The Book of the Dead (26 page)

Initially, there wasn’t much call for peanuts, so Carver set about exploring the possibilities for by-products. His ceaseless experiments produced some three hundred peanut derivatives, including evaporated peanut beverage, cheese, ink, dyes, soap, medicinal oils and cosmetics, metal polish, plastic, instant coffee, meat tenderizer, shaving cream, talcum powder, wood stains, shoe polish, peanut oil shampoo, and various cooking sauces, earning himself the nickname “The Peanut Man.” He may well have invented peanut butter, but he never patented it: He believed food products were a gift from God and therefore belonged to everyone.

Some weeks after going to Dearborn, Carver sent Henry Ford a recipe for a gravy substitute made using soybean oil, adding a note to Mrs. Ford:

Please watch the digestive tract of Mr. Ford for a few days after he has eaten the gelatinized pig’s feet. Notice how his face will fill up. To clear the skin, remove wrinkles etc, try massaging with pure, refined peanut oil.

The same month, Carver wrote again to Clara Ford saying: “I want to help Mr. Ford prove his startling statement that we can live directly from the products of the soil.” Their collaboration culminated in 1942 in an idea that was decades ahead of its time: a plastic car body made from soybeans that weighed 30 percent less than the standard steel model and ran on grain alcohol.
Sadly, the war intervened and the first ecocar never went into production.

Ford’s last years were dominated by paranoia and speculation on the afterlife. These were brought into sharp focus when his son, Edsel, died of cancer, aged only forty-nine, in 1943. Ford became convinced that the government was planning to oust him, and fearful of assassination attempts, he had all his chauffeurs armed. In fact, it was simply ill health that cut short his tenure, and his grandson Henry Ford II replaced him in 1945. Some say his final decline was caused by a stroke that struck him down as he watched uncut footage from the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek in Poland.

Ford had become a firm believer in reincarnation, inspired by one of the few books he admitted to having read:
A Short View of Great Questions
(1899) by Orlando Jay Smith. The book’s contention that our experiences in life are never wasted struck a chord. Henry Ford hated waste.

Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilize the experience we collect in one life in the next.

He decided that because he was born in 1863—the date of the Battle of Gettysburg—he was the reincarnation of a soldier who had died there.

By the end of his life, Ford had amassed a fortune that would today be worth $188 billion. Reincarnation gave him a plausible reason for the magnitude of his success and for his sureness of touch. He’d been around the block many times before. In 1928, he explained it to a reporter from the
San Francisco Examiner:

Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.

The other way Henry Ford put his mind at rest was by making sure everything was neat and tidy. He was very keen on keeping records. When his wife Clara died three years after him, in 1950, staff found that many of the fifty-six rooms at his house were crammed with his papers, notebooks, and receipts—even letters Edsel Ford had written to Father Christmas as a small boy. He had thrown nothing away in more than sixty years. The collection became the basis of the Ford archives, which number more than 10 million documents.

Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial flair, his enormous wealth, and his attempts to control every aspect of his life pale into insignificance, however, compared to the life and career of another billionaire,
Howard Hughes
(1905–76).

When Hughes died in 1976, he was the second richest man in the United States after J. Paul Getty. His father had made a fortune by patenting (in 1909) the rotary drill bit that was to revolutionize the oil industry. By 2000, the Hughes Tool Company still had an astonishing 40 percent share of the world drill-bit market. Hughes used his inherited wealth to build an empire that included not just oil but mining, aviation, armaments, films, and
property, including many of the hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. When he sold his controlling shares in the airline TWA in 1966, he was presented with the largest check that had ever been made out to an individual—for $566,000,000. On his death a decade later, he left around the same amount—though unraveling the details of his investments and legacies took another fifteen years. This sounds like the classic American dream, but whatever else his vast wealth did for Howard Hughes, it never made him happy.

From about 1950, he became increasingly reclusive, disabled by obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia. The last twenty years of his life were spent being looked after by a small team of loyal aides and doctors, an inner circle that either protected him from outsiders or, depending on your perspective, colluded to imprison him within his neuroses. Many of them were Mormons, whom Hughes trusted despite not being a member of their church. He died in an air ambulance en route to a Texas hospital from Acapulco, emaciated, unwashed, and pumped full of painkillers and sedatives. In a life that had more drama than anything he ever produced in Hollywood, his eating habits particularly stand out. They became a series of increasingly bizarre personal rituals, outward symbols of his inner distress.

It had all started very differently. As a young man, Hughes had declared:

I intend to be the greatest golfer in the world, the finest film producer in Hollywood, the greatest pilot in the world, and the richest man in the world.

He came very close to achieving all these ambitions (although he never bettered a handicap of two in golf). Even if he hadn’t
moved into film, he would be remembered for his achievements as a pilot. Just as Henry Ford had tested the possibilities of the automobile by becoming a racing driver, Hughes taught himself to understand the new science of aeronautics from inside the cockpit. Flying a Lockheed Super Electra in 1938 he broke the world air-speed record, as well as the records for the fastest flights across America and around the world (91 hours 14 minutes in 1938). In 1939, his flying career was recognized by the award of the Congressional Gold Medal. It is typical of Hughes that he never bothered to collect it: Years later, President Truman finally sent it to him by post.

If flying was Hughes’s amateur passion, he managed to turn it to good use in his professional career as a movie producer. His first successful film was
Hell’s Angels
(1930), an epic tale of World War I fighter pilots. Budgeted at $3.8 million, at the time it was the most expensive film ever made, in no small part due to Hughes’s perfectionism. He sent buyers to Europe to find as many World War I airplanes as possible for the film and shipped eighty-seven of them to the United States. He choreographed many of the dogfight scenes, and when the stunt pilots all refused to fly the dangerous final scene, he did it himself, crashing the plane but escaping with minor injuries—and filming the shots he wanted. Three other stunt pilots died during the making of the film.

Handsome, daring, and rich, Hughes had a roll call of lovers to match that of any of the leading men he cast. Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner were all charmed by his good looks and generosity. Hepburn in particular was smitten by his bravery, packing him turkey and cheese
sandwiches for his round-the-world flight in 1938, while on another occasion he let her steer his private plane under the Queensboro (59th Street) Bridge on a night flight across Manhattan. He was also rumored to have had affairs with Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and numerous other “pretty boy” stars.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Hughes appeared to be fulfilling all his youthful ambitions. But even then, ominous signs were perceptible. His colleagues complained of unreasonable requests, violent mood swings, and a fixation with tiny details. Obsessed with Jane Russell’s breasts in his 1943 movie
The Outlaw
, he designed and built a cantilevered, steel-reinforced bra to show them off to their full advantage (though Russell later claimed she never actually wore it). More troubling, in 1941 he was diagnosed with syphilis (which he also gave to Lana Turner), and he started to agonize over the possibility of “catching germs” from other people. After being given penicillin for the infection, he instructed his housekeeper to put almost all of his clothing into laundry bags and seal them with padlocks, after which they were to be thrown onto the lawn and burned. The syphilis caused an angry red rash to erupt on Hughes’s hands and his doctor told him not to shake hands with anyone until the antibiotics had cleared it up. His fixation with not touching anything dirty was about to take root.

In December 1947 he suffered a total breakdown. Telling his staff that he wanted to watch some movies, he disappeared into a nearby studio’s screening room and didn’t emerge for four months, refusing to speak or be spoken to, only communicating with his staff via notes scrawled on a yellow pad and living entirely on chocolate bars and milk.

He reappeared in the spring of 1948, but he was never the
same again. He stopped cutting his hair and nails, saved all his urine in glass bottles, and preserved any of his stools that he considered “worthy.” He ate only room-service meals, instructing that his sandwiches be cut in precise triangles, that no tomato should be sliced thicker than a quarter of an inch, and that his lettuce should be shredded “on the bias.” He kept a ruler in the room to measure any peas he ordered, sending back any that were “too big.” Hughes never really regained equilibrium. From then on he gradually disappeared from his own life.

By the time he married his third wife, the actress Jean Peters, in 1957, his fear of germs had reached a new level of intensity. He was going through a dozen boxes of tissues a day, using them to pick things up and to isolate him from anything he sat on. Even tins of food had to be scrubbed and disinfected and the contents removed very slowly, so that they did not brush against the sides of the can and become contaminated. When he and Jean stayed at a hotel in Nassau, he refused to let housekeeping staff into their room, instead simply moving to another one once it was too dirty. They remained married for fourteen years but, at times, Peters was a virtual prisoner, forced to write Hughes a letter whenever she wanted permission to leave their hotel. One of the less attractive aspects of their marriage was that she was kept awake at night by the clicking of his gigantic toenails, which he refused to cut. To enable her to get a good night’s sleep, he first slipped tissue paper between his toes, and then asked engineers at the Hughes Aircraft Company to build him a set of callipers with metal ridges in the foot plate that would hold his nails apart. Mr. and Mrs. Hughes had to have separate fridges so that he didn’t catch germs from her, and for the same reason she wasn’t allowed to touch the knobs on the TV. They divorced in 1971, though they hadn’t lived
together for more than a decade. When she remarried, Hughes bought the houses on either side of her new marital home, and two others across the street, just so he could keep an eye on her.

Hughes died without friends or family, his sordid decline eked out in hotel rooms, the windows shrouded with blackout material. Often he would sit naked, a hotel napkin covering his genitals, watching movies over and over again. He was rumored to have watched
Ice Station Zebra
, the 1968 Alistair MacLean spy thriller starring Rock Hudson, more than 150 times. No one knows what it was in the film that piqued his interest. When Hughes was chronically constipated and dehydrated in his final months, his assistant John Holmes would arrive every three days to deliver brown paper bags containing almond Hershey bars, homogenized milk, and unsalted pecans to his bedside. These had to be handed over in silence, the bag held out at 45 degrees so that Hughes could reach inside and remove the items individually with a clean paper tissue for each one. According to one biographer, Richard Hack, the chocolate was “cut into half-inch squares, each square chewed individually and completely, followed by a swallow of milk.” Hughes weighed less than one hundred pounds when he died. His appearance was so changed through neglect and malnutrition that the FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify him.

As falls from grace go, Hughes’s has a mythic quality to it. Few men have ever enjoyed so much money and fame; few have ended in such a complete rejection of the world. What was it that first sent Hughes over the edge in 1947? There are clues in his childhood: His mother, Allene, was always worried about germs, sending news clippings to the supervisor of young Howard’s summer camp advising caution when allowing so many boys to
mix together because of the dangers of spreading polio. His grandmother Mimi was also fearful of dirt and refused to have any built-in cupboards in the house because they could not be moved outdoors to be “disinfected” by sunlight. And both his parents had died suddenly when Hughes was in his late teens.