the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER 73
brassiere in an attempt to showcase his star’s ample fi gure. As an aircraft
builder, he pushed the envelope even more, lavishing his millions on radi-
cal, brilliantly innovative designs that turned out to be impractical.
On this par tic u lar chilly, windswept morning, Hughes had sum-
moned the press to witness the unveiling of Hughes Aircraft Company’s
most controversial project, which now loomed before them in the water.
Even among a bunch of jaded scribes who thought they’d seen it all already,
jaws no doubt dropped at the sight of the Hughes H-4 Hercules
seaplane. Tall as an eight-story building and with a wingspan longer than
a football field, it was by far the most gigantic airplane ever built. Its eight
engines had propellers seventeen feet in diameter. But size was just one of
the aircraft’s mind-boggling attributes. Due partly to wartime metal
shortages and partly to Hughes’s stubbornness, the two-hundred-ton craft
was made of plywood instead of metal. It was held together not by nails,
but by a special sort of glue—almost as if it were a twelve- year- old boy’s
hobby project instead of a military prototype in which the U.S. Treasury
and Hughes had invested a sum equal to $225 million in today’s dollars.
When defense officials commissioned the project in 1942, they envisioned
a fleet of supertransports that would turn the tide of World War
II by rushing an army of soldiers and tons of supplies across the Atlantic
while soaring safely above the German U-boats that menaced the Allies’
oceangoing ships. But the war ended with Hughes still laboring on the
prototype, fi xated inscrutably on details such as the perfect arrangement
of instrument gauges in the cockpit. Hughes, who had once been honored
with a ticker-tape parade in New York for his exploits as an aviator, had
metamorphosed in the public eye from American hero to profl igate pariah.
Critics ridiculed the now unneeded H-4 as the “fl ying lumberyard”
and the “Spruce Goose”—and questioned whether it could even fly at all.
Worse, they insinuated that Hughes was a corrupt grafter, whose lavish
lifestyle and succession of affairs with beautiful movie actresses was somehow
subsidized by taxpayers.
In truth, the H-4’s plywood hull and wings were mostly birch—