Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder by Claudia Kalb Read Free Book Online

Already primed with fears about illness, he was now fated to worry that he, too, might meet an early demise. Raymond Fowler, a psychologist who was commissioned to write a psychological autopsy after Howard Hughes’s death in 1976, spent years reviewing Hughes’s personal records and interviewing people who knew him. In his account, Fowler described Hughes becoming depressed and preoccupied by his health after his parents’ deaths. The “loss of the only two people with whom he had a close relationship,” Fowler wrote, “deepened his fears of death and increased his vulnerability to later disorders.”
    Hughes was, however, able to harness whatever emotional fortitude he had and set out to claim his independence when he was just 18 years old. Barely an adult, he rebuffed attempts by his grandparents and Rupert Hughes, his father’s brother, to provide him a guardian, turning instead to the inheritance he received from his father’s estate. The money was mostly bankrolled in shares of the Hughes Tool Company, the successful business Howard Hughes Sr. had founded to manufacture a revolutionary oil well drilling bit that could grind through hard rock. Young Howard had no interest in running the business’s day-to-day affairs but was happy to reap its financial benefits. Not long after his father died, Hughes dropped out of Rice University and married Ella Rice (her great uncle had founded the original Rice Institute). A Houston socialite two years his senior, she wed Howard in the early summer of 1925.
    Within just a few months, the young couple had packed up their belongings and moved to Hollywood, where Hughes set his sights on the competitive world of moviemaking. Though inexperienced in cinema, he had mingled with Hollywood producers and actors at the home of his uncle Rupert, who had become a successful scriptwriter. And Hughes had two other advantages: family money and bullish determination. In just a few years, he would make his first big box-office hit,
Two Arabian Knights
, a comedy featuring the zany adventures of a pair of American soldiers on the lam from a World War I POW camp.
    Hughes’s achievements in Hollywood surpassed the expectations of skeptics, who initially viewed him as nothing more than an amateur with wads of money. In 1929, the inaugural year of the Academy Awards,
Two Arabian Knights
won an Oscar for directing, and a second film Hughes produced,
The Racket
, was nominated for outstanding picture. His successes propelled Hughes to celebrity status. But he also overworked himself, spending endless hours on sets or in editing rooms, and straining his marriage.
    Around this time, in his early 20s, Hughes’s disconcerting behaviors began to emerge. Obsessive-compulsive disorder often strikes in adolescence or early adulthood, when life is in flux. For Hughes, one of the condition’s earliest manifestations was fear of germs, a phobia he shared with his mother. He “gargled often and avoided people with colds,” Fowler wrote in his analysis. “One time, when he found out that an actress with whom he had been having an affair had been exposed to venereal disease, he stuffed all of his clothes in canvas bags and ordered them burned.”
    Anxiety and stress are triggers for OCD, and Hughes was bedeviled by both, especially during filming and production of his epic World War I movie,
Hell’s Angels
. Shooting began in October 1927, just after
Two Arabian Knights
debuted, and continuedalmost incessantly for more than three years as Hughes fixated on every detail, editing and reediting film at all hours. Hughes’s demands went beyond those of even the most difficult Hollywood taskmasters. OCD is characterized by perfectionism and an overwhelming need to control one’s environment—qualities that defined the way Hughes operated. He insisted on using authentic fighter planes rather than replicas, requiring a ground crew of more than 100