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Where Was the Enemy? Hughes's anatomical work in The Outlaw could not contribute to human knowledge or advancement; his contributions to aviation, though a subject of bitter controversy, are much more substantial. In 1935 he had his racing plane, the Hi, ready to fly. This was the first airplane with flush joints and rivets (i.e., a smooth metal skin) and the first with power-driven retractable landing gear. In this plane Hughes set a new world's speed record (held in France for the previous two years) of 352 m.p.h., and a coast-to-coast nonstop record of 7 hrs. 28 min. And finally, in a regular Lockheed transport, adapted for long-distance flight, with special equipment, a skilled crew and egregiously painstaking preparations, he flew around the world in 3 days 19 hrs. 29 min. For these feats he got the Collier Trophy, the Harmon Trophy, a congressional medal, a handshake from Franklin Roosevelt and Broadway's accolade of ticker tape. In Hollywood and in the air, he had won. But where was the enemy? As his Uncle Rupert remarked, he was not much older than Alexander the Great when Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.
Last summer Hughes won again. A Senate committee investigating war contracts wanted to know why the Government had got nothing for $18 million paid to Hughes for his huge, eight-engined plywood cargo plane, or for $22 million paid for three XF115 (a high-ceiling, highspeed photo-reconnaissance plane). This inquiry suddenly involved Elliott Roosevelt, Johnny Meyer—the Hughes henchman with all the telephone numbers—and girls, girls, girls (TIME, Aug. 4 et seq.). Howard Hughes, uncowed and defiant, picked Senator Owen Brewster as a personal antagonist and made the Senator so uncomfortable that he presently departed for the Maine woods. The committee was glad to let go of Hughes.
Too Little Time. There are those who say that Howard Hughes cannot design an airplane and never has. Lockheed's famed triple-tailed Constellation, which Hughes pioneered on T.W.A., was originally billed as a Hughes design, but it is now represented as a Hughes "conception" (which it is) and a Lockheed design (which it is). Even his harshest detractors admit that he is a "hot pilot" but, they hasten to add, an exceedingly reckless one. ("Ah," says the Freudian, laying finger to nose, "our old friend, the subconscious death-wish. But why should this odd young man want to die? Perhaps it would be the greatest climax of all, a climax of which he somehow feels deprived.")
A crony of Hughes sees it differently: "Howard will never die in an airplane. He'll die at the hands of a woman with a .38."
The private life of Howard Hughes might be described as a complete and carefully protected disorder. He has no interest in clothes, only the barest minimum of interest in food and sleep. He owns five suits, of which the newest is five years old; he. is rumpled and disheveled most of the time, gets dressed up only for special occasions. He postpones haircuts as long as possible. "I used to be well-groomed," he says, "but now I am too busy to bother." The story that he once wore tennis shoes into Manhattan's superswank Stork Club infuriates him; he claims that he had no shoe-ration coupon and bought "canvas shoes" out of sheer necessity.