We Know Why Howard Hughes Lost His Mind
We Know Why Howard Hughes Lost His Mind
Howard Hughes’s private life was far from glamorous, as jars of urine, years of addiction, and bizarre eating habits slowly took their toll on him over the decades, though this horrific lifestyle could only be truly matched by his terrible, jaw-dropping death. As a multifaceted, outgoing, and ceaselessly creative person, Howard Hughes literally did it all throughout his long and colorful journey, ranging from becoming an accomplished pilot to an innovative aerospace engineer, a shrewd businessman, a visionary filmmaker, and even a dedicated philanthropist, until it eventually seemed like there was virtually nothing that Howard Hughes couldn’t possibly achieve, before he slowly and tragically started to become unhinged, exhibiting increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior that shocked everyone around him. Hughes actually came from a distinguished family with deep and enduring roots in American mythology, and on his mother’s side, there was the notable historical figure who had baptized George Washington himself, while Hughs’s own cousins were the famous environmental and industrial R Brothers, and his beloved uncle was none other than the Oscar-nominated novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes.
His official birth certificate clearly states that Howard Hughes was born on Christmas Eve in 1905 down in Harris County, Texas, but then there is also his contradictory baptism certificate which claims that he was born on September 24th of that same year 1905 and surprisingly gives no specific place of birth at all. Wherever and whenever Hughes was actually born, we do know for an absolute fact that he was an exceptionally brilliant young man from a very early age, because when he was just eleven years old, he personally built Houston’s very first wireless radio transmitter and became the first officially licensed ham radio operator in the entire state of Texas. The very next year, he proudly appeared in the local newspaper as the first boy in the entire city of Houston to own and ride a motorized bicycle, which he had impressively built completely by himself from scratch. By the time he reached the tender age of fourteen, he had already taken his very first professional flying lesson, setting the stage for his lifelong passion for aviation, but tragedy struck in 1922 when his beloved mother sadly passed away due to severe complications from pregnancy, and just two years later, his father suddenly died from a massive heart attack. Suddenly and devastatingly, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, Hughes had completely become an orphan, and his parents had passed away so unexpectedly and suddenly that his father hadn’t even updated his final will and testament, a fateful oversight that would permanently change Hughs’s life forever. It is statistically and historically likely that his strict dad wouldn’t have wanted to leave his entire unfettered, multi-million-dollar estate entirely to his young and inexperienced son, but that was precisely what ended up happening in the chaotic aftermath.
At just nineteen years of age, Hughes officially became an emancipated minor under the law, which granted him immediate, unrestricted access to the vast, incomprehensible sum of money he had inherited as the sole surviving child of immensely wealthy parents. The very first thing he decided to do with this unprecedented freedom was to officially quit school and marry his beloved sweetheart, Ella Rice, starting a new chapter of high-society life. Hughes and his young, beautiful wife quickly packed up their belongings and went off to sunny Los Angeles with a massive fortune ready to be spent on whatever caught their fancy, and Hughes soon crossed paths with Ralph Graves at Ellie’s exclusive Wilshire Country Club. Graves was an aspiring actor who happened to have a lucrative business opportunity specifically tailored for Hughes, because he had secretly written a promising film script and knew the absolute perfect actor to star in it—himself—and all he desperately needed was the financial backing to bring his cinematic vision to life. Since Hughes already harbored a deep, growing interest in the magical world of movie-making, he didn’t hesitate for a second and immediately handed over a staggering forty thousand dollars to finance the production of the film. With zero prior experience in the complex world of filmmaking, he was undoubtedly jumping straight into the deep end of the pool, and the movie Graves got Hughes to finance was titled Swell Hogan, but what actually swelled far beyond control was the production budget. The costs rapidly doubled to a whopping eighty thousand dollars, and when Hughes finally saw the finished product on the screen, he genuinely thought it wasn’t good at all, realizing the monumental mistake he had made. He decided to take the completed movie directly to his experienced Uncle Robert, who was already well-established in the film industry, and earnestly asked for his honest professional opinion.
Robert Hughes watched the footage and thought the movie was so utterly terrible that he sternly told his naive nephew to immediately burn the only existing copy of it, warning him that if he didn’t, he would instantly become the laughingstock of all Hollywood. We will ultimately never know just how truly bad the film actually was because Hughes wisely took his uncle’s harsh advice to heart and completely destroyed the only copy in existence, erasing it from history. His very first ambitious try at filmmaking had undeniably been a total disaster, but he certainly wasn’t a quitter, and around this same time, Hughs’s wife had unfortunately divorced him and permanently returned home to Houston, so he decided it was an ideal time to date famous cinematic beauties. He subsequently had high-profile romantic connections with legendary stars like Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn, and if you choose to believe the persistent Hollywood rumors, a few notable male beauties like Cary Grant and Tyrone Power as well. Hughes was ultimately so thrilled and satisfied with his fast-paced lifestyle in the movies that he decided it was finally time to make a massive, game-changing corporate purchase. He noticed that RKO Pictures was severely struggling financially and boldly decided to buy them out completely, wasting no time in aggressively restructuring the historic studio.
He quickly and ruthlessly fired seven hundred workers and drastically reduced the studio’s annual output from a steady thirty films a year down to a meager twelve, prioritizing quality and control over sheer volume. If the poor employees who somehow managed to remain at RKO thought they were safe and lucky, they were unfortunately in for yet another massive and stressful surprise from their eccentric new boss. Hughs’s next immediate act was to completely and utterly shut down RKO operations for a prolonged period because he harbored deep, paranoid suspicions that some of the remaining employees might secretly be dangerous Communists. For six long months, he meticulously and obsessively investigated the personal background of every single employee to be absolutely certain that they all held fiercely anti-communist political ideologies that matched his own strict worldview. In the honest opinions of many observers and insiders, Hughes was clearly acting like a complete madman, and now he was going to have to publicly explain himself for his bizarre corporate tyranny. The minority shareholders of RKO were not at all impressed or amused with Hughs’s erratic behavior and tyrannical management style, so they swiftly started suing him left, right, and center in various courts. Hughes had a remarkably simple and expensive solution to this legal headache, as he simply bought out all of their contentious shares with cash and became the absolute sole owner of RKO Pictures. True to his unpredictable nature, Hughes successfully sold RKO just six months later and laughed all the way to the bank, turning a massive profit on the transaction. He made so much incredible money from that single sale that he could now comfortably move right along to his next grand real estate and industrial venture without a second thought.
He aggressively purchased twelve hundred acres of prime land in Culver City and over four thousand acres in Tucson, Arizona, establishing a massive footprint in the American Southwest. Next, he expanded his vast property portfolio even further by buying twenty-five thousand acres of desert land near Las Vegas, proving that the ambitious man clearly had a grand, sweeping master plan for the future. However, one single careless and tragic mistake had the terrifying potential to derail his entire life and destroy everything he had worked so hard to build up to that point in time. Back in 1936, Hughes was casually driving his expensive car through the busy streets of Los Angeles when he tragically struck a pedestrian named Gabriel W. Meyer with his vehicle. Meyer was instantly killed in the devastating impact, and when a qualified medical doctor thoroughly examined Hughes shortly after the crash, he explicitly noted that the multimillionaire had clearly been drinking heavily prior to the accident. An independent eyewitness came forward and stated that Hughs’s driving behavior had been completely erratic and dangerous, and that Meyer had actually been safely standing well within a designated streetcar stop when he was violently mowed down.
Following the fatal collision, Hughes was immediately thrown into a prison cell to spend the night behind bars, and it seemed like an absolute certainty that he would be formally charged with severe homicidal negligence. Miraculously and suspiciously, the key eyewitness suddenly and inexplicably changed his entire story during the legal proceedings, and Hughes somehow managed to walk away completely scot-free without a single criminal conviction. The entire legal ordeal seemed deeply corrupt and suspicious from top to bottom, but Hughes simply shook off the controversy and immediately dove headfirst into his newest grand obsession—breaking a prestigious world record. Back in 1933, Wiley Post had famously flown completely around the globe in a staggering one hundred and eighty-six hours, and Hughes now firmly set his ambitious sights on shattering that impressive record. However, he also had a deeper, more calculated ulterior motive behind the flight, as he desperately wanted the global public to firmly understand and believe that long-distance commercial air travel was entirely safe. On July 14th of 1938, he and his highly skilled handpicked crew successfully landed back in New York, completely beating Post’s previous record by an astonishing and historic ninety-five hours of continuous flight time. The notoriously eccentric Howard Hughes was steadily getting more and more famous, notorious, and reclusive by the day as his massive wealth continued to grow exponentially alongside his peculiar personal habits. During the 1940s, Hughes actively dated Hollywood actor Jean Peters and eventually built up the courage to formally propose marriage to her, but Peters flatly said no because she was entirely focused on building her own independent acting career.
Alternatively, she might have wisely noticed the early warning signs that Hughes was already having his shady private security men follow her every single step around town like a hawk. Years later, the turbulent couple miraculously reconnected after drifting apart, and this time around, Peters was finally ready to settle down and become his devoted wife, leading to a quiet ceremony. In 1957, they officially tied the knot in a private ceremony held inside a hotel in Nevada, hoping for a peaceful and long-lasting partnership away from the glaring flashbulbs of the tabloid press. However, just one year later in 1958, Hughes suddenly decided that he wanted to aggressively binge-watch some motion pictures, a whim that might not sound overly unusual or shocking to the modern ear. Except for the crucial fact that Hughs’s extreme idea of a serious movie binge meant holing himself up in a completely private studio for four full, uninterrupted months without ever stepping outside into the daylight. He steadfastly refused to leave the dark studio during that entire multi-month stretch, and his daily diet consisted almost exclusively of plain chicken, chocolate bars, and fresh milk delivered to his door. Hughes had literally spent four solid months watching movies in total darkness, and when he finally stumbled back out of the studio into the real world, he hadn’t taken a single bath, cut his hair, or even clipped his fingernails and toenails. Incredibly, he eventually decided to do it all over again, and this time around, when Hughes wanted to binge-watch his favorite movies, he chose a much more comfortable and luxurious venue—a private bungalow at the rather expensive Beverly Hills Hotel. Hughes sat around his secluded bungalow day after day watching movies on a continuous loop, famously wearing nothing more than a flimsy pink hotel napkin to modestly cover his private parts from any passing staff. In that single calendar year alone, he spent something dangerously close to one million dollars entirely on hotel accommodations and room service bills at the legendary establishment. Of course, the million-dollar question that baffled everyone around him was what on earth he was actually watching on screen for all those countless hours and days on end. One particular film that he completely obsessed over and genuinely liked to watch on an endless loop was Ice Station zebra, a thrilling spy drama starring the popular actor Rock Hudson.
Since Hughes actually owned a major television station outright, he simply used his absolute corporate authority to demand that they play the film over and over again on the network without stopping. They ended up broadcasting the movie over a hundred times to satisfy his bizarre whims, and if Hughes happened to fall asleep halfway through and missed a crucial scene, he would instantly call them up and force them to replay it. Watching movies for months on end in total isolation was undeniably weird, eccentric, and deeply concerning to his associates, but it was mostly harmless compared to the darker secrets of his life. Soon enough, however, Hughes would find himself dragged straight into the explosive center of a massive, career-destroying presidential scandal that shook the entire foundation of American politics. Most historically informed people are well aware of the infamous Watergate scandal involving then-president Richard Nixon, but not nearly everyone is fully aware of Hughs’s direct and secretive financial involvement in the background. Nixon, a prominent Republican leader, had desperately heard rumors that the opposing Democrats had managed to gather damaging information about some very shady, under-the-table financial dealings he had previously conducted with Hughes, including a notorious two-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe. Panicked about his political survival, Nixon directly sent his loyal operatives into the Watergate hotel headquarters to covertly break in and steal any documents or information that might heavily incriminate him. As it ultimately turned out during the subsequent investigations, there was actually no such incriminating info stored there after all, but the bumbling men were inevitably caught red-handed by police, and Nixon ultimately lost his presidency in disgrace. By the late 1960s, Hughes was constantly moving from one luxury hotel to another across the country, accompanied by his massive collection of loyal personal aides, medical personnel, and rotating girlfriends. In November of 1966, Hughes and his enormous, eccentric entourage took a private train all the way to Las Vegas and went directly to check into the Desert Inn hotel and casino.
Hughes originally intended to stay there for a very long time, and to entirely avoid any potential problems, annoyances, or eviction threats from the hotel staff or the greedy owners, he simply bought the entire place. There was, however, a major and intolerable annoyance right outside the bedroom window he had chosen for himself at the Desert Inn, as the painfully bright neon lights flashing from the sign at the adjacent Silver Slipper Casino kept him awake all night. He could have easily solved the problem by simply changing rooms to the other side of the building, but true to his extravagant and stubborn nature, he instead bought the entire Silver Slipper Casino and had the giant sign permanently moved out of his sight. As Hughes continued to grow older with each passing year, his erratic behavior grew progressively more and more eccentric, rigid, and detached from standard human conventions. For instance, he persistently insisted on having the exact same specific items for his dinner every single night—a precisely cooked medium-range steak, a simple garden salad, and fresh peas, but they had to be exclusively small peas. His breakfast routine was similarly inflexible, demanding that his eggs had to be prepared in the exact, precise way that his family cook had lovingly made them when he was just a young boy back in Texas. By 1970, Hughes finally realized that he had completely lost all touch with his legally wedded wife Jean Peters, as they hadn’t genuinely lived together as a couple for years and only ever communicated through telephone calls. Well, Jean reasonably didn’t think that this bizarre arrangement constituted much of a real marriage anymore, so she finally decided to stand up for herself and asked for a formal divorce from the reclusive billionaire. This legal development looked like it was destined to become the most sensational courtroom drama of the entire century, completely filled with deeply exposed corporate secrets and bitter, multi-million-dollar legal fighting over money and assets.
The hungry media was already eagerly standing by to publish every single juicy, scandalous detail of their private lives, but in the end, that sensationalized media circus never actually materialized. As it remarkably turned out, all that Peters genuinely wanted from Hughes was a modest settlement of seventy thousand dollars a year, showing an incredible amount of personal dignity. She never once publicly talked about Hughes or exploited his eccentricities after their official divorce, even though there was legally no strict confidentiality agreement binding her silence, and Hughes never once said an unkind word about her either. The notable lack of messy drama surrounding his high-profile divorce was a massive disappointment to passionate gossip lovers and tabloid writers who were starving for dirt, but it showcased a rare moment of mutual respect. Sometime around the beginning of April in 1976, a deeply frail and failing Hughes finally boarded his private Learjet in Acapulco, Mexico, and directed the pilot to head north toward Houston, Texas, for medical attention. Then, absolute disaster struck the aging billionaire at some point during the grueling flight, as Hughes suddenly and terrifyingly stopped breathing while soaring high above the clouds. When the private plane finally touched down on the tarmac and arrived at the medical facility in Houston, the attending doctors literally couldn’t believe their eyes when they looked at the passenger. They desperately needed to formally identify Hughs’s body according to strict legal protocols, but at first, they genuinely couldn’t do it because his extreme, reclusive lifestyle and alleged heavy drug use had completely altered his physical appearance beyond recognition. He weighed less than ninety pounds at the time of his passing and possessed terrifyingly long, untrimmed fingernails, toenails, an unkempt flowing beard, and matted hair that made him look completely unrecognizable. To make matters even more surreal and secretive, he had also been traveling under a completely fabricated alias, using the fake name John T. Cooper to hide his true identity from the public. The seasoned doctors in Houston finally had to resort to taking his unique fingerprints as the only reliable way to positively identify Hughs’s corpse once and for all. The very next logical step for the authorities was to thoroughly investigate and figure out what had actually happened to him to cause such a sudden and catastrophic decline in his health. The official autopsy result formally concluded that severe, irreversible kidney failure was the primary medical cause of his ultimate demise, but just like almost everything else associated with Hughes, there was instantly massive controversy and mystery. A deeper, more exhaustive investigation into Hughs’s passing shockingly revealed that he had apparently received some sort of lethal injection prior to his death, adding a sinister layer to the tragedy.
The medical examiners also performed a detailed x-ray scan and surprisingly found five tiny, broken pieces from sharp hypodermic needles still lodged deep inside the flesh of his emaciated arms. In addition to these alarming physical findings, Hughes was completely covered in severe, painful bedsores and suffered from extreme, advanced malnutrition that had wasted away his muscles entirely. Surprisingly, despite all of these horrific and suspicious indicators, the medical examiners officially ruled out direct foul play, leading investigators to conclude that he had seemingly done all of this terrible damage to himself through self-neglect and addiction. With that grim medical chapter finally closed, the next burning question on literally everyone’s mind across the nation was who on earth would inherit his unfathomable, multi-billion-dollar fortune. Naturally, just like every other chaotic aspect of Hughs’s extraordinary life, there was immediate, high-stakes political intrigue and mystery surrounding his supposed final wishes and inheritance documents. For a long time, no one could legally find a valid will belonging to Hughes, and then a mysterious document suddenly turned up out of nowhere, creating an instant nationwide sensation. It was entirely handwritten and was bizarrely discovered sitting quietly on a wooden desk right inside the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints located in Salt Lake City, Utah. The press and legal teams quickly dubbed it the famous “Mormon will,” and absolutely no one seemed to know where it had actually come from, who had placed it there, or why it was sitting unattended on that specific desk. Then, an ordinary working man named Melvin Dummar suddenly stepped forward into the public spotlight with a wild story to tell the eager investigators and lawyers. It turned out that this mysterious man claimed he had previously delivered the controversial will to a gas station that was personally owned by none other than Melvin Dummar himself in the desert. Dummar went on to explain that prior to receiving the document, he had generously stopped on the side of a lonely highway near Las Vegas to help an old, disheveled hitchhiker who had fallen down. The strange man had later quietly whispered to Dummar that he was actually the legendary billionaire Howard Hughes, leaving behind a document that supposedly left money to a wide array of diverse charitable organizations. Sharp-eyed lawyers and investigators couldn’t help but immediately notice a glaring detail—that Melvin Dummar was also personally listed as a major financial recipient in the bizarre handwritten will. Naturally, someone quickly smelled a rat and launched a comprehensive, aggressive criminal investigation into the origins of this mysterious document to determine if it was a clever fraud. A dedicated Nevada jury carefully deliberated over the extensive evidence for days and ultimately decided that someone had skillfully forged the Mormon will and that it was legally completely invalid and worthless. Consequently, poor Melvin Dummar didn’t get a single penny of his anticipated multi-million-dollar inheritance, but he miraculously managed to avoid landing up in a prison cell on forgery charges because prosecutors lacked hard proof. With the fraudulent will thoroughly dismissed by the courts, Hughs’s massive, sprawling estate was eventually split evenly into twenty-two equal parts, with one separate share going to each of his surviving cousins. Hughs’s memorable personal appearances and direct references in popular culture are far too numerous to adequately mention in a single sitting, but his iconic, shadowy reclusive persona also heavily inspired several legendary fictional characters.
Most notably, legendary comic creator Stan Lee used elements of Hughs’s thrilling, fast-paced life as a direct, primary creative inspiration for the billionaire genius Tony Stark in Marvel’s Iron Man series. Similarly, Albert R. Broccoli, the legendary producer of the long-running James Bond film franchise, closely copied aspects of Hughs’s eccentric lifestyle for a memorable, quirky villain character featured in Diamonds Are Forever. Hughes was actually so deeply flattered and grateful to Broccoli for the cinematic nod that he made sure to keep a personal copy of the film safely stored inside his private collection. In the dramatic and lingering aftermath of the death of the legendary Howard Hughes, there was one final, lingering psychological mystery hanging heavy in the air that people desperately wanted answered. People across the globe constantly wanted to know what specific underlying medical or psychological condition had driven Hughes to act so completely unhinged, paranoid, and self-destructive during his final decades. Most casual observers simply assumed that Hughes had slowly gone completely crazy purely because of his immense, corrupting wealth, but the medical reality may have involved a much sadder and more scandalous answer. Tragically, it was largely his own reckless behavior as a young man that came back to haunt him, as the incorrigible Hughes had unfortunately contracted syphilis at the absolute height of his wild womanizing era. When the dangerous bacteria manages to aggressively spread deep into the human brain over many years, it can cause a devastating host of severe psychiatric symptoms collectively known to modern medical science as neurosyphilis. Experienced medical doctors eventually diagnosed Hughes with advanced neurosyphilis in the early 1930s, and the reality of that diagnosis is genuinely even worse and more horrifying than it casually sounds today. Neurosphilis causes widespread, irreversible damage to delicate brain tissue, which can trigger a horrifying range of psychological effects, including severe psychosis, profound dementia, creeping depression, wild delirium, and much more. To make an already tragic medical nightmare exponentially worse, Hughes unfortunately contracted the devastating disease decades well before the groundbreaking discovery and widespread medical availability of modern life-saving antibiotics. Because effective cures simply didn’t exist yet, medical doctors at the time desperately attempted to treat him using toxic heavy metals like mercury, which carried its own catastrophic host of severe side effects. When you combine heavy metal poisoning with what was clearly undiagnosed, raging obsessive-compulsive disorder, it becomes little wonder that his mental and physical state deteriorated as badly as it ultimately did.
