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Hughes: The aviator's final flightBy Michael Browning
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 23, 2005
The grim-faced old man with matted locks and one drooping eye seems to be sinking back into his pillow, vanishing below the surface of the yellowed paper forever. He wears a curiously angry expression, half Old Testament prophet, half homeless derelict.
But he is no derelict. He's worth $2 billion. He's Howard Hughes. He's dying.
He looks dreadful, a far cry from the youthful Howard Hughes portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's new film, The Aviator. This is a man teetering on the very limit of life.
An extraordinary chain of events led to the creation of this, the last graphic image of the eccentric hypochondriac who blazed an arrowy trail across the skies and through the bedrooms of Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s. No photographs of the reclusive Hughes exist for the last 20 years of his life, from 1956-76. There is only this charcoal deathbed sketch, done by Shirl Solomon of Palm Springs, at the request of NBC newsman Fred Francis.
"I was a courtroom artist for NBC in those days," recalls Solomon, a brisk woman who works as a document authenticator now.
"Anyway, Fred Francis called me up and said: 'Howard Hughes died today. I've got the two pilots who flew him from Acapulco to Houston. Can you talk to them and produce a sketch?'
"So they flew me in a helicopter from Palm Beach International down to Fort Lauderdale, and I sat down with the two pilots, Jeff Abrams and Roger Sutton. We only had half an hour before the broadcast, so I had to work fast. We did an interview. I asked questions. They described how he looked.
"They told me he was brought on board the airplane in Acapulco on a stretcher with a blanket over him. He was alive when they carried him onto the plane, but apparently he died en route. He died on April 5, 1976, and I spoke with the pilots on (April) the sixth."
Pilots fed her details
Working rapidly, alternating back and forth between the pilots, Solomon roughed out her sketch of the moribund Hughes. The pilots fed her details as she drew.
"They said he had a long face, bleary eyes, as though there were rheum in his eyes. One eye was open, one eye was shut. He had a long, aquiline nose with flaring nostrils. They kept referring to his hair. They said he had long, straggly hair and his fingernails were very long also."
She holds the frail sketch sheet in her hands. "That was 29 years ago," she muses.
Solomon was an experienced artist, used to working directly with ink on paper. For this assignment, however, she chose charcoal on beige pastel paper, and lightened the sketch here and there with streaks of white pastel.
"I had to be very loose, very free, very instinctive. I think even though the drawing was made from a description and not from life, it has a lot of immediacy. These pilots had been on the spot with Hughes, and now I was on the spot with them less than a day later. I could pick up a lot of their feelings from the intonation of their voices.
"They felt Howard Hughes' pain, his agedness, his incapacity to move. They told me one side of his mouth was sagging down. Maybe he had had a stroke or something like that.
"I got a feeling of compassion from the two pilots. They felt sorry for him. Here was a man who had been such a dynamo during his lifetime, and now he had become so weak, so totally defenseless. If you look at him in this sketch, he seems 100 years old. Yet he was only 70 when he died.
"I guess it was the drugs."
Two mental breakdowns
Hughes had suffered two mental breakdowns, one in 1944 and another in 1958. He moved to Mexico toward the end of his life to have easier access to codeine. X-rays taken during the Hughes autopsy showed fragments of hypodermic needles broken off in his arms. The flight from Acapulco to Houston, with Abrams and Sutton at the controls of the plane, was his last. He died of apparent heart failure en route to the U.S.
"Such was the mystery and power surrounding his life," write biographers Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele in Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes, "that when he was pronounced dead on arrival at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, on April 5, 1976, his fingerprints were lifted by a technician from the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office and forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington.
"Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon, for federal tax purposes, wanted to be sure that the dead man was indeed Howard Hughes. After comparing the fingerprints with those taken from Hughes in 1942, the FBI confirmed the identity."
The crusty, germophobic old billionaire glares up from the paper pinned to Shirl Solomon's easel in Palm Springs. An aviator to the last, Howard Hughes died aloft, expiring in the sky.
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This article originall appeared online at: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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***This article was originally published by the sources above and is copyrighted by them. Real Acapulco offers it on our website for educational purposes only in accordance with the 'fair use' of copyrighted material as indicated in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
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