End of the Party?

Even amid the zany opulence of the Hollywood set, Hal Braxton Hayes set a standard for show-offs to aspire to. A self-made millionaire, he liked to throw frequent parties for 200 to 300 guests in his $600,000, six-level surrealistic home carved out of a mountainside in Beverly Hills. Trim and handsomely greying at 48, Bachelor Hayes figured in gossip items with Joan Blondell and Barbara Hutton. and made the headlines for lasting two long months as the fiance-of-the-moment of Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. Hal Hayes also had another, essential side--the money-making side. He is the founder and sole proprietor of what he claims is the world's largest individually owned construction company, which is building about $60 million in housing projects at U.S. military bases.

Last week Hal Hayes's empire seemed in danger of falling all about him. For two weeks he had been reported missing. Then investigators and accountants descended on the Hollywood offices of his Hal B. Hayes Contractor Inc., spurred by the rising cries of creditors who claimed that Hayes owed them millions, and by Chicago's Continental Casualty Co., which had underwritten performance bonds on Hayes's projects. Subcontractors who said they had been unpaid stopped work for Hayes on an Army housing project in El Paso. At several other Hayes projects for the military, subcontractors complained that Hayes's complex of companies had not been paying them for their work. The Hayes organization called a halt to all these projects.

Around the World. In the midst of the furor. Hal Hayes suddenly reappeared at his Beverly Hills home, then called reporters to the bar of a Sunset Strip restaurant. He had not been "missing," he told . them, but had been around the world. He had been to the summit con ference in Paris, and to Hong Kong, Cairo and Beirut; he had been negotiating to build missile bases in France. Italy and Pakistan. "I haven't been hiding from anyone," said Hal Hayes. "Everybody is going to get paid. As of tonight, we've written $40 million worth of checks." At one point Hayes stopped reading his press handout to blurt to reporters, "Boy, I sure didn't write this myself." Then he went off to a Hollywood nightclub. Later, he was heard muttering, "I'm ruined, a ruined man"--and collapsed from what his secretary described as exhaustion and intoxication.

Hayes's latest troubles were not news to many of his subcontractors. So many actions (25) have been brought against Hayes's firm and its affiliates since last fall in El Paso, where Hayes is constructing 410 military housing units at a cost of $6.500,000, that they are now known locally as the "Hal Hayes type." One subcontractor, V. E. Lowry, said that Hayes had first avoided paying him for renting several pieces of earth-moving equipment, then offered him 50-c- on the dollar--and withdrew the offer after Lowry accepted. Last September, County Judge Woodrow Bean wrote to President Eisenhower, Senator Lyndon Johnson and others charging that "the conduct of the contractor has established a pattern which indicates a deliberate plan not to pay for equipment rented." 34-Minute House. Hayes has been an unusual operator in the construction industry from the start. When his builder father fell on hard times in the Depression, ij-year-old Hal took a job as a timekeeper for a San Francisco construction company, rose to general superintendent in a year, soon was out building houses on his own. Hayes believed that the way to find a market and a profit was to build houses cheaply on an assembly-line basis. A skilled inventor, he patented more than a dozen devices, including collapsible steel forms, that enabled him to put up entire houses in a few days. He once put one up in 34 minutes as a stunt.

As the money rolled in, it rolled out. Hayes found in 1950 that he was paying $70,000 a year for entertainment, so he set up his own nightclub in a $400-a-month Sunset Strip apartment with a dance floor, a waterfall, and rugs running up the walls. When he became engaged to Zsa Zsa Gabor (whom he made a vice president of his company), he gave her a 45-carat blue-white diamond so heavy that Zsa Zsa, who also knows a thing or two about publicity, could only gesticulate with her right, or free, hand. When the engagement broke up, Zsa Zsa, in unexplained violation of her usual practice, returned the diamond.

Hayes used all the building tricks he knew on his Beverly Hills house. It is entered through a narrow stairway flanked by huge concrete statues sculpted by Hayes himself; one represents Death, and the other, depicting an athlete who has fought his last battle and is dying, has the face of Hayes himself. The house has a figure 6-shaped swimming pool half inside the living room, lights that go on and off at the command of Hayes's voice, and such homey essentials as faucets that dispense Scotch, bourbon and champagne. There is also a bomb shelter stocked with a three-week supply of food, water and oxygen. For further protection, Hayes installed a heavy green living-room rug that climbs up a glass wall at the press of a button. Says he: "At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, windows blew out and lots of people were killed by glass. The rug catches it. Since the rug is so heavy, it stops gamma rays and neutrons as well."

At week's end Hal Hayes sat isolated and incommunicado among his green rugs and bomb shelters, all of which seemed insufficient protection for the jam he was in. No one knew for sure what his gamma-eyed creditors would do to his empire. But everyone in Hollywood agreed that it would be a shame indeed if anything put an end to those lovely parties in that all-out house.

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