The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  “That’ll win the Peeyoulitzer prize, all right,” Dick said when I switched off the recorder. “Let’s drop it. The book’s long enough already.”

  I had a different suggestion, which was accepted. “Let’s drop the Ramaprasad crap,” I said, “but keep the encounters with the fakirs in Benares. The local color’s good. That’s the kind of stuff the people at Life really go for. And who knows? Maybe Howard’s really been to India. He’d be annoyed if we left it out.”

  Sometimes Dick and I taped directly from the mass of factual material we had accumulated in the folders, amplifying constantly but occasionally playing it straight. At other times, feeling playful or adventurous, we launched out into the murky waters of Howard’s philosophy: his theory of corruption in American family life, of germs, of a universe in which an atom in a man’s toe might contain an entire solar system. Nothing was too outrageous. “The wilder the story,” I explained to Dick, “the deeper their need to believe it. And, of course, it’s less checkable.”

  Howard’s theory about his own eccentricity was provided to us accidentally by Edith. She still knew hardly anything about Howard Hughes and cared even less, and my constant preoccupation with him had led her to ban the mention of his name in our house. However, on one occasion at the breakfast table, the ban was lifted by Edith herself. “You know,” she said, “you and Dick always talk about this man as if he was nuts, what is wrong. He does things his own way, what he can afford to do, what is just the way Pimpi used to live.” Pimpi was Edith’s affectionate nickname for her father, who had died two years ago at the age of eighty. She proceeded to tell me some tales about her father, who was certainly an eccentric in his own right. I took mental notes and that afternoon, with Dick playing my role and feeding me the right lines, we taped the following dialogue:

  HOWARD: … If there’s a price on my head, and I can tell you there is, the man who wants to collect it won’t necessarily have to put a bullet between my eyes. There are other ways he could do it. That’s why I’m careful. What’s the matter?

  CLIFFORD: Nothing.

  HOWARD: If you think I’m insane I wish you’d say so and we can put a stop to this right now.

  CLIFFORD: I don’t think that. I just want to find out why you feel the way you do. That’s what the world wants to know and so do I.

  HOWARD: I’m eccentric and I make no bones about it. Eccentricity is the sign of a superior intelligence. Now, I’m not trying to say I have a superior intelligence because the truth is I don’t believe I do have. I don’t. I’m only saying … well, I’ll put it this way. People who ridicule eccentricity … ridiculing eccentricity is the sign of an inferior intelligence. You told me about your wife’s father, how he ordered food in restaurants, two French-fried potatoes and six string beans. Now that was eccentric, and the waiters probably thought he was crazy … that’s why they were waiters and he was a rich man. Did your wife think he was crazy?

  CLIFFORD: Certainly not. In fact, she thought it was great, that he was a great man.

  HOWARD: He may very well have been. My point is, and I’ve thought about this, and I think it’s of the very deepest importance that I spell this out for you … my eccentricities, if you look at them carefully, are just intelligent safeguards against the common dangers of life. More than that, every man would have them, every man would behave in a so-called peculiar manner, not necessarily my manner, but his own peculiar manner, if he had the courage.

  CLIFFORD: And the money.

  HOWARD: Yes, the money, the money to indulge your wishes and to tell other people to go to hell if they don’t like it. That’s it precisely. That explains in a nutshell why I’m odd, why people think I’m odd, because I am odd in that way and … only my oddness is my individuality, which I can afford to express whereas others can’t or are too scared to do so. And so naturally the world, the mass, the ones who can’t express themselves and … they look at someone like me, what they know of me or what they think they know of me, and they say, “He’s odd, he’s nuts, he’s crazy,” use whatever word you please. Well, you must, by definition, be odd and eccentric and maybe even nuts if you’re rich, because you can do what you like and have what you like and structure your life to suit your most, your very deepest personal tastes, without fear of the consequences, and any man’s tastes are — if he expresses them honestly — goddam peculiar. Artists are the closest to this, close to rich men like myself in this sense, because they have a highly developed sense of their own individuality and they don’t mind telling the world to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, and I don’t either. Because in my own way I suppose I’m an artist, too, as well as being rich. Now I want to stress this, all that I’ve said, because it is the truth, it is God’s honest truth, and I believe it and that’s what I want you to say, and I want you to quote me word for word on this, maybe brush up the grammar if it needs it, but that’s what I want to say about myself. That may be the most important thing I have to say about myself, to squash all those nasty stories people love to tell about me because … never mind why they do it. I want you to say exactly what I’ve said. Play the tape back for me now. [The tape was then played back.] Yes, I’m satisfied. That’s what I meant and I goddam well want it right out in front, and if people don’t understand that or don’t like it, that’s their problem, not mine. You still haven’t said, does it make sense to you?

  CLIFFORD: If you put it that way, it makes sense.

  HOWARD: Then why do you have that look on your face?

  CLIFFORD: I don’t know what look I’ve got.

  HOWARD: Do I bore you?

  CLIFFORD: Absolutely not. I think it’s a great statement.

  HOWARD: What is it, you want to go out and smoke a cigarette, put another nail in your coffin?

  CLIFFORD: Yeah, I know.

  HOWARD: All right, go ahead, smoke a cigarette.

  CLIFFORD: Okay, we’ll take a break.

  This passage was later read by Shelton Fisher, the President of McGraw-Hill, Inc. “By God,” he said to me, “he certainly gave you a hard time. But you stood up to him.”

  “I think he makes sense.”

  “So do I.” Shelton Fisher beckoned to the seven or eight other executives who sat with us then in the Board of Directors Room on the 32nd floor of the McGraw-Hill Building. “Here’s the key to this remarkable man’s character, gentlemen,” he said, passing them the pages which had their genesis in Edith’s breakfast table remarks. “If you want to understand Howard Hughes, read it carefully.”

  Truth may be stranger than fiction, but there are times when the reverse is true and others when the two concepts become hopelessly tangled and intertwined. Some of the material which we invented out of the whole cloth was later checked by Time-Life’s experienced staff of researchers. We had decided to have Howard’s father, a rough-cut bon vivant, race around Houston in a 1920 35-horsepower Peerless.

  HOWARD: He rebuilt that himself down at our garage and he used to race in it. He traveled all the way up to Dallas because some colonel up there claimed he had the fastest car in Texas, and that’s all my father had to hear. He went up there and bet this man $500 he could win in his Peerless, and he did, at sixty miles an hour over the track, or wherever they raced …

  Dave Maness, the Assistant Managing Editor of Life, apparently put his Houston stringer to work on the story. He called me one day to inform me that Hughes had made a mistake. The Life researchers had talked to a number of old-timers in the Houston area.

  “He went up to Dallas, all right,” Maness said, “and raced this colonel, but it wasn’t a 1920 Peerless he owned. It was a 1902 model. Will you be able to doublecheck that with Hughes? We want to be as accurate as possible.”

  I complimented him on the diligence and doggedness of his research staff, but shrugged off the necessity for further questioning. “Let it go as a 1902 model. It was probably just a typing error.”

  Howard, we decided, had had a humiliating and comical experience in a gym in San
ta Monica. We based it on something that had happened to Dick in the Great Blackout of December 1965.

  When the lights winked out all over the Northeastern United States, Dick was in the locker room of the Shelton Towers Gymnasium in midtown New York, just starting to get into his shorts and sneakers. By the time he had fumbled his way back into his street clothes, an attendant arrived with a flashlight and guided him out to the reception room, where he spent the next couple of hours trying to find out what was happening. At one point he was joined by a good-looking, freckle-faced young man he knew only as Billy. Billy’s face was streaked with sweat. “What’s the matter?” Dick asked him. “Did the showers break down, too?”

  “You couldn’t get me in there for a million dollars!” Billy said, and gave a bitter little laugh. He had been in the locker room when the lights went out. He continued on to the shower room, naked, but stopped at the door, appalled at the shrieking and giggling that was coming from inside the room. As he turned to go, a hand clutched at him and tried to pull him inside. He tore loose and ran. “They were going at it like fiends in there,” Billy said. “Jesus! Imagine if you dropped the soap. It’d be worth your life to bend over and pick it up.”

  “Worth your ass, you mean.”

  “Great,” I said to Dick, when he had finished. “We’ll tape it and you play Howard. We’ve got to make the man real.”

  Our work routine quickly established itself. No matter what time he went to bed, Dick found himself awake at six o’clock in the morning; so that after breakfast he would drive to the studio at Los Molinos and began transcribing the previous day’s tapes.

  My next-door neighbor at Los Molinos, a German homosexual named Gundel, cornered me one afternoon by a patch of cactus near the studio. “I can’t sleep,” he complained. “I hear you and your friend talking from so early in the morning to so late in the evening.”

  I apologized. “I guess we do rattle on a lot.”

  I warned Dick and suggested that he spend the morning before my arrival reading through the raw material that we were going to work with that day. But each day after that, when I arrived, he seemed poorly prepared. He finally confessed to me that he had discovered in a far corner of the bookshelves my small library of volumes on the stock market. He was spending his mornings educating himself in the folklore of bulls and bears. Since the April day I had helped Dick open an account at Merrill Lynch, the market had become an obsession with him. His brain, he told me, was a constant whirl of charts, Dow theory, and the myriad contradictory rules for buying and selling. “I dream of head-and-shoulder formations, of pennants and inverted V’s,” he told me. As the summer wore on he became both a bore and a worry to Ginette. Over breakfast he would say, gloomily, “The advance-decline line’s falling behind the industrials.” At dinner he would remark that he had “dropped a few hundred on Texas Gulf, but I think we’ll make it up on Sony.”

  “Schmuck,” I said to him — the blind leading the blind —” there are two basic rules in the stock market. The first is: cut your losses and let your profits run. The second is: never tell you wife what you’re doing.”

  But with all that we were rarely distracted, and we worked through a hot July into a hotter August. By early afternoon Dick was usually exhausted; he would slump into the big green easy chair, his eyelids would droop and he would start to snore gently until I shook him by the shoulder and said, “Go.” He left me then to continue the transcribing, and walked over the hill to his apartment in Figueretes. After lunch he and Ginette would fill a basket with towels, snorkels, toys for Raphael, and pile into the car to drive to Las Salinas, the site of the ancient Punic salt flats and one of the few unspoiled beaches on the island.

  Nedsky, Barney, and Josh — my oldest son, come from England for the summer — were often there, sometimes accompanied by the cheerful Australian au pair girl Edith had hired, sometimes by Edith herself. Dick and his family usually found a spot further along the beach near a Tahitian-style French snack bar. I would arrive around five o’clock, play for a while with the kids in the shallow water; then Dick and I would head for the deeps, beyond earshot and paternal responsibilities. Under a naked blue sky our heads protruded like bobbing corks from the glittering surface of the Mediterranean.

  “Tomorrow we’ll start in on RKO. Go through that file on the actresses and read that book on the witch-hunt in Hollywood.”

  “What did we decide about Jane Russell? Did he screw her or not?”

  “Not. She’s still around.”

  “Listen, I read the stuff you added about TWA and I still don’t understand a word of it. If he only had to come up with $40 million, why did he let them appoint a trustee for his stock? Why didn’t he …”

  And so on through the summer, while the children gamboled in the shallows and waited for us to build sand castles. After Nina arrived, in August, she installed herself on the other side of the snack bar, wearing a white bikini and baking herself to a pancake brown in the relentless sun. Once in a while, as I meandered casually along the water’s edge to where she lay on her beach towel, I would catch Dick’s eye. Giving me a worried smile, he would shake his head in mock reproof.

  “Watch yourself, man,” he told me. “It’s a dangerous game. You could get into a lot of trouble.”

  And I laughed.

  “Howard should have an early homosexual experience,” I decided.

  “You mean he’s queer?” Dick said. “You never told me that.”

  “Certainly not. He’s absolutely straight. But there are a lot of rumors around that he is queer, and we’ve got to scotch them. So we’ll have him attacked by somebody when he’s a young man, just arrived in Hollywood, and he fends them off and from then on the whole scene fills him with disgust.”

  “Good idea. He’s driving around in downtown Los Angeles and he gives a lift to a young sailor …”

  “No, no. Let’s pick an actor, someone well known. Let’s get some mileage out of it.”

  “John Wayne.”

  “Be serious,” I said. “We need a well-known actor who was around in 1930, who’s queer, and who’s dead.”

  “Ramon Navarro,” Dick said immediately. He had an encyclopedic memory crammed with names, dates, facts, and rumors. “He was murdered just a few months ago in Hollywood, stabbed or beaten to death by some kid he was supposed to have picked up.”

  Ramon Navarro it was, and we had Howard popping him one in the jaw in the bathroom of Mary Pickford’s house during a Hollywood party, after Navarro had injudiciously made a move toward Howard’s open fly. Our battle cry in moments of indecision was always: “Libel the dead.” The dead couldn’t sue for libel, and when we needed an actress to join Howard and the late Errol Flynn in a schooner lost at sea off Baja California, it was the late Ann Sheridan. When we needed someone to climb into bed with Howard, drunk, after his 1946 crash in the F-11, it was the late Linda Darnell. In some instances we deliberately — and flagrantly — libeled the living but these were incidents of no importance which were designed as throwaways; we knew that the publisher’s lawyers would strike them from the final text. They had to earn a living, too.

  Toward the middle of August we were working on the Las Vegas sections, which we thought were thin. It was the most obscure period in Hughes’s life and we had little to go on other than reports of hotel purchases and clips detailing Howard’s battle with the Atomic Energy Commission. I finally hit on the solution to the problem.

  “He’s not in Las Vegas,” I said. ‘That suite on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn is just a cover-up. He’s on the move, the king in disguise, traveling among the people, searching for the answers to life.” We invented trips to Mexico and Puerto Rico, most of them in company with the mythical love of Howard’s declining years, a diplomat’s wife whom we christened Helga — in honor of the lady who handled Howard’s banking arrangements in Zurich. It was intended as a private joke, but it had unforeseen repercussions at a later date. We also concocted a bizarre tale wherein one of
Howard’s doubles — we had no idea that he used doubles, but learned later that it was a fact — is kidnapped in 1965 from a Las Vegas bungalow while Howard himself is off trysting in Mexico with Helga. The ransom is $1 million and Howard’s lieutenants decide not to pay it. Then Howard returns from Mexico earlier than expected, the gang of kidnapers, apparently realizing their mistake, return the double for a paltry $150,000. Subsequently, Howard awakes to the realization that the double himself, whom we named Jerry, is the brains behind the whole kidnapping scheme. We finished taping the story. I switched off the machine and looked at Dick.

  “You believe it?”

  “I believe it,” he said. “Thousands wouldn’t, but I believe it.”

  It was during this same session that we taped the odyssey of Howard’s adventures with Robert Gross, the President of Lockheed. Gross was dead and therefore fair game. Dick and I had had a mutual friend who used to eat his lunch and dinner in the Grand Union supermarket in Greenwich Village, marching from one aisle to another, eating his way to the checkout counter where he would pay for a ten-cent bag of peanuts and then walk home. Our fond memory of this genial, hungry shoplifter, coupled with our knowledge, gleaned from the Dietrich manuscript, that Howard loved milk and cookies above all other delicacies, led to the following bursts of creativity.

  HOWARD: … Okay, listen. Here’s something I wanted to tell you. I was mentioning Bob Gross before. You’re always asking me for personal stories and incidents from my life, and I’ve remembered one that I can tell you about. It’s not one of the important things, hardly, but Bob Gross … this was with Bob Gross, when we were … well, Bob and I were pretty good friends, as I’ve said many times. He was a funny man. Choleric as hell sometimes, he’d blow up over nothing, you know I told you he threw me out of his office at Lockheed. And at the same time, funny. He had a real comic sense of things. But he was very peculiar … I once saved him from a terribly embarrassing incident. One time, this was in Las Vegas, we’d stopped in, it was late at night, we’d stopped in at a little place for coffee …