Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [26]
No one had seen him for almost a decade.
And like Dorian Gray himself, Hughes presented a public image that remained forever young, fixed in an earlier, more innocent time. The picture most people still had of Hughes was from his last public appearance. Vigorous and vital—if no longer Jimmy-Stewart boyish, still handsome, his dark hair slicked back and parted down the middle, a commanding presence, a tall supremely confident tycoon, looking a bit like a leading man from a 1940s movie, but far more rugged, more forceful, more dangerous, radiating power. In short, Hughes as he had appeared in his last newsreels.
Indeed, his whole life seemed as if it had been played out in a dazzling series of newsreels.
Orphaned a millionaire at age eighteen. Heir to an ever-expanding fortune based on a tiny drill bit his father had invented. Holder of an absolute monopoly on the device needed to extract from the ground virtually every drop of oil in the world. Sole owner of an enterprise that would pour out hundreds of millions of dollars!
Hughes in Hollywood. The teen-age tycoon come to Tinseltown, using his sudden wealth to pursue his passions: movies, airplanes, and women. 1930: Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Not yet twenty-five, he leaps into national prominence with the most expensive movie in history, Hell’s Angels. Then a whole string of big hits: The Front Page, Scarface, The Outlaw. Hughes at his own openings, a seemingly endless succession of screen goddesses on his arm, including two he himself made into sex symbols. Jean Harlow, the Platinum Blonde. Jane Russell, the Buxom Bombshell. A fabulously rich, somewhat notorious playboy-producer high-stepping through the Great Depression!
Hughes the Flying Ace. The daring young pilot in his leather flight jacket, a fedora tilted rakishly across his forehead. Standing beside racing planes he himself designed and built. Breaking all the records. 1935: a new land speed record. 1936: the cross-country record. 1937: a second transcontinental dash that breaks his own record. Capping it all, in 1938, a stunning around-the-world flight. Now an international hero, he comes home to ticker-tape parades down Broadway in New York and in Chicago, Los Angeles, and his old hometown, Houston. The toast of a country enraptured by men making history in the skies. A Lindbergh with uncounted millions!
Then, suddenly, tragedy—and scandal. 1946: near death in a dramatic plane crash. Hughes, test-piloting an air force reconnaissance plane of his own design, loses control and smashes the sleek XF-11 into Beverly Hills. 1947: barely recovered, he’s unceremoniously hauled before a United States Senate investigating committee, accused of war-profiteering and political payoffs!
Hughes on trial. Caught in the glare of the klieg lights. Charged with winning war contracts by plying Pentagon brass and the president’s son with bribes, booze, and broads. At the center of the controversy, a gigantic plywood seaplane—the “Spruce Goose.” Hughes’s Folly. An eighteen-million-dollar pile of lumber that’s never left the ground. Undaunted, Hughes faces down the senators. Stalks out of the hearing room with a daring promise: “If the flying boat fails to fly, I will leave the country and never come back!”
Long Beach harbor. November 2, 1947. Hughes at the controls of the “Spruce Goose,” dwarfed by the outsized airplane, five stories tall, far bigger than anything ever flown. He says he will only taxi it on the water this time out, but the cameras are rolling anyway. And, suddenly, the amazing thing is aloft! Hughes gets it seventy feet up in the air, flies it a mile across the bay!
That was his last newsreel. Indeed, Hughes was rarely seen in public again. His fame was at its peak. There was even a brief “Hughes-for-President” boom. But at the moment of his greatest triumph, he withdrew.
It was the beginning of a long retreat, and of a sudden series of defeats. The now hidden Hughes seemed to be losing control of his empire, a piece at a time. All his hobbies had become big corporations: the movies, RKO; the