Whether he was courting public attention in the roles of aviator, playboy and entrepreneur, or shunning it as a recluse, Howard Hughes commanded headlines throughout his career. Yet the image of his life, his power and his business empire that caught the public imagination was almost completely false. Hughes s fortune actually came from his father s tool company and, later, from the Hughes Aircraft Company, yet these flourished simply because Hughes was prevented from interfering in their workings. In fact, Hughes was a disastrous businessman - no company under his control ever built a successful aircraft, he nearly destroyed TWA and completely destroyed a major film studio, and even his gambling empire in Las Vegas was crippled by corruption. His personal life was even more disastrous - he feared, rightly, that he was mad and spent most of his fortune and the last 18 years of his life trying to prevent anyone finding out. He spent his time naked, eating little, addicted to drugs and tranquillisers, a physical wreck, and died surrounded by men who nurtured his madness for their own ends.

Portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese movie The Aviator, Howard Hughes is legendary as a playboy and pilot—but he is notorious for what he became: the ultimate mystery man. Citizen Hughes is the New York Times bestselling exposé of Hughes’s hidden life, and a stunning revelation of his “megalomaniac empire in the emperor’s own words” (Newsweek). At the height of his wealth, power, and invisibility, the world’s richest and most secretive man kept what amounted to a diary. The billionaire commanded his empire by correspondence, scrawling thousands of handwritten memos to unseen henchmen. It was the only time Howard Hughes risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires. Hughes claimed the papers were so sensitive—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my innermost activities”—that not even his most trusted aides or executives were allowed to keep the messages he sent them. But in the early-morning hours of June 5, 1974, unknown burglars staged a daring break-in at Hughes’s supposedly impregnable headquarters and escaped with all the confidential files. Despite a top-secret FBI investigation and a million-dollar CIA buyback bid, none of the stolen secret papers were ever found—until investigative reporter Michael Drosnin cracked the case. In Citizen Hughes, Drosnin reveals the true story of the great Hughes heist—and of the real Howard Hughes. Based on nearly ten thousand never-before-published documents, more than three thousand in Hughes’s own handwriting, Citizen Hughes is far more than a biography, or even an unwilling autobiography. It is a startling record of the secret history of our times.

George J. Marrett, a former test pilot for aviator Howard Hughes, separates fact from fiction to tell the inside story of the genius who set flight speed records in the 1930s and went on to develop some of America’s most famous aircraft and weapons. The author draws on his wealth of experiences and those of other Hughes confidants to take readers inside Hughes’s complex and clandestine world. Marrett integrates stories of Hughes the ace pilot with Hughes the designer and businessman who became America’s first billionaire.

Adapted to a major motion picture by director Martin Scorsese, The Aviator stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes! His wealth was legendary. His passions were bizarre. Charles Higham's biography tells the truth about the money, the madness, and the man behind the enigma. Howard Hughes is one of the best known and least understood men of our times--famed for his wealth, his daring, and his descent into madness. Bestselling biographer Higham goes beyond the enigma to reveal the incredible private life of Howard Hughes: * his romances with the great stars of Hollywood--Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and numerous others * his forays into sadomasochism * his involvement with Richard Nixon and Watergate * his bizarre final years This is a compelling portrait of a unique American figure--in a story as revealing as it is unforgettable.

Howard Hughes was one of the most amazing, intriguing, and controversial figures of the twentieth century. He was the billionaire head of a giant corporation, a genius inventor, an ace pilot, a matinee-idol-handsome playboy, a major movie maker who bedded a long list of Hollywood glamour queens, a sexual sultan with a harem of teenage consorts, a political insider with intimate ties to Watergate, a Las Vegas kingpin, and ultimately a bizarre recluse whose final years and shocking death were cloaked in macabre mystery. Now he is the subject of Martin Scorsese's biopic The Aviator. Few people have been able to penetrate the wall of secrecy that enshrouded this complex man. In this fascinating, revelation-packed biography, the full story of one of the most daring, enigmatic, and reclusive power brokers America has ever known is finally told.