CONTACT:
Cindy Grady
WriteLife, LLC
Phone: 877-974-8354
cindy.grady@writelife.com
Book Bit for WTBF-AM/FM, Troy, AL (air date 2/12/11)
“Boxes: the Secret life of Howard Hughes” by Douglas Wellman (WriteLife, LLC)
In time for Valentine’s Day, here is an amazing love story between one of the most wealthy and influential men in the world and his secret wife. Together, evidence would assert, they spent the last part of his secret life together on a farm on the road between Troy and Goshen!
Now, the idea that a world-renown engineer, businessman and billionaire could hide himself in a little southeast community on a farm with a new identity is fairly startling. But let's face it, if he had enough money and the willpower (and he did), who could have done so any better?
Howard Hughes was born in 1905 in Texas, a place still pretty wild. His father was shrewd, unethical and successful in his oil business. Hooked on aviation at an early age, he was educated in boarding schools back east. Money was never an issue because his father invented an essential component for oil drilling. Howard Junior was orphaned by 1924.He headed to Hollywood, and was in the business three decades, buying RKO in 1948. Concurrent with filmmaking, Howard Hughes launched a second career developing and flying aircraft. The assets of the Hughes Tool Company provide the money for aircraft development and construction through Hughes Aircraft Company. Later he adds the Hughes Helicopter Company. He bought controlling interest in TWA. Marriages come and go. By 1966, he runs his businesses over the phone, not in person. He wages continual war against the IRS. Howard was a wealthy, phobic, friendless man, hiding in his hotel room with a cadre of Mormon assistants while deflecting his current wife, the IRS and a steady stream of lawsuits. Howard needs a back door to escape into a new life.
In 1967, Eva McClelland of Troy, Alabama, sets off for a new life in the US Panama Canal Zone. At Howard Air Force Base in 1969, she meets an enigmatic, tall, handsome man calling himself "Nic", aka Verner Nicely (NICK-e-ly). He is hard of hearing and has terrible burns on his hands. (HH was badly burned in an airplane crash.) This “Nic” does not match the description of the real Verner Nicely, who vanished in 1967 working for the CIA..in Panama. "Nic" and Eva fall in love, and are secretly married in 1970 with no photographs. He is not easy to live with, and their relationship has serious ebbs and flows. After many moves, they eventually settle in a remote farm west of Troy near Goshen, Alabama. "Nic" keeps all his clothes in boxes so he can pick up and leave with all his stuff at a moment's notice . He also wear gloves and boots but little else. He is not an ideal neighbor, bur for Eva every day is an adventure.
Over time, “Nic” hints and reveals more of his true identity. “Nic” is reading a magazine article about Howard Hughes with a photo made prior to 1952, and gives it to Eva so she can declare, “Nic, that’s YOU!” He smiles. His behavior vacillated between bizarre and unusual. In 1976, an emaciated, longhaired shell of a man with extremely long fingernails indentified as “Howard Hughes” is removed by ambulance from a Nevada hotel and dies. Yet a trim dapper Howard Hughes had been in meetings, flown airplanes and traveled recently. After the funeral, “Nic” became slightly more open to Eva. Cancer entered both their lives in 1993. In 2001 they moved to assisted living in Dothan, but the cancer claimed him a few months later.
He died a pauper. Eva died in Nov. 2009, after telling her remarkable story to an Air National Guard Brigadier General named Mark Musick, who in turn told Douglas Wellmann. Together, they researched and interviewed Eva, to reveal her incredible love story!
We have a number of copies to give-away on the air this week, and I’ll talk to General Mark Musick this Sunday ON THE BOOKSHELF on WTBF-AM/FM about the book and his involvement in the unraveling of a mystery with local connections!
(Repeat title, author and publisher.) I'm Doc Kirby and that's a Book Bit.