The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

Dick’s eyes were glazed with fatigue. It was difficult to comprehend, much less assess, the rapidity of events. “So get the manuscript in to McGraw-Hill and then get the hell out. What do they think of it?”

  “They think it’s sensational.”

  “Then don’t make waves,” Dick counseled. “What about me? Am I here in New York now?”

  “Why not? I called you in to help me with the editing. Who knows the material better than you do?”

  “One thing more,” he said, coughing delicately. “I had a little problem with Nina’s car. I mean before I left Ibiza.”

  Nina’s station wagon had been parked for several weeks near the tunnel that led through the Roman wall to the Old Town. The best way to avoid meeting Edith by accident, Dick figured, was to spend the day in Santa Eulalia and return in time to put the car on the ferry for Palma, and then go on to Barcelona to start the trip across France to England.

  A few minutes out of Ibiza on the road to Santa Eulalia, Dick came nose to nose, as it were, with Edith in the Mercedes. She had just dropped Nedsky off at the kindergarten in the village of Jesus. “She recognized me and the car both,” Dick told me at Marty Ackerman’s, “so I turned around and went back to find her.”

  Edith sat nursing a coffee at a sidewalk table outside the Bar Alhambra, filled with paranoid suspicions that Dick and I had conspired with Nina against her. Dick told her the truth — which was that he hadn’t wanted her to see him driving Nina’s car — and she calmed down.

  “At least I thought she’d calmed down,” Dick said. “But when I went over to Ibiza yesterday to pick up this goddam letter for you, she was all in a state again. She’d just gone up to the studio to get the letter, and she handed it to me and marched off without a word.”

  “She’ll be all right,” I said, puzzled but not particularly troubled. “I’ll square it with her when I get back.”

  On Monday morning I appeared at McGraw-Hill and handed the last 133 pages to Robert Stewart for editing. A Xerox copy was given to Faustin Jehle for legal vetting. I was prepared for a mild panic but I found everyone in a sanguine mood, more amused than annoyed by events. John Cooke of the Legal Department had fired off a sharp letter to Richard Hannah of the Byoir Agency, who handled Hughes’s public relations, demanding a retraction of their various statements to the effect that McGraw-Hill and I were “either the victims or perpetrators of a gigantic hoax,” and threatening suit in the bargain.

  The letter must have caused some second thoughts at the Byoir Agency, for Richard Hannah wrote back almost immediately, saying that he did not believe that McGraw-Hill would knowingly participate in the publication of an autobiography that was not genuine. And under such circumstances, retractions or denials were unnecessary and inappropriate.

  Cooke seemed pleased with this response; and if he was pleased, I was pleased. Harold McGraw, on his part, had refused to speak to Chester Davis, the Hughes lawyer, who was calling almost daily. The newspapermen were being held at bay. I was given the 29th floor conference room of the Legal Department as an office. Robert Stewart journeyed up from the 20th floor. “The new material is marvelous,” he said, “and you’ve done a great editing job.”

  “What do you think about this denial?”

  “I predicted it,” Robert said. “I think Hughes is just playing a huge joke at everybody’s expense. It’s absolutely in character. He’ll never come out of the woodwork now. He’s a devil. He knows we’ve got the contract and the canceled checks, and I think he’s just sitting back laughing like hell.”

  “If he’s alive,” I said gloomily, and related the story of our missed rendezvous on St. Croix.

  That afternoon Albert Leventhal asked if I would say a few words at a sales luncheon the following day at the Hampshire House, and I agreed —” if I have time,” I added, “and there are no newspapermen there.”

  A few minutes later I was called to the 32nd floor for a talk with Shelton Fisher and Bob Slaughter, another executive of McGraw-Hill, Inc., the parent company. I repeated the St. Croix story and then Shelton backtracked to the week in Florida and the last two meetings with Hughes.

  “You were blindfolded in broad daylight?” Shelton asked, incredulous.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where were you sitting?”

  “In the front seat, right next to Holmes.”

  “But suppose you’d been stopped for speeding? Or some cop had seen the blindfold? How would this man Holmes have explained it?”

  It was something I hadn’t thought of and I was grateful to Shelton for pointing out the flaw. “He told me to say that I was tired, the glare was bothering me, and I wanted to sleep.” “It’s wild,” Shelton said, chuckling. “And this happened on the day you arrived?”

  I had meant to shift that event to my second day in Florida, but Shelton seemed so positive that I couldn’t remember whether I had told Beverly that it had been the day of my arrival or the second day, and it seemed safer to stick to the version Shelton believed.

  “Yes,” I said. “The day I arrived.”

  It was a tiny mistake, and an unnecessary one; if Beverly had contradicted me I could easily have said she had misunderstood. But at the time, that day in Shelton Fisher’s office, it seemed unimportant.

  “I got married here,” I said to Dick, as we stepped out of the taxi in front of the Hampshire House. It was warm and sunny, more like April than December. Central Park South was thronged with lunchtime strollers from the nearby hotels and office buildings. Some girls wore short-sleeved Indian-summer dresses, and a few of the more adventurous men walked with their jackets slung over their arms.

  “Yeah,” Dick said, “which wife?”

  “The first, wise guy. You only marry the first time in a hotel — when your father-in-law’s paying the bill. After that you go very unostentatiously to City Hall. I’ve been married in more City Halls than anyone else I know.”

  The McGraw-Hill luncheon was on the second floor of the Hampshire House in a private banquet room. The bartender shoved drinks in our hands as we entered, and I was whisked away by Beverly Loo and a woman I vaguely associated with Dell Books — or was it Women’s Wear Daily? “Circulate,” I called over my shoulder to Dick, “but don’t get drunk.”

  Dick was no drinker — although once, in Houston, celebrating at Trader Vic’s our finds in the morgues of the Post and Chronicle, he downed two enormous frothy violet concoctions with unpronounceable Polynesian names and I had to guide all 280 pounds of him back to the hotel, while he cursed all things Texan and mooned for his wife and son in faraway Mallorca. There in the Hampshire House, that balmy December day, he had the same glazed look in his eyes. I knew exactly how he felt. I, too, felt as though I were walking onto a movie set. My God, I thought, looking around, what hath Irving wrought — and immediately amended it to Irvkind. What hath Irvkind wrought? I liked the ring of it, but was stupefied by the apparent enormity of the forces we had set in motion, dating back almost exactly a year to that innocent breakfast meeting in Palma de Mallorca, when I had said: “Hey, listen, I’ve got a wild idea …”

  Some 200 people were present, almost all of them McGraw-Hill employees. They ranged from executives in the Trade Book Division to salesmen from Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco. I spotted Albert Leventhal, cheerfully chatting with Ed Kuhn, a former holder of Albert’s job and now running Playboy Books. There were dozens of other familiar faces — editors, department heads, peripheral figures in the Jolly Green Giant of publishing — milling about with drinks in their hands.

  The walls were lined with six-foot photographic reproductions. There was Jean Harlow, showing a nice bit of cleavage; Jane Russell in a scene from The Outlaw, showing more; Our Man in Nassau looking determinedly handsome and wearing the helmet and goggles of a pilot of the thirties. Above all, stunning in their impact, hung several gigantic reproductions of the book’s dust jacket — white with stark black lettering. There was nothing hesitant or crafty about that book jacket; it flashed for
th its message with all the vigor and certainty of a newspaper headline. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES: INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY BY CLIFFORD IRVING. I felt an idiotic grin starting to form and took another gulp of bourbon on the rocks to kill it. All these people are taking this seriously, I reminded myself. You’d better do the same. Don’t crack, and don’t crack up — or you’ve had it.

  Several months ago, after we had vanquished that first frightening challenge created by Messrs. Post and Eaton — whose book was destined never to be published — Dick had said to me: “Look is it possible that McGraw-Hill has figured it out? That they’re playing the game because they know we’ll all come out winners? That they really know?”

  “That it’s a hoax? My God, never. No way.”

  Dick arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely sure — I think.”

  “It’s got to occur to them. How can they be so naïve?”

  “Because they believe. First they wanted to believe, and now they have to believe. They want to believe because it’s such a coup for them, it’s weird and wild, it’s Howard Hughes and the Richest Man in the World and they’re personally, vicariously, in cahoots with him. They can identify because they like Oreo cookies, too, and they can marvel because Howard pisses away $137 million without a second thought. That’s the way they’d like to live. Can’t you see what an ego trip it is? The secrecy part — the thing that protects you and me — is what they love the most. That takes them out of the humdrum into another world, the world we all dream of living in, only we really don’t want to because we know it’s mad. And the greatest thing for them is that this way they can live in it part time. They’re participating but they’re protected by an intermediary. I’m their buffer between reality and fantasy. It’s a fairy tale, a dream. And the beauty part for them is that they’ll make money out of it, too. Corporate profit justifies any form of lunacy. There’s been no other hoax like it in modern times — it’s like that crazy guy in Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder, who was doing business all over Europe during the war — doing business with both the Americans and the Germans — but it was okay, because everybody had a share. Everybody benefits. Even Howard, in this case, because he becomes a folk-hero and gets a better autobiography than he could ever write himself.”

  “Or than he deserves. What a sonofabitch he must really be. Boy, if anyone knows, we know.” Dick’s eyes glinted mischievously. “But I still think you may be wrong. When it’s over, when you deliver the book and they hand you the last check, they’ll pat you on the back and give you a big wink, and Harold McGraw will say: ‘Good job, kid. We knew you could pull it off. Just make sure you pay the taxes.’” Dick broke up laughing, and so did I. It was a sweet vision to contemplate. But then I stopped and shook my head.

  “Never. They’re straight. They’re the Establishment. They believe. They’ve got to believe or they’d never get a night’s sleep.”

  And now that it was over, now that The Book was in the hopper and “Project Octavio” a success beyond anyone’s hopes, we could see that I had been diabolically right: they believed. Never mind that Hughes Tool had denied, never mind that Chester Davis thundered daily threats by hand-delivered letter and over the telephone to Harold McGraw, John Cooke, and Marty Ackerman. Belief had metamorphosed into something that bordered on religious faith. The luncheon at the Hampshire House was a feast of thanksgiving, for faith and toil had brought forth a bountiful harvest. So joyous was the hour that even the moneychangers were admitted to the temple.

  We saw this, Dick and I, and we wandered among the throng of well-wishers, hardly daring to look into each other’s eyes. A feeling of solemn lunacy pervaded. It was almost no longer possible to distinguish between illusion and reality; and, if we were ultimately successful, that distinction would vanish altogether. That in itself, I thought, would be an achievement worth carrying to the grave in silence. It contained a seed of bitterness, too, for the world could be fooled and mocked too easily. What hath Irvkind wrought?

  The meal was typical banquet fare: rubber chicken and fat green peas, the kind Howard despised. “Where’s your silver rake?” Dick called to me from across the table. I waved him to silence. He was referring to the tiny silver rake Howard used to comb through the peas on his plate. Those small enough to pass between the tines, he ate. The others he left.

  About halfway through the main course, a couple of men placed a microphone nearby. Jesus Christ, I remembered in a panic, they expect me to make a speech. I’ll screw up, I know I’ll say the wrong thing. I stood up — fortunately Albert Leventhal, sitting beside me and gnawing hungrily at a drumstick, was deep in an anecdote about his last telephone conversation with Chester Davis — and walked over to Dick, who was listening with a bored expression to the ecstatic sales figures being thrown at him by the man at his left.

  “You’re the hero of the hour,” Dick said, grinning.

  “I forgot about the speech. What’ll I say? I’m half-pissed. Give me an opening line.”

  Dick thought for a moment. “Okay, after the usual introductory bullshit, say: ‘Chester Davis may disagree, but from what I’ve heard at this luncheon this book is obviously the biggest thing to come down the pike since The Bible. I can say that to you without blushing, because I’m not the author.’ Then finish up on the right note. Say: ‘In conclusion, I give you Howard’s favorite toast: L’chayem.’”

  “I can’t do that,” I whispered. “They know he’s not Jewish.”

  “So tell them he’s Jewish. The best-kept secret of modern times. They’ll believe anything.”

  I slid back into my seat as Albert Leventhal was finishing his anecdote. “… He demanded to see the manuscript. I said I was sorry. He kept asking for more information and I said, ‘It’s all in the press release, Mr. Davis.’ He kept asking if I couldn’t give him something more, and I said: ‘How about syphilis?’”

  “You didn’t actually say that, did you, Al?” asked the man on the other side of him, speaking over the burst of nervous laughter.

  “No,” Leventhal said mournfully, “but I wish I had.”

  Immediately following the dessert — a coconut ball which I liberally doused with chocolate syrup — Leventhal stepped to a nearby podium and made a speech. Richard Hannah, he explained, PR-man for Hughes Tool, had already denounced the autobiography as a fraud, but McGraw-Hill knew that Hannah spoke in ignorance. They knew. They had the literary coup of the decade, if not the half-century. They knew that Howard Hughes had kept his meetings with Clifford Irving secret from even his closest associates. How did they know? Irving had told them so. “And moreover,” Leventhal explained, “I can now reveal to you that Mr. Hughes himself has been in written communication with a top McGraw-Hill executive and has empowered us to act in his behalf should any such quasi-legal challenges arise.”

  A murmur of approval rippled through the banquet room.

  “… And we who have had the privilege of reading the manuscript,” Leventhal continued, “know that it would take a Shakespeare to invent such a work. And as much as I admire our author, Clifford Irving, he is no Shakespeare.” Everyone laughed politely, except me. I was flattered, and at the same time mildly annoyed. Listen, Albert, knock it off. I’ve got a little surprise for you. But I held my tongue and restrained a frown as Dick, from across the table, flashed two fingers at me. A casual onlooker would have taken it as a V-for-Victory sign. I knew he meant “two Shakespeares.” So I smiled with proper humility.

  There were murmurs of further approval, and even awe, when Leventhal announced that the Book-of-the-Month Club had just agreed to pay the largest price in their history — $350,000 — as advance against royalties for the rights to the Autobiography. More nods and tongue-clucking followed when Leventhal said that Dell Books had bought the reprint rights for an advance of $400,000 — although this figure, as Beverly Loo loudly remarked, was a steal. “If Hughes hadn’t wanted so much money up front,” she had bitterly complained on several occasion
s, “we could have waited for galleys and put the book up for bids in February. I know I could have squeezed them for six hundred thousand, maybe even as much as seven fifty …”

  Leventhal finished with a little joke, and then introduced me. I took a deep breath and walked up to the microphone. I waited for the applause to die down and then began. I had had an inspiration, possibly resulting from the combination of bourbon and wine. “I don’t really deserve to be up here,” I said, truthfully, “and it’s a little frightening. There are a lot of people sitting in this room, people like Ed Kuhn and Beverly Loo, who knew me when I was just a novelist and a bum. Well, I had an inspiration and a few lucky breaks, that’s all. And,” I said prophetically, “when all this is over I have every intention of becoming a novelist and a bum again.”

  I launched quickly into a generalized discussion of the book, dropping a few tidbits concerning my meeting with Hughes, offering as little of substance as possible; tossing out accolades, whenever I felt myself wandering into trouble, to the various members of the Trade Book Division whose serious, thoughtful faces regarded me, remembering all I had learned in my days of lecturing at UCLA and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. After the luncheon, when I was mopping my brow, Ed Kuhn said to me wryly, “Don’t look so hangdog — you did great. Best speech I’ve heard in years. You spoke for fifteen minutes without saying a damn thing.”

  At the end of the ordeal I raised my glass and said: “And in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I can do no better than to offer you Howard Hughes’s favorite toast — although he prefers skim milk and Poland Springs mineral water to bourbon.” L’chayem formed in my palate, but I held it back. There was such a thing as going too far.

  “Confusion to our enemies,” I said stoutly.

  I saw Dick sputter in his cup of coffee and hide his face in a napkin to keep from laughing. Basking in the warm glow of applause, I returned to my seat. Albert Leventhal leaned toward me: “You really should have mentioned Dick Suskind, don’t you think? It would be a nice gesture.”