Howard Hughes

LAS VEGAS -- Amid the jangle of the slot machines on one of America's most famous strips, pirates battle it out aboard ships at Treasure Island, volcanoes erupt outside The Mirage and Roman statues stand guard at Caesars Palace. In the middle of it all, straight out of suburbia, sits the mall.Though it's surrounded by neon-bright casinos and hotels, the Rouse Co.'s Fashion Show Mall on Las Vegas Boulevard has no blackjack or blinking lights. It holds an allure of a different sort -- Macy's, Saks and Neiman Marcus, all satisfying the itch to spend.

James R. Phelan, an author and reporter who made a crusade out of investigating and writing about reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, died of lung cancer Monday at his home in Temecula, Calif. He was 85.Mr. Phelan died just before the publication of "Money: The Battle for Howard Hughes' Billions," which he wrote with Lewis Chester. The book will be published by Random House next month.Mr. Phelan, who was a staff member at the Saturday Evening Post and a free-lance writer for several other publications, including the New York Times and Paris Match, was fascinated by Mr. Hughes' financial dealings and political machinations.

LAS VEGAS -- The images endure: flashing neon, sweltering heat, shotgun betrothals, street hawkers selling smut and midnight romance all colliding in this outpost of Elvis impersonators and eternal hope in a slot machine.But across the desert landscape, another image is soaring above the rest: construction cranes silhouetted against the Red Rock Mountains.This is the future of Las Vegas.And Rouse Co., one of the nation's premier real estate developers, has laid its claim here into the next century, buying a legacy of the past: the last remnants of the Howard Hughes estate.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute will distribute $80 million over the next four years to 30 U.S. medical schools -- including $3.4 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine -- to shore up their research facilities, the institute announced today.Officials at the Chevy Chase-based research philanthropy intend the money to help support younger faculty members, pilot studies and communication technology."Academic medical centers across the country are being squeezed by reductions in patient-care revenues and restrictions on government research spending," Dr. Purnell W. Choppin, the institute's president, said in a written statement.

Good fortune befell Michael Summers in a letter bearing the imprint of Howard Hughes.Now Dr. Summers, an unassuming associate professor of biochemistry, is greeted on campus by shouts of "Hey, superstar."An intense interest in the role of metals in proteins led the University of Maryland Baltimore County scientist to be the first to describe a key component of the virus that causes AIDS. That discovery, in turn, helped him win a position as an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the largest philanthropic foundation in the country.

A vice president of the largest philanthropic foundation in the country and his wife were found fatally shot yesterday in a house in the affluent community of Winchester on the Severn, county police said.Jose Enrique Trias, 49, an executive and general counsel for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and his wife, Julie Noel Gilbert, 48, a Bethesda attorney, were found just after noon in a house in the 1600 block of Winchester Road, said Officer Randy Bell, police spokesman.The victims appeared to have been dead for 48 hours.

The two Bethesda lawyers killed at their weekend retreat in Arnold were shot in the back of the head in an apparent robbery, Anne Arundel County police said yesterday.The dark red Acura Legend that had been taken from the home of Julie Noel Gilbert, 48, and her husband Jose E. Trias, 49, was found by police in the 900 block of E. 20th St. in East Baltimore. It was taken back to police headquarters to be searched for evidence.A handyman found the bodies of Mr. Trias and his wife lying in the bed of their weekend home in the 1600 block of Father Urban Lane about noon Monday.

Basketball is back. "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld" and "Frasier" are showing reruns. One of the recent Oscar winners is showcased in a repeat of an oldie but goodie miniseries. That about covers it.* "NCAA basketball tournament" (8 p.m.-conclusion, WBAL, Channel 11) -- Here's something to ponder. If you had used an alphabetical system to choose winners for the second round, going with whichever city came first in the alphabet, you would have predicted 13 out of the 16 winners, including the upset by Boston College over top-seeded North Carolina.

The life of Howard Hughes, as chronicled here, reminds us that an excess of money can lead not to happiness but to personal chaos.Take Christmas Eve of 1940. Hughes was at home snuggling with actress Gene Tierney. His front doorbell rang. In bounced dancer Ginger Rogers, whom Hughes was also dating, dressed as Santa Claus -- white cotton beard, red velvet suit, black boots -- and carrying a bag stuffed with gifts.As biographer Charles Higham relates, Tierney "made a rather clumsy escape." Ms. Rogers and Hughes "plunged into a furious fight."

Able to leap tall bullets at a single bound, faster than a speeding building, more powerful than someone doing the locomotion, and a lot more fun than all of them, "The Rocketeer" is a romp through the deco style and the heroic postures of the late '30s,which ought to please both literaly minded kids and ironic parents.(If you are an ironic kid or a literal-minded parent,you ought to stay away.)The genius of the movie is how it operates with a great deal of brio on two levels: It is both a sterling aviation adventure about a boy who can fly and an amusing farrago of myths set in the popular culture of the times.

Dorothy W. "Dotty" Taylor, a former WAMPAS Baby starlet and Hollywood movie actress who appeared during the early 1930s in comedies starring Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chase, died in her sleep Thursday at the Edenwald retirement community in Towson. She was 96. She was born Dorothy Violet Wannenwetch, the daughter of a founder of the Western Southern Life Insurance Co. and a homemaker. During her early years, she moved with her family to Virginia Beach, Va., and later to Baltimore, where she graduated in 1929 from the old Hannah More Academy in Reisterstown.

A Johns Hopkins University molecular biologist is among the 56 researchers who will share $600 million in grants awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Duojia Pan, an associate professor of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, will receive about $500,000 a year for five years to study how organs control their own growth. "I'm really excited about this," said Pan, who is known as D.J. "It's not only the money - it's an honor." Announced Monday, the awards will go to innovative scientists who are conducting research on cutting-edge topics.

Worked for Howard Hughes Frank William Gay, a senior corporate officer for Howard Hughes and the recent target of a renewed claim on the billionaire's fortune, has died. Mr. Gay, who lived in Humble, Texas, died Monday in a hospital in Kingwood, Texas, according to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase. The cause was not released. He ran Hughes' holding company, Summa Corp., and was on the executive committee that ran his medical institute. Mr. Gay also served as chairman of Hughes Air Corp.

That Howard Hughes was a bizarre man is indisputable. Bizarre is also how I might describe my own encounter - to use the term loosely - with the reclusive billionaire, who is back in the pop culture spotlight thanks to the new film, Hoax. Hoax is Hollywood's version of writer Clifford Irving's outrageous attempt to sell a fake Hughes autobiography back in 1971 and 1972. Despite his claims, Mr. Irving never got close to Mr. Hughes. In 1968, an odd experience left me wondering whether I had. At the time, I was a young reporter for United Press International in New York, assigned to cover Mr. Hughes' attempt to purchase a controlling interest in the American Broadcasting Company.

Joe Smitherman, 75, whose decades as a councilman and mayor in Selma, Ala., included the turbulent civil rights era, died Sunday in a Montgomery hospital. A former appliance salesman, Mr. Smitherman was a 34-year- old city councilman when first elected mayor in 1964 as a segregationist. At the time, about 150 blacks were registered to vote in Selma. Six months later, marchers seeking equal voting rights were beaten by police on a Selma bridge in what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

Howard Hughes was rich. Howard Hughes was weird. That may be as much as most Americans know about Hughes, who entered adult life as one of the richest men in America and died in 1976 an emaciated recluse. But there was far more to the man than that. Hughes was an American original - brash, phobic, visionary, flawed, pioneering, obsessive, charismatic, womanizing. Having inherited millions thanks to a drill bit invented by his father, he spent huge chunks of money on his passions: flying and making movies.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association loves its California wines, loves Howard Hughes, and is pretty keen on the guy who played Ray Charles, if the 62nd Golden Globe nominations announced yesterday are any indication. Sideways, Alexander Payne's offbeat comic romance set in California's wine country, led the field with seven nominations. The Aviator, the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio epic on the life of Howard Hughes, scored six. But any way you look at it, Jamie Foxx was on the association's mind.

Some longtime friends long absent from the screen are returning this fall, which should make for some happy reunions in the nation's movie theaters. Among those actors who'll be offering their work up for public inspection after especially long absences are Jodie Foster, off screen since 2002's Panic Room; Annette Bening, off screen since 2000's What Planet Are You From? and even Barbra Streisand, AWOL since 1996's The Mirror Has Two Faces. Babs get the award for returning in the unlikeliest place; she'll be playing Ben Stiller's mother in Meet the Fockers (Dec.

NEW YORK - Somewhere yesterday, Katharine Hepburn certainly was howling. Whether in amusement or astonishment - now that was the question. What would the famously practical Hepburn, a thrifty, no-nonsense New Englander to her core, have thought about someone plunking down $10,200 for an outdoor plant stand she never even stood a plant on, or $10,800 for a pair of well-worn address books, filled with the names and phone numbers of people long departed from...

In Baltimore City College student, 19, fatally shot in possible robbery try Rio-Jarell Tatum, a Polytechnic Institute graduate home from his first year at Pennsylvania State University, was killed Sunday night, apparently on his way to a nightclub in downtown Baltimore. Officer Troy J. Harris, a police spokesman, said Tatum was shot once in a possible attempted robbery as he was walking in the 400 block of N. Paca St. about 10:30 p.m. He was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he died.