Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years

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Summary: From Inside Flap
Review: Here - and for the first time - the mystery of Howard Hughe's bizarre life and death is finally resolved in a startling eyewitness account by two of the aides closest to him during his long years of secrecy, hiding and flight. Their story is told by James Phelan, the investigative reporter whose encyclopedic knowledge of Hughes and his empire enable him to expose the Clifford Irving hoax of 1972.
After Hughe's death, the Cockney waiter who lifted the dying billionaire's wasted body onto the plane for his final flight, and Mell Stewart, a Utah barber whose first professional fee for Hughes haircut was a thousand dollars, came to Phelan with their incredible story. These two aides saw hughes day in and day out - as only a handful of men ever saw him in the tiny blacked-out bedrooms where he spent all of his last years.

Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years reveals how and why the once-dashing six-foot four-inch Texan, with the money to live like a maharajah, owned no clothes, had no possessions, lived as a physically wasted recluse, and spent most of his time virtually naked, compulsively watching movies while others ran his vast empire for him.

Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years gives the first authentic account of why hughes suddenly fled his penthouse hideout in Las Vegas and fired his $520,000-a-year chief executive, Robert Maheu. The aide who engineered it recounts Hughes's wild hairbreadth escape from the Britannia Beach Hotel in Nassau. And the book offers an insider's view of the billionaire's bizarre life style - his peculiar eating and grooming habits, his "insulation" against germs, the drugs he injected himself, which he insisted always be kept in a metal box at his bedside.

From the wealth of detail gathered from the aides and from his own twenty years of reporting on Hughes, James Phelan has written an extraordinary book that puts into context the pivotal role Hughes played in American life while keeping from everyone his own deep, dark mystery.