The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  After his trip to Zurich, Bob Morvillo returned to New York and flew on from there to Barbados for a week’s vacation with his wife. In Barbados he picked up Time and read the story, which quoted him as saying, in a warning to Maury Nessen: “All right, but Irving should know that we’ll break his balls before the grand jury if he says he met with Hughes.” Morvillo had never said anything faintly resembling those words, and he had never spoken to a Time reporter. He flew into a mild rage and handed the article to his wife. She read it and said: “This man Irving must be a horrible person.”

  Morvillo laughed. “I just finished telling you that everything they said about me and the U.S. Attorney’s office was a lie. What makes you think the rest of the garbage they write is true?”

  It was a good summing up, but it also occurred to us that Time might be launching an advance smokescreen to obscure any possible revelations concerning their sister publication, Life. It was already known that we had had access to the version of Noah Dietrich’s autobiography written by Jim Phelan, but no one as yet had revealed that our principal mine of information was the secret files of Time-Life itself. Apparently no one in the publishers’ ranks intended to reveal it, either. Ralph Graves, Life’s Managing Editor, who with Dave Maness had given me access to the files that past June, wrote an extraordinary editorial in the February 25th issue of Life. “Close parallels,” he said, “have been discovered between Irving’s book and an unpublished manuscript by James Phelan based on talks with Noah Dietrich (Time, Feb. 21), but much remains unaccounted for and much remains to be learned about Irving’s sources and how he got them. Both Life and McGraw-Hill intend to continue their investigations …”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said to Dick, astonished. “They know where I got the material. From them!”

  Dick shook his head sadly at what he considered my naïveté. “You forget, amigo, there’s no con game without a mark, a sucker. And more often than not, the mark makes it all work because he thinks he’s going to make a killing. He usually shuts up at the end and you don’t hear a peep out of him — unless, of course, it gets down to the wire and he knows someone else is going to blow the whistle. Remember W. C. Fields’s classic statement. It’s the last word on hoaxes: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’”

  “Come on. What are you trying to give me? The people at McGraw-Hill and Life are honorable men.”

  “So was Brutus, and I’m not trying to give you anything. The judge is going to give it to you, schmuck — right between the eyes.” Dick guffawed.

  “That reminds me,” I said seriously, “what do you say when he peers down at you and pronounces sentence? Can you protest? Or do you just say: ‘Thank you, Your Honor …’?”

  “You don’t say anything.” Dick’s laughter trailed off, too. “You just faint.” He managed a weak smile —” But don’t worry about hurting yourself on the floor of the courtroom. If you fall in the right direction, you’ll land on me.”

  Harold McGraw had finally announced, “We’ve been taken,” and McGraw-Hill was later to return to Life the monies received for serialization rights.

  Until the day we pleaded guilty, Dick and I practically lived in Maury Nessen’s office. Dick awoke at six, waited for the 23rd Street Automat to open so that he could eat his usual substantial breakfast, and then walk briskly up to 55th Street and Third Avenue — a jaunt which, he said, “starts the day off right. And from then on it’s downhill all the way.” I fumbled awake around nine, had a sleepwalker’s breakfast of coffee and cake, and reached Maury’s about an hour later. We would immediately begin the round of question and answer, speculation and maneuvering which would keep us occupied seven days a week, often till midnight or even later, until the middle of March. Maury was on the telephone almost daily to Morvillo, Tigue, and Newman.

  When Maury was not fencing with the prosecutors, he and Mert Sarnoff and Phil Lorber were putting Dick, Edith, and me through our paces, preparing us for our appearances before the grand jury and also for the private sessions of mea culpa with the U.S. Attorneys and the District Attorney. Time and again during those preparations, Dick was reduced to stuttering, helpless silence.

  “All right,” Mert Sarnoff would say to him, pinpointing a date or an event, “don’t tell me what you thought. Listen to the question! I want to know: what did you say to him, and what did he say to you?” — and Dick would attempt to reconstruct our conversations in Palma at the quayside, in our bungalow in Pompano Beach, in Palm Springs, getting the dates confused, forgetting when we had been where, and almost totally unable to remember the whereabouts of the $750,000 we had received from McGraw-Hill. I couldn’t understand what was wrong: it wasn’t like Dick to fall apart this way, and all of us — the attorneys and myself — began to worry that he would collapse before the grand jury and seriously compromise our intent to tell the truth. And then I suddenly understood what the problem was, what was making him hunch down in his chair and edge nervously around the simplest questions: he was conscience-stricken at the thought of laying so much of the blame on me. I took him to one side — it was nearly two o’clock in the morning and we had been talking nonstop since early that afternoon. I said: “Listen, old buddy, words like ‘stool pigeon’ and ‘squealer’ don’t apply in this situation. We’ve got a story to tell and I’ve been elected the bad guy.”

  “Yeah,” Dick said, wearily. “And I’m the dupe, with two hundred grand stashed away in Zurich and another fifteen in stocks with Merrill Lynch.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, you’re going to wind up a pauper.”

  I was referring to the fact that efforts toward restitution had begun a few days after my arrival in New York. On my behalf, Maury had told both the U.S. Attorney’s office and McGraw-Hill that I was willing and able to return the full amount of money they had given me over the course of the year: $750,000. Those efforts, however, were frustrated almost immediately by three parties: the Swiss government, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and McGraw-Hill itself. The Swiss had instantly frozen not only the Hanne Rosenkranz account, but Edith’s long-standing account with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Winterthur.

  The Winterthur account contained only $5,000 of the “Hughes” money (a repayment by me of an old debt to Edith, dating from the time we bought our house in Ibiza), but the Swiss apparently made no distinctions: they were out to put a lock on everything and anything, including Edith’s inheritance from her family. The IRS had frozen all our bank and brokerage accounts in the United States, and demanded $500,000 as income tax on the $750,000 “earned” in 1971, despite my announcement that it was to be returned to McGraw-Hill. McGraw-Hill, in turn, had triply complicated the financial picture by refusing, through their lawyers, to take a position on restitution of the money until after our plea of guilty. They would not want the world to think we were forgiven our heinous crime.

  “So stop the soul-searching,” I said to Dick. “If you don’t think society knows how to take revenge on zhlubs like us who make the Establishment look like dummies, you’re just kidding yourself. And the worst is yet to come.”

  As soon as Dick realized that he was hanging with me on the edge of a vat of boiling oil, he became his old self again — not quite as cheerful as before, but at least a reasonable facsimile — and the rehearsal for cross-examination began to make progress.

  One reason we spent so much time in Maury’s office — aside from the need to get the facts straight before our grand jury appearances — was because the alternatives had become so unpalatable. In the street, in restaurants, or even in the Chelsea Hotel, we were treated like celebrities. A celebrity, I soon realized, is a form of social freak: prey to every chance passer-by, a foreigner to the joys of anonymity and therefore deprived of all peace and privacy, and liable to be misquoted if he asks for the time of day. Vanity may be tickled the first time, or even the tenth time, but by the hundredth time it becomes a weariness of the flesh. On two occasions, however, it did give me a good chuckle. One morning i
n the Automat on 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue a short, tired-looking, middle-aged man in a windbreaker came up to me and said, “Mr. Oiving, I want ya to know the woiking people are behind ya.” A few nights later, at midnight, returning to the hotel after walking the babysitter home, a drunk planted himself squarely in my path. “I wanna tell you something,” he said, “’cause I know who you are.” He looked red-eyed and dangerous, and when he jabbed a stubby finger at my chest I thought we were in for some trouble.

  “Okay,” I said, warily.

  “Don’t give back a penny of it, kid,” he whispered.

  I could see that we made good copy for the media, but after a while that made no sense to me, either, unless my invariable reply of “No comment” simply whetted the newsmen’s appetite for something more substantial. Were we heroes? Anti-heroes? It puzzled me. Had we been truly successful, we might have felt like heroes — although the world would never have known. But we had failed. In the repressed, middle-class world of America, where so few men try to do anything other than cut along the dotted line, could the failure itself of a bold and lunatic scheme be the image of ultimate success? Whatever the answer, it would have to be beside the point. I knew what we had done: we had created a fictional autobiography, tried to perpetrate a hoax, and had been caught. I was still the man I had always been. Some five or six years ago, in another book, I had written: “Men wear masks on which they carve portraits of what they would like to be or think they ought to be. Opportunity, like fortune, does not change a man — it unmasks him. What is under the mask may surprise you; as it often surprises the man. But it was there before.”

  In Maury’s office we could be ourselves: our crime was known to the last jot and tittle. We were not specimens, objects of curiosity: we were people about whom one might say, “There but for the Grace of God …” Maury soon became more than our lawyer; he became our friend. Such was his confidence in us that he provided us with a key to the office so that we could come in and work at any hour of the night. We had valuable documents, too, that needed a secure resting place; and after the first week we were given the combination to the firm’s safe. I was touched.

  “Think of it,” I said to Dick. “They gave me the combination to the safe. Don’t they know I’m ‘Con Man of the Year’?”

  Dick brought me back to earth. “That just proves it,” he said, shaking my hand.

  By contrast the world outside the office was an obstacle course and a jungle — and nowhere more so than in the Chelsea Hotel. There, in our two-bedroom suite on the fourth floor, Edith and I nightly created our private version of hell. Recriminations, tears, apologies, more recriminations, with the children yelling and crying, and Dick fleeing back to the less painful isolation of his own room; sometimes until three or four o’clock in the morning, Edith poured forth her anguish from wounds I had inflicted and which my mere appearance reopened; hour after hour I begged, I entreated, I pleaded, I apologized.

  But it had to be borne, because what she bore was worse. I could only, in retrospect, see Edith as a victim — a victim of her love for me, her trust, and her own naïveté. I had asked her to travel to Zurich for me as a courier and she finally agreed, and the reason for that agreement — which she gave to me now in New York for the first time — was an astonishing one. But I knew her, and I knew it was true. “I guessed about you and Nina,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t really over. I thought this would bring us closer together, what we needed. And I thought, what makes me sick now to realize how dumb it was of me, that if you did this thing it would keep you so busy you’d stay out of trouble.” By trouble, of course, she meant only one thing: Nina.

  The Zurich bank and police officials had already stated their absurd conviction that Edith was probably the mastermind behind the whole scheme, because of her “sophisticated knowledge of Swiss banking procedures.” Even The New York Times dug up a quote from “a friend, Mrs. Christine Geiser,” who supposedly said: “If this Hughes thing is true, it was Edith who was the active person. Clifford may have thought of it as you would think of a plot for a book, but she is the one who all at once says, ‘Come, let’s try it.’ She does what she likes, like a child of 4. She has no inhibitions.’” Neither Edith nor I had ever known a woman named Christine Geiser.

  Edith had trusted me and I had failed her and betrayed her in every way possible. She faced charges in Switzerland as well as America, and it looked as though the Swiss were out for blood as well as the pound of flesh: their banks — their raison d’être as a nation, since the cuckoo clock had gone out of fashion — had been embarrassed and might even be accused, by a jury made up of other than Swiss bankers, as culpable. The sense of guilt I felt regarding the fate of her and the children cut deeper into my heart than any guilt I would have to plead before the court. My guilt before the law was clear and the limits of punishment was equally clear. But the limits of punishment and the method of payment for having placed Edith in such jeopardy, for having damaged her pride as a woman, and for the precarious future I might have created for two small boys — these punishments and penalties had no boundaries.

  I had hit the pavement at last, but there was more wreckage than just my bones.

  In early March we gathered in Bob Morvillo’s office to tell the tale. I went first, reciting the facts through a session that lasted nearly seven hours. Bob Morvillo leaned back in his chair and fired the first question.

  “Have you ever met Howard Hughes?”

  “No,” I said.

  From then on it was a dreary session. There were only two moments when the prosecutors appeared to doubt me. The first was when Lenny Newman asked if Nina had ever known that it was a hoax. The second came when I was asked the identity of the forger. Jack Tigue had already suspected it was me, and I had given handwriting samples to the Federal grand jury; even an unprofessional eye could see that there was a natural similarity between my handwriting and that of Howard Hughes. Back in late January, when the U.S. Attorney’s office had first decided on a joint investigation with the New York District Attorney, the prime suspect for the forger had been Elmyr de Hory, my ex-friend who had been the protagonist of Fake! and the premier art faker of the century. The government investigators cast a wide net. According to Robert Morvillo, they also contemplated the theory that I had had an accomplice inside either McGraw-Hill or Time, Inc. But they simplified matters with the decision that in the long run I had the key which could unlock the entire mystery, and so all efforts were concentrated to induce me to come in and tell the story.

  Lenny Newman still seemed slightly skeptical that I was the forger. After all, as Dick had remarked a year ago in January, forgery was a profession. You just didn’t pick up a pen and a single sample letter and write eighteen pages of script that received the unequivocating stamp of authenticity from two famous handwriting analysis firms. Newman looked at me, frowning.

  “How long did it take you to write that nine-page letter from Hughes to Harold McGraw?”

  “Not very long. Maybe an hour. Maybe less.”

  “Our handwriting expert says that would be practically impossible. How many drafts did you make?”

  “Just one.”

  Newman raised an eyebrow. “Would you mind?”

  “No, what the hell. Give me a pad of lined paper.”

  Chuck Clayman, Newman’s assistant, provided me with a pad of lined paper.

  “Just a letter to yourself,” Newman said. “Sign it ‘Howard R. Hughes.’”

  Resting the pad on my knee, I knocked out a brief note once again giving me Howard’s permission to offer his autobiography to McGraw-Hill. Newman blinked twice, then showed it to Clayman. “I’d like one, too,” Jack Tigue said. “I want to show it to our expert in Washington.”

  I wrote another letter. Tigue clucked his tongue and handed it to Henry Putzel III, the youngest of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys. Putzel later framed it and hung it on the wall of his office in the United States Courthouse building at Foley Square. Close to six
o’clock, nearing the end of the long interrogation, we came to the incident of the purported Howard Hughes telephone call to the seven newsmen. “Why the hell didn’t you say it was Hughes calling?” Jack Tigue asked me. “That might have given you a better chance.”

  “It just never occurred to me,” I said.

  “Didn’t you recognize the voice?” Henry Putzel asked, puzzled.

  On that note, with all of us laughing and Putzel looking slightly red in the face but taking the faux pas with his usual good humor, we all shook hands and decided to call it a day.

  We had one more session, this time with Dick and I together, to go through the transcript and indicate our sources for each anecdote, each bit of information.

  “We got that from the Time-Life file,” Dick or I would say. “That was in the Dietrich manuscript, but in a different form.” “That’s out of the whole cloth-pure bullshit.” This last response was the one most frequently heard, and invariably invoked Morvillo’s high-pitched peal of laughter, and amused head-shaking from Tigue and Putzel.

  Toward the end of the session, Tigue said to me: “What I don’t understand is why you treated John Meier so kindly — calling him ‘a nice kind of dope.’”

  “That wasn’t John Meier,” I said. ‘That was Johnny Meyer, Hughes’s publicity man during the war.”

  “No,” Tigue said, “it was Meier. I haven’t got those pages here, but I’m sure of it. I read it.”

  “But I wrote it. You’re wrong, Jack.”

  Tigue’s lips set in a tight smile. “Not a chance. It was John Meier, the guy who’s running for Senator in Nevada.”

  “I’ll bet you a year.”

  Maury gasped and Morvillo jerked upright in his seat. “I’ll check it in Maury’s office,” I said. “I’ve got a copy there.”

  I was right, and I called Tigue and read him the passage. “But I can understand why you were confused,” I said, “so I won’t hold you to the full year off the sentence. I’ll settle for six months.”