Howard Hughes, Part III

After the plane crash, Hughes had plastic surgery, and his looks changed considerably – and not for the better. Even so, Hughes was able to entice the 6'4" tall newcomer to Hollywood, Randolph Scott, into an affair. Turns out their fathers had been friends back in the day. When Scott was out trolling for male flesh one night in Griffith Park (a popular place for gay cruising), he propositioned a vice cop and was arrested. Hughes bailed him out and paid a $3,000 bribe to make the arrest disappear. Scott was grateful, but eventually moved on to Cary Grant, with whom he would have a long-term, volatile relationship. However, Jean Harlow claimed that Hughes had three signed photographs of Randolph Scott in his bedroom and stared at them in order to become aroused while having sex with her. During a heated argument with Billie Dove, whom Howard intended to marry, she called him an impotent bastard and a faggot – and she wasn’t kidding. Jean Harlow called him a “deaf faggot.”

Things started to go south for Howard in a big way. After the plane crash he started having debilitating migraine headaches, and his hearing loss worsened. He was having more and more frequent bouts of impotence, especially with women. He started to use cocaine, and he suffered a nervous breakdown, to boot. Once the best dressed man in Hollywood, Hughes began to appear in public in wrinkled, sloppy clothes. Hughes was also becoming involved in dealings with the mob, particularly Bugsy Siegel. Even worse, Howard turned into a scathing bigot, disdainful of Jews and blacks. A rare bright note was the enormous success of The Front Page, a film Hughes produced in 1931.

Howard was blackmailed by Billie Dove’s husband to the tune of $350,000 (Hughes paid up). By the early 1930s Hughes had blown through most of the profits of the Hughes Tool Company. He had used the company’s earnings to bankroll a string of money-losing projects in aviation and film production.

However, his taste in the handsomest men in Hollywood continued unabated: Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, George O’Brien, Johnny Mack Brown and many, many others. When Clark Gable first arrived in Hollywood, he dropped trou for several influential men, including Billy Haines and Howard – anything to get ahead and become a star. When über-gay George Cukor was directing Gable in Gone with the Wind, he teased him about his earlier dalliances with Haines and Hughes. Gable never spoke to Cukor again while on the set, and he led a successful effort to get Cukor fired (Cukor was replaced by Victor Fleming).

Howard’s attention drifted away from making films to the field of aviation. He became more and more eccentric. For example, all he would eat was rare steak and peas (but they had to be very small peas), and he started buying his clothes from thrift stores. He became hopelessly paranoid and insanely jealous of anyone who threatened to topple him from the mountaintop. His jealousy over the feats of aviation by Charles Lindbergh manifested itself into fits of screaming and profanity. After the kidnaping of Lindbergh’s child, Hughes became obsessed with security.

And that’s where I’m going to stop. Hughes went on to design and manufacture aircraft and forever change the face of Las Vegas. However, his life from this point was a sad lapse into mental illness, self destruction and bizarre behavior, much of it too unsavory to relate. A second plane crash in 1946 left him scarred and addicted to morphine. He ran RKO Pictures into the ground, and did much the same with Trans World Airlines. He later fled to the Bahamas and Mexico to have easier access to codeine, which he personally injected into his arms. He also suffered the effects of tertiary syphilis. His legacy was that of the world’s most eccentric billionaire, and today only his medical research institute carries his banner in a positive light.

Because of his wealth and power, his homosexual proclivities were not well known to the public during his lifetime. However, enough of his employees and colleagues survived after his death in 1976 to be able to speak openly about the subject without fear of reprisal. Turns out they had plenty to talk about.

Sources:
Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (1993) by Charles Higham
Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel (2005) by Darwin Porter