Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (6 page)

Hughes's mother likely felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of keeping her child safe in such a seemingly dangerous world. The enemy was everywhere and yet invisible, lurking in a cough or a handshake. Polio was on the loose, too, striking healthy people in
towns and cities across the country during the summer months. Tens of thousands were affected—some paralyzed, others killed. Public health campaigns attempted to raise awareness, but no doubt instilled fear in people already primed with worry. One polio pamphlet underscored the importance of washing and decontaminating: “Keep your children clean. Bathe them frequently. See that they keep their hands particularly clean. Be sure that each child has [his] own clean handkerchief. Keep your house unusually clean. Don't allow a fly in it.”

Hughes suffered numerous bouts of routine childhood illnesses, but his mother, especially, fixated on every symptom, no matter how minor. In 1919, he gave his parents a terrible scare when he was suddenly unable to walk. Fearing that Howard had been stricken with polio, Hughes Sr. flew an expert from New York's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research to the family's home in Texas to try to cure his 13-year-old son. The doctor, however, could find no evidence of the dreaded virus—and despite being confined to a wheelchair for several months, young Howard fully recovered. To this day, it's unclear what went wrong, leading some to wonder if the boy was feigning his illness. Whatever caused his symptoms, the episode only reinforced Allene Hughes's excessive worries about her son's health—a pattern of fear that would reverberate throughout Howard Hughes's life.

D
ESPITE HIS QUIET CONDUCT AND
social unease, Howard Hughes was filled with ambition, grit, even rebelliousness. These qualities emerged after both his parents died suddenly, when he was still a teenager. In 1922, his mother entered the hospital for what was considered minor uterine surgery. She was supposed to return
home that same day, but never regained consciousness after undergoing anesthesia. She died at the age of 39. Just two years later, Howard Sr., outwardly spry and healthy at 54, slumped to the floor in the middle of a business meeting, the victim of a lethal heart attack.

The loss of his mother and father affected Hughes profoundly. Already primed with fears about illness, he was now fated to worry that he, too, might meet an early demise. Raymond Fowler, a psychologist who was commissioned to write a psychological autopsy after Howard Hughes's death in 1976, spent years reviewing Hughes's personal records and interviewing people who knew him. In his account, Fowler described Hughes becoming depressed and preoccupied by his health after his parents' deaths. The “loss of the only two people with whom he had a close relationship,” Fowler wrote, “deepened his fears of death and increased his vulnerability to later disorders.”

Hughes was, however, able to harness whatever emotional fortitude he had and set out to claim his independence when he was just 18 years old. Barely an adult, he rebuffed attempts by his grandparents and Rupert Hughes, his father's brother, to provide him a guardian, turning instead to the inheritance he received from his father's estate. The money was mostly bankrolled in shares of the Hughes Tool Company, the successful business Howard Hughes Sr. had founded to manufacture a revolutionary oil well drilling bit that could grind through hard rock. Young Howard had no interest in running the business's day-to-day affairs but was happy to reap its financial benefits. Not long after his father died, Hughes dropped out of Rice University and married Ella Rice (her great uncle had founded the original Rice Institute). A Houston socialite two years his senior, she wed Howard in the early summer of 1925.

Within just a few months, the young couple had packed up their belongings and moved to Hollywood, where Hughes set his sights on the competitive world of moviemaking. Though inexperienced in cinema, he had mingled with Hollywood producers and actors at the home of his uncle Rupert, who had become a successful scriptwriter. And Hughes had two other advantages: family money and bullish determination. In just a few years, he would make his first big box-office hit,
Two Arabian Knights
, a comedy featuring the zany adventures of a pair of American soldiers on the lam from a World War I POW camp.

Hughes's achievements in Hollywood surpassed the expectations of skeptics, who initially viewed him as nothing more than an amateur with wads of money. In 1929, the inaugural year of the Academy Awards,
Two Arabian Knights
won an Oscar for directing, and a second film Hughes produced,
The Racket
, was nominated for outstanding picture. His successes propelled Hughes to celebrity status. But he also overworked himself, spending endless hours on sets or in editing rooms, and straining his marriage.

Around this time, in his early 20s, Hughes's disconcerting behaviors began to emerge. Obsessive-compulsive disorder often strikes in adolescence or early adulthood, when life is in flux. For Hughes, one of the condition's earliest manifestations was fear of germs, a phobia he shared with his mother. He “gargled often and avoided people with colds,” Fowler wrote in his analysis. “One time, when he found out that an actress with whom he had been having an affair had been exposed to venereal disease, he stuffed all of his clothes in canvas bags and ordered them burned.”

Anxiety and stress are triggers for OCD, and Hughes was bedeviled by both, especially during filming and production of his epic World War I movie,
Hell's Angels
. Shooting began in October 1927, just after
Two Arabian Knights
debuted, and continued
almost incessantly for more than three years as Hughes fixated on every detail, editing and reediting film at all hours. Hughes's demands went beyond those of even the most difficult Hollywood taskmasters. OCD is characterized by perfectionism and an overwhelming need to control one's environment—qualities that defined the way Hughes operated. He insisted on using authentic fighter planes rather than replicas, requiring a ground crew of more than 100 mechanics. He demanded that scenes be filmed repeatedly to get a portrayal he deemed powerful and realistic. At one point, he wanted a more imposing backdrop for a sequence that involved dozens of warring aircraft diving through the sky. The clear blue vistas of Southern California were too flat—he needed puffy white stuff—but nature refused to cooperate, so Hughes moved his filming operation north to Oakland, where he found the clouds he was looking for.

The film racked up costs of almost $4 million (about $54 million in today's dollars), an extravagance that shocked even Hollywood, and wore out the people who worked for him. His wife, fed up with his relentless schedule, packed up and moved back to Texas in the midst of filming. (They were divorced in 1929.) But Hughes carried on, with tireless intensity. He was unbendable, even when his vision was reckless. Advised to abandon his plan to have one of the planes spin down to earth, Hughes ordered it done anyway, killing one of his mechanics in a fiery crash.

Despite these tribulations,
Hell's Angels
made Hughes a big man in Hollywood and fueled his passion for aviation as both hobby and business. Two years before Hughes was born, the Wright brothers had succeeded in flying the first powered plane for 59 seconds; by the time he was five, they were manufacturing airplanes and training pilots. Flying saturated Hughes's childhood, and he wanted in on all of it as he grew up—the new machines,
the soaring heights, the adventure. An accomplished pilot, Hughes liked to take his small planes out at night off the California coastline before returning to the busy lights of Los Angeles in the dark. Being high in the air offered him solitude and a kind of mastery over his surroundings that was unattainable anywhere else. In his account, Fowler suggested that flying may have alleviated Hughes's anxiety: “For Hughes, the landings were a reassuringly familiar activity that helped him avoid social stresses while allowing him to control at least some part of his environment.”

Flying was an escape from what Hughes liked least about the world below: the clamor of celebrities and the never ending film extravaganzas and soirees. He was a “different man in the air,” Barlett and Steele note in their biography. “No longer the shy, tense, highly nervous man people saw on the ground, aloft he was at ease behind a dizzying array of toggle switches and gauges, integrated with the sound of the engine, the feel of the controls, the magnificent view of the earth.”

Hughes loved airplanes, and he was determined to make them better and faster—fast enough, even, to set new flying records. In 1932, he formed the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division he created out of his father's tool company, and soon after built the Hughes H-1, a racing jet. Taking the controls himself, Hughes took the plane up over a flat expanse of land in Southern California and gunned it to 352 miles an hour, setting a new speed record before running out of gas and crash-landing in a beet field. In 1938, he set his sights even higher, aiming to beat his competitors at circling the globe. In his twin-engine passenger plane, Hughes and his crew made it from New York to Paris in just 16.5 hours, slashing Lindbergh's transatlantic record by half. The entire trip, full circle, took 91 hours, setting a new world record. As he approached New York City, “twenty-five thousand cheering, hysterical people were
there to greet him,” according to Barlett and Steele. A ticker-tape parade followed the next day, with more than one million fans lining the sidewalks to see Hughes, the aviator, in person.

None of these achievements, however, could undo the growing turmoil in Hughes's mind, which would snowball when he became tangled up in a fiasco over an infamous flying boat. In 1942, during World War II, Hughes received a government contract to build the largest aircraft ever designed to transport military supplies and personnel. The H-4 Hercules, as he named it, was to be constructed out of wood with a wingspan bigger than a football field and a weight of about 200 tons. It was an intoxicating proposition for Hughes, but it was also impossibly ambitious. The government didn't help when it proposed a formidable challenge: Build it in ten months.

Given the scope of the project, Hughes sensed that it would be unworkable from the start, but he agreed to it anyway, amping up his stress. “The more he thought about potential problems, the more he worried and the less he slept,” write Barlett and Steele in their biography. Within the first year, Hughes had missed numerous deadlines and burned through much of the $9.8 million the government allocated for the project. But he was obsessed with getting it done. Told that the contract was being canceled in the winter of 1944, he flew to Washington and worked tirelessly to convince the higher-ups to grant him a temporary reprieve. But the “Spruce Goose,” as critics derisively called it, was doomed. By the time Hughes finished building it, the war was over.

The Hercules project left Hughes strung out and exhausted. By then, his preoccupation with germs and the precautions he took to avoid them had “gone beyond what most people regard as normal,” according to Fowler. And a new symptom had emerged: Hughes began repeating instructions to the people who worked for him,
either in person or in copious memoranda he dictated. In a memo about communication, he wrote, “a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable” and “think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits.”

Repetition is a core feature of OCD. It often plays out in the fixations people develop, but it can surface in speech as well, as it did with Hughes. There are a variety of reasons for both manifestations. In some cases, it's a struggle with perfectionism; an action or word has to be repeated over and over again until it feels just right. In other instances, it's an effort to neutralize bad thoughts (“I've offended God”) or fears about terrible things that might happen (“My brother is going to crash his car”). The hallmark of OCD, which is believed to affect up to 3 percent of the population, is the pairing of recurrent obsessions, which are intrusive thoughts, feelings, and images (“I forgot to turn off the stove” or “Germs are everywhere”), and compulsions, which are purposeful attempts to protect, escape, or reduce discomfort (checking and rechecking the stove or repeatedly washing one's hands).

Checking and washing are the most common and well-known manifestations of OCD, but symptoms can vary widely. Some people feel the need to organize books, papers, or clothing in a particular order; others are obsessed with counting or odd routines, like touching a doorpost a specific number of times before entering a room. In one of its most challenging forms, OCD can grip people with fears about causing grave harm to other people, like sexually abusing a child or even killing a spouse. Without knowing for sure that something bad is
not
going to happen, people with OCD devise irrational methods to keep everything under
control. “One common theme that connects them all is intolerance of uncertainty,” says Jason Elias, an OCD specialist at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.