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Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years

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After watching "The Aviator," my interest in Hughes was piqued, and I subsequently picked up this book again, after first reading it in the late 70's. I consumed it in a day this time. It hasn't lost its relevance and intrigue after all these years. The story of Hughes remains equally fascinating and tragic. This book captures and relates that atmosphere splendidly. Phelan is a professional writer who crafts his material well.

I think I originally got a copy of this book at Goodwill, probably 50 of the best cents I ever spent on anything. This is a seriously terrifying and incredible book, documenting the last 20 years of Howard Hughes' life, from the point when the billionaire's obsessive-compulsive disorder began to dominate his everyday existence - basically right where Martin Scorsese's terrific 2004 bio-pic of Hughes' earlier years, The Aviator, leaves things off. (Although written in 1977, you can almost imagine author James Phelan's picking up the story at the very moment where Scorsese leaves Leonardo DiCaprio-as-Howard Hughes at the movie's end, locked and isolated in a darkened restroom, physically scarred by his near-death aviation experiences, driven to paranoia by constant Congressional investigations, unable to stop muttering to himself, "the way of the future...")

Phelan's biography concentrates on the darkest chapters of Hughes' life - how his unbelievable wealth allowed him to fight off all medical treatments and exams and instead sequester himself for years at a time in totally secluded hotel rooms in Las Vegas, Canada and South America, suffering in an almost Beckett-esque cyclical daily hell of obsession with minutiae, paperwork and personal hygiene, all the while allowing his immediate surroundings to deteriorate month after month to skid-row-junkie levels of filth - incredibly, with wait staff at his 24-hour beck and call right around the corner. There would be days when Hughes would page his employees & have his soup sent back 40 times to be cooled down or re-heated again, to his exact specifications of temperature, with no questions asked.

Phelan does a fantastic job of documenting Hughes' business' goings-on (to Hughes' knowledge as well as all the secretive transactions conducted behind his back by his company's CEO's). He also provides in well-organized chapters the incredible details of how Hughes' O.C.D., combined with his absolute access to financial capital, turned even the most minor and insignificant personal whims into major business obsessions - such as the time when Hughes tried to have his staff purchase a TV-dinner company so he could make sure there was only the type of fruit crisp on the dinner platter that he preferred, and no other varieties of fruit crisp. There were months when Hughes' insisted-upon state of self-neglection and enforced malnourishment made his physical state resemble that of (in Phelan's description) a W.W. II concentration camp victim, and Phelan doesn't shy away from researching and examining the worst aspects of this historic American tragedy. The sad, pathetic, yet completely engrossing story is given weight and depth by Phelan's impeccable writing style, which is simultaneously evocative, informative and to the point, and the very best sort of biographical journalism. Highly recommended.

Here - and for the first time - the mystery of Howard Hughe's bizarre life and death is finally resolved in a startling eyewitness account by two of the aides closest to him during his long years of secrecy, hiding and flight. Their story is told by James Phelan, the investigative reporter whose encyclopedic knowledge of Hughes and his empire enable him to expose the Clifford Irving hoax of 1972.
After Hughe's death, the Cockney waiter who lifted the dying billionaire's wasted body onto the plane for his final flight, and Mell Stewart, a Utah barber whose first professional fee for Hughes haircut was a thousand dollars, came to Phelan with their incredible story. These two aides saw hughes day in and day out - as only a handful of men ever saw him in the tiny blacked-out bedrooms where he spent all of his last years.

Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years reveals how and why the once-dashing six-foot four-inch Texan, with the money to live like a maharajah, owned no clothes, had no possessions, lived as a physically wasted recluse, and spent most of his time virtually naked, compulsively watching movies while others ran his vast empire for him.

Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years gives the first authentic account of why hughes suddenly fled his penthouse hideout in Las Vegas and fired his $520,000-a-year chief executive, Robert Maheu. The aide who engineered it recounts Hughes's wild hairbreadth escape from the Britannia Beach Hotel in Nassau. And the book offers an insider's view of the billionaire's bizarre life style - his peculiar eating and grooming habits, his "insulation" against germs, the drugs he injected himself, which he insisted always be kept in a metal box at his bedside.

From the wealth of detail gathered from the aides and from his own twenty years of reporting on Hughes, James Phelan has written an extraordinary book that puts into context the pivotal role Hughes played in American life while keeping from everyone his own deep, dark mystery.