As she slowly began wading back into the public eye, she refused to offer specifics about her time with Hughes, and in late 1972 she even gave a press conference to talk about the fact that she was not planning to talk about her second marriage. “I’m not so naive as to think your only reason for being here is your interest in my career,” she said, “but my life with Howard Hughes was and shall remain a matter on which I have no comment.”
This did nothing to diminish curiosity. Indeed, reporters were only getting hungrier for any scrap of news about Hughes, because such scraps were increasingly so hard to come by. Between 1972 and 1977, Hughes would shuttle between Nicaragua, Vancouver, London, the Bahamas, and Acapulco. He would become so isolated, so elusive, that, as Time magazine would report, “only his death gave proof that he had still been alive.”
“Am getting many wild tips that Howard Hughes is dead,” reported The Hollywood Reporter’s Rambling Reporter, “but fact of the matter is he’s still on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and healthy enough to make many cheery calls to his estranged wife Jean Peters.” Thirteen months after announcing the end of their marriage, Peters still hadn’t filed for divorce. A month later, the IRS started sniffing around her, demanding she answer a twelve-item questionnaire, the most pressing question being, “Why have you not filed a tax return during marriage to HRH?” The answer was that she hadn’t worked at all during the marriage, and thus, “My income was such that no return was required.” (Thanks to the Medical Institute and other forms of creative accounting, Hughes himself had managed to avoid paying personal income taxes for seventeen years, from 1950 to 1966.)
D. L. Lyons returned to the Peters beat, knocking on her door unannounced. She would speak to him without opening it, their voices muffled by the barrier of wood. When he identified himself as the reporter who had tracked her down on the UCLA campus three years earlier, Peters exclaimed, “Go away!”
“Do you hate me, Jean?” the reporter responded.
“Of course not. Just go away.”
“She sounded,” Lyons claimed, “as if she were choking back laughter.”
Lyons interpreted Peters’s refusal to talk to him as proof “that her 64-year-old husband is still alive—a matter of considerable conjecture recently.” In an article discussing Jean’s fate, Lyons added that Hughes’s aides had made concerted efforts “to prevent publication of this article. While it was being written, a man known to have represented Hughes in the past offered to buy this story for $25,000. When I declined, another man rapped on my door and offered to trade a glittering new Mercedes-Benz 380SE for my old Mustang.”
Lyons further noted that Jean had been seeing Stanley Hough for about a year. An anonymous friend declared in the story that it is “quite romantic” that Jean and Stan had hooked up, as he had developed a crush on her twenty years earlier when serving as an assistant director on the Fox lot.
In June, the Hughes-Peters divorce was finalized. The agreement stipulated that Peters would collect an annual income of $70,000 (roughly $434,000 in 2018 dollars) from Hughes for the next twenty years.
IN DECEMBER 1971, REPUTABLE publications started to report that Howard Hughes had dictated an autobiography to author Clifford Irving, to be published by McGraw-Hill in March 1972. From the beginning, Hughes’s reps vehemently denied that the book was legit. In order to prove that his “autobiography” was a hoax, in January Hughes agreed to participate in a conference call with seven reporters who had spoken to him in the past and were deemed to be able to judge the authenticity of his voice.
On the day of the call, Hughes, who had set up camp in a hotel in the Bahamas, injected himself with a massive dose of codeine and watched several films: Gunfight in Abilene, Midnight Lace, Daring Game, Once Upon a Time in the West. He watched the first three films two times each, but after viewing the Sergio Leone movie, Hughes told his aides the print could be returned—and ordered them not to show him any more Italian westerns. He was similarly unimpressed by Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring petite-chested Audrey Hepburn, but when an aide put on Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz, featuring German brunette beauty Karin Dor, he was happy. “I like this one,” he said. He watched it twice.
Despite this unconventional method of preparation, Hughes’s performance on the conference call was masterful. The reporters came away convinced that the man calling himself Howard Hughes was in fact who he claimed to be, and that he had not participated in the book purporting to be Hughes’s autobiography. More than that, Hughes was able to put forth the illusion that something remained of the charming American iconoclast whom much of the American public had thought they had gotten to know so many years earlier. Even at far less than full physical strength, he was still a world-class spinner.
When asked to explain his seclusion over the previous fifteen years, Hughes said, “I don’t really know. I just sort of slid into it, but I will tell you one thing. I am rapidly planning to come out of it. In other words, I am not going to continue being quite as reclusive.”
The only time it got really weird was when Vernon Scott asked if Hughes had left his current hotel in the previous six months. “Well, you are getting into a pretty touchy area there,” Hughes responded. “Let’s say I haven’t left the Bahamas. . . .”
Thanks in part to the press conference, Irving’s book was proven to be a total hoax, and the “author” eventually went to prison. But the press conference did more than out the autobiography as a fraud: it also proved to the world that Hughes was alive. Several months later, he decided to give up his birthright: he sold Hughes Tool. His remaining businesses, which now included seven casinos, a couple of TV stations, a mining company, and a helicopter outfit, were reincorporated as the Summa Corporation.
IN 1973, HUGHES WENT to London. There he flew a plane for the last time, accompanied by pilot Jack Real. Real would later recall that when he returned with Hughes to his hotel, the aides who were waiting there for Hughes told Real to leave the Boss alone. They didn’t like it that Real was “getting him alive again.” Soon these aides got the submissive Hughes they preferred: in his London hotel room, Howard fell and fractured his hip. The hip was successfully repaired, but Hughes refused to submit to the follow-up treatment he needed. When Dr. Wilbur Thain offered to hire a “cute little physical therapist,” Hughes said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.” Hughes would never walk again.
After that, he stopped watching television, which was his last link to the news or current events. He ceased keeping track of the outside world. His aides continued projecting movies for him. He liked the Sean Connery James Bond pictures, produced by his old friend Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. He liked The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Klansman (a notoriously misbegotten exploitation drama about race and rape featuring the film debut of former football player O. J. Simpson). He loved a Cold War thriller called Ice Station Zebra, starring Rock Hudson. He watched it regularly.
One night in the spring of 1976, entertainment columnist James Bacon picked up his ringing phone and found Hughes, now in Mexico, on the other end. Bacon had known Hughes since the early 1950s. “It wasn’t too hard to know him [then],” Bacon would write. “You just had to keep late hours. He usually could be found around the old El Rancho Las Vegas around 4 A.M. eating breakfast.” But Bacon hadn’t seen Hughes since 1953, so he was surprised to hear from him, especially at “2 A.M. Los Angeles time, four o’clock in the morning at his suite in the Princess Hotel in Acapulco.” It was, Bacon said simply, “a happy call.”
In early April, Terry Moore, her mother, and a journalist met for drinks at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Howard Hughes became the topic of conversation. Moore explained Hughes’s isolation as a privilege: “With all that money he doesn’t have to go anywhere. He brings everywhere to him. He’s right in Acapulco, if you want to know.” When asked if she still saw Hughes, Moore demurred. “That is something I can’t answer.
“Howard told me he’d only been in love with three girls
in his life,” Terry boasted. “Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Terry Moore. I went with him for eight years, except for one marriage—I married Glenn Davis, the football player, you know, for three months.” To Terry, the eight years, about which she was happy to reminisce, were the good old days.
In Acapulco, Hughes’s weight had dropped down to 100 pounds, and it became apparent to his aides that he was dying. A Dr. Montemayor, an army lieutenant colonel, was brought in to examine Howard in his hotel suite. The doctor took notice of a system, consisting of multiple movie projectors and two screens, in front of a hospital bed. Howard apparently spent his every waking moment lying in bed, operating the projectors by remote control.
In addition to marveling over Hughes’s entertainment system, Dr. Montemayor confirmed that Howard’s condition was not good, and that he should be moved to the United States to receive the care he needed. His aides loaded his body onto one of his planes. On April 5, 1976—with the plane still in the air, half an hour away from the Houston airport—Hughes’s personal physician Dr. Wilbur Thain pronounced him dead.
On April 7, the results of the autopsy were released. The official culprit was kidney failure, described by the New York Times as “a common cause of death.” There were, however, plenty of uncommon details. The Treasury secretary made a public statement stressing the urgency of positively identifying the corpse, so that the IRS could start taxing the Hughes estate posthaste. Hughes’s face was so withered away that the FBI ran the corpse’s fingerprints to make sure it was really him. He had a separated-shoulder injury that looked recent, and a head trauma that looked as though it had gone untreated. There were broken-off hypodermic needles in his arms. He was dehydrated and starving, and had possibly overdosed.
After the autopsy, the body was claimed by Howard’s relatives, including Aunt Annette Lummis, who was now eighty-five. An eight-minute Episcopal ceremony was attended by Annette and Howard’s eight surviving cousins and their immediate families, about twenty people in all. Hughes hadn’t seen or spoken to most of these people since 1938 at the latest. He was buried in an unmarked grave beside his mother and father in Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery.
“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out,” said the priest who presided over the service. There were no vestiges of Hughes’s Hollywood life at his funeral. No actresses were in attendance.
Epilogue
Life After Death
One obituary of Howard Hughes called the deceased the “Most Publicized of His Time.” But as much publicity and press coverage as Howard Hughes managed to generate during his seventy years of life, it was nothing compared to what he generated simply by dying—and doing so without leaving a certified will where anyone could find it.
Over the next decade, an international search would ensue for a will, and for legitimate heirs. The legal battles over who would assume control of his estate, and which state or states would assume the privilege of taxing it, ensured that Hughes’s legacy was a topic of discussion in the world media almost until the end of the century.
One unauthorized biography and a few magazine articles had been published before Hughes’s death, divulging details of his unusual business practices and lifestyle. Still, the condition of his corpse, particularly the chilling detail of the broken needles found in his arms, and the fact that he had died without anyone close to him who wasn’t paid to be there, did much to complicate the still-prevalent image of him as a dashing international man of mystery. The legal battles over his estate did much to reveal the “real” Hughes—as well as the limits to which it had been possible to “know” Howard Hughes at all.
In order to defend the Hughes estate from claims made by former employees, Houston law firm Andrews, Kurth hired Raymond Fowler, then chairman of the psychology department at the University of Alabama, to create what was called a “psychological autopsy” of Hughes. Over many months, Fowler studied Howard’s medical records, the call logs generated by Operations, and all manner of Hughes ephemera; the psychologist also interviewed a number of surviving Hughes associates, including Walter Kane and Terry Moore.
Fowler concluded that Hughes had suffered from some form of undiagnosed mental illness for much of his life, and that it began in childhood with the paranoia and phobias instilled in him by his germophobic mother. Fowler also took note of the unusual number of plane and car accidents Hughes managed to get into between 1928 (the Hell’s Angels crash) and 1946 (the near-fatal Beverly Hills crash), a sheer volume of collisions that could usually only be explained by alcohol abuse, drug addiction, or epilepsy. Though he noted that hypodermic needles had been found in various Hughes properties “apparently dating from about 1936,” it was the latter hypothesis that seemed most interesting to Fowler.
“There is no record of Hughes ever having been diagnosed as epileptic,” Fowler noted in a memo written for attorney George Dean, “but it is highly unlikely that such a diagnosis, even if made, would have been recorded or retained, since it would have resulted in immediate grounding by the FAA.” By Hughes’s last years, his condition, Fowler wrote, “resembled that of a chronic psychotic patient in the very worst mental hospitals . . . he was, for all practical purposes, incarcerated in a mental institution of his own making, but he was receiving no treatment for his mental illness and not even adequate care for his basic needs.”
Before Fowler had been assigned the case, the Associated Press called a bunch of aging Hollywood beauties to play armchair psychoanalyst. “I think the sad part of his existence is that he was a loner,” mused Ginger Rogers, “and I think that loners are very unhappy people.” Ida Lupino downplayed her connection to Hughes, insisting that when she and Howard first met, “There was no romance—I was only 16. He used to take my mother and me out dancing: Howard loved music, and he was a good dancer.” Ella Rice, now remarried, was not heard from. Jean Peters would not comment on her relationship with Hughes but did say, “I’m sorry and I’m sad that he’s dead.”
Later, Peters would be forced to talk, when she was deposed in the multipart battles over Hughes’s legacy. She would insist that he meant for all of his money to go to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His “primary goal in life,” Peters said, was to “have it be the biggest and the most successful of any medical institute, research institute in the world.” This, Peters added, Hughes imagined as “his monument to his life’s work . . . the statement of what Howard Hughes really was. Because he was very disillusioned that many of his airplane records had been broken.” (If Peters was aware that the Medical Institute had mainly served the purpose of reducing her husband’s tax burden during his lifetime, she didn’t disclose this in the deposition.) Based on conversations with her ex-husband, Peters assumed that Hughes had a will, and that Cary Grant had been named “either a board of director or an administrator” of Howard’s estate. If this is what Hughes had intended, it had not been put on the record anywhere.
The lack of binding information about Hughes’s intentions and the inexhaustible media spotlight given to his life after his death—not to mention the enormous amount of money at stake—combined to draw people out of the woodwork laying claims on the estate.
Three weeks after his death, a package was dropped off at the Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, containing a will signed “Howard R. Hughes.” This will, referred to by lawyers and reporters as “the Mormon will,” divided the estate among a number of universities and organizations (including the Mormon church and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) and several people, including Noah Dietrich, Ella Rice, Jean Peters, and Melvin Dummar, a Mormon who claimed he had given an unrecognizable hitchhiking Hughes a ride through the Nevada desert eight years earlier. This will was declared to be a fake in jury trials in both Las Vegas and Houston.
In August 1976, the Texas judge presiding over the division of Hughes’s estate appointed a lawyer named O. Theodore Dinkins Jr. to represent the interests of Howard’s “unknown heirs.” Multiple pe
ople had come forward claiming to have been Hughes’s secret but lawful next of kin. One, who called herself Alma Cruise Hughes, claimed she had been artificially inseminated with his sperm in 1974 after having married the titan in a hospital. Another, calling herself Alyce Hovespian Gordon Hughes, said she and Hughes had married in 1946 and never divorced. A man and a woman, Donald E. McDonald and Clare Benedict Hudenberg, came forward to claim to be Hughes’s adopted son and illegitimate daughter. All four of these supposed heirs had their claims thrown out by a judge in 1981. By that point, after many years of research, Dinkins had certified that, with Hughes having sired no known children, and with his two known ex-wives prohibited from contesting his estate by their divorce agreements, Hughes’s living heirs included fourteen cousins on his mother’s side, as well as Barbara Lapp Cameron, Agnes Lapp Roberts, and Elspeth Lapp DePould—the three grandchildren of Rupert Hughes. Everyone who had known Howard Hughes was aware that having his estate trickle down through the family tree via his uncle Rupert was not what he would have wanted. But written evidence of what Hughes actually wanted was not available.
There was, however, a wrench in the legal works. While Hughes’s ex-wives of record remained silent, Terry Moore was more than happy to comment. A week after Howard’s death, she publicly declared for the first time that she and Hughes had been married in 1949, on a boat in international waters, and had remained together for eight years. This would have put their breakup in 1957, the year of his marriage to Jean, after Moore had legally and publicly married and divorced Glenn Davis, and after she had married Eugene McGrath. Moore now alleged that Hughes had destroyed the ship’s log that served as the only record of their marriage. She insisted that even though she had married three men after the 1949 wedding (including Hughes’s second previously known wife’s ex-husband), since Terry and Howard never divorced, each of their subsequent marriages were invalid, and technically she was his widow.
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