Howard Hughes: The Secret Life – Charles Higham, 1993 [No Stars]

Ain't No Fun Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire

Howard Hughes had a lot of sex in his life. He also flew planes, built businesses, and made some money, but those things didn't matter as much to Charles Higham in 1993 when he published this sleazy and highly speculative bio of the famous 20th-century American tycoon.

Howard Hughes: The Secret Life was the credited source for the 2004 Oscar-nominated film on Hughes, The Aviator, which was directed by Martin Scorcese and starred Leonardo DiCaprio. You remember all those gay sex scenes in The Aviator, like, well, um, come to think of it, I don't either, unless you count the time Jude Law as Errol Flynn plucks a pea off Leo's plate. No, I guess that really doesn't count.

Which goes to show you you can't judge a book by its film adaptation.

Forget germs and planes. For Higham, homosexuality is what really matters in his Hughes bio. That Hughes wasn't actually gay as far as most people knew only seems to have made Higham double down. Hughes as he writes him was not only a hard-wired homosexual from his childhood days when he was known as "Sonny," but disgusted about it to the point of self-destruction.

Already leaning toward homosexuality, and painfully frustrated in the presence of the handsome young Boy Scouts, Sonny cannot have been attracted to Rupert [Hughes, the brother of Howard's father], who was round, dumpy, and unhandsome. But perhaps curiosity and pubertal sexual tension drove him to the edge and he succumbed. A fire was awakened in him that would never be quenched. And along with it, self-disgust, guilt, misery, a sense of being less than a man...

Higham dedicated this book to his boyfriend, Richard V. Palafox. I wonder how Richard felt about that.

There's a lot of speculation masked as analysis in the above passage. Later on, such speculation becomes masked as fact. I have no conviction whether or not Hughes was gay; but the way Higham pushes the idea at every opportunity makes me doubt it. If he was surer of his facts, he wouldn't be so shrill about them.

As Howard Hughes: The Secret Life goes on, the nature of the sex becomes less important than the famous identities of many of his bedmates. Cary Grant gets so much attention in this regard that after a while you expect him to burst in on every scene, crying out: "Hughie, Hughie, Hughie" in that woman's bathrobe he wore in Bringing Up Baby. The exact nature of Hughes' and Grant's romantic life is not explored; all Higham thinks you need or want to know is that they were in bed together a lot.

Hughes did have some well-known heterosexual affairs, which Higham presents in the same inartful way. The one with Katharine Hepburn actually makes it into The Aviator, enough to win an Oscar for the actress who played her. Hepburn gets little attention in The Secret Life, except as someone Hughes can cheat on as he goes on a long Hollywood spree, his bedroom becoming a Grauman's Chinese Theater for what Higham terms "the world's best sexual shopping list":

His sexual partners were not so much lovers as hostages, prisoners, or victims of his will; he had to dominate in everything. His boyish, vulnerable charm, handsome, underfed, lanky look, and atmosphere of power and money captivated all of his sexual partners, but he left no echoes behind.

That is, not until his later years, when he stopped bathing and carried with him a persistent musk Higham likens to "a dead goat." One of the book's many imponderables is how it posits Hughes in his end years, the famous image of the shrunken mummy-like figure with his Mason jars of urine and long fingernails, and then asks us to see Hughes as "the black widow" who cagily engineered the Watergate break-in scheme in order to bring down the Nixon Administration, who blocked his efforts at acquiring property.

Howard Hughes at the cockpit of his most famous (or infamous) airplane, the H-4 Hercules, better known as the "Spruce Goose." Hughes' lone flight on the craft forms the triumphal climax of The Aviator, but the book only mentions it as part of a larger scam he perpetuated on the U. S. government. Image from www.biomagazine.gr.

That Hughes was one weird rich guy is so much at the center of The Secret Life that it's hard to understand how a movie made from it would be entitled The Aviator and be as focused as it is on Hughes breaking air-speed records and crashing into mansions in Beverly Hills. I mean, those things are referenced in Higham's book, but in such a by-the-way manner they hardly count.

The sensationalist agenda of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life is clear from the start, with a preface that casually links Hughes to Watergate. Higham takes a long time returning to this point, and never quite justifies it, but he really doesn't seem to care. He's more concerned with filling page after page with stories of how Hughes satisfied his apparently voracious and varied sexual appetite with this or that famous Hollywood star.

However many actresses Hughes bedded, it's the men Higham keeps returning to.

In the early years of the decade, Hughes again crossed, with more confident self-indulgence, into another area: the then criminally punishable, dark, and stimulatingly dangerous world of homosexual life. Rumors spread that he was involved in scenes of punishment: of torture and bondage in dungeon rooms in which he was the dominant figure. The late actor and decorator William Haines told the author of numerous incidents of this.

Higham does this a lot when he gets into the bedroom stuff, presenting his facts in the form of something this-or-that person said to him, invariably when that person was conveniently dead and thus unable to contradict him. The Notes On Sources section of this book is a cynical shrug in the direction of authorial responsibility in that and other ways; so thin as to beg more questions then it answers.

I didn't believe much of anything Higham presents here. I mean, I guess there was this guy named Hughes who flew planes, made money, and led a weird life, but Higham's sourcing is minimal, his frequent suppositions strained, and his aim throughout the book too blatantly that of naked shock value, written at a time and for an audience where homosexual behavior was seen as shocking. If Higham was still around and writing this today, I suppose we'd read of Hughes' putting batteries in his recycling bin, or spoiling movie endings on IMdB.

One of the sources Higham references is Kitty Kelley's Frank Sinatra bio My Way. When I read that, something clicked hard with me. Not that Higham like Kelley was disguising whoppers as fact; I was onto that long before. It was that he was doing such a dull job of it. My Way uses its half-truths and innuendo-shopping to make for a shamefully engaging narrative, fueled by a central character who grabs you by the throat from the first page. Higham has Hughes caught by Katharine Hepburn in his bedroom with Ginger Rogers, and it comes off as a giant ho-hum.

There is no passion in this book, no drama, no real theme beyond the idea that Hughes was a singularly miserable character with a lot of money. The only part of the book that gets vaguely interesting is when we follow him to the Desert Inn after he disappears from public view, eating chicken and napoleon cakes and watching Ice Station Zebra for 60 hours straight. Higham suggests Hughes was an early AIDS victim, on the authority his eyes were bad, his teeth bled, and some doctor he spoke to said it was "possible." Higham's "sourcing" here is as impeccable here as it is everywhere else.

The more I read Howard Hughes: The Secret Life, the more I realized it stunk worse than Hughes did. It winds up cataloging not one but two ruined careers, the other being Higham's own, who started out a well-regarded writer before he discovered there was money in rumor-peddling. By the time he wrote this, he had already famously remade Errol Flynn into a Nazi spy and connected Cary Grant to the Manson murders; by 1993 he could be counted on for shock value even if very few took him seriously anymore. The Secret Life is a cynical man giving readers what he thinks they want, not caring what questions he leaves behind.