“The Aviator” is a most suitable title for this film, since the word itself is no longer in common parlance, and thus harkens back to the romantic early days of air travel, when a person who flew in planes was an adventurer, an AVIATOR. The legendary Howard Hughes was a pioneer in this field, beginning in the 20’s and continuing into the 60’s. Simultaneously, Hughes sailed the treacherous waters of Hollywood, making a legend for himself there both romantically and cinematically. “The Aviator”, the film, directed by Martine Scorcese and starring DiCaprio, Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner), and Cate Blanchett (Katharine Hepburn) tells the story of Howard Hughes early days, when the handsome, willful, wealthy Hughes was at the top of his game, and the world was his oyster. Behind closed doors though, there was another scenario playing itself out, since Hughes was also victimized by disabling mental defects, including germ phobias, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and Scopophobia, a fear of being looked at.

HOWARD HUGHES

Howard Hughes was born on December 24, 1905, and at age 19 inherited his father's immensely profitable oil drilling-bit enterprise, the Hughes Tool Company. Hughes senior had invented an incredibly strong drill head that was capable of going through layers of hard rock, and this was the drill that triggered the rapid expansion of the oil industry in America.

When first his mother, and then two years later, his father died, Howard was left a vast fortune and he used it to pursue his three main interests - movies, airplanes and young women. Apart from Ava Gardner, who was 21 when she met Hughes, then 38, in February 1943, while she was divorcing her first husband, Mickey Rooney and with whom Hughes had a 22-year on-again off-again relationship, and Katharine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett. “The female Daniel Day Lewis. You have to be a true chameleon and genius to play Katharine Hepburn,” says DiCaprio.”) who left Hughes to pursue an affair with the very-married Spencer Tracy, he reportedly also had affairs with a mind-boggling list of Tinseltown's most celebrated female stars including Jean Harlow (who he cast in “Hells Angels”, transforming her from a bit player to a star), Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Ginger Rogers and Bette Davis.

Says DiCaprio about Hughes’ romantic escapades,“With Howard it’s an interesting dynamic because I honestly feel that as much as he had love and adoration for these women and genuinely cared for them, he kind of looked at them like airplanes. He was a technical genius and obsessed with finding the new, faster, biggest airplane and it was the same with women. He was always finding the new, hotter female to go out with.”

To say that his busy love-life was tempestuous is putting it mildly. One of the most notorious incidents, boldly featured in the film, was a fight that he had with the tempestuous Ava Gardner, in which she almost kills him. In her 1990 biography, “Ava-My Life” published just before her sudden death, she writes about the night she injured him.

Hughes had first slapped her hard across the face. "I'd never been hit like that before in my life," she recounts. “He walked away from me across the room, and let me tell you, I was not going to hit back, I was going to kill the bastard - stone dead!”

"I groped around the bar for something to throw at him, the lamp, anything, and my hand closed around the handle of a large heavy bronze bell - the sort that town criers use in England - and I threw it at him with all my strength. He had just half-turned back toward me when it hit him, bang, between the temple and the cheek. He went over backward, with the blood pouring out. And I was right after him. He wasn't dead yet, and I was going to kill him. I grabbed a big hardwood chair - God knows how I lifted it - and lurched over to smash him to death."

Gardner raised the chair just as a maid entered the room who advised her to drop it. Hughes needed stitches for a deep head wound, but he forgave Gardner and requested another date a month later. In fact, Gardner married bandleader Artie Shaw and then Frank Sinatra after her brief marriage to Rooney - and Hughes invariably came on the scene whenever she was in-between husbands.