The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  There was a moment of embarrassed silence; then Tigue said lightly: “If it was in my power, Cliff, you’d have it.”

  After that we went before the Federal and State grand juries to repeat the tale, this time under oath. The long, disheartening hours of mea culpa were finally enlivened when it came time for the Federal grand jury to dismiss Edith from the room. Edith had finished the recital of her various trips to Zurich; there was little else she knew or could tell. Jack Tigue directed the foreman of the jury to dismiss her, and the foreman said: “You’re excused, Mrs. Hughes.”

  Chapter 22

  Guilty, Your Honor

  Indictment day: Thursday, March 9th — one day before McGraw-Hill had scheduled official publication of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes — opened with howls from Barney, whines from Nedsky, and with me burrowing deeper into the bedclothes in an effort to avoid facing what had to be faced.

  Maury and Phil were to pick us up at nine-thirty and take us down to the Federal Courthouse, where we would hear a portmanteau charge which included Conspiracy to Defraud, Forgery, the Use of Forged Instruments, Using the Mails to Defraud, and Perjury. At nine o’clock, as I was somnolently munching pound cake and sipping coffee, Dick came in. He was wearing what he called his “courthouse suit” — a black single-breasted worsted, with a white shirt and black knit tie. It also happened to be his only suit.

  “I’ve got the answer to the question.”

  “What question?” I muttered.

  “You asked me last night how to keep your nails trimmed in prison, when they won’t let you have a nail file.”

  “Yeah. How?”

  “Claw the walls.” He burst into loud laughter, which lasted until he stuffed a chunk of pound cake into his mouth with trembling fingers.

  Edith said, “Merde.” I winced; and the babysitter looked at Dick as if he had lost his mind: which in a sense he had.

  Dick was not named in the Federal indictment, except as a co-conspirator. He set out on foot for Sarnoff’s office on 41st Street; from there they would take a cab to the State Courthouse, where we would join them and where all of us — Dick, Edith, and myself — would plead guilty to Grand Larceny, Conspiracy, and a variety of other charges. In this way the demand “for a body” by State and Federal authorities would be satisfied; although, since Dick outweighed me by about seventy pounds, New York State was getting more for its money.

  Before Judge John M. Cannella of the Southern District of New York, Edith and I were officially indicted, which was the prelude to formal arraignment. Edith, in fact, had already been arrested two weeks previously, based on the Swiss warrant for extradition. Bail had been fixed at $250,000 and her physical presence was limited to New York and Connecticut. “If you go more than halfway across the George Washington Bridge,” Maury had tried to explain to her, “you’re out of the jurisdiction and you forfeit the bail.” But the reality of this failed to permeate Edith’s mind and she was never able to understand how she was under arrest when she could trek with Nedsky and Barney every morning to the corner grocery store and spend her afternoons in the Chelsea Hotel, painting. Not that she believed herself to be free, for the Chelsea and New York City itself were for her a prison without bars.

  As soon as the courtroom formalities had finished, I was led down to what seemed to be the dungeon of the building, fingerprinted, and photographed in color with a Polaroid camera. My bail was fixed at $100,000. Our appearance in the State Court before Judge Joseph Martinis was much the same as in the Federal Court. Dragging a train of reporters and cameramen behind us, we were escorted by detectives to the Fifth Precinct House on Elizabeth Street to be booked. The newsmen poured into the precinct house on our heels and immediately began setting up lights and cameras as though it was a Hollywood soundstage. We were then led into a back room from which the press was barred.

  The room had all the charm you might expect in one of New York’s oldest precinct houses — peeling yellow-green walls, scarred furniture, posters of wanted men tacked up on a cork bulletin board.

  A detective brought in some papers for us to sign. “You’re allowed to make one phone call,” he said. “If you don’t want to make it, sign these waivers.” Edith and I both signed, but Dick hesitated. “Is it all right if I call my wife? She’s expecting it.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” the detective said.

  “Well, she’s in Spain,” Dick said.

  “Gee, I don’t know. Spain …” The detective scratched his chin. “I’ll have to find out about that.”

  “Never mind,” Dick said. “I’ll call her later.”

  We were taken out into the turmoil. We stood at the rail facing the desk, jammed in on all sides by lawyers, detectives, uniformed patrolmen, and about fifty reporters, a dozen of whom jabbed microphones in our direction. The microphones also lay across the huge desk before which we stood. They seemed to be silently pleading with us to say something — anything. I whispered to Mert Sarnoff, who was standing at my right shoulder: “It’s a fucking circus.” This appeared in the daily press as: “Irving turned to his attorney and whispered, ‘You’re standing on my foot.’” Of such stuff is history fashioned.

  “Where to now?” I said.

  “To be photographed and fingerprinted again,” Phil explained.

  “You know,” Dick said, “by the time they get through with you, they make you feel like a criminal.”

  After three sets of fingerprints were taken of each of us in the Criminal Courts Building, there was another inexplicable delay. Detectives popped in and out, and once Leonard Newman of the D.A.’s office appeared. All seemed worried and I asked Maury what the problem was.

  “They’ve got to take the mug shots soon, before the photographer closes up shop.”

  “What happens if he closes up?”

  “What happens is that you and Edith and Dick spend the night in The Tombs — in jail.”

  It came home to me in full strength: I was going to jail. It gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — and the feeling did not go away as we crossed the street and entered The Tombs.

  Down iron stairs; past brownish-yellow tiled walls; iron bars; a green corridor whose walls were covered with graffiti. “You should see this place after night court,” said the detective at my side. “Packed end to end with whores and pimps, drunks puking on each other. You guys are getting the VIP treatment.”

  Edith was first to be photographed. As the assistant hung the number under her chin and turned her face to the left, Dick pointed to a large 500-pound scale standing against the wall.

  “Who the hell could weigh five hundred pounds?” he asked.

  I had my revenge then for his remark about clawing the walls in prison to keep your nails trimmed. “Your cellmate at Riker’s Island,” I said. “The one who sleeps in the upper bunk. They’ve got him all picked out for you. He hates Jews, he’s queer, and he farts all night.”

  An article appeared in that day’s New York Daily News speculating that if we were convicted of all the counts with which we were charged, I could get something over a hundred years. Dick said: “Well, I’ll take my twenty-five percent, as always. That way you’ll only have to do seventy-five years in Danbury or Allanwood. If you eat your vitamins regularly and take plenty of exercise and fresh air, you’ll still be in good shape when you get out — and you’ll only be a hundred and fifteen years old. I’ll …” he broke off, unable to go on, and tears filled his eyes. “Oh, God,” I heard him murmur.

  On Monday, March 13th, we pleaded guilty in both the Federal and State courts. That evening the manager of the El Quixote Restaurant, next door to the Chelsea, where we had occasionally dined during the past weeks when we were sick of TV dinners and the confinement of the hotel room, left a bottle of Spanish white Rioja wine outside the door to my room. We put it on ice and drank it at midnight. The taste reminded us instantly of Ibiza: the hot windswept summers at the Salinas, the rainy autumns, the cold winter nights when we had sat by the fire w
ith the children while Eugen munched fresh-cut apple in her cage, the springs when the almond blossoms lay like snow across the green fields and my boat was hauled up on the slip at the Club Naútico to be ready for the first sunny breeze of May. It was far away — too far away. What price idiocy? My reputation as a writer was crippled; I was known as a liar and a con man; I had achieved — and hardly by design — not fame but notoriety. I owed, with Dick and Edith, well over $1 .5 million to McGraw-Hill, the IRS, and our lawyers.

  The year of the hoax seemed a strangely dim memory. In what lifetime had it happened? In whose lifetime? And why? The children were asleep, Nedsky moving about restlessly in his bed, Barney rocking in his crib. Edith finished the last of the wine and began to cry softly, and there was no way to comfort her.

  I walked Dick back to his room at the end of the hall. We were three months away from a prison sentence-three months that would certainly be a form of purgatory. Living with that threat hanging over our heads would be like living with an amputated arm or leg. The phantom ache of my missing freedom already nagged at me, like the phantom ache of the missing limb. Freedom — that most elusive and abused of abstractions — had suddenly become as palpable as the lump in my throat when I contemplated what we had done in the past and what awaited us in the future.

  “Sorry,” I said to Dick, in the hallway.

  He understood. “Don’t be a damn fool,” he said. “You didn’t con me. I knew what I was getting into … I think. And I take the responsibility for my own actions.”

  “Knowing what you know now, would you do it again?”

  He was silent for a long moment. “It was an interesting experience,” he said, “but I could have done without it. And you? Would you do it again?”

  “Never. I’ve lost too much.” Then I managed a slight smile. “But I had a crazy idea this morning, standing there in court. Listen to this. When we get out of jail and I finish my novel, we go down to Argentina. We take a trip back into the jungle, or the pampas, and one day …”

  “I’m ahead of you,” Dick said, his red-rimmed eyes already sparkling. “I had the same idea. We meet this very old man, white-haired with a little white mustache, and we get to drinking, and become friendly, and he says, ‘Ah! You’re the men who wrote the autobiography of my old friend Howard. I am getting very old, Clifford, and ach du lieber, it is time I, too, finally told the true story of my life.’ And you say: ‘Well, Adolf …’”

  We both tried to laugh; but it was difficult.

  On the morning of June 16, 1972, before United States District Judge John M. Cannella of the Southern District of New York, Clifford Irving was sentenced to two-and-a-half years’ imprisonment. He spent seventeen months in three federal prisons, including two stays in solitary confinement, before he was paroled and released on February 14, 1974.

  Judge Joseph Martinis of New York State sentenced Richard Suskind to six months’ imprisonment, and with time off for good behavior he served a total of five months.

  Edith Irving received from Judge Cannella a sentence of two years, all but two months of which were suspended; she served those two months in Nassau County Jail, near New York City. Swiss charges against her were not dropped, as previously promised, and in March 1973, despite the prosecutor’s recommendation that she not be incarcerated, a Swiss tribunal in Zurich sentenced her to two years’ imprisonment. On May 5, 1974, she was finally paroled and released.

  Howard Hughes died on April 5, 1976, in a Lear jet en route from Acapulco, Mexico to Houston, Texas.

  The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, by Clifford Irving and Richard Suskind, has never been published.

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1 Genesis in Palma

  Chapter 2 Wife and Mistress

  Chapter 3 The Ibiza Mob

  Chapter 4 South of the Border

  Part Two

  Chapter 5 Project Octavio

  Chapter 6 All Right So Far!

  Chapter 7 Helga Takes a Trip

  Chapter 8 Bonanza

  Chapter 9 “Who’s Howard Today — You or Me?”

  Part Three

  Chapter 10 Bungalow One at the Beachcomber

  Chapter 11 The French Quarter

  Chapter 12 The $1,000 Letter

  Chapter 13 “McGraw-Hill Announced Today …”

  Chapter 14 Confusion to Our Enemies

  Chapter 15 Confusion to Our Allies

  Chapter 16 The Swans of the River Limatt

  Part Four

  Chapter 17 Enter Howard Hughes (or a Reasonable Facsimile)

  Chapter 18 Nightmare in Paradise

  Chapter 19 “Arrest Me? For What?”

  Chapter 20 The Baroness Sings Off-Key

  Chapter 21 High Stake Poker at Foley Square

  Chapter 22 Guilty, Your Honor