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Summa under Lummis has changed its style. Gone is the compulsive secrecy that once enveloped Hughes' vast and tangled affairs. Recalls William Rankin, a longtime Hughes employee who is now No. 2 at Summa: "Everything was secret unless we were told otherwise. We hired a p.r. agency to say, 'No comment.' " Top executives no longer have to punch a code into an elevator in the parking garage before they can enter the firm's unpretentious headquarters two miles from the Las Vegas strip. Company officers now work in fourth-floor offices rather than the windowless basement rooms that Hughes' aides occupied.
The most important change, though, is that Summa is making money. In 1978 the company earned $30.9 million before taxes on sales of $762.3 million. Last year earnings dipped to $13.5 million, although sales rose to $869 million. The main reason for the lower 1979 profits: a strike-induced loss of $26.2 million by Hughes Airwest. Last year the hotel-casino group was the largest moneymaker, earning $38.7 million. The aviation group, on the other hand, made only $5.9 million. Says Rick Harrison, a Texas lawyer close to the protracted Hughes estate-tax fight: "Lummis has done a very good job. He's flat turned the company around."
The struggle for Hughes' fortune, however, is not over. The IRS has just filed a $275 million estate-tax ruling against Summa, which the corporation is contesting. Moreover, the biggest and presumably most profitable Hughes venture, the Hughes Aircraft Co., the nation's eighth largest defense contractor (with more than $2 billion in sales last year), is not controlled by Summa. Since 1953 it has been the property of the Miami-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit foundation that is dominated by Lummis' old antagonists Davis and Gay. Hughes' former henchmen have filed suit against Lummis, claiming that Hughes intended all his holdings, including Summa, to go to the Medical Institute. Lummis has countersued, challenging their control of the Medical Institute. But while that battle continues through the courts, at least part of Hughes' flamboyant empire has been turned into a less colorful, but more profitable, enterprise.
—By Edward E. Scharf. Reported by Michael Moritz/Las Vegas