QI The Book of the Dead

advising caution when allowing so many boys tomix together because of the dangers of spreading polio. His grandmother Mimi was also fearful of dirt and refused to have any built-in cupboards in the house because they could not be moved outdoors to be ‘disinfected’ by sunlight. And both his parents had died suddenly when Hughes was in his late teens.
    But there were two other specific events that took place just before his breakdown that may have contributed more directly to it. In July 1946 he was the pilot on the test flight of a spy-plane called the XF-11 when mechanical failure brought the plane down on the edge of Beverly Hills. It collided with three houses and then exploded. Hughes was severely injured, puncturing a lung, breaking six ribs and his collarbone and suffering extensive cuts and burns. The morphine used to treat a serious burn to his hand probably started his dependency on prescription drugs and he remained in constant pain for the rest of his life.
    The second setback involved Hughes’s contribution to the war effort. Concerned at the loss of American troops and equipment through U-boat action in the Atlantic, he had secured the government contract to build a huge transport seaplane, big enough to carry 750 troops and two tanks. The eight-engined H-4 Hercules, or ‘Spruce Goose’, was the largest plane then built and remains the largest wooden aeroplane in history. Though the Spruce Goose’s size has since been beaten by the Russian Antonov An-225, its wingspan of 320 feet is still a world record. Like many of Hughes’s schemes, it went wildly over budget and was never delivered, the contract being cancelled amid accusations of bribery. The prototype flew only once, in November 1947, a journey of about a mile at an altitude of 70 feet. Hughes was at the controls. The collapse of this project was a huge blow to his pride (and his pocket) and he kept the plane in a hangar in perfect condition at a cost of $1,000,000 a year until his death in 1976. He was not a man who was used to failure. As he reminded a reporter: ‘I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddamit, I’m a billionaire.’ Two weeks later, he withdrew to his screening room and began his long descent into oblivion.

     
    Howard Hughes’s descent into culinary lunacy feels a long way removed from the dietary eccentricities of Helena de Noailles or John Harvey Kellogg, or the weight-watching routines of Empress Elizabeth. Today when we call someone a glutton, we mean they eat too much. Of the lives in this chapter, only George Fordyce fits that description. But the original meaning of gluttony was much more subtle. The great medieval moralist St Thomas Aquinas defined it as the sin of ‘inordinate desire’: as well as eating too much, he thought eating too soon, eating too eagerly, eating too expensively and eating too fussily were all equally wrong. And we’re talking to an expert here. St Tom himself was so fat he had to have a semi-circle cut out of his dining table to accommodate his stomach. But where food is concerned we should not be too hasty in our judgments. As G. K. Chesterton said: ‘There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.’

CHAPTER SIX
     

Grin and Bear It
     
     
    Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have .
EDVARD MUNCH
     
    A mbition, fame, sex, gluttony: all these have the capacity to transform our lives for better or worse and, as we have seen, the struggle to control them can be the making of us. But there are some traumatic events over which we can have no possible control: the loss of a limb, the onset of blindness, an attack of mental illness. The human race fights a running battle against disease and injury. Most people who have ever lived (perhaps as many as 45 billion) died of malaria; plague and smallpox have killed more human beings than all wars and natural disasters put together. Even in affluent Britain and the US today, one in ten adults are registered disabled: over the age of fifty, this rises to one in two. A quarter of Americans suffer from some form of neurotic, psychotic or addictive disorder, and the commonest illness treated by doctors in Britain is depression. Whether we find comfort in religion, consolation in philosophy, or simply adopt a stiff upper lip, learning how to deal with sudden physical misfortune is something we all, sooner or later, have to deal with.
    Posterity