“We’ll have Howard ask for a million, but then I’ll haggle with him and he’ll come down to $850,000. That way Mother McGraw will know I’m on her side. What do you think?”
Dick is silent, mulling it over. We whip past a sign that reads PALM BEACH 27.
“They won’t pay it, of course,” he says at length.
“Of course not. I told you: a contract is a contract. That’s not the object of this triple reverse option with the tight end in motion. The object is to convince them that we’ve got the real thing and discredit this Eaton character. McGraw-Hill will insist that Howard live up to the terms of the agreement. He will — reluctantly, and that reluctance will give us an out later, when he turns against me, if he turns against me.”
“You don’t think they’ll compromise, offer say six hundred or six fifty?”
“Not a chance. They’re already paying out more up front in advance than anyone’s ever been paid before in the history of book publishing. They may be crazy, but they’re not stupid.”
Palm Beach was full of palms, dull and sensationally quiet, so we headed south toward Fort Lauderdale, eyeing an occasional motel or hotel along the way. Thunderheads studded the horizon and there were intermittent flurries of rain. It was early afternoon when we finally pulled into the parking lot of the Beachcomber Motel in Pompano Beach. In addition to the main building, a dozen or so bungalows were scattered about the grounds.
Bungalow One had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, two color television sets, and a fair number of giant southern cockroaches. It was located on the far side of the parking lot, near an astroturf putting green and well removed from the main buildings. We could type at any hour of the day or night without worrying about disturbing our neighbors, and we would later claim, if it became necessary, that Howard had chosen the villa because of its very isolation.
After lunch we found a place that leased office equipment, rented two standard Underwood typewriters, bought several reams of paper, a couple of boxes of carbon paper, and carted everything back to the Beachcomber. With Dick standing at my shoulder, making suggestions, I typed a draft of the telegram to Beverly Loo. The final draft, which we sent the next morning, read as follows:
BEST YOU BE ADVISED NOW BIG TROUBLES STOP OCTAVIO REGRETTABLY BUT UNAVOIDABLY NOW AWARE GRAVES COMPANY INVOLVEMENT STOP ALSO CLAIMS PREVIOUSLY UNAWARE DETAILS MY CONTRACT WITH MOTHER AND BELIEVED ADVANCE WAS FOR TRADE ONLY NOT SUBSIDIARY STOP THINKS MOTHER AND I CONNIVED WITHHOLDING INFORMATION STOP NO LONGER AGAINST GRAVES PARTICIPATION BUT DEMANDS AMENDED CONTRACT ALL SUBSIDIARY INCOME PAYABLE DIRECTLY TO HIM OR ALTERNATELY INCREASE TO HIS ORIGINAL ONE MILLION TOTAL ADVANCE OR DEAL OFF STOP MY SHARE STILL ONE HUNDRED STOP AM TRYING TO NEGOTIATE BUT GLOOMY OVER OUTCOME STOP CANNOT TELEPHONE LETTER FOLLOWS WITH ALL HORRIBLE DETAILS REGARDS CLIFF.
We sent another telegram on the heels of the first. It read: SAM POST SITUATION HAS NO BEARING CONTENTS OTHER TELEGRAM STOP OCTAVIO FLATLY DENIES POST BONA FIDES IS FURIOUS SAYS OTHER PUBLISHER IS BEING HOODWINKED CLIFF
Back in the bungalow, we went over our timetable. “Beverly will get the telegram in an hour or so. We’ll write the letter today and mail it tomorrow morning. She’ll have it …” Dick counted on his fingers, “… Thursday afternoon at the latest. Let her sweat it out overnight, then you call her on Friday morning.”
Meanwhile, I had rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter and was starting the letter. Dick came and stood at my shoulder, grunting approval or disapproval and suggesting changes.
Pompano Beach, Fla.
31 August 1971
Dear Bev,
If you didn’t get my cable, I attach a copy. The situation has improved sharply for Mother McGraw, but it is still a big comedown from my point of view.
Here is the background. Read carefully. I’ll try to be coherent although it’s 6A.M. and I am worn out.
Shortly after my arrival here H. asked me about McGraw-Hill’s arrangements for magazine and foreign publication. I said, as you and I agreed, that I didn’t know what if anything had happened. He asked who might be offered magazine rights — I said, “Oh, Look, Life, The New York Times, maybe one or two others.” He said, “Okay, any of those except Life. I won’t have the Luce people increasing their circulation at my expense.” I tried to argue but he didn’t want to hear a word.
I went on for four single-spaced pages, enumerating the struggle blow by blow and round by round. I had waged a furious battle on behalf of McGraw-Hill, had wrung one concession after another from Hughes. “I do believe that he has compromised all he’s going to,” I wrote at one point. “In his eyes he’s come down from a million to 850, and he’s thrown in an indemnification, the right to call it an autobiography, and what he calls ‘a free read’ for you and Life … I’ve fought like a tiger down here. But he says this is rock-bottom and he does not want to hear any counteroffers … I blush to tell you, but at one point he also asked if McGraw-Hill would pay for the expense of his typist including paper and carbons.”
“Why did you put that in?” Dick asked.
I looked at him with a faint sneer. “It’s obvious, my good man, that you don’t know Mr. Hughes as well as I do.”
When I finished the letter it was past midnight. Dick would take it to the post office in the morning and send it special delivery. “Then hang on to your hair,” he said, “and when you call her, hold the receiver well away from your ear. Otherwise you’ll end up like Uncle Howard, with a hearing aid.”
We got in three days of hard work on the Remington Noiseless portable that we also brought along, finishing The Abominable Snowman’s transcription of the first taped interviews. “The Abominable Snowman” was our name for Hughes’s faithful and only semi-literate typist. We called him that because, as I would claim to have told Howard, “he typed with all four paws.” This first part of the transcript comprised 268 pages. To provide me with an excuse for typing the remainder of the taped interviews, we inserted such things as “sorry; tape broke; piece missing,” at intervals throughout the opening section.
At 10:30 Friday morning, with Dick all but shoving me from behind, I went to a telephone booth next to the parking lot and placed a collect call to Beverly. We had decided to call from a booth rather than from the villa, because we wanted no one to know exactly where we were staying. “Too risky,” Dick said. “Suppose — just suppose — they smell something rotten in Florida and send down a private detective to keep an eye on us.” All 280 pounds of him shuddered delicately. “Disaster! Pure disaster!”
I forgot what Dick had said about holding the receiver well away from my ear, and Beverly’s opening shriek of rage left me numb and helpless. For the next thirty minutes, while passing cars and trucks spewed exhaust fumes into the booth, and while I slowly became drenched in sweat and wilted like an overcooked strand of spaghetti, Beverly had hysterics. Twice she almost broke into tears and she refused to allow me to string together more than three consecutive words — usually, “But Beverly, I …” Dick kept waving for me to hang up, and at length I said, “I’ll call you later, this is hopeless,” and banged the receiver back on the hook.
“Give her the weekend to cool off,” Dick said. We trudged back to the bungalow mopping our foreheads, “then call again on Monday.”
“But not from the booth. You could die in there. I’ll call from the bungalow while you make street noises, Okay?”
Dick lip-farted. “Sure. Just let me get my exhaust in shape.”
On Monday morning I was glued to the telephone for two and a half hours, subjected to such a harangue from Beverly Loo that at several points I threatened to hang up. The worst moment was when she said she had spoken to Ralph Graves and Dave Maness, and also to Harold McGraw, and that she thought they thought I was “taking a rakeoff from Hughes.”
My voice trembled with genuine outrage. “Beverly, that’s a vicious accusation. You don’t realize what hell I’m going through down here with that ancient prick. He’s taking my hide off
, and when I try to argue with him, he just shuts off his hearing aid and leers at me like he’s won a goddam battle. And then, to top it off, you accuse me of being a crook. I won’t take it.”
“Now, just a minute, Cliff, just a minute. I said I think that’s what they think, not what I think. I mean, I don’t think you’re a crook, but I think they think you might be one. So …”
It was as close as she came to an apology, and when I hung up the receiver, slick with sweat despite the air-conditioning, I was still furious. “What a fucking nerve!” I said to Dick, who had stood beside the desk, making Bronx cheers, revving noises with his throat, banging a pot against the wall, and periodically yelling, “Okay, Joe, move it over here!” in a Texas-cum-New York-cum-Florida drawl. That really burns me up!”
Dick looked at me with a mocking expression in his eyes. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d believe the book was for real. Or at least I’d believe that you believed it.”
“Don’t knock me out of the part,” I said. “I’ve got to keep a fine edge of fury for the letter I’m going to write.”
“Yes, O B’wana Stanislavsky. I hear and obey.” With a groan, he stretched, then turned and walked back to his bedroom. A moment later I heard the clack-clack of the typewriter.
Again we worked until midnight on the letter. Dick had been typing since five o’clock that morning, with only short breaks for lunch and dinner, and finally tottered off to bed, unable to keep his eyes open, while I finished the final draft. I stuffed it in an unsealed envelope and left it next to the chicken livers in the refrigerator, where I knew Dick would find it in the morning and mail it.
Pompano Beach
6 September 1971
Dear Beverly and Albert,
Obviously no one at McGraw-Hill has understood the intent or tone of my letter of 31 August to you, so I am going to spell a few things out clearly and in the simplest possible language. I deliberately did not interlard the facts with a lot of breastbeating, and that was a mistake; you wanted histrionics. You are still not going to get them. You are going to get facts.
The most important fact is that the demands I cited in that letter are not my demands. I am not in sympathy with them, primarily because they mean money from my pocket to Octavio. They are his demands. I merely reported them, after arguing myself blue in the face with him. When I wrote “not negotiable” I am not giving you my attitude; I am giving you his.
There is hardly one argument you advanced to me on the telephone that I did not advance to H., and vigorously. I told you — his customary answer is: “Bullshit.” It is almost impossible to get through to him with anyone else’s logical point of view. When he doesn’t like what he hears, he doesn’t listen. He doesn’t have a monopoly on that.
You also can’t understand how I could be on the edge of walking out of this thing when there’s so much money involved. I’ll tell you. I’m getting screamed at from both sides, I’m in the middle and I’m just trying to do a job of work, and I don’t like the screaming. You think I’m naïve because I believe some things he says. He thinks I’m naïve because I believe some things McGraw-Hill says. In a sense I represent McGraw-Hill to him, and in a sense I represent him to McGraw-Hill, but I am not, and I refuse to be, to either of you, responsible for what the other says, does, doesn’t say, or doesn’t do.
My interests lie clearly in getting the autobiography finished and published with the lowest possible advance — anyway, not in excess of the stipulated 500,000. He demands 850, having come down, in his view, from one million, which makes me sick, physically sick, because I’ve been working my ass off for months and not only is that fat potential paycheck being chopped to ribbons, but the whole project is in jeopardy. If neither he nor McGraw-Hill will bend it will probably end my involvement with the book, from his point of view.
Regarding your suggestion that if neither of you will give in I take the material and make an unauthorized biography and/or “memoir” out of it, this makes no sense to me at all. From a selfish point of view, there is just no money in it for me. There are already two such biographies and another one supposedly coming up. Life wouldn’t want that kind of book from him, for two excellent reasons. One you’ll understand best, and that’s what I said above, that there’s no money in it — and also I would be sued up, down, and sideways by Octavio, and so would you, and please remember, he’s got Two Billion dollars’ worth of clout and wouldn’t hesitate to use it in such a case. And the other reason, which you didn’t understand on the phone last time we talked, is that it would be totally and nakedly unethical. I have no intention of violating my deepest instincts on this matter, which is to act in good faith.
As for your anger that I revealed to H. the existence and details of the Life contract, I am simply at a loss to understand why the truth has to be so hidden and furtive. I did not intend to tell him, for practical reasons, and I lied, and I regret it. In the long run it’s his book, his life, and there is no reason why what’s going on should be hidden from him and lied about as if there’s something shady about McGraw-Hill’s arrangements.
That’s it for now. I have taken to heart what you said in our conversation and I will certainly do my best to make him see reason, from the point of view of logic and also my personal screwing. I just don’t want you to think that so far I have played patsy and let him walk over me. We have had some real wrangles and when he says, “I can’t go on like this, I’m having heart palpitations,” there is just nothing more I can do.
I will call you after I’ve next spoken to him, which would be tonight or tomorrow, and let you know where things stand. Whatever the result, I will definitely be in New York sometime Sunday, go to the Elysee, and call you from there; and I am counting on the readings starting first thing Monday morning. The material will be ready, unless we do any last-minute taping over the weekend. I mean it will all be ready but for anything I don’t have time to transcribe. So you will probably have heard from me before you get this letter.
Regards,
Cliff
The original plan, formulated back in June with McGraw-Hill, had been for the McGraw-Hill and Life contingents to fly to Ibiza in mid-September for the reading of the transcripts. Robert Stewart, Beverly Loo, Ralph Graves, and Dave Maness had enlisted for the junket, which would certainly have been the gala event of the fall publishing season — if not in New York, then certainly in Ibiza. None of the editors balked at the idea of a week in the sun and it would have saved me a dreary trip to the States. The rationale behind it, of course, was secrecy. According to the terms of my agreement with Howard, I had to be physically present during the readings. My house on the San José road would be the logical, anonymous place. I could even sneak away to the studio and do some editing while Edith or Dick minded the store. Harold McGraw evidently had grumbled a bit about what he considered an unnecessary expense, but I had pointed out that a week on Ibiza for two editors, including their air fare, was cheaper than my spending a week in New York in a hotel suite —” at McGraw-Hill’s expense,” I had added.
In a letter dated July 22nd, I wrote: “Octavio believes, at this point, that you are coming here. He knows nothing about the Life gang yet; I will have to tell him that next month, in person. He thinks it’s far and away the best plan and has said to me that he would never have rested easy if he thought those transcripts — ‘my life’s blood’ — were in McGraw-Hill’s offices. I know this is paranoid, but he is superparanoid. As you know, I’m fairly sure that this operation will be spied on; and I won’t lie to him.”
I had also written, in that same letter — following a telephone discussion with Beverly, who had been worried about another Hughes biography in the works (a chapter of which had been printed in Look magazine) by a man named Schemmer — that “O’s anxiety that the book be published as soon as possible has prompted him to suggest, rather forcefully, that the book take the form of a long edited interview, i.e., virtually an autobiography in the form of a conversation, with i
nterpolated material from me, in the third person, which would clarify and comment on his life story … I’m not a journalist and I don’t care very much about the sensationalism of the ‘scoop.’ The only true consideration, of course, is which will make a better and more saleable book. I don’t know the answer to that yet, although I suspect the autobiographical interview. However, O’s pressure is formidable and that may decide it in the end. But we can discuss all this after you have all read the material which, not exactly incidentally, is stupendous. Far more than I ever dreamed of getting …”
Now, however, in view of the contractual and financial crises, all bets were off. No one was flying to Spain, or deciding autobiography vs. authorized biography, before the financial situation was resolved and the Eaton book laid to rest, or before the company lawyers had given a preliminary vetting to the manuscripts. Beverly would reserve a suite for me at my favorite New York hotel, the Elysee, and the readings would take place there behind locked doors. Howard, I reported, refused to let me bring the transcript to either the McGraw-Hill or Life offices. I explained to Beverly that he had said: “You’ll go take a piss and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you can zip your fly.”
Between hysterical phone calls and long hours spent composing letters to McGraw-Hill, Dick and I typed, rewriting as we went, calling information and advice back and forth between Dick’s bedroom, where he had installed his Underwood, and the living room, where I had installed mine. For once in my life I started the day early — not as early as Dick, whom I could hear at 5:30 every morning as he rattled around the kitchen, making his daily breakfast of a chicken-liver omelette — but nevertheless early for me: between 7:30 and 8. We worked steadily through until lunch, which we ate either in Howard Johnson’s or Sambo’s in Pompano Beach. Then back to the typewriters until 6:30 or 7 when, groaning and stretching, we called it a day. I wrote a letter to Edith and the kids; then we put on our trunks and did a few laps in the pool, or dunked ourselves in the pea-green Atlantic; then dressed and went out for dinner to one of the nearby steak joints. We emerged from our trancelike state only twice: once we banged golf balls around at a driving range, which exhausted us for the day and made us think twice about further athletic activity; and another time we saw a movie in Fort Lauderdale. For the rest, it was work, sleep, work, sleep, while the pile of typescript grew daily higher and we gloated silently and aloud about both the quantity and the quality.
The Hoax Page 22