After winning her first Academy Award in the early 1930s, Katharine Hepburn followed it by playing a hillbilly girl in the justly forgotten Spitfire. Luise Rainer won two back-to-back Best Actress Oscars a few years later, followed by a half-dozen movies no one remembers and an early retirement.

By the advent of the 1970s, Howard Hughes, the legendary aircraft and electronics magnate and former movie producer (Hell’s Angels, The Outlaw), had withdrawn into heavily guarded seclusion, even as he continued to run his industrial and resorts empire. Very few had even seen him in years and journalists had been without access to him for a decade and a half. Around this time, Bing Crosby started a television special that was built on the idea of killing time with a song which included the line, “Something to do ’til they find Howard Hughes.”