The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  I had no way of knowing what Nina had told the grand juries. “Yes,” I said.

  “When did you tell her?”

  “At the beginning,” I said. “In Mexico. In February, last year.”

  “Would you be willing to take a lie-detector test and say that?” Newman asked sharply.

  I knew then that Nina had lied. “Yes,” I said, “I’ll take a test.”

  “You’re sure you’re not saying this just to get some kind of revenge?”

  “Revenge?” I smiled sadly. “No, Lenny. I’m saying it because I promised to tell you the whole truth.”

  A week later both the Federal and State grand juries called Nina before them, to give her the opportunity to recant. The alternative was a perjury charge which I would have faced had I lied and had she told the truth the first time. She was informed beforehand what was involved, that the truth was now out in the open, and she confessed that she had known from the beginning that it was a hoax; she wept openly in the elevator in the U.S. Courthouse and before the Federal grand jury. A witness said: “It was an Oscar-winning performance.”

  For Nina the tears were apparently a brief interlude, and despite her admission to the grand juries that she had lied, the public charade continued. On April 18th, she appeared on television on the Mike Douglas Show. After letting her sing an appropriate ballad called “Try to Remember,” Douglas began to chat with her. This was the dialogue:

  DOUGLAS: You have a very nice manager … he’s very British though, isn’t he?

  NINA: Yes, he is.

  DOUGLAS: He’s a good manager, isn’t he?

  NINA: He’s super. He really protects me and looks after me and has helped me through a lot of things which I really couldn’t have managed without him.

  DOUGLAS: Did you feel at any time that this whole thing was a fraud? Did you sense that in the beginning at all?

  NINA: No. Not really until Mr. Hughes himself denied it in the interview he did by telephone. You remember?

  One day, shortly before that, I had been talking with Bob Morvillo in his office at Foley Square. “Tell me something,” he suddenly said. “If you know the answer. Why do you think, at the beginning, that she went seventy-five percent of the way toward crucifying you, but she wouldn’t go a hundred percent?”

  “I suppose she was trying to protect me,” I answered.

  Morvillo’s look was brief — first a flash of puzzlement and wonder, then of pity. “Protect you?” he said.

  And then he chuckled softly, and we moved on to other business.

  Chapter 21

  High Stake Poker at Foley Square

  Dick, with Fred Boyden, the attorney we had dispatched to Spain, landed at Kennedy Airport on the evening of February 7th. Dick still had no real idea of the furor the Hughes Affair was causing throughout the country. He had been visited by reporters from the wire services and magazines, and teams of cameramen from the television networks. But compared to the hordes that descended upon Edith and me every time we poked our noses out of the Chelsea Hotel, he was living in all the blissful isolation of an anchorite.

  That came to an end within minutes after he landed. With policemen on either side of him, with Boyden clutching his arm and warning him to answer “No comment” to any and all questions, he left the International Arrivals Building and plunged into a blaze of popping flashbulbs, shouting reporters, and television cameramen stumbling backward over cables that looped in all directions. The late edition of The New York Post ran a photograph of him on the front page. He looked like a boar at bay, lip curled back in a tooth-revealing snarl, eyes wild and frightened — about as far removed from his usual gentle self as I could imagine.

  Mert Sarnoff spirited Dick off to the Chelsea Hotel, where we had reserved a room for him a few doors down the hallway from us, and an hour later they joined me in Maury’s office. I took Dick by the elbow, hauling him into an adjoining conference room. Maury’s warnings about the mad scramble for the courthouse door had never left my mind.

  “Welcome to panicsville.” I gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Did Boyden spell it out for you?”

  Dick laughed weakly. “Yeah,” he said. “But don’t look so worried. I couldn’t have done it to you — not even if Edith wasn’t involved. We’re a united front. We’ll sink or swim together.”

  I shook his hand, and said: “Come on and meet Maury. We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

  That evening, in concert with the five lawyers, we mapped out our general strategy. We would have to make a deal and we knew it. To plead “not guilty” would almost certainly mean a long and costly trial, with only a slim chance of winning. We knew that Nina’s testimony, in the long run, might hurt us but could never convict us; Maury’s cross-examination of her on the witness stand would eventually force her to admit that she had known all along it was a hoax. That admission would destroy her credibility before both judge and jury. Our case was threatened by Edith’s involvement with the Swiss banks in Zurich and by my mistake in the affidavit, where I had sworn that George Gordon Holmes had picked me up at the airport on the day of my arrival in Miami on December 2nd, taken me to see an ailing Hughes, and then driven me to the Newport Beach Motel. The rental contract for my car at Miami Airport had been time-stamped and so had my arrival time at the motel. What I had claimed to have done in two hours could only have been done in five.

  “And even if we win in court,” I said, “what happens to Edith? Can the Swiss still extradite her?”

  “Probably,” Maury declared.

  “Then it makes no sense. Let’s bargain.”

  The concept of plea-bargaining — the early revelation of the truth without trial in return for a lighter sentence — is at the root of the American judicial system. Without it, both the courts and prisons would be jammed to overflowing and the system itself would collapse like an overburdened donkey. Both the U.S. Attorneys and the New York District Attorney had already made the overtures to us; it only remained to make the best possible arrangement.

  Our primary aim, we decided, was to keep Edith out of prison. She was the least guilty of the three of us, and we had Nedsky and Barney to worry about — if both of us drew sentences, they would be parentless. Next, we would try to keep Dick’s sentence to a minimum. He was my co-conspirator, my collaborator, but I was to be acknowledged as the mastermind who had so successfully sold the scheme to McGraw-Hill and Life. From the beginning there was no doubt that the sharpest edge of the judicial knife would fall on my neck. I accepted it with few qualms. I had never realized I was committing a crime — I had thought of it as a hoax. The money had always been there for restitution; the concepts of mail fraud and grand larceny were foreign to me and I had never dreamed of the possible penalties — but the feeling of guilt was still there. My heart was sore, rubbed raw with the knowledge that I had drawn Edith into something she had never understood. That was the deeper guilt. For that, in all ways, I suffered, and had to take the consequences.

  That same evening the newspapers broke the story of my trip to St. Croix with Anne Baxter, whom the press immediately dubbed “Scuba Annie” in the same lighthearted way they had called Nina “the Danish pastry.” It made titillating reading — for everyone but Edith. We were in Maury’s office, and she plucked the newspaper from my hand as soon as she saw the expression on my face. I had spotted Annie’s photograph. Edith ran through the hall to Harold Weinberger’s office, and I followed her. She turned on me like a cornered cat.

  “Nina wasn’t enough,” she cried. “You had to make a fool of me again. You make me sick. All these papers,” she said, “I save! To show to your sons when they’re grown — so they know what kind of man their father was and why I left him.”

  “It meant nothing,” I said, and the words sounded as hollow as they must have sounded to the millions of men who had spoken them before.

  “To you,” Edith shot back. “Because you never knew how much I loved you. You did what you pleased, while I waited for
you and worried about you. But if it wasn’t one, it had to be another …”

  Tears and screams intermingled; it was too much catastrophe for her to absorb and the fury, the hurt, had to find an outlet and a victim. She swept Harold’s desk clean of papers and litter, seized a china jar of pencils and hurled it at the wall. As it shattered, and as I moved forward to stop her, she turned on me and swung. A clenched fist, a lucky blow — it caught me on the neck, below my left ear, on a nerve — and I fell like a stunned buffalo to the floor of Harold’s office.

  If I had expected Edith to fall on her knees beside me and wail her sorrow, I would have waited forever. A minute later, when I managed to climb to my feet and drop into Harold’s desk chair, she was gone. I laid my head in shaking hands and waited for the pain to go away.

  That night I walked through the streets of the city, alone, more miserable than I had ever been in my life.

  Toward the end of the week we made our arrangements with Bob Morvillo and Lenny Newman. I would tell them everything and plead guilty before both a Federal and a State court. Dick would be named only as a co-conspirator in the Federal court and would plead guilty to the State. No promises would be made to me by the government; the sentence would be entirely in the hands of the judge. Morvillo would make no recommendation. If I received two years’ or more imprisonment in the Federal court, Dick would get a maximum of one year from the State. If I received less than two years, Dick’s maximum would be six months. Edith, whom both prosecutors realized had been no more than a courier and a loyal wife, would be granted immunity from prosecution. Morvillo and Jack Tigue volunteered to fly to Switzerland to plead with the Swiss prosecutor, Peter Veleff, the Zurich District Attorney, on Edith’s behalf. There was to be no double jeopardy in the United States and Switzerland. That, as far as I was concerned, was the key and the sine qua non to the deal. Edith had to go free.

  Morvillo and Tigue took off from Kennedy Airport on a Thursday night, flying Sabena Airlines to Brussels, where they were picked up by a U.S. Postal Inspector. From there they flew to Zurich. Early Friday afternoon they met with Veleff and Lieutenant Willi Ulrich of the Zurich police.

  Late that night, Bob Morvillo telephoned Maury from Switzerland. “I had a hell of a time,” he said, “but it’s okay.”

  Veleff, he explained, had been horrified at the idea of plea-bargaining in general, and also at the American concept of the Fifth Amendment, which gave a man the right not to testify against himself or to make a statement which might tend to incriminate him. “However, he thought our pitch was strong and inherently reasonable,” Morvillo said, “and he had no objection — but he had no power to ignore the fact that a crime had been committed.” He could not let Edith go free if she were simply given immunity from prosecution in America.

  Disturbed at the reaction, Morvillo persuaded Veleff to take him to see the Attorney-General of the Canton of Zurich, Doctor Luty. “Then I came up with the idea,” Morvillo related, “of charging Edith with conspiracy. If we included all the Swiss charges in a single conspiracy charge before the Federal court, it might get round the problem. Luty got the point and thought it was a good idea. He agreed that if we charged either of the Irvings with anything, the Swiss wouldn’t proceed with their charges. In fact, he agreed to put a stop to the extradition proceedings.

  But Veleff, the prosecutor, was unenthusiastic about the arrangements, and the following morning a second meeting was held. “We re-stated the proposition,” Morvillo explained, “and Veleff agreed to go along with the deal.”

  Our relief and gratitude were short-lived. The promise of freedom for Edith lasted less than a week, by which time we had committed ourselves to confession. Bob Morvillo and Jack Tigue had done their best; their actions had been not merely self-serving, but humane. On Monday morning, however, the newspapers bannered the story on page one: SWISS OK DEAL ON IRVING’S WIFE. The story in The New York Daily News went on: “Swiss and United States authorities have made a secret deal to drop charges against Clifford Irving’s wife, provided author Irving cooperates with investigators and that ‘someone goes to jail’ …” The other New York newspapers trumpeted the alleged deal with equal certainty and disregard for the consequences.

  How the story leaked to the press, no one knows or will admit. But the damage was done. Apparently deciding that dignity was more precious than either justice or a firmly given commitment, the Swiss authorities wrote to Robert Morvillo. “They’ve simply reneged,” he told Maury. “They take the position they had made no deal.”

  Later the Swiss authorities claimed that it had all been a misunderstanding. “But there was no possible misunderstanding,” Morvillo said flatly. “We had an interpreter with us, and Jack Tigue speaks German. It was repeated three or four times on two separate occasions. I wouldn’t have left Zurich if it was vague or ambiguous in the slightest. They just reneged.”

  We sat in the anteroom of Morvillo’s office for hour after hour while Nessen, Sarnoff, and Lorber hassled back and forth with Morvillo, Tigue, Newman, a sprinkling of postal inspectors, and other government and state attorneys. We could hear the voices but not the words — except when the tone grew acerbic or loud with rage, when Morvillo’s cutting tenor came through the door like a knife, underscored by a bass rumble from Sarnoff, speaking around his ever-present pipe, and by placating noises from Phil Lorber’s slightly deeper tenor.

  I felt like a kid who had been caught playing hooky and was waiting to see the principal. Dick and I made feeble attempts to chat with the two secretaries in the anteroom. Once, after a particularly virulent outburst of angry voices, Phil came out shaking his head. “That Maury,” he whispered. “Playing brinkmanship like Kennedy with Khrushchev! I wouldn’t have the balls.”

  Periodically Sarnoff would come out to confer with Dick and Maury with me. Then they would return to Morvillo’s inner office and the poker game would go on. The stakes were our freedom — in effect, our lives.

  Buried as we were in the rotted hold of a sinking ship, there was still time for humor. “It’s either laugh or cry,” I said to Dick. “I don’t give a damn what the press thinks. They want me to beat my breast and grovel in public, but I can’t do it. I didn’t kill anybody or rape a ten-year-old girl. They’re big boys over at McGraw-Hill and Life.” I remembered the lie-detector test and the mysterious absence of the promised final written report. A moment in time arrives, I decided, when the victim’s willingness may lead him, consciously or otherwise, across the thin dividing line between gullibility and culpability.

  By then Time had dropped President Nixon from the cover of their February 21st issue and substituted a portrait of me — which even my own children couldn’t recognize as their father — naming me Con Man of the Year. Among other things I was accused of being in debt to Carlo Gambino of the Mafia, wife-beating, drug-taking, and heavy drinking; and if they had known I had a pet mongrel dog back in Ibiza, bestiality might have been included in the list of my sins. Time had Dick rushing to the U.S. Attorney and “in exchange for immunity from prosecution … willing to testify that contrary to his earlier affidavit, he had never seen Hughes.” Equally fictional was Time’s report on my reaction to Frank McCulloch’s informing me that “we’ve got the Phelan manuscript … and we’re going to lay it down alongside your manuscript in the morning and read them together.”

  Jim Phelan was the writer who had ghosted the first version of Noah Dietrich’s book, which Stanley Meyer had so affably given to us. Phelan arrived in New York and the manuscript was compared with The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. The similarities were obvious, but Time’s editors worked dutifully and doggedly, eliminating every possible difference between the two versions, in order to make it appear that passages had been plagiarized. At the same time Phelan was telephoning night and day to the Chelsea Hotel, desperately trying to reach me. Calls from the press had become so burdensome that we had asked the switchboard to put them through to a friend, James Sherwood, a writer also living in the Che
lsea. Sherwood acted as a buffer between us and the outside world, and this produced one of the minor ironies of the whole affair. Our voices were similar and I was often in Sherwood’s apartment; half the time when Phelan thought he was talking to Sherwood, he was actually talking to me, pretending to be Sherwood.

  Sherwood and I often took notes and Phelan once said: “Cliff stole my property? Bullshit! I never thought it was any good myself. It wasn’t worth stealing — but Cliff dressed it up and made it look pretty good … There I was, up on top of McGraw-Hill, and all seven vice-presidents opposite me, stuffed shirts hanging onto their precious book they wouldn’t let me see … Here’s this sunshine kid coming from his island to the big city, and fighting for his life, and this old gumshoe who earned a salary all his life is living it up … This whole fraud caper really boils down to one generation against another.”

  Later, in an article commissioned by Esquire, but which that magazine finally decided not to print, Sherwood wrote:

  “… A voice on our telephone came through with desperate loneliness. He identified himself as Jim Phelan, being featured in the Time cover story. Jim’s was a halting style of phone conversation. His voice was whiskey-hardened. Its tone was garden-path gravel. Every syllable crunched. Said Phelan: ‘I want Cliff to know I’m Inspector Javert and he is Jean Valjean … I’ve gone down in the sewers after him, and I’ve found the truth … He’s written a very great book on Hughes. My book was so bad I never wanted to sign it, and no one wanted to give me a dime for it until Cliff came along. Now I’ve made $60,000, thanks to Cliff … I can tell you this. I know the truth, and I can turn around on a dime and support Cliff, only Time paid me more than a dime. If I stand up to support Cliff, I’ll never live to sit down. I’m 59 years old, and Time has too much invested in my story … Cliff Irving has been knifed by some of the great corporations of this country, because he’s shown them the truth …”