HOUSTON – Howard Hughes probably would have liked Friday, his 99th birthday.
With temperatures around the freezing mark in normally balmy Houston, the gravesite of the man whose name was invariably prefaced by “reclusive eccentric billionaire” was devoid of visitors.
That is not always the case for the final resting place of the businessman, whose name has been back in the news with the release this weekend of the Leonardo DiCaprio movie “The Aviator,” about Hughes’ Hollywood years.
Nearly three decades after Hughes died of kidney disease at age 72 on a plane traveling from Acapulco, Mexico, to his native Houston, his grave at 133-year-old Glenwood Cemetery remains a popular tourist site.
The 30-by-50-foot family plot also includes the grave of his father, Howard Robard Hughes, who died in 1924 and whose oilfield drilling tool company became the basis for the family fortune. His mother, who died in 1922 when her son was 16, also is buried there.
The gravesite is surrounded by an iron fence with a padlocked gate. On Friday, the gate was decorated with a pair of Christmas wreaths.
The back of the site is bordered by 6-foot-high semicircular concrete wall sculpture that includes a half-dozen brass vases. Legend has it the granite tombstone was commissioned by Hughes to be modeled after a key fob his father used to carry.
The site, while distinctive, does not prominently display the Hughes name and is dwarfed by far grander memorials elsewhere in the cemetery, where about 22,000 people are buried. The billionaire was buried in 1976 in an $8,100 casket and $2,100 vault, according to probate court documents.
In his later years, Hughes was a recluse with shaggy hair, long fingernails and a morbid fear of germs. It was not until 1990 that his estate, estimated at $1.13 billion, was settled in the courts, because he left no verified will and dozens of purported wills surfaced after his death.
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