I brought David up to the studio in late October and explained the assignment. He was impressed and excited. “What a challenge! To paint the portrait of a man you’ve never met! But it’s going to be bloody difficult.”
“You can do it,” I reassured him. “I guarantee it.” I gave him all the photographs of Hughes that we had collected and lectured on Hughes’s present physical appearance. “Cheap clothing. Almost always wears a nondescript short-sleeved shirt, pale green or blue, and a tan cardigan with a button missing. White socks that usually slide down into his shoes.”
“I thought he wore sneakers,” David said.
“Don’t believe everything you read. They’re actually gray loafers.”
“And how does he sit when he’s talking to you? Give me some physical mannerisms. Does he slouch? Cross his legs? What gestures does he make with his hands?”
“David,” I said, “do him in various positions. I’ll tell you which one looks right. And keep his left hand out of sight. It’s crippled and he’s very sensitive about it.”
David worked for the better part of a month, came up several times to show me preliminary sketches and check with me on such details as the bushiness of Howard’s mustache, the length of his hair and the expression of his eyes. “Would you say they were piercing or reflective?”
“Depends on his mood. Do both.”
He finally presented me with a portfolio of seven oils and two dozen black-and-white sketches. “You’ve got it,” I cried. “That’s him!”
David blushed with pleasure. “It was a bitch of a job.”
“But I knew you could do it. I had complete faith in you.”
“Does Hughes have to give his approval?”
“He will,” I said, and to back up my conviction I gave David a thousand dollars as an advance against whatever Life paid him for the illustrations.
My own work continued to go well and by the second week of November I thought I could see daylight at the end of the tunnel. I had over 700 pages typed and edited, Dick had finished the appendices, and I had begun a rough draft of the introduction. I had occasional conversations with McGraw-Hill and all was quiet there; they were urging me toward my self-imposed deadline of December 1st, and I said, “I’ll make it.”
Then, during the second week of November, Beverly Loo called. As usual she launched into the heart of the conversation without even bothering to say hello. The news was like a hand grenade that fell without warning in our peaceful back yard. She had just spoken to John Mack Carter, Editor of Ladies’ Home Journal. They were going to print excerpts from the Robert Eaton book and there was a strong rumor in the trade that some other hardback publisher was contracting for the book itself. The Journal would announce its coup in less than two weeks.
“But it’s a hoax,” I yelled. “Octavio will sue the shit out of them!”
“I can’t tell them that,” Beverly yelled back. “I certainly can’t tell them we’ve got the real book. We’d be breaking our secrecy clause with Octavio.”
“Beverly, you’ve got to stop them.”
“Will you listen to me? I know that. We’ve been arguing about it here all day and we’ve decided there’s only one way. Octavio’s got to give us permission to announce that we’re publishing his real autobiography.”
“When?”
“Right away. By the end of next week.”
“He won’t do that. I know he won’t. And I can’t even get in touch with him to tell him.”
“He’s got to do it. And you’ve got to reach him.”
I explained the rest of it to Dick early that evening on the telephone. McGraw-Hill and Life took a very simple position, no matter what panic or hysteria accompanied its presentation. The existence of two Hughes autobiographies could shake the credibility of both, and there was a potential $750,000 investment in jeopardy. We were right back where we were in September, with one difference: now McGraw-Hill and Life knew that they alone had the real thing. The opposition had to be beaten to the punch. The contracts with Hughes, however, prohibited either McGraw-Hill or Life from announcing the news of the autobiography until thirty days after final payment. Any changes in that contract had to be in writing.
“In writing?” Dick’s voice rose a notch. “You mean an amendment to the contract?”
“No. I mean a letter. From Octavio to Harold McGraw. Which they want right away.”
“But you can’t reach Octavio.”
“That’s what I told Beverly. But he can reach me, can’t he? In fact, I’m hoping to hear from him early next week.”
“Oh,” Dick said. Then, after a pause: “How the hell can he write to Harold McGraw? He’s in Nassau and you’re in Spain. Have you got a trained carrier pigeon up in your studio?”
“Come over to Ibiza tomorrow,” I said. “Catch that early morning flight. I’ll explain the whole plan to you.”
Dick arrived at 8:30 A.M., Monday, and took a taxi from the airport to the finca. I was still sleeping. Edith made coffee for him and finally I stumbled out of the bedroom, yawning and scratching my head. Before I could even brush my teeth, Dick had hustled me into the library to harangue me. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but it won’t work. I stayed up all night thinking about it and it finally hit me on the plane. You forgot something.”
“Dick, let me have a cup of coffee first …”
“You forgot that if McGraw-Hill announces the book in the next week or two, before the final payment, we’ll never get that last check cleared and into Hanne’s account. The shit will hit the fan a week or two after the announcement, at the latest. And you won’t have the book finished for another three weeks. This brilliant letter to Harold McGraw will cost us exactly $350,000.”
“No,” I said. “It will cost us $1,000. Let me drink my coffee, will you? Then we’ll go up to the studio.”
I had given Bunty an extra key to the studio and she was already at work when we arrived. She sat in her usual posture — legs crossed, one eye squinted against the rising plume of smoke from the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, clicking off the pages expertly and relentlessly. She knew that Project Octavio, as we still called it in her presence, was very much hush-hush, so she wasn’t surprised when I told her we had some special work to do and gave her the rest of the day off.
As soon as she had gone, I unlocked the file cabinet and took out the nine-page letter on yellow legal paper that Howard Hughes had written to Harold McGraw the day before. The first three pages were full of rantings and ravings about McGraw-Hill’s incompetence; then Howard went on to Robert Eaton, denouncing him as a fraud, phony, crook, and giving McGraw-Hill permission to silence him “using all legal means at your disposal.” And, lastly, he gave McGraw-Hill the right to announce publication immediately — provided it was done simultaneously with the final payment of $375,000.
“Now you see why we won’t lose any money?” I said to Dick after he had read the letter, wearing my old pair of leather driving gloves so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. I had worn the same gloves when I wrote the letter. “If Mother McGraw goes along with it — and what choice does she have? — I’ll be hand-delivering the check to Octavio in Florida, and I’ll mail it from there.”
“But … Wait a minute. The letter to Harold …” An expression of dismay appeared on Dick’s face. “How are you going to mail it? No, wait. Don’t tell me. You sonofabitch — I’m going to earn my twenty-five percent the hard way.”
“Right. You go back to Palma tonight. You leave for London in the morning. You should reach Nassau on Wednesday afternoon. Call me Thursday morning from your hotel and I’ll let you know whether or not to mail the letter. I’ll have spoken to Bev in the meantime.”
I tried to blot out the problems from my mind and concentrate on work. So much hinged on Dick’s trip, however, that I found myself mentally accompanying him. I was with him on the first leg to London, spent the night with him alternately dozing and reading a spy thriller in the trans
it lounge at Heathrow; caught the ten o’clock plane to Nassau on Wednesday morning.
I called Beverly that afternoon, told her that Howard had phoned me and that I had delivered the message. He had ranted, grumbled, but finally agreed. He would write a letter to Harold McGraw giving him full authority to announce the forthcoming publication of the autobiography. “He said there would be special conditions of some kind,” I told Beverly, “but he refused to be specific.”
“That sounds ominous,” she said.
“He also said he’d call me again when he had mailed the letter.”
At noon on Thursday Dick phoned from the Sheraton British Colonial in Nassau.
“What’s the score?”
“All systems go,” I replied, which meant he was to mail the letter immediately.
Late the next day he called me again, this time from Palma, and told me about his trip. “Insanity, he said. “Twelve thousand miles and a thousand bucks to mail a letter. Who would believe it?”
“Not McGraw-Hill,” I said, “hopefully.”
Chapter 13
“McGraw-Hill Announced Today …”
I needed ten days more to complete the manuscript for the December 1st deadline. What concerned me most was McGraw-Hill’s reaction to Howard’s letter, and the timing of the announcement relative to the payment of the final check. I toyed with the idea of flying to New York earlier than scheduled, bearing an unfinished manuscript which I could finish there. I delayed my decision for the most prosaic of reasons: I had come down with a grippe that was rampaging round the island. Dick was due to leave for England any day. He was tired of Palma, he had never found a decent finca on Ibiza, and he had begun to think about putting his son into a good English school. Coincidentally, Nina had been looking for someone to drive her car from Ibiza to London, and Dick had agreed to do it.
“Don’t tell Edith I’m coming to Ibiza to pick up the car,” Dick had said to me. “She’ll see me driving it and I’d just as soon skip any awkward explanations.”
On Sunday evening, suddenly, Eugen died. A tiny, fragile creature, she had been ailing throughout the cold early winter. She was an old monkey and she had lived a good life, but we were saddened beyond reason, and Edith cried for most of the night while I tossed restlessly with a light fever. On Monday afternoon, depressed but unable to sit around the house, I dragged myself up to the studio. For an hour or two I puttered around, and was about to give up for the day when I received two telephone calls that once again changed the course of events.
The first was from Beverly Loo, who informed me in a worried, nervous voice that the letter from Howard to Harold McGraw had not arrived in New York.
“Did he tell you he definitely had mailed it?”
“That’s what he said, Bev.” I immediately envisioned all possibilities: the Nassau post office had swiftly relayed to the Hughes organization that they were in possession of a letter with the scrawled initials “H. H.” on the envelope, and Intertel had intercepted it; Dick hadn’t had it weighed and had put on insufficient postage, and since there was no return address the letter would never be delivered and we were out $1,000; or the letter had been lost in the mails.
“Can’t you fly here earlier?” Beverly asked. “God knows what demands the man’s made, and this is the sort of thing we may have to discuss face to face.”
“I’ve got the flu. I feel lousy. If I feel better tomorrow, I’ll come.”
The second call, following almost immediately, was preceded by the familiar voice of the local international operator: “The United Estates calling Señor Cleefort Eerveen.” It was Nina.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Las Vegas,” she said, laughing. “Christ, it’s unbelievable. It’s seven o’clock in the morning here and everybody’s downstairs gambling.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’m here with Marshall. Trying to drum up work. I haven’t talked to a human being in a whole week and I had to call you.”
“What a bad break,” I said. “I’m flying to New York next week. Same continent, but three thousand miles apart. Where do you go from Vegas?”
“To Los Angeles. Somebody’s given us a house. Why don’t you come earlier? Fly out to California and have Thanksgiving dinner with me.”
I thought it over for about five seconds and then said: “All right. I’m game. Why not? Give me your number in L.A., and I’ll call you from New York. If I can make it, I’ll be there.”
For once the Iberia flight was on time and I landed at Kennedy Airport at four o’clock Tuesday afternoon. My fever had gone but I was weak from antibiotics and my throat felt full of hot coals. I telephoned Beverly Loo from the airport. “Come straight to McGraw-Hill,” she said.
“But I feel awful.”
“We’ve got Octavio’s letter, and Ralph and Dave are due here from Life in fifteen minutes. It’s a summit conference.”
“My God. What did he write?”
“Come over here and I’ll show you.”
I arrived on the 20th floor at 5:30, bearing two copies of the incomplete manuscript. I had reached page 882 in the typing and had something over a hundred pages still to do. I had also brought David Walsh’s paintings and sketches. I tramped into Albert Leventhal’s office, sneezing and wheezing, carrying my suitcase, a huge artist’s portfolio and the familiar overstuffed straw shopping basket, bulging with boxes of manuscript. After I had collapsed on the couch, I asked: “Well, what are Howard’s demands?”
Leventhal’s answer was the most startling I could have received. “None,” he said, smiling. “He must have been kidding you. All he asked was that we lean more to the side of dignity than sensationalism when we release the news, and he wants the final payment at the same time as the announcement. We thought he really was going to ask the earth — something outrageous.”
I whistled with relief, but for different reasons than Albert and Beverly. I had imagined that the simultaneous payment would stick in everyone’s throat; but they had expected so much worse that they never considered the one demand to be excessive. I was shown a typed copy of the nine-page letter. The original, they said, was in Harold McGraw’s safe.
“By God, Howard sure can rattle on,” I said. “Now you see what I have to go through.” I finished reading the letter, careful not to skim through it too quickly. “This is fine,” I said. “We’re home free.”
Albert Leventhal had already prepared a draft of the press release. The release and the last check would be delayed about a week. I explained that plans had changed and I was meeting Hughes again in California; he would read the completed part of the manuscript and we were going to celebrate Thanksgiving together.
Albert also gave me a confidential memo, addressed to me but meant to be shown to Hughes. It confirmed McGraw-Hill’s intentions to avoid sensationalism and establish a channel whereby “O” could see and react to advertisements and publicity in advance. Albert concluded by noting that McGraw-Hill had “established the utmost security in the plants which will set the type and manufacture the book.”
The following afternoon, after calling Nina, I boarded an American Airlines flight for Los Angeles.
At the airport I rented a car, and Nina and I drove to Beverly Hills, to a house perched high in the mountains above the city. The house had been loaned to Nina and her manager by a film producer named Paul Radin whom we had all known in Ibiza. Marshall had landed a contract for Nina at the International in Las Vegas, and now he was trying to plug his “superstar” in Hollywood. He had taken over the downstairs half of Radin’s house. When he was not on the telephone to various record companies and producers, he was buzzing up and down the mountain and popping into bars and discotheques.
But what I realized, after a few days under the same roof with them both, was that Nina had become dependent on him to a degree I found difficult to understand. It may have been that she saw him as her last hope to revive her career. She was 39 years old; it was now or never. �
�I know I’ve only got a few years left,” she said, “and I’ve got to make money. I have to think about the kids.” Whatever the reason, when Marshall crooked his finger, Nina came to attention. She went where he told her to go, she wore what he told her to wear, and she trooped obediently to meet the people he thought could help her. She was unconsciously picking up bits and pieces of Marshall’s style, which was crass opportunism. It was something I had never seen in her and it disturbed me. If I thought of Edith, who was the most straightforward woman I had ever known — and who found it almost impossible, at gut level, to compromise herself or her love for another human being — Nina came off poorly. For the first time, the image of Nina that I had always believed in — a woman searching for something of value in her life — began to tarnish and look more like fantasy than reality. When I challenged her on it, she grew tight-lipped, almost surly.
I said: “Suppose you do have some sort of success? And you knock yourself out, and you sock your money in your Swiss bank account, and you go from city to city and nightclub to nightclub with John Marshall and his friends — where do you wind up? You’ll be 45 years old and worn out, and you won’t have anything to show for it except a scrapbook. You’re losing the one thing you’ve always had. You were always you. You never played petty little games.”
“It’s a world you don’t understand.” Her surliness had turned suddenly to anger. “If you’re going to make it, the only way to make it is Marshall’s way. I don’t like it, but I have to go along.”
“But you’re the victim.”
“Not in the end,” she said. “You’ll see. And there’s another thing you don’t understand. There’s nothing in the world that matters more to me now than my career.”
I looked at her for a long time. I could only nod and say: “I’m sorry about that …”
The strain stayed with us the whole time we were together in California, easing only during the two days we drove north to Big Sur and Monterey. For a moment, then, we recaptured something of what we had had during the time in Mexico. We were alone; the pressures of “making it” were temporarily gone. But the moment we got back to Beverly Hills she was uptight again. There were people to see, auditions, appointments. She was worried that Marshall might think she had stayed away too long. And there was a feeling in us both, tacitly acknowledged by some few words or the lack of them, that she and I were on the downhill slope. What was my restlessness but a refusal to give up a fantasy world that both entranced and enslaved me? For seven years I had been held in thrall; suddenly I felt the glimmer of an inner freedom.
The Hoax Page 26