Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

Preface

SINCE 1957, AS is well known, I haven’t granted an interview or had a photograph taken. It may seem as if I’ve gone overboard in a negative way, but a long time ago I decided I’m not here on earth to satisfy the vulgar curiosity of the mob.

The fact that I shunned publicity had a backlash. Just because I was the richest man in the world and wouldn’t give interviews and didn’t want to be a public figure, that made me a public figure. Every newspaper and magazine in this country has a reporter whose sole job is to snoop into my private life and the doings of my companies. If I’d courted publicity, after a while they would have said, ‘Watch out, here comes old moneybags again, looking for free newspaper space.’ I just wasn’t tricky enough.

But now, because I’m nearing the end of my life, I want to set the record straight.

There’s an old American Indian torture. They’d pull out a little piece of your intestines and nail it to a tree, still attached to you, and then shove hot brands at you, burning brands, to make you run around that tree and pull out your own guts – leave a trail of your own guts unwinding behind you. The tradition’s still carried on in this country by politicians, big business, and the news media, in less obviously bloody ways.

They tried to put me in an asylum. They wrote outright lies about me; I don’t mean distortions, I mean outright lies. The portrayal of me as an aging lunatic – I won’t have it. I want the balance restored. I don’t want future generations to remember Howard Hughes only as an obscenely rich and weird man. There’s more to me than that.

Nevertheless, I intend to be dead honest, because a great deal of what I did I kept well hidden. This is the truth about my life, warts and all. This book will be my epitaph, the only one I’ll ever have.