Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes inherited his father's tool manufacturing fortune as a young man and used it to fund parallel careers as an aviation engineer and pioneer, a Hollywood film producer, and, in his final decades, an increasingly reclusive and eccentric figure. In aviation he set multiple world speed records through the 1930s and later built and flew the enormous wooden "Spruce Goose" flying boat in 1947. In film he produced "Hell's Angels" (1930) and "Scarface" (1932), and later controlled RKO Pictures, which he owned from 1948 to 1955. Hughes and Cary Grant developed a close personal friendship dating from the 1930s, bonding in part over their shared enthusiasm for aviation; Grant was one of relatively few people who remained on close terms with Hughes as his behavior grew more erratic in later decades. In January 1947, Hughes and Grant took off together on a private cross-country flight and briefly lost radio contact after diverting their route; newspapers ran headlines reporting the two men killed in a crash before it emerged that they had simply landed off-schedule, first at El Paso and then in Guadalajara, avoiding bad weather and, by Grant's own account, rather enjoying the anonymity of being presumed dead. Hughes's later years were marked by severe obsessive-compulsive behavior, prescription drug dependency, and near-total seclusion, a decline that stood in sharp contrast to his earlier public daring.