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 the same 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 then 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 going 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 together for more than a decade. When she remarried, Hughes bought the houses on 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 rumored to have watched
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 advising caution when allowing so many boys to mix 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
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 semicircle 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.
Ambition, 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 United States today, one in ten adults is registered as 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 hasn’t been kind to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612–72), the last Dutch governor of what we now call New York. Ask an American what they know about him and they will probably tell you he had a wooden leg. The football team at New York’s Stuyvesant High School is still called the Peglegs, and grumpy, stubborn Peg Leg Pete is seen as, at best, a bit-part player in the long drama of the nation, an irrelevant prologue
