Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness

Slowly gathering speed in the face of a blustery wind, the Hercules sliced through the water, then dramatically lifted off. Cruising at seventy feet above the water, the big ship flew for about a mile before Hughes set it down, gently and without incident. The unexpected liftoff caught everyone ashore by surprise. A gasp and then a cheer went up from the thousands lining the harbor. Small pleasure boats, gathered to watch the tests, tooted their horns. In the cockpit, Hughes was like a “little kid,” recalled Joe Petrali, one of his crewmen. “He was grinning, and talking a lot, almost jumping up and down in his elation.”

As he grew stronger, Hughes worried that the accident might have made him apprehensive about flying. He need not have. On September 9, photographers snapped pictures of Hughes, sporting a moustache to cover scars on his upper lip, at the controls of his converted B-23 bomber before ascending on his first flight since the crash. For the next few months, to dispel any notion of fear, he flew everywhere—to New York, Kansas City, Dayton, and Mexico, for a much-needed vacation with Cary Grant. Hughes not only had recovered, but had also miraculously suffered no permanent disability. Two fingers on his left hand—the hand that had been burned so badly—did not move as freely as before. Other than that, he complained of no aches, pains, or discomfort. To the world it seemed that Howard Hughes had once again been very lucky.

“He knew how to get answers,” recalled Robert W. Rummel, an engineer who worked on the H-1 and later worked closely with Hughes at TWA. “He had a habit which I did not really discover until years later. He would call me up and talk about something like wing efficiency. He would want to know my opinion. I’d tell him. Then he would often call back later and say what about this or that, referring to our earlier conversation. Years later I learned he was doing the same thing with five or six guys.”6 By picking brains, Hughes narrowed his options, arrived at the right decision time after time, and wrote aviation history with the H-1. For eighteen months, the work progressed as the plane was assembled, taken apart, then reassembled.

Abounding in nervous energy, he flitted from one hotbed of mining activity to the next—low-grade silver mining in the Colorado mountains, zinc mining in the wilds of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and lead mining in rural southwestern Missouri—seeking his fortune “under the surface of the earth.”14 He did not find it, but his wanderings were not a loss. “If I accomplished nothing more,” he wrote later, “I at least learned something of the art of drilling wells with cable tools.”15 It was a knowledge he would put to fabulous use.