The desperado was named Clifford Irving.
***
Shortly before Christmas 1971 the publishing firm of McGraw-Hill dispatched a 550-word publicity release of special interest to the New York offices of major editors, newscasters, and wire services. After nearly fourteen years of refusing to be interviewed, photographed, or even seen by members of the press, Howard Hughes, America’s reclusive billionaire, had apparently completed, with the help of a collaborator, a 230,000-word account of his life. The clothbound edition of the work would be issued on March 27, 1972, and Life would publish three 10,000-word installments from it. “Call this autobiography,” the announcement quoted Hughes as saying. “Call it my memoirs. Call it what you please. It is the story of my life in my own words.” Also attributed to Hughes in the release were phrases singing the praises of his assistant in the project, Clifford Irving. In the billionaire’s putative words, Irving had been picked “because of his sympathy, discernment, discretion and, as I learned, his integrity as a human being.”
Hughes’s recollections, it seemed, had been taped: “The words in this book—other than some of the questions which provoked them—are my own spoken words.” At first editors assumed that the taping sessions had been held in the Bahamas hotel where he had been hiding out for the past year, but the truth seemed to be more dramatic than that; the two men had held over a hundred meetings “in various motel rooms and parked cars throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
That was the claim advanced in the publisher’s announcement. It would be accepted by the public for a month, and another month would pass before it was withdrawn. In the meantime the story was to become one of the most sensational in the history of the book trade. At one point it drove news of the President’s inspection of the Great Wall of China off tabloid front pages. More newspapermen were covering Hughes and Irving than the Vietnam War—nine reporters from the Los Angeles Times alone. Thirty postal inspectors were tracking clues in the mails. Paramount reissued The Carpetbaggers, a thinly disguised fictional account of Hughes’s life. An X-rated film entitled Helga and Howard was being shown in Manhattan, Hughes T-shirts were selling well at two dollars apiece, and people were wearing pins which said, “This is a genuine Howard Hughes button.”
The genuineness of the autobiography was first questioned in the wake of the December announcement. A spokesman for the Hughes Tool Company denied “the existence of a Hughes autobiography.” But the recluse was celebrated for his furtiveness with his closest associates; those who knew him best thought the disclaimer was completely in character, and in fact the editors of the book had expected it. When managing Editor Ralph Graves of Life showed his staff a handwritten letter from Hughes approving serialization of the text, one of them asked, “How do we know the letter’s not a forgery?” Graves replied, “It’s authentic, all right. We’ve had it checked by an expert.” Albert Leventhal, a McGraw-Hill vice president, told the New York Times, “We have gone to considerable efforts to ascertain that this is indeed the Hughes autobiography,” and Donald M. Wilson, a Life vice president, told another newsman, “Oh, we’re absolutely positive. Look, we’re dealing with people like McGraw-Hill, and, you know, we’re not exactly a movie magazine! This is Time, Inc. and McGraw-Hill talking. We’ve checked this thing out. We have proof.”
To another questioner Wilson said, “We never dealt with the Hughes Tool Company. It doesn’t surprise us that they know nothing of this, since Mr. Hughes was totally secretive about the project.” The person they had dealt with was Irving, who had been a McGraw-Hill author for twelve years. He had written four unsuccessful novels and, more recently, Fake!, an account of Elmyr de Hory, an art forger and Irving’s neighbor on the Spanish island of Ibiza. In retrospect it seems that his publishers should have taken a closer look at the author’s preoccupation with fraudulence and his story that Hughes insisted upon discussing the matter with no one but him. The truth was that the book was a complete fabrication. Irving had never met Hughes, let alone taped him, and Hughes had never heard of the man who claimed to be his ghost. At first glance McGraw-Hill and Life seem to have been inexcusably gullible. But in fact the hoaxer had shown remarkable cunning, and he had also been lucky.
The plot had begun a year earlier with the reproduction in Newsweek of an eleven-line handwritten note by Hughes. A month later Life published the letter in color. Irving was the son of a cartoonist; he had inherited his father’s clever fingers, and he found that with a little practice he could produce whole pages of writing which looked like that of Hughes. The tycoon was in the news that season, and much was being made of his secrecy. Some writers suggested that he might even be dead; no one in the outside world would know. It struck Irving that a book of reminiscences purporting to bear Hughes’s imprimatur might go unchallenged by him, especially since he might already be in his grave. He persuaded Richard Suskind, a fellow hack living on the neighboring island of Majorca, to collaborate with him. Later, when the names of both men had become household words, their photographs would be familiar on front pages around the world—Irving, tall and ruggedly handsome, and Suskind, “built,” as a friend put it, “like an avalanche with a gargoyle on top.” Ultimately their likenesses would represent the ultimate in literary chicanery. In the beginning, however, they appeared to the editors at McGraw-Hill as a writer known for reliability if not talent and his diligent researcher. The editors had no way of knowing that Irving proposed to share the swag with his crony, 75 percent for himself and 25 percent for Suskind. A third member of the conspiracy was Irving’s wife Edith, an attractive Swiss painter and the mother of his two children.
Irving played McGraw-Hill with consummate skill, forwarding them apparently genuine letters from Howard Hughes in which the billionaire expressed growing interest in the collaboration. At the appropriate time Hughes’s signature appeared on a contract, clause 22 of which specified that “The Publisher agrees that it shall undertake no advertising or promotion or sale of the Work prior to 30 days after acceptance by the Publisher of a complete and satisfactory manuscript for the Work.” Life, which bought first serial rights for $250,000, also agreed to stay mum. Taking what seemed to be reasonable precautions, the publisher submitted specimens of Hughes’s supposed handwriting to an expert, who compared it with samples of the real thing and reported: “The chances that another person could copy this handwriting even in a similar way are less than one in a million.” Later another firm of analysts concurred, declaring that it was “impossible, based on our years of experience in the field of questioned handwriting and signatures,” that anyone except Howard Hughes could have written the material which had come from Irving.
Most ingenious of all, Irving told his publisher that the eccentric tycoon insisted that checks made out to him bear only his initials: “H. R. Hughes.” When the author got them, he turned them over to his wife. Edith, wearing a wig and carrying an altered passport and a stolen identity card, flew to Zurich and opened a Swiss Credit Rank account in the name of “Helga R. Hughes.” Into this account, number 320496, she ultimately deposited nearly a million dollars of McGraw-Hill money, which she then withdrew and put in the Swiss Ranking Corporation across the street. Meanwhile her husband and Suskind had also been traveling, researching Hughes’s life in the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Palm Springs, California, the morgues of the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post, and—the unkindest cut of all—the files of Time-Life. Their most valuable acquisition was the unpublished manuscript of the memoirs of Hughes’s retired chief lieutenant. Irving borrowed it from one of the man’s associates and photocopied it. Pooling their information, he and Suskind took turns being “Hughes” and interviewing one another on tape. The tapes were then transcribed, and Irving wrote marginal comments on the resulting thousand-page manuscript in the billionaire’s hand. The result seemed so authentic that it fooled men who had known Hughes intimately years earlier.
The conspiracy began to come apart on the afternoon of January 7,
1972, when Hughes, speaking from the Bahamas, held a two-and-a-half-hour press conference over the telephone with seven journalists who had covered him before his withdrawal into seclusion. He branded Irving’s book a humbug and, while he was at it, denied reports that his fingernails were six inches long, that he was emaciated, and that his hair hung to his waist. All seven of his listeners agreed that the voice was his. Irving called it a fake, but time was beginning to run out for him. Edith’s end of the plot had begun to come to light. A Hughes lawyer had asked his client to fill out a questionnaire, establishing its authenticity with his fingerprints. One of the questions was: “When is the last time you personally endorsed a check for any reason?” Hughes answered in his own hand: “More than ten years ago.” The conspirators had assumed that numbered accounts in Swiss banks were inviolate under all circumstances. Not so: in cases of suspected crime details could be revealed, and when the Swiss learned that checks meant for Howard R. Hughes had been cashed by a German-speaking woman calling herself Helga R. Hughes, they knew something was rotten in Zurich. A worldwide search for the mysterious Helga began.
On Thursday, January 20, the day word of this sensational new development reached New York, Irving attended a conference of McGraw-Hill and Life executives. Coolly he advanced three possible explanations for it: that he had taped a charlatan pretending to be Hughes, that Hughes had used a “loyal servant” to deposit the checks, and that he, Irving, was a mountebank. Searching the eyes of everyone there, he said in his most sincere voice, “The last of these possibilities I intend to discard, and I hope that you do, too.” His presence was superb; they all nodded. Flying back to Ibiza—to the indignation of Life, whose editors thought he should stay in New York until the crisis had been resolved—he replied to reporters pointing out the resemblance between Edith and the Swiss descriptions of Helga: “Do you really think I’d involve my family in an enterprise like this?” Back in Manhattan his lawyer, whose suspicions had not yet been aroused, confided to reporters that he thought his client had been duped by a gang of impostors, two of them gifted forgers and the third a six-foot-three beanpole who looked like Howard Hughes.
This was a crucial moment in the conspiracy, and a grasp of it is essential to an understanding of what was happening to Clifford Irving. He had a large part of the money in cash, he had his freedom, and he could have kept both. Other fugitives from justice were living comfortably on Ibiza and Majorca. He, Edith, and Suskind might have remained where they were or flown to any one of several South American countries where their crimes were not extraditable. Expense was no problem; they could have afforded almost anything. The alternative was grim; exposure was now inevitable. Why, then, did Irving fly back to New York and into the trap? The answer, in the opinion of those who were close to him, was that he couldn’t resist the publicity. All his life he had craved attention. His books hadn’t brought it, but this caper had, and the knowledge that an eager press corps awaited him at Kennedy Airport drew him as though he were helpless. The moth simply could not resist the flame. It is one of the sad little ironies of his story that when he landed there he couldn’t answer their questions. He had laryngitis. “Gentlemen, this is a horrible experience,” he whispered to them. For once one believes him.
Another irony followed swiftly. Two reporters believed that Irving had been in touch with a former Hughes aide named John Meier. Calling to see him at his lawyer’s house, they sent in word: “Just tell Cliff we know all about Meier.” Irving had never heard of Meier, but when the message reached him he was stunned. He thought they meant Meyer, which sounded the same. The man who had slipped him the unpublished memoirs of Hughes’s retired assistant was named Stanley Meyer. If the newsmen had been tipped off to Meyer’s role, the plotters were finished, and Irving might as well own up to it. He went out to the district attorney’s office, made a partial confession there, and then returned to confront the two waiting newspapermen. “There’s something I have to tell you guys,” he said, “but it’s got to be off the record, O.K.?” Under the circumstances an off-the-record confidence was impossible, but they nodded. He took a deep breath and said, “Well, you may have guessed it and you may not. Helga Hughes is Edith. Edith is Helga.”
That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Improvising, he said that his wife had been acting at Hughes’s direction, and so convincing was the manuscript—and the opinions of the handwriting experts—that the hoax limped along for a few more days. Then two blows demolished it. The manuscript of the retired Hughes assistant’s unpublished memoirs surfaced, and the story of Irving’s taping sessions with Hughes in various exotic settings was unmasked. He had in fact traveled to those places, sending back picture postcards to McGraw-Hill, but he had made the mistake of mixing pleasure with business. One of his companions had been a willowy blonde scuba diving instructor who had accompanied him to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands; she told the Chicago Tribune that she had grown very fond of Irving, whom she had thought was separated from his wife, but that neither of them had encountered Howard Hughes. The second and more damaging of the hoaxer’s playmates was a beautiful Danish baroness and entertainer named Nina Van Pallandt. Irving had been indiscreet enough to brag about Nina to a McGraw-Hill editor and reveal her name. Located by postal inspectors, Nina admitted that she had traveled with Irving and said they had, in fact, copulated their way across Mexico. Since Cliff had been constantly at her side, she said, he couldn’t possibly have kept any rendezvous with Hughes.
That was the end for Irving. But not for Nina. It is a provocative comment on the value of publicity—any publicity—that it was only a beginning for her. For years she had been limping along as an obscure folksinger. Now, suddenly, she was in demand everywhere. She appeared twice on the David Frost Show, twice on the Mike Douglas Show, twice on the Dick Cavett Show, once on the Today Show, once on the Johnny Carson Show, and on a television special. Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel booked her for three weeks, and she was signed up for appearances in Miami, Dallas, San Juan, and San Francisco. Her manager said the Irving happening was “worth five hit records and an Academy Award.” Without doubt she was the most distinguished fornicatrix of 1972.
Howard Hughes was not so fortunate. The uproar had become so great that the Bahaman government began to investigate the fact that his staff lacked work permits and immigration clearance, whereupon he fled to Nicaragua accompanied by six television sets, several crates of Poland water, a document shredder, blood plasma, a refrigerator, a hospital bed, mattresses, office furniture, pots and pans, various boxes of film, several hundred yards of cable, an old electric stove, a heater, and a cheap vinyl couch.
Life was reimbursed by McGraw-Hill, which got most of its money back from the Irvings and Suskind, all three of whom briefly went to prison. But that wasn’t the extent of McGraw-Hill’s disasters that year. The publisher suffered a long streak of bad luck. After Irving had been led away the publishers had just begun to patch up their image with the success of a book about Indians, The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox, when an awkward truth emerged: Red Fox was plagiarized from a work published in 1940. Next the editor of the Irving book was accused of an unethical practice: borrowing money from two other authors, the sum amounting to 10 percent of their advances from the publisher. Then a final touch assured the firm’s wretched situation as the laughingstock of the New York communications industry that year. Before the hoax the first floor of the new McGraw-Hill Building on the Avenue of the Americas had been leased to a branch bank. Now the tenant was moving in. Horrified publishing executives saw the gilt lettering going up on the plate-glass windows and realized that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it, because the contracts had long been executed and filed. The signs read: THE IRVING TRUST COMPANY.
***
On the frosty morning of February 21, 1972, the silver, blue and white fuselage of the Spirit of ’76, as Nixon called the presidential aircraft, flitted across the muddy ribbon of the Yangtze, headed northward, and entered it
s glide pattern over Peking. American reporters who had covered China a quarter-century earlier were amazed by the changes in the landscape below: paved roads, irrigation canals, huge collective farms, and trees (“Trees in China!” wrote Theodore H. White) lining the highways. On this historic day the masters of Red China would once more grasp the hands of American leaders in friendship. Anti-Communism would cease to be the dominant note in U.S. foreign policy. It was an occasion for good omens, the eve of George Washington’s birthday in the United States and, in Peking, the seventh day of the Year of the Rat, an auspicious time on the Chinese calendar.
The presidential jet touched down at 11:30. A moment of consternation followed. Except for U.S. correspondents and TV technicians, the airport was almost deserted. There were placards, but they had nothing to do with Nixon—LONG LIVE THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AND LONG LIVE THE GREAT SOLIDARITY OF ALL THE WORLD’S PEOPLE. Fewer than four hundred troops were on hand; they were singing a Red Army ballad of the 1930s, “The Three Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points of Attention.” America’s peripatetic thirty-seventh President had greeted the rulers of Romania, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Japan, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, Austria, and the Vatican. Always there had been crowds. Here there were none. Dismayed aides wondered what to do if he were left in the lurch. Could they fly home and say it had all been a mistake? At the last moment the inscrutable Chinese became scrutable. Premier Chou En-lai appeared with a handful of officials. Nixon extended his hand, and as millions of Americans watched on television, Chou took it.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 190