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His father's death, and his own inheritance, gave Hughes freedom. He did not know exactly what talents he had, but he knew he was smart. He had outgrown childish toys; he was ready for grown-up toys. He had (or soon would have) the money to buy them; he had the brains to use them. He would have fun. But grown-up fun, he quickly found, sometimes involves frustration.
He spent a year at the tool plant, learning the business thoroughly. Then he turned it over to his executives (he could always quiz and harry them by telephone) and went to Hollywood. Since boyhood, fascinated by the movies, he had jotted down ideas for scripts in a notebook. He had even met and cultivated a movie actor named Ralph Graves. In Hollywood, his uncle, Rupert Hughes—a prosperous fictioneer and biographer—had been writing and directing pictures. Howard hung around the sets, asked questions.
Hollywood laughed when it heard that this young upstart wanted to make pictures himself. His actor friend, Graves, had a terrific idea for a script—about a Bowery bruiser who adopts a baby. Hughes was impressed, laid out $50,000. This picture, Swell Hogan, was such an arrant turkey that it was never released. The wiseacres laughed louder.
"The More You Spend . . ." Hughes got mad. He also got a good story and a good director, Marshall Neilan, and made a successful picture called Everybody's Acting, which returned 50% on his $150,000 investment. He made another, Two Arabian Nights, directed by Lewis Milestone, who won an Oscar for his work on it. The scoffing died down.
Then came the smash hit, Hell's Angels, which quite a few people besides Hughes think of as the greatest air epic of all time. Hughes spent $3,000,000 making it as a silent picture; before he had finished the "talkies" arrived. Hughes got a new heroine (the first one had a Swedish accent), reshot the talking sequences, poured in another million. The new heroine was Jean Harlow, prototypal "platinum blonde." Angels has made a profit of $4,000,000 so far, and is still showing in outlying theaters.
After Angels, Hughes made five more pictures, including his two best: Scarface, with Paul Muni, and The Front Page, with Adolphe Menjou and a newcomer named Pat O'Brien. Then he turned to aviation. So far as Hollywood was concerned, he had come, seen, conquered. On one of his very rare visits back to Houston, he said to friends: "Movies are a cinch. The more you spend, the more you make."
It was in Hell's Angels that Hughes first revealed his intense preoccupation with the female bosom (in one scene, Miss Harlow's neckline swooped almost to the navel). But it was in The Outlaw that his interest reached its fullest flower. In the flogging scene, when the bosom movement seemed unsatisfactory, Hughes decided that it was an engineering problem, called for his drawing board, designed a new brassiere for his star, Jane Russell. Thereafter the scene was shot to his entire liking.