the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 80
which he preferred to suitcases. Nevertheless, when Hughes fi nally re-
turned to work in the fall, he continued to insist on moonlighting as a test
pilot. In April 1946, he crashed a prototype for the F-11 reconnaissance
plane into a house in Beverly Hills, suffering such severe injuries that he
spent more than a month in the hospital. When he recovered, he agreed to
pay the government $5 million in compensation if he ever crashed another
defense project.
Meanwhile, the flying boat was inviting increasing scrutiny from
Republican members of Congress, who were eager to expose any improprieties
in war spending by the Demo crats. Though Hughes hadn’t made
any money on the fl ying boat—in fact, he ended up spending the equivalent
of $63 million in today’s dollars to finish it—he nevertheless was
summoned to Washington to testify before a Senate investigation led by
Senator Ralph Owen Brewster of Maine. In August, amid the glare of
klieg lights and whir of newsreel cameras, Hughes stood at the witness
table and gave a performance whose transcript reads like an absurdist play
by Samuel Beckett. He gave sarcastically officious answers to even the
simplest of questions, when he wasn’t demanding the opportunity to
cross-examine Brewster about his ties to Pan American Airlines, a rival of
Hughes-owned TWA. In a moment of candor, however, Hughes admitted
that he was unsure whether the flying boat would actually ever fl y. He
added that if the project was judged a failure, he would probably leave the
country and never return.
According to Barton, Hughes returned to California and for the
next three months spent every night working on the flying boat, which
had been moved, in pieces, to a dock on Terminal Island in Long Beach
harbor. He sometimes brought his then girlfriend, actress Jean Peters,
who sat and watched him supervise work on the flying boat’s engines. As
an executive, Hughes often was disinterested in details, but when it came
to the precise location switches in the cockpit, he was fastidious to the
point of mania. “Howard probably spent more time positioning controls
and instruments than he did anything,” an engineer on the project told