QI The Book of the Dead

almost all of his clothing into laundry bags and seal them with padlocks, after which they were to be thrown on to the lawn and burned. The syphilis caused an angry red rash to erupt on Hughes’s hands and his doctor told him not to shake hands with anyone until the antibiotics had cleared it up. His fixation with not touching anything dirty was about to take root.
    In December 1947 he suffered a total breakdown. Telling his staff that he wanted to watch some movies, he disappeared into a nearby studio’s screening room and didn’t emerge for four months, refusing to speak or be spoken to, only communicating with his staff via notes scrawled on a yellow pad and living entirely on chocolate bars and milk.
    He reappeared in the spring of 1948, but he was never thesame again. He stopped cutting his hair and nails, saved all his urine in glass bottles and preserved any of his stools that he considered ‘worthy’. He ate only room-service meals, instructing that his sandwiches be cut in precise triangles, that no tomato should be sliced thicker than a quarter of an inch, and that his lettuce should be shredded ‘on the bias’. He kept a ruler in the room to measure any peas he ordered, sending back any that were ‘too big’. Hughes never really regained equilibrium. From now on he gradually disappeared from his own life.
    By the time he married his third wife, the actress Jean Peters, in 1957, his fear of germs had reached a new level of intensity. He was getting through a dozen boxes of tissues a day, using them to pick things up and to isolate him from anything he sat on. Even tins of food had to be scrubbed and disinfected and the contents removed very slowly, so that they did not brush against the sides of the can and become contaminated. When he and Jean stayed at a hotel in Nassau, he refused to let housekeeping staff into their room, instead simply moving to another one once it was too dirty. They remained married for fourteen years but, at times, Peters was a virtual prisoner, forced to write Hughes a letter whenever she wanted permission to leave their hotel. One of the less attractive aspects of their marriage was that she was kept awake at night by the clicking of his gigantic toenails, which he refused to cut. To enable her to get a good night’s sleep, he first slipped tissue paper between his toes, and then asked engineers at the Hughes Aircraft Company to build him a set of callipers with metal ridges in the foot plate that would hold his nails apart. Mr and Mrs Hughes had to have separate fridges so that he didn’t catch germs from her, and for the same reason she wasn’t allowed to touch the knobs on the TV. They divorced in 1971, though they hadn’t lived togetherfor over a decade. When she remarried, Hughes bought the houses either side of her new marital home, and two others across the street, just so he could keep an eye on her.
    Hughes died without friends or family, his sordid decline eked out in hotel rooms, the windows shrouded with blackout material. Often he would sit naked, a hotel napkin covering his genitals, watching movies over and over again. He was rumoured to have watched Ice Station Zebra , the 1968 Alistair MacLean spy thriller starring Rock Hudson, more than 150 times. No one knows what it was in the film that piqued his interest. When Hughes was chronically constipated and dehydrated in his final months, his assistant John Holmes would arrive every three days to deliver brown-paper bags containing almond Hershey bars, homogenised milk and unsalted pecan nuts to his bedside. These had to be handed over in silence, the bag held out at 45 degrees so that Hughes could reach inside and remove the items individually with a clean paper tissue for each one. According to one biographer, Richard Hack, the chocolate was ‘cut into half-inch squares, each square chewed individually and completely, followed by a swallow of milk’. Hughes weighed less than 7 stones when he died. His appearance was so changed through neglect and malnutrition that the FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify him.
    As falls from grace go, Hughes’s has a mythic quality to it. Few men have ever enjoyed so much money and fame; few have ended in such a complete rejection of the world. What was it that first sent Hughes over the edge in 1947? There are clues in his childhood: his mother, Allene, was always worried about germs, sending news clippings to the supervisor of young Howard’s summer camp