Believe it... or not!
Posted on 08/09/2010 12:57:25 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
There are a lot of woolly, fabulous tales out there about Howard Hughes, the famously reclusive, eccentric billionaire.
And the Wikipedia version of his life is not the only one that "needs additional citations for verification."
The Martin Scorsese movie "The Aviator" recently advanced the images and legends of Hughes and his obsessive compulsions.
Hughes officially died in April 1976, an emaciated, drug-addicted, long-haired, tragic, lonely old man who proved to some people money couldn't buy happiness.
But not really,
according to a new book, "Boxes: The Secret Life of Howard Hughes," by Douglas Wellman, assistant dean of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, based on research done by the former commander of the Nebraska Air Guard.
The book says eight years before his "death," Hughes substituted a Las Vegas derelict for himself and escaped his identity yet continued to operate his business affairs until his stand-in died and his family overturned his famous will in court. It says Hughes spent his exile in the Panama Canal Zone, the Florida Panhandle, Arizona and Alabama in the privacy he craved. He assumed the identity of aircraft maintenance supervisor Verner "Nik" Nicely, the name of a real person who conveniently disappeared while working with or for the CIA in Panama.
Reportedly, as they say.
Hughes died in 2001, at age 96, according to the book.
Hughes had lost access to his fortune but won the heart of a woman, married her and stayed married 31 years until his death, according to the book.
The wife, Eva McLelland, who died last year, told her story to Mark Musick, who has been documenting this off-road saga for almost a decade. Wellman wrote the book for him.
"It is a wild story," Musick acknowledged. "It changes history."
This is the same calm, clear-headed Mark Musick who flew F-4s, commanded the Nebraska Air Guard for four years, worked for Stratcom and was keynoter at Lincoln's 2009 Patriot Day observance. He is a retired major general and is chief operating officer for a venture capital company.
Not some nut.
Musick said he met Eva McLelland when he was working as a fundraiser for the Arbor Day Foundation in Lincoln.
She had some land to bequeath, the book says, and Musick helped her get the Veterans Administration to build a home ramp for her husband.
Musick didn't meet her until three years later, after her husband had died. Then Musick accompanied her to the Gulf of Mexico to distribute her husband's ashes. There, she revealed to him that her husband Nik was really Howard Hughes.
Musick told her that was hard to believe.
Eight years later, after devoting himself to research and documentation of Eva's story, Musick understands the skepticism but believes her story.
"He wanted to escape the limelight," Musick said. "He could never go anywhere without being recognized. He found a way to disappear."
Eva recalled peculiar detail, which presented Musick a monumental task of confirmation.
"Nik had a distinctive wardrobe for special occasions that Eva referred to as his ‘courting clothes,'" the book says. "She thought they were glamourous. He wore either navy blue or black suits with high top shoes that laced up the front. When he was dressed up, Eva thought he was the most handsome man she ever saw. ..."
"Later in their life together, Eva would think back on that handsome sophisticate and wonder how he turned into the naked man running through the woods of Alabama, erecting voodoo icons on stakes by the trees that they planted on their property, but that comes later."
The task of documentation convinced Musick that Eva's story was true. Everything checked out, he said, and those mistakes he made, she caught.
"Everything she said, I could find something that fit," Musick said.
The publisher, writelife.com, is one of the companies in Prairie Ventures LLC, based in Omaha. Musick is chief operating officer. He lives in Lincoln.
He appears in "Boxes" as Mark Miller, not under his real name.
He said he did that to focus the story's attention on Eva, and not himself.
"Then she didn't live long enough to see it," Musick said.
"Boxes" refers to the mystery of Hughes' unopened moving containers and also, consciously or not, to the compartments of his life, kept separated, to help him protect himself from real and imagined threats, including the Internal Revenue Service.
This is not the kind of project Assistant Dean Wellman of the University of Southern California would attach his name to without a certain faith.
He's worked his share in the light and shadows of show business.
"It is an extremely wild story," Wellman said by telephone.
He met Musick through an Air Force colonel he trusted implicitly and who worked with Musick on some project.
"I didn't have the clearance to know what it was," Wellman said.
Wellman produced a TV show that focused on Hughes' famous Spruce Goose airplane, so he was familiar with some of the the background.
"As you go through the material, you find the historical record is frequently contradictory, and Eva's story suddenly shed light on that," Wellman said.
Others familiar with Hughes told Wellman that the new version made sense of Hughes for the first time.
"There absolutely have to be two Howard Hughes characters, and when you match it with Eva's story, you can see the real Howard is with Eva," Wellman said. "I wish we had the smoking gun, but all we can do is put up the mountain of circumstantial evidence.
"I went back and forth on this as I wrote the book.
"I went back there (to Alabama)and tried to politely see if I could shake (Eva's) story, and she was completely consistent."
Down to the helicopter landing on the Alabama lawn.
Eva's Howard continued to conduct his business through aides, even after his stand-in died, according to the book.
But he was thwarted, ultimately, by what was known as the "Mormon will," which Hughes' family challenged successfully in court.
It contained a cubby-hole of money that Wellman and Musick conclude was Hughes' retirement fund.
"Eva asked him one time, ‘What happened to the money?' and he said, ‘My family screwed me out of it,'" Wellman said.
"This is a man who spent his entire life trying to throw people off his trail. This is exactly the kind of thing he'd do. It makes more sense than it doesn't."
Believe it... or not!
Yes, yes. It always seems to, doesn't it?
What a pathetic pile of crap.
It would have been nice to have been able to do a DNA test. I wonder if any of his belongings from this time are still around?
"It's..."
/johnny
Nik Micely was my daddy and Eva McLelland was my momma. It’s true I tell you!
There's some evidence that even that “exposed” story (as
told in “Blind Man's Bluff” is a cover.
Ok then! :-)
I saw a guy that looks just like that in Blockbuster the other day renting a copy of Ice Station Zebra.
I saw Elvis just the other day here on Maui. It was by one of the water falls on the way down to Hana. He looked a lot different but what gave him away was when I gave him a mountain apple he said “ thank you, thank you very much”.
Good point.
Glomar Explorer had nothing to do with Hughes, his name was just the cover for a CIA op.
I guess to know these answers, I’d have to buy the book
What’s a ‘Mormon will’? How can he be screw out of his own money?
Me thinks she married a hobo impostor, claiming to be HH.
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