Howard Hughes: The Billionaire Recluse Whose Death Triggered the Largest Estate Battle in US History

What Happened

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was a man of staggering contradictions. He was a daring aviator who set world speed records, a film producer who made Hollywood blockbusters, an industrialist who built the Hughes Aircraft Company into a defense giant, and a business titan who controlled TWA, RKO Pictures, and vast real estate holdings. He was also crippled by obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic pain from a near-fatal 1946 plane crash, and progressive deafness that together drove him into extreme reclusiveness in his final decades.

Hughes married Ella Botts Rice in 1925, when he was 19 and she was 20. They moved to Hollywood, where Hughes plunged into filmmaking while Ella was increasingly marginalized. She filed for divorce in 1929, citing Hughes's neglect and the Hollywood lifestyle she could not tolerate. There was no significant settlement — Hughes was wealthy but not yet a billionaire. For the next three decades, Hughes dated a parade of Hollywood's most beautiful women — Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, and Ava Gardner among them — but did not remarry.

In 1957, Hughes secretly married actress Jean Peters in a small ceremony in Tonopah, Nevada. Peters was, by some accounts, the only woman Hughes ever truly loved. But his OCD had become debilitating — he lived in sealed hotel rooms, surrounded by Kleenex boxes, eating only specific foods prepared in specific ways. Peters reportedly communicated with him primarily by phone and memo even while living in the same house. She endured 13 years of this existence before filing for divorce in 1970. She requested lifetime alimony of $70,000 per year (adjusted for inflation) and waived all claims to Hughes's vast estate — a decision that seemed modest at the time but proved prescient.

Hughes died on April 5, 1976, aboard an airplane en route from Acapulco to Houston. He was emaciated, dehydrated, and nearly unrecognizable. His estate was estimated at $2.5 billion. No valid will was ever found. A document known as the 'Mormon Will' surfaced — a handwritten will that purportedly left money to various parties including the Mormon Church and a gas station attendant named Melvin Dummar who claimed to have once given Hughes a ride. After a seven-month trial in 1978, a jury unanimously rejected the Mormon Will as a forgery. In the absence of any valid will, Hughes's estate was divided among 22 of his maternal and paternal cousins under intestacy laws in 1983. It was the largest estate battle in American history at the time.

Legal Breakdown: Hidden Assets

What This Means for Your Divorce