CLIFFORD: Did you go back? Did you see him again?
HOWARD: I waited a long time. Much too long, in fact, because we had a basically very good friendship then, and if I had continued it I think I would have been the better for it. Ernest could have been the kind of friend I always needed. Very different from me, but I don’t think that would have made a … a barrier.
CLIFFORD: Why didn’t you go back?
HOWARD: Those were the years that I got so terribly involved and embroiled … I was drowning, I told you, drowning in details and deals, and I was sucked down into that morass of suits and countersuits and financing — the whole horror story of TWA.
CLIFFORD: Did you correspond with each other?
HOWARD: No. He didn’t write and I never write, rarely. I did go back, though, to see him finally, in … well, about five years later.
CLIFFORD: Just a minute. Five years later. You mean at the time of the revolution? The Cuban revolution?
HOWARD: No. The revolution was already accomplished. Maybe it was six years. It was sometime in 1959. And this time, understand, I went deliberately to see him. I had no other business in Florida. I went straight to Cuba to see Ernest because … it was a time in my life when I was completely fed up … not so much fed up as … well, no, I was fed up, fed up with everything, and I had nothing but good memories of Ernest and the times we had spent together, and I deeply regretted that we had been out of touch. When I went back there it was a snap decision. I had read in the papers that Ernest was back in Cuba — that was what prompted me. And I wanted to get out. This was not meant to be a two-day visit or a three-day visit or anything like that. I went, and at that point in my life, as happened again later, I was willing to burn my bridges behind me. As I said, I felt that Ernest and I had a tremendous camaraderie, and we could really be friends, and there wasn’t much more I needed in life at that point other than one close friend. A man. And so when I went back it was with the idea that I would stay as long as I wanted to. It could have been for the rest of my life. I had no time limit in mind. No minimum or maximum.
CLIFFORD: You were married to Jean Peters then. You mean to say you and Jean would have moved down to Cuba?
HOWARD: I don’t know what would have happened. Things were not … things had started to go a little sour by then. I think if I had … well, mind you, this is a fantasy, because as it turned out, and I’ll tell you very shortly, I only stayed two days — but had I stayed on, and I was free to do so, all I had to do was throw over my entire industrial empire, so-called. Or maybe … anyway, when I arrived and went out to the house, it was a terrible disappointment. It was saddening, and it threw me completely. Because everything had changed. Ernest had become an old man. And I don’t mean just old physically, old in appearance — he had a big white beard. The vitality had gone out of him and … well, I really don’t want to say anything bad about Ernest, but some of the intellectual honesty had gone out of him, I felt. He was crotchety and difficult and the first day I was there, half our conversation had to do with Cuban cigars, because Castro had accomplished his revolution and Ernest … I don’t remember if he smoked cigars but he gave a lot of cigars away to his American friends … and he was only worried that Castro was nationalizing the cigar industry and the cigars would not be of the same quality that they were before, and he said, “Howard, why don’t you buy the island and go into the cigar business?” And he pursued that theme. There I’d come to talk to Ernest about, you know, my life and my soul and a possible total change in my life, and Ernest kept talking about cigars. “The cigars won’t be the same if they’re not rolled on the thighs of Cuban girls, and you can make a good deal with Castro. You can buy in for a hundred million and what does that mean to a man in your position, Howard?” And I hadn’t come to discuss the thighs of Cuban girls or the quality of Cuban cigars. And so I spent, as I said, just two days there. The second day was just as bad. I never got a chance to talk to Ernest alone. He got up late and he had a lot of visitors … we had a pickup sort of meal out at the finca and there were a bunch of Cuban army officers and political figures. He introduced me as, thank God, George Garden. He did respect my wish for privacy, still. But he and these other people, these officers and politicos, just chatted away furiously in Spanish all afternoon. Every once in a while Ernest would stop and throw a line or two of translation in my direction — I don’t really remember much about it except I was bored. And, well, that’s it. Politics. That’s all I really remember. And by the time the afternoon was over, when they left, Ernest was drunk as a skunk. Head was falling on the table. I was embarrassed for him. This was a man who’d won the Nobel Prize, was a Nobel Prize author, a fine mind, and I found it, well, not a shameful thing, but a sad, pitiable thing to see a man of this power, this nobility of spirit, demeaned in this way. And I didn’t want to see any more of it. So I left.
CLIFFORD: You weren’t staying at the finca that time, either.
HOWARD: No, at a hotel, one of the big hotels in Havana. It was empty, I had the whole floor to myself — and I hadn’t rented the whole floor at the time. Matter of fact, there was a parade while I was there and Castro himself came marching down the street. I watched it from my window.
CLIFFORD: But you went back to see Ernest.
HOWARD: Yes. I went back, once. It was even worse the next day — I guess I spent three days, not two. Because naturally he wanted to know all about what I’d been doing in the past years, the inside story, but I didn’t feel that the stories of the machinations at Hughes Aircraft and troubles at TWA were the things that really would have fascinated him. I gave him a brief rundown on it, and all he could do was criticize me. And harp on the fact that I was wasting my life on involvements with this kind of thing and the kind of people I had to deal with. Now, I knew this, I’d been told this. That’s precisely why I had gone to Havana to see him. I was like a man who had a crippled leg, and I had gone to a doctor to see if he could cure me, and all the doctor could say was, “Your leg is crippled, your leg is crippled.” Now I knew that. What I was looking for was the cure. And Ernest offered me no suggestions. He only harped on the fact that I was too involved with these people, and I would say, “Yes, I know that, but I want to become uninvolved, and how do I do it? And where do I go? How do I cut loose?” Oh, I may not have put it in such childish terms as that, but it was very clear that I was there for help. And instead of helping me, Ernest tried to bully me. Well, when you bully me, I just vanish. Usually I vanish physically, but sometimes I just vanish mentally and emotionally. So I crawled into my shell, and the more I did that, the more Ernest tried to pry open the cover and knock holes in me. He still had a lot of the old charm, he wasn’t unpleasant enough for me to pick up and leave, walk out of his house — because every time he saw me getting really uncomfortable he’d slap me on the shoulder and say, “Oh, Jesus, it’s good to see you, Howard,” or “George.” He called me both names. People there thought my name was George Howard.
CLIFFORD: He hadn’t told anybody in all those years.
HOWARD: Not that I knew of. He’d kept his promise, I’m pretty sure of that. I think it amused him that he was the only one who knew.
CLIFFORD: Any fishing this time?
HOWARD: No fishing. Ernest was in no condition. He was worried about whether the government was going to take over his farm and he didn’t even want to leave the house. And he was worried about his health. I remember the doctor came out — took his blood pressure right there at the table. But there was still some of the old Ernest left. We drove into Havana together. There was just the two of us, and the car broke down halfway. Ernest cursed and muttered and started a speech about goddam machinery, and got out to open the hood. But I could tell from the way the motor sputtered that it was just probably out of gas, so I told him, and yes, that’s what it was. This was where the old Ernest popped up out of that crotchetiness. There was a car parked nearby, not far from a house or a few houses. Well, Ernest took a length of rubber tubing from t
he trunk. “Indispensable, Howard,” he said, I remember. “Never travel without it.” His gas gauge was broken. And siphoned a gallon or so of gas out of this other car, sucked it up with his mouth — you know how that’s done. Made me terribly nervous. I mean, if the owner had seen it he might have — God knows what — fired a shot at us. Might have been a soldier’s car. Anyhow, we got to the city all right, and filled the tank there.
CLIFFORD: How long did you say that trip was all together — three days?
HOWARD: It was a bad visit. It was a mistake. It colored the good memories of Ernest with an overlay of this unsuccessful visit. What I most deeply regret is that I hadn’t known Ernest as a younger man, and that we hadn’t been in touch. If I had known him during those years, let’s say even from ‘46 to 1960, that would have changed my entire life. But events intervened and you don’t always see the right course to follow, and we lost touch. I left that time and I never saw him again. I was deeply, deeply saddened when I heard of his death. Not that I object to suicide. I feel it’s every man’s right to put an end to his life when it’s become intolerable to him. But what preceded it, the sickness and the periods of insanity, the decline of a brilliant and fine man into this wretched shell. Blew his brains out.
One July morning about eleven-thirty Dick was saying, “All right, Howard, now tell me about …” when there was a knock at the door. This had happened four or five times previously, and our reaction was always the same: a moment of petrified silence, then a leap into action. “Shit!” — and Dick jumped out of the armchair.
“Just a minute,” I called out. “Un momento, por favor.” I unplugged the microphones, threw the cover on the tape recorder, slid open the top drawer of the file cabinet and dropped the Dietrich manuscript into it, then placed our heap of transcribed pages on top of it. Dick was dashing around the room scooping up blue folders and turning them so that their labels were hidden from view, closing books that were open to incriminating underlined passages, and looking for anything else that might give the game away.
“Okay,” he said, straightening up, his face red from exertion. “All clear.”
I padded barefoot across the red tiles and opened the door. It was Nina. She was wearing faded light blue slacks, a man’s shirt tied in a knot at the waist, and white canvas shoes. “Hallo, darling,” she said, offering me a sunny smile. She looked pale from the long sunless months in London, but as beautiful and desirable as ever. I put my finger to my lips and motioned with my head toward Dick, who was putting some books back on the shelf. She knew that I was working with him on the hoax; but he didn’t know I had told her it was a hoax.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and the three of us talked for a while. Finally I said to Dick: “Listen, we’ve got some private stuff to talk about. Why don’t you knock it off for now and come back this afternoon about four.”
“Yeah,” Dick said, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Private stuff.”
“Look,” I said to her later. “It’s the wrong time and the wrong place. Let’s not push our luck. I don’t ever want Edith to know, because that would be the end of everything — of you and me, and of me and her. And your divorce from Frederik would go right down the drain, too. He’d have you the guilty one.”
“All right,” Nina said.
“After the summer I’ll be traveling again to the States. We’ll find a way.”
Part Three
You can’t cheat an honest man.
— W. C. Fields
Chapter 10
Bungalow One at the Beachcomber
Toward the end of August, late one afternoon, just as I was getting ready to pack it in and head for the Salinas to swim with the kids and wheel Nedsky through the shallow water in his new canoe, Beverly Loo telephoned from New York. Every time she called — every time the international operator said: “Señor Irving? The United States is calling. Please hold on” — I had a moment of dread, a feeling that this is it. Dick and I had played it out together so many times, our own laughter counterpointing the imagined histrionics. “Listen, Cliff, we’ve just had a telephone call from Chester Davis … Howard Hughes has written a letter to Harold McGraw and he claims … The Hughes Tool Company says …”
But each time in the past when she had called and I had felt that pinprick of fear in my stomach, Beverly had dispelled it, asking how things were going, veering often to the corporate hope at McGraw-Hill that the book would metamorphose from an authorized biography to a full-fledged autobiography. So that each time, when I finally put down the receiver, the glow of renewed confidence had replaced the fear, and the theme song of Project Octavio echoed once again in my mind: “All right so far …”
By late August, then, I was blase, worn out, but filled with confidence and a lofty hubris. We were hard at work and the Hughes tapes were nearly done. More to the point, Howard was a man singing all the roles in a contemporary opera, and his voice moved from the banal to the profound without faltering. We were the ventriloquists, but so it is in all fiction: one day the puppet starts to sing by himself and the ventriloquist, the writer, merely listens and records and marvels. I was beginning to see the grandness of the man’s life taking shape on paper. I had said to Dick often: “You know, I have the feeling I know more about this man — and I don’t just mean the facts of his life, I mean the man himself — than anyone else in the world.”
“With one possible exception,” Dick said, “and one definite exception.”
“Okay, okay. You’re the possible exception. But who’s the definite exception?”
“What about Howard? Have you forgotten him?”
“Well, maybe. I thought you said he was chained to the wall. But why do you assume such self-knowledge on his part? You think he knows why he hates germs so much? We know why — because his mother told him you get leprosy from eating cornbread and because in 1929 an actress gave him the clap. I don’t think he knows that.”
“Don’t get carried away by all this,” Dick cautioned me. “It’s fiction. We made it up. Don’t forget that. You could go crazy. You could become schizophrenic. Jesus Christ, when this is over I can see you walking into the offices of Toolco and trying to give orders to Raymond Holliday and Chester Davis.”
“That, too, may come to pass. All I have to do is write out a will for him. He’d make me his heir. ‘I, Howard Hughes,’” I intoned, “‘being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath to Clifford Irving, in appreciation of the immortality he has given me by virtue of writing my autobiography and making of me a better man than ever I had realized, do hereby bequeath all my worldly goods …’ What do you think?”
Dick looked at me, fascinated, head cocked, brown eyes suffused with a dreamy look. His voice was soft. “Listen, don’t joke. That’s not a bad idea. If we …”
“And you think I’m going crazy? Get to work. Go read about Ethiopian landing fields and find out what outfit Hughes would have been flying with out of England in 1944.”
We had thus dismissed the thought of attempting to inherit $2 billion. That, we reckoned, would not only be beyond our abilities but it would smack of greed. In fact, it would be downright criminal.
And so all was going well. It was a summer of hard work and hot sun and sweat. The accumulating pages were stacked nightly and locked in the gray filing cabinet beside my desk, the key to the cabinet hidden under a Zapotec mask on my bookshelves. And then, on that late August afternoon — Dick had left for the beach — Beverly Loo telephoned and the entire edifice began to tremble.
“Cliff?”
“Yes. How are you? What’s …”
“You’d better pay attention. We’re in trouble.”
The Hoax Page 20