50 Fun Facts About Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes was born in 1905 in which state?

Texas: orphaned there at 18, he had a judge who had been his father's friend declare him a legal adult, so that he could take over the family tool company without waiting to turn 21.

The Hughes family fortune came from what invention patented by Howard Hughes Sr.?

A roller cutter drill bit: patented in 1909, its toothed cones ground through hard rock that stopped older bits, opening oil fields nobody could reach before, and it came to be used in most oil and gas drilling.

Which school did Hughes drop out of shortly after his father's death in 1924?

Rice University, then the Rice Institute: he left at 18 on inheriting most of the family firm, and the next year married Ella Rice, a great-niece of the school's founder.

Stan Lee said he modelled which Marvel superhero's civilian identity on Howard Hughes?

Iron Man: Stan Lee gave Tony Stark the tycoon's looks, his defence contracts and his playboy reputation, and Marvel later named Stark's inventor father Howard.

Hughes poured a then-enormous budget into which 1930 aviation epic?

Hell's Angels: Hughes took over as director, was badly hurt crashing one of the planes himself, and spent so much that even a box-office hit could not earn the money back.

Which actress replaced Greta Nissen as female lead of Hughes's 1930 air-war epic over Nissen's accent?

Jean Harlow was an inexperienced 18-year-old when Hughes reshot his silent film with sound, which cost the Norwegian-accented Nissen the part, and the newcomer caused a stir in it.

Hughes produced the 1932 gangster film Scarface, whose title character was inspired by whom?

Al Capone: censors thought the film made a hero of him and held it back until Hughes took them to court, and it reached cinemas with a subtitle tacked on, 'The Shame of the Nation'.

Which director made Scarface for Hughes and was later replaced by Hughes himself on The Outlaw?

Howard Hawks saw both films stall at the censors: Scarface was held back until changes were made, and The Outlaw, finished by Hughes, waited years for a nationwide release.

Which actress starred in The Outlaw, and stayed under personal contract to Hughes for years?

Jane Russell had never made a film, and the years of fighting with the censors over how The Outlaw displayed her made her nationally famous before most cinemas were allowed to show it.

What garment did Hughes design for The Outlaw's star because he felt the camera missed her figure?

An underwire bra: he engineered it with curved metal supports, but the star found it so uncomfortable that she secretly discarded it and filmed in her own instead.

Which struggling major studio did Hughes buy control of in 1948?

RKO: he fired hundreds of staff within weeks, and his neglect doomed the studio; by 1957 it had stopped making films and its lot belonged to Lucille Ball's company, Desilu.

After buying out his film studio's other shareholders in 1954, what did Hughes do with it in 1955?

Sold it to a tire company: General Tire bought the studio in 1955, Hughes came away with a profit, and the sale all but ended his career in films.

Which panned epic, filmed downwind of a nuclear test site, did Hughes buy up every print of and reputedly watch nightly?

The Conqueror cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan, and so many of its cast and crew later developed cancer that fallout at the Utah location came to be blamed.

Which company built the twin-engine airliner that Hughes flew around the world in record time in 1938?

Lockheed built the Model 14 he chose, and Hughes left little to chance: he fitted an autopilot and four radios and studied the weather along the whole route before taking off.

In 1935 Hughes flew the H-1, a plane built to his own order, to which world record for landplanes?

Speed: the H-1 was designed to be the fastest landplane in the world, and Hughes, who insisted on test-flying it himself, averaged 352 mph over a measured course in California.

Hughes's H-1, which he flew non-stop across America in 1937, now belongs to which museum?

The Smithsonian: Hughes made the seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Los Angeles to Newark, and the plane stayed with his company for almost forty years before it was donated in 1975.

Hughes's 1938 round-the-world flight took about 91 hours, beating whose 1933 record by almost four days?

Wiley Post had needed nearly eight days flying alone in 1933; Hughes, with four crewmen to share the work, was back in New York in under four and was met with a ticker-tape parade.

Which honor was Hughes voted in 1939, a year after his record flight around the world?

Congressional Gold Medal: the act praised him for 'advancing the science of aviation', which put him in the company of the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh, earlier winners of the same medal.

Which airline did Hughes quietly buy a controlling stake in, starting in 1939?

TWA: he built up 78 percent of the stock and ran the airline for two decades without ever holding a title, until the banks that financed its jets pushed him out of control in 1960.

Hughes is credited as the driving force behind which long-range airliner, ordered for his own airline in 1939?

The Constellation: at his urging the airline asked for a plane that could cross the continent without stopping, and Hughes paid for the first forty out of his own pocket.

Hughes was forced to sell his airline stake, for more than $500 million, after refusing to do what?

Appear in court: rather than testify in an antitrust suit the recluse went into hiding and lost by default, then sold his shares in 1966 and walked away with more than half a billion dollars.

In 1943 Hughes crashed a Sikorsky amphibian he was testing into which Nevada lake, killing two of the men aboard?

Lake Mead: the deaths did not stop Hughes testing his own aircraft, a habit that nearly killed him three years later.

Hughes's near-fatal July 1946 crash of the XF-11 came down in which neighborhood?

Beverly Hills: trying to reach a golf course, the plane tore through three houses and caught fire, and a Marine sergeant who happened to be visiting friends nearby dragged Hughes clear.

Which painkiller, first taken after his 1946 crash, did Hughes depend on for life?

He eventually injected it into his muscles with glass syringes whose metal needles easily detached.

The giant H-4 Hercules flying boat began as a partnership between Hughes and which industrialist?

Henry Kaiser, a shipbuilder, wanted cargo planes that German U-boats could not sink and sold Washington on a whole fleet; he then pulled out, leaving Hughes to finish the single HK-1 alone.

The 'Spruce Goose' was in fact built mostly from which wood?

Birch: wartime rules kept aluminium for combat aircraft, so the hull was moulded from thin layers of birch bonded with resin, and Hughes hated the nickname the press hung on it.

How many times did the H-4 Hercules ever fly?

Once: in 1947 Hughes lifted it off the water for about half a minute during what were billed as taxi tests, then kept it in a climate-controlled hangar, with a crew to maintain it, until he died.

Since leaving Long Beach in 1992, the H-4 Hercules has made its home in which town?

McMinnville, Oregon: after years as a tourist attraction beside the Queen Mary, the flying boat was taken apart and sent north by barge and truck to what is now the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum.

At the 1947 Senate hearings, Hughes accused his chief inquisitor, Senator Owen Brewster, of serving which rival airline?

Pan American: Brewster had sponsored a bill that would have handed that airline a monopoly, and Hughes's charge of collusion helped turn the hearings in his favor.

In 1953 Hughes gave all the stock of Hughes Aircraft to what new body, making its profits tax-exempt?

A medical research institute: critics called it a tax shelter, yet when it sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors in 1985 for about $5 billion it became one of the richest medical charities in the world.

Which actress did Hughes marry in a small hotel in Tonopah, Nevada, in January 1957?

Jean Peters gave up a thriving film career when she married him; the two soon lived apart, and at the divorce she asked for $70,000 a year and waived any claim on his billions.

To keep germs off his hands, Hughes insisted on touching doorknobs and other everyday objects through what?

Paper tissues: he laid them over anything he had to touch, and in time one of the most visible men in America vanished from public view altogether.

Which 1968 film did Hughes reportedly run on a continuous loop in his home?

Ice Station Zebra: with no video recorders yet, he is said to have rung the Las Vegas television station he owned and ordered it broadcast again whenever he wanted to watch it.

On Thanksgiving 1966, Hughes moved into which Las Vegas hotel, which he then bought rather than leave?

Desert Inn: the owners wanted his two floors back for their New Year high rollers, so instead of checking out he bought the hotel, and he did not set foot outside it for four years.

Hughes's casino buying spree in the late 1960s is credited with loosening whose hold on Las Vegas?

Organized crime: he bought casinos from men such as Moe Dalitz, and with a famous industrialist as owner gambling began to look like a respectable business, so hotel corporations followed him in.

Which casino did Hughes reputedly buy just to move its neon sign, visible from his bedroom?

Silver Slipper: the tale of the glowing shoe outside his window is doubted, but the purchase was real, and as the one casino he held in his own name its cash cage paid for his gifts to politicians.

The 1972 salvage ship Glomar Explorer, built under Hughes's cover, was really intended to recover what?

A sunken Soviet submarine: the CIA wanted K-129, lost near Hawaii in 1968, and a ship owned by an eccentric billionaire supposedly mining the seabed for manganese was the perfect cover.

Which author was jailed for fraud after selling a fake 'authorized' Hughes autobiography in 1972?

Clifford Irving forged notes in Hughes's handwriting to fool his publisher, banked a $765,000 advance and bet that the recluse would never come out of hiding to object; he lost the bet.

How did the reclusive Hughes denounce the fake autobiography in January 1972?

By telephone: he spoke to a room of journalists who had known him years before, and they agreed that the voice calling the book a fake was really his.

A $205,000 Hughes loan to which politician's brother caused embarrassment before the 1960 vote?

Richard Nixon lost that election narrowly, and it has long been argued that his fear of what Democrats knew about later Hughes money was one motive for the Watergate break-in.

Hughes's inner circle of aides was nicknamed what, for the faith of many members?

The Mormon Mafia: Hughes neither drank nor smoked and trusted aides whose church forbade both, though some biographers say this inner circle ended up sealing him off from the outside world.

Hughes died in April 1976 aboard a jet flying from Acapulco to which city?

Houston: his aides had found him unconscious in his Acapulco hotel and chartered the jet to get him to a hospital there, but he died in the air; the autopsy found kidney failure.

Hughes was so emaciated at his death that officials confirmed his identity by what?

Fingerprints: more than six feet tall, he weighed little more than 90 pounds, and with his hair, beard and nails grown long he looked nothing like the dashing flier the public remembered.

A will found after Hughes's death left a sixteenth of his fortune to Melvin Dummar, who ran what business?

A gas station: Dummar said that one night in 1967 he had picked up a ragged old man lying beside a Nevada highway, driven him to Las Vegas, and not believed him when he said he was Howard Hughes.

What did a Las Vegas jury decide in 1978 about the handwritten will that named Melvin Dummar?

It was a forgery: no valid will was ever found, so in 1983 the estate of a man with no wife, children or siblings was divided among twenty-two cousins.

Who directed The Aviator, the 2004 Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio?

Martin Scorsese took the film over from Michael Mann, who stayed on as a producer, and it led that year's Oscars with eleven nominations and five wins, though the directing prize was not among them.

Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for playing which of Hughes's romantic partners in The Aviator?

Katharine Hepburn met Hughes through their friend Cary Grant; he wanted to marry her and the papers announced a wedding, but she chose to concentrate on rescuing her film career instead.

Which billionaire character in the 2007 video game BioShock is loosely based on Hughes?

Andrew Ryan: the game's creator, Ken Levine, built him from Hughes and the novelist Ayn Rand, then gave him an underwater city, Rapture, in which to escape governments and churches.

Warren Beatty wrote, directed and played Hughes in which 2016 film?

Rules Don't Apply ended a forty-year wait: Beatty had wanted to play Hughes ever since glimpsing him in a hotel lobby, yet his first film as director since Bulworth failed at the box office.

Rupert Hughes, the uncle who gave the teenage Howard his first look at Hollywood, earned his living there as what?

A screenwriter: Rupert, also a popular novelist, wrote for Samuel Goldwyn's studio, but uncle and nephew fell out when the young heir had his lawyers buy the relatives out of the family firm.