Howard Hughes' Messy Legacy

Shocking details surface about drugs and deceit

Even more than great wealth, Howard Hughes prized privacy. Now, 17 months after his death from kidney failure in an air ambulance over Texas, the last shrouds of secrecy that enveloped his reclusive existence are finally being peeled away. And the disclosures are adding zing to the already roughhouse brawl over Hughes' financial empire, which was valued at $2.3 billion in the late 1960s. It is being racked by internal strife, buffeted by lawsuits and threatened by a plethora of alleged Hughes wills.

Some shocking details of Hughes' hidden years leaked out earlier (TIME cover, Dec. 13). Now new evidence, taken in the Los Angeles Superior Court in cases to determine Hughes' legal residence, is becoming public--and it only confirms and elaborates the worst suspicions about his decline and death. According to sworn testimony from his personal aides and doctors, Howard Hughes became addicted to the tranquilizer Valium. As a total recluse living in a series of penthouse hideaways, he popped large-dosage 10-mg. blue tablets, which his personal aides faithfully recorded as BBs (for blue bombers) in the daily log that they kept on his activities. On many occasions, Hughes gulped as much as 40 mg. at one time, a dosage that exceeds even the recommended daily medication for agitated mental patients. After the pill popping, he would doze for hours. In a deposition given in June, Dr. Homer Clark, one of Hughes' three physicians, conceded that Valium was not required for medical reasons. Hughes was evidently taking the pills for mental sensations.

In addition to his tranquilizer habit, Hughes injected himself with a mysterious clear liquid that knocked him out so violently that the syringe was often left dangling in his arm. According to Personal Aide Howard Eckersley, the liquid was a codeine solution. Hughes, who called the drugs "my goodies," would toss a codeine tablet into a water-filled hypodermic and shake the syringe until the pill melted. Then he would give himself a shot; if he could find a vein in his wizened body, he would mainline the injection.

During this period, Hughes was the largest private employer in Nevada and provided the cover for the CIA'S Glomar Explorer operation. The executives of Summa Corp.--which was solely owned by Hughes and still oversees his vast real estate, gambling and hotel interests and airline--pretended that the old man was alert and bossing the company from behind the scenes. Actually, he was leading a totally disoriented life. Hughes' daily log, which is expected to be introduced as evidence in pending court actions, recounts that he spent most of his waking hours watching thriller movies, going to the bathroom (for years he suffered from constipation) and toying with his food (he would often spend two hours nibbling on a single piece of chicken). One poignant entry in the log came on Nov. 9, 1971, at 1:10 a.m. while Hughes was watching The Ipcress File, a 1960s flick about brainwashing. An aide noted that Hughes could not stand to watch the torture scene in reel three, probably because he was too tortured himself.

Hughes left much agony behind for others. During his lifetime, he always played off both friends and enemies against one another and thus set the stage for the power struggle now under way. In the first months after his death, it seemed that the longtime Summa insiders and his heirs would avoid strife. Chester Davis, the pugnacious Wall Street lawyer who masterminded Hughes' long and ultimately successful legal battle against the Eastern financial Establishment regarding alleged antitrust violations at TWA, suggested that the closest heir, Houston Lawyer Will Lummis, 48, become chairman of the Summa Corp. at $180,000 a year and co-administrator of the estate. But after Lummis, the son of Hughes' maternal aunt and a striking Hughes lookalike, examined the Summa books, he started to worry.

Under the management of Davis and his ally, Summa Executive Vice President Frank William Gay, the company had lost a total of $132 million from 1970 through last September. One reason for the losses was the inexperience of Summa executives in running casinos and hotels. The estate's once vast assets dwindled so fast that the company might be hard pressed to meet federal inheritance tax payments; the first installment, estimated at $25 million, will presumably be due in January 1978. Three of its seven Nevada establishments were--and still are--losing big money.* Worse still, Summa was ordered to pay $71 million as a settlement to shareholders shortchanged by Hughes when he took over Air West in 1970.

When Lummis tried to impose his will on the Old Guard, Davis struck back in a Delaware court by seeking to have him removed as co-administrator of the estate, charging that Lummis had a conflict of interest as both co-administrator and Summa chairman. Lummis' answer was to fire Davis as Summa chief counsel (he had earlier kicked him off the board). A hard man to beat, Davis simply moved his power base to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, run by the oldtimer triumvirate of Davis, Gay and Nadine Henley, Hughes' onetime assistant. The institute is a tax-free foundation that Hughes established in 1954 as sole owner of Hughes Aircraft, a major defense contractor (estimated 1976 sales: $1.6 billion). Hughes Helicopter has won a defense contract--to build a new attack helicopter--that could run as high as $3.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Lummis, in an effort to stop the losses at Summa's casinos in Nevada, has hired Phil Hannifin, former chairman of the Nevada gaming-control board, to run the gambling operations. He will report directly to Lummis, strengthening Lummis' control over day-to-day operations.

For the moment, Davis is secure within the medical institute fortress. In fact, he has a far more profitable part of the empire than Lummis. Still, the ultimate solution of the conflict depends on a Hughes will--if there is a valid one. George Francom, a personal aide, has testified that Hughes once mentioned he had drawn up a handwritten will. But when Francom asked about its whereabouts, Hughes, ever suspicious, snapped, "You don't think I'm going to tell you where it is, do you?"

So far, some 40-odd purported Hughes wills have surfaced, but none have borne the earmarks of Hughes' painstaking attention to detail. The most famous one is the "Mormon will," so called because it was found on an official's desk in the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The will contains misspellings and references totally atypical of Hughes. It also leaves one-sixteenth of Hughes' money to a former Utah gas-station operator, Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have picked up Hughes in the desert and driven him back to Las Vegas--and Dummar has since admitted that his story was false. Even so, Hughes' old estranged lieutenant, Noah Dietrich, who is named in the will as executor, and Dietrich's Los Angeles attorney, Harold Rhoden, contend that the will is authentic. Next week a jury trial is scheduled to open in Las Vegas to decide on the validity of the Mormon will. If the will is declared to be a legal and binding document, Hughes' estate will be divided according to a complex formula among the medical institute, Rice University and the Universities of Texas, Nevada and California, and a number of organizations and individuals, including Dummar.

Led by Lummis, Hughes' heirs, who number 23 in all, are contesting the Mormon will. They want the estate to be divided according to a formula that would give nearly one-quarter to Lummis' mother and distribute the rest among the others. Davis, meanwhile, is starting his own case in which he will argue that although a written will has not been found, Hughes' real and declared intent was to leave his whole fortune to the medical institute. Even in Las Vegas, no one is willing to bet how long these trials will take or what the outcome will be. In the Mormon trial alone, supporters of the will are planning to call at least 45 witnesses. The Hughes will trials stand to be the best shows along the Strip this season.

* The losers are the Desert Inn, Frontier and Landmark hotels in Las Vegas. The Sands and Harold's Club, located in Reno, are nourishing. The Castaways, a Las Vegas hotel-casino, and the Silver Slipper casino are barely breaking even.

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