Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: the Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire, by Richard Hack
This book was only a little over 390 pages in length but it took me four weeks to read. Not only is the subject, Howard Hughes, very complicated and bizarre but the author delved into almost the minutiae of his business life (negotiations, contracts, lawsuits, etc) so I found myself having to give my brain a break after reading just a few pages. Interesting, yes. Easy to read, not so much. (I had to double-check the spelling of minutiae in the dictionary and I had it right. I be smart!)
From the bn.com site:
Was ever a life more incredible than that of Howard Hughes? Record-setting aviator, fabled lover, celebrated film director and producer, genius financier and industrialist, the nation’s first billionaire. who at one time or another owned TWA, RKO Studios and most of Las Vegas. Hughes (1905-1976) also suffered from severe psychological afflictions that led him to spend his last years in isolation, naked in blacked-out rooms on several continents, devoting days at a time to screening grade-Z movies, dictating long memos to his staff about the proper procedures to keep his room and person free of germs, mostly through the liberal use of Kleenex as a prophylactic, even as he ingested titanic amounts of codeine, his hair and fingernails growing to grotesque length and his back running with untreated sores. … To separate fact from rumor in detailing Hughes’s life, Hack read more than 8,000 pages of Hughes’s private papers, 2,500 pages of recently declassified FBI and CIA documents, over 100,000 pages of previously sealed legal briefs, corporate papers and inventories, and spoke with hundreds of players, key and minor, in Hughes’s drama.
I closed this book with a nagging question. It is mentioned several times in the book that Hughes considered Cary Grant his best friend. They did, if correctly documented, spend time together. Grant was often a passenger on Hughes private airplanes. But I read Grant’s biography earlier this year and I don’t recall any mention of Hughes in it. Could it be that Hughes actually believed they were close when Grant didn’t feel that way at all? Did Grant use Hughes for the publicity it would bring? I don’t want to think that about Cary Grant but it does have me wondering.
Of course, everyone wants to remember Hughes as the eccentric recluse, with stringy hair and nasty nails, but that wasn’t the man. That was the illness inhabiting the man. My lasting perception is that Howard Hughes is the poster child for self-fulfilling prophecy. If he set his mind on something, it happened. In 1925, he wrote: “Things I want to be: 1. The best golfer in the world. 2. The best pilot. 3. The most famous producer of motion pictures.” And at different points in his life, he accomplished all of those things. If he had only wanted more for others, something less self-involved, more altruistic, more generous…we may be living in a different world today.
