As for publication, I would choose the McGraw-Hill Book Co. They are an outstanding, prestigious, and conservative publishing house and big enough to handle what I feel would be a major publishing event. Also, I have a well-developed relationship with them which has resulted in a long-standing mutual loyalty. I’m sure they would maintain absolute discretion while the work was in progress … Before committing themselves, they or any other publisher would undoubtedly want to see some form of written agreement between us which would incorporate a legal release on your part and define the cooperation, since the prime value of the book would lie in the fact that it is an authorized, definitive, and ultimately uncensored biography, rather than a piece of opportunism … I think, too, that a brief preface or introduction to the book by you would make the concept absolutely clear. But we can discuss this later …
The sun has broken through here after weeks of rain, etc.
“Fascinating.” Albert Leventhal puffed nervously at his cigarette. “Well, I’ll tell you, if you meet the man and he’s willing to talk, it could be a sensational book. But if he’s going to give you only two or three hours of his time and then say, ‘Go away and write,’ it’s no good. And that’s what could happen. He’s a very unpredictable man, you know. Terrible reputation. He bought a yacht once from my father, years and years ago, and it was almost impossible to do business with him. Constantly changes his mind.”
“I can’t promise,” I hedged, “but I’ll do my best.”
“What did he want from us? A million dollars?”
“I told him that was out of the question. I had to give him a few basic truths about the poverty-stricken publishing industry.”
“We’ll come up with an offer,” Albert said, a little annoyed. He handed the letters back to me. “You hang on to these. Don’t lose them. Even if the whole book deal fell through, these letters are probably worth $25,000 each.”
“I should get him to write more,” I said, laughing; and Beverly and Albert laughed, too.
The woman at the reception desk in the Time-Life Building shook her head. “We don’t keep out-of-date issues of our magazines. It would help if you knew the date — we could look up the article for you.”
“It was a recent issue. That’s all I know.”
“Try the A & S Bookstore — Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street.”
In the rear of that shop I found a shelf piled high with back copies of Life. It took a few minutes to find the January 22nd issue with its tale of Hughes’s exodus from Las Vegas, a picture of Robert Maheu, and a two-page spread, nearly full size, of a letter that began: “Dear Chester and Bill …” The final paragraph was what I had seen in the Newsweek inset and used as the model for the forgeries. I paid fifty cents for the copy of Life and took a taxi back to the Hotel Elysee.
The three letters were locked in my Harrods suitcase, which opened only by spinning a combination dial. I dropped down on the bed and laid them out next to the open pages of Life, with its reproduction of the genuine letter from Howard Hughes. I felt giddy — I needed air. I stared at them for about ten minutes, then left the hotel and walked purposefully up the street to a stationery shop on East 55th Street, where I bought three pads of yellow lined legal paper, a Parker fountain pen, a bottle of Waterman’s black ink, and a date stamp.
Alone, and faced with absurdity, you rarely laugh. Sane laughter must be shared with another person, and the only person with whom I could have shared the laughter and the feeling of mild horror was Dick Suskind, who was 4,000 miles away. Alone, you just smile and shake your head in bewilderment. If that copy of Life had been there in Beverly Loo’s office and had been placed side by side with my letters from Howard Hughes, the ball game would have ended then and there. “They were godawful,” I said to Dick, two weeks later in Ibiza. “You can’t believe how bad they were. They were the worst forgeries ever made by man or beast. They just didn’t look the least bit alike.”
In the Elysee in New York, I sat down at the desk and worked from noon to ten o’clock at night. I wrote until I had the letters right, using up all three pads of paper, Then I tore up the old letters, dropped them in the wastebasket, slid the new ones in the file and locked it away in the suitcase; and then content but famished, went downstairs for a cheeseburger and a chocolate malted.
“Show them to Bob,” Beverly said the next afternoon, once again in Albert Leventhal’s office. I slid the new set of letters across the desk to Bob Locke, a McGraw-Hill vice-president. He passed them, as he finished each page, to Albert and Beverly, who read them for the second time. They could detect no difference from the set they had read the day before.
“He must be an extraordinary man,” Locke said. “I wouldn’t mind going with you to meet him. Where’d you say you were meeting him?”
“Nassau, I think. But I’ll have to go alone.” His suggestion had jarred me, but I was emphatic.
“I suppose so. I was just thinking what a hell of an experience it’s going to be.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what’s going to happen,” I admitted.
Bob Locke then made the offer I was to present to Hughes. McGraw-Hill would put up $100,000 upon signing a contract —” seed money,” as Leventhal called it — a further $100,000 on delivery and acceptance of the interviews which would form the basis for the book; and a final $300,000 on acceptance of a finished manuscript and a preface by Hughes himself.
“It seems fair to me,” I said. “But it’s Howard’s decision, not mine.”
I left the office and went straight to Western Union. I cabled Dick: MOTHER OFFERS FIVE HUNDRED REPEAT FIVE HUNDRED STOP BREAK OUT CHAMPAGNE STOP HEADING NASSAU DAY AFTER TOMORROW, and signed it LOVE HOWIE.
Nina was due in from London the following evening at seven o’clock. I went from Western Union to Eastern Airlines. “What flights have you got on Thursday or Friday to Nassau?”
The girl behind the counter smiled at me pityingly. “We can’t even wait-list you,” she said. “Our Nassau flights have been booked solid two months in advance. Next,” she called, and I was suddenly out of the line and heading for the door.
The girl at Northeast Airlines punched her computer. “It’s the big weekend,” she explained. “You know, President Nixon has changed Lincoln’s birthday to a Monday.”
“He’s doing what?”
“So there can be a long weekend in winter so people can get away.”
“And the American people will stand for that? They’ll let one president fool around with another president’s birthday? That’s sacrilegious.”
“Well, they’re both Republicans,” the girl said. “It’s sort of all in the family.”
I tried all the airlines that flew to Miami with connections to Nassau or Freeport. The next afternoon, having exhausted myself dashing up and down Fifth Avenue to all the airlines and two travel agencies, and feeling the beginning of panic — how could Howard Hughes not be able to arrange air tickets to Nassau or the nearby islands? — I tried the American Express office on Park Avenue, near the hotel. “Look, I’ll go anywhere south of Georgia and north of Venezuela. But I’ve got to go tomorrow or Friday.”
Seven telephone calls later, the agent said: “I can get you to Mexico City, sir. But not from there to Acapulco or any of the beach resorts.”
“How about Oaxaca? That’s in the south of Mexico about three hundred miles.”
He made one more telephone call. “Two seats open. You’ll have to stay overnight in Mexico City.”
“I’ll take them.”
The plan, of course, had been for me and Howard to hold all our theoretical meetings on Paradise Island. But suddenly, as a result of Nixon’s high-handed tampering with Lincoln’s birthday, Howard Hughes was on the move. The President’s thoughtfulness was to change Howard from a hibernating hermit to a peregrinating adventurer. As yet, however, I was unaware of this. And so, I need hardly add, was Howard Hughes.
Coming off the plane at Mexico City Airport, a young photographer scampere
d up the boarding ladder with a Polaroid camera, clicking off shots of the disembarking passengers. Nina threw up the collar of her old leather coat. shielded her face and stepped quickly toward the terminal building. I caught up to her at the gate. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, it would be lovely if that hit page one of the London Sunday Express. Edith and Frederik would adore it. That would be the end of your marriage and my divorce. That’s not the kind of publicity I need.”
“Are you kidding? Marshall would love it.” Her new manager had been dinning at her for months that she was a star and had to behave like one, think like one. “I hate to disillusion you,” I said, “but this airport isn’t the King’s Road in Chelsea. If they don’t know you in New York, they certainly don’t know you in Mexico.” And writers, I went on to explain, lived in the happy swamp of anonymity. It was one of the pleasures of the calling to be mildly known yet unrecognizable. “Anyway, that kid was just taking tourist photographs. So relax.” I laughed. Her eyes clouded over a moment; then she smiled, too.
“Where are we staying?” she asked, when we had cleared customs and immigration.
“I have to make a phone call to find out.” I ducked off to a public booth. I had told her that Hughes or one of his mysterious intermediaries was taking care of the arrangements. I called American Express to confirm the reservation I had made in their Park Avenue office for the El Camino Hotel. The hotel had no record of it, but they had a room.
Nina was waiting, sitting on the banged-up silver metal suitcase — it held her radio, tape recorder, one change of underwear, two old sweaters, and a pair of jeans. She wore her baggy leather coat, floppy trousers, and gigantic octagonal sunglasses, her mass of gold hair coiled and tucked primly under a black scarf. Nina Superstar! The Baroness van Pallandt, mother of three, whom one of the London newspapers had just voted among “the ten sexiest women in the world” — which accolade she had told me she considered one of the ten greatest practical jokes ever played. To a certain extent I had to agree. Wearing no makeup, looking lost and uncertain, she hunched down on her suitcase, a gangling, almost awkward figure that could uncoil into a lovely woman only if she chose, only if she let go, abandoned the armor of the wronged wife and the frightened girl-child. The large, gray-blue eyes regarded me with concern.
“The El Camino,” I said. “It’s a little way out of town.”
“Will you have to leave there to meet him?”
“If I get a telephone call. If I don’t, we fly to Oaxaca at seven o’clock in the morning.”
“Let’s go out tonight,” she said, climbing into the taxi. “Let’s have a siesta and then go out on the town, hear the mariachis.”
“And if Hughes calls while I’m out?”
“Oh, leave a message for the bloody bastard. I want to be with you. We have so little time.” And she leaned across, suddenly smiling, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
A moment after we jumped into the taxi a boy came running up, waving a photograph at me. I started to shake my head, then looked at it carefully. I was alone, poised at the head of the gangway on the Eastern Airlines jet, peering worriedly into the distance. “How much?” I asked.
“Quince pesos.”
I slipped the photograph into my briefcase. Nina frowned in puzzlement, then laughed. “What do you want that silly thing for?”
“A souvenir,” I said, casually.
The El Camino was a sprawling, modern, brown stucco palacio in the suburbs. It took five minutes for the Mexican bellhop to trundle our luggage down a maze of broad, split-level corridors to the room. The late afternoon sun still slanted strongly through the wooden shutters that gave a view of the swimming pool. The bed was huge. I closed the shutters so that only glints of golden light filtered through. When I turned, Nina’s long, lithe body was just vanishing under the sheet. My shy, 38-year-old Danish maiden … But she had tossed the blanket to the foot of the bed. I bent by her side and plucked out the brown pins, one by one, until the fragile storm of yellow hair fluttered free and came to rest on the pillow. Her eyes were closed. The room was very quiet and cool, bars of warm sunlight streaked across the brown carpeting. Her eyes opened, blinked a few times, and she smiled gently. Then murmured, into that calm, suddenly private silence: “Oh, God. I can’t believe it …”
“I know,” I said.
“Are we really here?”
“Yes, but it’s better not to believe it.”
I undressed and slipped in beside her. She sighed deeply and threw an arm across my chest.
I woke from time to time, shifted a little, pulled up the one blanket, aware of gathering grayness and then darkness; but each time dropped heavily into sleep again, not caring or wondering, freed from all obligations to time. The room was cool and silent, an oasis.
I felt Nina’s warmth as she bent over my wrist and read the luminous dials of my watch. “It’s almost midnight,” she cried softly. “What happened?”
“I don’t care. Do you?”
“No.”
“What about your mariachis?”
“Don’t care,” she murmured. Then she flicked on the bedside lamp and looked at me with grave worry, a hint of fear. “Did you get a call? Do you have to go? Did Hughes …?”
The darkness, the lovemaking, the long sleep, all had worn away pretense, chipped away prudence. If you lie to those you love and trust, there is only one valid reason: not to hurt them. You balance in your own mind the wound that will be opened by the truth against the wound caused by lies and deceit. You examine the implications of your cowardice, and then you choose. I had already made my choice with Edith, whom I loved and trusted. “Sit, walk, or run, but don’t wobble.” So speaks the Zen master. I tried to follow, limping a long way behind him.
“Listen,” I said to Nina, “I want to tell you something. You may be a little shocked … if that’s still possible. But whether or not you are, I need your word that this stays with you. That your lips are sealed.”
“That sounds so serious.”
“Well, it is. I don’t need your approval, but I do need your word.”
“You have it,” she said simply. “You don’t even have to ask. I never talk.” Then she chuckled, a little sadly. “I don’t have anyone to talk to, except you …”
I lit a cigarette and said: “I’m not meeting Howard Hughes here in Mexico. I wasn’t supposed to meet him in Nassau. It’s all a lie, a hoax. The letters are forged and I never spoke to the man in my life.” I told her the details, the plan, as much as there was a plan. She listened, blue eyes wide and cavernous with bewilderment. Then she broke into a howl of raucous, witch-like laughter. She held her ribs and her eyes glistened with tears.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. You are. Oh, my God. Do you really think you can get away with it?”
“I don’t really know. It’s just a question of letting things take their course, giving them a little shove now and then, and … well, we’ll see.”
“I’m flabbergasted,” she said, and crowed again with enormous glee.
“But not horrified?”
She shrugged. “Should I be horrified? You’re not planning to murder anyone.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not. But tell me what you think. It’s important to me.”
“I think,” Nina said, “that you’re quite, quite mad. But the world is mad, so what’s the bloody difference? And I love you. And I’m starving. Do you think, at this god-forsaken hour in this hotel out in the middle of bloody nowhere, we can get food and a bottle of wine? And then do you think we could go back to sleep, and get up in the morning and go to this Oaxaca place where no one knows us and no one cares, and where we can be quite, quite mad together?”
“We can try,” I said. I called Room Service and an hour later, at one o’clock in the morning, two sleepy waiters wheeled in a table with melon and shrimp and filet mignon and a bottle of cold rose wine, and we sat in our jeans by the side of the rumpled bed, eating and drinking and chuc
kling. Nina, wearing my shirt with the sleeves rolled up, leaned across the white tablecloth to kiss me.
“How lovely,” she said, “that your nasty old billionaire friend won’t be there in Oaxaca to take you away in the middle of night.”
Oaxaca had not changed since 1955, when I had spent three months there on my first trip to Mexico. That was hard to believe; I was used to seeing the once out-of-the-way places that I loved, like Ibiza, invaded first by artists, then bargain-hunting tourists, then land speculators and entrepreneurs, and finally graduating to “in” spots that sported French boutiques, Italian restaurants, Miami Beach–style hotels, and high-rise apartment houses. But Oaxaca was still a medium-sized pink-and-blue town in a lush valley surrounded by mountaintop ruins, a trading center for a dozen Zapotec Indian villages, with a plaza where you could drink cold Carta Blanca beer in the shade of the portales and buy a cheap handwoven serape and handwrought gold earrings from a local Indio vendor and listen to the marimba band three evenings a week. No new hotels had sprung up, although the plumbing had been improved in the old ones.
We were high up on the hill overlooking the town, in a bungalow of the Hotel Victoria. The gardens were fragrant with mimosas, bougainvillaea, and poinsettias. That first morning we went by taxi to a market in a nearby Indian town and bought black clay pottery and ate chunks of fresh watermelon after brushing away the flies. We spent the afternoon in the bungalow. After dinner the barman in the Hotel Victoria made a fine margarita — tequila with lime over cracked ice, the lip of the glass crusted with salt. Nina, no drinker, reluctantly sampled one. After the second she draped an arm around my neck and whispered: “Oh, I’m hooked. They’re marvelous. And I’m so sloshed I can’t see straight. I know you’re trying to seduce me and I don’t care. Can we go home, darling?”
The next morning we rented a Volkswagen and drove to Monte Albán, a 2,000-year-old ruin of a Zapotec priests’ city atop a mountain crowning the three valleys of Oaxaca. It was a clear, hot winter day and the sky was azure. We clambered through the temple ruins and drank cold orange soda in the shade of a tree and bought fake relics from a small Indian boy. After lunch we shopped in the streets off the zócalo and then went back to the bungalow of the Hotel Victoria and to bed.
The Hoax Page 6