Geoff Schumacher - Howard Hughes

In many ways, Howard Hughes was a detestable character. He wielded his money and power to manipulate the democratic process. He treated women like property. He was an unabashed racist. He didnt seem to have an artistic bone in his body, yet he arrogantly declared himself a movie director. He was an irrational Red baiter who fired numerous alleged Communists working for his movie company. Hughes was intermittently generous to friends and allies, but he was not a great philanthropist. For the most part, Hughes saw his fellow human beings as pieces on a chess board to be moved here and there to suit his needs.

But while I recognize his many flaws, Hughes is endlessly fascinating to me. He was smartsome say a geniusand largely self-educated. He was an important aviation innovator, despite having no formal training in aerodynamics. His flying boat was an incredible achievement, even if it flew only once. He was a maverick. He never ran with the pack, and he didnt back down from a fight. He was a rich man who had little interest in expensive clothes, cars, or houses. He wined and dined beautiful actresses, then drove them home in an unassuming Chevrolet. Hughes spent hundreds of millions of dollars in pursuit of his passions: airplanes, movies, and, later, casinos. In the process, he employed tens of thousands of people, many of whom were fiercely loyal to him even if they had never met him.

Hughes also was a tragic figure. His gradual descent into drug addiction, germ phobia, paranoia, seclusion, and obsessive-compulsive disorderall steadily worsening while doctors toyed with his drug intake and aides sat on their handsis one of the saddest stories of the twentieth century.

Indeed, Hughes was the last private man, as Joan Didion called him in 1967 while he was living in the penthouse of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, with only a handful of personal aides granted access to his suite. Hughes insistence on total privacy in the final years of his life is eternally intriguing. People just want to knowwhat was happening up there. Did he really keep his urine in jars? (Yes.) Were his fingernails really six inches long? (No.) Is it true that his top Las Vegas executive, Bob Maheu, never spoke with his boss in person? (Yes.) Is it true that he snuck out of the hotel a few times to visit a prostitute in rural Nevada? (No.) Did he really watch the same movie, Ice Station Zebra, over and over? (Yes.) A whole book could be written just confirming and debunking the legends generated by his privacy obsession.

I am also fascinated by Hughes impact on Las Vegas. Today, more than forty years after his death, his name has an uncanny way of popping up in conversation. Everybody in Las Vegas, it seems, knows somebody who worked for Hughes in some capacity. His former employees are still scattered across the city, and most of them love to talk about the man, even if they never met him.

Soon after I started working on the first edition of this book, my mom put me in touch with her neighbor, eighty-eight-year-old Russ Hudson, who said he played golf with Hughes in the early 50s. Hudson proudly showed me the pair of red cowboy boots he wore while playing with Hughes and that Hughes admired. In his final years, Hudson wore gloves much of the time, an homage of sorts to Hughes fear of germs.

I also sat down with Bob McCaffery, a former design engineer for Hughes Helicopter Company who regularly delivered public lectures about Hughes. McCaffery campaigned successfully in the 1980s to save Hughes flying boat from being dismantled and distributed to nine different museums. Then, with the plane facing eviction from Long Beach, California, he campaigned to bring it to Las Vegas. He identified a spot at the south end of the Strip where the giant plane could be put on display. Alas, Las Vegas lost out to a bid from the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, where the flying boat resides today.