The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  “Sorry, Stanley. I meant what I said. I don’t like Dietrich and I don’t think I would work for him. So let’s forget it. But thanks for the opportunity. I mean that, too.”

  After ten more minutes of debate, Stanley realized I couldn’t be budged. He looked at me sorrowfully, as though I were a moron. He had offered me the biggest chance of my life and I had turned it down. Then, flushing a little, he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “All right. But do me two favors, please, for old times’ sake. First of all, I want you to think about it for a while. I mean, if you change your mind, the offer’s still there.”

  “Glad to, Stan,” I said, thinking it would be a good thing if publication of the Dietrich manuscript were delayed for a while.

  “And the second …” Stanley bit his lip. He looked confused for a moment, then regained his habitual joviality. “This is a bit delicate. I shouldn’t have showed you this manuscript without letting Noah know about it.”

  “I’ll never say a word.”

  “It’s more than that.” He cleared his throat. “The point is that I’m not supposed to have this copy. I had it in the house for a while and I Xeroxed it, but no one knows that I Xeroxed it. I really shouldn’t have done that, and I’d be … I’d be a little embarrassed if that came to light.”

  “Stanley …” I shook my head solemnly, “I’ll never tell a soul. You can trust me.”

  Five minutes later Dick and I drove away.

  “Oh, my God,” Dick howled. “He swiped it, and we swiped it from him! He doesn’t want us to tell anybody he’s got it!”

  “Right,” I murmured. “And he’ll never be able to tell anyone he gave it to me. This is crazy. What next?”

  “Don’t you know? Howard Hughes is waiting for us at the Holiday Inn to tell you he wants you to write his autobiography.”

  “I’ll believe anything now,” I said, “anything.”

  Possession of the Dietrich manuscript gave us a tremendous psychic lift. It dissipated the last of my fears that we would be unable to produce anything better than a merely mundane, acceptable transcript. The actual information it contained was of minor value; most of it had been duplicated in the Time-Life files and elsewhere. What was important was the characteristic tone of Howard’s voice that came through to us in his informal conversations as reported by Dietrich. From Dietrich I learned that Howard’s two favorite solutions to business problems were: “Fire the sonofabitch,” and “Use other people’s money.”

  Appended to the manuscript was an extraordinary document. How Noah Dietrich or James Phelan came by it we were never to find out, although we developed several theories. It was a ten-page, single-spaced memo from Frank McCulloch, former Los Angeles bureau chief of Time to James Shepley, the President of Time, Inc., dated October 30, 1958. At the top of the first page was written: CONFIDENTIAL, DO NOT DITTO. The memo itself was obviously a verbatim transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between Frank McCulloch and Howard Hughes. McCulloch’s remarks were excluded, so that the transcript was essentially a Hughes monologue. Aside from the information it imparted — Hughes was begging McCulloch to use his influence to scrap a forthcoming Fortune article on the troubles at TWA, and in effect was offering to become an unpaid correspondent of Time, Inc. if Henry Luce would kill that article — it was the only long and informal speech of Howard Hughes that had thus far come into our hands. It gave us his conversational patterns, his expletives, his spoken syntax, manner of response, love of cliches, and mangled metaphors. I sat down one evening while we were still in California and typed a three-page list of recurring phrases and favorite exclamations.

  Dick took the carbon copy. “Study this,” I said, “and get it stuck into your mind. When the time comes, one of us is not only going to have to know all about Howard Hughes and think like Howard Hughes, but talk like him as well. And this memo is going to be our guiding star.”

  We were enraptured not only by our good fortune but by Dick’s meeting Howard and being offered an organic prune. Just as the securing of Time, Inc.’s files had seemed to lead in some mysterious yet inexorable way to our discovery of the Dietrich manuscript, so Dick’s unscheduled interview of Howard Hughes led me to concoct a further fantasy that had taken place in Palm Springs. The idea had dawned on me from the moment that Stanley Meyer had mentioned Vice-President Agnew’s presence in the area — a guest in the house of Frank Sinatra, who had been feuding with Hughes since 1967 when Sinatra had tangled with the manager of Howard’s newly acquired Sands Hotel and taken a punch in the nose which put him flat on his back. The tale I invented was totally lunatic. The interview with Hughes in my motel room in Palm Springs had been an all-night session. At five o’clock in the morning Howard asked me to take a look outside: “See if there’s a car waiting.” Sure enough, a battered Chevrolet had pulled up in the parking lot in the breaking dawn light. “Come with me,” Howard instructed. I followed. Howard got into the car and beckoned me closer. “This is Clifford Irving,” he said to the man in the back seat. “He’s a friend of mine, and if he ever needs help, you help him.”

  “It’s Spiro Agnew?” Dick said.

  “Right.”

  “But why?”

  “Why not? They’ve got business to discuss. Howard’s got Spiro in his pocket. It ties in with his plans for an SST port-of-entry in Las Vegas — and in the Bahamas. That, in fact, is why he’s in the Bahamas. Didn’t I ever tell you that?”

  “But what if they ever ask Agnew about it?”

  I laughed. “He’d have to deny it even if it was true. Vice-Presidents don’t meet with billionaires at 5 A.M. in parked cars to talk about the weather.”

  Dick was unable to dissuade me and from the Holiday Inn in Beverly Hills I called Beverly Loo and told her of the meeting. I wasn’t sure whether or not she believed me, so I wrote her a letter in which I confirmed it. “You’re losing your grip,” Dick said darkly.

  “Come on. The wackier it is, the more they believe it. You’ll see,” I promised.

  Our two fantastic strokes of luck — the Time-Life files and the pirated copy of the Dietrich manuscript — were followed by other, lesser, ones. Soon after our return to Los Angeles from Encino I called Bob Kirsch, the book reviewer for The Los Angeles Times and an old friend from hard times in the early 1960’s. We picked the Kirsches up at their house, took them out to dinner, went to a discotheque, and talked until past midnight. In the course of the conversation I told Bob what I was working on — a book about four millionaires — and said I was having trouble getting material on Hughes and also couldn’t seem to gain access to The Los Angeles Times morgue.

  “No problem,” Bob said. “I’ll write a letter for you to the librarian.”

  While waiting for the letter to arrive, my cousin Mike Hamilburg, Beabe’s son, helped me get a print of Hell’s Angels, Howard’s first major film, and we arranged to see it at a screening room on Hollywood Boulevard. The film itself, the cost of shipping it air express from New Jersey, and the rental of the screening room came to a total of about $300. “I hope you’re not planning to see all his films,” Dick muttered.

  “Couldn’t if I wanted to. They’re not available. Howard apparently bought up every print around. It was just luck that this one escaped.”

  But the film more than earned its keep, for in the transcript we had Howard explain how he had personally worked to achieve some of the technical effects, and relate anecdotes about Jean Harlow, Ben Lyon, and several of the ex–World War I pilots who flew in the combat sequences. We taped the film’s sound track on a cassette recorder and later, listening to the hero make a violent anti-war speech, I said: “Howard wrote that. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “I didn’t until you told me.”

  “There’s only one problem. How does he explain all that military garbage turned out by Hughes Aircraft?”

  “He doesn’t explain it. He brushes it aside. That’s business, the other’s personal. The schizoid personality of the bi
g American businessman. He really can’t see the connection between the air-to-air missiles and the other deadly hardware turned out by his companies, and his own personal condemnation of war.”

  “But he tries,” I said. “Remember, he’s a hero.”

  Our third bonanza came in the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Dick and I went there to compile a list of Hughes’s old pictures, who directed them, who starred in them, where they were filmed, whatever else we could find. The Academy’s files on Hughes, however, contained hundreds of clippings, some about his time as boss of RKO, others concerned with his personal and business life. There was too much to plow through in one session, so we returned the next day. When we arrived, the girl at the desk said: “Oh, by the way, something’s just come in that might be of interest to you. The private papers of Lincoln Quarberg.”

  “Who’s Lincoln Quarberg?” we, the Hughes experts, asked.

  “I’m not sure, but obviously he had something to do with Hughes, because the file is full of memoranda to him. I don’t think anyone else has seen it yet. It hasn’t even been collated.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Dick said quickly.

  Lincoln Quarberg, we soon learned, had been Hughes’s chief of public relations for Caddo Productions, the company that had produced all of Howard’s early films. He was also a compulsive hoarder, for his file contained personal letters, memoranda, notes, cables to and from Billie Dove, Robert E. Sherwood, and other personalities of the period. I went to the nearest camera shop, bought four rolls of Panatonic-X, and spent the rest of the day crouched over a table near a window, clicking away.

  The next morning, a Wednesday, I called The Los Angeles Times and was told that Kirsch’s letter had arrived and I was welcome to use their files. In the meantime, Dick had spoken to an aviation writer named Don Dwiggins, who had done several articles for Cavalier magazine when Dick was its Associate Editor. Dwiggins refused to give us any information on Hughes —” I’m doing a book on him myself,” he explained — but he did give us the telephone number of Charlie Lajotte, who had been Hughes’s flying instructor at Clover Field in Santa Monica during the 1930’s. I called Lajotte, made my pitch for an interview, and we arranged to meet at the Northrop Institute of Aeronautics at 11 A.M. “If I’m late,” Lajotte said in his dry, old man’s voice, “see Dave Hatfield down there. He can help you a lot.”

  Both Hatfield and Lajotte were garrulous on the subject of the young Howard Hughes. We took them to lunch at the Proud Bird Restaurant on the edge of Los Angeles International Airport — close enough to the runway so that the windows vibrated with each take-off and landing. Lajotte and Dick hit it off well when Lajotte interjected a French phrase into his conversation and Dick responded in kind. Charlie had once lived in Paris. He was spry and alert, well into his seventies, with a varied background as a flying instructor, bush pilot, World War I pilot, and chauffeur-pilot for a wealthy young woman who had wanted to tour Africa by air.

  Interviews such as this — and we had several, including one with my Aunt Beabe, who with her husband had chaperoned Howard and Mitzi Gaynor on a long Las Vegas weekend back in the 1950’s — posed a knotty problem. I couldn’t pretend that I had never seen Lajotte, putting his words and tales into the mouth of Howard Hughes; for Lajotte would surely read the book if it were published. There was only one solution. The transcript of the tapes eventually read:

  CLIFFORD: By the way, I met an old friend of yours the other day. Charlie Lajotte.

  HOWARD: Charlie-for heaven’s sake! Is he still alive?

  I then went on, in the transcript, to relate to Howard the anecdotes that Lajotte had related to me, and Howard obligingly confirmed and elaborated. When it came time to transform the dialogue of the transcripts into the finished Autobiography, I would eliminate my parroting of Lajotte’s remarks — with Howard’s permission and McGraw-Hill’s editorial blessing — and the problem, if ever scrutinized, would lend itself to a legitimate and logical explanation.

  Hatfield, too, had a lot to offer. He hadn’t known Hughes personally, but the bookshelves and photograph files of the Northrop Museum, of which he was curator, held a number of interesting items, and in his rambling fashion he provided us with a score of colorful tidbits about Howard the Pilot and Howard the Aircraft Builder which later found their way into the transcript. Hatfield persuaded Dick and me to take out subscriptions to a monthly newsletter published by the Institute. “Hughes has a subscription, you know,” he said. “I once got an angry note from one of his employees, man named Francis Fox, when he missed an issue.”

  Dick laughed. “If it’s good enough for Mr. Hughes, I guess it’s good enough for us.”

  It was mid-afternoon when we returned to Los Angeles — too late to do any more research at the Times’s library, too early to quit for the day. Dick solved our problem. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t we take some photos of Howard?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, we know he dresses like a bum, and he goes unshaven, also like a bum. So what we have to do …”

  “… is take photos of bums,” I finished.

  “Exactly. And where is the best collection of bums west of the Mississippi? Right here in L.A., on Pershing Square.”

  Twenty minutes later we put the car in a parking lot on South Broadway and walked through the sweltering smog to Pershing Square. My Nikkonnat was hanging from my neck, a new 36-exposure roll of Plus-X just loaded.

  “Remember,” Dick cautioned, “it can’t be just any old bum. He’s got to be damn near a cadaver, and be sure you take him a little out of focus, a little blurry around the edges.”

  I set the telefoto lens opening to f 11, the shutter speed at 250, and focused it at infinity, ready for action.

  Our first subject was passed out under a palm tree, a black crust on his lips and an empty pint of Thunderbird lying next to his outflung hand. “Wait,” Dick said, “I’ll get him to open his eyes.” He nudged the sleeping man with his toe and one red-veined eye opened to peer up at us. The other eye remained closed, clotted together by a yellowish gummy line. I peered at him through the view-finder but did not click the shutter.

  Dick nudged me. “Go ahead.”

  “No. We’d have to give him a bath first, and we haven’t the time.” The red-veined eye closed and we walked on.

  We came to two old men playing checkers on a bench. One of them fitted our bill of particulars except that he was totally bald.

  “You got a hat, mister?” Dick asked him.

  The old man gave him a quick look from under his brows, then waved him away as one would a troublesome fly.

  “Listen,” Dick persisted. “If you’ve got a hat, you can make five bucks.”

  At that the old man looked Dick full in the face. “Yeah?” he said, “which one of you?”

  Dick turned to me, puzzled. “What’s he mean?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “He thinks we’re propositioning him.”

  “I only like clean old men.”

  We spent another half-hour in and around the park, were propositioned by two drag queens, looked at suspiciously by one cop in a uniform and two others in mufti, and decided to leave while we were still ahead.

  A new shift had come on duty at the parking lot during our absence. Hughes’s spitting image, mustachioed and wearing green coveralls and a battered fedora, sat in the shed at the exit. In return for ten dollars and a promise that we would send him a copy of the Parking Lot Promoter’s Annual with his photograph inside, he lowered the top of his coveralls, tilted the fedora on the back of his head, and allowed me to take ten photographs, all out of focus, all with the old man’s face half hidden by the shadow cast by the overhanging eave of the shed.

  The next day we picked up all the films — those taken at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as well as those from Time-Life, Houston, and Ibiza. We also bought an Agfalupe, a special magnifying glass for contact prints. To our relief
, the documents I had photographed in Life’s secret file were legible, although a few of them were slightly out of focus. We pondered over the photographs of the parking attendant for all of ten seconds, then burst out laughing at our own stupidity, tore them into shreds and threw them in the wastebasket.

  That evening Dick lay sprawled on my bed and I sat at the table, shuffling through the notes and photographic material. “I’ve had it,” he said feebly. “We’re not going to get anything else. Let’s not push our luck till it goes dry.”

  “You’re homesick.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  I smiled. “Don’t sound so sheepish. So am I. Okay, you catch the next plane. I’ve still got to check those files at the Times. And I’ve got to get the photographs blown up so that we can read them.”

  We debated about that and decided the wisest thing was to have them enlarged in Europe, preferably in a camera lab where English wasn’t spoken, or in London, where interest in Hughes, we thought, would be minimal. I drove Dick to the airport that evening and saw him off to London with a farewell drink at the bar. “Next time I see you,” I said, “we get down to the real work. So go home, get some rest, and gear up.”

  He raised his glass in our favorite toast. “Confusion to our enemies.”

  “L’chayem,” I replied. I punched his shoulder and said: “Take care, have a good trip. And pay the bar bill,” I called as I left.

  The next morning I went down to the Times and spent the better part of the day in their morgue. I had thought our luck had run out, but I was wrong. The files were fat with material, much of it new to me. I Xeroxed everything that was of use and when I put the last folder back in the cabinet under H, I noticed one folder that was marked CONFIDENTIAL. I turned to ask the librarian if I could look at the folder, but she was gone. One of the clerks told me she would be back in about ten minutes. Those ten minutes were all I needed to Xerox the file, which contained the on-the-scene handwritten notes of the reporter who had covered the 1936 car accident in which Hughes had killed a 60-year-old pedestrian named Gabe Meyer. The reporter’s version of the facts had never been printed, and was at decided variance with what had been printed. When the time came, I decided, Howard would tell me what had really happened.