Howard Hughes’ Hollywood: THE AVIATOR, Katharine Hepburn, HELL’S ANGELS, RKO

Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator

Long before Leonardo DiCaprio, Tommy Lee Jones played billionaire Howard Hughes (right) in the 1977 television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes. Jason Robards played the old and haggard Hughes in Jonathan Demme's comedy-drama Melvin and Howard (1980), for which Robards received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor (he lost to Ordinary People's Timothy Hutton). George Peppard played a fictionalized Hughes in Edward Dmytryk's 1964 soap opera The Carpetbaggers (Carroll Baker was the Jean Harlow-like sex/love interest), while Robert Ryan played another character somewhat inspired by Hughes in Max Ophüls' Caught (1949).

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Howard Hughes claimed that his troubled 1930 World War I aviation epic Hell's Angels was, at a cost of $4 million, the most expensive motion picture ever made. Its actual price tag, however, was $1.3 million. At a cost of $3,967,000, MGM's problem-plagued 1925 version of Ben-Hur, (mostly) directed by Fred Niblo and starring Ramon Novarro, remained the most expensive motion picture until Gone with the Wind in 1939.

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RKO contract player Katharine Hepburn was not considered box-office poison when she met Howard Hughes in the mid-'30s. She was, however, included in an infamous box-office poison list in 1938. Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners of America, published an article in The Independent Film Journal complaining of the "nil" box-office appeal of performers such as Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Fred Astaire, Edward Arnold, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Mae West.

Not mentioned in The Aviator is the fact that Howard Hughes loaned money to Hepburn so she could buy the film rights to her 1939 Broadway production of The Philadelphia Story. The play's phenomenal success led to Hepburn's triumphant return to films (via MGM) in 1940.

Also, by the time Katharine Hepburn met her Woman of the Year co-star Spencer Tracy in the early 1940s, Hepburn's affair with Howard Hughes had already ended.

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In 1948, Howard Hughes bought control of RKO, Katharine Hepburn's studio in the 1930s, and proceeded to wreck it. In the mid-'50s, he sold it to General Teleradio, a subsidiary of General Tire and Rubber, which owned several TV stations in the United States. RKO finally ceased producing movies in 1957. That same year, Desilu, owned by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, bought the studio lot. (Ironically, Ball had started her career as an extra at RKO in the early '30s.)