Howard Hughes'cousin tackles a tangled financial empire
The resemblance is eerie, down to the gangling walk, the tight-lipped smile and the soft Texas accent. William R. Lummis, 51, is almost a double for the middle-aged Howard R. Hughes Jr., the eccentric billionaire who died on April 5, 1976, aboard a jet that was flying him from Acapulco to his native Houston. Lummis, Hughes' first cousin, is now standing in as head of most Hughes enterprises, a chaotic financial empire once estimated to be worth $2.3 billion. Lummis last week took another major step toward straightening out the family business when he sold Hughes Airwest, the West Coast carrier, to Republic Airlines for $38.5 million.
Ironically, Lummis (pronounced Luhmiss) did not even know Hughes, who lived the last 15 years of his life in seclusion and deprivation. A partner in one of Houston's most prestigious law firms, Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones, Lummis saw his cousin alive only twice, the second time when Lummis was nine years old. Four years ago, when he went to the Texas Medical Center to claim Hughes' body, Lummis was shown an ugly, wasted corpse and had to ask with consternation, "Is this Mr. Hughes?" When it became apparent that Hughes had died without leaving a will, Lummis, whose mother was Hughes' closest living relative, was named the representative for a group of distant Hughes relations.
At his death, Hughes' financial empire was nearly as wasted as his body. His holdings ranged from a major aircraft company and a helicopter manufacturer to casinos in Las Vegas, Reno and the Bahamas, ranches in Nevada, a magazine (Football Today), a television station (Las Vegas' KLAS-TV), mines in Nevada and vast amounts of undeveloped land. Most of the interests were grouped together in the Las Vegas-based Summa Corp., which, Lummis concluded, was run by a group of Hughes lieutenants of dubious ability and honesty. These included Chester C. Davis, Summa's general counsel; Frank William Gay, a onetime errand boy who became a board director; and Nadine Henley, once Hughes' stenographer.
After studying Summa's hard-to-find financial records, Merrill Lynch estimated that between 1970 and 1976 the corporation had lost $131.7 million. The company, for example, spent about $50 million to maintain the legendary Spruce Goose, the huge, 400,000-lb. wooden flying boat with a 320-ft. wingspan that Hughes had piloted once for a distance of a mile in 1947 and then stored away in a Long Beach, Calif., hangar. Other losses flowed from the hotels that Summa owned but managed haphazardly, a company formed to promote blood-analysis devices, Football Today, and a worldwide fleet of 34 aircraft ready to answer the whims of Hughes and his staff. Said Lummis last week: "Hughes was a lightning rod for every disaster imaginable."