...Still Stand Up?

If you're up there, you son of a bitch, you're going to jail!" cried Chester Davis, Wall Street lawyer, Harvard Law School graduate and New York country squire.

It was a bizarre tableau, even for Las Vegas, where the extraordinary tends to be commonplace. For one thing, Davis was directing his threats toward the blank ceiling of a plush Sands Hotel suite, as some sudden, irrational suspicion told him someone with a microphone was hiding up there. Davis' suite, however, was on the top floor of the Sands. If anyone were there, he would have been crouching on the roof under a cold December moon, 18 dizzying floors above the neonlit Las Vegas Strip.

What's more, the man Davis feared might be eavesdropping from the roof was Bob Maheu, his longtime business ally. For years, the two men had moved at the top of Howard Hughes's empire. Maheu was the $500,000-a-year executive director of Hughes's vast Nevada properties and his authorized spokesman. Davis was the most powerful Hughes attorney. Together, Maheu and Davis had hurried across the country in executive jets, huddled for momentous hotel-room conferences at the Regency in New York or the Bel Air in Los Angeles, had drunk nerve-settling liquor during long evenings of strategy and generally supported, counseled and admired each other.

But no more. Now lines were drawn and paranoia flickered like heat lightning over the Las Vegas Strip. Maheu, acting in the name of Howard Hughes, had removed Davis from any further handling of a portentous suit brought by TWA that threatens to cost Hughes more than $145,000,000. [Hughes's long involvement with TWA is detailed in the accompanying article by Edwin Fadiman, Jr.] Davis, also acting in the name of Howard Hughes, had countered by firing Maheu. Now, each surrounded by security guards, they were settled into Hughes hotels--Davis at the Sands, Maheu at the Frontier--to fight one of the ugliest internal battles in U. S. corporate history.

That was in December 1970, and since then events have become even more entangled, actions openly ruthless. Maheu has sued Hughes for $50,000,000, while an army of Hughes investigators prowls the country--so far in vain--for an error in Maheu's management that might put him in jail. Hughes has long since fled or been removed from Nevada, but the fallout from the Davis-Maheu blowup continues. It has broken Hughes's most precious possession: his passionately guarded privacy. Many of his confidential memorandums have been published for eager newspaper readers. Levar Myler--one of the squad of personal assistants, most of them Mormons, who are the only people who get to see Hughes--has been forced to submit to public questioning. The billionaire himself, hidden from view for 15 years, faces the prospect of returning to Nevada, plunking his spare frame down in a chair and submitting himself to the questioning of Maheu's lawyer, who is an intense, implacable Nevadan named Morton Galane. "I have quite a few questions that I am most eager to put to him," Galane says with manifest anticipation. "Yes, sir, I have, indeed."

There are other dreadful consequences of the bloodletting and open brawling that have scuffed much of the gloss from Hughes's Nevada venture. When Hughes went to Las Vegas in 1966, he was hailed as the faithful greet the Aga Khan. "Our Father who art in the penthouse," said the lounge comedians, "Howard be thy name." County and state officials unhesitatingly approved his purchase of seven hotel-casinos--one in a midnight session convened by telephone when he was in a hurry; and they somehow failed to demand a recent photo for the gaming files, as their rules provide.

Now the state officials ignore his relayed requests and treat him like anyone else, as if he were a bar owner asking permission to install slot machines next to his jukebox. For months they held up the gaming license of Chester Davis, newly named to the Hughes Tool board after Maheu's ouster, and then shocked Hughes executives last August by voting five to zero against sanctioning the attorney. The gaming commission also turned down a plan for reorganization of the Hughes casino structure, despite the anguished assurances of another Hughes attorney that that was what Howard wanted. ("How unfortunate," purred Maheu with delighted sarcasm, "that the present Hughes management is unable to come up with a plan that meets the approval of even one member of the five-man board.")

It was on this occasion that the commission, chaired by Jack Diehl, had the lese majesty to suggest that Hughes select a site, sit down with Nevada authorities and present a clean outline of the Hughes organization, showing where myriad responsibilities fell. The gaming chief added that his commission also wanted to see a financial statement from Hughes Tool Company. In the 47 years Hughes has owned Toolco, he has never shown that hole card to anyone. But early last September, as a possible indication that Nevada's newly assertive mood might be having an effect, a statement did find its way into the hands of a high state official.

• • •

Things were vastly different before Davis defeated Maheu. Former governor Paul Laxalt, who resembles a short John Lindsay and photographs even better, used to play tennis with Maheu and dream of the White House, where Hughes thought such a handsome, able and sensible fellow rightfully belonged. Hughes sent memos down from the penthouse suggesting a possible gubernatorial action or opinion and Laxalt demonstrated proper reflexes. He disclosed to the press that he had once talked to Hughes on the telephone; the story was printed under respectfully large headlines throughout Nevada.

But now there is a new governor in Carson City, a tough, independent-thinking Irish Democrat named Mike O'Callaghan, who lost a leg in Korea, taught government and economics in a Nevada high school and served in various capacities under Sargent Shriver during the Kennedy and Johnson years in Washington. He is not a man who genuflects to power and he got to Carson City with no help from Hughes. Consequently, the old Hughes ploys don't work anymore and the Hughes people don't know how to bend him. In their efforts to get Davis licensed, they presented O'Callaghan with what they swore to be a signed letter from Hughes. O'Callaghan replied cryptically that he couldn't be sure if it was really from Hughes, and even if it were, the note "was not responsive in any way" to what he and the gaming commission needed to know. O'Callaghan had also flustered Hughes's emissaries in the past by declining to talk with Hughes on the telephone. "I refuse to get involved with the game playing by telephone and letter," he said. "I don't know the authenticity of it, and I'm getting fed up with the intrigue that surrounds the entire matter."

He praised his gaming commission for refusing to accept further relayed, secondhand assurances.

"Everyone says Hughes is in excellent health," said the governor. "But they always add that if he saw one of our people it would be traumatic. The two statements don't jibe. What's so traumatic about seeing someone?" Besides, O'Callaghan said, he was really doing the billionaire a favor.

"We're just trying to make sure," said the governor, "that Howard Hughes knows what is going on."

And with that comment, O'Callaghan became the first major public official to open a large and very deep can of worms.

"If Howard Hughes knows what is going on and approves of it," says Herman "Hank" Greenspun, the ebullient editor-publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, "he has, at age 65, relaxed one of his strongest rules: He has always detested the exploitation of his name by employees." Greenspun is the man who helped influence Hughes to come to Las Vegas in 1966 and who broke the story of his disappearance four years later. He is the foremost proponent of the something-has-happened-to-Hughes postulate and is therefore a constant irritant to Chester Davis and other executives now running the Hughes-Nevada properties. In addition to promising to jail Maheu, Davis has solemnly vowed to "bury Greenspun." To this, Greenspun responds, "He'll find me a reluctant corpse." Greenspun believes that Hughes left Las Vegas unwillingly and is now either inoperative or being isolated from news of what is going on in the outside world.

"There are truths that you come to by instinct," says Greenspun, "supported by bits and pieces of evidence. There are a dozen leads that all point unerringly in the same direction. I'm convinced that Hughes is not functioning and that a little group of people are acting in his name."

Last summer, Greenspun heard vague rumors of a story that convinced him his instincts were accurate. He summoned this writer to Las Vegas to research the story. A peculiar tale it proved to be.

In the spring of this year, months after Hughes disappeared from Las Vegas, the head of his personal staff, Howard Eckersley, arrived in Montreal to promote a new issue of speculative stock. Eckersley is chief of the Hughes palace guard--the five male nurses/confidential aides/executive assistants who tend to his personal needs and monitor his switchboard.

Eckersley's Montreal stock, Pan American Mines, represented uranium and copper claims in Arizona. He was president of the company, and its backers included fellow Mormon palace guards Levar Myler, George Francom and their immediate superior, Kay Glenn. Vice-president of the firm was a Flagstaff gravel-pit operator, Floyd Bleak, whose business was in Federal receivership and who had been excoriated by an Arizona judge for filing false mining claims. The company was headquartered in a small unmarked suite at the rear of an Arizona real-estate office overlooking an alley. It had $15 cash in the bank when Eckersley put it on the Canadian Stock Exchange, a market notorious for flimsy offerings. The stock prospectus claimed to have a $1,000,000 loan commitment from a Phoenix insurance company that, investigation showed, had a net worth of only $197,000.

But what Pan American did have was a stock prospectus that had been liberally sprinkled with the financially potent names of Howard Hughes and Hughes Tool Company. Shortly after Eckersley showed up in Montreal, the local press blossomed with stories about a "new Hughes venture" and about "Hughes emissaries" looking at the Canadian market for further investment. The stock, offered at one dollar, rose to over five dollars the first week it appeared on (continued on page 312)...Still Stand Up?(continued from page 148) the Montreal board. The company has a total of 5,000,000 shares.

What intrigued Greenspun was his knowledge that Hughes has always been adamantly opposed to anyone in his employ using his name and financial status. "Hughes has never permitted it," says Greenspun. "He chopped off two lawyers in L. A. for going off on an oil-lease deal when the press merely speculated that it was a Hughes venture. He got sore at Bob Maheu for making some outside investments, even though Maheu advised him about them and made it crystal clear to the public that Hughes was not involved. Yet here is his palace guard, who know him best, bouncing his name and prestige all over the Montreal exchange. What they are doing just makes no sense--unless they know, and I mean know, that there is no way Hughes will ever find out what they've done."

When stories on the Canadian venture appeared in the Montreal papers, they touched off a great flap among the Hughes-Nevada people. They quickly set up a conference call among Eckersley, Chester Davis, a representative from the Carl Byoir agency--Hughes's public-relations firm--and longtime Hughes publicist Perry Lieber, and then issued a statement in Eckersley's name. It warned that the stock was "highly speculative," promised that the Hughes aides would have no part in Pan American's management and said that neither Howard Hughes nor Hughes Tool had any interest or investment in or knowledge of Pan American's affairs. When this story reached Montreal, the stock began to sag.

Eckersley then promptly flew to Montreal, held his own press conference and flatly contradicted the still-fresh statement. He said that Hughes had full knowledge of Pan American Mines, approved of it and that plans for vigorous mining activity were under consideration. The stock responded to these stimulating words and, by the end of August, sold at $12 per share.

It was a remarkable exhibition of Eckersley's strength that allowed him to speak from both sides of his mouth. In Las Vegas, the high-priced Hughes publicists had unprintably shrill words for Eckersley--but did nothing. "I am not about to take on Hughes's personal-staff chief," said one gingerly, "not without his say-so."

"That misses the entire point," says Greenspun. "What happens to everyone, including the state of Nevada, where Hughes is the biggest employer, if Hughes can't issue any more say-sos?"

This is all circumstantial evidence, but it is shored up by the fact that for a year now there has not been one verifiable wiggle of a finger from Hughes's alleged hide-out at the Britannia Beach Hotel in Nassau. Bahamian immigration officers, when asked about Hughes's entry card, point out that it's not a public document and then grow mute. Gaming officials in Nevada have offered to send a representative to Nassau if Hughes is incapable of returning, but the Hughes emissaries lapse into an inarticulate state of shock at the suggestion.

There is irony worth savoring in the thought that a man with a billion-dollar empire, possessed of absolute authority over every last square inch of it, with the most sophisticated communications systems available to him, could be deceived about what the hell is happening in his empire. But now that the secrecy is crumbling, there are facts surfacing that fit an odd pattern.

The machinery for isolating Hughes from the world has existed for years. Hughes put it together himself and issued the directives that started it working. The story of how Hughes began running a billion-dollar complex of enterprises from a position of truancy dates back 20 years and centrally involves a short, stocky, decisive accountant named Noah Dietrich.

Today Dietrich lives in a handsome house high in Benedict Canyon in the upper reaches of Beverly Hills. He is 83 and his hair is snow white, but he drives himself to his offices in Century City every day, where he leisurely supervises some business properties. His memory of 32 years with Howard Hughes is vivid and bitter. He broke with Hughes in 1957 and kept resiliently silent for 13 years, but now he is completing his memoirs--which the Hughes lawyers are intent upon keeping unpublished.

Hughes was only 19 and had just inherited Hughes Tool Company when he hired Dietrich. Dietrich's mind adroitly balanced Hughes's debits and credits and kept the bottom line black while his boss flew planes, made movies and chased girls. Hughes always has been spectacularly indecisive; he would agonize endlessly over an urgent matter while everything ground to a halt. Dietrich was a superb counterbalance; he snapped out a decision almost before the problem had been stated. In 1947, he independently spent $5,000,000 modernizing Hughes Tool in Houston, without first telling Hughes what he was doing, and thereby boosted profits from $4,000,000 a year in the Forties to $60,000,000 a year in the mid-Fifties. "Noah, you're a genius," Hughes told him, and from that day on no one in the empire could lay a glove on the brilliant Noah Dietrich.

In the early Fifties, Hughes took Dietrich from Houston to Los Angeles and installed him in a two-story buff-colored building at 7000 Romaine Street, which became Hughes's message center. Hughes himself was never there; the whole point of Romaine was to give him a nerve center so he could rule by remote control. Hughes relayed his instructions to Dietrich via the Romaine switchboard and Dietrich implemented them.

Then one day, Hughes turned his message center into a one-way hot line, an event that became critical to what happened later in Las Vegas.

"In 1956," says Dietrich, "Hughes issued a memo saying, in effect, to everyone down the command, 'From now on, don't call me; I'll call you.' Thereafter his executives could call in and talk to me but not to Howard. People grumbled that I was sealing him off from all contact, but that was what Howard wanted. Then he issued a second directive, early in 1957, to me. It said, 'Don't raise new problems when I call you, but confine yourself to the subjects I bring up."

Subject only to Hughes's potential veto, Dietrich ran the empire. The division executives became accustomed to operating their own enterprises without hearing from Hughes. He could fall silent for years and no one would get unduly alarmed.

The staff at Romaine included more than a dozen couriers, who drove old Chevrolets and delivered memos down the chain of command or fetched documents to send back up. As events evolved, this staff became the breeding ground, the Saint-Cyr academy, for some of the people now wielding awesome authority at the highest Hughes staff level. Directing the couriers was a dour Mormon, Frank William Gay, who, over the years, salted his staff heavily with fellow Mormons. This pleased Hughes for simple, secular reasons. Good Mormons don't drink or smoke and his security-conscious mind detests drunks in sensitive positions; he also hates the smell of tobacco. Among the Mormons functioning under Gay were Howard Eckersley, Levar Myler, Kay Glenn and George Francom.

Over the years, Dietrich had been feeling increasingly aggrieved, a mood aggravated by three-a.m. phone calls and long-unkept promises of stock options. In 1957, he quit. Hughes left Dietrich's position unfilled, but he retained the Romaine message center and all the accompanying Mormons. Hughes always has been a sort of corporate pack rat, a man who keeps used toys in his attic. For the next five years or so, the empire more or less ran itself, while The Man wrestled with moneylenders in order to pay for TWA planes. Liberated division chiefs functioned with new boldness and little or no instruction from Hughes.

During this period, Bill Gay rose meteorically but somewhat unnoticed in the Hughes hierarchy, from supervisor of the Chevy drivers to vice-president of Hughes Tool Company. And with him, as his chief assistant, he took Kay Glenn.

"There has always been something ghostlike about Bill Gay," says a veteran Hughes employee. "He's never out in front, but you better believe that he is there in the background, watching everything."

Two outsiders, Robert Maheu and Chester Davis, came into Gay's closely watched world in the early Sixties. They were invited into the Hughes organization separately--Maheu from Washington, D. C., as a consultant trouble shooter, Davis from New York as attorney to handle Hughes's massive legal problems with TWA.

Robert Aimé Maheu is a bald, confident, genial fellow in his early 50s. with a background full of powerful business acquaintances and a trace of officially requisitioned espionage. He was an FBI agent during World War Two and in the early Fifties formed Robert A. Maheu Associates in Washington. He calls Maheu Associates "a problem-solving organization." It was then staffed with ex--FBI men, former IRS agents and lobbyists and was basically an industrial intelligence agency, an avenue between Governmental bureaus and rich clients with widely disparate interests. His customers included Stavros Niarchos, Del Webb and the United Steelworkers Union. Maheu swam at ease through the upper levels of Washington politics, an intimate of Senators, governors and top regulatory executives. He was also involved in mysterious activities that convinced some Washington observers he had CIA connections. Columnist Jack Anderson has printed a story--and Maheu has "no commented" on it--that Maheu was involved in a series of assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, around the time of the Bay of Pigs, employing a West Coast ex-convict and Mafia figure named Johnny Roselli.

Maheu's anticommunism, his cloak-and-dagger expertise and his Washington influence appealed strongly to Howard Hughes. Maheu had a problem-solving organization and, God knows, Hughes had problems. Hughes became a prestigious addition to Maheu's client list in the mid-Fifties, began loading more and more work on him, and finally asked him to shed other clients, move to Los Angeles and work exclusively for Howard Hughes. Maheu moved West in 1961 and ensconced his family in a handsome mansion in Pacific Palisades.

To Bill Gay and other Hughes executives, Maheu was an outsider, a parvenu. But he had Howard Hughes's blessing and, increasingly, his ear. He was also entirely outside the corporate structure and authority; he had made his deal with Hughes himself as a consultant and was not on Hughes's employee payroll.

In 1965, Bill Gay attempted to confirm his executive brilliance with a grandiose venture into the computer business: a new division called Hughes Dynamics. He planned to take on IBM frontally and set up elaborate offices in the Kirkeby Center in Westwood, with carpets so thick they had to be lifted to the quarters by helicopter and shoved through the windows.

Hughes Dynamics quietly died within a year. And with it, Gay went into eclipse as a major power in the empire, though he retained his vice-presidency in Hughes Tool. "Howard didn't get a real look at what was going on in Hughes Dynamics until it was about nine million in the red--and then fini!" says Maheu.

When Gay faded down the power ladder, Maheu climbed past him to the top. In the fall of 1966, Hughes moved to Las Vegas and he tapped Maheu to handle all the details. He also instructed Maheu "not to invite Bill ... and not to permit him to be privy to our affairs.... I no longer trust him. My bill of complaints against Bill's conduct goes back a long way and cuts very deep." (Hughes placed heavy blame on Gay not only for the failure of Hughes Dynamics but also, by way of some convoluted reasoning, for the failure of his marriage to Jean Peters.) He also instructed Maheu to keep the Houston Tool Company people out of Vegas. Down in Houston, the old-line executives simmered, and back in Los Angeles, Bill Gay burned.

Hughes's move to Las Vegas was much more than merely a change in residence. After years of litigation, Hughes was forced to divest himself of all his TWA stock and it proved the happiest defeat in his entire career. He sold near the peak of the market--at $86 a share--and received a check for more than $546,000,000. In 1967 the stock plummeted, and by the end of 1970 it was moving weakly at $14 a share.

After paying capital-gains taxes, Hughes had around $440,000,000 to invest. He brought this gigantic bundle with him to Las Vegas and began buying up sections of the town and great chunks of surrounding Nevada land. He also publicly blessed the new position into which he had elevated Maheu, naming him chief executive for Hughes-Nevada Operations and the exclusive spokesman for Howard Hughes. For the next four years, all the real action in the Hughes empire was centered in Las Vegas and the man with the baton was Bob Maheu.

But at the same time, Hughes did a baffling thing. Although he kept the Romaine center operative, Hughes duplicated it on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn and, to staff it, he brought in five of Bill Gay's couriers--Howard Eckersley, Levar Myler, George Francom, Roy Crawford and John Holmes. Maheu had the authority to dispose of the giant TWA windfall. But Gay's palace guards had control of the communications.

Maheu soon learned that while Hughes could call him, he couldn't call Hughes. When he wanted to talk to The Man, he phoned the penthouse and requested a conversation. Sometimes his call was put through, sometimes it wasn't. The Mormons often told Maheu that Hughes was resting; and he did sleep at irregular hours, sometimes for astonishing periods of time. Or they might report that he was involved in business matters and had left word not to be disturbed. Maheu's memos received the same uneven treatment. A torrent of directives, handwritten on yellow legal pads, came down to Maheu from Hughes. He would send his answer back up by courier or originate a memo himself, suggesting a course of action. All the memos necessarily passed into the hands of the palace guards. Sometimes there was an answer.

Maheu was helpless to do anything about this one-way communications system; it had been sanctified by custom all the way back to Noah Dietrich's days and everyone in the empire had accepted it for years. Maheu never talked face to face with Hughes but only on the phone via the Mormon-staffed switchboard. The revelation that Maheu never saw Hughes personally emerged in the subsequent court battle and greatly surprised Las Vegans, who assumed that Maheu saw Hughes constantly, that he could drop up to the penthouse whenever he chose for long, private chats with his boss. Maheu never said that he talked to Hughes in person, but he also never said that he didn't. He countered questions with a nimble evasion that became a cliché: "Those who say they see him don't," he would smile, "and those who see him don't say." What he omitted was, "Some of those who don't see him also don't say."

When you consider Hughes's life in Vegas, it brings on claustrophobic chills. Other than his former wife, Jean Peters--and there was some question about her--in all the world, the only human beings whom Hughes saw, spoke to in person, said "Good morning" or "Good night" to, were those five tight-mouthed, diffident aides who took the calls, handled the memos and screened all the communications. With all the options of a billion dollars open to him, Hughes lived in a world more constricted than a hermit's cave. He could pick up the phone and talk to Maheu--sometimes he would call and say, "Bob, I'm lonesome"--but Maheu was just a faceless voice. Hughes could pull back the draperies in the penthouse and look down nine floors to the people creeping up and down the Strip. But if he wanted to talk to someone, ask how the Dodgers were doing, philosophize on Vietnam or argue the sins of the New Left, the only ears available were those of Eckersley, Myler, Francom, Crawford and Holmes.

Napoleon complained that, in the depths of a palace, the only news the emperor received was that brought to him by his ministers. Hughes's empty confinement was even more severe, by his own doing. Not even his "ministers" could bring him news; not his premier, Maheu, nor the head of Hughes Aircraft, Pat Hyland, nor the top executive of Hughes Tool, Raymond Holliday, nor his number-one lawyer, Chester Davis.

• • •

Chester Davis, a former partner in the lofty New York law firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, is an abrasive, outspoken man with a sandpaper tongue and a great store of charm when he chooses to show it. He works diligently at being something of a crass, unpredictable character. He will turn his back on a judge when a ruling goes against him, walk to his desk, lean over his lawbooks and scratch his behind for the court's edification. Chester Davis knows how he affects people and nourishes his reputation as alternately gracious and tactless. He is an adroit man in the exercise of power, as Bob Maheu found out, and he moves in a world where the acquisition of power is the ultimate satisfaction.

Davis took on Hughes's TWA troubles in the early Sixties, when he was still with Simpson, Thacher. He shortly discovered that there were conflicts of interest; the law firm also handled businesses that had lent money to TWA, which was on the other side of the fence in the court fight. In one of those lordly gestures that billionaires can afford, Hughes offered to underwrite Davis if he would leave Simpson, Thacher and set up a pristine firm free of entanglements with Wall Street money.

When he came aboard the Hughes organization, Davis found a natural friend in Bob Maheu. Both had their futures tied exclusively to Hughes and both were outside the Hughes corporate hierarchy, with its ingrown, tightly allied executives. They enjoyed a close compatibility for years, until that day when Davis lost the TWA case and the primal consideration of self-survival imposed itself on their friendship.

Although Hughes had sold his stock, there remained a complex damage suit, with TWA as the plaintiff. The litigation was the largest Hughes had ever faced, a case so big that it was known starkly in the Hughes empire as "The Big One."

Hughes had been assured, says Maheu, that the most he could conceivably be asked to pay was $5,000,000. But in April 1970, TWA was awarded a default judgment for more than $137,500,000, plus $7,500,000 for TWA's lawyers, plus court costs, for a total of $145,448,141.07, plus interest at six percent, or almost $9,000,000 annually, until paid. (This ruling was upheld by a U. S. Court of Appeals last September and the rate of interest was raised to seven and a half percent.) There was also the expense of Chester Davis' legal fee.

Hughes long has had the deserved reputation for being the coldest, most unflappable poker player in the business world, but this setback plunged him into a deep depression that lasted for many weeks. When he emerged, he told Maheu that the entire TWA matter was being turned over to him, including the choice of lawyers to pursue any appeal. Maheu wisely asked the Hughes Tool board of directors to ratify the assignment of authority. In January 1970, Hughes had sent Maheu a memorandum confirming his decision:

You have the ball on the TWA situation. You do not need further approval from me until such time as you are prepared to recommend to me a specific settlement at a specific sum of money.... If I am to hold you responsible for the overall outcome of this litigation, I must give you the complete authority to decide which law firm you want to handle each phase of it. I repeat, Bob, you have full authority.

Recognizing the enormity of the assignment, Maheu turned the whole record of the litigation over to three top law firms, including former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford's, and asked them to review it as quickly as possible and advise him. They recommended that Davis' name be omitted from the appellate brief, so that new counsel could defend Hughes's interests rather than Davis' performance. The argument could then state that Hughes had not been adequately represented in the earlier litigation.

The falling out between Maheu and Davis was swift, brutal and predictable. When Davis learned that he was being removed from the case, he sent a blistering message to his old friend Maheu, telling him to stop tampering with Hughes's legal matters. Maheu shot back a stiff teletype informing him: "To date you have lost this case at every level with catastrophically adverse financial and other injury to the defendant.... I have no confidence, in view of your unfortunate record thus far, that your presence will contribute to a successful appeal.... You have repeatedly assured me that no antitrust violations were involved and that in consequence, TWA could prove no damages. I must conclude that you were either wrong or wholly ineffectual, for the judgment now stands at a staggering figure.... I deeply resent your presumptuous request that I 'cease interfering with counsel in charge of and responsible for the case.' There has been no interference on my part other than taking steps to accord other counsel an opportunity to salvage a case which you have tragically lost."

If ever there was a time for Howard Hughes to intervene and sort out the Byzantine confusions, it was in November 1970. Instead, a dead silence hung from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn. It had begun six weeks earlier, when one of the Mormon palace guards called Maheu to say that Hughes wasn't well and would be out of touch. "He told me to carry on per existing directives," Maheu says. "There had been periods like that before, so I just carried on. When the showdown came with Davis, I sent to the penthouse a memo giving the views of the three law firms that supported my position. I learned later from three separate sources that it was never sent in to Hughes."

Events then came tumbling in on top of one another. On the final day for filing the appellate brief, Maheu got word from a senior partner at Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irvine, the New York firm handling it that Davis' name would appear, despite Maheu's instructions. From the Hughes Tool board of directors came a new resolution, rescinding Maheu's authority over the TWA case and restoring it to Davis. It was recently learned, from a member of the Tool Company board, that it issued this second directive at the request of Howard Eckersley, who claimed to be speaking for Hughes. No word came directly from Hughes.

Five days before Thanksgiving, Bill Gay's assistant, Kay Glenn, moved into the Desert Inn penthouse to supervise all communications. A few days later, a convoy of limousines from 7000 Romaine slid into the Desert Inn parking lot. On Thanksgiving, Howard Hughes, the Mormon palace guard and the limousines departed.

On December fourth, Chester Davis showed up in Los Angeles, summoned a legal friend of Maheu from Washington and told him that Hughes had executed a proxy giving all Nevada management authority to him, Bill Gay and Toolco vice-president Raymond Holliday--or any two of those three. In a line straight out of a 1930 Western, Davis said, "Maheu resigns by sundown or he's fired." He refused to specify Hughes's dissatisfactions or to show the purported proxy.

Davis and Gay then flew to Las Vegas, set up battle headquarters in the Sands and that evening moved a small army of auditors and security men into the casino cages of all Hughes hotels. They shouldered aside the regular staff and began feeding cash and markers--Las Vegas I. O. U.s--into special pouches.

Maheu refused to be fired for three reasons. First, the lawyer ordering his dismissal had just been barred from a case by Maheu himself. Second, the basis for the action against him was a document he hadn't seen. And, third, no confirming word had come from Howard Hughes. From the casinos, calls flooded Maheu's office complaining about the strange raids. "What they were doing in the cages violated state regulations and threatened the licenses of the hotels," said Maheu. "I talked to Hughes's personal Nevada attorney, Tom Bell, and he told me I had to get those people out of there." Maheu rallied his forces and got the Davis-Gay men out.

The case wound up in court and has been exhaustively reported. It pivoted on the authenticity of Hughes's signature on the proxy by which Davis sought to fire Maheu. One of the foremost handwriting authorities in the country, Charles Appel, the man who broke the Lindbergh kidnaping and who helped save Clay Shaw from Jim Garrison's prosecution, testified that the signature was a forgery. The Davis-Gay forces produced a retired officer from the Long Beach, California, police department, who said the signature was authentic and the judge ruled that the Toolco people were acting properly in behalf of Howard Hughes. Only one man testified that he had seen Hughes sign the proxy: palace guard Levar Myler. He testified that only he and Howard Eckersley were present when Hughes signed the document. His testimony gave the merest pinhole peep into the hidden world of Howard Hughes. Though he had been a Hughes aide for 20 years and was one of the five people who saw him, Myler testified:

"Mr. Hughes asked Mr. Eckersley what I was doing there. Mr. Eckersley explained that I was going to witness and that he, Mr. Eckersley, was going to notarize the signature for this proxy."

Maheu's attorney, Morton Galane, was prevented from exploring in detail how the proxy originated, what Hughes had to say about it, what his role--if any--in originating it might have been or why he had signed Maheu's corporate-execution warrant without even picking up the phone and advising Maheu that the ax was going to fall. But Galane elicited, a bit at a time, some intriguing pieces of information that much of the press overlooked.

The contents of a proxy were first discussed, testimony showed, three months before Hughes signed it. Those involved were the five palace guards, Chester Davis and Bill Gay. There were various versions of it drawn up and discarded, and the final draft was prepared in Chester Davis' New York office and transmitted to Eckersley via telecopier on the day Hughes is said to have signed it. And once Hughes had signed it, Myler said, it went into Myler's own private safe-deposit box and he told no one in the entire Hughes empire about its existence--except Bill Gay.

"Those little penthouse fellows," mused a Newsweek staffer who covered the hearing, "have sure come a long, long way from their Chevy-driving days."

When Hughes fled Las Vegas to the Bahamas, Myler said, Hughes released the proxy and ordered Maheu fired after viewing a copy of the Las Vegas Sun reporting the Hughes disappearance from the Desert Inn. "Mr. Hughes said that Greenspun wouldn't have dared to print that unless Bob was behind him," Myler declared.

Before Maheu was fired, the Hughes public-relations men were asked what the reaction to such a move would be. They responded that it would touch off a long international wave of publicity, mostly adverse. With such a warning, and the chaos that ensued, it seems puzzling and unreasonable that Hughes acted simply because a newspaper had reported--with absolute accuracy--that he had moved out of one of his hotels.

• • •

Las Vegas has always been a nervous town and the incestuous disorder in the Hughes empire has put it collectively on edge. Beneath the surface uneasiness and the wry jokes runs the anxiety of vulnerable people whose world has turned unpredictable. The thousands who work for Hughes reason that if a man with Maheu's once-held power can get mugged in a corporate alley, who's safe? Where is their Protector, why did he flee and why does he remain so deathly silent? After Maheu was fired, more than 100 employees were chopped, and the purges go on. About six months ago, two Las Vegas veterans, Al Benedict, head of all Hughes hotels, and Bernie Rothkopf, boss of the Sands, were fired at midnight, their departures announced in a one-sentence predawn press release. As an indication that they were in disfavor, they found the locks changed on their office doors. They were old Vegas faces with a lot of friends, and many people who only shrugged at Maheu's removal deeply resented the cold handling of Benedict and Rothkopf. "Man, I tell you," said a Desert Inn bartender a week before he quit and went to San Diego, "the Mau Maus are loose in this town."

When the governor of Nevada openly wonders if Hughes knows what is going on, the old taboos expire and what was said behind hands becomes a public subject. People no longer discuss the Nevada trouble in terms of Hughes's eccentricity. They debate whether Hughes is dead, or alive and nonfunctioning and the object of manipulation.

Sitting in his Benedict Canyon home, Noah Dietrich gives credence to the latter theory. He was closer to Hughes than any other living man, and for a longer time, and is the only one with respectable credentials as a Hughes intimate who will speak out.

"I'm 83 and probably haven't long to go, but before I do there are some things that ought to be known. Hughes's affairs are entwined in the affairs of this country. He's a major defense contractor and he has put himself in the public arena, and a Federal court has so ruled. His claim that he is just a private citizen is nonsense, and his efforts to gag me violate my constitutional freedom of speech."

His old blue eyes snap and he tosses his white mane, a man ending a silence that ran too long.

"I think the pressure gets too much for him," says Dietrich. "In 1957, when he had all those money troubles financing TWA, two men in the empire came to me independently and suggested that I have a court-appointed guardian assigned to watch over him.

"One was a Houston lawyer. Howard had committed the Tool Company to more than $400,000,000 in jet orders and we didn't have the money to pay for them. Yet the lawyer said that Hughes had told him to go to Canada and bid on another $125,000,000 worth of Viscount planes that were available up there. The lawyer said, 'Noah, you have to do something to stop him.'

"A few weeks later, Hughes's own physician, Dr. Vernon Mason, came to me and wanted me to have Hughes hospitalized. I told him that he was Hughes's doctor and that was his job, not mine. He said he didn't want to endanger his $50,000-a-year position with the Hughes Medical Institute."

There is corroborative evidence, much closer in time. After Hughes disappeared from Las Vegas, the sheriff's department called in a local doctor who had treated Hughes on November fifth--just three weeks before he left the city--and questioned him about Hughes's condition in an effort to determine if Hughes had left of his own free will. His report was kept confidential, but its contents leaked out. He declared that Hughes was receiving blood transfusions, that his weight was down to near 100 pounds, that his hemoglobin count was down to four from the normal 13 to 16 and that he should be moved nowhere except to a hospital.

Since then, Hughes officials say, two doctors have examined him in Nassau and have reported to Governor O'Callaghan that he is in good health, "considering his infirmities" and is operative both mentally and physically. But these executives decline to identify the doctors, to let them be interviewed or to make public their report.

If Howard Hughes is healthy, as all those Hughes Tool people who never see him keep saying, it just might require a simple, but altogether uncharacteristic, act to silence Governor O'Callaghan, to rebut Noah Dietrich, to stop all the speculation and tranquilize the uneasy state of Nevada.

In order to sufficiently convince the world that he's in control of himself and his empire, Hughes might have to ask someone who knew him well in the old days--for instance, Frank McCulloch, New York bureau chief of Time--to fly to Nassau and visit the Britannia Beach Hotel. Then, at an agreed-upon time, Hughes would step from his doorway, assuming he were able, and say, "Hello, Frank. Here I am, so let's stop all this pointless talk about my being dead or in a coma."

That takes, by the stop watch, about ten seconds, and somehow it seems an easy enough thing for a powerful man to do.