WHY DID HOWARD HUGHES END UP LIKE THIS? THE STORY NO ONE TOLD

When the men finally walked into that darkened hotel suite in Acapulco, Mexico in the first days of April 1976, they froze. They had been hired to protect this man. Some of them had worked for him for 20 years, and yet not one of them could honestly say in that moment that they recognized the figure lying on the bed.

His fingernails had grown into long, yellow, curling spirals, almost like the claws of some old desert bird. His hair fell past his shoulders, white and matted. His beard reached down onto his chest. His arms were so thin you could close your hand around the bone above his elbow. He weighed less than 100 lb, and he was over 6 ft tall.

Inside his arms, broken needles from injections he had given himself days or weeks earlier were still embedded under the skin. The room around him was sealed. Curtains taped to the walls, no daylight. Aides moving on tiptoe in white cotton gloves. When his body was finally flown to Houston, the medical examiner could not identify him by sight.

They had to call the FBI. They had to take his fingerprints and match them one by one to old aviation and military records, because that was the only way left to prove who he was. And the name those fingerprints belonged to, my friends, was a name that only 20 years earlier had been on the cover of Time magazine, on the front page of every newspaper in America, in the credits of Hollywood blockbusters, on the side of airliners crossing the oceans of the world.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., the richest man in America, a pioneer of aviation, a movie producer who broke every rule in the book, a A who at one point personally owned the city of Las Vegas, or as close to it as any one human being has ever come. A man who set world speed records, designed aircraft that changed the course of history, dated the most beautiful women of the 20th century, and built an empire worth, in today’s money, somewhere far north of 10 billion dollars.

And he ended his life as that creature on the bed. A ghost his own bodyguards could not recognize. How does a human being travel that distance? How does the boy with everything become the old man with nothing he can bear to touch? Stay with me, because over the next hour or so, I’m going to walk you through one of the strangest, saddest, most fascinating lives in the entire 20th century.

And toward the end, I’m going to tell you what he left behind. What happened to all that money, and why his final flight, even in d.e.a.t.h , became one of the most unusual journeys in aviation history. You will not want to miss it. So, let us start at the beginning. Let us start with a little boy in Houston, Texas, who already by the age of 11, had begun to suspect that the world was full of invisible danger.

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born on the 24th of December, 1905, in Humble, Texas, just outside of Houston. His father, Howard Sr., was a clever, restless, charming man who had failed at several careers before stumbling onto the invention that would build the family fortune. In 1908, Howard Sr.

patented a new kind of drill bit, a two-cone roller that could finally cut through the hardest rock layers blocking access to deep Texas oil. He did not sell that drill bit. He only leased it. Every oil company in Texas, and soon enough, every oil company in the world, had to rent that piece of equipment from him by the day, by the hour.

The Hughes Tool Company was born and money began to flow in like water through a broken dam. The mother of our story is just as important as the father, perhaps even more so. Her name was Allene Gano Hughes. She came from a refined Southern family, educated, church-going, deeply concerned with propriety.

And according to the biographers who have stud.i.ed her letters and the recollections of family members, she carried inside her an unusually intense, almost overwhelming fear of disease and contamination. Now, I want to be careful here because we are stepping into territory where the historical record is partly documentary and partly reconstruction.

We do not have transcripts of conversations in the Hughes household in 1912. What we do have are letters Allene wrote, the recollections of relatives and household staff later collected by biographers like Donald Barlett and James Steele, and the well-documented later behavior of Howard himself. From those sources, a fairly clear picture emerges.

Allene watched her son with an intensity that bordered on obsession. The biographers describe how she examined him daily for any sign of illness, a spot, a rash, a cough, a slight warmth on his forehead. She kept him out of school for long stretches when she feared an epidemic in town. She wrote anxious letters about his digestion, his sleep, his bowel movements, his exposure to other children.

In an era when childhood diseases like polio and diphtheria genuinely terrified American parents, her fear was not irrational. But its intensity, in her particular case, seems to have crossed a line. Imagine, if you will, what it might feel like to be that boy, to grow up under that gaze, to learn before you have learned almost anything else, that the world outside your skin is essentially a battlefield of invisible enemies.

To understand in the deepest part of your small mind that the only way to win your mother’s calm is to remain perfectly clean, perfectly examined, perfectly contained. His mother d.i.ed suddenly in 1922. She was 39 years old. Howard was 16. She had gone into the hospital for what should have been a routine procedure, and she did not come out.

The boy who had been told all his life that the world was full of mortal danger had just received the most terrible possible confirmation. His mother, the cleanest, most careful person he knew, had been killed by a hospital. By the very people whose job it was to protect bod.i.es from harm. Two years later, in January of 1924, his father also dropped dead.

A heart attack at his desk at the Hughes Tool Company. Howard was now 18 years old. He was an only child. Both of his parents were gone, and he had just inherited through a combination of his father’s will and some very clever legal maneuvering on his own part, a controlling interest in one of the most profitable companies in the United States.

On the 28th of March, 1924, 3 months past his 18th birthday, Howard Hughes walked into a Texas courtroom and convinced a judge to declare him a legal adult ahead of the normal age of 21. He then quietly bought out the shares of his various aunts and uncles. By the end of that year, he owned roughly 3 quarters of the Hughes Tool Company outright.

A teenage boy was now the absolute master of a fortune that no 18-year-old in America, perhaps in the world, could match. And here is where the story turns towards something almost cinematic. Because most young men of 18, handed that kind of money, would have done one of two things. They would have spent it on toys and parties, or they would have left it alone and let the company keep paying them.

Howard did neither. He did something far stranger. He looked at this enormous flow of cash coming in from the oil fields of Texas, and he decided to use it to chase three obsessions that had been building in him since boyhood. Movies, airplanes, and eventually, beautiful women. He moved to Hollywood.

He was 19 years old. He had no friends in the film industry. He had no experience producing motion pictures. He had no idea, really, how movies were made. What he had was money, raw curiosity, and a stubbornness that no one around him had yet learned to take seriously. His first films were forgettable. One of his early productions, a comedy called Two Arabian Nights, won the Academy Award for Best Director of a Comedy Picture in 1929.

He had been in Hollywood for roughly 3 years. But he was not satisfied with comed.i.es. What he really wanted to make was a movie about airplanes, about combat in the air. About the kind of flying machines he had been dreaming about since he was a small boy in Houston, watching the very first aircraft cross the Texas sky.

The film was called Hell’s Angels. It was about British and German pilots in the First World War. And the way he made it, my friends, was one of the most extravagant and reckless productions in the history of cinema. He He a private air force, over 80 real aircraft. He hired 137 pilots. He built a small airfield outside Los Angeles just to operate them.

He filmed dog fights in the actual sky with actual planes performing actual maneuvers. Three pilots d.i.ed during the filming. Hughes himself, who had taken flying lessons by then and considered himself a competent aviator, insisted on flying one of the most dangerous scenes personally. The aircraft stalled. He crashed it. He was pulled from the wreckage with serious injuries, including a fractured skull, and spent weeks recovering.

Then, when the film was almost finished, the sound era arrived in Hollywood. The Jazz Singer had come out. Silent films were dead. So, Howard Hughes, instead of releasing his nearly completed silent epic, scrapped large portions of it and reshot it as a sound film. He replaced his leading lady, a Norwegian actress named Greta Nissen, because her accent did not work in English language dialogue.

He found a young American woman named Jean Harlow and put her in the role. Hell’s Angels made Jean Harlow a star. And the film, which cost almost $4 million in 1930 dollars, an absolutely staggering sum, eventually made its money back and then some. But the truth is, Howard Hughes did not really care about making money on movies.

He had plenty of money already gushing in from Texas oil rigs every single day. What he cared about was the airplanes. Hell’s Angels had been an excuse to buy aircraft, to fly them, to film them. The story, the actors, the dialogue, those were almost incidental. By the early 1930s, the airplanes had stopped being a hobby and become the center of his life.

He founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He hired some of the best aeronautical engineers in America, and he set himself a goal that, frankly, sounded ridiculous coming from a 20-something Hollywood playboy. He was going to design and build the fastest airplane in the world. The result was the H-1 racer, a small, sleek, almost impossibly beautiful aircraft with a polished aluminum skin and flush rivets that almost no plane of that era used.

On the 13th of September, 1935, near Santa Ana, California, Howard Hughes climbed into that aircraft and flew it himself. He pushed it to an average speed of 352 mph over a measured course. That was the new world record for any land-based aircraft. The previous record had been held by a French pilot. The American newspapers went wild.

On the last pass over the course, the engine ran out of fuel. Hughes managed to crash-land the aircraft in a beet field. He climbed out of the wreckage, dusted himself off, and reportedly asked the gathered observers when they would like him to try again. Whether those were his exact words or a later embellishment by reporters, we cannot now confirm, but the spirit of the moment is well documented. The man was hooked.

Two years later, in January of 1937, he flew a modified aircraft from Los Angeles to New York in 7 hours and 28 minutes, another transcontinental record. And then, in July of 1938, came the flight that turned him from an aviation enthusiast into an international hero. He flew around the world. He took a twin-engine Lockheed 14 Super Electra, modified for long-range flight, and a crew of four.

They took off from Floyd Bennett Field in New York on the 10th of July. They flew to Paris, then to Moscow, then across Siberia, then to Fairbanks, Alaska, then to Minneapolis, then back to New York. Total flight time, 3 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes. He had cut the previous around-the-world record set by Wiley Post almost in half.

When he landed in New York, a crowd estimated at 25,000 people was waiting at the airfield. New York City threw him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. Newspapers compared him to Charles Lindbergh. Some compared him to Christopher Columbus. He was 32 years old. Now, hold that image in your mind for a moment, my friends.

Howard Hughes, 32 years old, standing in an open car as it rolls slowly up Broadway. The confetti falling around him. The cheers of 100,000 New Yorkers rising in the canyons of Manhattan. He has movie studios. He has the fastest airplane in the world. He has just circled the planet. He has more money than most countries.

And inside his head, even then, in that very moment of triumph, something was already wrong. The aides who knew him in those years would later tell biographers that he was already, by his early 30s, refusing certain handshakes, washing his hands compulsively, avoiding certain foods, becoming irritated by tiny sounds and smells nobody else could detect.

The lessons of that nursery in Houston had never left him. They had only been hidden for a while behind the engine noise and the cheering crowds. And somewhere ahead of him, just a few years away, was a moment in a sky over Beverly Hills in a brand new experimental aircraft that was going to break his body so badly that the doctors did not expect him to live through the night.

That crash, more than anything else, would be the hinge of his entire life. Everything before it belongs to one Howard Hughes. Everything after it belongs to another. But to understand the full picture of the man he was becoming even before that day, we must go back to the women who had already begun to see the cracks in his armor.

Her name was Billie Dove, and she was the first. Billie Dove was, in the late 1920s, one of the most photographed faces in America. A silent film star with dark, enormous eyes and a kind of quiet grace that came through even on the flickering screens of that era. When Howard Hughes met her, he was barely in his 20s, freshly arrived in Hollywood, and she was already a major star.

She was also, inconveniently, married to a film director named Irvin Villet. What happened next has been told and retold in so many Hollywood memoirs that the precise facts have become slightly tangled. The widely accepted version, repeated by multiple biographers including Bartlett and Steele, goes something like this.

Howard Hughes wanted Billie Dove. He wanted her enough that he was willing to pay her husband to step out of the marriage. According to long-standing Hollywood legend, the payment was made in cash, delivered in a suitcase, and the figure most often cited is around $325,000 in late 1920s money. Now, I want to be straightforward with you here.

This particular detail, the suitcase full of cash, comes from accounts repeated by people who knew the parties involved, but it has never been confirmed by any documentary evidence. So, treat it as Hollywood lore rather than hard fact. What is documented is that Irvin Willat and Billie Dove divorced, that the financial settlement was unusually generous, and that Hughes and Dove then became for several years one of the most discussed couples in Los Angeles.

They were engaged. For a while it looked as though they would marry. And then, slowly, the same pattern that would repeat itself with almost every woman in his life began to emerge. He would court her with extraordinary intensity. He would shower her with attention, with gifts, with the full focus of his strange, magnetic personality.

And then, gradually, the attention would begin to drift elsewhere. The phone calls would come less often. He would disappear for days, sometimes weeks, into the hangars of the Hughes Aircraft Company, or onto a film set, or simply into one of the hotel suites he was already, even then, beginning to favor as places of isolation.

Billie Dove ended the relationship. She married someone else. She lived to be almost 100 years old, dying in 1997. And when she was asked about Howard Hughes in her old age, she did not speak about him with bitterness. She said, in essence, that he had been very generous to her. Coming from a woman who had every right to be angry, that single, quiet sentence may be the kindest verdict any of his women ever gave him.

Then came the woman from Connecticut, Katharine Hepburn. She was already, by the time she met Howard Hughes in the mid-1930s, one of the most distinctive actresses in Hollywood. Tall, angular, with that famous accent and a way of looking directly at the camera as though she were daring it to disagree with her.

She came from old New England money. She was an athlete. She played golf. She flew airplanes herself. And when she met Howard Hughes, the two of them seemed for a brief shining period almost designed for each other. He flew her around in his own aircraft. She wrote later in her memoir about the strange exhilaration of those flights, about sitting beside him in an open cockpit, the wind tearing at her hair, the engine noise so loud that conversation was impossible.

About landing on private airstrips behind his estates and walking together across the grass in the early evening. About the long silences between them, which she said never felt awkward, only full. They were together on and off for about 3 years. He proposed marriage. According to her own account, she actually considered accepting.

And then, like Billie Dove before her, she watched the pattern begin. The disappearances, the strange phone calls at 3:00 in the morning, the aides who would suddenly arrive to deliver cryptic messages, the growing list of small habits, the washing, the inspecting, the avoiding, that she did not yet understand but already could not live with.

She left him. She did it gently by her own account, but firmly. Years later in her memoir titled Me, published in 1991, she wrote about him with what can only be called affection. She did not romanticize him. She did not betray the privacy of what they had shared. She said, in essence, that he was a fascinating and difficult man, that she had loved him, and that she had been right to walk away.

She lived until 2003, dying at the age of 96. Four Academy Awards for Best Actress, the most ever won by any performer. And And somewhere in all that, 3 years with Howard Hughes. There were many other women, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis briefly, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Peters, who we will come back to in a moment because she will play an enormous role in the rest of this story.

Hughes pursued them with the same intensity, the same lavish generosity, the same eventual emotional withdrawal. Some of them found him fascinating. Some of them found him exhausting. Almost all of them in the end walked away. Ava Gardner described him in her own memoir, dictated late in her life after a stroke had taken much of her strength.

She told a story about an evening when she had been so furious with him over something he had said or done that she picked up a bronze figurine from a side table and threw it at his head. By her own telling, she connected. He bled. And then, instead of becoming angry, he simply held her without a word. She wrote that he was a man who would have given her anything except his own presence.

And presence, she eventually decided, was the only thing she had ever really wanted. We need to pause and think about what these stories collectively reveal. Because if we are honest, the pattern they show is not really about romance. It is about a man who was beginning, even in his 30s, to discover that he could not tolerate sustained closeness with another human being.

He could buy proximity. He could buy attention. He could buy years of a beautiful woman’s calendar. What he could not do, what he never figured out how to do, was actually let another person near him day after day without something inside him recoiling. The aides who worked for him in those years, whose recollections were later collected by biographers, described his living arrangements in terms that would become familiar by the end of his life.

Hotel suites kept dark, linens changed obsessively, visitors screened, hands washed for minutes at a time. By the late 1930s, certain rituals around food preparation had begun to appear. Specific dishes prepared in specific ways, cans opened only with new can openers, glasses of milk placed at exact distances from the edge of a table.

He was, in clinical terms we did not yet have in the 1930s, almost certainly suffering from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. The illness had no name yet in the form we now understand it. There were no medications, there were no therapists trained to recognize it. It was just a brilliant, fabulously wealthy, increasingly anxious young man hiding his rituals from the world behind a wall of money and assistants who were paid not to talk about what they saw.

And then came the 7th of July, 1946. The XF-11 was an experimental military reconnaissance aircraft that Hughes Aircraft had been developing under contract for the United States Army Air Forces. It was a twin-engine, twin-boom design intended for high-altitude photography. By 1946, the war was over.

The original urgency was gone, but Hughes had personally insisted on completing the prototype. He had also insisted on personally test flying it. The aides who watched him climb into the cockpit that afternoon at the company airfield in Culver City, California, were nervous. He had told them the flight would last 45 minutes.

He had under 3 hours of fuel on board. Standard test protocols required two pilots. He was flying alone. He took off in the late afternoon, the sun already low. For the first hour, everything went well. He climbed, he cruised, he tested the controls. And then, somewhere around the 70th minute of the flight, something began to go wrong with the right engine.

The propeller on that engine, due to a hydraulic problem in the pitch control mechanism, began to reverse pitch. Instead of pulling the aircraft forward, it was suddenly creating massive drag, slowing that side of the plane and pulling it violently to the right. He was now in serious trouble. He was over Beverly Hills, in a heavily populated residential area, in an experimental aircraft that was rapidly losing control.

He tried to nurse it back toward the airfield. He could not gain altitude. He could not maintain heading. He kept trying to bring it down somewhere safe. The aircraft, sinking too fast, clipped the roof of one house, tore through the upper floor of another, and finally smashed into the third, a home on North Linden Drive, in a fireball that immediately set the structure ablaze.

By some miracle, no one inside any of those houses was killed. By another miracle, neither was Howard Hughes. He was found by a United States Marine Corps sergeant named William Lloyd Durkin, who happened to be visiting in the neighborhood. Durkin pulled him out of the burning wreckage. Hughes was unrecognizable.

His face was burned. His chest was crushed. Eight ribs were broken. His left lung had collapsed. His skull was fractured. His heart had been displaced inside his chest cavity by the impact. The doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles did not expect him to survive the night. Then they did not expect him to survive the week.

Then they did not expect him to ever walk again. He proved all of them wrong. Within a month, he was sitting up. Within 2 months, he was walking. Within 6 months, he was working again. Of course, he was. But, my friends, the man who walked out of that hospital was not the same man who had climbed into the XF-11.

[gasps] The pain from those injuries never fully left him. To manage it, the doctors had given him morphine. And as anyone who has ever known someone who came home from a serious injury in that era can tell you, what began as legitimate medical treatment slowly, quietly, over months and then years became something else.

By the early 1950s, those closest to him would later testify that he was dependent on codeine and that the dependence was not going to end. It was the second of his great inheritances. The first had been from his mother. The second was from that crash. He also redesigned the airplane that had nearly killed him.

11 months after the crash, he flew a modified version of the XF-11 successfully. He did this, by some accounts, partly to prove a point to the United States Senate. Because while he had been recovering, the political knives had come out. A senator from Maine named Owen Brewster was running a Senate War Investigating Subcommittee.

Brewster believed that Hughes had been wasting government money on two enormous wartime contracts, the XF-11 and a second project we are about to discuss, an aircraft so large and so improbable that it would become the single most famous piece of woodwork in aviation history, the Spruce Goose. Its real name was the H-4 Hercules.

It was a flying boat. It was made almost entirely of laminated birch wood because wartime restrictions on aluminum had forced the design that way. And it was simply the largest aircraft anyone had ever attempted to build. A wingspan of 320 ft, near enough. A height taller than an eight-story building.

Eight engines, designed to carry 750 troops across an ocean. The Senate subcommittee summoned Howard Hughes to Washington in the summer of 1947. Brewster believed he could break this strange, secretive Texan publicly. He believed he could prove that the Spruce Goose was a boondoggle, an enormous wooden disaster paid for with $18 million of original federal contracts, with total project costs by then running well over 20 million when Hughes’ own contributions were added in.

What Brewster had not expected was that Howard Hughes, this reclusive man who hated public appearances, was going to fight back. Hughes flew to Washington. He sat in front of those senators on live national radio. And he did something almost no witness had ever done in those hearings. He went on the attack. He accused Senator Brewster of being in the pocket of Pan American Airways, who wanted to crush Hughes’ airline, TWA.

He pointed out, fact by fact, the connections between Brewster and Pan Am’s chairman, Juan Trippe. He made the senator look on the radio like exactly what he probably was. A politician doing the bidding of a corporate ally. The American public listening at home ate it up. Howard Hughes, the wounded aviator, the boy genius, was up there single-handedly humiliating a powerful senator.

The hearings collapsed. Brewster lost his Senate seat in the next election. And Hughes, for for first and only time in his life, became a kind of populist hero, the lone individual against the corrupt machine. But, there was still one problem, the Spruce Goose itself. It had never flown. Many people, including some on his own engineering team, doubted it ever could.

And Hughes himself had told Congress under oath that he believed in this aircraft so strongly that if it failed, he would leave the country. On the 2nd of November, 1947, in Long Beach Harbor, California, with thousands of spectators watching from the shore and the press waiting for a public humiliation, Howard Hughes climbed into the cockpit of the H-4 Hercules.

He started the eight engines. He taxied the enormous wooden aircraft across the surface of the harbor for what was officially described as a test of water handling. And then, with no announcement, he pushed the throttles forward. The Spruce Goose accelerated across the water, and for 26 seconds, over a distance of about a mile, at a height of roughly 70 ft, the largest aircraft ever built lifted itself off the surface of the harbor and flew.

Then, he set it gently back down. He shut off the engines. He had answered every critic in the world without saying a single word. That brief flight is the last great public moment of Howard Hughes as the heroic aviator. He never flew the Spruce Goose again. He had it towed into a custom-built climate-controlled hangar in Long Beach, where he kept it in flight-ready condition for the next 33 years.

He spent something on the order of a million dollars a year, by various estimates, maintaining a crew of mechanics whose only job was to keep an aircraft that would never fly again ready to fly tomorrow. Estimates of the crew size vary from around 200 to 300 workers and the annual cost figures vary in the same range across different sources, but the order of magnitude is clear.

An enormous, irrational, beautiful waste. The Spruce Goose still exists, by the way. After his d.e.a.t.h , it eventually traveled to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, where it sits today, indoors, perfectly preserved, still the largest wooden aircraft ever built. Children walk under its wing and look up and try to imagine the strange, brilliant, troubled man who built it.

And it is in that hangar in Long Beach, in the years after that 126-second flight, that we can see the next stage of his life beginning. The public Howard Hughes was about to step quietly off the stage. The private Howard Hughes, the one who would eventually become that figure on the bed in Acapulco, was about to take over.

The first signs were small. He began renting whole floors of hotels just for himself. He began holding meetings in parked cars in the middle of the night on empty Los Angeles streets, because he did not want anyone to know his location. He stopped opening his own mail. He stopped touching most surfaces. And then, in 1957, he did something nobody who knew him saw coming.

He got married. Jean Peters was not like the other women in his life. That is the first thing to understand about her. She was not a glamour queen. She was not chasing fame. She had grown up on a farm in Ohio. She had won a college beauty contest almost by accident, the prize for which had been a screen test in Hollywood.

And that screen test had turned into a contract with 20th Century Fox. She made some good films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Captain from Castile, Niagara opposite a young Marilyn Monroe, Pickup on South Street. She was a working actress, not a star in the Garbo sense, and according to almost everyone who knew her, she was something far rarer in Hollywood than glamour.

She was kind. She was grounded. She was the sort of person who actually preferred a quiet dinner at home to a premiere. She and Howard Hughes had met all the way back in 1946, a few months before the XF-11 crash. They had dated on and off for years. She had watched him quarter, watched him drift away, watched him return, watched the strange parade of other women come and go.

At one point in the early 1950s, exhausted by the pattern, she had actually married someone else, a Texas oilman named Stuart Cramer. That marriage lasted barely a year. And then, in 1957, Howard Hughes came back for her one final time. On the 12th of January, 1957, in the small desert town of Tonopah, Nevada, the two of them were married in a private ceremony under assumed names.

Hughes called himself G. A. Johnson. Jean signed the certificate as Marian Evans. There were almost no witnesses. There was no press. The world did not learn about the marriage for some time afterward, and even then most of the details remained fuzzy. For the first couple of years, by accounts later given to biographers by household staff and by Jean herself, the marriage was something close to normal.

They lived in a series of houses around Los Angeles. They watched movies together. They ate meals together. He was eccentric, of course, even then. He had his rituals. He had his rules about what he would and would not touch. But he was present. He was, in his own peculiar way, a husband. And then, slowly, that began to change.

By the early 1960s, he had moved her into a separate bungalow on the property they shared at the Beverly Hills Hotel. By the mid-1960s, the husband and wife were communicating almost entirely by telephone, even though they were living within walking distance of each other. By the late 1960s, she sometimes went weeks without hearing his voice at all.

The man she had married had quietly disappeared into a series of darkened rooms, surrounded by a small group of male aids, most of them members of the Mormon faith, who controlled every detail of who reached him and who did not. Why the Mormon aids? That is a question people have asked for decades. And the answer is fairly simple.

Hughes, who had grown up Methodist, but who never seems to have had any particular religious feeling of his own, had become convinced that men from the Latter-Day Saints community were exceptionally trustworthy, clean-living, abstemious, discreet. He surrounded himself with them. They became the wall between him and the world.

They have come to be known, in the literature about him, as the Mormon Mafia, though that nickname is more colorful than fair. Most of them appear to have done their jobs honestly, by the standards they were given. But the standards they were given came from a man whose grip on reality was steadily loosening.

And so, the wall they built around him eventually became the wall that sealed him off from everything, including his own wife. Jean Peters filed for divorce in 1970. The divorce was finalized in 1971. By the terms of the settlement, she received what was reported to be around $70,000 a year for the rest of her life in exchange for an absolute lifelong commitment to silence.

And she kept that promise, my friends. She kept it completely. She lived until 2000, dying of leukemia at the age of 73. She remarried, lived quietly, gave almost no interviews, and never once told the world what she had seen inside that marriage. Whatever she knew about Howard Hughes, she took with her. Now, we need to back up a few years because while Jean Peters was sitting alone in that bungalow, Howard Hughes was making the business decisions that would define the last chapter of his life.

And the strangest, most consequential of those decisions involved a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. He arrived in Las Vegas on the 27th of November, 1966, on a private train in the middle of the night, on a stretcher. He was 60 years old. He had not been seen in public for years. He was checked into the Desert Inn Hotel, taken up to the top floor, and installed in a darkened suite.

A few weeks later, when the management of the Desert Inn asked him politely to leave because they needed his rooms for high-rolling gamblers over the holidays, Howard Hughes responded in the only way that made sense to him. He bought the hotel. The reported sale price was somewhere around $13 million. And once he owned one casino, he discovered that he rather liked the experience.

Over the next four years, he bought another and another and another. The Sands, the Frontier, the Castaways, the Silver Slipper, the Landmark. By 1970, Howard Hughes personally owned a significant share of the Las Vegas Strip, along with a major television station, several mining claims, large tracts of desert land, and a small regional airline.

The man on the top floor of the Desert Inn, who had not been seen in public in years, had quietly become the largest single private property owner in Nevada. And here is where the story takes a turn that for many years would be filed under conspiracy theory, until enough documents were finally declassified to confirm large parts of it.

Because while Howard Hughes was buying up Las Vegas, somebody else in the corridors of power in Washington was also taking a careful look at him. The Central Intelligence Agency. In 1968, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine, designation K-129, sank in the Pacific Ocean about 1,500 nautical miles northwest of the Hawaiian Islands.

It went down in roughly 16,000 ft of water. The Soviets searched for it. They could not find it. The United States, with better undersea detection, did find it. And inside the Pentagon and the CIA, an idea began to form that, if you read it in a novel, you would set the book down and tell the author to be reasonable. The idea was to build a giant ship.

A ship with an enormous claw on the end of a string of pipes nearly 3 miles long. To lower that claw to the ocean floor. To grab the Soviet submarine. And to lift it in secret all the way back up to the surface, recovering its missiles, its code books, and its nuclear weapons without the Soviets ever finding out.

It was, on the face of it, a ridiculous plan. It was also, as we now know, real. The project was called Project Azorian. The ship that was built to carry it out was called the Hughes Glomar Explorer. And the cover story used to explain its existence to the world was that Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, had decided to enter the business of deep sea mining for manganese nodules.

That was the official story. The cover. Hughes was paid handsomely for the use of his name and his corporate infrastructure. The ship was built. In the summer of 1974, the Glomar Explorer steamed out into the Pacific, lowered its enormous claw, hooked onto the K-129, and began to lift. Partway up, a significant portion of the submarine broke away and fell back into the abyss.

What exactly was recovered remains classified to this day. The full inventory of what came up and what stayed down at the bottom of the Pacific, you and I are not going to know in our lifetimes. The CIA has declined to confirm or deny most details, giving us along the way the famous phrase Glomar response, still used in legal and journalistic circles when an agency refuses to either confirm or deny something exists.

Now, I want to be careful here because we are at the edge of the documented historical record and the beginning of legend. The basic outline I have just given you, the sinking of K-129, the use of the Hughes name as a CIA cover, the construction of the Glomar Explorer, the partial recovery attempt in 1974, all of that is now documented through declassified materials and through the work of investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh, who first broke the story in 1975.

The deeper claims about exactly what was on that submarine and exactly what the United States learned from it, those remain in the world of speculation. So, if you ever hear someone tell you they know the full story of the Glomar Explorer, smile politely and remember that the people who actually do know are still under oath not to say so.

Meanwhile, the man whose name had been lent to that fantastical operation was sliding deeper and deeper into his own private fog. By the late 1960s, Howard Hughes had essentially stopped leaving his bed except to be moved from one hotel to another. He spent his days, all of his days, in a single room with the curtains taped to the walls, the windows blacked out, and the temperature controlled by his aids to within a single degree.

He watched the same handful of movies over and over, projected onto a screen at the foot of his bed. Ice Station Zebra, Citizen Kane, a film called Diamonds Are Forever, which had been partly filmed inside one of his own hotels. He would watch the same picture, by some accounts, more than a hundred times. He stopped cutting his hair.

He stopped cutting his fingernails. He stopped cutting his toenails. The reasons given in the historical record vary. Some biographers, drawing on the accounts of aids, suggest that his fear of contamination had become so extreme by this point that he could not bear to allow any sharp instrument near his skin, even in the hands of someone else.

Other accounts suggest that he had become so deeply withdrawn that simple grooming had ceased to occur to him as a meaningful activity. Probably both are true. He weighed himself daily. His d.i.et had narrowed to almost nothing. Some days, a single bowl of soup. Other days, a candy bar. He drank milk mostly. He took drugs, mostly codeine, sometimes Valium, in quantities that would have killed most men his age.

He stored, according to the testimony of his own aids, his own urine in glass bottles and jars lined up against the walls of his bedroom. That last detail sounds like something invented by a tabloid, but it is in fact one of the most thoroughly attested facts about his final years, confirmed under oath by several of the men who worked for him.

In November of 1970, in the middle of the night, his aids moved him out of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas on a stretcher, down a back staircase, into a waiting van, and out to a private aircraft. He left the United States that night. He would never return alive. Over the next five and a half years, he was moved from country to country, from hotel to hotel, always to the top floor, always to a sealed, darkened suite.

The Bahamas, Nicaragua, Canada, London, back to the Bahamas, then Acapulco, Mexico. In each location, his aids would arrive ahead of him, prepare the suite to his specifications, install the blackout coverings, sterilize the surfaces, and then bring him in, unseen, by service elevator, on a stretcher, in the dead of night.

During those years, the empire he had built ran itself, mostly through a corporation called Suma, managed by executives, most of whom never met him in person. Decisions worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars were communicated through handwritten notes, passed from his bed through the Mormon aids to the executives, and back again.

There’s a memorandum in the Hughes archives in which he gives detailed instructions about the precise procedure for opening a can of fruit. There is another in which he describes, over several pages, the correct method for handing him a single Kleenex tissue. The man who had once flown around the world in less than 4 days now spent hours of his day on the choreography of a tissue.

And then, on the 5th of April, 1976, his body finally gave out. He had been in Acapulco for several months. He had become so weak that his aides had grown alarmed. They had finally been told that he needed urgent medical attention. They put him on a chartered Lear jet to take him to Houston, Texas, the city of his birth, to a hospital where he might have a chance.

He d.i.ed somewhere in the air between Acapulco and Houston before the aircraft landed. Where, exactly, the records do not say with precision. The d.e.a.t.h certificate gave the cause as kidney failure complicated by severe malnutrition and dehydration. He was 70 years old. He weighed approximately 90 lb. When his body was wheeled into the hospital morgue in Houston, the doctors there had a problem they had never faced before.

The man on the stretcher did not look like Howard Hughes. He did not really look like any specific person at all. He was a long-haired, bearded, emaciated figure with fingernails like talons, with broken needles in his arms from his self-administered injections, with the body of a man who had not seen daylight or felt fresh air on his face in years.

So, they called the FBI. And the FBI took his fingerprints. And those fingerprints were compared to the ones taken from him decades earlier when he had been issued his pilot’s license, when he had received various government security clearances, when he had been one of the most famous men in the United States.

And only when those tiny ridges and whorls matched exactly did the federal government formally confirm what everyone already suspected, that the figure on the table in Houston really was Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., The boy with the drill bit fortune, the flyer who had circled the world, the producer of Hell’s Angels, the husband of Jean Peters, the owner of half the Las Vegas strip, the cover identity for one of the strangest intelligence operations of the Cold War.

He d.i.ed, as far as we can tell from the records, intestate. That is, without a clear, signed, witnessed will that anyone could find. And that single absence in the days after his d.e.a.t.h was about to set off one of the most extraordinary legal carnivals in American history. A traveling road show of forged documents, sudden cousins, mysterious gas station attendants, and in the end, a court ruling that would send most of his fortune to a place neither he nor anyone close to him had ever quite expected it to go.

To understand why the d.e.a.t.h of Howard Hughes set off such a circus, you have to understand the size of the prize. When he d.i.ed in April of 1976, the total value of his estate was estimated, in the months and years that followed, at somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion dollars. Two billion in 1970s money.

Adjust that for inflation and you are looking at a figure in the range of 10 to 12 billion dollars today, depending on which calculator you trust. That fortune was spread across an extraordinary range of holdings. Hughes Aircraft Company, Hughes Tool Company, the original family business, the casinos in Las Vegas, hotels, mining claims, real estate, a television station, pieces of TWA, though by this point he had largely been forced out of that airline after a long and bitter battle in the early 1960s.

Add it all together and what you had was one of the largest private fortunes in the United States with no clear, signed, properly witnessed last will and testament to govern where it should go. That, my friends, is what you might call a problem. A $2 billion problem. Within days of his d.e.a.t.h , the first claimed relatives began to appear.

By the end of the first year, the number of people claiming in some way or another to be entitled to a piece of the Hughes fortune had risen into the hundreds. Distant cousins emerged from small towns across Texas and California, waving birth certificates and yellowed photographs. A woman in Nevada announced that she had been secretly married to Howard Hughes in the 1940s.

Another woman claimed to be his illegitimate daughter. Men appeared in courthouse hallways claiming to be his secret sons. Genealogists were hired by various sides, lawyers by the dozen, then by the hundred, attached themselves to the case. And then, alongside all of this, the wills began to arrive.

Over the months and years that followed his d.e.a.t.h , dozens of documents would be presented to courts in various American states, each one claiming to be the true last will and testament of Howard Hughes. Different biographers and legal historians give different totals for exactly how many of these alleged wills were eventually surfaced, with figures ranging from around 20 to closer to 40, depending on how you count fragments, photocopies, and obvious forgeries.

The exact number is less important than the texture of what was happening. Wills handwritten on hotel stationery. Wills typed on cheap paper. Wills signed in pencil. Wills bequeathing the entire estate to housekeepers, drivers, doctors, mistresses, real and imagined. The American legal system was, for a period of several years, drowning in paperwork that purported to be the final wishes of a dead billionaire.

But of all these strange documents, one in particular came to dominate the public imagination. It became known in the press and eventually in legal history as the Mormon Will. The story of how it appeared is, even now, almost too odd to believe. On the 27th of April, 1976, just 3 weeks after the d.e.a.t.h of Howard Hughes, a man walked into the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah.

He carried with him an envelope. Inside the envelope was a three-page handwritten document with the words “I, Howard R. Hughes” written across the top. The document distributed the Hughes fortune in 16 equal shares. It gave 1/16 to the Mormon Church. It gave 1/16 to various universities, including Rice in Houston.

It gave 1/16 to the Boy Scouts of America. It gave 1/16 to Jean Peters. It gave 1/16 to a man identified as William Lummis, an actual cousin of Hughes. And, most dramatically, it gave 1/16, roughly 156 million dollars in 1976 money, to a Utah gas station owner named Melvin Dummar. You can imagine the reaction.

Within days, journalists had tracked down this Melvin Dummar at his small filling station in Willard, Utah. They asked him why on earth he, of all people, would have been named as a beneficiary in the will of Howard Hughes. And Dummar told a story so peculiar that the press at first did not know whether to laugh at it or print it on the front page.

His story, told in interviews and later in his own book, and eventually in an entire Hollywood film about his life called Melvin and Howard, went like this. Sometime in late 1967, Dummar said, he had been driving on a back road in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas late at night. He had been working as a milkman and was on his way home.

He came around a curve and saw, lying in the dirt by the side of the road, an old man. The old man was dirty, scraggly bearded, looked very weak. Dummar stopped his car, got out, and helped him up. The old man asked for a ride to Las Vegas. Dummar gave him one. As they drove, Dummar said, the man told him that his name was Howard Hughes.

Dummar laughed. He did not believe him. He thought the man was probably a deranged prospector. But he dropped him off at the back entrance of the Sands Hotel, gave him a quarter so he could make a phone call if he needed one, and drove away. He never expected to hear about it again. That was the story. And of course, by the late 1970s, with that handwritten will sitting in evidence, the whole of America wanted to know whether it was true.

A trial was held in Las Vegas in 1978 to determine whether the Mormon will was authentic. It went on for 7 months. Hundreds of witnesses testified. Handwriting experts on both sides examined the document. Some declared it authentic. Others declared it an obvious forgery. Investigators dug into Melvin Dummar’s past looking for any sign of fraud, any evidence that he had written the will himself or paid someone to do it.

Dummar passed at least one polygraph test, though, as we now know, polygraph tests are far from conclusive. In the end, on the 8th of June, 1978, the jury ruled that the Mormon will was a forgery. Melvin Dummar received nothing. The Mormon Church received nothing. The Boy Scouts received nothing. Now, I want to be very straightforward with you about what we know and what we do not know because this part of the story has been told in many different ways, depending on who is telling it.

What we know is that the jury, after hearing months of evidence, ruled the document a forgery. And the courts have never overturned that ruling. That is the legal fact. That is the official history. What we do not know, and what biographers and journalists have argued about for decades, is whether the jury got it right.

Melvin Dummar continued to insist, until his d.e.a.t.h in 2018, that he had told the truth. That he had picked up an old man in the desert. That he had not written the will. That somebody, somewhere, had simply delivered the genuine wishes of Howard Hughes into his hands by a route nobody had been able to fully reconstruct.

Some investigators over the years have argued that there are credible reasons to think his story may have been more accurate than the jury believed. Others remain absolutely convinced that the will was a clever, opportunistic forgery from beginning to end. What I’m telling you here, my friends, is that this is one of those moments in history where I would rather be honest about the uncertainty than pretend I can hand you a tidy resolution.

The official legal answer is that the Mormon will was not real. The cultural and historical answer is that doubt has lingered in some corners ever since. You are free to make up your own mind. In the absence of any will that the courts would accept, the Hughes fortune was eventually distributed under the laws of intestate succession.

After years of further legal battles, the bulk of the money flowed to a group of cousins and more distant relatives on both his father’s and his mother’s sides of the family. Not a single one of them had been particularly close to him in his lifetime. Most had not seen him in decades.

Several had never met him at all. Some of them became almost overnight multi-millionaires by accident of genealogy. The lawyers, of course, did very well, too. But there is one piece of the Howard Hughes legacy that did not go to distant cousins. And in many ways, it is the most important piece. It is, I would argue, the part of his story that should be remembered when everything else is forgotten.

In December of 1953, more than two decades before his d.e.a.t.h , Howard Hughes had created an organization called the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He had done this in part for reasons that were not entirely noble. The institute provided certain useful tax advantages to his business empire. It also helped him resist a federal antitrust action against his ownership of Hughes Aircraft by formally placing the aircraft company as an asset of the medical institute.

So, the original founding of HHMI was, as much as anything, a piece of legal strategy. But here is the strange and beautiful thing. Whatever his original motives, the institute he created turned out to be one of the most consequential medical research organizations in the entire world. After his d.e.a.t.h , with the legal battles slowly resolving, Hughes Aircraft was eventually sold to General Motors in 1985 for over $5 billion.

That money, by the structure Hughes had put in place decades earlier, went into the endowment of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and HHMI, with that enormous endowment, became one of the largest private funders of biomedical research in the United States. To this day, the institute supports the work of hundreds of investigators at universities and research centers across America.

Its scientists have made foundational contributions to cancer research, to neuroscience, to genetics, to the study of infectious disease. Multiple Nobel Prize winners have, at one time or another, been Hughes investigators. There is a real and almost cosmic irony in this. The man who could not bear to be touched, the man who lived in terror of microbes, the man whose own body was destroyed in part by his obsessive fear of contamination, ended up funding, after his d.e.a.t.h , some of the most important research humanity has ever

conducted into the very diseases he had so desperately feared. The drill bit fortune of the Houston oilman, channeled by a frightened boy into airplanes, then into casinos, then into hotel suites with taped-up curtains, ultimately became the endowment that pays for hundreds of laboratories trying to cure the things that terrified him.

I do not know what to make of that, my friends, except to say that human lives are stranger and more layered than we usually allow ourselves to believe. Now, before we close out this story, there is one final passage I want to walk you through. Because the journey of Howard Hughes did not actually end with that last flight from Acapulco to Houston.

There was one more journey after that, and it tells us, in its quiet way, something important about the man. After the autopsy in Houston, after the fingerprints were matched and the identity confirmed, his remains were taken to Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas. There, on the 7th of April, 1976, 2 days after his d.e.a.t.h in the air, he was buried next to his mother and father.

He had been gone from Houston for more than 50 years. He had circled the planet. He had built airplanes and movie studios and casinos. He had spent his fortune on every conceivable amusement and on a few inconceivable ones. And in the end, he was placed back into the Texas soil between Howard Sr. and Allene, the two people whose love and whose fears had shaped every choice he ever made.

The grave is modest. If you visit it today, you will find no large monument, no statue of an aviator, no replica of the H-1 racer or the Spruce Goose, just a simple stone with a name and two dates. Howard Robard Hughes Jr. born 24th December 1905, d.i.ed 5th April 1976. That is the public end of his story. The end you can see, the end you can visit, the end the law has finalized.

But, as I am sure you have already started to suspect, there is one more aspect to the Howard Hughes saga that we have not yet talked about. Because behind the dates and the lawsuits and the institutes, there are still questions about how he actually d.i.ed in that bed in Acapulco that have never been quite fully answered.

Questions about exactly what was in his bloodstream that final week. Questions about who was making decisions for him in those last days. Questions about whether the man on the stretcher at the very end was being cared for or simply being managed. The autopsy was performed at the Methodist Hospital in Houston on the afternoon of the 5th of April, 1976, only hours after the Learjet from Acapulco had landed.

The pathologist on duty that day was a man named Dr. Jack Titus, and the report he produced is, even now, one of the more sobering documents in the medical history of the 20th century. The official cause of d.e.a.t.h was listed as chronic renal failure, kidney failure in plain English. But the body that lay on that table told a much longer story than those two words could capture.

He weighed 90 lb. He was 6′ 4″. His body was dehydrated to a degree the pathologist would later describe as severe. There were old fractures, never properly set, in his skull, in his ribs, in his collarbone, in his hip. Many of these were the lingering remnants of the XF-11 crash 30 years earlier. Some biographers have argued came from later, smaller incidents that had never been documented.

He had been a fragile man in a fragile state for a long time. Inside his arms, the pathologist found broken hypodermic needle fragments embedded under the skin. Five of them in total, by the count given in later sworn testimony. These were the tips of needles that had broken off during his own self-administered injections of codeine in the weeks and months before his d.e.a.t.h .

He’d been injecting himself repeatedly into the same sites, into tissue that had become so damaged that the needles themselves were snapping inside him. And nobody in those final months had successfully intervened. The toxicology report found significant levels of codeine in his system. Some accounts in the historical record also mention Valium and a sleep medication called Emperin in his bloodstream, though the precise quantities have been reported differently in different sources, so I will not give you false

precision here. What the pathologist’s report does make unambiguously clear is that in the final period of his life, Howard Hughes was being kept in a constant heavy pharmaceutical fog. Whether that fog was self-imposed, aid-imposed, or as is most likely some combination of the two, became one of the central questions in the years that followed.

Because here is the part that you do not see in the simple neat version of the story. Howard Hughes, at the end of his life, was not really a man making decisions for himself any longer. He was a man being managed by a small group of aides, by a Mormon executive named Bill Gay, by a chief of staff named Frank William Gay, by a personal physician named Wilbur Thain, by lawyers, by accountants, by a corporate structure that had grown up around him like ivy on the walls of an abandoned house.

The question of who, exactly, had been authorizing what in those final weeks became the subject of a federal grand jury investigation, of multiple civil lawsuits, and of years of journalistic inquiry. In 1978, a federal grand jury in Las Vegas indicted Dr. Wilbur Thain, the physician who had been treating Hughes during the final period, on charges related to the prescription and supply of controlled substances to his famous patient.

The case was complicated. The evidence was disputed, and in the end, in 1979, a jury acquitted Dr. Thain. The legal record then contains no formal finding of criminal wrongdoing in the care of Howard Hughes during his final years. But, my friends, the absence of a criminal conviction is not the same thing as the absence of moral concern.

And many of the people who have stud.i.ed this case most closely, including the biographers Donald Barlett and James Steele, whose two-volume work Empire and Howard Hughes, His Life and Madness, remains one of the most rigorous accounts we have, have argued that the picture which emerges from the testimony of the aides themselves, given under oath in various proceedings, is deeply troubling.

A man who could not feed himself being fed inadequately. A man who could not regulate his own medication being supplied with quantities of it that astonished outside physicians. A man whose mental state had collapsed years earlier being asked somehow to make multi-million dollar business decisions through scribbled notes passed to him by the men who were also choosing what to put into his arm.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I know exactly what happened in that Acapulco suite in the final weeks of his life. The honest answer is that nobody outside that room knows for certain. And many of the people who were inside that room are themselves now dead, having taken whatever they knew or believed with them.

What I can tell you is that the people whose job it was to protect Howard Hughes did not, in the end, protect him. Whether through cowardice, through habit, through divided loyalty, through the simple paralysis that comes over employees when the boss has been giving strange orders for so long that nobody remembers how to give a different kind of answer.

They let him slide day by day into the condition in which he d.i.ed. And so we come at last to the question that I think this entire long life is really asking us. How does a person like that end up like that? The simple answers do not work. It is not enough to say that he was sick. He was sick, yes. He almost certainly suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder beginning in childhood, undiagnosed and untreated for the simple reason that the medicine of his lifetime did not know what to do about it. He almost certainly suffered

as well from prolonged opioid dependence beginning legitimately after the XF-11 crash and never resolved. He may have suffered from neurological consequences of multiple head injuries. He may have suffered from any number of other conditions that the historical record cannot now fully reconstruct. But sickness does not by itself explain a life like this.

Many people are sick. Many people are obsessive. Many people are dependent on medications. Most of them do not d.i.e alone, fingernails curling in sealed hotel suites surrounded by jars of their own urine. Something else was going on with Howard Hughes. And I think, my friends, the thing that was going on was simpler and sadder than any clinical diagnosis can capture.

He had no one in his life who could say no to him. That is the truest, most ordinary, most terrible thing I can say about the arc of his story. From the moment he became an emancipated adult at 18 years old with a controlling interest in the Hughes Tool Company, Howard Hughes lived in a world that he could buy his way out of.

He could buy his way out of obligations. He could buy his way out of inconvenient relationships. He could buy his way out of unpleasant conversations. He could buy his way out of being told by someone who genuinely cared about him that what he was doing to himself was going to kill him. His parents, who might have been able to tell him such a thing, d.i.ed when he was a teenager.

His wives, when they tried, were eventually walled off by aides and replaced by silence. His lovers, when they tried, were paid handsomely to leave. His business partners, when they tried, were fired. The Mormon aides, who in their own way may have loved him, were employees first. They were paid to keep him comfortable, not to confront him.

And so, slowly, year by year, decade by decade, the silence around him grew thicker, and the rituals grew stranger, and the sweets grew darker, until there was simply nobody left who could walk up to that bed and say, “Howard, this has to stop.” Money, in the end, did not save him. Money, in fact, killed him.

Not the money itself, but the wall of money. The barrier that money allowed him to build between himself and every other human being who might have been able to reach him. He had $2 billion. He had everything that $2 billion could buy. And in his final years, what he had bought himself was a kind of solitude so absolute that when he finally d.i.ed, the men whose job had been to keep him alive could not pick him out of a lineup.

I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I think that is the lesson, if there is one, in this strange, brilliant, sad life. We tend to imagine, when we think about people like Howard Hughes, that what we are looking at is a story about wealth, or about fame, or about the price of genius. And the story is, in part, about all of those things.

But underneath all of it, in my opinion, this is really a story about what happens to a human being when there is nobody around them brave enough, or loved enough, or close enough to tell them the truth. The richest man in America d.i.ed because nobody in his life had the standing to say no to him. The greatest aviator of his generation d.i.ed because the boy he had been, the boy under his mother’s frightened gaze, never learned that the world outside his skin was not actually a battlefield, that other people were not actually contamination, that closeness, however

terrifying, was the only thing that could have saved him. There is, I think, something almost universally human in that. Almost none of us will ever inherit a drill bit fortune. Almost none of us will ever fly around the world in 3 days. Almost none of us will ever own a major piece of Las Vegas, but all of us, every single one, face in our small ways the same essential question that he faced in his enormous one.

Are we going to let other people get close to us, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it is messy, even when it costs us something? Or are we going to build, in whatever materials we have available to us, the walls that will eventually leave us as alone as he was, on that bed, in that suite, in Acapulco, on the 5th of April, 1976.

He left behind, in the end, an extraordinary mixed legacy. He left behind the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which to this day funds biomedical research that touches the lives of millions of people he will never meet. That is a real, tangible good that his fortune now produces in the world. He left behind a body of aviation work, including the Spruce Goose, still resting in its hangar in Oregon, that genuinely advanced the science of flight.

He left behind films, some of them still watched, some of them quietly influential in the history of cinema. He left behind a corporate trail that, decades after his d.e.a.t.h , still touches industries ranging from defense to entertainment to mining. And he left behind a cautionary tale that, I would suggest is more relevant today than it has ever been.

Because we now live in an age in which more and more people, not just billionaires, can construct around themselves the kinds of bubbles that only Howard Hughes could once afford. We can curate our social circles. We can avoid the people who disagree with us. We can spend our days in rooms whose temperature, lighting, and content are all set exactly to our preferences.

We can, if we are not careful, become small Howard Hugheses in our own small suites. And the lesson of his life, I would humbly suggest, is that this is not a path that ends well. The last image I want to leave you with is not the image of that body on the autopsy table, although that image, once you have seen it described, is hard to forget.

The last image I want to leave you with is a much earlier one. It is the 18-year-old Howard Hughes walking out of that Texas courtroom on the 28th of March, 1924, having just convinced a judge to declare him a legal adult. The world is open in front of him. He has more money than he knows how to count. His parents are dead.

He is alone in a way that almost nobody his age has ever been alone before, and free in a way that almost nobody his age has ever been free before. He could go in any direction. He could become almost anything. He chose airplanes. He chose movies. He chose women. He chose Las Vegas. He chose, eventually, sealed rooms and broken needles.

But the boy walking out of that courtroom did not yet know any of that. The boy walking out of that courtroom still had every possibility in front of him. I think about him sometimes, that boy. I think about how easy it is to look at the end of someone’s life and pretend that the end was the whole story. It never is.

Inside every old man dying in a sealed suite, there is still a teenage boy standing on the steps of a courthouse blinking at the sun. Inside every cautionary tale, there is still a person who was once just a person doing the best they could with what they had been given. Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was a brilliant, broken, lonely, generous, frightened, courageous, foolish, gifted, ordinary, extraordinary human being.

He built things that mattered. He hurt people. He helped people. He lived a life so strange that nobody in the end could fully follow him into it. And he left scattered behind him the wreckage and the gifts that all human lives leave behind, just bigger, more visible, more public than most. If you have stayed with me this whole way, I want to thank you sincerely.

There’s something almost intimate about spending an hour together inside a life like this, and I do not take it lightly that you chose to spend it with me. If something in this story moved you, if some piece of it made you think about your own walls, your own rooms, your own people, then I think Howard Hughes, wherever the dead go, might be quietly glad to have been useful for that.

Until the next story, my friends, be kind to the people who are close enough to tell you the truth. They are, in the end, the only thing standing between any of us and a darkened room.