The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  “In my declining years,” Nina said that evening in the bar, shaking her head sadly and sipping a margarita, “I’ve become a sex maniac.”

  “Is that a complaint?”

  “My God, no. I think it’s wonderful. But objectively speaking, it’s disgusting. I mean, we’re practically middle-aged — and look at us. Clifford, it’s shameful. However, let’s not stop,” she giggled. “Let’s have another margarita and …” She yawned, giggled again shyly, and laid her head on my shoulder.

  “Tomorrow,” I promised, “we’ll go swimming. That’s a healthy thing to do. Burns up excess energy. Cools the ardor.”

  “The hotel pool looks awful.”

  “We can swim in the Pacific.”

  “Is it far? I haven’t seen a map. I’m not even sure where we are, except that it’s Mexico. Is it Mexico? Yes, Mexico.”

  “About two hundred miles to Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz, but we’ve got the Volkswagen. It’s mountain country all the way. Very primitive, very beautiful.”

  “You want to drive two hundred miles to go for a swim? Has anyone ever told you that you’re mad?”

  “Yes. You told me the other night in Mexico City.”

  On the drive down to Tehuantepec on the isthmus, the next day, we stopped first at the ruins of Mitla. After that the road twisted through scarred, forsaken mountains, one hairpin curve after another, with the thatched huts of lonely Indian villages hidden in the fastnesses of the dark valleys. The morning was hot and cloudless. “What are you going to tell your publishers?” Nina asked. “That you spent all this time with Howard Hughes?”

  “Howard Hughes? Who’s that?”

  She frowned. “Be serious. You’d better think about it. Get your story straight.”

  “Preliminary talks. I wasn’t with him the whole time. Just a few hours yesterday and a few hours today. Imagine my shock when I discovered he was blond, Danish, and beautiful.” I squeezed her leg just as we screeched round a curve. “Getting to know you, Howard …”

  “Watch the road, for God’s sake.”

  “All right. I’ll use the facts. I’ll tell them we met yesterday at Monte Albán and that today he had me flown down in a private plane to Tehuantepec. There’s an airport at Juchitán. I checked the map. A Mexican pilot flew me down, a trusted Hughes aide. His name is … his name is Pedro. Does that sound like the name of a Mexican pilot?”

  “And they’ll believe that rubbish?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Clifford, do you really know what you’re doing?”

  Thirteen years ago I had crewed on a three-masted schooner sailing from southern Mexico to the French Riviera. Leaving the jungle port of Alvarado, a harbor pilot had come aboard to guide us from the mouth of the river. There were shifting sandbars in the estuary, he explained. I asked: “If the sandbars shift, how do you know whether or not you’re going to hit one?” Smiling crookedly, he had replied: “El golpe avisa. The blow tells you.”

  “Considering the nature of my life,” I said to Nina, after relating this tale, “and the fact that we’re here, which I still find unbelievable, there’s only one answer to your question. Does anyone know what they’re really doing? El golpe avisa.”

  We bought lunch in a small cantina near Tehuantepec and then drove across to the long, rough, sand beach at Salina Cruz. The Pacific was a bright, dark blue, but cold. We ate the tortillas and drank a bottle of white wine and walked up the length of the beach for nearly a mile, with the icy surf licking our feet. The beach was vast, deserted, and bravely we peeled down to swim. Then, shivering, we lay down together on my sweater and let the Mexican sun warm our bones. At three o’clock we left, driving back for five hours through the mountain darkness to Oaxaca. Our plane left at eight o’clock the next morning.

  “It’s all over,” Nina said. “It was too quick.”

  “I know. You’ve got to be in London to sing at the Dorchester, and I’ve got to be in New York to tell tales to McGraw-Hill. The good things always seem to be over too quickly. Let’s go to the bar and have a margarita, for the road.”

  She had once, many years ago, told me that there was good luck, bad luck, short luck, and long luck. “And you and I,” she said then, “have had a good short luck.” She had been right, but it had happened again, and again, and become a habit, and we were both always afraid to press that luck for fear it would turn bad. “If we ever lived together,” she had often told me, “it wouldn’t be the same. You’d be bored. You’d go away. This way, at least, it works and it’s always good, always beautiful. I know you’re there and that’s all I need.”

  “And all you want.”

  “Yes, I wouldn’t dare want more. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe,” she said, with flat resignation, “that anything lasts.”

  “Which means that the world is all fucked up.”

  “The people in it.”

  “We seem to last,” I said.

  “This way. Our way. Maybe it’s the only way.”

  “If it’s not good enough for you, you’ve got to tell me. And then well end it.”

  “And you tell me, too. Promise?”

  I had promised, and she had promised, and we had had this conversation once or twice a year for the past seven years. The last night, in the bar of the Hotel Victoria, we sat in a corner booth on leather cushions and listened to a guitarist and drank three margaritas each. Then we walked through the darkness to the bungalow and at eight o’clock the next morning we boarded the jet for Mexico City. From there I cabled Beverly Loo that all had gone well. We changed planes for New York, arrived at Kennedy Airport and took a taxi to the Hotel Elysee, and the next morning I went with Nina back to Kennedy. Her flight to London left at eleven o’clock.

  “Don’t hang around,” she said, smiling. “You have things to do.”

  “All right,” I said. “Have a good flight. Take care.”

  “You too, my sweet. And good luck.”

  She vanished in the crowd toward the boarding area. We always said our goodbyes that way, without plans. It was the only way when you were playing a good short luck. I took a taxi from the airport straight to the McGraw-Hill Building. Beverly Loo and Albert Leventhal were waiting.

  “It went fine,” I said. “You got my cable? He wouldn’t let me call.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Sure I saw him. He’ll do it. He accepted the terms.” I explained how I waited first in New Orleans, then Mexico City, then Oaxaca, until finally at five o’clock on the second morning in the Hotel Victoria the telephone had rung. A voice had identified itself as Pedro. I had said, “I don’t know anyone named Pedro. Who the hell are you?”

  “A friend of Octavio’s.”

  “Look, it’s very early in the morning and I’m in no mood for games. I don’t know you and I don’t know your friend Octavio.”

  “Ah. Patience, señor. Octavio is the man you have come to see.”

  And so at dawn I had been picked up by Pedro in a Volkswagen, driven to Monte Albán and pointed in the direction of a parked, battered Buick. The man waiting for me in the front seat —” he’s a wreck, a thin and tired ruin” — was Howard Hughes. We had talked, we had wandered through the temples. The next morning Pedro had picked me up again and flown me in a Cessna through the mountains to Juchitán. “He was a mad pilot. He nearly killed us. He kept dipping down into the valleys to show me the Indian villages. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘they live like animals! Los indios! This is the Stone Age!’ And Hughes was waiting for me in Tehuantepec. First I went to Salina Cruz with Pedro and had a swim in the Pacific. Nearly froze my ass off. Then I met Howard in a little hotel. We drank orange juice together. ‘Best orange juice in Mexico,’ he said. I gave him a draft of the contract, he made a few changes, and we shook hands — well, not literally; he never shakes hands — but we agreed. I’m seeing him next month, probably in Nassau. He’s going to call me. I still have no way to contact him. Now look at thi
s …”

  I took from my briefcase the souvenir photograph of me at Mexico City Airport. “I was tailed all the way down. Pedro gave this to me. One of Hughes’s men took it at the airport when I got off the plane — for identification.”

  “And to make sure you were alone,” Beverly pointed out. “God, that man is clever. You must feel like you’re in a James Bond movie.”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  The next afternoon I was brought to the 32nd floor to meet Harold McGraw, President of the Book Company. He seemed equally pleased, although cautious; and the following morning one of the McGraw-Hill lawyers, Faustin Jehle, had finished reading through the handwritten draft of the contract between Hughes and myself. “It’s all right,” Jehle said, “except for one or two clauses. We’ll show you how they should be changed. And there’s one thing more. We’ll want a bank-documented signature, or else he’ll have to sign the contract in front of a notary.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll do that.” I explained. “He’s being sued for $50 million in Las Vegas and all he has to do is go before a Nevada notary and sign a paper that he fired Robert Maheu and he could win the suit, but he won’t do it. And you know he never showed up in court for the TWA lawsuit. That cost him $137 million plus damages. I don’t know if he’ll do it, Faustin.”

  “Well, if he wants us to publish his book, he’ll have to,” Jehle said.

  I gave the news to Beverly and Albert Leventhal and made the same speech. “I’ll talk to the Legal Department,” Albert promised, “but if that’s what they say, I think that’s the way it’ll have to be.”

  I flew back to Spain the next evening, slept like a dead man for fifteen hours in the arms of my wife, then drove off to the studio in a steady drizzling rain and called Dick in Palma. “It’s all off,” I said. “It’s finished. They want a notary to witness the signature.”

  “Don’t they trust you?” Dick said, aghast.

  “Sure they trust me. It’s Hughes they’re worried about.”

  “How long does it take to get a notary’s license? I’ll cram for the course.”

  “Forget it. They won’t bite. It was too good to be true. I’ll call them in a week or so and tell them he turned them down, and I’ll get back to my novel, and you finish Richard the Lion-Hearted. And we’ll chalk it all up to experience.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Dick said, laughing. “You’re conning me again, like the time you said you called Beverly and she said, ‘Oh, that old Hughes–authorized biography gag again?’ What really happened? Don’t be funny, Cliff, because I’m too nervous. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in three weeks.”

  “I’m not being funny.” I repeated the story until finally he believed me. “We’re out of business. Maybe it’s for the best. We always said it was a crazy idea and there had to be a snag in it, and now we know the snag. I pissed away $2,000 on a trip to Mexico and now they want a notarized signature on the contract.”

  “Can’t you …”

  “No, I can’t. Forget it, Dick. I mean it. The ball game’s over.”

  Part Two

  Free speech is the right to shout “Theater” in a crowded fire.

  — Abbie Hoffman

  Chapter 5

  Project Octavio

  If I had previously flirted with any illusions that my mind was still not made up and that I would drift with the prevailing wind —” if they buy the idea, fine; if they don’t, the hell with it” — they had vanished by the time of my arrival back in Ibiza. I had been lighthearted with Dick on the telephone, because there seemed little choice. But in my heart there was no lazy gladness, no feeling of relief, no sense of having been saved from the brink of a possibly disastrous enterprise. After all, it was a hoax, not a crime. All I tasted was the gall of disappointment.

  Getting back into the novel was hard work. I would reread chapters, block out a new version of a section yet to be written — and then drift off into thoughts of what might have been if the McGraw-Hill Legal Department had not been so adamant and intelligent in their demands. To pass the time I read through the three biographies of Howard Hughes that I had picked up in New York: Albert Gerber’s Bashful Billionaire, John Keats’s Howard Hughes, and Omar Garison’s Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. The Gerber and Garison books were slop. They tried for sensationalism without benefit of fact, other than material culled from newspaper clippings and interviews with unnamed “friends” and “reliable sources.” The Keats book was well written, more of an attempt at true biography; and therefore, since so little truth about Hughes was available, the dullest of the three.

  After an appropriate number of days had passed, I telephoned Beverly Loo. This time I reversed the charges. “He called,” I said, “and I told him Jehle wants the contract notarized. It’s no deal. He said exactly what he said to Senator Brewster in 1947 when they wanted him to produce Johnny Meyer at the hearings in Washington. He said, ‘No, I don’t think I’ll do that.’” Beverly tried to interrupt, but I went on doggedly. “He’s got a notary in the palace guard, but it’s one of the men who’s not supposed to know anything about the project. And he said he’d be damned if he’d go to the local candy store in Nassau. So let’s forget it. I’ll write about the Mexican trip in my memoirs.”

  “Listen,” Beverly said excitedly, “I’m trying to tell you something! The lawyers made that demand without consulting anyone else. Lawyers are over-cautious. Now just forget what they said. If you can get Octavio’s signature on a contract and have him sign it in your presence, that’s good enough.”

  “Whose decision is that?” I asked.

  “Everybody’s.”

  “Well,” I said, “fortunately he promised to call me back in case you changed your mind. He was a little pissed off, but I think I can calm him down.”

  “We’re counting on you,” Beverly stressed.

  I took a deep breath and said, “You can.”

  Hanging up the telephone, I let out a war whoop of joy. Then I dialed Dick’s number in Palma.

  He arrived in Ibiza two days later, jubilant. I had gone over the three letters from Howard to me, comparing them once again with the letter reproduced in Life, and decided that my second version was passable but hardly expert. I spent those two days drafting still a third version, giving up only when I had run out of yellow legal paper, That was it, I decided, as I reproduced all the doodles and stains that appeared on the second version.

  It was time for what we call a P & P session — plotting and planning.

  “If Howard was able to go to Mexico,” I said enthusiastically, “he can go anywhere. I think I’ll meet him in Puerto Rico to sign the contracts.”

  We basked in the strong sharp light on the terrace of the studio, sheltered from the cool wind that blew across the Mediterranean from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Dick had stripped to the waist and was leaning against the flaking white wall with his face turned to the February sun. His massive chest rose and fell almost as though he were asleep. He was content, reprieved from Richard the Lion-Hearted.

  “Why Puerto Rico?” he murmured.

  “Well, he should stay in the south. Somewhere he can get to easily by plane, without creating a fuss. And there happens to be a direct flight from Madrid to San Juan — Colombian Airlines. Edith and I flew it in 1965 when we went out to Tobago.” It would look good, I thought, if I appeared to be going out of my way slightly for our meetings. McGraw-Hill’s knowledge of international airline schedules would be limited, I reckoned; Puerto Rico would seem a reasonable choice for Hughes and a chore for me, when in fact the opposite was true.

  I worked for three days on the contract. I had a sizable file of old contracts with magazines, book publishers, and film companies. A paragraph from one, a phrase from another, a few additions that would be peculiar to Howard Hughes and would serve our purpose as well, then it was done. I typed the final draft on white legal-size onionskin until I could see exactly how far down the final page the signatures should go. Then
I signed “Howard R. Hughes” on about fifty sheets in the correct place.

  “Pick out the best three,” I told Dick, handing him Life’s reproduction of the letter to Chester Davis and Bill Gay for comparison.

  “I can’t tell one from another,” he confessed, then looked puzzled. “Why do you need three?”

  “One copy for me, one copy for McGraw-Hill, and one for Hughes.”

  “You’re getting too involved in this,” he said. “Hughes isn’t going to need a copy.”

  “You’re right. I need a rest.”

  I took my rest on the beach of the El San Juan Hotel in Puerto Rico. On the third day I flew to New York, checked into the Algonquin Hotel, and had lunch there the next day with Beverly Loo and Robert Stewart of McGraw-Hill, and Ross Claiborne, Executive Editor of Dell Books, one of the major paperback publishing houses. Dell had reprinted my last book, Fake!, and Claiborne, who was young and intelligent, treated me with interest directly proportionate to the sales of the book, which had been only fair.

  “I can’t tell you what Cliff’s working on,” Beverly said smugly, “but it’s the most fantastic project of the year.”

  “The decade,” said Stewart.

  Claiborne’s barely concealed boredom evidenced the fact that he had heard such talk before. “Sounds interesting,” he murmured.

  Beverly remained undaunted. “When the time comes,” she promised, “you’ll pay through the nose.”

  That afternoon and all the next day I held conferences with the McGraw-Hill editors and executives. It was explained to me that in the interest of secrecy Hughes had been assigned a code name, Octavio — in honor of his pseudonym during our Mexican meeting — and that the book itself would be called “Project Octavio.” “That’s what they did at Life when they were working on the Khrushchev memoirs,” Beverly said. “That was called ‘Project Jones.’ And we’d like to bring Life into this for first serial rights. They’re the only ones who can handle it properly. And also, probably, the only ones who’ll pay the price we want.”