The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  “How much?”

  “The highest they’ve ever gone for anything is $200,000. I want to top that.”

  “But can they keep their mouths shut?”

  “On Project Jones there were only three people up there who knew about it until just before publication. And they have very good files, you know — the best. That might help you in your research.”

  “You mean a file on Howard Hughes?”

  “Well, they’ve got to have one, with all the articles they’ve done on him in the past forty years.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing those files. They could save me a hell of a lot of work.”

  “Let me handle it,” Beverly cautioned. “Let’s not seem anxious.”

  A discreet lunch was arranged at Barbetta’s between Beverly, myself, and Ralph Graves, Executive Editor of Life. I liked Ralph immediately: a man in his late forties, with a deep voice and blue eyes whose keenness was curiously softened by his glasses. The meeting I judged to be crucial. McGraw-Hill was one thing, Life was another. If there was skepticism and challenge, it would come from Time, Inc.; they had resources to investigate not only the eventual book but the tales I might spin during the period of creation. Tread gently, I cautioned myself. But after our third Tanqueray martini, Beverly said: “Tell Ralph about the first meeting in Mexico.” I launched into the now-familiar mountaintop scene and the wild plane ride to Tehuantepec. Graves nodded.

  “And now tell Ralph about Puerto Rico and the bananas.”

  I felt like a child being asked to play a Bach fugue at a grownups’ party. I would rather have been in bed reading a comic book, but I had to play. The banana story had come to me on the plane from San Juan to New York, based on an experience that Edith and I had had in Puerto Rico in 1965. During an eight-hour layover before we flew on to Trinidad, we had rented a car and driven up to the tropical rain forest.

  I had been met at San Juan Airport, I related to Beverly and Graves, by the Puerto Rican equivalent of Pedro. This one’s name was Jorge. He had taken the contracts from me for delivery to Hughes, whom he knew as Mr. Frazier, a name I chose because of the impending bout with Muhammad Ali, and then checked me into the El San Juan Hotel near the airport. “Stay in your room,” he had said. “Mr. Frazier might call at any time.” Remembering the long wait in Oaxaca, I had replied: “Look, I may want to go out on the beach and take a swim.”

  “In that case,” Jorge replied, “we’ll have you paged as Mr. Kelly.”

  “Suppose there’s another Kelly in the hotel?”

  “Oh, no,” Jorge explained, “this hotel is filled with Jewish people from New York.”

  Jorge — I continued — had called at four o’clock the following morning and instructed me to come down to the lobby. He had led me to a parked car on a side street. There was Howard in the front seat, wearing a shaggy black wig. (If Edith could do it, I figured, why not Howard?) “Cost me $9 .95 in Woolworth’s,” he said, “You don’t know the risk I take in meeting you this way. They’re always after me.” We had driven then, with me at the wheel, to the tropical rain forest, arriving at dawn. Howard had told me where to stop, and a few minutes later a peasant woman emerged from the thick grove of trees, bearing a basket of bananas on her head. Howard instructed me to buy a dozen.

  “He ate six of them,” I told Ralph Graves. “He said they didn’t travel well. Very fat, short, sweet bananas. He told me that the bananas you bought in the States were made of plastic. I said I thought the Puerto Rican bananas were the best I’d ever eaten, and then he got very friendly. He likes a man who appreciates a good banana. We went over the contract and he had hardly any changes to suggest. The next night we met again and we signed it in the car.”

  “Show him the notes,” Beverly instructed.

  On the plane from San Juan to New York, I had filled half a spiral notebook with my recollections of conversations between Howard and me. I read them to Graves. Howard had offered his opinions on women, bananas, the loneliness of old age, the Eastern Establishment, friendship, credit cards, and Mormons. He favored bananas over Mormons, which I thought was a good move, since his palace guard consisted almost entirely of Mormons and they were the ones, in the end, who might well try to undo my good work.

  Ralph Graves had listened with careful, quiet attention, but whether his nods meant belief or doubt was difficult to say. He was polite, but there was no amazement, no commitment. I rattled on about Howard’s secret experiences in Ethiopia. “He was a bush pilot out there. Went out without anyone in the company knowing about it. TWA had a contract to organize Ethiopian Airlines …”

  “And Hemingway …” Beverly prompted.

  “Yes, he knew Hemingway,” I said. “Had a long relationship with him, which isn’t generally known. Knew him in Cuba, I think.” Graves said: “We know Mary pretty well. We can ask her about that.”

  “Mary?”

  “Mary Hemingway. His wife.”

  “I wonder if Howard ever met her,” I mused aloud, and made a mental note to make sure he hadn’t.

  “Let’s see the letters,” Graves said.

  I produced them, and Graves adjusted his reading glasses and went through them carefully. He came to the last letter, in which Hughes set forth his reasons for wanting the book written. The second page of that letter seemed to catch his attention. He studied it with intense concentration. “Look,” he said, offering me the page.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The way he writes the letter I. You see here? How he’s gone over it twice, scratched it with his fountain pen where he didn’t get it right the first time?”

  “I never noticed that.”

  “That’s a habit of his,” Graves explained. “I’ve seen it before in his other letters, the ones in our file. Very characteristic. So is the phraseology.” He extended his hand to me, smiling. “I think you deserve congratulations. You’ve succeeded where professional journalists have failed for the last fifteen years.”

  “I’ll take the congratulations when the book is done,” I said modestly, and then with a good measure of truth, “until then I don’t know what I’ll come up with. But thanks.”

  The two scratched I’s in my letter from Hughes had been an accident of the pen that I had let stand because they had a look of naturalness. In the genuine letter I had used as the model — and the one of which Life had a copy — Hughes made no such characteristic error. Graves’s mistaken memory surprised and gratified me. It was only later, thinking about it under more private circumstances, that I felt I understood. Like the others, he was all-too-human. He wanted to believe. “They’ll help us all the way,” I had said to Dick before I left Ibiza. “Whenever we stumble, they’ll pick us up. Don’t think of them as the enemy. They’ll turn out to be our best allies …”

  “Good luck,” Graves said solemnly. “If we can do anything for you, just let me know.”

  The last meeting took place in the office of John Cooke, a McGraw-Hill vice-president and the head of the Legal Department. He was a big, imposing, white-haired man. “This was signed in your presence?” Cooke asked, indicating my contract with Hughes.

  “In a parked car on a side street in San Juan.” I laughed, and both Cooke and Faustin Jehle shook their heads slowly in gentle wonder.

  “What’s this Rosemont business?” Jehle wanted to know. The contract contained a clause which noted that it superseded “any previous similar agreement made between H. R. Hughes and any other person, company, or corporation, including but not limited to Rosemont Enterprises, Inc.” Rosemont, I had learned from the Gerber biography of Hughes, was the corporation to which Howard had apparently given the rights to his life story. Rosemont had twice sued to prevent publication of biographies about Hughes; both suits had failed, but I had decided it was wiser to bolt the barn door before the horse knew he had been penned.

  “Hughes just told me to write that into the agreement,” I explained. “He said it was to protect me and you. Since then I’ve done some research,
” and I informed the lawyers about the Rosemont suits.

  “Christ, that’s no good,” Cooke said. “He can’t just say the contract supersedes any other contracts if the others are still valid. He’ll have to warrant that he’s got the rights. And whatever happens, he ought to indemnify us against suit from Rosemont. Can you get him to sign an amendment to that effect?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  Cooke leaned back in his leather swivel chair, chuckling. “What a hell of a guy. The richest man in this country, and he takes $400,000 of the advances and leaves you with $100,000, and you’ve got to pay all your expenses. How’d you let him talk you into a deal like that?”

  “You’ve missed the point, John. After the advance is earned out, Hughes doesn’t share. All the royalties are mine. In the long run I’m liable to make more money out of the book than he will. It’s a gamble, but I’m willing to take it.”

  It was later explained to me by Beverly Loo that management had been more concerned than Dick and I had realized or than anyone was willing to reveal to me, about the bona fides of my relationship with Hughes. In the early stages of the hoax, two things had served to convince them. The first was my willingness to take the financial risk; and work, in terms of percentages, for relatively little money. Irving is gambling, they reasoned, that he’ll get enough material from Hughes to make a big first-rate book. If he doesn’t get the material, he won’t make money. So he’ll make damn sure he gets it.

  It was good thinking, and they were right: I would make sure I got it.

  “The second thing that convinced them,” Beverly told me, “were those first two telephone calls you made to me from Ibiza. You paid for them yourself. When Harold McGraw heard that you didn’t reverse the charges, he said: ‘Cliff is obviously taking this very seriously.’ He was impressed.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked.

  “No, it’s true.”

  “That impressed him? That I paid for the telephone calls from Spain to New York?”

  “Well, of course. You know that most writers usually call collect. In fact, you usually call collect.”

  “I’m impressed, too.” But I didn’t say with what.

  Cooke finally handed the contracts back to me. “Who drew these up?” he asked.

  “Hughes and I did.”

  “He didn’t have an attorney?”

  “Not that I know of, unless he was hiding in the bushes. But they look pretty good to me.”

  Cooke chuckled. “Well, they’ve got some cockeyed language in them, but they’ll stand up in court. A lawyer would have done a better job, but sometimes when two simple people write a contract the intent is clear and it’s even harder to challenge. They’ll do.”

  “Thanks, John.” Laughing, I stood up to leave his office. “That’s one of the compliments I’ll treasure till I die–that you lump Howard Hughes and me together as ‘two simple people.’ I’ll let him know that’s how you feel about him.”

  Back on Ibiza, I gave Dick a blow-by-blow account of the trip. The McGraw-Hill contract would be in the mail to me, signed by Harold McGraw himself, by the end of the month. “And it’s firm. I’ve got a contract to write the authorized biography of Howard Hughes. It’s no pipe-dream any more. It’s real.”

  “I won’t believe it till I see it,” Dick murmured.

  “You’ll see it. But it’s time to go to work, buddy. So far it’s been fun and games and tall tales, but now we’ve got to get down to it. There’s a life out there waiting to be researched and created. And we won’t do it sitting on our asses here on Ibiza.”

  We spent a long day poring over the three Hughes biographies and the other material I had picked up in New York, working out an itinerary for our projected research trip. The initial idea was to accomplish everything in one month of nonstop digging and travel, then do the taped interviews with the mythical Hughes, then follow up with a second research trip whose primary purpose would be interviews of Howard’s ex-friends and business associates. The breaking of secrecy was what we most feared, and the interviews could be dangerous in that respect; therefore they had to wait until the last possible moment and then be incorporated into the text of the final draft of the book.

  “What happens if we get caught?” Dick asked. “Suppose this thing blows wide open before we’re finished?”

  “The money will be there,” I said. “Hell, it’s no Federal case. We haven’t stolen anything. I’ve lied, that’s all. I’ll have to take the consequences. So what can they do to me? They can’t stop me from writing other books. Someone will publish them. As long as they get their money back, the worst thing they can do is yell. And I have a feeling they won’t yell too loud, because they might look pretty foolish.”

  The beauty of it, as we had conceived the scheme then in its embryonic stage — and even later, when we were fully launched into a year of plotting and labor, refining, improvising, sweating, tacking and trimming sail in rough waters — was that no one would be hurt. There was no caper that seemed to parallel what we were about to do. Rob Fort Knox? Steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London? We had no criminal ambitions and such derring-do, while it may have made for the stuff of Hollywood caper films we had seen and marveled at, was beyond the scope of my imagination, much less our intention. Implicit in theft was the possibility of violence. Dick and I were not violent men. During the 1948 War of Independence he had been a volunteer with the Israeli Army. He had been stranded in Rome, unable to pay his hotel bill. An Italian dubbing company hired him once to scream in English. The Israelis agreed to pay the hotel bill if Dick would sail to Haifa and fight. But once there, his trained baritone outweighed his temporary bravado; he wound up singing for the troops on the road to Jerusalem. I had been a volunteer in Israel as well, in 1956. I had joined a border kibbutz and one night, on guard duty, fired my only shot of the campaign at what I thought were marauding fedayeen. I hit a tin bell hanging from the neck of a wandering goat, woke up everybody in the kibbutz, and the next day was confined to trench-digging.

  We weren’t stealing anything, I had said to Dick. For whatever we received, we would be giving fair value. Not that it would be what I represented it to be — the authorized biography of Howard Hughes — but it would be a book. “An important book,” I added. “And a good book.”

  With that summing up, we decided to stand pat and call a halt to our P & P session. By the second week of April, I decided, we would have digested all the accumulated material, listed our tasks and objectives for the first research trip, and then be ready to go. The next day, at the Iberia office on the main paseo, I bought our air tickets.

  Chapter 6

  All Right So Far!

  Dick and I flew from Ibiza to New York on April 13th with Edith due to follow in a week’s time. For her it was to be a holiday, the first we had had together for three years. Dick and I stayed in what had been my parents’ apartment at 92nd Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan-a gloomy, seven-room place which had not been lived in, and seldom cleaned, since my father’s death almost a year ago. It was cluttered with the detritus of three lifetimes: my mother’s, my father’s, and mine. And over every surface in the apartment was the spoor of the New York beast: a patina of black, greasy, gritty dust.

  Dick and I spent most of the week in the New York Public Library and the second-hand bookstores on Fourth Avenue, digging into Hughes and related subjects such as aircraft design and the early days of Hollywood. The second day in New York I went to McGraw-Hill; they had already received my two signed copies of the contract with them which called for an “Untitled Biography of H (Señor Octavio),” and I dutifully signed an additional letter, to be kept in the Legal Department’s safe, identifying the mysterious Señor Octavio as Howard R. Hughes.

  “It’s like a cartoon I once saw in The New Yorker,” I told Dick. “A guy’s falling from the top of the Empire State Building and as he passes the fiftieth floor on his way to the pavement, someone leans out of a window and calls, ‘H
ow’s it going, fella?’ The guy grins and yells back, ‘All right so far!’ That’s us. But I’ve said it a dozen times. If things get too hot, or even if they don’t you can always go to them and tell them it’s a hoax. The money will be there — and then we’ve got an unauthorized biography or a novel.”

  “What do you think they’d do to you?”

  “If I told them it was a ripoff?” I thought for a while. “I don’t know. They’d either throw me right out on my ass and sue for their money, which they wouldn’t have to do because I’d have the check in my hand; or, if they had the guts, they’d laugh like hell.”

  That evening I had been invited to a cocktail party in honor of Germaine Greer; McGraw-Hill had just published her best-seller, The Female Eunuch. A British television crew was on hand to film the festivities. I arrived, grabbed a drink, ducked the hot lights and the clusters of women’s libbers who had come to pay homage to Germaine, and then spotted a strange-looking figure in the corner. An old Indian, dressed in a war bonnet and full technicolor redskin regalia, sat on a sofa drinking a glass of ginger ale. I was with Beverly Loo and I said: “Who’s that?”

  “Oh, you’ve got to meet him, Cliff. That’s Chief Red Fox. He’s a 101-year-old Sioux Indian chief. We’ve just published his memoirs.”

  I sat at the feet of the old man for nearly an hour, swapping tales of the frontier until he clapped me on the shoulder at one point and said, “Hey, you don’t have to call me ‘Chief.’ Call me Red Fox.”

  He was an extraordinary man, with a seamed, bumpy face, lively and full of himself. “I’m on the Johnny Carson Show tonight. Second time in three months. That’s rare, you know, but I kind of liven it up for him … Read my book yet? You should. It’s terrific.” He explained to me that as a child he had been camped a few miles away from the Battle of Little Big Horn and had heard the shooting. Now he did public relations work for a meat packing company and occasionally performed war dances at supermarket openings in the southwest. Without his feathers and buckskins he could have passed for an old retired shopkeeper sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn tenement, rattling on about his youth.