The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  CLIFFORD: Did you get along with him personally then, in Hollywood?

  HOWARD: Oh, we had no chance either to get along or not get along. It was hardly more than an introduction at a party in some bungalow, some crazy place he was living. The Garden of Allah … A lot of writers lived there. But he impressed me, Hemingway did, and I thought I would like to see him again. And the occasion arose, just after the war, sometime in … I think the fall of 1946, when I went out to look over Sun Valley, with the idea of buying it.

  CLIFFORD: For what purpose?

  HOWARD: To buy it. Oh, I see. To … for the purpose it’s being used for now. That is, a popular and successful resort area. I flew out there. I was flying a converted B-25, I believe, at the time. I knew Ernest was there with his family and he was hunting, and so I met him. I found out where he was living. Everybody knew, and I marched right up to his door, knocked on it, and he opened it.

  CLIFFORD: You had gone out to Sun Valley as Howard Hughes.

  HOWARD: I never travel under the name of Howard Hughes. That’s the kiss of death. They would have jacked the price up fifty percent just on that knowledge alone. I’m speaking of Sun Valley.

  CLIFFORD: What name did you use?

  HOWARD: I was using George Garden.

  CLIFFORD: Why George Garden?

  HOWARD: Well, I knew a George Garden very briefly once. I had met him out in Ethiopia. Just casually met him … flew on a plane with me once. He was a young Englishman who wanted to go exploring in the Danakil part of the country. Very dangerous, a lot of really savage tribes in that neck of the woods. Couldn’t get permission to go. And he went anyhow, and he was never heard of again — I checked on that when I went back the last time. Now I don’t want to convey any idea that I felt any kinship of any sort with this boy, this wanderer who vanished. But the story had impressed itself on me, so I used the name. And that was the name I gave to Hemingway, to Ernest, when he opened the door. I must say I was struck by his reception. I myself … well, the occasion would never arise where some stranger would come up and knock on my door. First of all nobody knows where my door is. Second, if they do know, there’s a guard out there, outside a guard and inside a guard, and they would … it would certainly never occur to me to open the door myself. But there he came out to the door looking like a tramp. Beat-up corduroy trousers and a lumberjack shirt open to the waist …

  CLIFFORD: What were you wearing?

  HOWARD: Come to think of it, I was not a hell of a lot more respectable. It was a bit chilly, I had a couple of sweaters on. Old sweaters. No, I don’t really remember what I was wearing, except I wasn’t dressed up, that’s a certainty. I wasn’t wearing a business suit. And so I introduced myself and Ernest said, “Well, come in, come in, have a drink.” I excused myself from the drink because I don’t drink, and we talked for a while, and he immediately showed an interest in who I was, why I was there. Understand, I passed myself off as George Garden, member of a real estate group in California that was interested in Sun Valley. I didn’t say that I personally, even as George Garden, was going to buy it. But I suppose no matter how you dress, the smell of money doesn’t leave your skin. And Ernest cottoned on very quickly to the idea that I was rich, and he was fascinated by rich people. He took a tremendous interest in my proposal for the valley and the surrounding area, asked me all sorts of very intelligent and perceptive questions about how I was going to go about it. The extraordinary thing is that I had been in his house no more than fifteen minutes, and I was sitting in an armchair and talking as freely and easily as I’d talked with any man in my whole life. Writers are … well, we’ve talked about this, and I know you disagree with me. But writers give you this feeling … it may be true, it may be phony … but they give you the feeling they’re interested in you, what makes you tick. I don’t mean writers like Ben Hecht, not Hollywood writers, newspaper hacks — they just want your money, or your hide. But Ernest had that quality of making you feel immediately at home. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours. He talked about his books, somewhat, in general terms. He didn’t … I’m no expert on literature, by any means, but I do read novels, a lot of them. As I remember, we talked about practical things mostly, more than about either of us. We talked about them in a very straightforward and simple way that I wasn’t used to, except with pilots. Thing is, at the time, I didn’t want anything from Ernest and he didn’t want anything from me. I had read a couple of his books but I really hadn’t dropped in to see him as a writer. It was more … I guess I had in my mind a certain image of Ernest Hemingway, as a person who had gone through all sorts of adventures and rough experiences, and he’d had a rough time of it, and he’d come out of it whole, tough. Toughened, I mean. And not only did I respect him for that, I was fascinated, and I wanted to know how and why. Anyhow, we spent a couple of hours talking and I invited him to take a spin with me in the B-25 next day, which he was delighted to do. Well, we hit it off very well. This flight … I was doing, not a geographical survey, but just to get an over-all picture for myself of the valley area, its potential. And so I flew around, in and out, through the canyons. At first Ernest was up there in the copilot’s seat and asked me a hell of a lot of questions about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and of course I had no trouble answering that — that was second nature to me, it was a routine flight for me. He told me afterward that it was one of the most lucid and cogent explanations of flying that he had ever heard. And not only that. He couldn’t get over the fact that I could fly and look around and maneuver, and at the same time maintain a running conversation with him about anything in the world. That really impressed him. Then I … I was so involved after a while, however, with what I was looking for that I broke off the conversation and just concentrated on flying. The flight was a bit low, I suppose, and looking back on it, now — dangerous. The wingtips were not brushing, but they weren’t too far from the canyon walls a couple of times, and there was a time there I was totally absorbed in what I was doing. This was no Cessna 180, this was a B-25 bomber. Ernest loved all that afterward, on the way back, he turned to me. He had a … I guess a touch of awe in his voice, and he said, “George, you’re a hot pilot.” I left shortly after that. We saw one another briefly the following day, and then I was off. Had to go. But it was a very pleasant encounter and Ernest wanted to write to me about something, as a matter of fact, but I knew I wouldn’t answer, and I didn’t want to create that sort of situation, and so I told him some story. I said, I think, we were moving offices, and as soon as I had an address I would write his publishers, something like that. It was a lot easier for me to get in touch with him than for him to get in touch with me, and it was nearly nine years before I saw him again.

  CLIFFORD: You waited that long? Why?

  HOWARD: It wasn’t a deliberate question of waiting. I was so immersed, embroiled in affairs, I just had no chance. Sort of like a man, a drowning man … I’d draw my head up out of the water and I could see Ernest along the shore from time to time, but I was sucked down again before I could even call out to him. And he was off on his own affairs in Europe, Africa, Cuba. Cuba, as a matter of fact, is where I saw him next.

  CLIFFORD: Let me just interrupt you a second. When you met him that first time, how did you get along with him politically?

  HOWARD: We didn’t talk politics at all. I’ve never been a political person.

  CLIFFORD: You knew, of course, that he had been involved in the Spanish Civil War, on the Loyalist side.

  HOWARD: I wasn’t concerned with that. As I said, I’ve never been a political person. I’ve only voted twice in my life, and that was for Roosevelt — that was a long time ago. I’ve always made sure that I had members of both parties on my payroll so that no matter who won, Hughes didn’t lose. It didn’t matter who was in office. And that’s as far as my political interests went. During the Spanish Civil War, that would be 1937, ‘38, I was involved in my flights and airplanes and I was about as apolitical as you could get. In any case, polit
ics was not what Ernest and I discussed. Moreover, politics was never, from what I can gather, was never Ernest’s major interest, either. Strictly secondary. He told me that. I’ve always had the feeling he went to Spain because there was a war on and he wanted to see men in action. Naturally his sympathies were with the … not with the fascist side, because he was that kind of man. But he had this obsession with death and how men faced it. He asked me a great many questions in later years about my accidents, how I had felt about them, and I answered to the best of my ability. He was the only man I ever knew who was more banged up physically — had more broken bones, and wounds — than I was. Or maybe we were even up. I often wondered if he ever used that stuff I told him in any of his books, or whether there’s some unpublished novel of his that has quotes from me or even has some incident from my life in it, because his questions were endless, about how I felt in the various crashes, and how I felt when a plane was in trouble. He was a man obsessed with death and danger. That’s why he liked that ride in the B-25 so much.

  CLIFFORD: Then you saw him again, and you told him who you were.

  HOWARD: Yes, I saw him again in … eight, nine years later, I believe, in 1954. I was in Florida, where I had planned to build my own jet aircraft factory. That fell through and sort of on the spur of the moment — I knew Ernest was in Cuba — I hopped over there to Havana. Commercial flight.

  CLIFFORD: Give me the details on this. You know. don’t rush this story.

  HOWARD: I remember it very well. First I went to the Floridita, that bar, because I knew he spent a lot of time there, but he wasn’t there. It was empty at that hour. This was early afternoon — well, daytime. So I took a taxi out to the finca. I didn’t remember the name of the finca, didn’t even know it was called a finca then. I just said to the cab driver, “Hemingway,” and he said, “Ah, Papa!” And I said, “No, no, I don’t want Papa. I want Hemingway.” And he said, “Sí, sí, Papa.” And I said, “I want Señor Hemingway,” and he said, “Sí, sí, Papa, Papa.” Of course by then we were halfway there and it turned out to be Ernest. I guess he wasn’t working. As a matter of fact, I was let in without any ceremony. The maid at the door didn’t even ask me my name. And Ernest was sitting around the pool with a few other people, and I remember I walked up … I hadn’t had time to change, I was still wearing a business suit. I had taken the tie off, stuffed it in my pocket. I walked up and Ernest was sitting there with his pot belly hanging out and peered at me over his glasses, and the first thing he said was, “Don’t stand there with the sun behind your back. I can’t make you out — that makes me nervous. Move around this way.” So I obediently did as I was told, till he could see me. He looked at me with a very grim expression, like: what’s this? And then suddenly his face broke into a big beautiful smile, and he said, “Goddamit, George, it’s good to see you and you’re welcome.” I felt wonderful. Not just at the warmth of his welcome, but that he’d recognized me after all those years. Really glad to see me. Ernest had that quality of welcoming, which is so rare. Well, the house was full of people, apart from his family. There was his wife — at least some little woman running around that I thought was his wife. And some blonde girl who, as I recall, the wife didn’t like very much. And a bunch of servants, and some kids — his own and others. And some college kids from the United States. They’d come down there and just thrust themselves upon him with their manuscripts, expecting God knows what — maybe that he’d buy them and publish them. But he did read their work, with great patience. I remember that one of them left and he came to Ernest and asked him for money, because he didn’t have the fare back home, and Ernest just smiled and gave it to him. One or two hundred bucks. That’s the kind of man he was.

  CLIFFORD: You were still George Garden?

  HOWARD: I was afraid to tell him my real name, afraid it would change things too much. And it was such a good relationship that I didn’t want to run that risk. We … well, we sat around the house, just talked, I can’t remember too well about what. Ernest wanted to know what I’d been doing all those years, and I made up a few stories — paralleled my life in a sense. The events may have been different but the general content was the same, so that I wasn’t lying to him, not in any meaningful way, really.

  CLIFFORD: Did you stay at his house?

  HOWARD: The first day I stayed at his house, and then he insisted I go out fishing with him.

  CLIFFORD: No, I mean, were you his guest?

  HOWARD: No, nothing like that. I stayed at one of those big hotels in Havana. The National, I think it was. Yeah, the National. But I did spend most of the day at the finca, except when we went fishing. That was my second or third day there. That was a very strange experience, Clifford — I really remember it that way. Ernest had always … I had taken him up in my plane, and now he wanted to take me out on his fishing boat, show me his specialty. I was a sportsman in the sense that I was a good golfer and a good shot, but I never went hunting or fishing for pleasure, and I didn’t really know what to expect. I was taken aback to begin with, when … to find … there was Ernest on board, about five minutes after we left the dock, wearing a jock strap. Nothing else.

  CLIFFORD: Who else was aboard? Any women?

  HOWARD: There were a couple of Cuban helpers, that’s all. One who was steering and one who was serving drinks. But Ernest knew by then that I didn’t drink, so he had a bottle of milk along in the ice chest for me, and every time he would pour … I think he drank, I don’t know, tequila or daiquiris or something, and he had a couple of thermoses full of them … and each time he’d take himself a belt he’d say to his barman helper, “Get out the milk for Señor Jardín.” And then he would crack up laughing. That broke him up, broke him up that I drank milk. But the fishing was bad. Ernest said it was the fault of the tankers that had been torpedoed there by German subs during the war … the garbage that had spewed out of them had killed off most of the big game fish. And he moaned and grumbled, and then it got hot, and he said his jock strap was itching, and he peeled it off. And he said, “Come on, George, you must be dying. You’re going to get prickly heat. Take off your clothes.” Now I checked over in my mind what I remembered of Ernest’s sexual habits and sex life, and I figured it was safe enough, so I peeled down to my skivvies. I’ve always been a little shy about being naked with other men, or women for that matter. Not for any deep reason. I don’t know what it is, but many times when I used to play golf, in the locker rooms all the men would shower together and I waited till they were out of there before I would shower. Crept into a corner of the locker room when I had to change my clothes. I don’t know why I had that kind of shyness. I’m sure it goes back to my childhood, being tall and awkward, but I could never put my finger on the reason. Anyway, after a while, Ernest said, “Let’s go for a swim.” I peeled down and we dove over the side. That was an extraordinary experience for me, because … it’s hard to explain it to you. There we were, we were grown men. I was then, well, 48 years old, and Ernest was older, and there we were in the water — and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. And he wanted to play fish. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a marlin, or a swordfish, and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other —” Watch out, here I come.” Splash around, like children. And it was marvelous. It was a broiling hot day and there we were, two grown, middle-aged men, splashing around right in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. It gave me a curious view of Ernest. I saw something in him which now I know is a common element in many geniuses and great men. That is, the capacity to play, to remain in some respects childlike until they’re very old. I haven’t got it, sad to say — never did. It’s a naturalness that men have when they’re not ashamed of themselves and of what’s buried inside of them. A total lack of self-consciousness. And it was a beautiful day, an absolutely beautiful day. I felt more relaxed with Ernest than I felt with men I had known all my life … We just took each other for granted and … I w
as terribly impressed. With myself, too. Mind you, I wasn’t conscious of this at the time. A lot of it came to me in thoughts afterward, because I knew that this was not the way I usually behaved. And I was happy. And then, then I made a bad mistake. I thought we had such a good relationship growing up between us that, well, I felt ashamed of myself for deceiving Ernest by calling myself George Garden. It suddenly seemed ignoble. And so I said to him, “You know, I shouldn’t really … I have to tell you something. My name isn’t George Garden.” And he laughed, took a gulp of his drink and said, “Who the hell are you?” And I said, “I’m a businessman named Howard Hughes.” I thought maybe he might not … but he just looked at me for a minute, finished his drink, and said, “Goddam. Sonofabitch! I should have known, should have guessed. That’s why you flew so well. I should have known it.” And I was relieved at his reaction because I thought everything was going to be okay.

  CLIFFORD: He believed you immediately?

  HOWARD: Yes, he believed me immediately, not that this is invariably true. There have been many occasions in my life when people have refused to believe I was Howard Hughes. Times when I was in trouble, too. I spent a night in jail once in Shreveport — remind me to tell you about that — because they wouldn’t believe I was Howard Hughes. And another time they turned me away from a motel for the same reason. But Ernest believed it at once. And if he had any doubts, I reminded him of the fact that I had met him a couple of times out in Hollywood in the thirties, as Howard Hughes, and I recalled the incidents and the time and place, and that of course clinched it. But he didn’t doubt me. It made sense to him right away. But it was a mistake to have told him. In subtle ways his attitude began to change almost at once. The first thing that happened is that he wanted to know all about me, that is to say, about Howard Hughes. He asked me a hell of a lot of questions and that’s when we got on to our long discussions about flying, what I’d been through — and that was all right. But then he started asking me the same sort of questions that reporters had asked me for years. I had developed a habit by then of instantly ducking into my shell and being brusque, the moment these kinds of questions were posed to me. And that’s what happened to me then. We went back to the house and I asked Ernest, “Please, the one thing I beg of you is not to tell anyone else who I am, because that ruins everything for me. People treat me differently and I don’t like it.” He said he understood. He wished that he could be anonymous sometimes but his face was too well known, the big beard and everything. In retrospect I don’t believe him, but that’s what he said then. And, well, his attitude changed … it’s very hard to explain. He had always been fascinated by rich people and he told me that, and he began to talk about money. Now money is not a subject that I’m shy about, but I didn’t want to hear about it from Ernest, and I didn’t want Ernest pumping me about money, how much I had, how I got it, that stuff. And the more I talked … I guess, when I talk, I talk about a million dollars as most men talk about a hundred … Ernest became almost deferential to me. He was awed by all this. The worst thing that happened was, just before I left, he became aware that he had been deferential. Because he was a perceptive man and he was, I think, aware of his own attitudes as few men are. And once it had dawned on him that he was being deferential … I may even have said something to him, not meaning to insult him, but said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t pull that with me, that’s what I get from flunkies” — he was ashamed. And he became … he took it out … he turned against me. No, that’s not fair, he didn’t turn against me, but he became surly and difficult and … well, I do remember, when I left, we had one very good moment. He threw his arms around me and he said, “Howard, I don’t care whether you’re George or Howard, I’m just delighted to know you, and I want you to come back and I look forward to seeing your skinny ass again.” And so everything was okay when I left.