A Norfolk jacket is a loose, belted, single-breasted jacket
with box pleats on the back and front, with a belt or half-belt. It was
originally designed as a shooting coat that did not bind when the elbow was
raised to fire. It was named either after the Duke of Norfolk or after the
county of Norfolk and was made fashionable after the 1860s in the sporting
circle of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, whose country residence was
Sandringham House in Norfolk. The style was long popular for boys' jackets and
suits, and is still used in some (primarily military and police) uniforms.
Before odd jackets there came the Norfolk jacket. This
humble jacket was prototypical sportwear before the age of sportswear, born a
bit after the 1850’s for use in the British countryside. Its most important
benefactor was Edward VII, at this time known professionally as Prince of
Wales, who chose the jacket as part of his leisurewear. Following Edward’s
example, his closest friends donned the garment and were, in turn, followed by
the gentry in full.
The gentry would hunt, shoot and relax in a loose,
single-breasted Norfolk jacket which is still set apart most by its box pleats
on the front and back. The jacket also has a full- or half-belt made from
matching fabric, along with leather buttons, notch lapels and a single vent. A
burly option are notch lapels with throat latches. Its name comes from the Duke
of Norfolk or from the county of Norfolk in the East of England. Before the
advent of technical layers, Norfolks were among the best choices for sports.
A decidedly informal model, the Norfolk jacket is usually
made from tweed, closed with three or four buttons and features large patch
pockets. The jacket was worn with knickerboxers or loose breeches until the
20th century, when odd trousers became the norm. Its popularity soon lead to
use in cycling and everyday leisure. Thanks to the rugged box pleats, the
jacket allows great trajectory and comfort for the arms while its heavy fabric
ensures warmth and protection from the foul British winds and torrents.
In essence, the Norfolk jacket is a manly garment. Despite
the masculine spirit, Norfolk jackets were allowed for women from the beginning
of the 20th century as sporting garb. Besides outdoor use, Norfolk jackets were
a common sight on the shoulders of boys. As decades passed, the Norfolk jacket
was modified to meet the needs of indoor and city use. The belt and box pleats
disappeared, the pockets were cut smaller, leather buttons were replaced with
horn versions — and the odd jacket was born.
The norfolk jacket is a singular sight today. Its rugged
look is most at home in the countryside, yet still carrying an aura of costume.
I feel this is mostly due to limited exposure: when not seen often, any item
turns odd. Fedoras, top hats and Norfolks all suffer from this phenomenon.
Tweed jackets are better suited for citywear and Norfolks should be reserved
for rural outings. So as to avoid looking like a man lost in time, this jacket
model is best paired with understated, yet complimentary clothing. Moleskin or
corduroy trousers, large check shirts, heavy brogues, so on. The adventurous
reader could also try jeans, roll-neck jumpers and beanies.
I’m thinking of giving up writing about clothes and catwalk
shows and reviewing bra tops and yoga classes instead. The latest “in” look for
abs; whose mat was in the front row – that sort of thing. What do you think?
After nearly two decades as a fashion editor, I feel as though it’s a
straightforward transfer of my skillset.
It’s time for me to jump ship because wellness is killing
fashion. To be fair, it has had a good innings. For a hundred years, it has
made billions of pounds out of selling us stuff that boosts our
self-esteem/makes us feel more attractive/makes us appear richer and more
successful. Stuff, though – that’s the problem. Fashion is stuff and stuff is,
like, so 20th century. No one wants stuff any more. We want glowing skin and a
110-minute half-marathon time and inner peace and Michelin-starred kombucha
instead. That’s what aspirational looks like in 2019. Wellness does exactly
what fashion used to do, which is sell you a dream version of you, only it’s
better for you and doesn’t create landfill. Game over.
The cannibalisation of fashion by wellness began with
athleisure. Around the beginning of this decade, £100 running leggings were
suddenly a thing. Why would anyone spend £100 on leggings, normal people asked?
And the fashion industry was like, sideways glance to camera, “the leggings
aren’t the point, you desire clothes for the life transformation they promise.
You ever hear of Cinderella?”
Fashion embraced those legging-curious newcomers with open
arms. Come here, girl, we got you. But Lululemon leggings turned out to be a
Trojan horse. A new and seductive industry grew up around the business of
wellness. Boutique gyms instead of boutiques, gratitude journals instead of
waiting lists. Expenditure and aspiration, but more virtuous.
Athleisure was just the start. This is a more significant
culture shift than wearing leggings to brunch. The generation gap between
millennials (those born between 1980 and 1999 or so) and fortysomethings is
much wider than the one between fortysomethings and their baby-boomer parents.
The instability of the world in which millennials have grown up has given them
a sharply different understanding of what security looks like, of how
investment works, of what their future environment will be. Wellness sounds
made up to older people, but to a younger generation it is an investment in
themselves in an uncertain world.
This cultural shift has been monetised rapidly. Notice how
running, which was at the centre of the initial craze and costs nothing, has
fallen off the radar in favour of £28 Pilates classes. You can tell that
wellness is the new fashion because it has become so easy to spoof. There are
£6,000 Chanel yoga mats. There is Mark Wahlberg starting his day at 3.40am with
a 95-minute workout. And, of course, there is Gwyneth Paltrow – Patsy from Absolutely
Fabulous for a new generation. On her website Goop, you can buy a candle called
Church (£66 – free delivery, though) with a scent described as “cypress smoke,
snow, sensual quiet”. Does snow have a scent? Or sensual quiet? Yet Paltrow is
very much for real. Goop raised $50m in venture capital last year. It has
started opening bricks-and-mortar boutiques. It recently signed a content deal
with Netflix.
For a shiny, modern industry, the optics of wellness can be
strangely regressive. While fashion is – finally, slowly – addressing its
diversity problem, the imagery of wellness seems to skew heavily towards
skinny, white women. The ideal requires you to be time-rich and rich-rich. Two
hours spent working out each day – let alone a five-day yoga retreat in a
hilltop Balearic finca – is a pipe dream for most of us. Wellness, which should
be bolstering, is in danger of becoming yet another thing for women to fail at.
The vagueness of “clean eating” dangles the carrot of perfection just out of
reach. Beneath the manuka-honey sweetness there is a competitive core.
Perfecting your right hook at Kobox and honing your willpower with intermittent
fasting is the glossy, feminine equivalent of those gruff survivalist types
stockpiling tinned food and doing pull-ups in a weird basement.
Does it matter if wellness edges out fashion? A two-minute
plank is a more wholesome status symbol than a two-carat diamond. If sleeping
well and eating vegetables are now aspirational, that must be good. Going to a
yoga workshop is better for you than buying a new pair of earrings, even if, at
the fancier end of the scale, it isn’t any cheaper. Vaginal steaming, coffee
enemas and “venom cheese” (Google it) give wellness a bad name, but then every
bit of culture has its freakstore fringes. They say that runners run because
they like running and joggers jog because they like cake, but, as far as your
cardiovascular system goes, the result is the same. If wellness really is the
new black, it’s fine by me. After all, monochrome looks particularly chic at
yoga.
In this riveting popular history, the creator of You Must
Remember This probes the inner workings of Hollywood’s glamorous golden age
through the stories of some of the dozens of actresses pursued by Howard
Hughes, to reveal how the millionaire mogul’s obsessions with sex, power and
publicity trapped, abused, or benefitted women who dreamt of screen stardom.
In recent months, the media has reported on scores of
entertainment figures who used their power and money in Hollywood to sexually
harass and coerce some of the most talented women in cinema and television. But
as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was
Howard Hughes—the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a
cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer.
His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late
1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of
Hollywood’s most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn,
Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and
Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes—perhaps more
than any other filmmaker of his era—commoditized male desire as he objectified
and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes’s
grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an
increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private
investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these
actresses would not escape his clutches.
Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining,
The Seducer is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in
Hollywood during its golden age—a legacy that endures nearly a century later.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's
Hollywood
Image of Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard
Hughes's Hollywood
“Throughout his moviemaking career, Hughes relentlessly
worked the Hollywood system to fuel his ego, his libido, and his ambition, but
in the end, he was undone by his own paranoia. He died a reclusive outcast
remembered almost as much for his oddities as he is for his accomplishments.”
Most people today think of Howard Hughes as the eccentric
germophobe who made millions in the oil and aviation businesses (including
wartime profiteering during World War II), while dabbling in the movie
industry, but Hughes more than dabbled. He used his money and power as a
producer, and later as owner of RKO Studios (which he essentially ran into the
ground), to collect Hollywood starlets “so visually similar to one another that
a rubber stamp would have offered more variation,” while simultaneously using
that power, and sex, to make, control, and crush careers.
If Hughes were alive today, he might well be a poster boy
for the #MeToo movement. Such is the decidedly unflattering portrait author
Karina Longworth paints of Hughes in her new book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and
Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.
Longworth gives us a glimpse of Hollywood as it moved from
its infancy to adolescence, from silent films to talkies, when multitudes of
young women answered its siren call, hoping to find fame on the silver screen.
For many, their only currency was their beauty and sexuality, which played
right into the lustful hands of many of Hollywood’s power elite.
It was into this strange, and often perverse, industry that
Howard Hughes, Jr. arrived in 1924 when, at the age of 18, he became heir to
his father’s business as manufacturer of the Sharp-Hughes drill bit, with which
the senior Hughes aspired to “drill the deepest well in the world.” But young
Howard had different aspirations: to make a name for himself in aviation,
movies, and golf . . . and to become the richest man in the world.
He quickly mastered Hollywood’s formula of promising young
actresses a shot at fame in exchange for sexual favors. He also began
“replicating the failure to make good on the promise, implied or directly
stated at the beginning of the sexual transaction.” In fact, Hughes often took
the formula one step further, promising marriage. That strategy would later
cause considerable distress to his heirs and line the pockets of many a lawyer
hired to untangle the legal mess wrought by his marriage-or-not to actress
Terry Moore.
Seduction tells the story of some of the women who became
involved with Hughes, either sexually or professionally. Some of them prospered
because, or in spite, of Hughes, while others saw him dash their dreams before
they could get airborne. The names
include luminaries like Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Jane
Russell, and Ava Gardner, and lesser knowns such as Billie Dove, Jean Peters,
and Faith Domergue.
Hughes’s first major foray into moviemaking, which set a
pattern for the rest of his Hollywood career, was with Hell’s Angels and his
discovery of Jean Harlow. It also marked the birth of his fascination with
using women’s breasts as a marketing tool. The author calls it his “interest
and expertise in costuming for cleavage.”
That fascination created friction with his star, another
pattern that would follow with future projects. Longworth tells us: “That
Harlow took no pleasure in putting herself on display made the pleasure Hughes
took in forcing her to do so all the more sadistic.” With Hell’s Angels, Hughes
hit a trifecta of his personal interests: movies, aviation, and beautiful
women. Had he been able to slip a Hughes drill bit into the film, it would have
been a quadfecta.
Yet another pattern set by Hell’s Angels was the beginning
of Hughes’s feuds with censors as he continually pushed the envelope of what
was acceptable, often because he simply didn’t know what he was doing. The
author tells us that his “lack of regard for the ‘rules’ of Hollywood had
promotional value, but behind the scenes, his ignorance was at times almost
embarrassing.”
By the time the 1940s rolled around, Hughes had mastered the
game, and he turned his attention to a new generation of women. “As with so
much in his career, Hughes did the same things that other men did—he just did
them more crudely, and with even less of a regard for the person these
actresses were before they came into his life, and what would become of them
once he had moved on.”
Throughout his moviemaking career, Hughes relentlessly
worked the Hollywood system to fuel his ego, his libido, and his ambition, but
in the end, he was undone by his own paranoia. He died a reclusive outcast
remembered almost as much for his oddities as he is for his accomplishments.
This is a book for Hollywood lovers, especially lovers of
the golden age when the studio system cranked out movies like products on
assembly lines. The moral of the story is that, when the rich and powerful die,
they are just as dead as the poor and oppressed. The final exam is how they are
remembered for living their lives when they were above-ground. To hear Karina
Longworth tell it, Howard Hughes flunked.
Mike Farris is an author of both fiction and
nonfiction. His most recent nonfiction
books include Poor Innocent Lad: The Tragic Death of Gill Jamieson and the
Execution of Myles Fukunaga and the award-winning Fifty Shades of Black and
White: Anatomy of the Lawsuit behind a Publishing Phenomenon. A retired
attorney whose practice included commercial litigation and entertainment law,
he is an adjunct professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas at
Arlington.
Early romances
In 1929, Hughes' wife, Ella, returned to Houston and filed
for divorce. Hughes dated many famous women, including Billie Dove, Faith
Domergue, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn,
Hedy Lamarr, Ginger Rogers, Janet Leigh, Rita Hayworth, Mamie Van Doren and
Gene Tierney. He also proposed to Joan Fontaine several times, according to her
autobiography No Bed of Roses. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of
Hell's Angels, but Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship
was strictly professional, as Hughes apparently personally disliked Harlow. In
his 1971 book, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich said that Hughes
genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell, but never sought romantic
involvement with her. According to Russell's autobiography, however, Hughes
once tried to bed her after a party. Russell (who was married at the time)
refused him, and Hughes promised it would never happen again. The two
maintained a professional and private friendship for many years. Hughes
remained good friends with Tierney who, after his failed attempts to seduce
her, was quoted as saying "I don't think Howard could love anything that
did not have a motor in it." Later, when Tierney's daughter Daria was born
deaf and blind and with a severe learning disability because of Tierney's being
exposed to rubella during her pregnancy, Hughes saw to it that Daria received
the best medical care and paid all expenses.
Buys luxury yacht, fatal car accident
In 1933, Hughes made a purchase of an unseen luxury steam
yacht named the Rover, which was previously owned by British shipping magnate
Lord Inchcape. "I have never seen the Rover but bought it on the
blueprints, photographs and the reports of Lloyd's surveyors. My experience is
that the English are the most honest race in the world."Hughes renamed the
yacht Southern Cross and later sold her to Swedish entrepreneur Axel
Wenner-Gren.
On July 11, 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian
named Gabriel S. Meyer with his car at the corner of 3rd Street and Lorraine in
Los Angeles.[87] After the crash, Hughes was taken to the hospital and
certified as sober, but an attending doctor made a note that Hughes had been
drinking. A witness to the crash told police that Hughes was driving
erratically and too fast, and that Meyer had been standing in the safety zone of
a streetcar stop. Hughes was booked on suspicion of negligent homicide and held
overnight in jail until his attorney, Neil S. McCarthy, obtained a writ of
habeas corpus for his release pending a coroner's inquest. By the time of the
coroner's inquiry, however, the witness had changed his story and claimed that
Meyer had moved directly in front of Hughes' car. Nancy Bayly (Watts), who was
in the car with Hughes at the time of the crash, corroborated this version of
the story. On July 16, 1936, Hughes was held blameless by a coroner's jury at
the inquest into Meyer's death. Hughes told reporters outside the inquiry,
"I was driving slowly and a man stepped out of the darkness in front of
me."
During his 1954 engagement at the Last Frontier hotel,
entertainer Liberace mistook Hughes for his lighting director, instructing him
to instantly bring up a blue light should he start to play "Clair de
lune". Hughes nodded in compliance, before the hotel's entertainment
director arrived and introduced Hughes to Liberace.
Marriage to Jean Peters
On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters at a
small hotel in Tonopah, Nevada.The couple met in the 1940s, before Peters
became a film actress. They had a highly publicized romance in 1947 and there
was talk of marriage, but she said she could not combine it with her career.
Some later claimed that Peters was "the only woman [Hughes] ever
loved," and he reportedly had his security officers follow her everywhere
even when they were not in a relationship. Such reports were confirmed by actor
Max Showalter, who became a close friend of Peters while shooting Niagara
(1953). Showalter told in an interview that because he frequently met with
Peters, Hughes' men threatened to ruin his career if he did not leave her
alone.
Nixon scandal
Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon
was alarmed when it was revealed that his brother, Donald, received a $205,000
loan from Hughes. It has long been speculated[98] that Nixon's drive to learn
what the Democrats were planning in 1972 was based in part on his belief that
the Democrats knew about a later bribe that his friend Bebe Rebozo had received
from Hughes after Nixon took office.
In late 1971, Donald Nixon was collecting intelligence for
his brother in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. One of his
sources was John H. Meier, a former business adviser of Hughes who had also
worked with Democratic National Committee Chair Larry O'Brien.
Meier, in collaboration with former Vice President Hubert
Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to the Nixon campaign. Meier
told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because Larry
O'Brien had a great deal of information on Richard Nixon's illicit dealings
with Howard Hughes that had never been released; O'Brien did not actually have
any such information, but Meier wanted Nixon to think he did. Donald told his
brother that O'Brien was in possession of damaging Hughes information that
could destroy his campaign.Terry Lenzner, who was the chief investigator for
the Senate Watergate Committee, speculates that it was Nixon's desire to know
what O'Brien knew about Nixon's dealings with Hughes that may have partially
motivated the Watergate break-in.
Last years and death
Physical decline
Dietrich wrote that Hughes only ate the same thing for
dinner, a New York strip steak cooked medium rare, dinner salad, and peas, but
only the smaller ones, pushing the larger ones aside. For breakfast, Hughes
wanted his eggs cooked the way his family cook, Lily, made them. Hughes had a
"phobia about germs", and "his passion for secrecy became a
mania."
While directing The Outlaw, Hughes became fixated on a small
flaw in one of Jane Russell's blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along
a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He wrote a
detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem. Richard Fleischer,
who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at
length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the tycoon. In
his book, Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer explained that Hughes was fixated
on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate. He also
revealed that Hughes' unpredictable mood swings made him wonder if the film
would ever be completed.
In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some
movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened
screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate
bars and chicken and drank only milk, and was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex
boxes that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to
his aides giving them explicit instructions neither to look at him nor speak to
him unless spoken to. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair,
often naked, continually watching movies. When he finally emerged in the summer
of 1958, his hygiene was terrible. He had neither bathed nor cut his hair and
nails for weeks; this may have been due to allodynia, which results in a pain
response to stimuli that would normally not cause pain.
After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a
bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he also rented rooms for his aides,
his wife, and numerous girlfriends. He would sit naked in his bedroom with a
pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. This may have been
because Hughes found the touch of clothing painful due to allodynia. He may
have watched movies to distract himself from his pain—a common practice among
patients with intractable pain, especially those who do not receive adequate
treatment.[39] In one year, Hughes spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.
Hughes began purchasing all restaurant chains and four star
hotels that had been founded within the state of Texas. This included, if for
only a short period, many unknown franchises currently out of business. He
placed ownership of the restaurants with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
and all licenses were resold shortly after.
Another time, he became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice
Station Zebra, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to
his aides, he watched it 150 times. Feeling guilty about the commercial,
critical, and literal toxicity of his film The Conqueror, he bought every copy
of the film for $12 million, watching the film on repeat. Paramount Pictures
acquired the rights of the film in 1979, 3 years after his death.
Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects to
insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains, or other
imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of them. Once
one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public
view, although tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and
whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even
dead.
Injuries from numerous aircraft crashes caused Hughes to
spend much of his later life in pain, and he eventually became addicted to
codeine, which he injected intramuscularly. Hughes had his hair cut and nails
trimmed only once a year, likely due to the pain caused by the RSD/CRPS, which
was caused by the plane crashes. He also stored his urine in bottles.
Later years as a Las Vegas recluse
The wealthy and aging Hughes, accompanied by his entourage
of personal aides, began moving from one hotel to another, always taking up
residence in the top floor penthouse. In the last ten years of his life, 1966
to 1976, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities—including Beverly Hills, Boston,
Las Vegas, Nassau, Freeport, Vancouver, London, Managua, and Acapulco.
On November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day), Hughes arrived in
Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to
leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners, Hughes bought
the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel's eighth floor became the nerve center
of Hughes' empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became his personal residence.
Between 1966 and 1968, he bought several other hotel-casinos, including the
Castaways, New Frontier, the Landmark Hotel and Casino, and the Sands.He bought
the small Silver Slipper casino for the sole purpose of moving its trademark
neon silver slipper; visible from Hughes' bedroom, it had apparently kept him
awake at night.
After Hughes left the Desert Inn, hotel employees discovered
that his drapes had not been opened during the time he lived there and had
rotted through.
Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something
more glamorous. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide, "I like to think of
Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully
jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car." Hughes bought
several local television stations (including KLAS-TV).
Hughes' considerable business holdings were overseen by a
small panel unofficially dubbed "The Mormon Mafia" because of the
many Latter-day Saints on the committee, led by Frank William Gay. In addition
to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes' health, they also
went to great pains to satisfy Hughes' every whim. For example, Hughes once
became fond of Baskin-Robbins' banana nut ice cream, so his aides sought to
secure a bulk shipment for him, only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had
discontinued the flavor. They put in a request for the smallest amount the
company could provide for a special order, 350 gallons (1,300 L), and had it
shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced
he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla ice cream. The Desert
Inn ended up distributing free banana nut ice cream to casino customers for a
year. In a 1996 interview, ex–Howard Hughes communicator Robert Maheu said,
"There is a rumor that there is still some banana nut ice cream left in
the freezer. It is most likely true."
As an owner of several major Las Vegas businesses, Hughes
wielded much political and economic influence in Nevada and elsewhere. During
the 1960s and early 1970s, he disapproved of underground nuclear testing at the
Nevada Test Site. Hughes was concerned about the risk from residual nuclear
radiation, and attempted to halt the tests. When the tests finally went through
despite Hughes' efforts, the detonations were powerful enough that the entire
hotel where he was staying trembled due to the shock waves. In two separate,
last-ditch maneuvers, Hughes instructed his representatives to offer
million-dollar bribes to both presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
In 1970, Jean Peters filed for divorce. The two had not
lived together for many years. Peters requested a lifetime alimony payment of
$70,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, and waived all claims to Hughes'
estate. Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she
declined it. Hughes did not insist on a confidentiality agreement from Peters
as a condition of the divorce. Aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of
her. She refused to discuss her life with Hughes and declined several lucrative
offers from publishers and biographers. Peters would state only that she had not
seen Hughes for several years before their divorce and had only dealt with him
by phone.
Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake
Managua in Nicaragua, seeking privacy and security, when a magnitude 6.5
earthquake damaged Managua in December 1972. As a precaution, Hughes moved
first to a rather large tent, facing the hotel, then after a few days there to
the Nicaraguan National Palace and stayed there as a guest of Anastasio Somoza
Debayle before leaving for Florida on a private jet the following day. He
subsequently moved into the Penthouse at the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand
Bahama Island, which he had recently purchased. He lived almost exclusively in
the penthouse of the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina for the last four years
of his life. Hughes had spent a total of $300 million on his many properties in
Las Vegas.
Memoir hoax
In 1972, author Clifford Irving caused a media sensation
when he claimed he had co-written an authorized autobiography of Hughes. Hughes
was so reclusive that he did not immediately publicly refute Irving's
statement, leading many to believe the Irving book was genuine. However, before
the book's publication, Hughes finally denounced Irving in a teleconference and
the entire project was eventually exposed as a hoax. Irving was later convicted
of fraud and spent 17 months in prison. In 1974, the Orson Welles film F for
Fake included a section on the Hughes biography hoax, leaving a question open
as to whether it was actually Hughes who took part in the teleconference (since
so few people had actually heard or seen him in recent years). In 1977, The
Hoax by Clifford Irving was published in the United Kingdom, telling his story
of these events. The 2006 film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, is also based
on these events.
Death
Hughes family grave site at Glenwood Cemetery
Hughes was reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27
p.m. on board an aircraft owned by Robert Graf and piloted by Jeff Abrams. He
was en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel in
Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston. Other accounts indicate that he
died on the flight from Freeport, Grand Bahama, to Houston.
After receiving a call, his senior counsel, Frank P. Morse,
ordered his staff to get his body on a plane and return him to the United
States. It was common that foreign countries would hold a corpse as ransom so
that an estate could not be settled. Morse ordered the pilots to announce
Hughes' death once they entered U.S. airspace.
His reclusiveness and possible drug use made him practically
unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6
ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to
use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body.Howard Hughes' alias, John
T. Conover, was used when his body arrived at a morgue in Houston on the day of
his death.
A subsequent autopsy recorded kidney failure as the cause of
death. Hughes was in extremely poor physical condition at the time of his
death. He suffered from malnutrition. While his kidneys were damaged, his other
internal organs, including his brain, which had no visible damage other than
illnesses, were deemed perfectly healthy. X-rays revealed five broken-off
hypodermic needles in the flesh of his arms. To inject codeine into his
muscles, Hughes had used glass syringes with metal needles that easily became
detached.
Estate
Approximately three weeks after Hughes' death, a handwritten
will was found on the desk of an official of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The so-called "Mormon
Will" gave $1.56 billion to various charitable organizations (including
$625 million to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute), nearly $470 million to
the upper management in Hughes' companies and to his aides, $156 million to
first cousin William Lummis, and $156 million split equally between his two
ex-wives Ella Rice and Jean Peters.
In this will, Hughes left his entire estate to the Hughes
Medical Institute, as he had no connection to family and was seriously ill.
This is contrary to the many wills that have surfaced after his death. The
original will that included payments to aides never surfaced. It was apparently
in a home surrounding the Desert Inn Golf Course belonging to the mother of an
assistant. He had no desire to leave any money to family, aides or churches,
including William Gay and Frank Morse.[131][full citation needed] Hughes was
not Mormon and had no reason to leave his estate to that church. Frank P. Morse
is still the attorney of record for Hughes.
A further $156 million was endowed to a gas-station owner,
Melvin Dummar, who told reporters that in 1967, he found a disheveled and dirty
man lying along U.S. Route 95, just 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas. The
man asked for a ride to Vegas. Dropping him off at the Sands Hotel, Dummar said
the man told him that he was Hughes. Dummar later claimed that days after
Hughes' death a "mysterious man" appeared at his gas station, leaving
an envelope containing the will on his desk. Unsure if the will was genuine and
unsure of what to do, Dummar left the will at the LDS Church office. In 1978, a
Nevada court ruled the Mormon Will a forgery, and officially declared that
Hughes had died intestate (without a valid will). Dummar's story was later
adapted into Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard in 1980.
Hughes' $2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983
among 22 cousins, including William Lummis, who serves as a trustee of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled
that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which
sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5.2 billion. The court rejected suits by
the states of California and Texas that claimed they were owed inheritance tax.
In 1984 Hughes' estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed
she and Hughes had secretly married on a yacht in international waters off
Mexico in 1949 and never divorced. Moore never produced proof of a marriage,
but her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a bestseller.
The Quality Mending Company has been on the same block of
Prince Street, in lower Manhattan, for more than a decade. Founded in 2003 as
Eleven Vintage, the shop has always concentrated on stocking the finest in
vintage menswear.
In 2010, as it became clear that select in-demand items were
getting more difficult to track down, the owner introduced the Quality Mending
Company, a line of mainly locally made clothing and accessories that takes its
inspiration from vintage but possesses an of-the-moment sensibility.
These new items fit in nicely alongside the carefully
curated vintage pieces that continue to be an essential element of the store.
