Perhaps Hughes most enduring creation, however, is the modern airline. Before Hughes, air travel was risky and time consuming because planes had to fly around weather--a danger to the passengers and schedules. When he bought ailing Trans World Airlines and equipped it with new planes with pressurized cabins that could fly over weather, the non-stop cross country service we take for granted today became possible.

My acquaintance with Howard Hughes, written about at length elsewhere on this website, was, not to put too fine a point on it, because he was a tit man. Howard spotted me in the Miss Palm Springs beauty contest, put me in a few movies at RKO, and launched my career. Our relationship lasted from the time I was 16 until I was 20. What caught his eye, I'm sure, was my naturally large breasts. (I am occasionally asked if I have had breast enhancement. Answer: No. Never have.)

There's a scene in "The Aviator" that depicts Hughes' first meeting with Faith Domergue that comes very close to the scene in my book "Playing the Field" describing my first meeting with him. He asks Faith how old she is. Answer: 15. He asked me the same thing. Answer: 16. He even asks if she lived with her parents and how nice it was that she lived at home. The only thing he didn't ask her in the movie was the main thing he asked me: are you a virgin?

Leonardo DiCaprio handles Hughes' portrayal much better than I expected. It's hard for a man with such a pretty baby face to age the way Hughes did after the ravages of near-fatal plane crashes and the dietary obsessions that were part of his increasingly acute obsessive/compulsive disorder. But Leo stays in it and delivers a first rate performance.

Cate Blanchet as Katherine Hepburn just plain acts too much. It may be too much to ask of an actress to bring to life one of the screen's true originals and one of the quirkiest women to ever walk on a movie set. Kate Bekinsale as Ava Gardner is just not beautiful and poised enough. It's a good try.

And the movie ends at what I thought was an odd moment: Hughes has just managed to get the giant Spruce Goose flying boat off the water in L.A. harbor, and back at the dock amid the reception and congratulations, he has a disabling attack of OCD. He sees himself as a child saying he wants to be a great and famous man, and the credits roll. I felt cheated that we didn't get to see him retreat into Las Vegas and practically buy up the town. (Oh, yes, Howard more or less invented the modern Las Vegas too.)

It gets harder and harder for me to go to movies anymore, at least the ones that come out of mainstream Hollywood. The movies look slick (although the Spruce Goose sequence in this one looked, well, like the animation it was) and they have this pretense of being blockbusters. But they all seem to say what this one did: there's nothing much new in Hollywood and if only we had another Howard Hughes to dream up something. --Mamie