Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

Afterword

IN FEBRUARY 1972 Howard Hughes fled Paradise Island in the Bahamas to take up residence on the top floor in yet another hotel, the Intercontinental Managua in Nicaragua. During the four remaining years of his life, he never returned to live in the United States. In December 1972 he moved to England, to London’s Inn on the Park; a year later he was back in the Caribbean in the Xanadu Princess Hotel on Grand Bahama Island; and two years later he flew to Mexico, to a hospital bed in the penthouse of the Acapulco Princess Hotel.

In 1972 Hughes finally relinquished control of Toolco and allowed it to become a public company; he soon sold all his shares. A holding company, Summa Corporation, was created, and all of Hughes’s property except for Hughes Aircraft was placed under its umbrella.

Many witnesses, including a four-man medical team, later testified that by 1973 Hughes had become a hopeless drug addict, and that the chief purpose of his move from the Bahamas to Mexico was to insure a steady supply of codeine for his habit. (One of his doctors said under oath that Hughes’s drug usage had risen to between 25 to 45 grains of codeine and seven to fifteen ten-milligram Valium tablets per day.) In the last year of his life he shrank three inches, a tumor protruded from the side of his head, his teeth were almost destroyed, his arms and thighs were a maze of needle tracks, his prostate was radically enlarged, and he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He was starving.

On April 3, 1976, after a period of delirium, he lapsed into a virtual coma. On April 5 he was flown in a private plane from Acapulco to a hospital in Houston, the city where he had been born. He died before the plane crossed the border.

In 1983 the wooden flying boat – the Hercules, or Spruce Goose: 750 feet long with a wingspan of 330 feet – was moved from its hidden hangar by the City of Long Beach, California, and placed on exhibit in the world’s largest geodesic dome as a tourist attraction. A decade later it was disassembled and moved to McMinnville, Oregon by the Evergreen Aviation Educational Center. There she still sits.

The original H-1 racer is on exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.