Shocking details surface about drugs and deceit
Even more than great wealth, Howard Hughes prized privacy. Now, 17 months after his death from kidney failure in an air ambulance over Texas, the last shrouds of secrecy that enveloped his reclusive existence are finally being peeled away. And the disclosures are adding zing to the already roughhouse brawl over Hughes' financial empire, which was valued at $2.3 billion in the late 1960s. It is being racked by internal strife, buffeted by lawsuits and threatened by a plethora of alleged Hughes wills.
Some shocking details of Hughes' hidden years leaked out earlier (TIME cover, Dec. 13). Now new evidence, taken in the Los Angeles Superior Court in cases to determine Hughes' legal residence, is becoming public—and it only confirms and elaborates the worst suspicions about his decline and death. According to sworn testimony from his personal aides and doctors, Howard Hughes became addicted to the tranquilizer Valium. As a total recluse living in a series of penthouse hideaways, he popped large-dosage 10-mg. blue tablets, which his personal aides faithfully recorded as BBs (for blue bombers) in the daily log that they kept on his activities. On many occasions, Hughes gulped as much as 40 mg. at one time, a dosage that exceeds even the recommended daily medication for agitated mental patients. After the pill popping, he would doze for hours. In a deposition given in June, Dr. Homer Clark, one of Hughes' three physicians, conceded that Valium was not required for medical reasons. Hughes was evidently taking the pills for mental sensations.
In addition to his tranquilizer habit, Hughes injected himself with a mysterious clear liquid that knocked him out so violently that the syringe was often left dangling in his arm. According to Personal Aide Howard Eckersley, the liquid was a codeine solution. Hughes, who called the drugs "my goodies," would toss a codeine tablet into a water-filled hypodermic and shake the syringe until the pill melted. Then he would give himself a shot; if he could find a vein in his wizened body, he would mainline the injection.
During this period, Hughes was the largest private employer in Nevada and provided the cover for the CIA'S Glomar Explorer operation. The executives of Summa Corp.—which was solely owned by Hughes and still oversees his vast real estate, gambling and hotel interests and airline—pretended that the old man was alert and bossing the company from behind the scenes. Actually, he was leading a totally disoriented life. Hughes' daily log, which is expected to be introduced as evidence in pending court actions, recounts that he spent most of his waking hours watching thriller movies, going to the bathroom (for years he suffered from constipation) and toying with his food (he would often spend two hours nibbling on a single piece of chicken). One poignant entry in the log came on Nov. 9, 1971, at 1:10 a.m. while Hughes was watching The Ipcress File, a 1960s flick about brainwashing. An aide noted that Hughes could not stand to watch the torture scene in reel three, probably because he was too tortured himself.