Mad Millionaires

He left Las Vegas for the Bahamas, and then moved to Mexico,

reportedly to get codeine more easily. He made one public phone call in

1972 to repudiate a book allegedly based on his memoirs, but for the most part

kept to himself. Only his security guards and doctors saw him. By

now, he was injecting codeine, breaking needles into his arms that later showed

up on X-rays during the autopsy. He wore tissue boxes on his feet, wore no

clothing, and let his hair and nails grow out. Eating candy bars, his

teeth rotted and fell out because he never brushed them. He urinated on

the floor and never bathed, but might sit on the toilet for twenty hours at a

time. He still watched movies obsessively, mostly Ice Station Zebra, his

favorite. On his way to a hospital in Houston in 1976, he apparently died

of heart failure. From Houston, his fingerprints were sent to the FBI to

affirm that this corpse was indeed that of the legendary Howard Hughes—mostly

for the treasury department’s purposes.