The Money - The Battle for Howard Hughes's Billions

Random House New York, 1997. Previous owner's initials and date at top of front endpaper, othewise good secondhand condition.

Howard Hughes's death in 1976 exposed a unique American horror story. Hughes wandered six years in exile in a self-constructed private asylum, the victim of such gross neglect that neither he nor his keepers dared disclose him to public view. When he died, he weighed ninety-two pounds and was indistinguishable from a street derelict, dehydrated and ravaged by drugs.

There was no discoverable will, and thousands of people became involved in a bitter struggle to claim his fortune. There were those who lied, fantasized, and forged in an effort to seize a prize that, in the opinion of most contemporary financial experts, was worth $2 billion. More recently, however, Hughes's worth at the time of his death has been shown to be in excess of $6 billion--approximately three times J. Paul Getty's wealth at his death.

Among the motley of contenders fighting for The Money were two powerful groups. On one side was Will Lummis, a soft-voiced conservative lookalike cousin of the billionaire, and twenty other Hughes cousins claiming legal heirship. On the other side were the people who had managed the empire of the phobia-ridden Hughes during his last six years. They were headed by an executive triumvirate: Chester Davis, Hughes's aggressive and abrasive chief counsel; Frank W. Bill Gay, his mousy, low-profile executive vice president; and Nadine Henley, a plump, peroxided one-time secretary.

The final irony of Hughes and The Money was that the fight for his fortune demolished the privacy it had bought for him at great cost in his later years. The secrets came flooding forth as the men who had hidden him and those who ran his businesses were put under oath and required to talk.