Howard Hughes was America’s most famous playboy and rogue operator, an outlaw eccentric millionaire and hellraiser, ‘I can buy any man’ he once bragged, ‘and have any woman.’ And it was almost true. He stormed from bedroom to boardroom, from corporate bribary to Capitol Hill; his affairs with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Bette Davis and many others were as brief as they were stormy. he was a deeply involved in Watergate and in the Cuban missile crisis. He burgled his own office records when tax authorities were after him. And, despite a mystrious illness, he wheeled and dealed to the last days of his life.