James Phelan
Born: 1912 in Alton, Illinois
Pen Name: None Connection to Illinois: James was born and raised in Alton, Il. Biography: James began his career at the Alton Evening Telegraph as a reporter.
Awards:
Selected Titles
Howard Hughes : ISBN: 0006350402 OCLC: 16435976 Fontana, [London] : 1977. |
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Scandals, scamps, and scoundrels : ISBN: 0394481968 OCLC: 8627519 The author explains how he worked as an investigative reporter for forty years and tells the stories behind some of his most engrossing cases. |
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The money : ISBN: 0752813919 OCLC: 38590675 Orion Business Books, London : 1998. |
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The money : ISBN: 0394556372 OCLC: 36284297 Random House, New York : ©1997. "Howard Hughes's death in 1976 exposed a unique American horror story. Hughes wandered six years in exile in a self-constructed private asylum, the victim of such gross neglect that neither he nor his keepers dared disclose him to public view. When he died, he weighed ninety-two pounds and was indistinguishable from a street derelict, dehydrated and ravaged by drugs." "There was no discoverable will, and thousands of people became involved in a bitter struggle to claim his fortune." "Among the motley of contenders fighting for The Money were two powerful groups. On one side was Will Lummis, a soft-voiced conservative lookalike cousin of the billionaire, and twenty other Hughes cousins claiming legal heirship. On the other side were the people who had managed the empire of the phobia-ridden Hughes during his last six years. They were headed by an executive triumvirate: Chester Davis, Hughes's aggressive and abrasive chief counsel; Frank W. "Bill" Gay, his mousy, low-profile executive vice president; and Nadine Henley, a plump, peroxided one-time secretary." "When Hughes died, both Texas and California claimed him as their taxable own, setting off years of litigation that went several times to the U.S. Supreme Court." "The final irony of Hughes and The Money was that the fight for his fortune demolished the privacy it had bought for him at great cost in his later years. The secrets came flooding forth as the men who had hidden him and those who ran his businesses were put under oath and required to talk."--BOOK JACKET. |