HUGHES

For many years, before billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes succumbed to his germ phobia, Jeff Chouinard was the Old Man's chief security officer and closest associate. Hughes trusted Chouinard, whose main job was to investigate and keep a running hourly report on the endless starlets in Hughes' harem. At the time Hughes owned RKO, and even after he lost it he was still nominally head of a film company, but few of these starlets ever saw themselves in celluloid. Hughes was a voracious reader of picture magazines and any girl's picture anywhere--as high school valedictorian or beauty-contest winner--could spark his interest and the offer of a ""film contract."" After a girl was installed in a germ-free apartment and fed germ-free food for three months, he was ready for his one night of love and might visit her--or not. Chouinard's memoir as told to Mathison strings these incidents together so rapidly that the book never gets deeper than an amusing skim through one man's sanitary sex life. An hors d'oeuvre beside James Phelan's Howard Hughes--The Hidden Years (p. 76).