July 7, 1946: The Crash That Ruined Howard Hughes

July 7, 1946: Howard Hughes crashes his Hughes XF-11 airplane. The plane is destroyed. So were four houses. Hughes himself was never the same.

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was born on a Christmas Eve, December 24, 1905, in Houston, Texas. His father was an inventor, and the owner of a tool company. On his mother's side, he was a distant cousin of airplane inventors Orville and Wilbur Wright.

As a boy, he showed an affinity for technology, and built Houston's 1st "wireless" radio transmitter when he was only 11 years old. He soon became one of the earliest "ham radio" operators in the city. At 12, he had taken parts from a steam engine his father had built, and given himself a "motorized bicycle." At 14, he took his 1st flying lesson.

His parents both died before he turned 20, and, inheriting 75 percent of the family fortune, he established a medical research laboratory in their memories. It is now known as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and operates in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland.

In 1925, he dropped out of Houston's Rice University, and married Ella Botts Rice, a member of the university's founding family. They moved into the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles -- where Robert Kennedy would be assassinated in 1968 -- and he went into the film production business.

He found success with the films Two Arabian Knights (1927), The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930, a film about pilots), The Front Page (1931), and the original version of Scarface (1932). While some producers, directors and actors were fazed by the switch from silent films to "talking pictures," Hughes, as ever, reveled in a new technology.

The film with which Hughes is most identified, however, came a few years later: The Outlaw, made in 1943 but not released until 1946, loosely based on the story of Wild West figure William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. All anybody remembers is Jane Russell, whose clothes were considered too tight for the puritanical Hays Code. Hughes' solution spoke to both his love of technology and his love of women: He designed a better bra for her.

Ella divorced him in 1929, freeing him to date anybody in Hollywood he could get his hands on. Russell and Gene Tierney both turned him down. While Jean Harlow was his date to the premiere of Hell's Angels, their relationship went no further than that. But among the women who said yes to him were both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

(Hughes was not the source of their famous feud. Actor Franchot Tone was: Davis starred with him in Dangerous, and she fell in love with him, but he married Crawford.)

He also dated Olivia de Havilland, possibly due to her family's involvement in the British aviation industry. And he dated Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian bombshell who was as brilliant as he was, developing a patent for an early radar system. Tierney was quoted as saying, "I don't think Howard could love anything that did not have a motor in it." Nevertheless, he also dated Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Debra Paget, Yvonne De Carlo, Gloria Vanderbilt and Mamie Van Doren.

On July 14, 1938, Hughes took off from New York City in a Lockheed 14 Super Electra, with Harry Connor, a co-pilot; Thomas Thurlow, a navigator; Richard Stoddart, an engineer; and Ed Lund, a mechanic. He wanted to show that long-distance air travel was not only possible, but safe.

He landed, and refueled, in Paris; in the Soviet cities of Moscow, Omsk and Yakutsk; in Fairbanks, Alaska; and Minneapolis, before returning to New York. He completed this around-the-world flight in 3 days, 19 hours and 17 minutes, cutting the existing record, set by Wiley Post in 1933, in half. For this achievement, New York City gave him a ticker-tape parade up Broadway.

Through his Hughes Aircraft Corporation, he continued to design planes for the U.S. government, proving valuable during World War II. Even after the war, he kept at it. But this proved to be harmful to him in the long run.

On July 7, 1946 -- the day after future President George W. Bush, future actor Sylvester Stallone, and future football player-turned-actor Fred Dryer were born -- Hughes himself piloted a plane of his own design, the XF-11, taking off from his company's airfield outside Los Angeles, in Culver City, California at 5:25 PM Pacific Time (8:25 Eastern). Immediately, he violated U.S. Army Air Force protocol: He retracted the landing gear -- and it didn't retract properly.

Only 2 XF-11s were ever built.

This is the 2nd plane's 1st flight.

It was the plane's maiden flight, and it was supposed to last 45 minutes. Hughes flew the plane in circles over Culver City for an hour and 15 minutes, until an engine gave out. He aimed the plane at the closest thing he could find to a flat piece of ground where there was unlikely to be any people: The Los Angeles Country Club.

He didn't make it. He clipped houses on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, before his plane burst into flames as it sliced through 808 and 810 Whittier Drive, and crashing onto the lawn of 810 Whittier, at 6:47 PM. Despite extensive injuries, he managed to get out of the plane, and was dragged to safety by 2 military men: Marine Master Sergeant William L. Durkin and Army Captain James Guston, one of the residents at 810 Whittier, before the plane blew up completely.

The crash site is literally around the corner from 810 North Linden Drive, where Mob figure Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel would get rubbed out nearly a year later; and both are half a mile south of Maltz Park, where Sunset Boulevard makes what became known as "Dead Man's Curve," made famous in a 1964 drag-racing song by rock duo Jan & Dean -- and, for Jan Berry, art would imitate life, and he would nearly die in a crash there 2 years after that.

Hughes was 40 years old, and had already lived the lives of several men. He was taken to the Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital, and given a 50-50 chance to live. He had a crushed collarbone, several cracked ribs, a collapsed left lung, and several 3rd-degree burns.

He did survive, and even piloted the 2nd XF-11 that was built on its maiden flight, the following year. Also in 1947, he built, and piloted on its one and only flight, the largest airplane ever built to that point, the Hughes H-4, known as the Spruce Goose. He bought RKO Pictures, and consolidated several smaller airlines into the larger Trans World Airlines (TWA). So his business acumen seemed unaffected.

But Hughes was left with permanent injuries. He grew a mustache to hide a scar on his lip. He had developed an addiction to painkillers, and sustained a concussion and brain damage. He developed obsessive-compulsive disorder, and became a germophobe. And yet, the few people who saw him in his last few years maintained that he would frequently go for weeks without bathing, shaving, or getting his hair or fingernails cut.

As far as can be authenticated,

this is the last known photo of Hughes.

The year was 1961. He was 55 years old.

He looks a lot older than that.

On Thanksgiving Day 1966, he moved into the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Apparently, he got disruptive, and the owners tried to kick him out. So he bought them out. He made the 9th floor penthouse his personal residence, and the 8th floor his business headquarters. He bought a hotel across the street, simply to have the legal right to dismantle a neon sign that shone into his bedroom and disturbed him. (That's not crazy: If I had the money to eliminate something that was upsetting me, without hurting anybody, I would. It's not like he dismantled the hotel and put people out of work. In fact, there was an episode of Seinfeld with echoes of this story.)

In 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters. But she divorced him in 1971. He is not known to have had any children. And so, when he died on April 5, 1976, at 70 -- he was so unkempt that fingerprints had to be used to conclusively identify the body -- his estate, worth $2.5 billion (about $12.8 billion in 2022 money), was divided among 22 cousins, with one William Lummis receiving $625 million to endow the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Each of his ex-wives received $156 million, and $470 million was divided among some of his corporate executives.

Actress Terry Moore, who married 5 times, the 1st time to football star Glenn Davis, claimed to have married Hughes in 1949, separating from him in 1956, but never divorcing him -- which, if true, would have made both of them bigamists. She contested the will on the basis of that marriage, but no available documentation could prove her claim. She settled with the Hughes estate, receiving $350,000.

The characters of Jonas Cord (played by George Peppard) in the 1964 film The Carpetbaggers, Willard Whyte in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, a reclusive millionaire played by John Astin on a 1973 episode of The Partridge Family, and Mr. Bigweld (voiced by Mel Brooks) in the 2005 animated film Robots, were based on Hughes. He was a friend of the Bond films' co-producer, Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, so not only did Hughes not object to the homage to him in Diamonds Are Forever, he actually allowed filming in the Landmark Hotel, which he owned.

A 1985 episode of the ABC sitcom Benson featured the title character (Robert Guillaume), by this point a State's Lieutenant Governor, inheriting the assets of Hugh Howard, a pastiche of Howard Hughes and Hugh Hefner (who was still alive at that point), including his Playboy-like magazine and private club, which becomes embarrassing for him, Governor Gene Gatling (James Noble), and the Governor's staff.

At one point, Benson tells the Governor that the details of the will state that he can't give the assets away unless he dies. The Governor, not quite understanding, says, "That could take months!" His problem was solved when, in a mirror of the Terry Moore case, Hughes' business manager/mistress sued him. Legally, Benson couldn't give her the assets by settling, so he had to tank the court case.

Hughes has been played by Tommy Lee Jones in the 1977 CBS TV-movie The Amazing Howard Hughes, Jason Robards in the 1980 film Melvin and Howard, Dean Stockwell in the 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Terry O'Quinn in the 1991 superhero film The Rocketeer, Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2004 film The Aviator (which spectacularly staged the '46 crash, and won 5 Academy Awards, as many as all of the films that Hughes ever produced, combined), and Warren Beatty in the 2016 film Rules Don't Apply.

The superheroes Bruce Wayne, DC Comics' Batman, and Tony Stark, Marvel Comics' Iron Man (as the character's co-creator, Marvel boss Stan Lee, admitted), were both based in part on Hughes, to the point where, when Stark's backstory was fleshed out, his father was named Howard. That character was played as a young man by Dominic Cooper in the film Captain America: The First Avenger and the TV show Agent Carter; and as an older man by John Slattery in the Marvel Cinematic Universe scenes taking place from 1970 to 1991.

Howard Hughes was a scientist, a filmmaker, a pilot, a business lord, and a nut. He was, to borrow the words of an old song, "Something appealing, something appalling."

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July 7, 1946 was a Sunday. As was often the case in that era, baseball teams frequently played doubleheaders on Sunday. On this day, 12 of the 16 teams did:

* The New York Yankees split with the Philadelphia Athletics at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Yankees won the opener, 7-3. Aaron Robinson and Tommy Henrich hit home runs, in support of Bill Bevens. Joe DiMaggio got a hit in his 1st at-bat, then left the game due to injury, and did not play in the nightcap, which the A's won, 4-1. Bob Savage outpitched Spurgeon "Spud" Chandler.

* The New York Giants swept the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 and 10-2 at the Polo Grounds.

* There was a split at Braves Field in Boston. The Boston Braves won the 1st game, 3-2. The Brooklyn Dodgers won the 2nd game, 4-2. 

* The Boston Red Sox swept the Washington Senators, 11-1 and 9-4 at Griffith Stadium. Over the 2 games, Ted Williams went 4-for-6 with a home run, 5 walks and 3 RBIs.

* There was a split at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Cleveland Indians won the 1st game, 3-2. Bob Feller was the winning pitcher. The Chicago White Sox won the 2nd game, 5-0. Future Yankee Eddie Lopat pitched a 2-hit shutout.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-2 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Detroit Tigers Beat the St. Louis Browns, 3-0 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Hal Newhouser pitched a 5-hit shutout.

* And the St. Louis Cardinals swept the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 and 6-0 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Howie Pollet pitched a 3-hit shutout in the 2nd game.