Word: mormons
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Another peculiarity of the Mormon will is that it names as executor Noah Dietrich, Hughes' onetime chief lieutenant. Hughes had a severe falling-out with Dietrich in 1957, and the two men never patched up their relationship. Even so, Beverly Hills Attorney Harold Rhoden, who represents Dietrich on the case, has submitted the will to eight noted handwriting experts who have declared that the handwriting is Hughes...
...Summa Corp. and Hughes' assorted relatives all contend that the Mormon will is a fake. Summa is run by a triumvirate: Frank William Gay, 55, who is president and chief executive officer; Nadine Henley, 70, one of Hughes' earliest assistants, who is senior vice president; and Chester Davis, 66, an abrasive Wall Street lawyer, who is Summa's legal strategist. Hughes' maternal nephew, William Lummis, 47, joined Summa as chairman to avoid a struggle for the spoils between the company and the relatives...
They were Hughes' so-called Mormon Mafia, the six gentlemen in waiting who were recruited by Summa Corp. Vizier Bill Gay, himself a Mormon, and attended the anchoritic Croesus day and night, in eight-hour shifts. They were assisted by four physicians on 24-hour call and five lesser functionaries, including Gordon Margulis and Mell Stewart. For their services the six senior aides were (and apparently still are) paid as much as $110,000 a year each. They equipped his various hideaways, decided which messages would reach him, censored his reading matter. In short, they controlled Howard Hughes...
JOHN HOLMES, 60, the primus inter pares of the Mormon Mafia, though the only non-Mormon among them (he is a Roman Catholic). Holmes worked in Southern California as a salesman for a tobacco company before he signed on as Hughes' personal driver in the early 1950s. He joined the inner circle in 1957, and is now one of Summa Corp.'s five directors. Tense, quiet and politically conservative, Holmes is said to have been a very heavy coffee drinker and a chain-smoker-but never in Hughes' presence...
LEVAR ("BEEBE") MYLER, 53, the only other member of the Mormon Mafia on Summa Corp.'s board of directors. A former Air Force mechanic and picture-frame maker, Myler signed on in 1950 as a chauffeur for Actress Jean Peters, Hughes' second wife. Overweight, short-tempered and ailing (gout, heart trouble), he was standoffish and kept mostly to himself...