Indeed, apart from farming, music was Hughes’s most consuming passion. It pained him that he was so identified with the 80s alterna-pop of his teen films, since that music represented but a thimbleful of the many genres and idioms he enjoyed. His iTunes library filled several hard drives, and he planned the playlists for his sons’ weddings as carefully as he had the soundtracks for his movies. In recent years, he took to dispensing pre-loaded iPods to people he liked, much as he’d assiduously compiled mix tapes for Ringwald and Broderick in the old days. The last time he ever saw Hughes, in November 2008, Chris Candy, John Candy’s 25-year-old son, was the recipient of such an iPod, “an incredibly eclectic four-gig, thousand-song mix tape, basically,” Candy says. “I have a local radio show on a college station in L.A., and when John passed away, I just put that iPod on ‘shuffle’ and let it play as my tribute to him.” It was this iPod, returned on loan, that the Hughes family used as background music for Hughes’s funeral.

Last Picture

The evening of Wednesday, August 5, 2009, was a happy one for Hughes. He and Nancy had arrived in New York from Chicago in time to drop in on James and his wife, have dinner, and take lots of photographs and video of their new grandson. Hughes was conversationally “on fire” that night, James says, “in the best possible mood.” After dinner, parents bade good-bye to son and daughter-in-law with plans to meet again the next day.

The morning of August 6, Nancy awoke in her Manhattan hotel room to find her husband’s side of the bed empty, which was not unusual. It was Hughes’s custom to get up early and enjoy a morning constitutional when staying in New York. The routine provided him with an opportunity to get a head start on his relentless observing, sketching, and note-taking.

James was eagerly awaiting the chance to talk with his father about the death of the great screenwriter Budd Schulberg, whose obituary was in the papers that morning. Both Hugheses were fans of A Face in the Crowd, the connoisseur’s choice over Schulberg’s more celebrated On the Waterfront, and surely, James thought, a compelling John Hughes riff on the life and oeuvre of Schulberg was forthcoming.

But then the terrible news reached James, as it had already reached Nancy, and would soon reach John III back in Illinois: Hughes had collapsed on a sidewalk a few blocks from the hotel. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, near Lincoln Center, and pronounced dead of a heart attack.

His death was completely unexpected. Though he had been a chain-smoker for most of his adult life (Tareytons in his adman days, low-tar Carltons thereafter), he had finally kicked the habit in 2001. He had displayed no recent signs of ill health.

“I lost two people with his death,” John III says. “I lost my father, which comes with its own territory. But, really, that was second to losing him as a friend, collaborator, and mentor to my children.”

Says James, “You almost wanted to pick up the phone to talk about John Hughes’s dying with him.”

The notebook that Hughes was carrying with him when he died, a red Smythson Panama, contained no new entry for August 6, though August 5 was filled with a detailed description of the hotel—as if setting the scene in a screenplay—and warm notes about his visit with his grandson. The family also recovered the camera that Hughes had been carrying on his last walk. It contained a few photographs he’d taken that very morning: neatly composed streetscapes. “It’s some small comfort to us that we know from the spot where the ambulance arrived, and from where his last picture was taken, that it was a small distance—that it was sudden,” James says.

More comforting still, James says, is that, “when he passed away, he was doing something he loved. He was out note-taking and observing”—even if the notes were mental and photographic rather than pen-to-paper. The point is: John Hughes never stopped writing until his heart stopped beating.

David Kamp is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.