Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters

The subtitle here of "The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters" made me think this would be a compendium of correspondence and indeed kept from reading it from some time. This does draw a lot on Hughes memos (like his increasingly bizarre tissue-handling directions) to his rare letters as well as court documents, quotations from other memoirs and manuscripts and diaries not by Hughes. The actual telling, which may drift into novelization with imagined interior thoughts tells the tragic tale of the hotshot pilot playboy that became the first billionaire to become a coddled recluse drug addict that ultimately died intestate.

One of his many 40s-era love interests that he faithlessly chased (without permanent success, like Ava Gardner) was show more target="_top">Faith Domergue. Funny, until now I thought the Jennifer Jason Leigh character Daisy Domergue in The Hateful Eight had a made up last name. show less

Very very detailed biography. Starts with his death and the mysteries that surrounded it. If you liked the movie The Aviator this might be a good book for you. It fills in a lot of the blanks and some of the strange behaviors exhibited in that movie. Follows his life from when he was a sickly child. Moving around and around, losing his mother and then his father. His public persona as a ladies man, generally with young girls. Then his deterioration into different manias, locking himself away from the outside world for days to weeks to months on end. Again very detailed but after a while it just turns tedious.

Fine biography, sprinkled with twentieth century American history.