There is one detail about Howard Hughes that I keep coming back to. When his body arrived at the morgue in Houston in April of 1976, the staff could not confirm who he was. The richest man in America weighed barely 90 lb. His hair fell past his shoulders. His fingernails had curled. The FBI was called in to match his fingerprints because nothing else about him was recognizable. He was 70 years old.
40 years before that morning, this same man had been the most celebrated pilot in the country. He had set the world speed record in a plane he designed himself. He had flown around the earth in just over 91 hours, come home to a ticker tape parade in New York, and collected a Congressional Gold Medal before he turned 35.
He had produced the most expensive movie Hollywood had ever seen. He had dated its most famous actresses. He had owned an airline, a film studio, and a defense company that helped arm the American military. Then he disappeared, not all at once. But by the time he died, the man behind those achievements had been invisible for over a decade.
Sealed inside a hotel penthouse with the curtains drawn, injecting codeine, surrounded by a handful of Mormon assistants who controlled every door between him and the outside world. I have spent a long time with this story. The part that I find hardest to explain is not the wealth or the airplanes or the Hollywood years.
It is the fact that the same trait, the obsessive need to control everything he touched, built a $2.5 billion empire and then destroyed the man who owned it. This is the story of how that happened. Chapter 1, The Ghost in the Penthouse. For the last 6 years of his life, Howard Hughes moved from one hotel penthouse to the next across the Western Hemisphere.
Always the top floor, always behind covered windows, always attended by the same small group of men who decided what he ate, what he was injected with, and who was allowed to know where he was. He left Las Vegas in November of 1970. The departure was planned in secret and carried out in the middle of the night.
His attendants loaded him onto a stretcher, brought him down a service elevator, and drove him to a private airfield outside the city where a plane was waiting. He had spent 4 years in a sealed suite on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn reshaping the Las Vegas Strip with over $300 million in acquisitions, and he left it all without a word to anyone outside the room.
Robert Maheu, the man who had run his entire Nevada operation, was removed from his position in the same week. He never received a phone call from Hughes explaining why. Jean Peters, the actress Hughes had married in 1957, was not told her husband was leaving the country. She filed for divorce the following year.
The marriage had been conducted largely at a distance for most of its 14 years through intermediaries and telephone calls. Peters rarely spoke about it publicly. By most accounts, the two had been unreachable to each other for a long time before the paperwork made it official. The first stop was the Bahamas. Hughes took over the top floor of the Britannia Beach Hotel and closed the doors.
The room was arranged according to a set of rules he enforced without exception. The windows were sealed with tape and covered with heavy material to block all outside light. A single reclining chair sat in the center of the room surrounded by a zone of stacked paper towels and tissues that served as an insulation barrier between him and everything else in the space.
His aids were not permitted to touch him, hand him objects directly, or enter the zone without following a specific sequence of steps he had written out on a lined notepad. He watched movies, the same ones over and over. His favorite was a Cold War submarine thriller called Ice Station Zebra, which by some accounts he watched more than 150 times.
He would sit in the dark for hours in the chair with the screen running, issuing handwritten instructions on yellow pads that his men would collect and carry out. The memos covered decisions worth millions of dollars in the same handwriting as instructions about the precise way a can of fruit should be opened before it entered the room.
The script grew harder to read as the years went on, but the compulsion to dictate every detail never stopped. That pattern followed him from country to country. Nicaragua came next. He was living at the Intercontinental in Managua when, just after midnight on December 23rd of 1972, a massive earthquake tore through the city.
The building shook violently, walls cracked open. The surrounding blocks collapsed into rubble. Thousands of people in Managua died that night. The Intercontinental held because it had been built to resist seismic damage, but the upper floors were badly shaken. His men carried Hughes down the stairwell in the dark and got him onto a plane.
He was flown to London. Then he moved to Vancouver, then to the Fairmont Princess in Acapulco. Each place looked the same from the inside. The top floor closed off, the windows blocked, the chair, the tissue barrier, the television, the codeine. He had not appeared in public since the early 1960s. The men around him, members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, handled every transaction, every visitor, every piece of food that entered the suite.
They wrapped his utensils in paper before placing them inside the sterile zone. They opened doors with their elbows so he would not have to touch the handles. Some biographers would later argue that these men had deliberately cut Hughes off from the outside world to protect their own access to his fortune. Others believed they were following his orders to the letter exactly as he demanded.
The question of who was actually in control inside those rooms has never been answered. His body was coming apart. By the mid-1970s, he had stopped bathing. His teeth had gone dark. He lived on ice cream, chicken, and milk, and sometimes went days without eating at all. He injected codeine using glass syringes fitted with reusable metal needles, and the needles had a tendency to snap off inside the flesh.
After his death, doctors found five broken tips still embedded in his arms. The man who had organized his entire existence around the fear of contamination had become, at the end, the thing he spent his life trying to keep out. The medical examiner in Houston listed kidney failure as the cause of death. But the collapse behind that diagnosis had been building for 30 years.
It began on a July afternoon in 1946 on a test flight over Beverly Hills when his airplane dropped out of the sky and hit a house. Chapter 2: The Bit That Paid for Everything. His mother was afraid of everything that could make her son sick. Allene Gano Hughes monitored every meal, every playmate, every surface the boy touched.
She checked him for signs of illness the way other mothers checked for bruises. She was convinced that polio or typhoid or some unnamed infection carried on the hands of the neighbors’ children would find its way into her house and take the only child she had. This was Houston, Texas in the early 1900s. Childhood disease was a genuine threat.
Infant mortality in the state was still brutally high. But even by the standards of a dangerous time, Aline’s fear of contamination went further than most. It shaped the way her son understood the world. By the time he was old enough to understand what germs were, he had already learned that the air around other people could not be trusted.
It would take decades for anyone to see what that lesson had done to him. Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born in 1905, the only child of Aline and Howard Sr. The family was comfortable, but not yet extraordinary. The thing that would change that was a piece of metal that his father had not yet finished designing. Howard Hughes Sr.
had come to East Texas chasing the Spindletop oil strike of 1901, when a geyser of crude erupted over 100 ft into the air outside Beaumont and triggered the Texas oil boom. He worked as a wildcatter, drilling for oil with the standard equipment of the era, a blunt rotating tool called the fishtail bit. In soft earth, it worked well enough.
When it hit hard rock, it stopped. Most wildcatters accepted that as a limit. Hughes Sr. treated it as a problem to be solved. By 1908, he had designed something new. A drill bit with two interlocking steel cones, each one studded with rows of cutting edges that could chew through the hard formations the fishtail could never reach.
He called it the Sharp Hughes rock bit after himself and his partner Walter Sharp. It was not a modest improvement. It changed the physics of what a drill could do. Wells that had been impossible to reach were suddenly open. And the oil underneath them was suddenly available to anyone willing to pay for the tool that could get there.
The tool was the key, but the business model was the fortune. Hughes Sr. did not sell the bits. He leased them. Drilling companies paid as much as $30,000 per well to rent the equipment, and when the job was finished, the bit came back. He held the patent. He controlled the supply. Every barrel of hard rock oil pulled out of the ground anywhere in the country paid a royalty to Hughes Tool Company, which he incorporated in Houston in 1915.
It was a licensing machine that produced cash the way the wells produced oil, continuously, automatically, and in quantities that grew every year. The boy grew up surrounded by this money, but showed little interest in how it was made. What interested him was how things worked. At the age of 12, he built a radio transmitter out of a doorbell.
When his mother refused to buy him a motorcycle, he attached a motor to his bicycle and rode it through the neighborhood. At 14, he took his first flight in an airplane and came back talking about nothing else. He attended private schools in California and Massachusetts, then enrolled at Rice Institute in Houston and briefly at the California Institute of Technology.
He was not a committed student. He was not particularly sociable, either. A hereditary condition called otosclerosis, a progressive hardening of the bones in the inner ear, had left him partially deaf since early childhood. The condition ran in his family and would worsen as he aged. It made crowds uncomfortable and conversation difficult, and it pushed him toward solitary work with machines, where listening to people was not required.
His mother died in 1922 during a surgical procedure. She was around 40 years old. Howard was 16. His father died less than 2 years later in January of 1924 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 54. In the space of 18 months, the boy had lost both parents and gained an empire. The estate was valued at roughly $870,000 along with the patents in the company.
Howard inherited the majority of it. He was 18 years old. Rather than let the extended family manage his share, he went to a judge, had himself declared a legal adult, and then persuaded his relatives to sell him their remaining stakes. Before he turned 19, he controlled Hughes Tool Company outright. Every dollar of royalty it generated was his.
He did not stay in Houston, he did not stay in oil. He married a young woman from Houston society named Ella Botts Rice, packed up, and moved to Los Angeles because that was where the most interesting machines were, the most interesting people, and the greatest distance from the life his dead parents had planned for him.
The marriage lasted 4 years. The money lasted forever. The drill bit kept earning. It would keep earning through every phase of his life for the next five decades, silently funding the airplanes, the movies, the speed records, the lawsuits, and the slow private collapse that came after.
Howard Hughes never had to earn a single dollar on his own. The bit earned it for him. That freedom made everything that followed possible, and it made all of it worse. Chapter 3, Hollywood’s richest outsider. He arrived in Los Angeles at 20 years old with a checkbook that could outspend any studio in the city and no experience making a film.
Hollywood in the late 1920s was controlled by a small group of studio bosses who had built the industry from nothing and ran it like a private kingdom. Hughes was not part of that group. He had no connections, no reputation, and no particular talent for storytelling. What he had was the money to ignore every rule the kingdom ran on.
He approached filmmaking the way he would later approach everything else he touched. He picked the biggest, most expensive version of whatever he wanted to do, threw money at it until it worked or broke, and treated anyone who told him it was impossible as a problem to walk through. His first significant production, a silent comedy called Two Arabian Nights, won the Academy Award for Best Director at the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929.
It was a promising beginning. It was also the last time anything about his Hollywood career would go quietly. His next project was Hell’s Angels, a World War I aerial combat epic he had been developing since 1927. Hughes bought dozens of vintage military planes and hired over 100 pilots to fly them. He assembled what was reportedly the largest private fleet of aircraft in the world at the time, and he flew some of the more dangerous sequences himself.
Three stunt pilots died during production. He had originally budgeted around $2 million. Then, midway through filming, the industry switched from silent pictures to sound. Hughes scrapped most of what he had already shot and started over, recasting the female lead with a young actress named Jean Harlow. By the time Hell’s Angels reached theaters in 1930, it had cost nearly $4 million, a figure that almost no film in history had reached at that point.
It made Harlow a star overnight and made Hughes a force the established studios could no longer pretend was not there. He kept pushing. Scarface, released in 1932, was a gangster film so violent that the industry’s Hays Code censors demanded cuts and rewrites before it could be shown to the public. Hughes fought them for months, delayed the release, and eventually forced most of what he wanted onto the screen.
A decade later, he did the same thing with The Outlaw, a Western built around a young actress named Jane Russell. Hughes marketed the film almost entirely around Russell’s figure. He used publicity photographs so provocative that the censors pulled the picture from theaters within a week of its first limited release.
He waited 3 years, re-released it without their seal of approval, and let the controversy do the advertising for him. The audience lined up specifically because they had been told they were not supposed to see it. Hughes moved through Hollywood’s women the way he moved through its studios. Katharine Hepburn lived with him for a stretch in the late 1930s.
She walked out after discovering he was involved with several other people at the same time. Ava Gardner was part of his life on and off for years in a relationship that, by multiple accounts, turned violent on both sides. Gardner reportedly struck him with a heavy ornament during an argument in a studio executive’s office.
Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland were all connected to him at different points across three decades. He was lavish with gifts and relentless with attention, and the attention did not always stop when the other person wanted it to. The women he pursued were famous, independent, and difficult to control, which may have been exactly what drew him to them.
In 1948, he bought a controlling interest in RKO, one of the original five major Hollywood studios. It was already carrying around $40 million in debt when he took the reins. Under Hughes, the situation deteriorated. He fired executives without warning, delayed films for months over minor objections, and made decisions so erratic that the production schedule collapsed.
At one point, he shut down production entirely and left the studio dark for months while he reconsidered its direction, with contracted actors and crew sitting idle. Writers and directors who could avoid working with him did. He held RKO for roughly 7 years and then sold it to the General Tire and Rubber Company, walking away with a profit and leaving behind a hollowed operation that never recovered under new ownership.
By the mid-1950s, Hughes had left the film industry behind for good. He had spent three decades in Hollywood proving the same thing over and over again. That he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, because the drill bit money would always outlast whoever stood in his way. But the films were not what had kept him in California all those years.
The airplanes were. He had been designing and flying them the entire time, quietly, alongside everything else, and by now they had taken over completely. They responded to precision. They did not argue back. And unlike the people in his life, they performed with total consistency every time as long as the engineering was right.
Was Chapter 4, The Fastest Man Alive. Other men with his kind of money collected paintings or race horses or real estate. Hughes collected speed records and unlike the other collectors, he did not hire someone else to do the dangerous part. He strapped in and flew the machines himself. In 1932, he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in a rented hangar in Glendale, California.
It was not a vanity project. Hughes had studied engineering, understood aerodynamics at a technical level, and involved himself directly in the design of every plane his company produced. He hired some of the best engineers in the country, many of them recruited from Caltech. Then he sat with them at the drafting table, arguing over wing profiles and engine configurations until the numbers satisfied him.
The planes that that out of that hangar were not toys for a rich man. They were serious machines designed to do things no other aircraft had done. The first result that mattered was the H-1 racer. On September 13th of 1935, Hughes took the H-1 up from a measured course near Los Angeles and flew it at 352 mph.
No human being had ever traveled that fast in a land plane. The H-1 was not just fast, it was a technical leap. It used fully retractable landing gear, which reduced drag in the air, and a flush riveted aluminum skin that smoothed out the turbulence created by exposed bolt heads on conventional planes. Both features would later become standard across military and commercial aviation worldwide.
The aircraft was so well engineered that Hughes eventually donated it to the Smithsonian, where it still sits today. Two years later, he broke the transcontinental speed record flying from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey in 7 hours and 28 minutes. But he was already planning something larger. On July 10th of 1938, Hughes lifted off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn in a Lockheed 14 Super Electra with a crew of four.
His goal was to circle the globe faster than anyone in history. The existing record, held by the aviator Wiley Post since 1933, stood at just under 8 days. Hughes intended to cut it by more than half. He flew east across the Atlantic to Paris, then on to Moscow, across Siberia to Yakuts, over the Bering Strait to Fairbanks, south through Minneapolis, and back to New York.
The conditions were punishing at stretches. Fog over the Atlantic, mechanical strain over Siberia, and the grinding pressure of sleep deprivation across thousands of miles of open water and unfamiliar ground. When the Lockheed touched down at Floyd Bennett Field on July 14th, the official time was 3 days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.
He had not just broken the record, he had demolished it. New York gave him the largest ticker-tape parade the city had seen since Charles Lindbergh came home from Paris 11 years earlier. Crowds packed the sidewalks from the airfield to City Hall. The press called him the greatest aviator alive. He was 32 years old, and for that brief stretch of summer days in 1938, he was quite possibly the most famous man in America.
The honors followed quickly. He received the Harmon Trophy for outstanding aviator and the Collier Trophy for the greatest achievement in American aviation that year. In 1939, Congress awarded him a gold medal by joint resolution, citing his advancement of the science of aviation and the credit it brought to his country.
He was not yet 35. What almost nobody outside his immediate circle understood at the time was that none of it was self-sustaining. The airplanes, the engineers, the crew, the fuel, the years of development behind every record, all of it came from the drill bit. Hughes Aircraft did not turn a profit in those years.
It did not need to. The tool company back in Houston generated the cash, and Hughes burned it in the sky. The freedom that arrangement gave him was total. He answered to no investor, no board, no one. He had reached the highest point of his life. The country knew his name and admired what he had done with it. But the quality that had made all of this possible was also the quality that made what came next inevitable.
He could not delegate the risk. Any test pilot in the country was available to him. He never considered it. The seat had to be his. The controls had to be in his hands. Chapter 5 The Crash The Senator and the Wooden Plane The oil started leaking from the right engine about 45 minutes into the flight. It was the evening of July 7th, 1946.
Hughes was at the controls of the XF-11, a twin-engine reconnaissance plane his company had built under a wartime contract for the United States military. The aircraft had been for high-speed, high-altitude photo surveillance. The government had originally ordered 100 of them, but the war ended before Hughes delivered a single one.
He was allowed to finish two prototypes. This was the first and he was flying it himself. The flight had been smooth. He had taken off from his company’s airfield in Culver City and was circling over Los Angeles at several thousand feet. Then the leak caused one of the propellers to reverse its pitch. The drag on that side became enormous.
The aircraft pulled hard to the right and began losing altitude. He fought to bring it down on the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, which was the nearest flat ground. He did not reach it. The XF-11 clipped the roof of a house, tore through a second structure, and slammed into the earth in a residential neighborhood in Beverly Hills.
The wreckage was already burning when the first rescuers reached it. They pulled him out of the cockpit alive, barely. His chest had been crushed. His left lung had collapsed. The force of the impact had reportedly shifted his heart to the right side of his chest cavity. He had severe burns across his upper body and multiple broken bones.
Doctors at the hospital were not certain he would survive the night. He survived. But the man who came out of that hospital was not the man who had gone in. The injuries left him in constant, severe pain and the doctors managed it with codeine. The drug worked. It worked so well that Hughes never stopped taking it.
The substance that would slowly dismantle his mind and his body over the next 30 years entered his life in a hospital bed that summer. It was prescribed by physicians who were trying to keep him alive. While he was still recovering, the United States Senate came after him. Senator Owen Brewster of Maine chaired a committee investigating Hughes’s wartime defense contracts.
The charge was blunt. Hughes had taken tens of millions of dollars in government money to build military aircraft. By the time the war ended, he had not delivered a single operational plane. The committee wanted answers. Among the projects under scrutiny was a massive cargo flying boat that had been constructed primarily of birch wood because wartime restrictions had made aluminum unavailable.
The press had already given it a nickname. They called it the Spruce Goose. Hughes hated the name. He showed up to the hearings in Washington and turned the proceedings upside down. He accused Brewster of acting as an agent for Pan American Airways, which he argued was trying to eliminate TWA from transatlantic competition.
The press had expected him to be on the defensive. Instead, they watched him go on the attack, combative, specific, and unwilling to concede a single point. The committee later issued a report criticizing his management of the contracts, but the public had already made up its mind. Hughes had won the room. Then he went back to California and did the thing his critics said could not be in Long Beach Harbor with press and politicians watching from the shore, Hughes climbed into the cockpit of the flying boat.
The aircraft was staggering in scale. Its wingspan stretched 320 ft. It had eight engines and could carry several hundred passengers. Nobody outside his inner circle believed it would leave the water. He taxied it across the harbor several times. Then, on what was supposed to be another taxi run, he pulled back and lifted the aircraft into the air.
It flew for roughly 1 mile at about 70 ft above the surface before he brought it down. It never flew again. Hughes kept it stored in a climate-controlled hangar in Long Beach for the rest of his life, reportedly spending close to $1 million a year to maintain it. He never publicly explained why. But, the flight had done what it was meant to do. It ended the argument.
What almost nobody recognized at the time was that this was the end of something larger. Hughes had appeared before the Senate, fought back, and piloted the largest aircraft ever built at that time. It was the last time he would do any of those things in front of the world. The crash had broken his body. The codeine had begun its work on his mind.
And the force that had driven him to chase speed records and face down senators was turning inward now, toward darkened rooms and silence. Chapter 6: The Man Who Bought Las Vegas From a Dark Room When the owners of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas told Howard Hughes to check out, he bought their hotel for $13.25 million.
It was December of 1966. He had been occupying the top two floors for barely a month, and the casino’s co-owners, led by a man named Moe Dalitz, needed those suites back for the New Year’s Eve high rollers who had already reserved them. His top aide, Robert Maheu, tried to negotiate for more time.
When that ran out, Maheu called in a favor from Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, who telephoned the Desert Inn and told the owners to leave his friends alone. That bought a few more weeks, but the pressure kept building and Hughes, rather than be moved, simply purchased the building. The money to do it came from an airline.
Earlier that year, he had sold his controlling stake in Trans World Airlines for just under $550 hand over the enormous capital gains tax that came with it, he needed to reinvest the money fast. He chose Las Vegas. He had arrived on the strip around Thanksgiving of 1966. His aides brought him by train from Los Angeles.
They carried him on a stretcher through the service entrance of the Desert Inn and up a freight elevator to the ninth floor. He was in pajamas. He had not been seen in public in years. The curtains were pulled shut. From that point forward, Hughes ran every piece of business from inside that suite without once stepping through the door.
The buying spree that followed was unlike anything the city had seen. After the Desert Inn, he acquired the Sands, the Frontier, the Castaways, and the Landmark Hotel. He bought a small casino called the Silver Slipper for a reason that had nothing to do with gambling. The building had a rotating neon slipper on its roof and the glow from the sign reached his bedroom window.
He bought the property and had the sign turned off. When he tried to purchase his seventh casino, the Stardust, the federal government stepped in on antitrust grounds and blocked the deal. Over the course of 4 years, he spent more than $300 million on Las Vegas properties. He bought thousands of acres of desert land surrounding the city, a local airline, mining claims, and a television station called KLAS because he wanted to control what played on screen at any hour of the night.
All of it was managed through Maheu who ran the entire Nevada operation as Hughes’ representative. The arrangement was extraordinary. The two men communicated almost exclusively by telephone and handwritten notes. By some accounts, they went years without being in the same room. Maheu made the deals, attended the meetings, and spoke on behalf of the organization, while Hughes gave directions from behind a locked door on the ninth floor.
Behind Maheu, a separate circle of personal aids controlled everything closer to the man himself. These men were almost all members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He preferred them because their faith prohibited alcohol and tobacco, two things he did not use and did not want anywhere near him.
The group was led by Frank William Gay, who had worked for the organization since the 1940s, and who controlled physical access to the penthouse with an authority that, according to some observers, eventually rivaled his own. The effect of all this spending on Las Vegas was enormous and largely unintended. Before Hughes arrived, the casinos on the strip were widely understood to be controlled by organized crime.
The ownership structures were hidden, the money was questionable, and the regulatory system was weak. When a billionaire industrialist backed by a legitimate corporate structure began buying properties at full market price, it forced a shift. His presence gave casino ownership a degree of credibility it had never carried.
Nevada’s lawmakers, who had been fighting for years to push the mob out of the gambling business, used his arrival as evidence that legitimate capital could sustain the industry. Within a decade, the era of corporate casino ownership had taken hold, and the mob’s grip on the strip had loosened for good. Hughes himself had no interest in the daily operations of any of it.
He never walked the floor of a single casino he owned. He never shook hands with a pit boss or sat across from a hotel manager. He never once looked out at the strip his money had reshaped. He ran a city from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn without stepping outside the door. Chapter 7, The Phantom and the Cold War.
By the early 1970s, Howard Hughes had become so invisible that two entirely separate groups of people decided to use his name for their own purposes. One was a novelist looking for a payday. The other was the Central Intelligence Agency. The novelist came first. In 1971, a writer named Clifford Irving approached the publisher McGraw-Hill with an extraordinary claim.
He said he had conducted a series of secret face-to-face interviews with Hughes and was prepared to deliver an authorized autobiography. He brought letters apparently signed in the billionaire’s handwriting. He brought transcripts. He brought details that sounded plausible to editors who had no way of checking them.
Irving’s wife deposited the publisher’s checks into a Swiss bank account she had opened under a name designed to pass for that of Hughes himself. McGraw-Hill paid a substantial advance and began preparing the book of the decade. The problem was that none of it was real. Irving had never met Hughes. The letters were forged.
The interviews were invented from beginning to end. He had gambled everything on the assumption that the most reclusive man in the world would never surface to deny it. He lost that bet. In January of 1972, Hughes did something he had not done in years. He picked up a telephone. Seven journalists who had known him personally were brought onto a conference call, and Hughes, his voice thin and halting but unmistakably his own, told them the book was a complete fraud.
It was the first time the public had heard from him in over a decade. Irving was exposed, convicted, and sent to prison. The autobiography never reached a bookstore. But the real significance of the episode was not the hoax itself. It was what the hoax revealed about what Hughes had become. A stranger had very nearly gotten away with inventing his voice because nobody alive could prove the real voice still existed.
The CIA had a bigger plan for the same silence. In 1968, a Soviet submarine designated K-129, armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, had sunk in the Pacific Ocean roughly 1,500 mi northwest of Hawaii. It settled on the ocean floor more than 3 mi down. The Soviets searched for it and gave up. American intelligence located the wreck and saw an opportunity to recover Soviet nuclear and cryptographic technology from a depth that no salvage operation had ever reached.
The engineering problem was immense. The submarine weighed roughly 1,700 tons and lay in total darkness at the bottom of the sea. The CIA needed a ship large enough to lower a mechanical claw 3 mi to the seabed, lock onto the wreckage, and pull it to the surface. All of this had to happen without the Soviet Navy realizing what was going on.
To explain the construction of such a ship, they needed a cover. They picked the name Howard Hughes. The account put out to the world was that Hughes was building a 618-ft research vessel called the Glomar Explorer, intended to mine manganese nodules from the deep ocean floor. It was exactly the kind of eccentric, oversized venture that the public associated with the Hughes name, and nobody questioned it.
The ship was completed, launched, and in August of 1974, it reached the site of the wreck. The crew lowered the claw and began pulling the submarine up. During the lift, part of the hull fractured and fell back to the bottom, but the section they retained held two nuclear torpedoes, cryptographic equipment, and the remains of six Soviet submariners who were later given a burial at sea with military honors.
Soviet vessels had been trailing the Glomar Explorer throughout the operation. Intelligence reports later revealed that Moscow had dismissed the real purpose of the mission as too far-fetched to take seriously. The operation was compromised the following year. In June of 1974, burglars had broken into the Romaine Street headquarters of Hughes’s organization in Los Angeles and stolen a cache of documents.
Some of those papers related to the Glomar project. When the story found its way to journalists months later and they pressed the CIA for a response, the agency issued a line that would become famous in its own right. We can neither confirm nor deny. The phrase, known afterward as the Glomar response, entered the legal and political vocabulary permanently.
It began as seven words invented to protect a submarine mission hidden behind the name of a man who had not been seen in public for more than a decade. There was one more thread tying Hughes to the politics of the era, though it remains disputed. He had maintained financial connections to Richard Nixon for years, reportedly channeling significant sums through Nixon’s close ally, Bebe Rebozo.
Some investigators later argued that the Watergate break-in of 1972 was partly motivated by the search for documents connecting the president to money that led back to Hughes. The theory has never been established as fact, but the fact that it was treated as credible tells you how deeply the phantom’s name had embedded itself in the power structures of the country he had long since stopped living in.
He had not set foot outside a sealed room in years, but his name was doing more in the world than he was. Chapter 8, the empire with no heir. Howard Hughes had spent 50 years controlling every detail of his existence. The food that came into his room, the people who came near him, the curtains, the temperature, the light.
Every element of his life had been dictated by his own hand. In death, he controlled nothing. He left no will, or rather no valid one was ever found. His business holdings, governed by a holding company called Summa Corporation, and valued at roughly two and a half billion dollars, were suddenly without an owner or a direction.
Probate proceedings were opened simultaneously in Houston, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, because nobody could agree on where he had legally resided. Summa’s attorneys conducted an exhaustive search of his properties, his offices, and the hotel suites he had occupied across three countries. They found nothing. Under Texas law, when a person dies without a will, the estate passes to the nearest surviving relatives.
He had no children. He had no siblings. The nearest relatives anyone could locate were approximately 22 cousins, most of whom he had not spoken to in decades. Before they could inherit, a document appeared. A few weeks after the death, a handwritten paper turned up at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City.
It was dated March 19th, 1968, and it bore the signature Howard R. Hughes. Among its provisions, it left 156 million dollars to a man named Melvin Dummar. Dummar was a gas station operator in rural Utah. He told a story that sounded like fiction. He said that one night in 1967, he had been driving on a desert highway outside Las Vegas.
He found a thin, disheveled old man lying by the side of the road. He picked the man up and drove him to the Sands Hotel on the Strip. When he dropped him off, the man said he was Howard Hughes. Dummar told the press he had not believed him at the time. The document became known as the Mormon will. And it was examined more closely than almost any piece of paper in American legal history. The problems were immediate.
The will referred to the H-4 flying boat as the Spruce Goose, a nickname he was known to despise. It named both of his former wives as beneficiaries, even though their divorce settlements explicitly barred any further claims on the estate. It designated Noah Dietrich, an executive he had fired in 1957, as executor.
And it was addressed to a church president who had died in 1970, two years after the document was supposedly written. In 1978, a Nevada court ruled it a forgery and declared him intestate. The story was later adapted into a film called Melvin and Howard, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1981.
The estate went to the cousins. The group, led by a Houston attorney named William Lummis, reached a settlement in 1983. More than 400 people had come forward with claims over the years, including purported spouses, alleged children, and former business associates. Every claim outside the blood relatives was rejected.
The litigation consumed years of court time and generated millions in legal fees on all sides. The final asset in the estate was not distributed until 2010. 34 years after his death, the last piece of his empire was finally handed off. One part of what he built did survive, though not in the way he probably intended.
In 1953, he had created the Howard Hughes Medical Institute [music] and transferred ownership of Hughes Aircraft Company into it. The move was widely viewed at the time as a tax strategy, and the Internal Revenue Service fought it for years. But the research mission behind the institute was real. And after his death, the aircraft company’s enormous value poured into the endowment.
Today, the institute funds more biomedical research than almost any other private organization in the country. Its endowment stands at roughly $23 billion. It employs hundreds It employs hundreds of investigators and has produced multiple Nobel Prize winners. It is, by any practical measure, the most lasting thing he left behind.
He had no descendants. He had no functioning connection to any living relative. The fortune he spent a lifetime building was carved apart by strangers in a courtroom. But the research institute he created almost as an afterthought, for reasons that had more to do with taxes than with science, is still operating.
It funds work in genetics and neuroscience and cellular biology at universities across the country, performed by scientists who in most cases have never heard his name, and would not recognize it if they did. That is what remains of the two and a half billion-dollar empire of airplanes and madness. I said at the beginning that the part of this story I find hardest to explain is how the same quality could build an empire and destroy the person who owned it.
After all this time with Hughes, I think I had the question wrong. The obsession never changed. It did not cross some invisible line from productive to destructive. The need to control every variable, every surface, every outcome had produced the fastest airplane on Earth from a hangar in Glendale, California.
That same need, unchanged, kept him sealed behind a locked door in a hotel room in Acapulco for the last years of his life. When his body was strong and the world gave him runways and film sets and Senate hearing rooms to operate in, the control looked like genius. When his body broke and those outlets closed, that control turned to the locks on the doors, the temperature of the room, and the position of every object within reach. There was no switch.
The genius and the illness were the same thing, seen from two different sides. That is what makes this story harder to sit with than most. It is not a cautionary tale about drugs or greed or unchecked wealth. It is a story about what happens when a person’s defining quality has no limit and no counterweight.
The drill bit gave him limitless money. The money gave him limitless freedom. And nobody in his life, not his wives, not his aides, not his lawyers, had the power or the standing to tell him to stop. The obsession ran until there was nothing left for it to organize except the interior of a sealed room and the veins of his own arms.
The Spruce Goose is behind glass in a museum in Oregon. The Desert Inn was torn down to make way for a newer casino. The airline is gone. The studio is gone. The drill bit patent expired decades ago. Almost nothing he built still operates under his name. What survived were two things he never planned for. A medical research institute he created as a tax shelter in 1953, which now funds science on a scale he could not have imagined, and a seven-word phrase he never spoke.
We can neither confirm nor deny. The CIA invented it to protect a submarine mission hidden behind his name, and it has outlasted everything else he did. Nah, he spent his whole life making sure nothing happened by accident. In the end, the accidents were all that lasted.
