The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  CLIFFORD: When was this?

  HOWARD: In the fifties, the middle fifties. Call it 1953, it doesn’t matter. And Bob stopped at the counter to pay the bill. And I was looking at a magazine rack at the time, and I remember just as he paid, as the woman took his money and turned away to the cash register, I saw something I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw Bob Gross, and mind you, this is the man who was President of Lockheed Corporation, one of America’s biggest corporations, I saw him reach out and stick a candy bar in his pocket. Well, I thought I must have seen things, but no …

  CLIFFORD: But he paid for it, didn’t he?

  HOWARD: He didn’t pay for it, he stuck it in his pocket. He stole it. And I said to myself, “What’s going on here? What is this?” And when we got outside I couldn’t contain myself, I said, “For God’s sake, Bob, what in the world are you doing stealing that candy bar?” He turned red for a minute, and then laughed and said, “Well, every once in a while, it’s a kick. It’s more fun than paying for it. You ought to try it sometime, Howard.” Well, we went on about this for a while, but I was totally flabbergasted. He told me he did this, not every day by any means, but whenever the impulse moved him. And, you understand, never anything of value, not diamond watches or sable coats — a candy bar, that’s all. But this is not the incident I was going to tell you. This is just the beginning of it, because a few months later, some months later, I don’t remember exactly when, Bob and I were returning — I’d been out in the desert with him half the night, we were negotiating the possible sale of TWA to Lockheed, or Bob’s buying a percentage of the stock of Toolco, but we couldn’t come to an agreement — and this was, oh, it was about nine, ten o’clock in the morning. We were driving back to Los Angeles and we passed through a little town, one of those little crossroads towns, now you see it now you don’t, you know, and they had a supermarket. I suppose it was a shopping center for people all around there. And I felt a yen, I wanted some Oreos. You know Oreos …

  CLIFFORD: Oreos are those chocolate …

  HOWARD: Chocolate sandwich cookies. And a container of milk. That was one of my favorite snacks. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to find a decent Oreo cookie. The damn fools at Nabisco, they had a winner, they used to make it with a white filling — that’s the only decent kind of filling, a pure white vanilla filling, and now all I can find is goddam chocolate filling or yellow filling. I’ve had men go out and scour the stores to find me some Oreos and they had to go to half a dozen stores before they found what I wanted. There are all sorts of other brands, but an Oreo is like the Cadillac of cookies — at least for me. And I like Oreos.

  CLIFFORD: What other kinds of cookies do you favor?

  HOWARD: Well, I like butter cookies and Toll House, if they’re well made, with good-quality chocolate, and occasionally, if my … I’m not supposed to eat too many sweets, I never was supposed to, but I did … occasionally … and I love Mallomars. Now that’s another cookie that’s practically gone out of existence. There are all sorts of substitutes on the market, gooey sweet things, marshmallow things, but a Mallomar has a special quality, very crisp when you bite it, and you can’t get them. I used to stock them in all my bungalows and houses, in the refrigerator, so they wouldn’t get moldy. And graham crackers, of course. I used to like graham crackers. Still do.

  CLIFFORD: Anyway, you were saying about …

  HOWARD: Yes, that’s right, we were coming back through this town and I wanted a package of Oreos and a container of milk. So I stopped the car and … well, this was in the midst of a lot of publicity about me and TWA and I somehow didn’t want to go in, so I asked Bob if he would do me a favor and go in and buy me a package of Oreos. If he couldn’t get Oreos, I said, I’d take plain butter cookies or graham crackers or some such thing. And a container of milk. And Bob said he’d be delighted. So he went in and I waited, and I waited, and no Bob. I said, “What the hell is going on here?” And finally I didn’t want to drive off and leave him stranded, of course, so I got out of the car and went in — it was at least fifteen, twenty minutes later — and I went in and Bob was standing, one man had him by the elbow, and he was talking hard, talking for his life, it looked like, to another.

  CLIFFORD: You mean he’d been caught stealing?

  HOWARD: He’d been caught stealing. He’d stuck those damn Oreo cookies inside his windbreaker, zipped it up and stuck them right in. That’s not a candy bar, you know. A package of Oreos is bulky. And the damn fool had gotten caught.

  CLIFFORD: Did he try to steal the milk, too?

  HOWARD: No, no, he’d paid for the milk. That must have been against his principles, to steal milk. And …

  CLIFFORD: Did you go over and get him out?

  HOWARD: Oh yes. Well, at first, I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, and what could I do? Go up there and say, “I’m Howard Hughes and you must let this man go. He’s the President of Lockheed Corporation.” I didn’t know whether Bob had identified himself as Robert Gross, President of Lockheed, and I didn’t want to embarrass him and I didn’t want to embarrass myself, you know, be hailed into court as an accessory to a theft in a supermarket of a package of cookies. That would have made page one. Can you see it? HOWARD HUGHES AND ROBERT GROSS STEAL PACKAGE OF COOKIES FROM SUPERMARKET. Big headlines.

  CLIFFORD: He had passed the turnstiles, I take it.

  HOWARD: Oh, yes, they grabbed him on the outside, near the door. They always wait, I understand, until you’re outside of the store or otherwise you can sue them for false arrest. Now, the point is, he didn’t want to identify himself as Robert Gross. He wanted to pay these people off, slip them some cash and just get out of there as quickly as possible. That’s what he was trying to do when I walked in the supermarket. But he didn’t have enough cash with him, he had maybe ten or twenty dollars in cash, and that wasn’t enough to get these hicktown people off his neck.

  CLIFFORD: Didn’t he have a checkbook?

  HOWARD: Of course he did, in the car, in his briefcase, but how could he give them a check and sign it Robert Gross? That would have allowed them to blackmail him for the rest of his days. He needed cash, and he didn’t have enough. You don’t buy yourself out of a situation like that with ten dollars. So he … well, I don’t remember whether he came up to me or I went over to him, I think he, I think they had posted a man at the door, some young guy in a T-shirt, very beefy guy, probably worked there moving cartons around, but his job at the time was to see that Bob didn’t run out the door. So, Bob sidled up to me and told me what had happened and he had to have cash, had to have something substantial to pay these people off, and he asked me for it, he begged me for it. “Please,” he said, “Howard, I’ve got to have a hundred dollars.”

  CLIFFORD: But you didn’t carry that kind of cash.

  HOWARD: Not on my person, of course not, but I did in my hat. I had my hat on the back seat of the car. The car was locked. I had locked it. I went out to the car, they let me go, they had nothing against me except that I was obviously the friend of this thief they’d caught, and I tore open the lining of my hat and found a hundred-dollar bill and brought it back in.

  CLIFFORD: I thought you said you only carried thousands and singles.

  HOWARD: Well, I was lucky this time, or Bob was lucky. I had a few hundreds. If I’d had … if I’d only had thousands it would have cost Bob a thousand dollars to get out of that jam, because I’m damn sure they wouldn’t have made change for him. They probably would have had him arrested for passing counterfeit money.

  CLIFFORD: It wasn’t counterfeit.

  HOWARD: No, of course not, but what would they think if a thief produced a thousand-dollar bill? They’d think it was counterfeit, wouldn’t they? I told you, neither of us was dressed like … we looked like workingmen, nothing more. Well, to cut this short, I gave Bob the hundred dollars and he gave it to the store manager or whoever the guy was, and they said okay and let him go. We went outside together and he was red in the face and sweating, I’l
l tell you, and he said, “Here’s your damn Oreos. Next time go in and buy them yourself.” I said, “What are you talking about? I didn’t tell you to steal them, you goddam idiot.” I made him a long speech. I said, “You ought to know that crime doesn’t pay. And you should be damn grateful I had the money to bail you out of this. I could just as easily have turned tail and run and let you go to jail. How would it look if I was associated with a shoplifter? It would ruin my reputation.” And that’s true, you know. I doubt very much if Equitable Life would have loaned me $40 million if I’d been involved in a shoplifting scandal, even for a package of cookies. But of course, mostly I was just kidding Bob, and he knew it.

  CLIFFORD: What did he say afterwards?

  HOWARD: We laughed about it, but it was kind of a strained laugh on his part, and I often wondered afterwards if he went on with his cookie and candy stealing or if that was the sort of high point of his career.

  CLIFFORD: Did he pay you back the hundred dollars?

  HOWARD: The next day. Bob was very scrupulous about that.

  CLIFFORD: Listen, speaking of cookies, you told me a long time ago — I was reading the transcript of the first interviews again — and I noticed you told me to remind you — you told me that Noah Dietrich had told a story about you once regarding cookies which wasn’t true, but you never told me what the story was.

  HOWARD: Well, first of all, you have to understand that Noah Dietrich has, since our breakup, and before, has turned into a vindictive old cocksucker who wants to take my hide off. And he’s told story after story about me. Unfortunately — or rather fortunately for me — he’s a very imprudent man, because a lot of these stories have gotten back to me. He’s told stories about business dealings we have done where he’s twisted the whole thing around, where I was the one who made the decision, he’s told other people, “I made it and Howard didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” This is an example of one of the things he did. The story itself is so trivial, but I’ll tell it to you. It was very simple. A long time ago. It was during the … we had just finished shooting Scarface … the movie. I was working with the cutting editor and we were working … Christ, we hadn’t slept for two days, and we hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long. At one point, I remember, we were really hungry. I sent out for food and this guy sent out for food, and when he finished eating he was still hungry. Now, I had sent out for milk and cookies, which was quite enough to keep me going. This man hadn’t sent out for any dessert, and when I started to eat my cookies, he said, “Mr. Hughes, could I please have one of your cookies?” And I gave him one … I hesitated, because I knew … well, I didn’t want to start a precedent, because cookies were all I had to eat. These other people would go out and gorge themselves on hamburgers and French fries and whatnot and all I had to eat was milk and cookies. I kept them in the studio or the cutting room, or wherever I happened to be working, and they were all I had to eat. But I gave him a cookie. Now … well, first of all, Noah twisted this all around. He told somebody that I refused to give the man a cookie and that I made a fuss about it. That’s absolutely not true. I definitely gave him a cookie.

  CLIFFORD: What kind of cookies were they?

  HOWARD: They were, I don’t remember, I think at the time I liked plain butter cookies. But the sequel to this incident was, for weeks afterward men would come up to me on the lot, whenever I went off to a corner to drink my milk and eat my cookies, they would come up and say, “Howard,” or “Mr. Hughes, can I please have a cookie?” Now, I couldn’t very well refuse them, since I’d given this other man a cookie, so my cookie supply just vanished every day under my eyes, and I was constantly running out of cookies. And I knew then that I was right in the first place, because you give one man a cookie, you’ve got to give every man a cookie, and pretty soon you don’t have any cookies yourself. And you’re a poor man — cookiewise. You think that’s funny?

  CLIFFORD: I think it’s hilarious.

  HOWARD: Well, I can see the humor in it. But when you’re hungry it’s not funny when your cookies vanish. Besides, it might have been hundred-dollar bills next. I didn’t want to get the reputation of being an easy touch.

  CLIFFORD: Don’t worry.

  HOWARD: What did you say?

  Noah Dietrich’s unpublished manuscript — taking into account the petty envy he seemed to show for the man about whom he wrote — gave us the basic clues to Howard’s business methods. Dietrich might tell of an incident in a single paragraph; as in the cookie story, we would expand that paragraph into several pages and reverse the point of view to put Howard in a more favorable light.

  But the major revelations of Howard’s character, and the parts we most enjoyed taping were those incidents stitched together from the multicolored fabric of our imagination, our own views of life and people, and our vision of what Howard Hughes might have been had we lived in his skin. I had already given McGraw-Hill and Life some skimpy details of his relationship with Ernest Hemingway. No evidence existed that the billionaire and the writer had ever met. But we felt that Howard, in his search for a life-style other than the one that had brought him nothing but lawsuits, loneliness, and misery, would at one point in his life — having already failed with Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa — set out to find a man who could combine for him the qualities of hero, mentor, and friend. One muggy afternoon I plugged the mikes into the tape recorder. Dick dropped his bulk into the easy chair, with Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway balanced on his lap. I sat at the desk, surrounded by reference books, time charts, and recent histories of Cuba. Alternately playing Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving — sometimes to the extent of interrupting each other in mid-sentence when the other faltered, so that in the end it was often impossible to tell which phrase of Howard’s was Dick’s and which was mine — we related the entire relationship of Hughes and Hemingway. When it was over, we were exhausted.

  “That’s one of the best sections we’ve done,” Dick said happily. “Let’s transcribe and see how it reads.”

  I pulled out the microphone cords and set the machine to PLAY. We listened. There was a hum and an occasional high-pitched buzz, nothing more.

  Dick frowned. “Go forward a bit.”

  I pushed the FAST FORWARD button, then switched back to PLAY. The machine hummed like a dying horsefly. “Oh, my God,” I said. “I must have plugged the mikes into the wrong holes.”

  Dick stared at me. “I’m going to kill you.”

  “Get me the knife,” I groaned, “I’ll do it myself.”

  We sat for ten minutes in a state of semi-shock, muttering to ourselves, unable to think or act. It was as if a significant moment of living literature had been created, then lost forever. I snapped out of the lethargy first and jammed the mikes into the proper holes. “We’ll do it again.”

  “I couldn’t face it,” Dick said hoarsely, “Tomorrow …”

  “No. It’s like getting thrown from a horse. You’ve got to jump back on and ride. Let’s do it right now. We’ll take it from the top. Come on,” I urged, “we can do it.”

  “Are you plugged in the right way this time, you stupid sonofabitch?”

  “Yes, yes, come on … let’s go.”

  Dick sighed deeply, but nodded. “Okay. Where should I begin?”

  “Just the way you did before.”

  “All right.” He took a deep breath. “Despite my terrible disappointment with Dr. Schweitzer, that I never got through to the man …”

  We finished two hours later. Worn out and wilting from the heat, we played it back. “And that,” I said triumphantly, “is how history is made. If you don’t succeed at first, try again.”

  “My God, it’s good. I never thought we could do it.” He mopped his forehead with a towel. “Now that’s what I call a day’s work.”

  That day’s work follows: the second rambling version of Howard’s fictitious thirteen-year relationship with Papa Hemingway.

  HOWARD: Where should I begin?

 
; CLIFFORD: Just the way you did before.

  HOWARD: All right. Despite my terrible disappointment with Dr. Schweitzer, that I never got through to the man — I mean he brushed me aside like some insignificant creature from out of the bush down there, worse than one of his darling lepers he loved so much he had to lock up the place every night so they wouldn’t steal the shirt off his back — despite this, I still felt that there were men in this world, and he was one of them, in some kind of perverted way who had found — well, I hate to use the word, the secret, but … had found a way, or had been lucky enough or something, in some way had put their feet on the right path early in their lives and never left it. They were just following a clearly marked path through the jungle that human life resembles. And I said, this is something that was missing from my life. I knew that I had my share of achievements, but when I added up everything I had done I could see no focus. I’m talking about the early fifties … I could see I was not on a clear track that progressed from one stage of development to another. It was helter-skelter, it was what seized my imagination at the time, and yet when I analyzed it — and I’m not trying to say that I thought about this all the time — I could see no progression. And when you can see no progression in your own life, no clearcut advance from one goal to another, leading to major goals, then you can’t see yourself, which is blindness. That sort of blindness is worse than any kind of deafness. I know. And … well, I had met another great man, in quotes — I had met another great man in my life. That was Ernest Hemingway. We had met briefly in Hollywood when I was making movies. I don’t know what Ernest was doing at the time. Writing, I suppose. But he made a great impression on me. I felt a tremendous … well, the force of personality more than even the power of his work, although I had read and admired his novels very deeply. Especially the one about the guy — The Sun Also Rises.