at one spot. I turned greaser and sank into the thick of it. Rough neck, owner, disowner, promoter, capitalist and “mark”—with each I can claim kin, for I have stood in the steps of each.¹⁷

 

From Spindletop, Hughes followed the crowd from one strike to another, learning the ins and outs of the young industry and applying the rudimentary knowledge of drilling he had picked up in mining ore to tap oil reservoirs. Although he was for once sticking to a line of work, his fortunes fluctuated as wildly as ever. “One year he had fifty thousand in the bank,” Rupert wrote later. “The next he owed the bank fifty thousand.”¹⁸ He survived these reversals mostly because of his “uncanny gift for extracting money from my father for his wildest schemes.”¹⁹ And Hughes might have gone on wandering aimlessly from one oil field to the next had he not met Allene Stone Gano.

Hughes was hardly an attractive marriage prospect. He had no steady income. His future was uncertain. His past was marked by chronic instability. He was thirty-four years old and no closer to success in the oil business than the day he had abandoned law nine years before. But he did have his fine points. He was well-dressed, charming, and educated—qualities in short supply in turn-of-the-century Texas. Allene Gano found him appealing. The daughter of a prominent Dallas judge, she had been raised in a cultured, refined atmosphere. Whatever else he might be, Howard Hughes Sr. was a gentleman.

Like the Hugheses, the Ganos went back a long way in America. But they had a somewhat more illustrious past. The first Ganos were French Huguenots who settled in New York in the seventeenth century after fleeing religious persecution in France. In the Revolutionary War, the Reverend John Gano was chaplain of the Continental Army, and was said to have converted George Washington to the Baptist faith. Howard Hughes’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side was General Richard Montgomery Gano, a dashing soldier who gave up a medical practice for the nomadic, grueling life of a Confederate cavalry officer in the Civil War. He fought in more than seventy battles, was said to have won all but four, had five horses shot from beneath him, and was wounded only once. After the war he settled in Dallas, where he raised thoroughbred horses, preached the gospel, and surveyed uncharted regions of Texas. The general rolled several careers into one, as an entry in his daily journal attests: “Today I surveyed 16 sections and saved 16 souls.”²⁰ Before his death, the general was credited with “saving” sixteen thousand fellow Texans.

General Gano’s son William Beriah Gano—the maternal grandfather of Howard Hughes Jr.—was a graduate of Harvard Law School. He rose quickly in Dallas’s legal fraternity from practicing attorney to judge. (Howard Hughes Jr., who would spend so much of his later life defying court orders, thus had judges as grandfathers on both sides of the family.) W.B.—he disliked the name Beriah and preferred to go by his initials—married Jeanette de Lafayette Grissim, a doctor’s daughter and also a descendant of an old Huguenot family. Nettie, as an early Dallas social directory described her, was a graduate of Wellesley College and of the Musical Conservatory of Cincinnati, a student of “belles-lettres,” and a “musician of marked ability.”²¹ Like the Hughes household in Keokuk, the Gano home in Dallas was filled with music and literature.

Allene, born in 1883, was the oldest of four children. Tall, well-formed, and dark-haired like all the Ganos, she was a quiet, soft-spoken, and refined young woman. A relative who remembered her years later said Allene “looked and acted like a queen.”²² She was calm and not easily ruffled except when a cat came into the same room with her. She had an intense fear of the animals and was known to faint when one came near.²³ Not much is known of Howard Hughes Sr.’s courtship with Allene Gano except that it was apparently short. On May 24, 1904, the couple were married at the bride’s home on Master Street in Dallas. They made a handsome pair: Allene, tall and graceful, with a beautifully formed face set off by high cheekbones against rich, dark-brown hair; Hughes, straight-backed, proud, slender, slightly ascetic-looking, with a long angular face and deep brown eyes. They left immediately after the marriage on a long tour of Europe. That Hughes did not have the money to spare for such an extravagant wedding present did not stop him. It was typical of the flamboyant gestures by which Howard Hughes’s father lived his life.

Months later, after traveling through England, France, and Germany, the couple settled in Houston, where Hughes could be near the “oil game.”²⁴ Once a sleepy, semitropical southern community, Houston was being transformed by the oil rush. It was not so much a city as an overgrown town. Old, sprawling southern homes dozed alongside new Victorian mansions with ornate turrets and circular rooms. Office buildings rose up six or more stories next door to stucco hovels of another century. The streets were still mostly dirt; only a few were paved with crushed shell, asphalt, or limestone slabs, which glistened like marble in the rain. On Buffalo Bayou, the city’s serpentine link to the sea, the lonely horns of oceanbound steamers sounded all day long and far into the night.

In the city’s center, on a hill above the bayou, rose the two Romanesque towers of City Hall. Anchored firmly in Market Square, the massive brick-and-stone edifice was Houston’s marvel. Punctuated by the two richly ornamented towers and capped by an imposing clock whose bell tolled devotedly every half hour, City Hall was something to behold: soaring arches, delicately sculptured figures, exquisitely inlaid tiles, and resplendent public rooms. Outside in the dusty square, life went forward on a more primitive level. Vendors hawked fresh vegetables, fruits, and rabbits from the backs of mule-drawn carts. People strolled by displays of fresh partridge, sandhill crane, and snipe, tied neatly in bundles at the neck. Saloons never closed, and around the corner from City Hall an ounce of cocaine was as easily bought as a glass of beer or a woman.

By the hour, or so it seemed, passenger trains streamed into Houston. Smoke billowed from beneath the immense wooden shed at Grand Central Station, where trains from all points ground to a halt and discharged their thousands of weary riders into the humid Gulf Coast air. Officially, Houston had sixty thousand people in 1905. But it seemed like more.

The lure was oil. After Spindletop in 1901, there were other great finds in East Texas, some on the outskirts of Houston itself. The region was becoming the oil capital of the nation. No early-day H. L. Hunt had emerged as the archetypal Texas oilman, but men such as William Stamps Farish, a smalltown Mississippi lawyer, had come to Texas after Spindletop and parlayed a modest stake into a fortune drilling for oil. Petroleum companies with names like the Lucky Strike Oil Company and Slow Poke Oil Company came into being overnight. As more and more oil flowed from the ground, surged through pipelines to Houston, and emptied into steamers bound for ports around the world, money gushed into Houston itself.

When Allene and Howard Hughes Sr. settled down in 1905, they lived at 1404 Crawford Street, a few blocks east of what is today downtown Houston. The house has long since disappeared, as have most of the other dwellings in the near eastside neighborhood. It was a modest area of frame houses bordering both sides of a crude lane, in keeping with the family’s means at the time. Here Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., was born on Christmas Eve of 1905. The birth was so difficult for Allene that although she was only twenty-two years old and in good health, the attending physician, Dr. Oscar L. Norsworthy, advised her not to have any more children.²⁵

Howard Hughes came into the world as mysteriously as he left it. No birth certificate has survived. Dr. Norsworthy was one of the city’s most respected doctors and presumably would have completed and filed it with authorities. Nevertheless, there is no trace of Hughes’s birth certificate at either the Houston Board of Health or the Texas Division of Vital Statistics in Austin. Thirty-six years later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, this would present a problem for Hughes when he had to authenticate his age. In the absence of a document, an aunt, Annette Gano Lummis, and Estelle Sharp, the mother of one of Hughes’s childhood friends, signed an affidavit attesting to where and when he was born. To this day, it is the only official record of his birth.

Howard would have no memory of the little house where he was born. His early life was transient and unsettled as his father followed the oil rush from one strike to the next. Sometimes Howard and his mother would go along on these expeditions, but most of the time the conditions in the field were too rough for a young mother and child, and they stayed behind in Houston. When Howard was about eighteen months old, the family moved to northern Louisiana, then a new hotbed for oil exploration. They settled temporarily in a little town called Oil City, twenty-five miles north of Shreveport. From this grimy petroleum outpost, Hughes Sr. traveled out into the adjoining fields to wildcat for oil. Back in town, he doubled as postmaster and deputy sheriff of Oil City to help make ends meet.

Allene Gano Hughes with Howard, about 1910.
Liberty Library Corporation

THE ROCK EATER

By the time Hughes Sr. moved to Louisiana, he had a partner, Walter Bedford Sharp, a brilliant oilman of slight build and tireless energy who was one of the most respected oil operators in Texas. Although he disliked partners and was usually too independent-minded to work with anyone, Hughes’s decision to team up with Sharp was one of the smartest moves he ever made. Sharp had an uncanny nose for oil, and was already on his way to riches. He was also knowledgeable about oil-field technology and, like Hughes, was interested in improving drilling methods. He had patented a process for injecting compressed air into deficient oil wells to make them flow artificially.

Even with Sharp as a partner, Hughes made no spectacular breakthrough as an oilman in Louisiana. He continued to earn a respectable living as a wildcatter, but there were no significant finds. Nevertheless, the Louisiana interlude changed his life. As he and Sharp drilled for oil, they became increasingly frustrated over their inability to penetrate thick rock formations and hard, sandy soil that perhaps shielded vast oil deposits. The most popular drill in those days—the fishtail drill, so named for its shape—was maddeningly inadequate. It bore smoothly through dirt, mud, and soft sand, but when its cutting edges encountered rock or hard sand, progress became painfully slow. Oilmen were forced to use cable drills literally to hammer their way through hard formations. When the process worked at all, it took days or weeks.

By 1908, Sharp and Hughes were spending more and more time on attempts to come up with a drill that could bore through solid rock. Before the year was out they had done it. Known as the Hughes rock bit, it would have a sweeping effect on the development of the oil industry and would make Hughes, and later his son, Howard Jr., incredibly wealthy. The story of how the bit was designed and came into use is, like so many aspects of the Hughes legacy, shrouded in mystery. The Hughes Tool Company and the members of the Hughes family have insisted that the drill was solely the product of Howard Robard Hughes, Sr.’s inventive mind. The widow of Walter Sharp—who died a few years after the drill was invented—contended that her husband helped develop it. The full story will probably never be known, but one of its missing chapters may be found in the obscure memoir of a little-known oil-industry pioneer.

The man, Granville A. Humason, an adventurous young millwright who left Mississippi in 1908 to seek work in the northern Louisiana oil fields, met Hughes Sr. one night in a Shreveport bar and showed him a model of a crudely fashioned drill bit made of wooden spools. Its main features were two coneshaped cutters that continued to rotate when they touched a surface. Humason had gotten the idea for it one morning while grinding coffee and he had tried to sell it to several oil-well drillers. No one would listen. Hughes, however, listened closely and decided to buy Humason’s spools on the spot, offering $150, which Humason accepted. Delighted at finally having sold his idea, Humason celebrated by spending $50 on drinks for the “oil boys” who were crowded into the saloon. He then left with Hughes to visit Walter Sharp at the nearby Phoenix Hotel. Hughes showed his partner the spools he had just purchased and told him, “Sharp, give me fifteen hundred dollars. I’ll give you a half interest.”²⁶

Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., about 1910.
Texas State Archives

“What,” exclaimed Sharp, puzzled, “[in] those spools?” Hughes pulled his partner aside for a few minutes of private conversation and afterward Sharp handed over $1,500 to Hughes. Leaving $500 with his wife, Hughes “jumped on the train” to go to Washington, where he planned to have the drill patented.²⁷ Actually, Hughes jumped on the train to Keokuk, turning, as he often did when he needed financial help, to his father, who hired a leading St. Louis patent lawyer, Paul Bakewell, to file the necessary papers with the patent office in Washington. Hughes Sr. apparently made the final drawings for the drill in the family home in Keokuk. Rupert Hughes later wrote that his brother had “called for a breadboard from the kitchen, fastened paper on it, and, sitting at a dining room table, began to sketch his model. He emerged from the family dining room with an Archimedean cry of ‘Eureka’ and the picture of a bit that had no less than 166 cutting edges!”²⁸ To go along with the design, Hughes Sr. wrote a lengthy technical description of the bit. On November 20, 1908, Bakewell filed Hughes’s application for two patents covering the drill with the U.S. Patent Office. Calling his invention a “new and useful Improvement in Drills,” Hughes listed himself as the sole inventor.²⁹

While waiting for Washington to act, Hughes took his drawings to a machine shop and had a prototype of his drill manufactured. In June of 1909, he and Sharp brought the newly cast steel bit by horse-drawn wagon to an oil field at Goose Creek, Texas. Stopping at an oil well that had defied conventional drills, they ordered field hands away from the site, secretly brought the drill bit out from under wraps, and attached it to the pipe stem of a conventional rotary drilling rig. For the next eleven hours, the drill bore through fourteen feet of solid rock, a feat so miraculous for the time that drillers dubbed the mysterious device the “rock eater.”³⁰ The success of the field test made Hughes all the more eager to secure his patents. When a delay developed in the application, a Washington lawyer was hired to shepherd the request through the Patent Office bureaucracy. On August 10, 1909, the Patent Office granted Hughes patents 930,758 and 930,759 on his rock bit. The foundation of the Hughes fortune had been laid.^*

In 1909, when Howard was three years old, the family moved back to Houston. With the patents secured, Hughes Sr. and Sharp went into business, leasing the rock bit to other oilmen. They formed the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company, a partnership, and rented a corner of the Houston Car Wheel & Machine Company as the tool company’s first shop. For all practical purposes, the job of managing the fledgling company and promoting the rock bit was left to Hughes. Although he and Sharp were equal partners, Sharp continued to concentrate on exploring for oil. It was a wise division of duties. Sharp had few peers as an oilman and Hughes Sr. was an exceptional salesman. In the beginning the response to the drill was not especially enthusiastic. But in time that would change.

Until now, the Hugheses had lived near the stagnant, mosquito-infested waters of the Houston bayous, which often became a health hazard in the summer. Now it was time to move to the south side, a burgeoning mecca for the city’s rich and powerful. Although they were not yet rich, or even well-off, Allene and Howard Hughes were very much a part of Houston’s elite. They were members of Christ Church Cathedral, the city’s leading Episcopal church and the most prestigious congregation in the city. They belonged to the Houston Country Club. And when young Howard was old enough to go to school, they enrolled him at Prosso’s Academy, a private school then “catering to the upper crust.”³¹

At Prosso’s, Howard was an average student. Like his father, he had little interest in school. But Howard’s case was complicated by another handicap. He was quiet and shy, a boy who did not make friends easily. Consequently, he spent a great deal of time alone. Instead of concentrating on his schoolwork, Howard preferred to tinker with mechanical gadgets, taking them apart and reassembling them. He even built a makeshift radio sending set, lifting most of the working parts from the family doorbell. Years later, Hughes would recall that one of the “greatest thrills” of his life was when his homemade radio set actually worked.³²

Howard’s father was pleased by his son’s budding interest in electronics and mechanics. It mirrored his own interests. Hughes Sr. hoped that Howard would one day become an engineer. He helped his son build a motorbike, one of the first in Houston, rigging a small gasoline engine to a conventional bicycle. Although the machine could not have gone very fast, Howard’s motorized bicycle delighted him and struck terror into the hearts of neighboring parents, who had never seen such a contraption and feared for their children. Hughes Sr. also set up a worktable at the tool company’s plant, where Howard passed the time learning about machines and working with tools.

The neighborhood where Howard grew up abounded in children his own age, but he had only one friend—Dudley C. Sharp, the son of his father’s partner. In many ways the two boys were opposites. Howard was thin and sickly looking; Dudley was well-built, robust, the picture of health. Howard was shy, quiet, and withdrawn; Dudley was outgoing, talkative, and made friends easily. Yet, the two became fast friends. Howard was envious of Dudley’s ability to make friends, and Dudley admired the determination that enabled Howard, when motivated, to undertake a project and stick to it. Both of them started taking saxophone lessons at about the same time. Dudley, convinced that he would never be very good at the instrument, quickly lost interest. But Howard, determined to master the instrument at all costs, practiced and practiced, and in doing so “drove his family almost insane with his tootlings.”³³

With each year, the family grew more prosperous. The Sharp-Hughes Tool Company, now a major supplier of drill bits to the oil industry, had its own two-story building at Second and Girard Streets, where the precious bits were packaged and shipped out to oilmen around the world. Largely because of Hughes Sr.’s promotional efforts, the rock bit was gaining wide acceptance in the oil fields. Hughes was also determined to stay abreast of the drilling industry’s needs. He set up a galvanized metal shed next to the plant where he and his engineers devised and tested new drills. A stickler for detail, Hughes had rock shipped from all parts of the country to be used in the tests. When a new bit was considered satisfactory, he immediately applied for a patent. Hughes also bought up patents on other rock bits, some predating his own, and filed lawsuits to frighten off competitors who tried to introduce drills that he felt in any way infringed on his patents. Less than five years after the tool company was founded, Hughes had not only made an impressive start on sewing up the American drilling market but had also patented his rock bit in at least thirteen foreign countries. In doing so, he was laying the groundwork that would one day give the company a near worldwide monopoly in supplying drill bits to the oil industry.

On November 28, 1912, Walter Sharp, long plagued by ill health, died at the age of forty-two. He left his half interest in the tool company to his wife, Estelle. Early in 1913 the growing company was formally incorporated. The Sharp-Hughes name was retained, and capital stock of $300,000 was issued, evenly divided between Hughes Sr. and Sharp’s heirs. Estelle Sharp and Allene Hughes were the best of friends and constant companions, but Estelle and her business managers soon became alarmed over the way Hughes Sr. was running the company. “He was spending money faster than the tool company could make it,” Dudley Sharp contended.³⁴ Although he was obviously a gifted promoter, Hughes was not much of a manager, and Estelle feared that he might one day bankrupt the company. Hughes thought nothing, for instance, of renting an entire wing of a hotel to throw a lavish party for a prospective customer. He often shipped his big cabin cruiser, Rollerbit, to California by rail when he wanted to entertain West Coast oilmen. When Hughes’s spending sprees put the company in the red, it fell to Estelle to make up the deficits,³⁵ and two years later, she sold her interest for $65,000 to Ed Prather, an oilman and friend of both Hughes Sr. and Walter Sharp. On February 3, 1915, the name of the company was changed to the Hughes Tool Company, but as it turned out, Prather had no more success in controlling Hughes Sr. than Estelle Sharp, and within three years he would sell out too. This time there was no new partner. Hughes bought out Prather, gaining 100 percent control.

The original cone bit that launched the Hughes fortune.
Wide World Photos

The Sharp-Hughes Tool Company in Houston, about 1910. United Press International

MOTHER

Young Howard, or Sonny, as he was called to distinguish him from his father, grew up under the eye of his mother. Since his father traveled much of the time, to California, to New York, to Louisiana—wherever necessary to promote his rock bit—the task of raising Howard fell to Allene, who made it a full-time job. His mother, in fact, smothered Howard Jr. with care. She forced him to take mineral oil nightly. She watched for the slightest change in his physical condition. If she detected any abnormality in his feet, teeth, digestion, or bowels, she whisked him off to a doctor for an examination. During outbreaks of infectious diseases, the two of them often left Houston for some distant, uncontaminated place.

Relatives who saw Howard and Allene Hughes together felt the boy “idolized” his mother. “Howard and his mother were very close,” said Mrs. Martha Potts, a cousin. “Howard didn’t treat his mother the way all of us treated our mothers. When we wanted to hug our mothers, we would just rush up into their arms. Howard was more formal.” Mrs. Potts remembered one time in particular when she and several of her cousins from Dallas were visiting Howard and his mother in Houston. “Allene drove us down to Galveston to see the houses and the sea. We drove back to Houston. We all just started to scatter to our rooms when Howard came up to his mother and said, ‘Thank you, mother, for so much fun today.’ It made the rest of us feel impolite, like country bumpkins. Howard was so well-behaved, patient, and attentive.”³⁶

When Howard was about ten, he was officially welcomed into the society for which his mother had so conscientiously been preparing him by being crowned “king” of the Christ Church Cathedral May Fete, an annual spring rite staged for the children of the elite congregation. A photograph of Howard and his “court” has survived. About a dozen children are seated cross-legged, in flowing white togas. Twenty more are standing behind them similarly garbed, peering intently into the camera. At the top, taller than the others, a pointed paper crown resting to one side of his head, is Howard, surveying his court, tight-lipped and aloof.³⁷

Howard did not spend a night away from his mother until he was ten years old. In the summer of 1916, his parents sent him away to camp. A neighbor, Lewis Thompson, had recommended a boys’ camp in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Camp Teedyuskung was operated by Daniel Carter Beard, one of the founders in 1910 of the Boy Scouts of America. At Dan Beard’s Outdoor School, youthful campers, or “Buckskin Men,” as they were called, were schooled in outdoor living and nature. Mostly from affluent eastern families, the boys learned to live in tents, to make fires without matches, to flip flapjacks in a skillet over an open fire, and to identify local flora and fauna. The regimen was broken by pleasant boat rides on Lake Teedyuskung at dusk or by overnight hikes into the lush Pennsylvania woods. Allene Hughes felt that the camp would be an ideal place to help Howard build up his fragile health. On June 14, 1916, she wrote Beard:

My dear Mr. Beard:

I have received your catalogue and letter of May 29th and we have heard much of your camp from Mr. Thompson and his boys. Mr. Hughes and I feel that the life at your camp and your personal influence will be of great benefit to Howard and [we] are enclosing his application for entrance this summer. There are a few questions we want to ask and will very much appreciate your answering by wire. Do you take boys as young as Howard? How many boys near his age will you probably have in camp? What will your total enrollment be? This will be Howard’s first experience away from his family and we think it desirable to place him in a rather small camp for this year at least.³⁸

Beard’s reply was satisfactory to Allene Hughes, and she made plans to take Howard to New York in late June, where they would meet Hughes Sr., who was in the city on business. From there, Allene planned to escort her son the eighty miles northwest to Beard’s camp. On June 23, 1916, Hughes Sr., at the Vanderbilt Hotel on Park Avenue, sent a brief note to Beard:

My dear Sir:

Enclosed please find Boy Scouts Measurement Blank filled in with my dear boy’s dimensions. I trust you will be able to get his suit without serious delay and that Howard will outgrow the shirt during the eight weeks. When Mrs. Hughes arrives in New York we will communicate with you at once and obtain final directions. Please advise me at once your camp telephone number.³⁹

On June 28, Howard and his mother arrived at the camp, and Howard was assigned to his own “stockade.” Allene Hughes looked over the grounds and was given a briefing by Beard and his assistants on what her son would be doing for the next eight weeks during his stay, then returned to New York. A few days later, Hughes Sr. wrote Beard:

My dear Mr. Beard:

I am taking the liberty of enclosing several newspaper clippings showing the rapid spread of infantile paralysis in Brooklyn and elsewhere.

Mrs. Hughes has told me one of your boys is in a hospital in Brooklyn having his throat treated who is soon to return to your camp where our boy is.

I thought these clippings might be of interest as the clippings show how easily the violent germs are carried even by a well person.⁴⁰

On July II, to reassure Howard’s parents that their son would not be exposed to any harmful germs, Beard wrote the couple at the Vanderbilt that the boy referred to in their letter would be placed in “quarantine” as soon as he returned to camp and “will not be allowed to enter his own tent until the doctor thinks it safe for him to do so.” Beard went on to give the parents a report on Howard. “Your boy seems to be holding his own here in camp. He is an interesting little chap, full of fun and well liked. Please tell his mother that the last time I saw him he did not look a bit like he was going to cry. His mouth was open and he was yelling, but he was yelling to the rest of the stockade to hurry up, and get a move on. In fact he has shown no signs of homesickness at all and seems very happy.”⁴¹

A month later, Beard sent along to Howard’s parents various reports he was receiving from the camp doctor and wildlife instructors on their son’s progress. “So that you may have a clear understanding,” Beard wrote, “I am giving you the reports just as they come into me. Such reports to me are always more harsh than when written for the fond parent’s eyes.

“Doctor’s report:—Physical condition, bowels, feet, O.K. General appearance, better than when he first entered camp. Heart, much better now. First Aid Mark A.

“Instructor’s report:—He cannot stick to one thing very long, but is doing fairly well in scoutcraft and never gives us any trouble. In birds his effort and deportment is [sic] good. In his other studies he is trying hard, but is easily discouraged. Needs someone to show him how and then make him do it.”⁴²

Back in New York, Allene Hughes was finding it hard to be separated from her son. At the beginning of the summer she had been worried about how Howard would get along without her. All the reports indicated he was doing fine, but Allene was nevertheless filled with anxiety. She and Hughes Sr. had hoped to pick up Howard about mid-August, but Hughes was running behind schedule in New York. This gave her the option of leaving Howard at the camp for a few more days. Before making a decision, she wanted to see her son. On August 9, 1916, the day she received Beard’s latest report on Howard, Allene sat down at her desk at the Vanderbilt and wrote a reply in her elegant, flowing handwriting. Thanking Beard for giving them a “frank report” on Howard’s classwork rather than one “written to please,” she quickly moved on to the subject that was troubling her:

We had expected to go to Shawnee, Pa. this week and after two weeks there come over to camp for Howard but Mr. Hughes has again been delayed and doesn’t know just when he can leave so we are delighted that there may be an opportunity for Howard to stay longer with you. Before deciding definitely however I would very much like to talk to him. Do you think it could be safely arranged, in any way, so that I could see him for a few minutes? I would not come to camp of course. Please wire me what you think about it and I will come up at once and return the same day. His letters are so short and unsatisfactory that I feel I must talk to him if it is possible before I can decide about leaving him longer.⁴³

Whether Howard’s mother carried off her secret rendezvous with her son is not known, but less than two weeks later she abruptly took him out of the camp anyway. The reason for the sudden move was a polio scare in the East. On August 21, 1916, she wrote Beard from the Buckwood Inn at Shawnee-on-Delaware, in Pennsylvania, about thirty miles from the camp:

Daniel Carter Beard, “Chief” of Camp Teedyuskung.
Boy Scouts of America

“We will come up for Howard the latter part of the week and I think I will take him straight to Cleveland. Mr. Hughes’ brother has a big place at Euclid Heights and I think Howard would be safer there than anywhere around here. I am afraid of the trip on the train but it seems to me less risky than trying to go in a car and stopping at various hotels. I wanted to ask you to [get] from the doctor the proper health certificates if possible so I won’t have any trouble on the train.”⁴⁴

On August 26, Allene picked up Howard at the camp and left immediately for Cleveland and the home of Hughes Sr.’s youngest brother Felix. Then a teacher of light opera, Felix and his musically talented wife Adella lived in a spacious home in the city’s exclusive Cleveland Heights section. Howard’s aunt was busily engaged in efforts that would lead to the formation of the Cleveland Orchestra. Allene and Howard stayed there until she felt the polio scare had passed.

Howard had enjoyed his short stay at camp and looked forward to returning. On November 27, 1916, “Chief” Beard wrote Howard that Teddy Roosevelt himself was expected to visit the camp the next season and urged Howard to bring a friend with him. On December 29, 1916, five days after his eleventh birthday, Howard wrote back.

Dear Chief,

I was glad to get your letter, and I hope that I can come to your camp next year, and bring my friend Dudley Sharp. I have joined the Y.M.C.A. and like it very much.

Enclosed please find my Buckskin Badge. I have returned it on account of eating some candy.

With love from,
Howard

P.S. I hope that you and Mrs. Beard and Bartlett and Barbara have a Happy New Year.⁴⁵

 

As much as Howard wanted to return to the Pennsylvania woods the next summer, for a while it seemed unlikely. On April 22, 1917, he and his mother wrote individual letters and sent them off together to Beard.

“I don’t think that I will be able to come up to camp this summer although I would like it very much,” Howard wrote the Chief. “We have just bought a boat and I think that we will stay here all summer except about one or two months. I hope that the camp is as nice this summer as it was last summer.”⁴⁶

Allene Hughes explained that the family planned to stay “close at home” this summer.⁴⁷ But soon afterward Howard fell sick. He lost seven or eight pounds, had problems with his digestion, and missed school. His mother began to feel that the crisp mountain air of northeastern Pennsylvania might be the tonic needed to restore her son’s health. On June 19, 1917. Howard wrote Beard: “I may be able to come up to camp after all. Mother has thought it over and she says that if Daddy thinks it is all right I can surely come. If I come I will bring my friend Dudley also but we will not be able to come up until the 10th of July. We will want to be put in Luitenant Oris’s [sic]^* stockade. We will also want to room together, and what about that stockade you promised me? Answer soon.”⁴⁸

Eager for a summer in the wild, Howard and Dudley arrived at the camp on Monday afternoon, July 16, 1917. In a letter that followed the next day, Allene Hughes asked Chief Beard to pay special attention to Howard’s health: “I hope the doctor will keep an eye on him, watching his feet and teeth, and see that he takes his Russian oil every night. I put a large bottle of it in his suitcase, but I am sure he was tempted to throw it out of the car window and he may have done it.” She asked Beard to make sure that neither Howard nor Dudley took a long hike right away, which might tax their resistance, or to eat any of the camp’s “precious” flapjacks.⁴⁹

Howard’s mother also wrote directly to his stockade leader, Lieutenant Aures:

I am afraid that you may not have realized when you promised to take Howard under your wing and into your stockade that your promise entailed writing me every now and then to let me know just how he is getting along. I am trying hard to overcome too much anxiety over my one chick but don’t seem to make much headway. As I wrote Chief, he has not been at all well this spring and ever since he left camp last year he has been having trouble with the soles of his feet. Please if you notice any of his shoes getting run over throw them away. I started him off with two pairs of doctored up old shoes which may be too small to wear with scout stockings but might be alright with his ordinary hose. I have ordered two larger pairs which I will send as soon as the heels are fixed according to the doctor’s directions.

I am afraid you will find him pretty nervous this year. He was so much improved in that respect by last year’s camp that I hoped he was outgrowing it and his supersensitiveness but it seems to have all come back this spring since he has not been so well. That is one reason I was particularly glad for you to have him in your stockade. I think you understand him well enough to help him over the many times he gets his feelings hurt…. If you can help Howard to take the teasing without getting hurt and resentful we will surely be lastingly in your debt. Dudley makes friends so much more easily than Howard does and Howard feels that keenly too…. If you can help him to forget himself, get along better with boys and perhaps teach him to keep his hut in order, I ask for nothing else.⁵⁰

Howard was glad to be back in the familiar rustic surroundings of Chief Beard’s camp, but the summer was not as pleasant for him as the year before. The United States’ entry into the First World War had deprived Beard of some of his more experienced instructors, and the men who took their place were not all of the same caliber. Also, a small group of older bullies at the camp made life uncomfortable for some of the young woodcrafters like Howard. A few days after his arrival at camp, Howard spoke to his mother by phone and complained of “bad dreams,” of “not sleeping well,” and of “feeling tired all the time.”⁵¹ Allene Hughes asked the camp office to have the doctor examine Howard immediately. On July 27, Beard cabled a brief medical report to her in Houston: “Doctor reports eyes, ears, nose, throat, lungs, heart OK. Digestion all right. No restrictions. Letter follows.”⁵²

Despite all of Allene’s fears for her son’s health, she was delighted with the way he looked when he returned to Houston later that summer. “He is in better condition, I think, than he has ever been,” she wrote Beard. “His cheeks are round and fat and rosy and he is full of ‘pep.’ We think you are largely responsible for this and hope he can be with you next summer.”⁵³

A few days after Howard returned from camp, Houston was convulsed by a race riot. On the night of August 23, 1917, a contingent of black soldiers who were part of a national guard unit camped outside the city rioted over the way Houston police had earlier manhandled a black fellow soldier. Arming themselves with revolvers and rifles, the soldiers marched toward downtown Houston, indiscriminately shooting whites who tried to stop them. Before police could halt their advance and take them into custody, seventeen persons had been killed. Thirteen black soldiers later were executed.

The riot made an indelible impression on Howard. Although he lived miles away from the scene of the killings, he later wrote that he had been “right in the middle” of the riot.⁵⁴ Gruesome stories spread through Houston’s white community about atrocities allegedly committed by black soldiers. Howard was caught up in the anti-Negro frenzy sweeping the town, instilling in him a lifelong bias against blacks. Fifty years later he cited the 1917 riot as the reason his Las Vegas casinos should never give in to pressure from blacks for more jobs.

Early in 1918, the family moved into a new house in Houston. The year before, Hughes Sr. had bought a corner lot at 3921 Yoakum Boulevard, in the exclusive Montrose section north of Rice Institute, and began building an imposing two-story brick house. Despite Hughes Sr.’s extravagant business practices, the tool company was returning ever-greater profits. The house Hughes built was in keeping with his growing stature as one of the city’s leading businessmen.

Howard’s room was on the second floor, facing north. There he assembled his shortwave radio equipment and, using his call number, 5CY, spent hours flashing messages to amateur operators all over the country and to ships at sea. With fellow radio enthusiasts, he formed the Radio Relay League, a local organization of young amateurs like himself. Since Howard had the latest equipment, the boys usually met in his room.

Despite that interest, the winter and spring of 1918, when he was twelve, was an unhappy time for Howard. He was sick and spent a good deal of time confined to his bedroom. When he got back to school, he found himself hopelessly behind the rest of the class and was forced to spend all his time trying to catch up. His illness served to alienate him further from education. As the summer months approached, Chief Beard began writing Howard, urging him to sign up for camp that year. Although Howard still had an uneasy feeling about the camp because of the way he had been bullied by older boys the summer before, he thought about going back, and when he found out that Dudley had already signed up, he made up his mind. On May 4, 1918, Allene Hughes sent his application and a note along to Chief Beard, with the inevitable concerns:

“As the time approaches he always wants to go back tho’ I don’t think he was very happy while there last year. We are very glad that he does want to go back because there is no doubt of the benefit that he receives. I wish you would write me more of the camp as it is to be this summer.” Allene asked Beard if he intended to appoint Howard a stockade leader this summer. “Please don’t think from this question that I want him to be one unless in your judgment he should be. I surely want to know so that I can save his being disappointed when he gets to camp by telling him before he goes. Last year he thought because he was a second year boy and a buckskin that he would surely be a stockade leader and it was a bitter blow when he found out that he wasn’t.”⁵⁵

On May 9, Beard replied that all the unruly pupils and faculty had been “eliminated” from the camp and that Howard would undoubtedly have a more enjoyable time this year. Beard said he had always intended to appoint Howard a stockade leader, but he could not guarantee him the position before the summer session began: “I do not like to make a positive promise because many things may arise to upset my plans,” Beard wrote. “I may have more leaders than stockades. However, rest assured we will do all in our power to make Howard happy, and I think the main thing to do is to make him healthy.”⁵⁶ Howard made plans to go, even to setting a date for his arrival, but for some reason the trip was cancelled at the last minute. He never returned to Dan Beard’s Outdoor School.

During Howard’s childhood, Allene Hughes exerted an overpowering influence on his development. She was obsessed with her son’s physical and emotional condition. If she was not worried about his digestion, feet, teeth, bowels, color, cheeks, weight, or proximity to others with contagious diseases, she was anxious about what she called his “supersensitiveness,” nervousness, and inability to make friends with other boys. If Howard had no inherent anxieties in those directions as a small boy, he certainly had them by the time he reached adolescence. His mother helped instill in him lifelong phobias about his physical and mental state. Howard also learned from her that the best way to attract attention or to escape unpleasant situations was to complain of illness. The slightest whimper from him would unleash a wave of smothering attention from Allene Hughes, and throughout his life he would pretend to be sick when he wanted to avoid responsibility or elicit sympathy.

TRAGEDY

Even though Howard was no longer going to camp, Allene Hughes still arranged for him to get away from Houston during the summer when danger from disease was at a height. Sometimes the two of them went to resorts like the Greenbrier, in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, where Howard could play golf, one of his new interests. Other times he went alone to visit his grandparents in Keokuk. Hughes Sr. had built his mother, Jean, a handsome white frame “summer” home on a bluff high above the Mississippi. In the evening, one could gaze out across the great river from the screened-in back porch and bask in the solitude of the midwestern night. But the visits were not always happy for Howard. His grandparents’ differences had hardened with time. They quarrelled more than ever. Felix was nearly deaf, and Jean had developed a phobia about bugs, refusing to allow closets to be built in her new home for fear insects would nest in them. At night, she dined regularly on a spartan meal of buttermilk and cornbread. Occasionally a neighbor child, like pert Mary Hollingsworth, five years older than Howard, was conscripted to take him to a movie. But much of the time he was alone with his cantankerous grandparents.

One spring day in 1919, when Howard was thirteen, he suddenly could not walk. His panic-stricken parents feared that he had contracted polio. Houston doctors confirmed that his illness had all the signs of infantile paralysis and Howard was confined to a wheelchair. Hughes Sr. frantically telephoned the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and pleaded with the director, Dr. Simon Flexner, a pioneer in polio and meningitis research, to come to Houston. Dr. Flexner sent an associate, Dr. H. T. Chickering. After examining Howard, Dr. Chickering was not certain of the cause of the boy’s illness, but was confident that he would recover. Dr. Chickering attended Howard for two weeks in Houston, then spent four more weeks with him and his mother on Mackinac Island in Michigan. Finally, after more than two months in a wheelchair, Howard was able to walk again. By summer he had begun to “pick up,” as his father wrote later, “and become a perfectly normal boy.”⁵⁷ The cause of the illness remained a mystery.

That fall, Howard enrolled in South End Junior High School (now San Jacinto High) in Houston and continued his lackluster academic ways, to the discomfort of his father. Although he had been the bane of many a teacher himself, Hughes Sr. now firmly believed in education. In spite of his son’s mediocre showing, he was determined to send him to the best schools. While he himself had found Harvard stifling, Hughes Sr. hoped to send Howard there. To prepare for that, he enrolled his son in the exclusive Fessenden School, in West Newton, Massachusetts. In the fall of 1920, when he was fourteen, Howard boarded the train for Boston.

At Fessenden, Howard was thrown in with the sons of other wealthy parents who were counting on the school to polish their boys into suitable Ivy League material. Founded in 1903, Fessenden was situated on a rolling, lush tract in the midst of one of Boston’s oldest suburbs. Every facility from a sports arena to a library could be found on the grounds. There was even a nine-hole golf course.

For the first time in his life, Howard studied hard. The following June, he was cited for “outstanding industry and attention to studies.”⁵⁸ According to the school, Howard’s academic records have long since been destroyed, but Percy Williams, briefly a roommate, recalled that Howard was a “hard worker” who achieved good marks.⁵⁹ “He was a good mathematician,” said Williams, “and he was fairly good in languages, French comes to mind.”⁶⁰ Howard also amused some of his classmates with a scheme that enabled him to pick up spare change, even though his parents kept him plentifully supplied with cash. Frequently receiving shipments of fresh grapefruit from Texas, Howard took what he needed for himself and sold the rest to his classmates at a nickel apiece.

Howard still remained shy and withdrawn at Fessenden. “He didn’t get involved in too many social things,” Williams said.⁶¹ The school sponsored joint dances with girls’ schools in the area, but “I don’t recall him coming to those dances.”⁶² Even so, Howard tended to stand out. He was growing into an exceptionally tall, handsome young man. Williams remembered him as the tallest boy in their class of thirty. Despite his shyness, he usually sat near the front of his classes, probably an early indication of hearing difficulty. Hughes insisted years later that his hearing had been damaged in a childhood swimming accident. A more logical explanation is that he was suffering from the same hearing defect that had plagued the Hughes family for generations. His father, both his uncles, and his grandfather on his father’s side were all hard of hearing. His Uncle Rupert, in fact, had been denied overseas service in the First World War in part because of growing deafness.

While Howard’s grades at Fessenden were good compared to his past marks, he excelled at only one thing—golf. In fact, he was becoming a fanatic about the game. There was not as much time to play in Boston as there had been in Houston, but Howard spent every possible minute on Fessenden’s course. In the spring he entered a school tournament, losing the championship by only one stroke.

During the year, Hughes Sr. dropped by the school and took Howard to the Harvard—Yale boat races in New London, Connecticut. As a loyal Harvard man, he was rooting, of course, for the Crimson and promised Howard that he could have anything he wanted if Harvard won. When Harvard did win, Howard told his father he wanted to take a ride in an airplane. On the way into New London he had seen a Curtiss seaplane tied up to a bulkhead in the Thames River advertising rides for five dollars a head. Hughes Sr. was not happy at the idea of his only son thus risking his neck, but Howard was insistent. His father gave in and paid the ten dollars, and the two of them went up for a brief flight, which, though uneventful, was a turning point in Howard Hughes’s life. Those few minutes in the Curtiss seaplane fired his fascination with airplanes and marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair with aviation, his most enduring passion.

Class of 1921, Fessenden School, West Newton, Massachusetts. Hughes is fourth from right, third row. Wide World Photos

In June of 1921, Howard was graduated from Fessenden’s sixth form, a level roughly equivalent to eighth grade in public school. The class prophet wrote: “Howard Hughes has a large ranch in Texas where he raises toothless cows. The advantage of those animals over any others is beyond the human mind with Hughes’ excepted.”⁶³ The class historian summed up Fessenden’s ambivalent attitude toward the young man: “Howard Robard Hughes comes from just where you would expect: Texas. But we are not sure just where he will go.”⁶⁴ As the boys prepared to go home for the summer, Percy Williams asked Howard to sign his yearbook. In one column where Hughes was to list his ambition, he wrote, “yegg,” then a popular slang term meaning criminal or thug. In another column entitled Happy Thoughts, Howard wrote in French, “Il n’y a pas”—none.⁶⁵

Instead of sending Howard on to one of the well-known eastern prep schools, Hughes decided to enroll his son in the Thacher School in Ojai, California, near Santa Barbara. The family was spending more time in Los Angeles—Hughes had opened a branch of the tool company there to serve California oilmen, who had embraced the rock bit with even more enthusiasm than their counterparts in Texas—and Howard’s parents wanted him in a school nearby so they could be with him more often.

But getting Howard admitted to Thacher was no simple matter. The school was small and in the summer of 1921 when Hughes tried to enroll his son for the fall, he found out that Thacher was already full. Hughes personally appealed to Sherman Day Thacher, the school’s founder and president, saying he was deeply discouraged, but had not given up hope that his son might indeed be admitted. “My own life has been a constant uphill fight,” he wrote Thacher, “and I never like to give up once I start to accomplish any definite thing. Right now, this is one of the deepest regrets [I] have had to face.”⁶⁶

To induce Thacher to make a place for his son, Hughes offered to build an addition to the school’s dormitory. Whether the school accepted is not clear, but Hughes’s persistence paid off: Howard was admitted to Thacher that fall.

With an enrollment of only sixty students, Thacher was smaller and more intimate than Fessenden, but this had no effect on Howard’s shy behavior. Once he played a detective in a school play, walking around the stage whispering to other characters his true identity, then imploring them to keep the information a secret. But mostly he shunned group activities. He bought a horse and rode for hours alone in the hills near the school. As usual, his mother worried about him.

On October 19, 1921, less than two months after Howard had entered the school, Allene Hughes wrote Sherman Thacher inquiring about her son. She told the headmaster that Howard seemed to like Thacher, but rarely mentioned any other boys. “I think it is awfully hard,” she wrote, “for an only child to adjust himself well in school and make friends as he should, and I am very interested to hear from you about him.”⁶⁷

During the spring semester, Allene Hughes entered Baptist Hospital in Houston for minor surgery. The operation was a curettement, usually performed to remove growths or abnormal tissues from the uterus or to stop excessive hemorrhaging, although in her case the exact reason for the surgery was not disclosed. She went into the hospital the afternoon of March 29, 1922, planning to return home a few hours later. Instead, she never regained consciousness from the anesthetic. At thirty-nine, Allene Hughes was dead. Her death devastated Howard’s father. In his despair, he sent off two telegrams—one to Howard in Ojai and the other to his brother Rupert, who was living in Los Angeles where he was writing screenplays for Sam Goldwyn. Rupert later wrote:

I received one night a heartbroken telegram from my brother, saying that Allene, his wife, had died suddenly. He had telegraphed young Howard at Ojai, telling him merely that his mother was ill and he had better come home. My brother asked me to meet the boy when he came down from Ojai and put him on the first train for Texas.

Young Howard, then just sixteen, arrived in great anxiety and suspense. I hesitated a long while over telling him the bitter truth. My poor brother, I knew, had suffered so much in the death of his beloved and beautiful wife that telling his son the news would be too much to put upon him. So I steeled myself, told young Howard the truth, and tried to uphold him in his first great tragedy.⁶⁸

However much anguish and pain his mother’s death caused him, Howard never discussed it. Grief, like so many facets of his personality, was a very private matter for him. It was not so with his father. Howard Hughes Sr. was permanently shaken by the premature death of his wife. He used any excuse to stay away from Houston. The city that had given rise to his growing fortune and had been the scene of many warm memories now became too painful to endure, and he spent his time traveling to New York, Los Angeles, wherever a convenient excuse led him. On his rare trips to Houston, he could not bear even to set foot in the family home on Yoakum Boulevard.⁶⁹

To look after Howard, he turned to Annette Gano, a younger sister of Allene, who had lived in the Yoakum house since 1919 and was already a full-fledged member of the family. Tall, dark, and outgoing, Annette had been graduated from Wellesley College, then enlisted in the Red Cross in the First World War and sailed to Europe to serve coffee and doughnuts to Allied troops on the Western Front. After the war, she had become active in civic and charitable work in Houston. At the time Allene died, the thirty-one-year-old Annette was on the verge of marrying a prominent Houston physician. Hughes begged her not to get married, but instead to devote her life to raising Howard. Hughes was “possessed,” as Annette recalled, by the notion that she should bring up his son. “I told him that I would give him one year and live with Sonny,” she said later. “Then I was going to get married. I thought it was not good to have Sonny live with a little old lady.”⁷⁰

Soon after Allene’s death, Hughes Sr., Howard, and Annette left Houston for the West Coast “to get away from Yoakum.”⁷¹ Howard and Annette settled in a cottage at the Vista del Arroyo, a hotel in Pasadena, while Hughes stayed most of the time at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Howard returned to Thacher that fall, but his stay was even shorter than that of the year before. Early in 1923, shortly after Howard turned seventeen, Hughes informed Sherman Thacher that he was taking his son out of the school. After saying that he thought Howard needed special tutoring, Hughes disclosed the real reason for the move. In a candid, moving admission, Hughes explained that he was desperately lonely and had been unable to get a grip on himself since his wife’s death. Perhaps with Howard with him in Los Angeles, he told Thacher, he could cure his loneliness and fill the emptiness in his life.⁷² Although sympathetic to Hughes, Thacher gently urged him to leave Howard in school until the end of the year:

[Howard] needs more than most boys the contact with other fellows such as he gets in school; and I think your desire and tendency to indulge him in every way would probably be very hard for him to resist and probably not at all good for him. I feel quite sure that the fact is that it is not the best thing for a boy to be held in constant sympathetic association with those of an older generation, even his own father and mother. Nature seems to insist on a certain kind of separation between the generations, and the child seems to develop abnormally and not quite wholesomely if we attempt to vary this order of nature. We have to be content with rather slender associations and intimacies and ready to look on at a respectful distance while the young people work out their own problems and carry on their development among their own contemporaries.⁷³

Thacher told Hughes he did not believe his son needed special tutoring:

I think he needs to be treated like any other boy and to learn more about how to carry himself among other fellows, and I think he himself really feels conscious of this although I believe he is full of sympathy for you and most desirous of contributing in every way that he can to your contentment during these hard days.⁷⁴

All of this had a serious effect on Howard. Whether he was torn between wanting to stay at Thacher or go to his father is not clear. In any event, he became ill with a headache and cold, and spent several days in bed. Thacher wrote Hughes on January 17 that his son had been sick, but was recovering.

A few days later, Howard went to Los Angeles to visit his father and never returned to Thacher. Now that the issue was settled, Sherman Thacher wrote Howard: “I have every confidence that you are making the right decision in staying with your father, and I hope that you will get every kind of advantage out of your life in Pasadena and the intimacy with him which I know will give him great satisfaction and be a very great comfort to him at the same time.”⁷⁵

Even though he had taken his son out of high school prematurely, Hughes still had high hopes that Howard would be able to go to college. No sooner was Howard back at the Vista del Arroyo with Annette than he worked out an arrangement for Howard to attend classes at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Howard’s lack of a high school diploma did not deter his father. In return for letting Howard attend classes at Cal Tech, Hughes Sr. made a contribution of an undisclosed amount to the school’s scholarship fund. As Annette bluntly put it later, “they were bribed to let him in.”⁷⁶ Even though Cal Tech agreed to allow Howard to attend, it apparently did not go so far as to give him credit for the courses he took. The school has no formal record of Hughes’s attendance. The only indication that he even went there is a brief note in the school’s files that a Cal Tech upperclassman tutored Howard in solid geometry in 1923.

Annette’s feelings toward Howard would cool over the years, but in 1923, while he was going to Cal Tech and she was looking after him at the Vista del Arroyo, she saw him as a model nephew: “He was perfectly beautiful, and he was a charming young boy, and that year I was with him in California he couldn’t have been more thoughtful. We ate dinner together every night.”⁷⁷

Howard and his father often spent Sundays at the home of Hughes Sr.’s brother Rupert, who lived in a gabled, Gothic mansion on South Western Avenue. Hughes Sr. was fascinated by the new motion-picture industry and was eager to produce films himself. It was an interest no doubt sparked by Rupert, who, after a highly successful career in New York, including a stint as an editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and as a writer of dozens of bestselling popular novels, had been lured west by Sam Goldwyn to turn his most popular tales into wildly successful silent movies. Since his arrival in Hollywood in 1919, Rupert had taken the budding film capital by storm, and by the early 1920s he was one of the town’s most talked-about celebrities, earning upward of $125,000 a year.

Rupert’s Hollywood Sunday brunches were an institution. Famous actresses, actors, and directors met and mingled on the grounds to eat, drink, and talk about motion pictures. Hughes Sr. was a regular participant and he usually brought Howard along. At one party, Howard met Eleanor Boardman, who was starring in Souls for Sale, a movie being directed by Rupert. Howard was immediately infatuated with the twenty-three-year-old hazel-eyed actress, but the feeling was not mutual. Eleanor found Howard “very unattractive, very shy, hard of hearing, difficult.”⁷⁸ Too shy to ask her for a date, Howard sought his father’s help. As Miss Boardman later remembered, “he tried to sell me young Howard… by telling me he was going to be so rich.”⁷⁹ For Miss Boardman, who would become one of the reigning queens of the silent screen and marry the director King Vidor, money was insufficient incentive.

In the summer of 1923, Annette Gano’s year of solicitude to Howard ended and she went back to Houston to marry her fiancé, Dr. Frederick Rice Lummis, a member of the family that had founded Rice Institute. Although Hughes Sr. still opposed the marriage, he promised to return to Houston to give Annette away. But on her wedding day he failed to appear. Shortly after Annette and her husband moved into their first apartment, Hughes Sr. asked her if she would move back to Yoakum. Howard, he explained, would be returning to Houston to attend classes at Rice. By some means, Hughes had managed to persuade the school to enroll his son as a freshman that fall, even though he still had no high school diploma. Annette talked it over with her husband and agreed. “My husband was a saint,” she recalled. “[We] closed our apartment, packed everything up and moved to Yoakum so Sonny could go to Rice.”⁸⁰

Hughes Sr. continued to shun Houston. His absence had no effect on the tool company, for Hughes had little taste anyway for the day-to-day grind of managing a business, and over the years he had installed a competent group of managers to oversee the company. He had especially come to rely on the leadership of his general manager, R. C. Kuldell, a former army colonel whom he had recruited after the First World War. But even so, there were a few meetings too important to be missed, and in January of 1924 he made one of his rare visits to the city.

On the afternoon of January 14, while meeting with S. P. Brown, the tool company’s sales manager, Hughes Sr. “suddenly rose to his feet, grasped at the desk before him convulsively, and fell to the floor.”⁸¹ At fifty-four, Howard Robard Hughes, Sr., was dead of a heart attack. For Howard, Jr., as Annette later recalled, the news was a “horrible blow.”⁸² His father’s death was as unexpected and traumatic as his mother’s had been less than two years earlier. One moment each had been alive and seemingly healthy; the next moment they were dead.

On January 16, at the funeral held in the Hughes house on Yoakum, the rich and powerful of Houston turned out to pay tribute to the man who had revolutionized the oil industry with the rock bit. They also paid homage to him as a friend. “There is no man in the oil industry who was more endeared, no matter what his station or rank,” contended one oil journal.⁸³ That afternoon, with Dr. Peter Gray Sears of Christ Church Cathedral presiding, Hughes Sr. was buried next to his wife at Glenwood Cemetery. For eighteen-year-old Howard, it was a time of great loneliness, sorrow, and grief. It was also the end of his boyhood.

The premature death of both parents had a profound psychological effect on Howard. Raised to believe in his own delicate nature and in the grave danger of being exposed to germs, he became obsessed about his health, and feared that he too was destined for an early death. The slightest change in his physical condition or the mildest illness now threw him into a panic. He began to take pills and resort to all sorts of precautions to insulate himself from disease and illness. It was an obsession that would grow with time.

POWER PLAY

At the time of his father’s death, Howard did not have the slightest notion of what to do in life. His parents had always planned his every move. His father had enrolled him in the best schools with hopes that he would become an engineer. Howard despised school and was at best lukewarm to the idea of becoming an engineer, but he was an obedient, acquiescent son who did what he was told. Hughes Sr. had hardly been a stern taskmaster, but Howard revered his father and wanted to please him. Insecure about his own drives and ambitions, he had gone along with his father’s goals. One searches his youth in vain for a trace of the individualism and rock-hard independence that would govern him as a man and make him a cult hero to millions. As a youth, Howard was nothing more than a jumble of possibilities, none of them very promising.

All that began to change with his father’s death. Less than a month after Hughes Sr. died, Howard dropped out of Rice. College had been his father’s idea, not his. In the months ahead, more signs of his growing independence appeared, sometimes to the despair of his relatives. Free of his father’s overpowering personality, Howard began to think for himself. There was another reason for his new independence: his father’s death had made him an extraordinarily rich and powerful young man.

Under the terms of Hughes Sr.’s will, Howard was the major beneficiary of the estate. The will, dated eleven years earlier, left half the estate to Howard’s mother and one-fourth to Howard. (Since Allene Hughes had already died, her share passed automatically to her son.) The remaining one-fourth was divided equally among Howard’s grandfather, grandmother, and Uncle Felix. Rupert, who was already earning a sizable income, was not included. Hughes Sr.’s sister Greta had died of tuberculosis in 1916. Shortly before Hughes Sr. died, he had drafted a revised will, which gave a higher percentage of the estate to his parents and brothers. But he never signed it. Had he done so, Howard’s career might have been quite different; at least he would not have started it with a supply of money that seemed virtually endless.

True to his spendthrift ways to the end, Hughes Sr. left little cash. Most of the estate was represented by 1,500 shares of stock in the Hughes Tool Company. The value of the company stock was conservatively estimated at $750,000 for inheritance-tax purposes. The company, which was then returning yearly profits of several hundred thousand dollars, was in fact worth many times that amount. Overall, the estate was appraised at $861,518. Once Hughes Sr.’s debts had been paid, the net figure was reduced to $607,606.⁸⁴ Theoretically, Howard was worth three-fourths of that amount, or about $450,000. In fact, at eighteen years of age, he was a millionaire.

Shortly after the funeral, Howard left for Los Angeles to visit Rupert and his grandparents, who had been unable to attend the funeral because of their advanced ages. Felix Sr., at eighty-five, and Jean, now eighty-two, had left Keokuk the year before to escape the rugged midwestern winters. At the time of their son’s death they were staying with Rupert in Los Angeles. Howard found the house, the scene of such lively gatherings in years gone by, shrouded in gloom.

The grandparents were overcome with grief. Jean Hughes, still erect and proud, wore black in memory of her dead son. If she had had a favorite child, it was Howard Sr. “I am so desolate,” she wrote a friend after her son’s death. “Life is so dark and cold. That precious Howard was my idol, more to me than all the world. But why try to tell you. For you must realize that all my heart was given to that precious child. My life is finished. Nothing left.”⁸⁵

Howard’s stay with his relatives was a disaster, and a turning point in his relationship with his father’s side of the family. Not long after Howard arrived, he and Rupert began to quarrel. At issue was Howard’s future. Rupert felt obligated to take Howard under his wing and offer guidance. He suggested that he should be named Howard’s guardian until he reached twenty-one. Howard viewed this as an attempt by Rupert to grab control of his inheritance. Rupert also thought Howard should go back to school and complete his studies, a view shared by the rest of the family. It was also one of Howard Sr.’s wishes, as spelled out in his will. But Howard had other ideas.

He told Rupert and his grandparents that he did not need a guardian, did not want to return to school, and instead wanted to take over his father’s company. Coming from an eighteen-year-old boy, this must have sounded preposterous. Exactly what occurred next is not clear, but both sides clearly staked out positions, refusing to budge, and the visit degenerated into a series of ugly scenes. Within a few weeks, Howard returned to Houston “very bitter” toward Rupert, as Dudley Sharp recalled.⁸⁶

In Houston, Howard received little support for his plans from his aunt, Annette. “I told him he ought to finish Rice and have a degree before he got too independent,” she remembered. “He paid no attention to me.”⁸⁷ Instead, Howard was now more than ever determined to free himself from any strings to his relatives, and he decided to buy out their minority interest in the tool company. As he explained later, “The thing I knew was that I would never be able to get along with my relations and that’s why I was determined to buy them out and go it alone.”⁸⁸ Howard told the officers of the tool company to open negotiations with his grandparents and uncle to acquire their 25 percent interest. They were not eager to sell, but in May of 1924, just four months after Howard Sr.’s death, they reluctantly agreed to do so. The purchase price was $325,000. To raise the cash, the tool company dipped into its own reserves—a move that left it dangerously close to insolvency for a year. But it was a risk Howard was willing to take to go it alone.

In doing so, he cut forever most of his family ties, leaving nothing but bitterness between himself and his father’s relatives. Howard blamed all the trouble on Rupert, whom he believed had organized the other relatives against him. Jean Hughes, Howard’s sensitive grandmother, suffered most from the breach and went to her grave bitter toward Howard. Her will, signed a few months before her death in 1928, left her estate to her two surviving sons, Rupert and Felix Jr. In Article 4, she singled out her only grandson for special notice: “I mention the name of my grandson, Howard R. Hughes Jr. to show that I have not forgotten him and that I purposely have not given him anything in this my Last Will and Testament.”⁸⁹

Rupert Hughes, Howard’s uncle. Pach Brothers

By buying out his relatives, Howard had consolidated his hold on the Hughes Tool Company less than six months after his father died. The only barrier between him and absolute control was his age—he was a minor and would not be truly his own man until he was twenty-one. But he soon saw a way to overcome that obstacle.

Howard had learned that under Texas law a minor can, at age nineteen, petition the courts to remove his disabilities as a minor and be declared an adult. That done, Howard could acquire virtually all the rights and privileges of an adult and assume full control of the tool company. He could hold the stock in his own name. He could oversee his financial affairs without the need of a court-appointed guardian, thus circumventing Rupert. Annette Lummis, with whom Howard was still living, did not like this idea any better than her nephew’s earlier decision to drop out of college. But Howard, she said, was “just possessed to be declared an adult,” and he went ahead with his plan over her objections.⁹⁰

Howard could not actually file the legal application until December 24, 1924—his nineteenth birthday. In the meantime, he campaigned hard with Judge Walter Montieth to act favorably on the request when it reached his court. All through the fall, Howard was one of the judge’s golfing partners at the Houston Country Club. Now an excellent golfer, Howard had done some homework about the tool company. “Walter Montieth said he couldn’t ask him any question that Howard didn’t know the answer,” Annette remembered.⁹¹ Although he had no intention of going back to college, Howard promised the judge that if he was declared an adult, the next fall he would go to Princeton University, where his friend Dudley was then enrolled, and finish his education.⁹² All of this made a favorable impression on the judge and on December 24, when Howard’s application was filed with the court, it was a foregone conclusion that Judge Montieth would act in his favor. Two days later he signed an order removing the young man’s “disabilities of minority” and declaring him of “full age.”⁹³ With that signature, Howard Hughes became master of his own future.

Even though Hughes now had full control of the tool company, he took no step to interfere in its day-to-day operations. Like his father, he had little interest in them, and, in Howard’s case there was an added reason: he considered it his “father’s monument”—to be preserved, protected, and left alone.⁹⁴ Thus he suppressed his instinct to meddle in a way he was never able to do again. For Hughes, there would be other worlds to conquer, although he still did not have a clear notion of what they would be. He experimented with a steam-powered car, talked to Annette about going west to produce motion pictures, and that spring began wooing a young woman named Ella Rice.

She was two years older than Hughes, dark-haired with soft features and an aristocratic air, and a sense of belonging among society people who made Hughes feel uncomfortable and out of place. The daughter of a wealthy businessman, Ella was a grand-niece of William Marsh Rice, the founder of Rice Institute. In Houston, there was no better name than Rice. Hughes had known Ella since childhood, when both had attended Christ Church Cathedral. As they grew up, their paths diverged. Howard was something of a flop with girls and not much interested in the city’s social life. His wealth and dark good looks should have made him an appealing young man about town, but he had few dates, and when he did go out, to functions like the debutante balls, he often showed up alone. Ella, on the other hand, was the wheel around which young Houston society turned, forever surrounded by suitors and very much in demand.

Annette later recalled that Howard saw Ella at a social affair at Christ Church in which she was crowned queen and “apparently he was in love with her from then on.”⁹⁵ As it had been earlier with Eleanor Boardman, the infatuation was one-sided, at least at first. Ella did not pay much attention to Hughes’s overtures. As time went by they dated, and Hughes became all the more determined to win her hand. He wanted Ella to marry him and to come with him to California. But when he asked her to do so, she refused. For help, Hughes turned to his aunt Annette, who was related by marriage to Ella’s parents:

[He] came to me and asked me to go and convince Aunt Mattie [Ella’s mother] to let Ella marry him, and I was against it…. I didn’t think he ought to. I thought he ought to go to Rice… but I went and asked her…. I convinced Aunt Mattie she ought to let Ella marry Howard. I said, “I can’t send him with all that money to California with all those vampire movie people.” And Aunt Mattie she agreed with me, and Ella and Howard were married.⁹⁶

The wedding was scheduled for June 1, 1925. In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, Hughes did not throw himself into the traditional round of bachelor parties or merry prenuptial celebrations. Instead, he wrote his will:

I give… to my friend Dudley C. Sharp… the sum of Ten Thousand Dollars; to my uncle, Chilton Gano, Fifteen Thousand Dollars; to my aunt, Mrs. James P. Houstoun, Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars; to my aunt, Mrs. Fred R. Lummis, One Hundred Thousand Dollars and my home on Yoakum Boulevard;… to my wife, Ella Rice Hughes, the sum of Five Hundred Thousand Dollars in first class, high-grade securities, to be delivered to her by my Executors as soon after my death as can conveniently be arranged…. To Lily Adams and John Farrell (my colored household servants)… a weekly pension of Twenty Dollars each….

Ella Rice, Hughes’s first wife, in 1938.
Bettmann Archive

To six executives of the tool company he bequeathed a percentage of the company’s dividends: S. P. Brown, 1 percent; Matt Boehm, C. S. Johnson, and H. W. Fletcher, 2 percent each; Arch A. MacDonald, 3 percent; and R. C. Kuldell, 5 percent. Conspicuously absent from the last will and testament of nineteen-year-old Howard Hughes was any bequest or reference to his uncle Rupert, his uncle Felix, his grandparents, Felix and Jean Hughes, or any other relative on his father’s side of the family. For the remaining assets of his estate, Hughes had special plans:

As soon after my death as practicable, my Executors shall cause to be created a corporation, to be known as HOWARD R. HUGHES MEDICAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES, the objects and purposes of which shall be the prosecution of scientific research for the discovery and development of antitoxins for the prevention, and specific remedies for the cure, of the most important and dangerous diseases to which this section of the country may be subjected. Said Laboratories shall be located in Harris County, Texas [Houston]. It shall not be a school for the education of doctors, nor of those desiring medical education, but shall be a LABORATORY devoted to the discovery and development of ways, means, antitoxins, and specifics for the prevention and curing of the most serious diseases with which this country may from time to time be afflicted, and shall be devoted to the search for and development of the highest scientific methods for the prevention and treatment of diseases.

The laboratories were to be headed by a three-man board of trustees—Frank Andrews, the tool company’s lawyer; Dr. Fred Lummis, Annette’s husband; and Frederick C. Proctor, a family friend. The same three were also to serve as executors of Hughes’s estate. They would have the power to establish the laboratories, make bylaws, and oversee their operations. Hughes directed that as soon as the conditions of his estate would permit, the trustees should

acquire a proper site in the vicinity of the city of Houston and proceed with the construction of proper buildings for the scientific research herein provided for. I especially direct that they shall construct and build the very finest and most highly scientific LABORATORIES for such research work that may be obtained, and that they shall employ, to the extent of the means available for that purpose, a few of the most noteworthy scientists and doctors available for the particular line of work. I do not desire a large number of scientific men employed, but I do desire the very best available for the particular subjects which my Trustees may from time to time have under investigation.

In the last part of the will, Hughes wrote a tribute to his father and a plea that his father’s creation—the tool company—be preserved after his own death:

It is my will and desire that my Trustees shall continue the operation of Hughes Tool Company as far as practicable as now carried on. This institution was founded by my father and promoted through his genius and ability, to the success which it now enjoys, and it is my purpose and intention, so long as I shall live, to continue its development and progress, by following out the policies practiced by my father; and it is my will and desire that my Trustees, so far as practicable, shall continue the same course after my death, thus building to my father a permanent monument marking his initiative, judgment and foresight in the founding and upbuilding of a great business. My Executors and Trustees shall never pledge the stock of said company. They shall never sell the same so long as said company may be profitably operated; and it is my will and desire that they shall exhaust every means to see that its profitable operation is continued. If they fail in this, they may sell the physical properties, or sell the stock, as an entirety, and devote the proceeds of such sale to the objects and purposes expressed in this will in founding HOWARD R. HUGHES MEDICAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES.⁹⁷

After working for weeks on the will with Frank Andrews, once his father’s lawyer and now his, Hughes signed the ten-page document on May 30, 1925, two days before he was married.

The wedding took place at seven o’clock on the evening of June 1 in the rose garden of the home of Ella’s sister, Libby Farish, at 10 Remington Lane in Shadyside, the luxurious walled enclave of the Houston aristocracy bordering Rice Institute. The Houston Chronicle called the wedding a “notable event of the year on the social calendar.”⁹⁸ Little Martha Farish, Ella’s niece, and five-year-old Janet Houstoun, who was the daughter of Hughes’s other maternal aunt, Martha Houstoun, were flower girls. Dudley Sharp, just back from his freshman year at Princeton, was best man. As the women in their long white gowns and the men in their white linen suits sweltered in the humid evening, Dr. Peter Gray Sears of Christ Church solemnized the marriage of Ella Rice, twenty-one, and Howard Hughes Jr., nineteen.

In the short space of the year and a half since his father’s death, young Howard Hughes had asserted himself in ways no one in the family could have foretold. The obedient boy had given way to an aggressive, rebellious young man. He had broken with his relatives, grabbed control of a fortune, and taken a wife at an age when most of his peers were completing their first year of college. Yet where was this flash of independence leading him? He was still not sure, but he had decided that his future lay beyond Houston, his father’s town.

After a leisurely summer of playing golf, working on his steam-powered car, and taking his wife to Dallas to show her off to his Gano cousins, Hughes was ready to move on. He and Ella packed and took the train to California. By then, Hollywood had come to represent for spirited young men what Spindletop had meant a generation before: adventure, excitement, and wealth. Hughes had no need for money, but he did have a need to prove himself. Perhaps in the slightly unreal, but vibrant world of Hollywood he would find a way to do that.