The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  I had neither seen nor spoken to anyone from McGraw-Hill since leaving New York in mid-January. The relationship had ended; apparently they realized it as well as I did, despite their public proclamations of “we’re-waiting-to-see-how-this-all-turns-out,” and they made no effort to contact me. I wanted to call Beverly Loo — but what was there to say? The personal apology I had to deliver would also be a confession of guilt; and the moment for that, our lawyers pointed out, had not yet arrived.

  At Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, the forces of law and order were convening; the investigation was underway. The United States Attorney of the Southern District of New York and the District Attorney of New York County had elected to pool their investigative resources. “Which means,” Maury said, “there’s going to be a fight over the body.”

  “The body?”

  “You, pal.”

  We were in his office again and he had just put down the telephone after speaking first to Robert Morvillo, Chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Pleading that he had not yet had sufficient time to interview his client and learn the facts, Maury had managed a postponement of my subpoena to appear before the two grand juries.

  “Let’s get down to business.” Maury tilted back in his chair and lit another cigar. “You’re going to have to make restitution to McGraw-Hill, and the sooner the better. The bulk of the money is in Switzerland, in the Hanne Rosenkranz account, and you’ve told me that there’s some of it in Spain. Where in Spain?”

  “Here,” I said, reaching into my briefcase for the latest issue of Time. Time had been following the story with the relentlessness and clear-sightedness of Mister Magoo on the track of a stolen flea. I tossed the magazine across the desk to him. It was open to their latest article on the Hughes affair. “Right there” — and I pointed to a photograph of our house on Ibiza.

  “You see that open shed on the right? That one stone that’s whiter than the others? There’s $50,000 in Swiss francs behind that stone.”

  “In cash?”

  “We left Ibiza in a hell of a hurry. There were reporters all over the place. We had no way to get it out.”

  “How much?”

  “I never counted it.”

  “You,” Maury said, “are just too goddam much.”

  Harry Grigg, with his merry brown eyes and modified Groucho Marx mustache, was President of Interstate Security, Inc., a private detective agency with some 600 employees in New York and New England. When Maury and I told him the problem, Harry’s eyes lit up with pleasure. “This is one I’ll handle myself,” he said. “I’m getting stale behind a desk.”

  Harry’s job was to fly to Ibiza and extract the cash before someone else — a thief, a reporter, Interpol, or the Spanish police — reached the logical conclusion and did the same thing. The finca was completely unguarded except for Rafaela, the maid. I gave Harry a list of the various hiding places, which he committed to memory, and then a handwritten letter of introduction to Rafaela.

  “Anything else beside the money? Anything in your studio? Any drugs? Any documents?”

  “No,” I said.

  He left for Kennedy Airport and 48 hours later the telephone rang in Maury Nessen’s office. Maury signaled me to listen on the extension. It was Harry Grigg. “If anyone can do this job,” Maury had cried, with pixyish delight, “it’s Harry! He’s just great.”

  “I’m at Ibiza airport,” Harry said calmly. “I’ve mowed the lawn, I’ve washed the laundry, and I’ve got the summer clothes.”

  “It must be a bad connection,” Maury replied. “I didn’t quite get that.”

  Harry quietly repeated his message. He had mowed the lawn, washed the laundry, and he had the summer clothes.

  Sweat popped out on Maury’s broad forehead. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and hissed at me: “Did you tell him to get any summer clothes?”

  “For Christ’s sake — it’s January.”

  “Harry, I think there’s some kind of misunderstanding. Cliff said he told you …”

  “I’ll call you back,” Harry said, and immediately hung up.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Maury said.

  “I think I’m going to be poor.”

  Ten minutes later the telephone rang again. This time it was John Wentworth, the Vice-President of Interstate Security. “Maury, just before he left there was something he asked me to tell you. There’s a code that we set up when I drove him to the airport. It goes like this. What’s outside the finca is called the summer clothes. What’s behind the wardrobe is called …”

  The next night Harry arrived back in New York. We had just finished dinner at Maury’s apartment. It was the first meal we had eaten at anyone’s home since our arrival in New York and the pressures had been building on both Edith and me until I thought we would shatter like glass. That morning, with Maury, I had made my first visit to the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square to see Robert Morvillo and Jack Tigue, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who had been assigned to the case because of his expertise in Swiss banking practices. Maury had warned me to keep my mouth shut and listen, and I did just that while Morvillo — a chunky, shirt-sleeved man in his late thirties — made a brief speech. “Morvillo’s tough,” Maury had said, “but straight.” His pitch to me was a simple one. “If you help us, if you tell the whole truth, you’ll stand a better chance. If you don’t help us and we have to unravel it ourselves, we’ll do it, because we have nothing but time and manpower.” The United States Postal Inspectors, it seemed, had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the case and were scouring half the Western Hemisphere for information. “Our opinion,” Morvillo said, “is that you did not meet Howard Hughes. In fact, we’re sure of it. And we also have good reason to believe that the story you told, the one in that affidavit in the Rosemont suit, won’t hold up. The longer you wait before you talk, the worse it will be for you.”

  Maury and I had a good idea what they were talking about, but that evening, at his house, we had no heart to go deeper into it. We sat with his three children for a while in front of the television set, watching a hockey game.

  A few minutes before we were ready to leave, Maury received a telephone call. He drew me into another room. “That was from a reporter,” he said. “They know about Nina.”

  I felt the first twist of the knife and asked: “How much do they know?”

  “That she was with you in Mexico last February. They’ve been hunting for her the last few days. They’ve found her in the Bahamas.”

  “They’ll think she’s visiting Howard Hughes.” I tried to make light of it, but the going was hard. “Has she talked to anybody?”

  “I couldn’t find out.”

  “She won’t,” I said. “I know her. She’ll tell them to go stuff it, or she’ll just say ‘No comment.’”

  But I had to talk, because I knew that whether or not Nina did, the story of the Mexican trip and our meeting in California would come to light now. I had to talk to Edith. That night at two o’clock in the morning, in our room at the Chelsea Hotel, I told her that I had not been alone in Oaxaca and Beverly Hills.

  Edith cried herself to sleep.

  Whatever our private sense of desolation, the mundane world existed and threatened, and each challenge had to be met with a response. Dick was still in Palma — alone, uninformed, and vulnerable. I had called him from Connecticut the day I had made the decision to tell the truth to Maury. “Don’t,” he begged, and I had to say, over and over, “I know what I’m doing. Trust me. I’m only talking to lawyers, not the police.”

  Since then the Postal Inspectors had been to his home in Palma, threatening him with a subpoena and suggesting extradition. When they vanished, the reporters appeared. Dick locked the door and sat down to sweat it out.

  “But why does he need a lawyer of his own?” I asked Maury. We were in his office once more, on the morning after my confession to Edith. I was exhausted; I had slept fitfully all night, drifting in and out of nightmares. �
��Dick and I are a team. We went into this — ” the word “crime” stuck in my throat like a bone — ”this hoax, together. We trust each other. Why can’t you represent us both?”

  “Because there’s what’s called a conflict of interest.” Maury sighed and stuck a panatella in his mouth. “Usually, where there are two or more people involved in a crime, you get a rush to the courthouse. They’re practically beating on the door to get in.” He hesitated. “If I could arrange it, for example, what would you say to you and Edith going down to the U.S. Attorney’s office and confessing? I mean, if in return for it, you’d get immunity.”

  “Immunity from prosecution?”

  “That’s right. Anything’s possible. The only thing is it would mean that Dick would go to prison, probably for five years.”

  “You know damn well I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Quite right. You probably wouldn’t. But that’s what Dick will be offered — immunity in return for a full confession. His attorney would be less than ethical if he didn’t explain the opportunity. I couldn’t make him that offer myself — that would mean betraying the trust of my clients, of you and Edith. That’s why Dick needs separate counsel.” For the first time, Maury’s slight smile faded. “You know Suskind. I don’t. Now you tell me — would he make a deal like that if it’s offered to him?”

  “No, he wouldn’t do it; either. Not Dick.”

  “I’m glad you’re so sure. In the same set of circumstances, I’ve seen brother turn against brother.”

  “Not Dick,” I repeated. “He couldn’t do something like that. Even forgetting me for a minute, he’d be throwing Edith to the wolves.”

  But inside I was shaken, all the warmth and security of my feelings about Dick suddenly cast into shadow by Maury’s words.

  Pinpoints of doubt still pricked me when I called Dick later that morning and told him that Maury had arranged for two lawyers, Merton Sarnoff and Fred Boyden, to represent him, and that Boyden would be flying to Mallorca the next day — and probably bring him back to New York.

  “One thing more,” I said. “You have my word that I won’t do anything here in New York without talking to you first. So …” I hesitated. “Don’t you do anything, Dick, without letting me know.”

  The U.S. Postal Inspectors and a team of reporters from The Los Angeles Times, including John Goldman, had tracked Nina to the Bahamas. Our first knowledge of this came directly from John Marshall, who telephoned Maury on the evening of February 2nd. The conversation was transcribed verbatim by a secretary at our end of the line. Federal authorities, Marshall related, had come to see them at Treasure Cay. “We didn’t refuse to see them,” he explained, “because I saw no useful purpose in not answering the questions. I had already read the Irving affidavit. Nina is shattered and doesn’t want to talk to him … Nina said she went to Mexico with Irving and Irving told her that he was going to Mexico to see Howard Hughes, who he was writing an autobiography about. Irving claims he met Hughes. Nina has not corroborated,” he emphasized. “At no time, to her knowledge, did he meet anybody at all. She told the FBI that as far as she knew he did not take a plane trip.”

  Maury said nothing.

  “Nina is ultimately respectable,” Marshall went on. “She comes from a good family. It’s sad that it’s got out that she has had an affair with him. She has to set the record straight. I’ve told Nina that under no circumstances must she tell anything but the truth. She’s agreed to go to the United States. She must clear her name. Her image is the height of respectability. I would like you to tell Clifford from me and Nina that he must take the consequences. I, as Nina’s manager, must insist that she tell the truth. He showed very little love for Nina in involving her. I see no justification for her protecting him.”

  He pontificated in this vein for a while and then Maury broke in to ask: “Are you with the Henry Fords?” We had had a hint of that already and it was later corroborated by Frank McCulloch, who told John Wentworth that he had tracked Nina from London to Bermuda in the Fords’s company. But Marshall neatly ducked the question.

  “We’re with the Guinnesses and Rootes people in the Bahamas.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t reach you,” Maury said.

  “Give Clifford a message from Nina and I.”

  Maury laughed. “What kind of an Englishman are you? You mean me.”

  “No,” Marshall replied, missing the point. “Nina and I. We’re extremely sorry and we hope that whatever he’s involved in, he’ll sort it out. I can’t allow Nina to protect him in any way if it will damage her reputation.”

  He hung up and Maury turned to me with a sad but still slightly devilish glint in his eye.

  “So much for your faith in Nina, pal. If she’s told that much, she’ll tell everything.”

  For a while I couldn’t answer. Nina knew the details of the hoax. She had always said to me: “Be careful, darling.” And yet, knowing what it would mean for me and Edith and Dick, she had not hesitated to tell anyone who would listen that I couldn’t possibly have met Howard Hughes in Mexico.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said, feeling a little numbed.

  But in the days to come it became clear to anyone who was neither blind nor deaf, including me, what it was all about. John Marshall and his budding superstar were ready to grant any kind of interview to any member of the media. Nina blushed and said, “It’s all so ridiculous.” Then she went on, quoted in a dozen newspapers: “I am flabbergasted. I can’t understand the whole thing … Quite honestly, you know, I didn’t know very much about Howard Hughes until I read about him … I would see Clifford again. I am loyal to my friends. And I would love to hear the truth from him … It seems I’ve been deceived by a man who seemed to have everything — he was gentle, nice, amusing, and highly intelligent … I only pray to God that he will have an acceptable explanation that will justify his actions … It’s been a harrowing experience for me, and I have come back to the United States to do what I know in my conscience I must do — tell the truth.”

  It might all have been viewed as a machine-gun barrage of misquotations, except that in the midst of it an article appeared in the London Sunday Mirror, reprinted in The New York Post. It was written by Nina. It remains one of the most amazing peripheral documents in the Hughes affair, rivaling in a minor way both my affidavit and the Autobiography itself. In part, she wrote: “It’s all getting a little bit like James Bond,” Nina wrote. “The events of the past four days have been in a world of sheer fantasy. All I keep hearing are two names. One is Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire I’ve never met in my life. The other is Clifford Irving, the name of a man I have loved and an author I still believe has pulled off the literary coup of the century.

  “It was seven-and-a-half years ago in Ibiza when we found ourselves in a small beach party together. Clifford — I’d read several of his books and knew him by reputation — was in the party and we discovered we both lived on the island. I was then living with my husband, Frederik, and our children. Ibiza is a small island and it has lots of social life and it wasn’t long before I was bumping into Clifford at cocktail parties and other functions. He became a family friend. It wasn’t until last year that our friendship developed into any kind of relationship.”

  She then described the Mexican trip, repeating that I could not have met Howard Hughes, and went on: “Last November, Clifford and I met again in Los Angeles. I picked him up at the airport and he was all aglow over his manuscript on Howard Hughes. Clifford had sworn me to secrecy about the whole thing. At the house we borrowed from a friend I cooked some steaks for Clifford and my manager, John Marshall, and over dinner Clifford told us of the strange meetings he had with Howard Hughes.

  “It all seemed so fantastic, and Clifford showed us the original letter he had received from Hughes granting him the rights to the biography.

  “It looked perfectly genuine. Apparently he had known Clifford over a number of years and trusted and respected him …”

 
A few days later, Nina and Marshall arrived in New York to testify before the two grand juries. The interviews continued nonstop, this time at the St. Regis Hotel and along Fifth Avenue in the February sunshine. NBC, CBS, and ABC were on hand, and dates were booked with the Mike Douglas Show, David Frost, Johnny Carson, and Dick Cavett.

  Marshall capped it all by stating: “No singing until after the grand jury. This isn’t a circus, you know. We’re here for serious business, to help the authorities get at the truth.” Possibly unsure that his audience had got the point, he added: “Look, you understand, we’re not here for the publicity.”

  I watched some of the performances on television. This was a woman I had loved and trusted. I had held back nothing from her; I had told her everything. Edith was already facing the threat of extradition to Switzerland by the District Attorney’s office in Zurich. Edith was a woman whose loyalty had no limits. The carelessness with which I had plunged into the Hughes caper had placed her in the worst jeopardy, and it brought no relief to know that if I had understood the consequences to her and my children I would never have taken the first shaky step that long year ago in Ibiza. With steadfast dedication I had hurt her and lied to her, and all for a woman who had betrayed me — lightheartedly, smiling.

  I felt slightly sick. And more than that, ashamed.

  Two days prior to her appearance before the grand jury Maury had managed to contact her attorney, Richard Russell. We had known that ultimately I would have to tell the full and true story under oath, and I said to Maury: “You’ve got to stop her from perjuring herself.” Maury said to Russell: “For your client’s sake, she should tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — and my client will do the same.”

  Before the Federal grand jury, Nina told her oft-repeated tale that I could not possibly have met Howard Hughes in Mexico. She denied, under oath, any prior knowledge on her part that the autobiography may have been a hoax.

  When it finally came time to confess everything to the U.S. Attorneys and the New York District Attorney, Leonard Newman came to the subject of the Baroness van Pallandt. “Did she ever know it was a hoax?”