Check, Please!

Away back, Harry Truman's Senate War Investigating Committee had taken a couple of quick sniffs at the war contracts let to Howard Hughes, the West Coast plane builder, movie producer and bachelor millionaire. Last February, the SWIC, now headed by Maine's loud and mistrustful Owen Brewster, sniffed at Hughes again. The committee was still sniffing cautiously last week when a rank outsider, slight, swarthy Society Columnist Igor Cassini (Cholly Knickerbocker), suddenly lit on an angle that took the sniffing out of congressional back rooms and into the headlines. The Hughes probe was loaded with girls.

That was enough for the summer-becalmed tabloids. They sailed into the story with shrieks of joy and thankful indignation. They were sure they saw squads of scantily clad models, actresses and whatnots, running in & out of New York and Hollywood bars, house parties, nightclubs, swimming pools, hotels--hotly pursued by grinning generals and Government administrators. Was this any way for generals to behave?

The motives of the Brewster investigation got lost in a Scotch mist, while front pages bloomed with a mixture of cheesecake and pious duckings about "babes, booze, and brass." Then came the names.

Elliott, Of Course. First off there was tall, heavy-lidded, 41-year-old Howard Hughes, who very nearly killed himself recently in his own experimental plane, and who, as producer of The Outlaw, made the bust of Jane Russell famous from coast to coast. Then there was a sleek and portly Hughes pressagent and talent scout named Johnny Meyer. Meyer, it appeared, had been a great spender of Hughes's money. And whom had he entertained? None other than Interior Secretary Julius A. ("Cap") Krug, for one. According to the amazingly detailed Meyer expense sheets which the committee had seized last June, Hughes Aircraft had played host to at least ten parties for ex-WPB Administrator Krug. The papers drooled.

Next? There was Elliott Roosevelt, of course, and his actress wife, Faye Emerson. Meyer claimed to have picked up over $1,000 worth of their hotel, bar, party and race-track checks. On the distaff side, the names read like theater marquees or the roll call at Hollywood's Central Casting. Actresses Lana Turner, Linda Darnell and Ava Gardner were said to be on the committee's list. A leggy, blonde ex-riveter named Judy Cook declared that she had been paid $100 to put on her swimming act in the Hughes pool for visiting dignitaries. Actress Myrna Dell and Lovelies Marilyn ("Miss America, 1946") Buferd and Wendy Russell denied having been paid for their company. So did all the other girls.

But What? But what was the story? In two months of secret proceedings the committee had tried to find out 1) if Hughes and his wartime partner, Henry Kaiser, had used pressure to get and keep war contracts, and 2) what they had done with the $40 million the Government had given them to build war planes.

Where did the girls come in? All the accused, except the girls, kept mum. Elliott had been through newspaper probes before. He said nothing. But Secretary Krug, a Cabinet member now, had to say something. He admitted that he had attended a few of Meyer's parties. But he denied having attended at least three for which Meyer had him listed on his expense sheet. Meyer, said Krug wrathfully, was padding the account at his expense.

The inscrutable Mr. Hughes, who had been ignoring the whole thing in Hollywood, suddenly got mad. In an open letter to Brewster he blared: "Since you think it is so horrible for anyone to accept my hospitality, why don't you tell about the $1,400 worth of airplane trips you requested and accepted from me? . . . Why not tell that this investigation was really born the day that TWA [in which Hughes is the principal stockholder] first flew the Atlantic . . . the day TWA first challenged the theory that only Juan Trippe's great Pan American Airways had the sacred right to fly the Atlantic?"

In Washington, Senator Brewster explained the plane trips by saying that they were taken at Hughes's request. Then, on the theory that there had to be some, he began to hunt for facts.

Across the nation, both press and public hoped that the facts wouldn't get the story too far away from all those girls.

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