Visconti thought he had tapped a guilty truth; Thomas Mann's novella was not just a high-flown hymn to unrequited love, it was all about gay desire. By the time Thomas Mann died in 1955, a younger generation was ready to dismiss him as a starchy man of letters. Hughes, typically, has gone missing from his own biography.Death of the Dream Footnote: lawyers made at least $10m in fees from the litigation over the Hughes estate. And, yes, potential, I should think they probably are happy..
VISCONTI's film of Death in Venice ends with high camp; Dirk Bogarde dies lying in a deck-chair, his black hair-dye running down his face as he gazes at the beautiful boy on the beach It could have been called Love on the Lido. (How did he persuade big Hollywood stars to sleep with him? Silly question: mostly he asked them to marry him, which, quaintly, pre-60s, seemed to make it all right. He then reneged, of course.)But although Brown and Broeske can tell you this, and what he was wearing on a given day in February, 1945 (raccoon coat, serge suit), and that his body required just three16oz bottles of embalming fluid, they fail to give the slightest smell of this crazy guy. Was he happy? No, potential reader, he was not happy.What more need detain you, before you walk away, shaking your head and drawing a moral? Brown and Broeske, you should know, interviewed more than 600 people for this book, and have drawn on documentation which included surveillance reports from the FBI and other agencies, and court depositions, including 400,000 pages never previously seen. The bibliography lists 294 books, including some 25 other biographies and memoirs of Hughes.You will learn that Watergate, apparently, was prompted by fears that secret loans from Hughes to Nixon were about to be exposed; that he liked his lettuce shredded on the bias and that he kept a slide-rule to measure the size of the peas he customarily ate with the steak he customarily ate (too big was bad); that his starlets were not allowed to travel at more than two mph in cars over bumpy roads because the sudden motion might tear at their breast muscles; and that on New Year's Eve, 1956, he dined with three film star lovers, Susan Hayward, Jean Peters and Yvonne Shubert, in different rooms at the same hotel, each unknown to the other. He died unkempt and neglected by them in 1976 at the age of 70, weighing 93 lbs He had barely been seen in 18 years He was married twice and divorced twice but had no children His estate was contested for 14 years.
Yes, one of the key figures in the American defence industry at the height of the Cold War was completely barking.His aides fed his addictions and he became their prisoner. In later life he became addicted to various drugs and became increasingly reclusive in an attempt to escape the germs he believed had taken his parents at an early age He watched films and ate chocolate bars. He would touch nothing without covering it and his hands in tissue (earlier in life this meant that he would have to wait to get out of restaurant and hotel lavatories until somebody else opened the door) He bought most of Las Vegas. He was also diagnosed as suffering from Neurosyphilis and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). He kept the stable of starlets he used for occasional sex in a form of purdah, holding out to them the hope of film roles that rarely came.He built up a large network of aides who spied on his paramours, logging such things as their ice cream consumption.