The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  On the other hand, we are more than eager to make certain that Mr. Hughes is happy with McGraw-Hill as his publisher. In that spirit, therefore, we are willing to amend our original contracts, increasing the advance from $500,000 to $750,000 …

  “But not a penny more,” Albert said firmly.

  Dick was in his room when I got back to the hotel. As soon as I slid my key in the lock, I heard him rapping insistently on the connecting door.

  I unlatched it and he said: “Well?”

  I had planned to wear a long face and tell him they had refused to pay a cent more than the five hundred thousand, but the patent anxiety in his voice made me relent. “They won’t go a cent higher than …” I hesitated an instant, “… than seven-fifty. That’s their last offer.”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Not a penny more,” I said, grinning. “They’ve upped the advance a quarter of a million. When they told me that, I nearly fell off my chair. That means, theoretically, the same $100,000 for me and the rest to Hughes.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true … I swear it.”

  It was the last possibility we had considered when we swung into action with our triple reverse option play. The irony, the absurdity of it, left us glassy-eyed and incoherent for more than an hour. We had intended to create a diversion and run a play that would at best hold the line for us. Instead, we had scored a touchdown. We were richer — in theory — by $250,000. And by now I had joined Dick in the realization that it was money, even if I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I would do with it all.

  The rest of the plan was simple and we threw our ideas in the pot and cooked it up within half an hour. George Gordon Holmes, a new mythical intermediary between Howard and me, would call me that evening, instructing me to go to a public telephone booth and call another number, which would also be that of a public telephone booth. From that booth, using an electronic device called a Blue Box — which I had just read about in the most recent issue of Esquire — he would switch the call to Howard’s private number in Nassau or Palm Beach. I was never to know its location and, with my habitual carelessness, I would lose the number of the public telephone booth that I had scribbled on a page of The New York Times. At first, Howard would refuse the offer of $750,000. Then, determined that the project had to be saved, I would offer him the additional $100,000 out of my share of the royalties.

  “I don’t want your money,” he would yell. “I want McGraw-Hill’s money! That’s the most obscene offer I’ve ever heard.”

  “Take it or leave it, Howard.”

  He would take it. He would yell at the publishers, he would call me naïve and a fool, he would rant that it was a plot on the part of McGraw-Hill and myself — but he would take it. The next day I would pick up the check and fly to Florida, spend the night somewhere near Miami, pretend to meet with Hughes, fly back to New York and then on to Spain.

  “Okay,” Dick said, “but for Christ’s sake, be careful. You’ll be carrying a check for $275,000 and if anyone can lose it, you can. Besides, they might follow you to make sure you’re really delivering it. So rent a car and be certain you’re not being tailed. Take plenty of twists and turns, and check your rearview mirror.”

  The checks were ready the next afternoon. Albert Leventhal passed them to Ralph Webb, McGraw-Hill’s treasurer, who handed them to me. One was my share: $25,000. The other check was for $275,000, made out to Howard R. Hughes. I looked at it, frowning.

  “What’s the matter?” Webb asked.

  “Well, it’s a minor point, but Hughes asked me to have all checks to him made out in the name of H. R. Hughes. I suppose it’s to keep up some pretense of anonymity. We’ve had so damn much trouble with him lately, Ralph, that I’d hate like hell to get him into a stew over a little point. Can you make it out again — to H. R. Hughes?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said, and the next day he placed the new check in my hand. Accompanied by Webb and Faustin Jehle, I went downstairs to the Chase Manhattan Bank where we rented a safe-deposit box. Into it we placed one Xerox copy of the transcript. McGraw-Hill had explained to me that if my plane crashed en route to Spain, they would have paid out a total of $400,000 and would have no manuscript in their possession. With a grim-visaged bank guard hovering nearby, we signed an escrow agreement for the transcript: it could be removed from the bank by mutual agreement between McGraw-Hill and myself, or in the event of my death, or if one of the signing parties in any way breached the contract.

  I went back to the hotel at four o’clock and waved the big check in front of Dick’s nose. He stared at it for a moment and then shook his head slowly.

  “A piece of paper. A lot of numbers.”

  Strangely, we had come to the realization simultaneously: this check had less meaning, less reality, for us than the one we had cashed back in April. For that first check of $97,500, we had done almost nothing; for this one we had sweated and created a book and teetered on the brink of disaster for weeks. Its receipt, its physical presence, seemed anticlimactic. Almost disdainfully, I slid it into my briefcase.

  Chapter 12

  The $1,000 Letter

  Three days later I was back in Ibiza. I had flown to Miami as planned, on September 23rd, rented a car and headed for Key Biscayne. It was night, and I remembered Dick’s fears that I might be followed. I checked the rearview mirror so often that I missed the turn off the highway, got lost, and by the time I reached the Sonesta Beach Hotel it was too late to do anything other than watch the eleven o’clock news and go to bed. In the morning I cabled to Beverly Loo: ALL WELL CHECK TRANSFERRED OCTAVIO PLEASED ALTHOUGH NOT IN GOOD HEALTH SWEARS CONTINUING COOPERATION ROUGH VERSION PREFACE SIGNED MINOR PROBLEM REGARDING POSSIBLE EARLY SECRECY BREAK WILL WRITE DETAILS TO ALBERT BUT REPEAT ALL WELL LOVE CLIFF.

  The details of the cable were critical. McGraw-Hill had begun to make some noises just before I left New York to the effect that they might want to announce the book earlier than originally planned. It was a disturbing idea. I wanted the book at the printer, preferably bound and ready for the bookstores, before the world-at-large — and most particularly the Hughes organization — had even a clue. Howard’s deteriorating health was also key to our defense should any problem arise after the announcement, whenever it might take place. As for his acceptance of the check, according to the newly amended terms of the contract with me — which, I had explained, we, too, had hammered out “with blood, sweat, and tears” in Pompano Beach — once he had endorsed the check and deposited the $275,000, he was locked in. From that point on, McGraw-Hill could publish the autobiography whether or not he gave it his final approval. I had hesitated before including this clause in the addendum to Howard’s contract with me. It had seemed too bold a stroke; but I had felt it would convince McGraw-Hill that Hughes, an unpredictable man at the best of times, had boxed himself in. That he would do so, of course, was ridiculous, but people see what they want to see, and no one at McGraw-Hill had seemed surprised.

  The entire sequence of events, beginning with Hughes’s supposed fury at Life’s involvement and ending with the offer to return the initial $100,000 payment, had turned the tide in the hoax. The publishers had adopted a new attitude. They no longer thought of Howard Hughes as eccentric or possibly crazy. Now they saw him as a financial fox. They were afraid of him. More to the point, they seemed to believe that I had some strange power over him. Robert Stewart, after reading the transcripts, had remarked: “He treats you like a son.”

  It was a perceptive insight. In rewriting the tapes, I had inserted remarks and full paragraphs calculated to create that precise impression. I had known of Stewart’s orientation toward Freud and psychology in general. What I had failed to see was that the implied relationship would instill in McGraw-Hill an almost unlimited faith in me. If I snapped my fingers, they seemed to believe, the richest man in the United States would come to heel.

  Dick flew over from Palma to Ibiza th
e day after my return, and a key discussion took place. First we decided that the basic responsibility for reworking the transcript into an autobiography would be mine. Whole scenes had to be shifted in order to achieve a rough chronology, although we elected to keep certain moments of revelation in their original order, lest the narrative lose the power it gained from Howard’s backtracking on some less-than-true tales he had told me in the earlier interviews. In the Nassau interviews, for example, he had refused to talk about his early sexual experiences, and he had invented a story of an orgy in Monterey, California, involving two girls and a pilot named Frank Clarke. During the California interviews, when our personal relationship had been cemented, he had told me that the story of the orgy was a lie. At the same time, with tears in his eyes, he had related a harrowing tale of a visit to his father’s weekend cabin near Galveston when he was fifteen years old, his first experience with a woman — his father’s mistress — and the horror of his realization that his father, drunk, had watched the entire performance from a doorway. The incident had colored his whole sex life. The contradictory revelations, of course, were as wholly fictitious as the stories they contradicted. We had been writing a novel without realizing it, and our fictioneering skill had been sufficient to dispel any doubts on the part of McGraw-Hill and Life as to the authenticity of the incidents.

  But the drama was the thing, and I refused to sacrifice it for mere chronology’s sake. To keep the whole of the work balanced in mind and then to reconstruct it was a one-man job, and I wanted to do it alone. Pride and vanity forced my decision as much as objectivity. I wanted to put my mark on the book. Dick seemed to realize it, and he gave way goodnaturedly. “Just write the appendices,” I told him, “and come over here every week or so to edit what I’ve done.”

  The second problem we tackled was that of the money. Edith would be flying to Zurich in a few days, as Hanne Rosenkranz, to deposit a check for $275,000. And then, in the winter, when the final manuscript was delivered, there would be an additional $325,000. The sums still had no reality for me, and my attitude was reflected by Dick’s.

  “What the hell can we do with it?” he said.

  We faced the odd predicament that we might, jointly, be millionaires. If the book was published and royalties flowed in, there would be no doubt of it. As writers, neither of us had ever been prepared for such an eventuality; as hoaxers, it had been a peripheral consideration and we had never faced it squarely or honestly. And as money managers, we were about as experienced as first-graders confronted with adding two plus two. Moreover, we were aware that the bulk of the money had to be squirreled away, untouched, until some undecided-upon future date when we would either return it or begin to tap it.

  “We’ll invest,” I proclaimed. “Pick a good portfolio of stocks and bonds, and the income from it ought to be about fifty thousand bucks a year.”

  “Which would give me twelve to fifteen thousand,” Dick mused. “Well, that’s manageable. I could buy a house. Ginette’s always wanted her own house. Nothing extravagant, just a nice three-bedroom place with a little swimming pool. That certainly won’t attract any attention.”

  The problem was that I would be left with the rest of the income: some $35,000 a year. Added to what I could ordinarily expect to earn from my novels, it gave me far more money than I could possibly spend in Ibiza, even if I traveled around the world and went twice a year to New York. I could swap my 24-foot sloop for a 32-footer, but beyond that I had no material ambitions. We had a 15-room house. We had servants. We had all we needed, and more.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Dick said presently. “I didn’t expect money to be such a constant pain in the ass. When you have no money, it seems to me, you worry less than when you have a lot of the stuff. I’m getting pretty goddam bored with worrying about whether the market’s going up, down, or sideways, and as soon as I can figure out someplace to stick the loot, without all that worry, even at a lower rate of return — I’m going to do it.”

  But we had the immediate problem of how to disperse the $275,000 Edith would carry to Switzerland. Dick had arrived in Ibiza bearing analyses of about a thousand American businesses which he had obtained via a three-month trial subscription to Value Line, an investment service. We drove up to the studio, laid out the heavy Value Line book, the latest issue of Trendline, and the Granville Market Letter, and began listing stocks and bonds for Hanne to buy.

  First we had to decide whether or not we were going to pay income tax on the proceeds. The temptation was to avoid it, but we both agreed that the risk of being caught was too great. “Christ,” Dick said, “for that much money — that’s three hundred fifty grand in taxes, man — the IRS could keep a couple of guys on our tails for years. But how do we pay it?”

  I found a solution. “After all the money is in, Howard will sign a new agreement in which he gives it all to me — in an uncharacteristic outburst of generosity. Then I pay the taxes in my name, and that’s the end of the problem. So long as they get it, the IRS doesn’t care where the money comes from. They won’t report to McGraw-Hill that I’ve paid it, so who’s to know?”

  We returned to the investment problem.

  “We’ve got to keep two things in mind,” I said. “We want to have the money available to give back to Mother McGraw if this thing should go belly up; and if we do manage to pull it off, we don’t want to risk losing the whole thing by being greedy.”

  Dick agreed, and we spent the day compiling a list of stocks and bonds which we hoped would give us a balanced portfolio: so much in international AAA-rated industrial bonds with tax-free dividends; so much in blue-chip stocks such as IBM, Upjohn, and Cities Service; so much in Canadian gold mining companies; so much in slightly riskier stocks such as Texas Gulf and Carlisle; and finally, a small percentage in pure risk stocks, mostly in the electronic and mini-computer fields.

  Dick had trouble going to sleep, he told me the next morning. “I finally made it by trying to figure the interest our bonds would bring in over a three-year period, and the quarterly dividends on our stocks. As a soporific, it beats barbiturates all to hell.”

  Edith’s second pair of round trips to Zurich — one in late September to deposit the check for $275,000 in the Hughes account, the other, two weeks later, to transfer the cash to the Rosenkranz account — were uneventful as far as the banking and the crossing of borders were concerned. At the start of the second trip, however, she had a disconcerting encounter with a young American friend who lived in Ibiza. She had just arrived in Barcelona, put on her black wig and spectacles in the Ladies’ Room, and was walking with her airline bag to the International Departures Lounge, when she came face to face with him.

  He peered at her hesitantly and said, “Edith?”

  Her first impulse was to put her nose in the air and breeze past him; but she immediately abandoned it. “Hello, Tom,” she said.

  Tom took in the wig, the glasses, the thick layer of lipstick that disguised the delicate lines of her mouth. “What’s all the cloak-and-dagger about?”

  Thinking fast, Edith came up with an answer. She put her fingers to her lips. “Please, you won’t tell Cliff, will you? He thinks I’m in Palma to see a gynecologist.”

  Like all the foreign residents in Ibiza, Tom relished a scandal. “Who is it — anyone I know?”

  “No. He’s …” she remembered Howard’s Helga, “… he’s a South American diplomat from an embassy in Madrid. Please, don’t say anything to Cliff.”

  “Not a word. I promise.” He chuckled. “It’s about time you gave him some of his own back …”

  “And so you must not let on when you see Tom,” Edith said to me, after her return from Zurich. “Wear your horns bravely, darling, as I wore mine.”

  While Edith was purportedly cuckolding me in Barcelona, I got to work on the final manuscript. I hired a middle-aged, close-mouthed Scotswoman named Bunty to help with the typing, and settled down with the pastepot and scissors to transform the transcript into a
book.

  In New York, in conference with Leventhal and Stewart, we had decided to retain the question-and-answer format. “It’s the soul of the book,” I had maintained. “Converting it to a third-person narrative would rob it of all spontaneity.” What I didn’t say was that it would also take an additional six months or more of hard work to do such a conversion job. Fortunately, they agreed with me.

  We had abandoned the idea of faking a photograph of Howard; after the reading of the transcript at the Elysee there was no longer any need to shore up the authenticity of the relationship. However, I still felt obliged to deliver something in the way of illustrative material to Ralph Graves. “Life’s paying a quarter of a million dollars,” I explained to Dick, on one of his October visits to Ibiza. “They’re a picture magazine, so let’s give them a break. I’ll get David Walsh to do some illustrations.” David was an English painter who lived on Ibiza, an old friend and one of the finest draftsmen I knew. He had recently married a young Dutch girl and they had a newborn baby. Of late, times had been tough for him. He had three other children to support and was perennially broke, in debt, and churning out landscapes like a factory.

  “We’re coming out of this pretty well,” I said to Dick, “so why not spread the joy? I can describe Howard to David, work with him a little bit, and he’ll turn out a batch of oils and sketches. He’s bound to get the cover of Life. They’ll be delighted and so will David. It will solve his financial problems.”

  “You’ve got a good heart,” Dick said.

  “Yes, I do. Thank you.”

  “But a pygmy brain. If Hughes won’t allow a photograph because he looks so godawful, why would he give his okay to a painting?”

  “Because it will flatter him, schmuck.”