Armand Hammer

A judge has set today as the deadline for the house occupied by industrialist Armand Hammer at the time of his death to be turned over to the Los Angeles woman who inherited it when Hammer's wife, Frances, died last year. The transaction is occurring only after a confrontation over the attempted removal of belongings from Hammer's luxury Westwood home Dec. 10, hours after he died. Bitter controversy, which seemed to surround Hammer in the last years of his life, has followed him in death.

A more personal side of industrialist and philanthropist Armand Hammer emerged at private funeral services Thursday. At an hour-long service attended by 200 people at Westwood Memorial Park, family members, friends and former business associates remembered the 92-year-old chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., who died Monday, as an "indomitable, tenacious" man who loved jokes, eating--especially dessert--and even helped plan his own funeral.

When Occidental Petroleum Corp. signed a contract in 1973 to build a huge fertilizer plant and port on the Black Sea, company Chairman Armand Hammer, the longtime advocate of closer Soviet-American ties who died this week, called the gigantic complex "the crowning achievement of our relations with the Soviet Union."

Armand Hammer, who died Monday night at age 92, was an entrepreneur on a grand scale, one of a rare breed who make a difference in worldwide business, in good ways and bad. Hammer was admired for his unceasing energy and for his efforts on behalf of better relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The world greeted the death of industrialist and philanthropist Armand Hammer in as richly varied a way as it reacted to his life: with awe and praise for his endeavors on the international stage, tempered by diplomatic silence, criticism and even relief from some of his many antagonists. Hammer, 92, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., died Monday night at his home in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles after a brief illness.

If Armand Hammer, who died Monday at 92, could have had his life story told the way his ego would have preferred, it no doubt would have been a sprawling novel, not to mention a TV miniseries. And--a man of extraordinary wealth and ambition--his only condition would not have been this: that he would have to be the novelist.

Armand Hammer's death has called into question the future of Occidental Petroleum Corp., the quirky Westwood oil company that carried his imprint for more than 30 years as he transformed it into the nation's 16th-largest industrial company. On Tuesday, Wall Street interpreted Hammer's death as leaving the oil and chemical company vulnerable to takeover or to being sold off in pieces. Heavy trading fueled a spike in the stock of Occidental and IBP Inc.

As Armand Hammer built Occidental Petroleum Corp. from nearly nothing to the nation's 16th-largest industrial corporation, his grip on the company was so tight that critics called it a stranglehold. Today the question is whether his successor, Ray R. Irani, can hold together a company long regarded as a natural takeover target, worth far less as a whole than broken into its separate businesses: oil and gas, chemicals, natural gas pipelines, pork and beef, coal.

Armand Hammer, the financial entrepreneur whose extraordinary career spanned seven decades and half a dozen different businesses and whose avocation as a collector of art added to an already controversial life, died Monday at his home in Westwood. Hammer, 92, died following a brief illness, said a spokesman for Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Mazel tov, Armand Hammer. The 92-year-old billionaire industrialist will be pronounced a man next month when he celebrates his bar mitzvah, 79 years late, in a swank ceremony studded with Hollywood celebrities. The ceremony, signaling the entry of a Jewish male into manhood at age 13, is anticipated as officials at his Occidental Petroleum are making the most cautious of statements about the philanthropist's health.