The Hoax
Page 30
“I certainly should have.” I stood up again, tapped a spoon against my glass for silence, and said: “Last, but by no means least, I have to give credit where credit is due … as Howard would say. I’d like you all to meet my researcher, Richard Suskind, an author in his own right and a man who stood by my side all the way. And without whom, I can truthfully say, I could not have done the job I did and this would not be the book it is. Let’s give Dick a hand, which he richly deserves.”
A red-faced, smiling Dick half rose in his chair, wearing the gold jockey shirt he had bought in Pompano Beach, clasped his hands above his head like a benign Primo Carnera who had just K.O.’ed Jack Sharkey, bowed right and left, and sat down again. There was more appreciative applause. Dick’s round face split with a grin of delight. Albert Leventhal patted me on the arm and nodded. “Good,” he said. “That was nice.”
When Dick and I made our escape, about fifteen or twenty minutes later —” Sorry,” I said gravely, to one and all, “but we have to get back to the shop and work” — we took a wrong turn in the hallway and opened the door on a roomful of salesmen being addressed from another podium by Leventhal: “… and Irving’s right. If the opening gun orders from bookshops are less than 150,000 copies, then I’ve got to say you men are in the wrong business. Now let’s break the figures down region by region …” We hurriedly closed the door and walked toward the street.
“Jesus,” Dick said. “Do you believe all this?”
I shook my head slowly. “I’ll tell you — it’s hard. But they’re convincing me. It’s going to happen.”
We gulped the fresh, crisp air, It was noticeably colder than when we had entered the hotel, but nothing could chill our spirits. We knew that back there in the Hampshire House the machinery was inexorably in motion, the wheels were turning. The sunlit sweep of Central Park, with the hansom cabs lined up outside the Plaza, looked like a painting done by a child. Out here it was fantasy now; back in there, real.
“How many copies are they figuring to sell?” Dick prodded me.
“That’s what Leventhal asked me. They had a production meeting, and I was there, and they were trying to figure it out, and he turned to me and said, ‘How many copies do you think we’ll sell, Cliff?’ I said: ‘415,000 the first year.’ He said to the production manager, ‘Okay, we’ll do a first printing of 150,000.’ Now they’ve upped it to 200,000, and with the Book-of-the-Month Club they have to do a run of half a million. That’s just the first printing, you understand.”
Dick looked puzzled. “Why did he ask you the sales figures? What the hell do you know about that sort of thing?”
“Absolutely nothing. Whenever they need the answer to a question these days they ask me, and they take what I say as gospel. It’s insane. But it’s happening.”
“Why did you say 415,000?”
“I don’t know. I pulled it out of a hat. It was the first figure that popped into my head. It sounded pretty good, didn’t it?”
Dick blinked as we jumped into a taxi and I gave the address of the McGraw-Hill Building. “Jesus,” he said again. There was no blasphemy in his tone, only reverence for something beyond our control or understanding. “You may be right,” he murmured. “They may publish the damn thing …”
“Who the hell can stop it?” I said quietly.
The beginning of the answer to my question came sooner than expected — late that same afternoon. The mood of dazed euphoria continued throughout the day, which Dick and I spent working on the manuscript in the conference room on the 29th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building. Robert Stewart, the editor of the book, felt I had effaced myself too efficiently and modestly from the dialogue and he said: “Beef up your questions. Make them more searching. They’re too thin and staccato.”
“You mean go back to the original questions in the transcripts? The ones you told me to take out?”
“Well, yes,” he admitted. “Something like that.”
McGraw-Hill’s lawyers were giving the book a simultaneous reading, and they marched into our office every day with more and more suggested changes. A libelous passage about Norris Poulsen, the ex-mayor of Los Angeles, had to be excised in its entirety. The Nixon episode had to be modified slightly, as much for libel as for political considerations. Hughes’s description of Lyndon Johnson’s “climbing out of the White House swimming pool with his giant-sized Texas pecker hanging out” had to be chopped. “Johnson is a private citizen now,” Faustin Jehle explained to me. “He could sue.”
“Would you sue if you were nearly seventy years old and someone said you had a giant-sized Texas pecker?”
Jehle conceded the point but still insisted. “The book is packed with good material. Taking out a few questionable remarks won’t hurt it. Let’s not invite trouble if we don’t have to.”
I argued for every point. I was fighting for the integrity of my own work, not Howard’s, and that made me stubborn to the point where Jehle often wondered why I battled with such ferocity against a possible emasculation of the text. “Look,” he explained, “Hughes is talking here about how much he manipulated the stock of TWA on the New York Stock Exchange so that he could exercise his option more cheaply. Now I’m sure it’s true or he wouldn’t have said it, but TWA could have a stockholders’ suit on their hands.”
“Faustin, he’ll kill me if I take that out. The man set out to tell the truth. I can’t, in conscience, dilute it.”
“And what about this business where he says he paid $100,000 to the Democratic Party to get that indictment quashed?” Jehle was referring to an alleged fraud on the part of Hughes Aircraft in 1948, whereby the company had used veterans’ priorities to buy surplus C-47’s cheaply and then converted them to luxury aircraft for businessmen. “His own company could get into trouble on that little hanky-panky.”
“Twenty years later?”
“It’s possible. It certainly won’t do their reputation any good.”
“I guess he just doesn’t give a damn,” I maintained. “The man’s honest.”
“I’ve read the manuscript,” Jehle said. “He’s also crazy.”
“Is that the feeling you get out of it?”
“It’s a conclusion that’s hard to avoid. He puts a leaded glass screen in front of his TV set to cut out the gamma rays. He says that everyone and his uncle is out to kill him and the price on his head is half a million dollars. Is that the talk of a completely sane man?”
I mulled that over. “I’ll have to trim down those parts, I don’t want the reader to have that impression. I owe that much to Howard.”
Jehle stopped by my office that afternoon, too, worried about the latest hysterical letter from Chester Davis. “Didn’t you tell Beverly Loo,” he asked, “that someone who was with you had met Hughes by accident out in California?”
Dick looked up from the end of the table, where he was correcting and revising fresh anecdotes that I had added to the manuscript in Florida. “Me,” he said. “He offered me a prune.”
“He did what?”
“He offered me a prune.”
“I see,” Jehle said wearily. “Would you mind making a statement to that effect?”
“Not at all.”
Jehle brought in a secretary, and Dick dictated a brief version of the incident we had concocted during that strange weekend in Palm Springs. The secretary typed it and brought back three copies. Jehle read one, shaking his head half in amusement and half in bewilderment, then gave them to Dick to sign.
“That’s not quite the way it happened,” Dick said, frowning as he scanned the page. “I didn’t ask him if the prune was organic. He said it was organic. And he didn’t take it out of a cellophane bag. It was a brown paper bag.”
“No,” I said, “it was a cellophane bag.” I explained to Jehle: “We always have this argument. We never can agree. He says cellophane and I say paper.”
“The other way round,” Dick corrected me.
“Not important,” Jehle said. He took the three sig
ned copies into his office and returned with them notarized. By then I thought he had the impression that Hughes had infected us and we were all slightly crazy.
“I can just see my picture in Time,” Dick said, “with one of their cutesy captions underneath: Offered a Prune. Do you think I could do a television commercial for Sunsweet? ‘Howard Hughes and I prefer organic prunes. But if you can’t find an organic prune in your neighborhood grocery, the next best thing is Sunsweet.’ What do you think?”
“Could be,” Faustin said. He left, still shaking his head.
The rest of the afternoon passed swiftly, while we worked, until just after five o’clock when the telephone rang. It was Beverly Loo, calling from the 20th floor. “Get down here right away,” she snapped.
I had never heard her so grim. “What’s going on?”
“Just get down here. This is urgent.”
I swallowed hard. “Look, everyone’s gone from the Legal Department and I can’t leave the manuscript lying around the table. This is all top-secret stuff. You better tell me what it’s all about.”
Beverly rapped and I listened. I hung up the telephone and turned to Dick, who looked apprehensive. He had already popped a gout pill into his mouth while I was waiting for Beverly to finish. “I don’t think I want to know,” he said. “I think I’m catching the night plane for Madrid.”
“No, you’re going with me. I need you. The shit is about to hit the fan.”
“Then let’s duck while the ducking’s good.”
“We can’t,” I said hoarsely. “We’ve got to brazen it out. Listen to this.”
Less than ten minutes ago Ralph Graves of Life had called Albert Leventhal to advise him that Chester Davis — acting as Hughes’s principal spokesman — had telephoned an hour previously to Don Wilson, the Time, Inc. publicity director. Davis had claimed that Howard Hughes wanted to talk to Frank McCulloch, New York Bureau Chief of Time. McCulloch was the last reporter to have interviewed Hughes — sometime in the late 1950’s — and had evidently had intermittent telephone conversations with him since that date. According to Chester Davis, Hughes wanted to discuss seven points: six to do with the situation in Nevada, and the seventh regarding the book to be published by McGraw-Hill. Davis would place the call himself from the Time-Life Building between 5:30 and 6 P.M. Graves had told Leventhal: “I think you’d better get over here in a hurry, and bring Irving. We’ve agreed to go through with it.”
Dick and I locked up the material for the night and went downstairs. Leventhal, Beverly, and Robert Stewart waited by the elevators, already wearing their coats. Before anyone could talk, I launched into the attack.
“Why the hell did Graves and Wilson agree to this? It’s just Davis’s way of getting a confrontation. He’s no more going to call Hughes than I am. For Christ’s sake, he’s never even met Hughes in his entire life. It’s a trap,” I grumbled, “a ploy, and those guys from Life just stepped into it.”
It was no bluff on my part; I half believed it when I set out from the 29th floor, and by the time the elevator had reached the 20th floor I was completely convinced.
“I agree,” Beverly said angrily. “Why are they butting into our business? It’s our book, not theirs. We should insist that they call it off.”
“We’re late,” Leventhal muttered, as he fumbled for the keys to his car in the parking lot next to the McGraw-Hill Building. Albert seemed to have developed a nervous tic since I had last seen him only a few hours before, holding forth cheerfully at the salesmen’s luncheon. He grimaced repeatedly, as though false teeth were pinching his gums. Squeezed into the back seat between Dick and myself, Robert Stewart chattered on and on, as Leventhal maneuvered through traffic and nearly scraped a dozen fenders on the way to Rockefeller Plaza. “Isn’t this the most … I mean, really! … what do they think they’re doing? … It can’t be Hughes, and if it is … I mean, why do you think he’s acting this way, Cliff?”
“He’ll never get through to him,” I said. “We’ll hang around there till midnight while Davis goes through his wounded boar routine.”
I had never thought of Beverly as inscrutable. No mysteries of the East were contained in that round, open, pleasant face. Usually she was more of a talker than even Robert. Now, however, she silently glowered in the front seat next to Leventhal.
Graves, Maness, Wilson, a Time, Inc. lawyer named Jack Dowd, and one other unknown man were waiting for us in Wilson’s plush executive office. I walked in casually, unshaven, my overcoat slung over my shoulder. Graves, who looked pale and solemn, said to me abruptly: “Cliff, this is Frank McCulloch.”
A little startled, I stuck out my hand and said, “Hello, Frank.”
“Mr. Irving …”
McCulloch nodded and shook hands. He had a hard grip. He was a man of about fifty, tall, ruggedly built, with eyes to match his handshake and a completely shaven, knobby skull that gleamed and rippled almost as though it were made of muscle. He looked at me coldly. He didn’t want to know me, and he had nothing more to say to me. I suddenly found that I had nothing to say to him, either. He spoke to the others: he was from the south or southwest, I judged, with a swift, rasping voice that grated like a file on metal. He was tough, and he was the enemy. Until now the enemies had been gentle, sympathetic, believing, and the weapons I needed were almost too easy to come by. But McCulloch didn’t believe, and I had no weapon. Under that hard stare I felt weak and vulnerable, an amateur in the ring with a professional. Don Wilson was busily attaching a tape recorder to the telephone.
“You’re going to tape the conversation,” I said, to no one in particular.
“Absolutely,” Graves replied.
“Good idea,” I said.
“If the goddam thing works,” McCulloch growled.
“I want to hear it afterwards,” I said to Graves, “if Davis really makes the call.” I managed to draw Dick aside for a moment and whispered, “Listen. If there’s anyone on the other end of that line, no matter who it is, I’m going to yell that it’s not Hughes. If the voice is strong, I’ll say Hughes’s voice is weaker, and if it’s weak, I’ll say Hughes’s voice is stronger. Take your cues from me if you get a chance. Just back me up.”
Dick nodded. “What if they want you to talk to him?”
“I’ll ask for the code word and when he can’t give it I’ll say, ‘Good try, but you’re a goddam phony,’ and then I’ll hang up.”
“Get ready to fight your way out of the room,” Dick counseled. “I’ll block for you.”
Davis and two lawyers from his Wall Street office were due to arrive in five minutes. The presence of a gang was deemed undesirable, as was a confrontation between Davis and myself. Graves, Maness, Stewart, Leventhal, Beverly, Dick, and I were herded down the hall to another office, where we dispossessed its puzzled owner and sat down to wait. I was behind the desk, doodling on a pad of paper, when I realized to my horror that it was a pad of yellow lined legal paper and I was unconsciously — for my mind was in the office next door with McCulloch and Wilson — writing the signature of Howard R. Hughes. No one was looking at me; they were silent, with Dick slumped on the couch next to Beverly and Albert. I tore off the sheet of paper, folded it carefully, and put it in my back pocket. After a few minutes I went to the door, opened it and poked my head out. I saw three men, one of them ruddy-faced, gesticulating and talking in a loud voice, marching toward me from the bank of elevators. I ducked back in and swiftly shut the door.
“There’s Davis,” I said jauntily. “With his Praetorian guard.”
The jauntiness deserted me ten minutes later. Ralph Graves had stepped out of the room. He came back a minute later to say that he hadn’t gone in to Wilson’s office, but that he had stood outside the door for a moment and heard Frank McCulloch’s voice. “He was on the telephone,” Graves said ominously. “They’re talking. The call’s gone through.”
“McCulloch hasn’t seen Hughes since 1957,” I said. “How could he possibly recognize the voice?”
Twenty more minutes passed. The tension inside me built to a point where I thought I would either burst or faint. Dick, on the couch, looked like a gray mammoth, gutshot, and about to sag to his death. I had told everyone present that we had a dinner date with the Ackermans, which was true, and that we were already late. I stood up suddenly and said: “This is a farce. I’m damned if I’ll wait. You’re taping it, so I’ll come round tomorrow and listen, and I’ll tell you if it was Hughes or not.” Dick got quickly to his feet.
The coolness and aplomb must have been impressive, because no one objected to our leaving. They would have kept me there by brute force if they could have peered past my poker face to the terror within. “Call me from the restaurant, Graves said. “I’ll tell you what happened.”
The door closed behind us and Dick clutched my arm, eyeballs rolling in their sockets like Zero Mostel. “Walk swiftly, don’t run, to the nearest exit.”
We tried the glass doors leading to the bank of elevators and found them locked. It was long past closing time for the building. “How the hell do we get out of here?” Dick asked, an edge of panic in his voice. We found the emergency staircase. It was locked.
“Oh, my God,” he groaned. “We’re trapped in the Time-Life Building.”
“Go back in there and ask Graves for the key.”
“You go back. I’d rather jump.”
We heard a clanking sound coming from the far end of the hall and half ran, half walked in that direction. A janitor stood by the freight elevator, swishing a mop in a pail. We stepped past him into the elevator and he said, “Sorry, no passengers.” I explained that the door to the main elevators was locked. He shrugged and clanked his bucket. “Listen,” I said sharply, “we’ve got to get out of here right now. We’re on a special assignment. Plane to catch … Washington.”
“Brazil,” I heard Dick mutter.
The janitor took us to the ground floor. We ducked out of the building, into the rain and icy wind, and hailed a taxi. I pulled my collar up around my face while Dick slumped in the corner of the seat, looking like a man in shock.