BUILDING: End of the Party?

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Even amid the zany opulence of the Hollywood set, Hal Braxton Hayes set a standard for show-offs to aspire to. A self-made millionaire, he liked to throw frequent parties for 200 to 300 guests in his $600,000, six-level surrealistic home carved out of a mountainside in Beverly Hills. Trim and handsomely greying at 48, Bachelor Hayes figured in gossip items with Joan Blondell and Barbara Hutton. and made the headlines for lasting two long months as the fiance-of-the-moment of Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. Hal Hayes also had another, essential side—the money-making side. He is the founder and sole proprietor of what he claims is the world's largest individually owned construction company, which is building about $60 million in housing projects at U.S. military bases.

Last week Hal Hayes's empire seemed in danger of falling all about him. For two weeks he had been reported missing. Then investigators and accountants descended on the Hollywood offices of his Hal B. Hayes Contractor Inc., spurred by the rising cries of creditors who claimed that Hayes owed them millions, and by Chicago's Continental Casualty Co., which had underwritten performance bonds on Hayes's projects. Subcontractors who said they had been unpaid stopped work for Hayes on an Army housing project in El Paso. At several other Hayes projects for the military, subcontractors complained that Hayes's complex of companies had not been paying them for their work. The Hayes organization called a halt to all these projects.

Around the World. In the midst of the furor. Hal Hayes suddenly reappeared at his Beverly Hills home, then called reporters to the bar of a Sunset Strip restaurant. He had not been "missing," he told . them, but had been around the world. He had been to the summit con ference in Paris, and to Hong Kong, Cairo and Beirut; he had been negotiating to build missile bases in France. Italy and Pakistan. "I haven't been hiding from anyone," said Hal Hayes. "Everybody is going to get paid. As of tonight, we've written $40 million worth of checks." At one point Hayes stopped reading his press handout to blurt to reporters, "Boy, I sure didn't write this myself." Then he went off to a Hollywood nightclub. Later, he was heard muttering, "I'm ruined, a ruined man"—and collapsed from what his secretary described as exhaustion and intoxication.