The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  The ride back to Frankfurt was far more pleasant than the ride coming into Switzerland. I had tucked the Helga Hughes passport under a scarf in the bottom of my handbag so that I wouldn’t take it out by mistake and show it instead of the Irving passport. The thought came to me then, for the first time, that I should really have another passport to travel on so I could fly straight from Spain to Switzerland and not have to go this roundabout way, and be so long away from my little boys … But the ride back was so beautiful that I stopped thinking after a while. It was the beginning of May, and all through the Valley of the Rhine the flieder — the lilacs — were blooming, and all the other flowers and trees, whose names I didn’t know, were in blossom, too. I had forgotten how lovely it is during springtime in the Valley of the Rhine. In Ibiza you have no real spring, just almond blossoms in February, like balls of vanilla and strawberry cotton in the valleys toward San José; and then everything is burned and dry and you are in summer. But it’s never this explosion of nature from winter darkness into spring, and the softness of the valley, and the glory of the flowers. I had a tiny cry because it reminded me of childhood and things which are forever past, and of my parents who had died; of their garden in the spring … and maybe, too, it was the feeling of relief and of release from terror, now that I was on the way back and the first trip was almost over.

  In Frankfurt I rented a Hertz car and drove to my daughter’s school, about forty-five minutes’ drive from Frankfurt. I met Nicole — fifteen years old and looking so much like me that it’s incredible — and we talked and met her friends, and then it was evening and we went all together and went to a very good restaurant. All Nicole’s friends were between fifteen and eighteen, some without shoes, all with long hair, and when I went to park the car the parking attendant rushed up and said, “This is only for guests of the restaurant.”

  So I looked very haughty and said, “That’s fine, my good man, because we are guests of the restaurant.” He smiled a frozen smile, and Nicole’s friends all laughed at him, and we went in and had a beautiful dinner with elegant but somehow very fast service, because I think they wanted us to hurry and leave. But we had such wonderful conversation, these children and me, and we stayed on and on after coffee. I liked their ideas so much, and none of us wanted to leave.

  I stayed at a hotel in the town nearby and saw Nicole again in the morning, and then I drove to the airport and flew to Düsseldorf. My ex-husband Dieter was there to meet me, and my other daughter, Katja, and Dieter’s wife. They all hugged and kissed me and we drove to Wuppertal, to Dieter’s big house there, what I remembered so well because we had built it together after we were married. It’s always good when you meet good friends, and they were my best friends in the world. People always think it strange when you say, “My best friends are my ex-husband and his wife,” which I can’t ever understand, because if you loved a man enough to marry him and have children with him, it would be even stranger afterwards if you didn’t feel some deep affection for him. And Hanne, who married him, was really now one of my daughters’ two mothers, and I loved her like a sister. We talked and we laughed, although I let them do most of the talking because I couldn’t tell them what I had been doing, or that I had been to Zurich, or the crazy thing that Cliff was trying to do. But Dieter and Hanne had just been to Nepal and visited the Dalai Lama, and they told me about it and it was like old times again, all of us friends together.

  Hanne’s son by her first marriage, Marcus, was now living with them, and this made my daughter Katja happy. And besides, there were Dieter and Hanne’s two young children, six and four, and the old dog, Karl, who still wagged his tail and recognized me with his white, nearly blind eyes, and it was all marvelous and made me happy.

  And now I must tell you something I did — something I can’t believe I did, but I know I did it. It happened when I opened a drawer to take out the telephone book so that I could call the airport about my plane back to Ibiza. I opened the desk drawer and there was Hanne’s kennkarte, her German identity card. lying next to the book. I picked it up and put it in my handbag. I’ll travel with it, I thought, because Hanne doesn’t need it — she always travels with her passport And, I thought, now I can travel directly from Ibiza to Zurich, if I have to go again, and not be gone so long from Nedsky and Barney. I thought all these things, but I was almost sick to my stomach with self-disgust, because I had taken my dear friend’s identity card. But some devil had hold of me and I slid the card in my handbag, and my heart was banging away in my chest, and I left the room thinking: Well, it’s too late. I’ve done it now.

  On the day that Edith left I returned home early from the studio. I wanted to spend some time with Nedsky and Barney. At eight o’clock, after I had read to the kids from a Dr. Seuss book, I drove into town and had dinner alone in the Indochinese restaurant, then meandered along to La Tierra, the most popular bar-cum-meeting-place in Ibiza. At about eleven o’clock, just as I asked for my bill, Nina walked in. She was wearing her big leather coat and carrying her tin suitcase. She had flown down from London and taken a taxi straight from the airport to town.

  The friends I was sitting with were her friends, too, and she joined us. After an hour she began to look gray and tired and she said, “I’m exhausted.” Quietly, she asked me: “Can you drive me home?”

  On the way out to her house, in the mountains beyond the village of Santa Eulalia, I said: “No one will ever believe we didn’t plan this. No one will believe that you didn’t know Edith was going to Germany today and no one will believe I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Who cares what people believe?” she said. “This is always the way it happens to us. It only proves that if you don’t make plans, things work out.”

  She was to be on Ibiza for a week, with faithful little John Marshall scampering down after her in three or four days. She had contracted to cut a solo album for Pye Records, a London company, and Marshall wanted photographs of her against the background of the Mediterranean landscape. “And the roof needs repairing down here, and I just needed a rest.”

  I left her at the finca and drove home. We were both busy the next day, I with work that had to be done on my boat, and Nina with her roof, but we had arranged to meet the morning after. “I’m dying to go to the beach,” she said. “If the weather’s decent, let’s try Figueral.”

  The weather was cloudy, but occasionally the sun burned through and held possession of the sky for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Figueral, a beach on the northeastern coast of the island, was a rarely frequented spot we had known from that time many years ago when we had been together so briefly. No one we knew would be there to see us at this time of the year. I had told her I would bring my camera and click off a role of film. “Maybe I’ll get a shot you can use for the record jacket.”

  “You won’t get a photo credit for it, my sweet,” she said.

  “I don’t want one, thanks.”

  But the day was too gray and Nina threw herself into the cold water a few minutes after we had trekked down the mountain to the beach, so that she was hardly glamorous enough for a cover photograph. I used the telefoto lens a few times for closeups, but her hair was wet and bedraggled. With the beach deserted, she had taken off her bikini top. I shot half a dozen photographs of her like that, laughing, with a bottle of red wine held aloft in one hand.

  “Where will you get those developed?” she asked, a little worried.

  “In the States, the next time I go. No one knows you there.”

  “Send me copies. There might be one we could crop and use.”

  She was in a strange mood, restless, and oddly depressed, then suddenly buoyant again. It came out after a while. She was unhappy with the record she had cut and a promised television series had fallen through. “And I’ve done something I should never have done,” she said finally. “I’ve loaned a lot of money. It was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”

  “If you need money to cover the loan,” I said, “I may h
ave some after the summer.”

  “The Hughes thing?”

  I nodded.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “I don’t want to borrow from you. I hate to borrow money. How is that all going?”

  I brought her up to date, omitting only the fact that Edith at that moment was in Zurich, marching into what I later learned was the Swiss Credit Bank as Helga Renate Hughes. The real work, I explained, had yet to begin. Nina frowned.

  “Do you really trust Dick that much?” she asked.

  “I have to,” I said. “Hell, of course I trust him. Why shouldn’t I trust him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. People talk too much. They’re so careless.”

  “I’m trusting you,” I said, smiling.

  “You couldn’t get a word out of me on anything, even if you used a crowbar, if I didn’t want to talk.”

  I had told several friends on the island that I was meeting with Hughes and working on his authorized biography. There was no simpler way I could figure out to explain my prolonged absences, and the last thing I wanted was too much speculation. I had of course sworn them all to secrecy. Two of them, however, had already told the story to Nina, who had professed a blend of astonishment and lack of interest. “I kept such a straight face you wouldn’t believe it. And I keep thinking: if they really knew.”

  “No one will ever know. Maybe when I’m old and gray I’ll write my memoirs and tell the whole truth.”

  “And no one will believe you,” she said, going off into a peal of laughter.

  We saw each other once after that day, eating a quiet dinner at an out-of-the-way restaurant; and then John Marshall arrived to move into the finca and take photographs for the album jacket. And then, on the following day, I drove out to the airport to meet Edith.

  Coincidence my foot, coincidence any other part of my anatomy you’d care to name — that the Danish Poison just happened to arrive in Ibiza on the day I left for Germany, and just happened to meet Cliff in La Tierra. and just happened to return to London the day after I came back to Ibiza …

  I took a Valium every morning and every evening, and then it was two weeks later, time to go collect the money, and I took two Valiums to start the day.

  It was May 27th, two weeks after my first trip, when Beverly went with me to Barcelona. I flew as myself to Palma, then from Palma to Zurich as black-haired Hanne Rosenkranz. Dick met me at the Palma airport with the ticket. I don’t know why, but I had put on a knitted wool dress and knee-high boots and I was sweating terribly; and then, sitting in Dick’s new Citroën in the parking lot, I put on the wig and the makeup and the glasses, and it was even worse.

  We went to a cafe on the Borne, one of the large shady places where the drinks are expensive and the waiters have stone faces. We didn’t talk about Howard Hughes or about why I was going to Zurich. There were too many Americans and English sitting at nearby tables. We talked about the weather, about friends; we commented on the people we saw; and then it was time to go and I felt calmer and more relaxed, even though I was carrying three identity documents: my own passport, the Hughes passport, and Hanne’s kennkarte. I put the two passports in a zipper compartment of my handbag, so that I could not take them out by mistake; and I put the kennkarte in my wallet, which was also in my handbag. But then I thought: Suppose some damned thief steals the wallet? Or suppose the handbag flops open and the wallet falls out and I lose it? And I began immediately to get nervous again, and my hands and feet to sweat. I wrapped the kennkarte in my handkerchief, so that my sweat would not make the ink run, and I clutched it in my wet hand all the way to Barcelona and then from Barcelona to Zurich. I felt foolish and I murmured to myself: You are the weak link. You don’t know how to do these things. You’ll make a mistake and the Swiss will find out you are really Edith Irving and that will be the end — the end of the book, and of Cliff and Nedsky and Barney and Dick and Ginette and Raphael …

  By the time I got through Swiss immigration I felt ten years older, a feeble old woman whose heart would burst with fear, so hard it was thumping. And even, I went on, if nothing happens this time, what about the other trips you must make? You must never again carry three identity documents, but only one, Hanne’s kennkarte.

  It was 4:30 when I got to Zurich. The Credit Suisse was still open, and I dashed in and asked the teller if the check had cleared. It had, she said, and I told her I would be back in the morning, and left the bank walking a few feet off the ground. I slept that night in the Gotthard Hotel, and the next morning, remembering what Cliff had told me, I drew out all but the minimum balance. It was paid to me without question; no one ever asked to see my passport. And then I crossed the Paradeplatz and rented a safe-deposit box, and put into it all the Hughes papers — the passport and the bank documents. Finally, with 5,000 Swiss francs, I opened an account in the Swiss Bank Corporation in the name of Hanne Rosenkranz. Everything was so swiftly done that I had more than two hours to wait for my plane back to Palma.

  So I sat on a bench by the river in the spring sunshine, sweating …

  Dick flew to Ibiza the day after Edith’s return. I handed him $10,000 in various currencies — Swiss, German, and American — and said: “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, let’s see …” He mused thoughtfully. “We’ve just bought that little Citroën, but Ginette could use a second car. What do you think’s better, a Ferrari or an Alfa-Romeo?”

  “Not even in jest, my friend,” I said. “That money sits tight, because we may decide one day to give it back. And if we go the full nine innings on this caper, there damn well better be no conspicuous consumption.”

  “Where are you putting your part of it?”

  “It’s tacked to a big wooden beam in the house. You can’t see it unless you climb a ladder and crawl on top of the wardrobe. I nearly broke my neck getting it up there.”

  “I’ll put it in the refrigerator,” Dick said brightly. “In the crisper, under the lettuce.”

  But money was not the subject that had made me summon him to Ibiza. I had finally collated all the research material we had picked up on our April–May trip. I had read through everything, filed it, and then read through it a second time. What I felt, on completion, was a sense of unease and disappointment. We had accumulated enough statistics for an abridged World Almanac and enough facts to form the basis for a biography; but not enough for the definitive, free-swinging biography that I had dreamed of. There were too many gaps in Howard’s childhood (we knew almost nothing about his first wife and his mother) and the Hollywood sections would have to be shaped from newspaper clippings and our imaginations. Dick argued that our imaginations would more than do the job, but I disagreed. “Look,” I said, “I’ve read the stuff twice through. I’ve never seen any of the movies Hughes made. I still can’t figure out the TWA shenanigans. We’re weak, and we’re just weak on colorful material. What happened to him after his marriage broke up in 1930? Who did he live with? That’s what we’ve got to know.”

  “That’s exactly what we can make up.”

  “And have it checked? No.”

  We argued the point and finally Dick conceded it. Then he revealed the truth, as he always did in the end. “I just don’t want to leave Ginette and Raphael again,” he admitted. “That last try was hell for me. You were with Edith. I was alone, and I hated it.”

  “Dick,” I said, “the book’s the thing. We’ve got to do it right or the whole thing’s a farce, and we can’t do it right if we don’t make one more trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “Los Angeles. We’ll go by way of Houston and fill in the holes, and we’ll stop off in New York first. I want to take a crack at Time-Life’s files. Come on,” I urged. “Remember, the pay is good.”

  “This trip’s going to cost us five thousand bucks before we’re through.”

  “That’s what the money’s for,” I reminded him.

  Dick thought it over a while, then nodded emphatically. “You’re right. When do
we go?”

  “Next week. The first of June. And that’s it, that’s the last trip. We’ll get lucky on this one,” I added. “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

  Chapter 8

  Bonanza

  I had written to Ralph Graves at Life in early May, while Beverly was on Ibiza, giving a progress report and adding: “It’s occurred to me that Time-Life-Fortune may have some good research files on Octavio and they might be of great help to me and save me some dreary leg-work. If this is so, and if they’re available to my eye, would you let me know?”

  Ralph had replied in a letter dated May 18th, saying: “I don’t see why I can’t get you a look at the files, but it would have to be here in the office. I can’t let them out of the building.” He then wrote:

  You know anything about a man named Dietrich? He is supposed to be a long-time intimate of Octavio and is said to be coming out with a tell-everything book this fall. That’s absolutely the extent of my knowledge, but I’ll let you know if I learn any more.The existence of the Dietrich book troubled me, but I wrote back that Hughes and Dietrich had parted company in 1956 or 1957 and therefore it was impossible for Dietrich to “tell everything”; only Howard could do that. When I arrived in New York, Ralph Graves told me that Life had been offered a look at the Dietrich manuscript but had declined. Why should they bother? They had — or were going to have — the real thing.

  On the telephone in New York, I explained why the Time, Inc. files might be of use to me. “That whole business with TWA,” I told Ralph, “is something I don’t really understand. Octavio keeps getting pissed off at me when I don’t have the background information. If I can fill myself in on that, I won’t make such a horse’s ass of myself when I see him.”