Often now he would awaken in the terrors of withdrawal and begin his day by reaching down to the black metal box by his bedside where he kept his stash and his unsterilized hypodermic needle. Immediately mixing a fix, he would dissolve several white tablets in his pure bottled Poland Spring water, then jab the spike into his wasted body. Sometimes he prolonged the ritual by “double-pumping,” injecting half the white fluid, then drawing it back up into the syringe with his blood, letting the needle dangle for a moment before he shot the full load back into his system. Then he would relax, and in the first warm flush of relief and satisfaction now and then softly sing a little jingle to himself, a little scat bebop routine he remembered from the old days. “Hey-bop-a-ree bop. Hey-bop-a-ree-bop.” And finally maybe even a quiet chuckle.
There were other drugs, and the codeine was not the worst of them. Hughes was also gobbling massive quantities of tranquilizers, up to two hundred milligrams of Valium and Librium at a single shot, ten times the normal dose. Blue bombers. And when he wasn’t shooting codeine, he was swallowing fistfuls of Empirin #4, a prescription compound containing codeine, aspirin, caffeine, and a synthetic pain-killer called phenacetin. It was not the codeine but the phenacetin that was doing the real damage, ravaging his already shrunken kidneys. Eventually it would kill him.
Already he had the smell of death around him. He rarely washed. He never brushed his teeth. Most of the time, instead of walking to the bathroom, he stayed in bed and urinated into a wide-necked mason jar, insisting that the filled jars be kept and stored in his bedroom closet. Moving his bowels was a far more complex operation. He was chronically, terminally constipated and routinely spent a large part of his day, often five or ten hours at a time, sitting on the toilet without results, despite huge doses of powerful laxatives. In the end, he usually gave it up and had to once again submit to the humiliation of an enema administered by one of his nursemaids.
So there he was, sprawled naked on his unmade bed. Mr. Big. Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, his was the true but hidden face of power in America. All the inner corruption made visible. And like that portrait, Howard Hughes too had to be locked away, concealed from public view.
No one knew what he looked like. No one knew how he lived. No one—not the man in the street, not the businessmen or politicians who dealt with him, not the presidents who treated him as an equal, not even his own top executives—had the slightest inkling of what Howard Hughes had become.
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 shop where he built his racing planes, Hughes Aircraft; his love of flying, TWA. His toys had outgrown him. First he had to surrender direct control of the aircraft company after an ultimatum from the Pentagon. Then he was forced to sell RKO. Finally, in 1957, crisis.
He was about to lose TWA, the enterprise closest to his heart. It was Hughes versus the Bankers. He wanted a new fleet of jets and needed their money. They wanted control. He wouldn’t share it. At the peak of the crisis, the one man he trusted, the one man he needed, his right-hand man, Noah Dietrich, the gruff CPA who had run his business empire since 1925, his surrogate father, suddenly abandoned him. Almost simultaneously, Hughes found himself forced into a new partnership. He got married.