inally, in 1930, with nearly four million dollars spent—making Hell’s Angels the most expensive film up to that time—the movie reached the theaters. It did well but took years to cover Hughes’s expenses. Neither this nor the divorce settlement nor the Depression bothered Hughes much, for the Hughes Tool Company, which he owned outright, was still gushing money. His next success, Scarface (1932), starred Paul Muni in the role of a thinly disguised Al Capone. When a New York State censorship board refused its approval, Hughes shocked the film industry by suing the board. He eventually forced it to back down. By then Hughes had produced about a dozen movies, including the original (1931) film version of The Front Page.

      Then, with Hollywood at his feet, he shifted careers and took a major plunge into aviation. He started in 1932 by working as a co-pilot for American Airways, a job that included such tasks as handling passengers’ baggage. He used an assumed name, and people sometimes remarked on how much he looked like Howard Hughes. Then, dropping his secret identity, he obtained an Air Corps fighter plane and won an air race with it in Miami early in 1934. This success fired his ambitions anew. He had made the world’s best aviation film; now he would build the world’s best airplane.

      He held no engineering degree, and he lacked experience at the drawing board or on the shop floor. But he could hire people who had this background, and he knew enough to respond intelligently to the best technical suggestions. While the Depression had put many good plane builders on short rations, Hughes had money to burn. He pulled together a picked group of designers, engineers, and mechanics that he called the Hughes Aircraft Company. His plane, which became known as the H-1, skillfully synthesized such existing ideas, introducing fully retractable landing gear and rivets set flush with the fuselage to reduce drag. Hughes flew the H-1 to a world speed record of 352 miles per hour in September 1935.

       He then rebuilt it to carry enough gasoline for a cross-country flight. In January 1937 he flew from Los Angeles to Newark in seven and a half hours, setting a record that would hold up for seven years until Hughes himself broke it. This feat won him the Harmon Trophy, awarded to the world’s best aviator. He also met with President Roosevelt at the White House. But when he tried to pitch his designs to the Army Air Corps, he found no interest. The plane was speedy enough but lacked features that would have made it suitable for combat.

        By now even the United States was too small to contain Hughes’s vaulting ambitions. He bought a two-engine plane from Lockheed and flew it around the world in less than four days. This accomplishment, in mid-1938, won him a congressional medal, the Collier Trophy for progress in aviation, and a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City.

        Hughes had reached pinnacles of success in two vastly different enterprises. Daring and bold as he was, though, he was also painfully shy. Collier’s magazine described him as “self-conscious with strangers and reticent with intimates.” He felt out of place at parties: “When standing he inclines his head out and down and looks at the ground. Seated, he clasps his hands between his wide-spread knees and stares at his knuckles.”

       He also had a strong phobia about germs, which had drawn encouragement from his mother’s robust emphasis on cleanliness. When he learned in the mid-1930s that he had caught syphilis, Hughes stuffed the whole of his wardrobe and bed linens into padlocked canvas bags and ordered them burned. He then scrubbed his home from top to bottom with strong lye soap.

       In time his shyness would ripen into reclusiveness, and his obsession with germs would broaden into utterly debilitating mental illness. But that all lay in the future. In the late 1930s, and for many years thereafter, what counted was his keen mind. Robert Rummel, who became his senior technical manager, recalls Hughes’s “consummate, unquenchable interest in airplane design. His questions concerning broad design concepts as well as details were crisp, comprehensive, and usually exasperatingly detailed. He wanted to know everything.”

         Hughes made another bold move in 1939 when he purchased control of a major airline, TWA (Transcontinental and Western Air, later changed to Trans World Airways). Its president, Jack Frye, was in deep trouble over plans for a new aircraft, the Boeing Stratoliner. Frye wanted to place an order for these planes, but the nation’s economy was in a slump, and TWA had been losing money. Its chairman, John Hertz of Lehman Brothers, had refused to release the funds for this purchase.

        To raise cash, Frye offered to sell some of TWA’s air routes to Hughes to be leased back to TWA. Characteristically, Hughes upped the ante, saying, “Why don’t we buy TWA?” He purchased 12 percent of the airline’s stock, giving him an interest as large as that of Hertz and Lehman. Now, with Hughes’s support, Frye took charge and challenged Hertz to a proxy fight—a shareholder’s election to decide if Hertz should remain chairman. Hertz, having no wish to pursue the matter, caved in. Hughes then bought more stock and told Frye to go ahead with the Stratoliner.

       The Stratoliner was an early effort in the new field of four-engine airliners. Douglas Aircraft, the nation’s leading builder of commercial airplanes, was preparing its own entry, the DC-4, and was winning interest from United and American Airlines. Yet it offered a very unspectacular design. Its cruising speed, 200 mph, would merely match that of the Stratoliner. Its cabin would be unpressurized, limiting it to low and stormy altitudes that made passengers airsick.

       Hughes expected to go much further. In 1939 he and Frye developed a concept for a four-engine airliner that would be advanced indeed. Hughes would gladly have used his own plane builders, but now that he controlled TWA, federal law prohibited him from building equipment for his own airline. He had purchased his world-circling plane from Lockheed, and now Frye approached that firm. The airplane that emerged was the Lockheed Constellation.

       The key to its success lay in pressurizing the fuselage—sealing it so it could hold a comfortable internal pressure. The plane could then cruise at 20,000 feet, far above the turbulent weather. The rarefied air at that altitude would also substantially reduce drag. Yet the engines would still put out full power, for they would mount superchargers—compressors to provide them with all the air they needed. The plane could cruise at an impressive 275 mph, while its top speed of 340 mph would exceed that of contemporary fighter aircraft.

       Two years after the Constellation’s design was decided, America went to war. The Army drafted the Constellation and the DC-4 into wartime service and quickly expressed a strong preference for the DC-4, which was farther along in development. It entered military use as the C-54 transport plane. The Constellation also enlisted for the duration, as the C-69. In April 1944 Lockheed arranged for a test flight, ostensibly to deliver its prototype to the Army. But Hughes, a consummate showman, stage-managed the event to suit his purposes. Having painted the plane in the vivid red of TWA, he and Frye flew it from Los Angeles to Washington in less than seven hours.

       For Donald Douglas, builder of the DC-4, this flight presented a twofold challenge. It showed that the commercial Constellation could fly nonstop from coast to coast, something no other airliner could do. And the flight time stood a half-hour under that of Hughes’s 1937 transcontinental speed record. Douglas responded by reinventing the DC-4. New and more powerful engines would boost its cruising speed above 300 mph, topping the Constellation. These engines would also stretch the range. A pressurized cabin now was a necessity, and the cabin would also grow in length to accommodate more seats. The new plane was the DC-6.

       The stage was set for one of the great rivalries in aeronautics. Douglas and Lockheed both had superb designs that could take advantage of continuing increases in the power of engines. During the subsequent decade each firm repeatedly introduced new and more capable models. Their competition defined the progress of airliners until the advent of jetliners.

       Meanwhile, Hughes returned to Hollywood. He had made no movies since 1932, but in February 1943 he outraged the censors anew with The Outlaw, a tale of Billy the Kid. He introduced the buxom Jane Russell as Doc Holliday’s girlfriend Rio. The film had been shot in 1940 and 1941 and featured what an obituary of Hughes called “greater exposure of Miss Russell than was customary.” As he had done with Scarface, Hughes milked the ensuing censorship controversy for the maximum possible publicity. A toned-down version was released in 1946.

      He also sought greater prominence for Hughes Aircraft, working during the war to build new facilities and shoulder part of the national effort. At the outset he decided that the aircraft of the future would be built of plywood, not aluminum. As problems cropped up with aluminum construction, Hughes and others looked back to the proven technology of the 1920s. He pinned his hope on a newly patented process that bonded thin sheets of plywood to a wooden frame. He used this process as the basis for the design of a fast twin-engine bomber, the D-2, which he pitched to the War Department. Its officials showed no interest, for they strongly preferred aluminum. Indeed, they dismissed Hughes Aircraft out of hand.

     An internal War Department memo, written in early 1943, concluded “that the plane is a hobby of the management and that the present project now being engineered is a waste of time.” Though harsh, this assessment was close to the mark. Howard Hughes wanted to build new aircraft and contribute to the war effort, but he wanted to do it his own way. While Hughes Aircraft was more than a hobby, it was definitely an extension of its founder’s ego. (Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft did make important contributions by building components of planes.)

ughes found a new opportunity in a partnership with the shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser had introduced assembly-line methods to achieve amazingly rapid production of the Liberty ship, a standard cargo freighter. Nevertheless, German submarines took a heavy toll on Allied shipping during 1942. Kaiser, as ebullient as Hughes, responded by proposing to build a vast fleet of flying boats, enormous aircraft that would cruise high above the danger.

      The view was far less sanguine in Washington, where federal officials were ready to ignore their plans outright. Political considerations intervened, for Kaiser had a solid record of success in shipbuilding, while Hughes carried the glamour and hope of aviation. Supporters claimed that their plan could win the war. Buoyed by popular enthusiasm, which drew again on Hughes’s skill at public relations, the partners won an $18 million contract to build three flying freighters.

       The design called for an airplane with a wingspan of 320 feet, a record that stands to this day. Its weight of 200 tons made it nearly three times as heavy as any other aircraft in existence. Hughes Aircraft had no background with flying boats of any size, but Howard Hughes nevertheless proposed not just to build this behemoth but to draw on his experience with the D-2 by crafting it of wood. As a result, it became known as the Spruce Goose, even though most of the wood in it was plastic-impregnated birch.

        Time passed and the Goose refused to hatch. Hughes spent much of the allotted funds with little to show for it, and the government responded by moving to cancel his contract. In February 1944 Hughes hurried to Washington, lobbied furiously, and won the right to build a single prototype. At war’s end it was still far from finished, but in November 1947 the leviathan was finally ready for testing. With Hughes at the controls and plenty of newsmen in attendance, it skimmed across Long Beach Harbor. Hughes lifted it into the air, reached an altitude of 70 feet, and flew for less than a mile before setting it back down. The Goose never flew again, but for the rest of his life Hughes kept it in a hangar, where he cherished it as the largest of his many trophies.

       The D-2 went through a similar cycle of hype followed by disappointment. Hughes modified its design, changed its construction from wood to aluminum, and won a contract to build a hundred copies in a photoreconnaissance version, the XF-11. Again the war ended before production could begin; again the War Department canceled his contract and left him with no more than a handful of prototypes. Then in July 1946, when Hughes once more indulged the urge to be his own test pilot, his XF-11 crashed and nearly killed him.

       He had now built four airplanes—the H-1, D-2, XF-11, and Spruce Goose—with none of them reaching production, even during the wartime aviation boom. His Constellation was on its way to a brilliant success, but he had left that in the hands of the experienced professionals at Lockheed. If Hughes Aircraft was ever to amount to anything in its own right, he would have to build it up on merit in the face of a severe contraction in the aviation market.

      Despite his eccentric ways, Hughes had an inner solidity, an ability to attract good people and to pursue good ideas. After the war he drew on this native talent to steer Hughes Aircraft into another new area, military electronics. This decision reflected his keen eye for promising directions in technology. Air Force Gen. Elwood Quesada, who later headed the Federal Aviation Administration, said that Hughes was the first corporate head to realize that military aircraft would need lots more than the pilot. During the war a number of scientists and engineers had worked on radar, fire control (the aiming and firing of a plane’s weapons by electronic means), and automated systems for the military.

      They now faced a postwar world where they might have to work in the civilian market, building television and hi-fi equipment. In the postwar aviation slump, as in the Depression, Hughes found talented people easy to hire. He was famous, rich, and smart, and he was giving them a chance to continue pursuing their wartime interests. With Pentagon support dropping rapidly, few firms cared to compete with him.