Pop History Moment: Howard Hughes Crashed And Burned

On this day in 1946 eccentric industrialist and zillionaire Howard Hughes nearly died when the XF-11 spy plane prototype he was piloting plummeted into a Beverly Hills neighborhood shortly after 7:20 in the evening; having developed a technical difficulty during the flight, Hughes had been aiming the doomed plane for the golf course at the Los Angeles Country Club to minimize damage to both the aircraft and surrounding properties, but fell about three hundred yards short, crashing into three nearby homes.

The first of these - at 802 North Linden Drive, belonging to Dr. Jules Zimmerman, the 'dentist to the stars' - had its red-tiled roof sheared off; the second, belonging to film star Rosemary DeCamp and her husband Municipal Justice John Astin Shidler, sustained damage to its master bedroom and lost both its garage and a row of poplar trees. The third home - at 808 North Whittier, belonging to Lt. Col. Charles A. Meyer, known for his role in the Nuremberg Trials - was destroyed by a subsequent fire (caused by the explosion of the plane's fuel tank). Amazingly, no one was killed in the accident.

It was actor Dennis O'Keefe who summoned the police and fire department to the scene, although no one had to summon the crowds of eager on-lookers who themselves came from miles around to survey the devastation. Hughes was rescued from the wreckage by Master Sergeant William L. Durkin, of the US Marine Corps, and later taken to Good Samaritan Hospital where although he survived his grievous injuries his life definitely took a turn for the worse; friends and family later cited this event as to blame for his morphine addiction and well-documented freakiness later in life.

The entire scene was re-enacted in Martin Scorsese's 2004 biopic The Aviator, in which Hughes was of course played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
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Remembering... Howard Hughes

While a more standard news outlet might report that on this day in 1976 Howard Hughes died, there's very little that's standard about the Pop Culture Institute; here we'd be more likely to debate precisely when the handsome and dashing aviator known as Howard Hughes died and was replaced by the agoraphobic Howard Hughes who was scared witless of germs. Nevertheless, it's a debate which could continue for years...

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As long ago as the early 1930s Hughes was displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder with regards to the size of peas on his dinner plate; as a film producer he was a micro-managing control freak (even more than usual), often overlooking the quality of the picture as a whole in favour of fixating on some minor flaw in costuming, for instance, as he did during production of The Outlaw. By 1947 he'd taken to locking himself away from the world, surrounded only by a few flunkies to whom he issued variable and complicated instructions; for the most part he would spend the last 30 years of his life in such a reclusive state, using his vast wealth to insulate himself from everyone and everything.

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Certainly, he'd survived numerous plane crashes - including that of the XF-11 in July 1946 - which left Hughes addicted to various pain medications, but he may also have been susceptible to a hereditary mental illness which, given the judgements and pharmaceuticals of the day, no one at the time could have done anything to allay...

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