QI The Book of the Dead

of the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. When he sold his controlling shares in the airline TWA in 1966, he was presented with the largest cheque that had ever been made out to an individual – for $566,000,000. On his death a decade later, he left around the same amount – though unravelling the details of his investments and legacies took another fifteen years. This sounds like the classic American dream but whatever else his vast wealth did for Howard Hughes, it never made him happy.
    From about 1950, he became increasingly reclusive, disabled by obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia. The last twenty years of his life were spent being looked after by a small team of loyal aides and doctors, an inner circle that either protected him from outsiders or, depending on your perspective, colluded to imprison him within his neuroses. Many of them were Mormons, whom Hughes trusted despite not being a member of their church. He died in an air ambulance en route to a Texas hospital from Acapulco, emaciated, unwashed, and pumped full of painkillers and sedatives. In a life that had more drama than anything he ever produced in Hollywood, his eating habits particularly stand out. They became a series of increasingly bizarre personal rituals, outward symbols of his inner distress.
    It had all started very differently. As a young man, Hughes had declared:
    I intend to be the greatest golfer in the world, the finest film producer in Hollywood, the greatest pilot in the world, and the richest man in the world .
     
    He came very close to achieving all these ambitions (although he never bettered a handicap of two in golf). Even if he hadn’tmoved into film, he would be remembered for his achievements as a pilot. Just as Henry Ford had tested the possibilities of the automobile by becoming a racing driver, Hughes taught himself to understand the new science of aeronautics from inside the cockpit. Flying a Lockheed Super Electra in 1938 he broke the world air-speed record, as well as the records for the fastest flights across America and round the world (91 hours 14 minutes in 1938). In 1939, his flying career was recognised by the award of the Congressional gold medal. It is typical of Hughes that he never bothered to collect it: years later, President Truman finally sent it to him by post.
    If flying was Hughes’s amateur passion, he managed to turn it to good use in his professional career as a movie producer. His first successful film was Hell’s Angels (1930), an epic tale of First World War fighter pilots. Budgeted at $3.8 million, at the time it was the most expensive film ever made, in no small part due to Hughes’s perfectionism. He sent buyers to Europe to find as many First World War aeroplanes as possible for the film and shipped eighty-seven of them to America. He choreographed many of the dog-fight scenes and, when the stunt pilots all refused to fly the dangerous final scene, he did it himself, crashing the plane but escaping with minor injuries – and the shots he wanted. Three other stunt pilots died during the making of the film.
    Handsome, daring and rich, Hughes had a roll-call of lovers to match that of any of the leading men he cast. Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner were all charmed by his good looks and generosity. Hepburn in particular was smitten by his bravery, packing him turkey and cheesesandwiches for his round-the-world flight in 1938, while on another occasion he let her steer his private plane under 59th Street bridge on a night flight across Manhattan. He was also rumoured to have had affairs with Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and numerous other ‘pretty boy’ stars.
    Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Hughes appeared to be fulfilling all his youthful ambitions. But even then, ominous signs were perceptible. His colleagues complained of unreasonable requests, violent mood swings and a fixation with tiny details. Obsessed with Jane Russell’s breasts in his 1943 movie The Outlaw , he designed and built a cantilevered, steel-reinforced bra to show them off to their full advantage (though Russell later claimed she never actually wore it). More troubling, in 1941 he was diagnosed with syphilis (probably contracted from Lana Turner) and he started to agonise over the possibility of ‘catching germs’ from other people. After being given penicillin for the infection, he instructed his housekeeper to put