Howard Hughes

he dated ginger rogers.

i mean, that's enough for me.

http://www.gingerrogers.com/images/photos/rogg006.jpg

what a button!

Hey, it's more than most.

yes. quite the playboy, and it isn't hard to see why, what with those darling eyes. a troubled soul.

Hands down my favorite crackpot billionaire.

60 Minutes featured the Hughes Medical Institute on an episode a couple months ago and it's worth the time to watch.

His private B-25 (painted in TWA colors) still sits out in the Antelope Valley...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1205/778998720_8137ec81fa.jpg

And his old office at 7000 Romaine in Hollywood.

http://www.quartzcity.net/wp-content/uploads/blogpicts/romaine-hughes.jpg

he dated ginger rogers.

He ended up marrying Jean Peters (they didn't divorce until 1971) and, um, wow! http://www.flickr.com/photos/view-finder/1572639164/

yeah nothing to be ashamed of ;)

And of course:

http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/7409/beardpv6.gif

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/fiction/images/simpsons.jpg

"...Hop in."

F For Fake to thread as well.

And this movie (which was pretty terrific)

http://www.lamarsmoviepalace.com/hoax.jpg

Speaking of Hughes, the hanger where the Spruce Goose was built is up for sale.

I finished the 'Untold story of Howard Hughes' biography...goddamn he chased a lot of women. And a lot of teenage girls. And treated a lot of women realllllllly poorly. Like, it's great that he'll fly them anywhere and wine them and dine them but I'd love a final count of how many women at any one time he kept holed up in various houses and apartments.

And the wilderness years are just really sad to read about; that level of crippling mental illness no matter how weird is just really fuckin sad when you see it laid out. The book pointed out that he had suffered something like 24 concussions/severe head injuries in his life. And he apparently had neurosyphilis. AND on top of all that, the OCD which wasn't really ever diagnosed or treated becuase it wasn't even really understood back then. With all of that going on mentally & physically it's a wonder he didn't commit suicide, or murder any of his million girlfriends.

The thing that really stuns me though is the level of talent & innovation and genius in his aviation life. The fact that he could achieve all of that in the early part of his life and be pretty bugfuck even then, is kind of astounding.

someone needs to start a tumblr of all of his weird memos about kleenex.

new book by Karina Longworth

https://longreads.com/2018/11/13/karina-longworth-on-the-women-caught-in-howard-hughes-hollywood-web-of-gossip/

http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-seduction-howard-hughes-longworth-20181108-story.html

https://aerbook.com/books/Seduction-159091.html

A lot of things were surprising, but if you want to just talk about very specific things, for me the biggest shock was the information about Ida Lupino’s collaboration with the FBI during the blacklist, which is well documented in her FBI file and which goes against certainly her best biographer’s account of her relationship to the black list and her political life in general, and it goes against public statements that she made where she painted herself as a New Deal Democrat. So that was extremely surprising to me, and I just tried to analyze it and contextualize it as much as possible.

And then there were a lot of smaller scale surprises. Like I personally was surprised to find memos from Howard Hughes’ publicist talking about how bad Jane Russell looked the summer after she had an illegal abortion. They’re not talking about the abortion, but they are like, “Why is she sick? Why does she look so bad? Why is she late for rehearsals?” And I know from putting together the other materials that that is when she was recovering from a botched abortion that made her really, really sick. Finding things like details that have never been connected before is always surprising and, to some extent, gratifying....

I’ve always said even in the first conversations I had with my agent and my publisher that what it was really about was the experience of being a woman in Hollywood from the 1920s through the end of the ’50s, which is this period that historians call the classical Hollywood era, and which just so happens to be exactly the period of time that Howard Hughes was active in Hollywood. So you can use him as a way in, as a Trojan horse to this period, and as a way to contain the stories. I could’ve focused on two dozen women very easily, but I had to pare it down to the ones that were the most interesting to me and the ones that I felt like could help me talk about the widest range of things and time periods.

I've been a Karina Longworth skeptic but her book is a really great read (so far). 125 pages in and the female-centric approach to the subject has proved enlightening. It's as much about Hollywood in general as it is about Hughes, which is fine with me since I've already read a regular Hughes bio.

did Hughes ever actually produce a decent movie?

what I know of his film career is mostly tangential/references in other bios (Robert Mitchum's for ex.)

Scarface and I guess Hell's Angels... and Macao is kind of trashy-good iirc. It's admittedly not a good track record plus of course he ran RKO into the ground.

ah yeah Scarface is great

His Kind Of Woman is so much fun.

Lots of famous artifacts from 7000 Romaine coming up for auction:
https://www.liveauctioneers.com/news/auctions/upcoming-auctions/howard-hughes-stars-in-profiles-in-history-auction-july-23/