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

mechanics. He demanded that scenes be filmed repeatedly to get a portrayal he deemed powerful and realistic. At one point, he wanted a more imposing backdrop for a sequence that involved dozens of warring aircraft diving through the sky. The clear blue vistas of Southern California were too flat—he needed puffy white stuff—but nature refused to cooperate, so Hughes moved his filming operation north to Oakland, where he found the clouds he was looking for.
    The film racked up costs of almost $4 million (about $54 million in today’s dollars), an extravagance that shocked even Hollywood, and wore out the people who worked for him. His wife, fed up with his relentless schedule, packed up and moved back to Texas in the midst of filming. (They were divorced in 1929.) But Hughes carried on, with tireless intensity. He was unbendable, even when his vision was reckless. Advised to abandon his plan to have one of the planes spin down to earth, Hughes ordered it done anyway, killing one of his mechanics in a fiery crash.
    Despite these tribulations,
Hell’s Angels
made Hughes a big man in Hollywood and fueled his passion for aviation as both hobby and business. Two years before Hughes was born, the Wright brothers had succeeded in flying the first powered plane for 59 seconds; by the time he was five, they were manufacturing airplanes and training pilots. Flying saturated Hughes’s childhood, and he wanted in on all of it as he grew up—the new machines,the soaring heights, the adventure. An accomplished pilot, Hughes liked to take his small planes out at night off the California coastline before returning to the busy lights of Los Angeles in the dark. Being high in the air offered him solitude and a kind of mastery over his surroundings that was unattainable anywhere else. In his account, Fowler suggested that flying may have alleviated Hughes’s anxiety: “For Hughes, the landings were a reassuringly familiar activity that helped him avoid social stresses while allowing him to control at least some part of his environment.”
    Flying was an escape from what Hughes liked least about the world below: the clamor of celebrities and the never ending film extravaganzas and soirees. He was a “different man in the air,” Barlett and Steele note in their biography. “No longer the shy, tense, highly nervous man people saw on the ground, aloft he was at ease behind a dizzying array of toggle switches and gauges, integrated with the sound of the engine, the feel of the controls, the magnificent view of the earth.”
    Hughes loved airplanes, and he was determined to make them better and faster—fast enough, even, to set new flying records. In 1932, he formed the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division he created out of his father’s tool company, and soon after built the Hughes H-1, a racing jet. Taking the controls himself, Hughes took the plane up over a flat expanse of land in Southern California and gunned it to 352 miles an hour, setting a new speed record before running out of gas and crash-landing in a beet field. In 1938, he set his sights even higher, aiming to beat his competitors at circling the globe. In his twin-engine passenger plane, Hughes and his crew made it from New York to Paris in just 16.5 hours, slashing Lindbergh’s transatlantic record by half. The entire trip, full circle, took 91 hours, setting a new world record. As he approached New York City, “twenty-five thousand cheering, hysterical people werethere to greet him,” according to Barlett and Steele. A ticker-tape parade followed the next day, with more than one million fans lining the sidewalks to see Hughes, the aviator, in person.
    None of these achievements, however, could undo the growing turmoil in Hughes’s mind, which would snowball when he became tangled up in a fiasco over an infamous flying boat. In 1942, during World War II, Hughes received a government contract to build the largest