The Real Reason Howard Hughes Lost His Mind D
Howard Hughes’s private life was far from glamorous. Jars of urine, years of addiction, and bizarre eating habits took their toll. But this horrific lifestyle could only be matched by his terrible, jaw-dropping death. A multifaceted, outgoing, and ceaselessly creative person, Howard Hughes did it all.
From becoming a pilot to an aerospace engineer, a businessman, a filmmaker, and even a philanthropist, it seemed like there was nothing Howard Hughes couldn’t do. But then something changed. He slowly started to become unhinged, showing increasingly bizarre behavior. Most people chocked it up to his extreme wealth, but evidence later came out that Hughes’s tragic and unnecessary demise wasn’t quite so simple.
Hughes came from a family with deep roots in the American mythology. On Hughes’s mother’s side of the family, there was the man who baptized George Washington. Meanwhile, Hughes’s cousins were the first in-flight Wright brothers. On top of this, Hughes’s uncle was the Oscar nominated novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes.
Howard Hughes would make his own name before long, but that’s not always a good thing. Born in Texas, Hughes built Houston’s first wireless radio transmitter when he was just 11 years old and became the first licensed ham radio operator in the state. The next year, Hughes appeared in the newspaper as the first boy in Houston to have a motorized bicycle, which he built himself.
By the time he was 14 years old, he’d already taken his first flying lesson. He had so much going for him, but then fate served up a horrible tragedy. In 1922, when Howard was only 16 years old, he lost his mother due to complications from an ectopic pregnancy. But this was just the beginning. 2 years later, Hughes senior had a heart attack and passed.
Suddenly, at the age of 18, Hughes had become an orphan. His parents had passed so closely together that dad hadn’t changed his will. And this fact would change Hughes’s life forever. It’s likely that Hughes Senior wouldn’t have wanted to leave his entire unfettered estate to his young son, but that’s exactly what happened.
At 19 years of age, Hughes became an emancipated minor, which granted him access to the vast sum of money he’d inherited as the sole child of rich parents. The first thing Hughes did was quit school and married his sweetheart, Ella Rice. Hughes and his young wife went off to Los Angeles with a fortune to spend.
He soon met actor Ralph Graves at LA’s Wilshire Country Club. Graves was an actor and he had a business opportunity for Hughes. He had written a film script and he knew the perfect actor to star in the picture himself. Of course, all he needed was the money to make the movie. Hughes had an interest in movie making, so he handed over $40,000 to make the film.
With no experience in film making whatsoever, Hughes was jumping into the deep end without a life jacket. The movie Graves got Hughes to finance was Swell Hogan. But what actually swelled was the budget. It soon doubled to $80,000. Then when young financeier Hughes saw the finished product, he thought it wasn’t good at all.
He took the movie to Uncle Roert who was in the industry and asked his opinion. And of course, he didn’t get the answer he was hoping for. Rupert Hughes thought Swell Hogan was so terrible that he told his nephew to burn the only existing copy of it, or else he and Graves would be the laughingtock of Hollywood.
So really, how bad was this film? We’ll never know, as Hughes took his uncle’s advice and destroyed the only copy. Hughes’s first try at filmm had been a disaster, but he wasn’t a quitter. More successful films such as The Outlaw followed, but his Hollywood career wasn’t the only thing hitting its stride.
There was also Hughes’s love life. Howard’s wife had divorced him and returned to Houston, so he decided it was a good time to date famous beauties. He had romantic connections to Betty Davis, Olivia de Havland, Ginger Rogers, and Catherine Heepburn. And if you believe the rumors, a few male beauties as well, including Carrie Grant and Tyrone Power.
Hughes was so happy with his life in the movies that he decided it was time to make a huge purchase. He saw that RKO Pictures was struggling and decided to buy them out. When Hughes got to be the boss, he quickly fired 700 workers and seemed happy to reduce the output from 30 films a year to just 12. Hughes had just gotten rid of the bulk of his workforce, and the ones that remained were in for the surprise of their lives.
Hughes’s next act was to completely shut down RKO for a shocking reason. He had suspicions that some of the employees may be communists. For 6 months, he investigated the background of every employee and made sure they were anti-communist. Then he went a ridiculous step further. Hughes had to be sure that all his employees had political ideologies like his own.
But that wasn’t enough. He then went through all the films that were already in production and made sure the ideas behind these films were 100% anti-communist. If they weren’t, he shut the film down. In some people’s opinions, Hughes was acting like a madman. But now he was going to have to explain himself.
The shareholders of RKO were not at all impressed with Hughes’s behavior, so they started suing Hughes left, right, and center. These lawsuits were like buzzing insects around Howard and he wanted them stopped. So he came up with an easy solution. He just bought the entire company and became the sole owner of RKO.
Surely this was a huge financial mistake. Right. Well, Hughes eventually sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company and laughed all the way to the bank. He made so much money from the sale that he could now get on with his next venture. This was in real estate. He purchased 1,200 acres of land in Culver City and over 4,000 acres in Tucson, Arizona.
Next, Hughes hit Nevada and bought 25,000 acres near Las Vegas. Clearly, the man had a plan, but one careless mistake had the potential to derail it. In 1936, Hughes got in his car and drove through the streets of Los Angeles. At a corner, he hit a pedestrian named Gabriel Meyer. Meyer didn’t survive the crash and Hughes himself had to go to the hospital with minor injuries.
When the doctor examined Hughes, he noted that the millionaire had been drinking. It looked like Hughes was in a heap of trouble. A witness to the accident said that Howard’s driving was erratic and Meyer had been safely within a street car stop when Hughes hit him. They threw Hughes into overnight prison and it seemed like the end as they wanted to charge him with homicidal negligence.
Miraculously, however, the witness suddenly changed his story and Hughes walked away from it all an innocent man. This whole event seemed really suspicious, but Hughes shook it off and started on his new obsession, breaking a world record. In 1933, Wy Post flew around the world in 186 hours, and Hughes set his sights on beating that record.
But he had an ulterior motive. He wanted the world to know that long-d distanceance air travel was safe. On July 14th, 1938, Hughes and his crew landed in the Big Apple, beating Post’s record by an astonishing 95 hours. Waiting for him was a ticker tape parade. The eccentric Howard Hughes was getting more and more famous by the day, but he had dark secrets lurking behind the scenes, things that his adoring public would find offensive.
Back in the 1940s, Hughes dated Hollywood actor Jean Peters. He eventually proposed marriage, but Peters said no because she was focusing on her career. But there may have been another reason why Peters declined the millionaire. Maybe she noticed that Hughes was having his security men following her every step.
Well, years later, they met again, and Peters forgot about his eccentricities and was ready to be his wife. Poor girl. In 1957, Hughes and Peters tied the knot in a hotel in Nevada, but trouble was close at hand. While making Niagara with Marilyn Monroe, Peters had made a friend named Max Shoalter.
When she wanted to maintain her friendship with Max, he received a chilling threat. Through his security team, Howard told Max that he would ruin his career if he didn’t stay away from Peters. And there were other bizarre behaviors, ones that would do harm to Hughes himself. In 1958, Hughes decided he wanted to binge some movies.
That might not sound too unusual, except Hughes’s idea of binge watching meant watching in a private studio for four full months. Hughes never left the studio and he only ate chicken and chocolate and drank milk. When he came out of the studio and into the harsh light of day, his loved ones were in for a disturbing surprise.
Hughes had spent 4 months watching movies in the dark. When he came out of the studio, he hadn’t taken a bath, cut his hair, or even clipped his finger and toenails. One can only imagine that he looked like a monster. But if you think it’s time for an intervention, it wasn’t coming.
Hughes learned no lesson from this extreme binge watching session. And in fact, he was about to do it all over again. This time, when Hughes wanted to binge watch movies, he chose a more comfortable place, a bungalow at the rather expensive Beverly Hills Hotel. Hughes sat around his bungalow watching movies and only wearing a pink hotel napkin to cover his private parts.
In that single year, Hughes spent something close to $11 million at the hotel. Now, binge watching movies was mostly just harmless fun. But soon, Hughes would be in the center of a huge presidential scandal. Most people know about the Watergate scandal involving then President Richard Nixon, but not everyone knows about Howard Hughes’s involvement.
Nixon, a Republican, had heard that the Democrats had information about some shady dealings Nixon had had with Hughes. This belief led Nixon into some very unpresidential behavior. The idea that the Democrats had info about Nixon and Hughes’s illicit dealings infuriated Nixon, and he made the mistake of his political career.
He sent his men into the Watergate Hotel to steal info that, among other things, incriminated him regarding Hughes. As it turned out, there was no info at all, and Nixon lost his presidency. Meanwhile, Hughes was getting into dangerous situations, and he needed an entourage to keep him safe. Of course, Howard’s hiring criteria was just bizarre.
One thing Hughes couldn’t abide was having members of the entourage drink on the job. To make sure this didn’t happen, Hughes wanted to hire people who didn’t drink at all. So, he went to the Mormon church and hired his aids there, as the church forbids drinking of any kind.
Hughes’s entourage was getting big, and he had to find a place where he could house them all. By the late 1960s, Hughes was moving from one hotel to another with his collection of aids and girlfriends. In November of 1966, Hughes and his entourage took a train to Las Vegas and went directly to the Desert Inn.
Hughes wanted to stay for a long time, and he anticipated some problems from the staff and owners. To avoid these problems, Hughes did the simplest thing. He bought the place. But there was still one problem he had not anticipated. There was a major annoyance in the bedroom Hughes had chosen in the Desert Inn.
The bright lights on the sign at the Silver Slipper Casino kept him awake. Being the owner of the Desert Inn, Hughes could have changed rooms, but he came up with a better option. He simply bought the silver slipper and had the sign moved. Hughes had taken care of his problems at bedtime, but now he needed to tackle his bizarre dietary needs.
As Hughes got older, his behavior got more and more eccentric. For example, he always had the same thing for dinner, a medium rare steak, salad, and peas, but only small peas. Breakfast had to be eggs made the way the family cook had made them when he was a child. It seemed that Hughes wanted everything to always be the same until one day he would find a brand new favorite.
While living at the Desert Inn, Hughes decided that he was in love with banana nut ice cream from BaskinRobins. Hughes’s minions quickly went out to buy as much as they could to keep their boss happy. But when they got to BaskinRobins, they made a chilling discovery. The company had discontinued the flavor and their boss was not going to be happy.
Hughes’s aids knew that if their boss wanted banana nut ice cream, they had better find some banana nut ice cream. They contacted BaskinRobins and asked what the smallest order they could make from the factory was. And it was,300 L or 350 gall. They proudly brought the massive order back to Hughes, only to discover that he’d changed his favorite to French vanilla.
Indeed, Hughes’s money could make BaskinRobins recreate a flavor. But he was about to come head-to-head with an organization not so easily paid off. When the US government wanted to test nuclear devices underground in the Nevada desert, Hughes had a problem with it. This time, his enormous influence in Nevada couldn’t stop them.
So he went straight to the actual president to stop the tests. This failed and the tests went ahead anyway. Some were so bad that Hughes felt an eerie rumble right through his hotel. Luckily, Hughes had his entourage there to make him feel better until he noticed that a certain member was AWOL. In 1970, Hughes realized he’d lost touch with his wife.
They didn’t live together and only communicated by telephone. Well, Jean Peters didn’t think this was much of a marriage, so she asked for a divorce. This looked like it would be the courtroom drama of the century, filled with exposed secrets and bitter fighting over money. Of course, the media was ready to publish every scandalous detail. Well, this didn’t happen.
As it turned out, all Peters wanted from Hughes was $70,000 a year. When he offered her a cool million, she said, “No thank you. Also, Peters never talked about Hughes after their divorce, even though there was no confidentiality agreement. On the other end, Hughes also never said an unkind word about Peters.
The lack of drama around his divorce was a disappointment to gossip lovers. But don’t worry, all his secrets were about to come out. In 1972, author Clifford Irving told the world that he and Hughes had written a book together, which he claimed was an authorized autobiography. The strange thing was that Hughes had never met Irving.
If Hughes wanted to expose Irving as a huge phony, he’d have to come out and tell the world. But the problem was that by this time, Hughes was living a completely reclusive life. Howard had a choice. come out or let the book of lies see the light of day. He realized that if he didn’t step forward, the unauthorized story of his life would soon be on bookshelves.
No one had seen Hughes publicly for years, and he liked it that way. So, he set up a teleconference and announced that Irving was lying. The truth was now out there, and Irving soon found himself in prison. Finally, Howard was safe to go back into his hermit-like existence. But sadly, he didn’t have much time left.
Sometime around the beginning of April 1976, Hughes boarded his Learjet in Aapulco, Mexico, and headed to Houston. Then, disaster struck. Somewhere between Mexico and Houston, Hughes stopped breathing, and he would never stir again. But the story doesn’t end there. When the plane arrived at the hospital in Houston, the doctors couldn’t believe their eyes.
They had to identify Hughes’s body, but they just couldn’t. His reclusive lifestyle and alleged drug abuse had altered his appearance. He weighed less than 100 lb and had long fingernails and toenails along with a scruffy beard and unrecognizable hair. He was also using the alias of John T. Cooper. Doctors were at a standstill and they needed to know if this was Howard Hughes or not.
The medical team finally came up with fingerprints as a way to identify Hughes’s body. When they confirmed this, the next thing to do was figure out what had happened to him. The autopsy result was that kidney failure was the cause of his demise. But like most things with Hughes, there was more controversy and mystery.
An investigation into Hughes’s passing revealed that he had received a lethal injection. They also did an X-ray and found five pieces from hypodermic needles in his arms. In addition to this, Hughes had bed sores and suffered from malnutrition. Surprisingly, they ruled out foul play. Apparently, Howard Hughes had done this all to himself.
Of course, like everything else in his life, there was intrigue. Most people just assume that the insanity of Howard Hughes was caused by his money, but there may have been a sad and scandalous answer. As a young man, the encourageable Hughes contracted syphilis at the height of his womanizing era.
When the bacteria spreads to the brain, it can cause a host of symptoms called neurosyphilis. Doctors diagnosed Hughes with neurosyphilis in the early 30s and it’s even worse than it sounds. Neurosyphilis causes widespread damage to the brain which can have a range of effects including psychosis, dementia, depression, delirium, and more.
But it still gets worse. Hughes got the disease before the discovery of antibiotics. So doctors at first treated him with mercury, which has its own host of side effects. Add to that what was likely undiagnosed OCD and it’s little wonder that Howard Hughes’s mental state deteriorated as badly as it did. Regardless of his tragic ailment, Hughes left a powerful impact on the world around him.
Indeed, his personal appearances in pop culture remain too numerous to mention. But his reclusive persona also inspired some iconic characters that people might not realize. Stan Lee used Hughes’s life as an inspiration for Tony Stark in Iron Man, while Albert R. Broccoli, producer of the James Bond series, copied Hughes’s life for an eccentric character in Diamonds Are Forever.
And just like those diamonds, it appears that the equally fascinating and tragic legacy of this eccentric mogul will indeed last forever. Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us. If you enjoyed this video, check out the videos on screen for more amazing history content.
