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from page 47
The "Spruce Goose" is currently on display in the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Ore.
Congress had ponied up $18 million
for the project, and Hughes added $7
million of his own money to create a fly-
ing troop-and-cargo ship to ferry as
many as 700 soldiers to Europe. Its
impetus, early during World War II, was
the Nazi sinking of American troop
ships at an alarming rate.
Constructed of laminated birch —
not spruce — the plane was five stories
high with a wing span the length of a
football field, weighed 400,000 pounds
and had eight engines. But the war
ended before the plane was completed,
and Hughes lost interest in ever trying
to fly it again.
Formerly displayed at Long Beach
Harbor next to the old Queen Mao,
ocean liner, the Flying Boat now is in
the Evergreen Aviation Museum in
McMinnville, Ore.
Remembering Hughes
6
Disappointed that her husband was left
out of The Aviator, Ruth Grant is look-
ing forward to a documentary on the
plane and David's involvement yet to be
filmed and narrated by retired CBS
newsman Walter Cronkite for the
Discovery cable TV channel.
"All of the stories about Howard have
been greatly exaggerated,' she lamented.
"He really didn't become strange until
later in life."
She recalls some anti-Semitic episodes
during her husband's career with
Hughes, "but mainly because I think
some of David's co-workers were jealous
of his relationship with Howard, so they
took it out on David that way."
Ruth also is surprised that neither of
Hughes' wives is mentioned in The
Aviator. She knew actress Jean Peters, the
former Ohio State University beauty
queen whom Hughes married in 1957
and divorced in 1970. "Jean and I used
to ride around in her old Chevy," Ruth
mused. Before he came to Hollywood,
Hughes was married, from 1925 to
1929, to Ella Rice, of the Rice
University founding family in Houston,
"Pilot" Howard Hughes and "Co-Pilot" David Grant are pictured
in a book commemorating the Nov. 2, 1947, flight of the "Flying
Boat," or as it more commonly known, the "Spruce Goose."
12/17
2004
48
Texas.
Also left out of the film is any men-
tion of Hughes' ownership of RKO
Pictures and later Air West Airlines, and
his involvement with Nevada casinos.
There's a brief reference to noted
industrial designer Raymond Loewy,
who was well known in the Detroit area
automotive styling community. He
designed the Avanti car for Studebaker
and created slanted windshields and
built-in headlights. But Hughes men-
tions wanting to fire him as a designer of
his plane interiors.
Ruth Grant blames Hughes' cleanli-
ness fetish on his mother, who bathed
him constantly (re-created in The
Aviator's opening scene) because she was
worried about polio and other child-
hood diseases.
Hughes drank only milk, never shook
hands, carried his own soap with him,
washing his hands until they bled, and
even burned all of his clothes after
Hepburn moved out on him.
"He was always very businesslike,
A photograph of the young Howard
Hughes: :'All of the stories about Howard
have been greatly exaggerated," said David
Grant's widow, Ruth. "He really didn't
become strange until later in life."
although he told some dirty jokes once
in a while," David Grant recalled in later
years. "But it was strange to see him eat
banana cream pie a la mode for break-
fast.
Ruth says Hughes changed drastically
after crashing the XF-11 experimental
plane in Beverly Hills, Calif, shown in
the most graphic and realistic scene of
the movie. He survived with nine bro-
ken ribs, a collapsed lung and burns over
70 percent of his body. "He needed
drugs to counteract the pain and stayed
on them the rest of his life," she said.
The most humorous scene shows
Hughes trying to convince the dour-
looking movie censorship board to
approve actress Jane Russell's cleavage-
laden scenes for the controversial movie
The Outlaw. The board relented after he
showed them a number of photo
blowups of the cleavage — he
calls them "pectorals" — of every
other actress in the movies of that
time.
Coming through loud and clear
in The Aviator is Hughes' pen-
chant for spending a lot of money
— his or anyone else's.
"Howard was a good man to
work for," David Grant once
remembered. "He might ask you
how long it would take you to do
something, but he never said,
`How much will it cost?'" LI
David Grant, right, with Gen. James Doolittle in the "Spruce
Goose," in a photograph from the late 1980s taken at Long Beach
Harbor in California.
The Aviator, rated PG-13,
opens Saturday, Dec. 25, in
area theaters.