Volume 26, Number 9 · May 31, 1979
The Solid Gold Cornflake
By Nicholas von Hoffman
Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes
by Donald L. Barlett, by James B. Steele
Norton, 687 pp., $15.95
The only human being in our epoch who has been able to equal Jackie O in ink and air time was Howard Hughes. We've had celebrity tycoons before, some of them almost as wacky as the solid gold cornflake. In the 1890s there was Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Street, followed in the first decades of the century by Henry Ford; and ever since the billionaire, mysterious, industrialist, recluse, eccentric, speed-plane pilot, movie producer, Las Vegas entrepreneur, CIA partner Hughes, until on April 5, 1976, his dehydrated, drugged, and debilitated, 100-pound corpse was off-loaded from a private jet at Houston Intercontinental Airport.
Review, 2818 words
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