Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel
America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire
By Darwin Porter
Blood Moon Productions, April 2005, Hardcover, $26.95
814 pages, ISBN# 0-9748118-1-5, with 175 vintage photographs
When Howard Hughes (now known to moviegoers as “The Aviator”) was 18 years old, his father, the mega-rich owner of the Hughes Tool Company, discovered that his son had homosexual tendencies. Disgusted by the discovery and irritated by behavior he considered disloyal, Howard Senior replaced his existing will with one that would have left his daughter wealthy from him but without the autocratic power he himself had enjoyed. But just moments before he could execute the new document, Howard Senior suffered a fatal heart attack in his Houston office.
If he had signed it before his death, American aviation history and Hollywood movie history might have been very different.
Before his father was in the ground, Howard (he never used “Junior” again) tore the new will to shreds and went after the other beneficiaries of his father’s estate, his grandparents and uncle. “I don’t want to own 75 percent of Toolco,” he told his father’s lawyer. “I want to own 100 percent so I don’t have to inform anyone.”
With persuasion, intimidation, and something akin to blackmail, he was eventually able to acquire the balance of the outstanding shares and thus gain full control. The rest is history. Debt to no one, with virtually unlimited funds at his disposal, Howard Hughes and his infinite ego set out to create an empire. Three empires really: Toolco grew without much input from Hughes into a billion-dollar company; Hughes Aviation propelled Howard to the forefront of 20th century flight; and Caddo Productions, which later became RKO Pictures, established him as a major filmmaker.
Hollywood biographer Darwin Porter has outdone himself with Hell’s Angel. The two previous intimate portraits of him, by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, set a new standard for detailed and revealing biographies. Now at 814 pages on “America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire,” Porter once again raises the literary bar. Beginning with his own spying as a child on the set of Slattery’s Hurricane, where his mother worked as an assistant to both Linda Darnell and Veronica Lake, Porter continued through decades of interviews with literally hundreds of Hughes associates, intimate and casual. His own research was bolstered by the extensive previously unpublished memoirs of his former writing partner, the late Stanley Mills Haggart, a former roommate of Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. (The 15-page index is a veritable encyclopedia of the movie industry: from Aherne, Brian to Zanuck, Darryl.)
Due to the highly personal nature of this oral history, most of this detail has never been seen in print before. The press of the 1940s and 1950s, even nosy Hollywood gossip columnists, could not print the Porter revelations that unfold in these pages. Be careful, he doesn’t write these stories. He sometimes gets very intimate; He didn’t really need to know about Clark Gable’s smegma problem, for example.
The dictionary has two definitions for the word “waste.” Howard Hughes epitomized them both: “utterly given over to debauchery” and “wildly extravagant.” Outlandish, like when he dumped a load of diamonds, rubies, and precious stones into young Elizabeth Taylor’s lap as she lounged by a hotel pool. (She wasn’t impressed.)
And, as with so many rich and powerful men, sex was a constant. Porter documents Hughes’s relationships, all the famous ones, including Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Gloria Vanderbilt on the spinning wheel side and Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn on the other.
Many of Hughes’s conquests remain unnamed. As a heavyweight Hollywood producer, he has signed on to dozens of aspiring actresses, usually teenage sweethearts who come to California hoping to break into movies. He would then audition them on his casting couch.
If you’ve seen the movie, now discover the rest of the Howard Hughes story.