the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

Lesson #7
CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER
the kaiser-hughes fl ying boat
If you’re crazy enough to take on an incredibly diffi cult
project in an unrealistically short deadline, don’t ask an
even crazier person to help you get it done.
ON NOVEMBER 2, 1947, a pack of reporters and photographers
crowded onto a motorboat in Long Beach, California, harbor with their
host, Howard Hughes. They had come for a close-up look at what promised
to be either the most outlandish, astonishing triumph in human fl ight
since the Wright brothers, or else the most ill-conceived, embarrassingly
costly aviation fi asco ever.
Since Hughes was involved, it was a safe bet that they would get one
extreme or the other. To the tall, mustachioed forty-two-year-old multimillionaire,
a dandyish figure in his snap-brim fedora and gaudy two-tone
sports jacket, prudence was a thoroughly alien concept. The scion of a
Texas oil-well drill- bit fortune, he sank much of the vast wealth he inherited
as a teenager into two of the riskiest ventures around—moviemaking
and designing airplanes. He pursued both with a perfectionism that was
extreme, perhaps even for a clinically obsessive-compulsive personality
whose brain tissue had been battered like a piñata in a series of near-fatal
car and plane crashes. As a Hollywood producer-director, he thought
nothing of shooting as much as 166 feet of film for each foot that ended up
in the finished product, and once invented a special cantilevered metal