The Money: The Battle for Howard Hughes's Billions Book

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. 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. When Hughes died, both Texas and California claimed him as their taxable own, setting off years of litigation that went several times to the U.S. Supreme Court. 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.

Upon his death, with no discoverable will in sight, more than 1,000 people queued up to claim the fortune of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. Told by the writer who first revealed the true story about Hughes's final years in the bestselling Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years, here is the bizarre--and truly almost unbelievable--story of what happened to Howard Hughes's money. 8 pp. photos. 288 pp. Author tour. National ads, publicity. 30,000 print.