I Was Howard Hughes by Steven Carter

Author:Steven Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

ODYSSEY

IT TAKES COURAGE to go on an odyssey, and Howard Hughes did it not just once, but several times. However, he doesn’t end up like Ulysses, that most famous of travelers, home again, happy, maybe just a little discomfited by domestic tedium; no, Hughes’s odysseys describe an unfolding tragedy. On the surface his adventures seem just like those of Ulysses: outlandish, improbable, quixotic. The difference between them, though, and it’s an important one, is that all of Hughes’s adventures are true. They actually happened. The suffering is real, and there’s no happy literary ending. In fact, what strains our credulity when we hear these stories about Hughes is that no matter how fantastic they are, we know they actually happened. We must remember, though, that Hughes had a lot of money and very little concern for social convention and this combination gave him the capacity to do whatever he wanted.

In this section, we first see Hughes not long after Billie Dove left him. After a disturbing incident in a barbershop in Beverly Hills, he goes to Fort Worth, takes on a false identity to get a job with American Airlines, and establishes a relationship with a young woman, Janice Trundle. We next see Hughes ten years later, not long after he’s crashed a plane into Lake Mead in Nevada. As soon as the plane is recovered, Hughes takes off in it with two mechanics (Russelli and Tompkins from “A Gift Is A Gift”) on a rambling eighteen-month journey and everywhere he goes he takes along a large box, which I’ll say more about later. In this episode Hughes is really starting to lose touch, the tragedy is accelerating, and this continues when he is under subpoena from the Senate on charges of war racketeering and avoids federal marshals by hiding out and paying someone else to go on his odyssey for him, a man named Brucks Randall, an out-of-work actor who is a dead ringer for Hughes and travels around impersonating him. Hughes gives Randall lists of instructions to carry out that have nothing to do with avoiding the marshals, and these lists (read them as Lear raging on the heath or Hamlet muttering in the palace) reveal Hughes’s belief he is a complete failure. Finally, not long after his marriage to Jean Peters, Hughes holes up in a screening room in Hollywood for five months and endures a terrifying interior odyssey, and two short letters exchanged by Hughes and Peters during this time are enough to show us the once great man now completely fallen, the once great love now completely doomed.

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