The Eccentric Howard Hughes: A Wealth of Madness

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was at one point in time the richest man in the world. He was an accomplished aviator who showed the world in 1938 that long distance air travel was indeed possible and safe, he was also responsible for creating some of the greatest films of his decade, from "Hells Angels" to the classic gangster film "Scarface". Even today his medical foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a leading research group in biomedical science. However, with all his talent and achievements, Hughes was a prisoner within his own mind. Trapped by a crippling mental disorder that was only aggravated by his addiction to opiates, Howard Hughes spiraled from a larger then life figure to a mad recluse.

Movies, Milk and Candy Bars

December of 1947 Hughes fell into his most talked about and frightful episode. Before people had only commented on his at times wild mood swings and his obsession with minute details. One day he would be fine and the next he would have the costumes for his leads torn apart because he would see an errant seam but December marked something unexplainable. That morning he told his aids that he wanted to screen some movies in a near by theater, there he locked himself in the viewing box for four months. He never came out for that time period and lived on a diet of milk and chocolate bars. He would reuse the milk bottles as he needed them and only communicated with his aids through yellow legal sheets. These sheets would tell them not to speak to him or look at him unless told otherwise. Howard Hughes would just sit there in the dark, naked, rearranging Kleenex boxes and watching movies. In the spring of the next year he emerged a shell of who he once was, bearded and filthy with long nails and an emaciated body.

Flying High

It is known today that Howard Hughes suffered from an acute case of OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which was aggravated by his later addiction to painkillers prescribed to him because of his numerous injuries from plane crashes. The most famous and devastating of which was the crash of experimental reconnaissance aircraft XF-11, he was testing for the US Military. An oil leak caused one of the propellers to spin in reverse with caused him to dip wildly; in a last ditch effort to save the plane Hughes attempted to land it in a golf course in Las Angeles. However the plane suddenly began to drop drastically and ended up crashing into three houses in a Beverly Hills neighborhood. That crash left Hughes with a crushed chest and cracked ribs along with a host of other issues, one of which was an addiction to morphine.

The Mormon Mafia and a fading light

Hughes surrounded himself with Mormons (or Latter Day Saints), because he felt that they were the only people he could trust even though he himself was not a member of their church. After his mad dash around the world, buying up hotels as temporary homes, Howard Hughes began to fade himself out of the public eye. In the end he became a recluse, his last "appearance" being a 1972 teleconference to expose Clifford Irving's biography of him as a hoax. (Clifford Irving was later convicted of fraud and his actions were turned into a 2007 film called "The Hoax" staring Richard Gere)

Howard Hughes died officially on April 5 of 1976 at 1:27 in the afternoon. There have been many theories as to his death but his death certificate rules the cause to have been kidney failure, believed to have been brought on by malnutrition. He is buried next to his mother and father in Houston Texas, at Glenwood Cemetery