“Trouble?”
Trouble meant only one thing. I felt that cold clutch of fear and prepared to hang up the telephone the moment Beverly got halfway through her speech about how the Hughes Tool Company had telephoned Harold McGraw and denounced “this man Irving” as a fraud. Still, Beverly had said “we” and not “you.” There was hope. “What kind of trouble?” I asked.
It came out in her usual nonstop fashion. “I have a friend at another publisher. Never mind his name. He called me an hour ago. There’s a man named Sam Post and he represents, or he’s a friend of, or he’s involved with, a man named Eaton — Robert Eaton. Did Octavio ever mention this man’s name? He’s one of Lana Turner’s ex-husbands. He used to know Octavio.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, listen to this. My publishing friend called to tell me that this man Sam Post came into his office to offer him The Autobiography of Howard Hughes as told to Robert Eaton, and he showed him …”
“Beverly,” I said, masking my nervousness with nervousness, “for God’s sake, don’t use that name on the telephone. I told you it could be tapped. Octavio, Octavio,” I stressed.
“Yes, you’re right — Octavio. I’m sorry. Well, either your friend Octavio is up to no good and playing a double game, or someone else is up to no good. My friend has known Post for a few years and they’re on a friendly basis, and that’s why Post went to him — says that Octavio has tape-recorded his autobiography with this writer, Robert Eaton. And he’s given written authorization to Eaton to sell it, to get it published.”
“Post has?”
“No, dammit. Octavio’s given authorization to Eaton. On lined yellow legal paper, just like yours. Post is just the middle man. And there’s an agent mixed up in this, too. I don’t understand the exact details, but it’s some agent named Shelly Abend.”
I tried to sound more bored than confused. “Is anyone taking this seriously?”
“Yes,” Beverly shouted. “That’s the whole point! Do you think I’d be calling you if they weren’t taking it seriously? I’m taking it seriously, I’ll tell you that much! Do you realize what this means?”
My finger was sneaking toward the button that would break the connection. I touched the button, then drew back. I was too fascinated. I had to know. “You’d better give me some details,” I said, “before I offer any theories. This is a lulu.”
“I told you! Post has some sort of authorization that Octavio’s given to him or Eaton, and evidently it’s good enough for this other publisher to want to see the manuscript.”
“There’s a manuscript?”
“There’s a hundred pages available now and evidently there’s more coming. I don’t know if the publisher has read them or not. I do know that whatever agreement there is between Eaton and Octavio is almost exactly the same as the one between you and Octavio — the same secrecy clauses, same insistence that the transcripts be read while Eaton is physically present.”
“Incredible,” I murmured.
Beverly went on, her outrage building. “I think Octavio’s double-crossing you, and us in the bargain. I think he’s taken the tapes he’s done with you and given a copy of them to this man Eaton. His idea is to see which of you can turn out the better book, and then that’s the one he’ll choose.”
I protested. “He’d never do that to me.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t do that to you.” She was sarcastic now. “You’re so special. Listen, your ego is getting in the way of your grip on reality. Don’t you think he’s tricky enough to do that kind of thing? You may think he’s a great man, and you may think he’s such a dear friend of yours now, but don’t forget that you hardly know him; and he has the reputation of being one of the most unscrupulous businessmen in the United States. Didn’t you tell me how many deals he’d reneged on in his business life?”
“All that was long ago,” I said, sharply defending the integrity of my Howard Hughes. “He’s changed, Beverly. No, I can’t believe it. I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.” I heard a tremor in my voice; I was in the part. “That would be unforgivable, unethical, and … disgusting.”
“Yes, it would. But it’s still a possibility. There’s only one other possibility,” she added, carefully.
I looked at the button the telephone. My finger was poised. “And what,” I asked, slowly, “is that other possibility?”
“How well do you know Dick Suskind?”
“You’ve asked me this before. In what sense do you mean?”
“How much do you trust him?”
“Well, I’d say we were casual friends. Not really close. But I wouldn’t have hired him to do this job if I didn’t trust him.”
“You didn’t trust him well enough back in April to tell him you were really meeting with Octavio.” She had evidently forgotten that I had told her I wanted to tell Dick, and both she and Robert Stewart had advised me — almost forbidden me — to do so.
“No,” I said, “that’s true. I guess I didn’t.”
“I think that Dick Suskind’s always resented the fact that you didn’t tell him, and he realized he never would have found out if Robert hadn’t let it slip that day in the office. I think, as usual, that your naïveté’s gotten in the way of your common sense. Don’t you see what I’m driving at?”
“No, Bev, I really don’t.”
“I’ll spell it out for you. Does Dick Suskind have access to the transcripts of the tapes that Octavio gave you in California?”
“He’s got a copy. He needs it for reference.”
“Then the other possibility,” Beverly said triumphantly, “is that Suskind went behind your back and sold it to these people, Post and Eaton.”
“Impossible. Never! Dick would never …” I hesitated. “No, he wouldn’t do that.”
“But you’re not sure. I can tell from the tone of your voice.”
“Look, Bev, anything is possible — theoretically. But I don’t believe Dick would do a thing like that. Ethics aside, he’s loyal.”
“Money sometimes speaks louder than ethics or loyalty.”
“He just wouldn’t do it,” I said. “Besides, I’ve been keeping my eye on him. When could he have got in touch with these guys?”
“So you do accept it as a possibility. You don’t trust him completely, do you?”
“Yes, I do, dammit. Anyway, there’s a third possibility. Don’t you see it?”
“What’s that?”
I hesitated. I didn’t know if I could or should pronounce the word “hoax”; it would be the opening of a can of worms — more than worms: of cobras and pit vipers — of whose existence no one, as far as I knew, had yet dreamed. I hesitated; then I heard a familiar buzz. The line had gone dead. The Spanish operator had made my decision for me. She had cut us off.
I slammed down the receiver, struggled into my bathing suit, rushed out of the studio and up the hill, jumped into the Mercedes and headed for the Salinas.
By the time I topped the sand dunes and surveyed the beach in the late afternoon sun, Edith, Nedsky, and Barney had returned to the finca. Under a striped umbrella, like a pink-brown hippo in the shade of an African plane tree, Dick snored contentedly, while Ginette sat by the water’s edge building a sand castle with Raphael. I tapped Dick on the shoulder. Opening his eyes instantly, he blinked at the glare, then saw my expression.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “You look worried.”
“Because you look worried. Who called?”
“Beverly.”
“Oh, my God. It’s blown.”
“No, no, no. Don’t worry.”
“If you could see your face, you’d worry, too. What’s happened?”
Too many people lounged within earshot. Dick clambered to his feet and we walked into the shallow water. Children were playing there, so we forged deeper, until our heads and shoulders protruded above the flat surface of the sea.
“You fink,” I said. “You’ve sold the transcrip
t to Sam Post and Robert Eaton. Sam Post is your brother-in-law and Robert Eaton is your uncle by your mother’s fourth marriage. And Beverly Loo knows all.”
“Post? Eaton?” Dick sputtered. “Where have you been? Did you have an accident in the car? Did Edith hit you over the head?”
“No. Beverly called.” And I told him the story. “You can figure out what’s happened, can’t you?”
“I can figure it out, but I can’t believe it. There’s only one explanation. One or both of those guys have come up with exactly the same idea that we did. It’s a hoax!”
“You’ve got it,” I said. “You don’t think there’s a chance they might have the real thing, do you?”
“You mean that this Eaton’s really met Hughes, and Hughes dictated his autobiography to him? You know Hughes would never do that.”
“I know. And certainly not behind my back.”
“Those sons of bitches,” Dick said. “What a rotten thing to do.”
Work ground to a halt. Dick slumped in the big green armchair and I sprawled in the red leather desk chair, spinning slowly, fingers tapping nervously on the glass top of the desk. The morning sun slanted through the glass door and we sweated and talked and tried to figure the percentages.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Dick maintained doggedly. “This guy Eaton stole our idea. It’s all a horrible coincidence.”
“Good ideas are in the air. You can’t expect to have a monopoly on them.”
“But the timing,” Dick groaned. “It couldn’t be worse.”
“Look on the bright side of things. They could have come up with the idea before we did. Why don’t we join forces? Cut them in for a third if they’ll shut up and go away.”
“A third of your share,” Dick said.
“We can’t just sit here and mull about it. We’ve got to do something. Beverly’s bound to call me back today. We’ve got to have a plan.”
“For Christ’s sake, tell her Hughes says it’s a hoax.”
“But it may not be a hoax. And if it is and I say so, I plant the idea in her head that a hoax is possible. If Post can turn up with a letter to Eaton and convince another publisher, then Irving could have done the same thing and convinced McGraw-Hill. I don’t even want to use the word. You know Beverly. Once it gets into her head nothing will shake it out. It’ll rattle around in there, and one day she’ll take a good long look at the contract and the secrecy clauses and she’ll realize that no one at McGraw-Hill’s had any verification from Hughes that he’s ever met me and they’re going on my word alone, plus your crazy prune story; and they haven’t seen a stitch of manuscript yet. Until they read those transcripts, we’ve got no weapons.”
“We’ve got to knock Post and Eaton out of the ball game before she gets that idea.”
“We need a diversion. A big diversion. And a plan.”
“You’re the mastermind. Make a plan.”
“De l’audace,” I said. “My right flank is crushed, my left flank is giving way, my center is demolished. What do I do? I attack! Chutzpah — brass — balls — gall — audacity. Toujours l’audace. That was Napoleon’s motto, and look how far it got him.”
“Yeah,” Dick said gloomily, “all the way to Waterloo.”
An item had appeared in the monthly newsletter of the Northrop Aviation History Library, published and written by Dave Hatfield, whom we had interviewed in California during our June trip. It noted that Clifford Irving and Richard Suskind had visited the Northrop Institute and were preparing a biography of Howard Hughes. We remembered Hatfield’s mention that Hughes had a subscription to the newsletter. Our plan had been to fly to Nassau in late August or early September, when a rough draft of the tapes had been transcribed. On Paradise Island, at the Britannia Beach Hotel or the nearby Beach Inn, we would type the final draft of the tapes and I would theoretically, at the same time, conduct the final interviews with Howard. But the mention of our names in the newsletter changed everything. “He’ll read it,” Dick maintained. “You know how he hates any books to be written about him. We won’t be safe in Nassau. They’ll find out we’re there, and one day when you’re snoozing on the beach they’ll get into your room and sneak a look at what we’re doing. Then we can kiss it all goodbye.”
So we shifted the site of the meeting to Florida, on the assumption that Hughes could fly back and forth unnoticed, by helicopter, from the Britannia Beach Hotel to the Fort Lauderdale–Palm Beach area. Before we left we burned all of the tapes, the two copies of the Dietrich manuscript, and most of the Time-Life documents. “We may have to kiss the whole thing goodbye anyway,” I said glumly, “because of this Eaton autobiography. We can raise a smokescreen, but there’s got to come a day when the smoke settles and the McGraw-Hill gang will see.”
“What are you trying to say?” Dick demanded.
“That this may be the end. We may have to pay back the money and get out.”
“Admit it’s a hoax?” He looked horrified.
“Not necessarily. I’ve got an idea. Just give me time to work it out …”
“If it means giving the money back, how the hell can we do it? We’ve already spent twenty grand in expenses.”
“Edith and I can cover that. The point is, we’d still be left with the material, and we can turn it into an unauthorized biography or a novel. Just shut up for a while and let me think …”
I set about, in my mind, writing a script of the next few weeks. It had gaps and a dozen permutations; but at least I knew the characters, and they were predictably unpredictable. At the same time I realized that what we were living, and what had happened to us in the past six months, was akin to cinéma vérité, a real-life movie. It was happening, and we were in the center of it, creating the action as we moved through it.
SCENE: The waiting room of the Ibiza airport. Dick glances at the battered attaché case clamped between his feet. It contains our most precious possession: a thousand pages of transcript worth a minimum of half a million dollars. He peers under the table, says: “Where’s your basket?”
I look around, puzzled. “I must have left it at the newspaper counter.”
With a yelp of agony, Dick leaps to his feet. He dashes out the door, returns a moment later with the straw shopping basket. He is pale, his brown eyes blaze. “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind! You’ve got almost ten grand in cash in there, and look what else I found … it fell out of your leather briefcase.” He flashes a familiar object — the checkbook of H. R. Hughes at the Credit Suisse in Zurich–then shoves it out of sight into the basket. “Have you been carrying this with you on all our trips?”
“Yeah. I just stuck it in there and forgot about it. I carry everything that might be incriminating. Suppose someone broke into my studio when I was away?”
He sighs heavily. “Jesus, can you tie your own shoelaces in the morning? … Never mind, never mind,” he goes on, as I start to protest. “Let’s get back to what we’ve got to do — raise a smokescreen, throw dust in their eyes.”
“All right. We’ve agreed that it’s got to be an outstanding demonstration of chutzpah, something so far out that it’ll knock them completely off balance.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Dick says. “We know Octavio hates the Luce organization. Fortune zapped him five or six times and Life’s never been friendly to him. Dietrich says so, and we’ve got that McCulloch memo to prove it. So why can’t we …”
“That’s it! Listen …”
SCENE: Our old friend Frank Powis — tall, thin, bearded, and elegant — meets us in the bar of the Ritz Hotel in London as Dick and I are drinking our second bourbon sour and we take a cab to Rule’s. The place is everything Frank claimed it to be when he picked us up at Gatwick that afternoon — a splendid example of Ye Olde Englande, except for the waiters, all of whom are Spanish. “We have a reservation,” Frank says to the maître d’hôtel, and a moment later we are tucked away in a corner on the second floor, perusing menus the size of small billboards.
We order a noble meal. We chat idly of this and that. Conversation is difficult for both Dick and myself; our thoughts are elsewhere. Before the dessert arrives, Frank excuses himself. The moment he is gone, Dick says: “Okay, so he hates Luce and he didn’t know that the book had been sold to Life. Besides, he never read your contract with McGraw-Hill and he thinks he’s being cheated, that all the subsidiary money should go to him directly. It’s the Eastern Establishment after his ass, just like they were after TWA. Is that what you meant?”
“Pretty much. Beverly told me not to tell him the serial rights have been bought by Life. So Octavio finds out and threatens to back out of the deal. He demands the full quarter of a million Life is paying for first serial rights. Maybe …” I break off as Frank returns to the table. We sit there for another hour, have coffee and several liqueurs apiece. When Frank drops us at the Ritz, Dick and I are too tired to go on with the conversation. We say goodnight and leave a call with the desk for eight o’clock. Our plane leaves for Miami at ten.
SCENE: A BOAC jet 30,000 feet above the gray Atlantic. Dick pulls the headphones out of my ears and says: “He’s got to ask for the full million, his original demand. That’ll convince Mother McGraw that they’re dealing with the real, the one and only, Octavio.”
“Yeah. But they’re liable to cut my throat. A contract is a contract, you know. We’ll hear them screaming all the way down to Miami.”
I plug the earphones back in, click the indicator in the arm of the seat from number to number. The Rolling Stones … Che gelida manina … Ah, Fagin’s song from Oliver … I lean back with a smile and close my eyes.
The earphones are yanked out of my ears again. Dick’s face is inches from mine. He’s glaring at me furiously. “How can you listen to music at a time like this?”
SCENE: Outside Miami Airport in a rented car. The air conditioner in the car works badly. As I make a sharp right turn onto the highway, water slops out of the dashboard onto Dick’s shoes. He yelps. “Christ! This isn’t a car, it’s a broken-down ice-cube machine.”
I smile, thinking the problem is on his side of the car. Then I make a sharp left turn and my feet are drenched with icy water. But my mind is elsewhere.
The Hoax Page 21