The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  It was no problem, and Graves agreed to set it up for the following morning. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to be there personally — it was closing day for the magazine — but Dave Maness, the Assistant Managing Editor, would take care of me. He also apologized in advance for the fact that the files might be in haphazard chronological order. “You may have to rummage through the whole damn thing to find what you want.”

  “Is there a lot?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid there’s an awful lot.”

  “Well, I’ll plow through it. Do you mind if I bring Dick Suskind? That’s the man who’s helping me — my researcher.”

  Graves hesitated, then said: “I don’t think so. The problem is that these are confidential files. They’re not supposed to be made available to anyone who isn’t a Time, Inc. staffer. You shouldn’t even be seeing them, but I think this case warrants making an exception.”

  “In other words, you don’t want me to tell anyone I’m seeing them.”

  “That’s right,” he said, relieved. “We won’t mention it, and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t either. In fact, I’m afraid I have to make that a condition.”

  “Say no more, Ralph. Can I Xerox anything I need?”

  “No good. We don’t have really private Xerox facilities. You’d have to give the material to secretaries and the word would spread.”

  “Maybe I’ll bring my camera. I’ll be there at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  At nine o’clock the following morning I went to Willoughby-Peerless on West 48th Street, one of the best camera equipment shops in New York. I had my Nikkonnat in its bulky brown carrying case, complete with telefoto and wide-angle lenses. I explained the assignment to the assistant behind the counter: I had to photograph a number of documents and newspaper clippings; I could only use available light and I had no idea what that might be like. At his suggestion, I bought four rolls each of Tri-X, Plus-X, and Panatonic-X, and four close-up lens attachments that screwed on to the regular Nikkonnat f 1 .4 lens.

  “You’ve got a tripod, of course,” the clerk said.

  “Do I need a tripod?”

  He frowned. “If you were thinking of hand-holding the camera, forget it. You can’t possibly get any decent definition.”

  “I’ve got steady hands.”

  “You’d better use a tripod.”

  “I’ll come back and get one,” I said, “later.”

  Whatever the risk, however brash I might be, I knew I could never walk into the office of Time-Life, camera in one hand and tripod in the other, and blithely ask to see the files on Howard Hughes. There were limits to audacity, and I had learned them that April day on the steps of the Library of Congress. I would attempt to photograph whatever of Time, Inc.’s files seemed useful, but I wasn’t going in there with a tripod that screamed the full scope of my intentions.

  I walked through the warm June morning, from 48th Street to the Time-Life Building near Rockefeller Center and took the elevator to the 29th floor.

  Dave Maness appeared; then his secretary dropped a pair of keys in my hand. “We’re putting you in a separate room,” Maness explained with great solemnity. “These are the only keys to it. If you want to, lock the door when you’re inside. The files are on the desk. Just don’t take them out of the room.”

  “Have you been through them?”

  “I haven’t had time,” he apologized. “I just took a quick look. There’s one great letter from a pilot who wrote to us after the 1947 Senate hearings and told us all about his experiences flying with Hughes. He may be a crackpot, but it’s a damned funny letter. Also, there were one or two things we had to remove from the file because they’re confidential — there was a telephone conversation between Hughes and a Time executive which was really the property of that man, and it said some things we really don’t feel should be revealed.”

  “Oh, if it’s confidential, I wouldn’t want to see it.”

  “What the hell is that you’re carrying?”

  “A camera.”

  “A Minox?”

  “No, a Nikkonnat.” I unzipped the case and showed it to him and the secretary. “My wife gave it to me for Christmas.”

  “Can you take photographs of documents with that kind of camera?”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But without a tripod, it’s difficult.”

  He unlocked a door and let me into a small room. A dozen bulging manila folders were piled on the desk. “Have fun,” Maness said, and left me alone with the files.

  A good strong north light filled that little room on the 29th floor. It was one of those bright clear Manhattan days that give one the illusion that the air swirling through megalopolis is breathable and that the ecologists are winning the battle. I made some notes to this effect even before I began work, and much later, in the final draft of the Autobiography, I had Howard say: “New York is the Cairo of America,” which perfectly expressed my own feelings.

  The files were in better order than Graves had realized, although the indexing was occasionally haphazard. They were arranged chronologically, beginning with Hughes’s neophyte days in Hollywood during the late 1920’s, moving through his air exploits and business ventures to the debacle in Las Vegas. But they contained more than news clips from Time, Life, Fortune, and The New York Times. I skimmed through until I pulled out a sheaf of yellowed pages: the handwritten notes of the Time magazine correspondent who had interviewed Hughes at Floyd Bennett Field immediately following his landing after the flight around the world in 1938. There were impressions, sidelights, details, quotes from both Hughes and his four-man crew. I screwed the plus-4 magnifying lens to the camera, placed the sheets of paper side by side on the window ledge, clamped the camera to my eye, fiddled for a minute or two with the light meter, levered my head up and down until I had what I thought was a clear focus on the pages, and began clicking away.

  In an hour I had pages strewn all over the desk and my heart was pounding. It was a treasure trove. The files were filled with interviews that had never been printed, with quotes from politicians and Hughes associates, most of them marked “Not for attribution.” There was Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, discussing with a Time correspondent the troubles at Hughes Aircraft in 1953 and referring to Hughes as “that idiot.” Tex Thornton, head of Litton Industries, had reported to McNamara that Hughes believed management’s dissatisfaction with the operation of the aircraft company was a communist plot. The Time reporter noted that “this really kills McNamara.” There was Noah Dietrich, relating to the bureau chief of Time’s Los Angeles office a tale of Ava Gardner walloping Hughes over the head with a copper ashtray. Again: General Harold George, administrative head of Hughes Aircraft, detailing how Hughes would borrow dimes from him to make telephone calls. “He was the cheapest sonofabitch I’ve ever known,” George concluded. Floyd Odium, the man from whom Hughes had bought RKO, told tales of Howard’s assignations with both women and businessmen. And always: “Not for attribution.” The stories had never found their way into print. I finished the first roll of Panatonic-X and jammed a second roll into the camera. My knees were weak from the constant bending to get what I hoped was the perfect focus and my head already ached from the strain of peering through the lens.

  I worked from ten o’clock in the morning until nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. No lunch break. I had a candy bar with me and twice I walked out into the corridor to the water fountain. Dave Maness marched in early in the afternoon. I was too weary to hide the camera. It stood on the desk next to six or seven empty film packs. “How’s it going?” he said. “The girl says you haven’t had lunch.”

  “Yeah, I want to get through this in one day. I don’t want to bother you again tomorrow.”

  “Find anything to help you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s pretty much the same old stuff.”

  “Look for that letter from the pilot. That’ll give you a laugh.”

  Maness left and I took up where I had left off. I had
come across a batch of analyses from Time and Fortune staffers, digging behind the scenes on the $205,000 loan to Donald Nixon, the Vice-President’s brother, and also detailing Hughes’s possible manipulations regarding TWA. One memo listed the favors the government seemed to have done for Hughes Tool, Hughes Aircraft, and TWA following the Nixon loan. I found the ten-page typed letter from the pilot, a man named Frank Williams, who told in insufferable detail the story of a flight he had taken with Hughes from Los Angeles to Amarillo, and accused Howard of being one of the worst pilots he had ever flown with. I photographed all ten pages. I found lists of Hughes’s girlfriends with background analyses and a breakdown of the romantic possibilities and rumors. My knees were shaking and it was difficult to stand; the focus seemed more blurred with every picture I snapped. When I was done, I had taken twelve rolls of film, more than 400 exposures of possibly 300 documents. I stacked the files carefully, staggered out of the office, and handed the keys to the secretary. Dave Maness appeared again to say goodbye.

  “I read the letter from the pilot,” I said. “It’s funny as hell. Aside from that,” I added glumly, “there wasn’t much.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked genuinely disappointed.

  I took a taxi back to the apartment on West End Avenue and found Dick in the kitchen, sitting at the table in front of a row of newly acquired bottles of organic vitamins, drinking a No-Cal, and reading a detective novel. I dumped the boxes of exposed film on the table.

  “Well?”

  “We hit the jackpot,” I said. “Listen to this — and look at these!” I gave him details and that big, ingenuous smile spread across his face. I felt proud and happy, as if I’d given my best friend a present he’d dreamed of all his life. “Gee,” Dick kept saying, “that’s fantastic …”

  “The only thing is,” I said eventually, to dampen both his euphoria and my own, “the guy at Willoughby’s told me to use a tripod, but I hand-held. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to read the damn stuff.”

  Two more days in New York, during which I blackened my hands rummaging through piles of second-hand aviation and movie magazines, and Dick Xeroxed old newspaper clips in the public library; then down to Houston. In the taxi from the Houston airport to the Towers Hotel, we noticed that, unlike New York taxis, no protective shield of bulletproof plastic separated the driver from the customers. “We’ll have Howard comment on that,” I said.

  The next morning I went to The Houston Post, said I was a freelance writer from Richmond, Virginia, and obtained immediate access to their files on Hughes. Dick was in the Texas Room of the public library, combing the city directories and microfilms of old newspapers for anything he might have missed on his first trip. I joined him there later and photographed the pages of a pictorial volume commemorating Hughes’s arrival in Houston after his around-the-world flight. Later, I cropped several of the photographs and told the people at McGraw-Hill and Life that they had been given to me by Howard.

  We wasted several hours in the Texas Medical Center complex in Houston, because we had read in an old clip from the Chronicle that Hughes had donated $125 million to build a separate unit. The director quickly disabused us of that idea. “Not a bean,” he said. “That man is about as far from a philanthropist as you can get.”

  After a short visit the following morning to the County Records Office — where we dug up the details on Hughes’s marriage to his first wife, Ella Rice — we packed and caught an early afternoon flight to Los Angeles.

  We flew Continental Airlines, a smooth flight with amiable stewardesses, plenty of leg room, and good food. I was in a buoyant mood. “This is a damn good airline,” I said. “Let’s buy stock in it for our portfolio.”

  “Look it up in the Trendline,” Dick suggested.

  Trendline — a publication that offered bar charts of leading stocks — showed Continental as suffering substantial losses over the past two years, and the stock seemed to be headed nowhere but down, at least for the foreseeable future. “You see,” Dick said, with all the wisdom of his two months in the market, “effort means nothing in business. All this service we’re getting and all this leg room is costing the company a small fortune. Look for airlines with lousy food and cramped seats, whose motto is ‘Screw the customer.’ They’re the ones that make money. Let’s put our money into one of them.”

  We had telephoned from Houston and made reservations at the Holiday Inn on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. This would be an obvious choice for Howard, we felt, both because of its location and its anonymity. It was relatively close to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had kept a bungalow for some ten or fifteen years, so he would feel on familiar ground. It had no cachet or distinction of any kind. We were also fortunate in the rooms assigned to us. Both were on the fourth floor, with one of them at the end of the corridor. “Good,” I said. “It’s all falling into place. This is just what Howard would have told me to do. You’re on one side, so no one can eavesdrop. And there’s only the street on the other side. Make a note of that, Jeeves. I’ll include it in my introduction to the book.”

  Another reason that Hughes had chosen Los Angeles as the site for our next series of interviews was that he wanted to show me the Spruce Goose, his gigantic wooden flying boat which was secluded under armed guard in a twenty-story hangar in San Pedro. “He’s promised me a look at it,” I had told Beverly and Albert in New York; and I had added to Ralph Graves: “Maybe I can even get a photo of him standing next to it.”

  “That’s just what we need,” Graves said. “But if you can’t get a shot of him with the flying boat, get a recent photo — something we could use on the cover. That’s very important for us.”

  “I’ll do my damnedest, Ralph,” I had promised … and our plan was taking shape. Like all of our best plans, it was a brilliant combination of simplicity and simplemindedness. “I’ll never get a look at the Spruce Goose,” I told Dick. “Howard keeps postponing it and postponing it until he falls desperately ill and vanishes.”

  “Yeah,” Dick said, “that’s good. It’d be too easy to check if you had or hadn’t seen the plane. Besides, this may help out later, if Howard stabs you in the back and denies the authenticity of the book. You can always claim he was a dying man when he left California, and force him to make an appearance in court. He’ll never do it.” Dick looked briefly worried, then shook his head and repeated: “Never!”

  We spent two days in the book shops on Hollywood Boulevard, buying old screen magazines, glossies of stars in the 1930’s and 1940’s with whom Howard might have had affairs, and various books that covered the period. I also interviewed a lawyer named Arthur Crowley who had sued Hughes on the charge of having placed a wiretap and bug in his office in the Taft Building on Hollywood Boulevard, and another lawyer named Moss who had represented Paul Jarrico, the screenwriter Hughes had fired from RKO during the witch-hunting days of the film industry. Again, in Hollywood as well as Houston, Howard was not a very popular man. All this, I decided, would have to be changed in the book. Howard, a violent anticommunist in the early 1950’s, would now have second thoughts; he would see how he had been swept into the hysteria of the McCarthy era. He would be mellow. He would recant. “We’ll make a bigger man of him than he is,” I told Dick. “Remember — soul-vomit.”

  The second morning I walked up Wilshire Boulevard to the Beverly Hills Camera Shop and handed in the rolls of film I had snapped in the Time-Life Building and Houston, as well as the one roll of Kodacolor I had taken of Nina on the beach at Figueral. I ordered contact sheets for the black-and-whites. Back at the hotel, I found Dick slumped in an easy chair, snoring. The message was clear: we needed a break. The pace in New York and Houston had been headlong; we were tired and getting stale. “Let’s head south to Twenty-nine Palms,” I said. “That’s where this guy Williams lives.”

  “Who’s Williams?”

  “The pilot who wrote that long letter to Life saying what a lousy flier Hughes was.”

  �
��Howard won’t like this,” Dick said, yawning. “But a break will do us good.”

  Dick was in an ecological mood when we started south from Los Angeles. He slouched in his seat and grumbled about the smog, about the millions of acres of arable land smothered in freeways, bedroomvilles, used-car lots, shopping centers, and restaurants whose food was as tasteless as their decor. “It’s gotten worse since ‘62,” he said. “At least then you used to see an orange grove or two.”

  I remembered and for a while we reminisced about the spring and summer of 1962, when we were both living in Southern California. My second wife. Fay, and I had come there from our eight-month trip around the world, which included a stay in a Kashmir houseboat where I finished a novel, and a trip by freighter across the Pacific. Landing in California broke, we rented a house in Venice from the then aging and endlessly pontificating self-appointed guru of the beatniks, Lawrence Lipton. He preached “holy poverty” — for others, of course. Dick and Ginette lived farther south, in Manhattan Beach. Through a friend Dick had landed a job as a technical writer for a large aerospace company in El Segundo. Hardly able to do more than change a light bulb, he was working with a gaggle of Ph.D.’s on a study concerning the feasibility of a direct flight to the moon. A bare four months later he fled back to Ibiza, armed with a contract to write a book about the First World War. “It’ll take me a year to research and write,” I remembered him saying, “and I’ll make every bit as much as I would in two months of technical writing, but …” and he had shrugged helplessly, a victim of both his restlessness and his passion to be a “real” writer.

  I held on a bit longer, struggling without success to sell film scripts, television plays, to start a new novel; making ends meet by teaching creative writing at UCLA and by an occasional poker-playing foray to Gardena. What stood out sharpest in my memory of those days was the fright-filled time when my son Joshua, born three months prematurely and weighing barely two pounds at birth, was fighting to stay alive in his incubator; and the endless squabbling with Fay. I was thinking about Josh, now nearly ten and living with Fay and her new husband in England, when Dick heaved a heartfelt sign and said: “What do you say we forget about Twenty-nine Palms? We’ve got photos of Williams’s letter. We don’t really need to see the guy. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing.”