Howard Hughes: Tinseltown’s new take on high-profile recluse
The super-rich recluse Howard Hughes keeps popping up in pop culture, 40 years after his death.
The billionaire entrepreneur, film producer, aviation pioneer and famed womanizer who long had a fascination with the movie industry — and vice versa — is a supporting player in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply (in theaters Wednesday), the latest film to offer its take on the mysterious Tinseltown figure.
In the comedy/drama set in 1958 Los Angeles, a young actress (Lily Collins) signs a contract with RKO Pictures, run by Hughes (Beatty), and falls for her driver (Alden Ehrenreich) — a no-no for those in their eccentric boss’ employ.
Hughes keeps a hold on Hollywood “because he remains elusive,” says film historian Leonard Maltin. “There’s a mystique surrounding him that’s never gone away because he operated in such secretive and bizarre fashion.”
Part of his aura can be attributed to the fact that he was making movies such as Hell’s Angels and the original 1930s Scarface when filmgoers “didn’t know everything about celebrities as we do now with tabloids and social media,” says Fandango.com correspondent Alicia Malone.
Since his death in 1976 at 70, Hughes has popped up as a character in films, most notably as played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2004 biopic The Aviator, which won five Oscars. Jason Robards played the enigmatic man in 1980’s Melvin and Howard, which centered on Hughes’ will, and Terry O’Quinn channeled the mogul in the 1991 action-adventure The Rocketeer.
Everybody has a take because no one had a strong handle on his character, Maltin figures. “Even the people around him had different views — there’s no unanimity about him. He could be kind, he could be generous, but more often he was mercurial and arbitrary to a point of almost literal madness.”
In showing Hughes’ quirks — shying away from in-person meetings, being weirded out by small children, getting OCD about his ice-cream flavors — Beatty drew on stories from people who actually knew him.
“He’s been a source of amusement for a long time for me,” Beatty says. In Beatty’s nearly 60 years in Hollywood, he has met people who knew Hughes, “and they all quite liked him but found him impossible to deal with because he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.”
Beatty was never introduced to Hughes but says he had “comical near-brushes” with him. By 1964, Beatty was famous enough in Hollywood to garner the attention of tabloids, and while staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he sensed he was being spied on by two men in the suite next door.
When Beatty called to complain, the hotel operator said they were with Hughes.
“I said, ‘Are you telling me that I’m in the next suite from Howard Hughes?’ ” Beatty recalls. “They said, ‘Well, we don’t know. ... He has seven suites. And confidentially, he also has five bungalows.’ I thought, that’s material for some kind of movie.”