Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  Sy Hersh, who had now used his access to Cusack’s papers to increase his book advance by several hundred thousand pounds, was as much of a Kennedy enthusiast as the next American, but he was also a highly professional journalist with a peerless reputation to protect. So, very sensibly, he began to ask friends and associates of the Kennedys to tell him what they knew about Camelot’s relationship with Lawrence Cusack (or ‘Larry’, as he chummily calls him in the notes). Worryingly, he drew a complete blank. Even Kennedy’s former secretary, whose name appeared on some of the letters, claimed never to have heard of the lawyer. Another graphologist was brought in to scrutinize the handwriting and although she conceded that it looked like Kennedy’s, she was able to discern the tell-tale stops and starts and minute irregularities in pressure that characterize a painstakingly forged script.

  By this point, with the finger of suspicion already hovering over Lex Cusack, some fatally damning careless mistakes were found in the letters. On one letter there was a zip code – something that had not yet been invented. Then it was discovered by forensic experts that some of the typewritten papers had been created on a machine which hadn’t existed at all in the early 1960s. But the detail which indicates most emphatically that Lex was the type of underachieving, glory-hunting son to make it all up was the discovery by Hersh that he had lied about his army qualifications and academic credentials in a wedding announcement in the New York Times.

  Hersh knew full well that hoaxers frequently turn out to have left a trail of mis-truths and self-aggrandizing lies, and eventually he had to admit he had been conned. In 1999 Lex was imprisoned for ten years for defrauding his buyers of a total of $7,000,000.

  Astonishingly, despite Cusack’s conviction, and although scraps of paper were found in his office which appear to show him practising Kennedy’s handwriting, some of those buyers were determined to reclaim their property from the government lawyers who seized them in the process of the case. One collector, Mike Stern, who spent $300,000 on forty documents in the mid-nineties, told journalists: ‘We paid for them, we’re entitled to them. Stamp them with the word “forgery” if you have to, but we want to hang them on our walls even if they are fake.’ It seems, then, that the enduring strength of the Kennedy myth is very much above the law, whatever you believe about the man himself.

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES

  HOWARD HUGHES IS one of the most enduring symbols of Hollywood’s golden age. As a director, he discovered the film stars Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, as a lover he was associated with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Ginger Rogers, and as a pilot and racing-plane designer he broke several world speed records. But the side of his life that fascinated the gossip column-reading public more than anything was his self-imposed exile into his own, reputedly very strange, world during the last fifteen years of his life. After suffering a breakdown in the late 1950s, his obsession with germs and an escalating drug problem led him to isolate himself completely from the outside world, living in a series of sealed-off luxury hotel suites and attended only by a few trusted and hygienic glove-wearing intimates.

  Although the full details of his later years were not fully known until after his death from heart failure in 1976, stories would occasionally leak out, and he became known as a madman who never cut his nails or wore clothes and sat naked in a white leather chair all day watching old films. It was at the height of speculation about Hughes that the writer Clifford Irving – a New Yorker living in Ibiza who had written several critically acclaimed novels and, interestingly, a biography of an art forger – came up with the idea for an extraordinary literary hoax. Judging by the fact that his commercially unsuccessful novels had never earned him the kind of money he liked to spend, and that his latest effort had not been accepted for publication at all, it is safe to assume that his chief motivation was financial.

  According to his own account of the affair, The Hoax, which he published in 1981, he had been in Spain, about to cross over to Ibiza, when he bumped into his friend, the writer Richard Suskind. Suskind was a children’s author who specialized in historical adventure stories and although he was less of a literary player than Irving, he was used to doing a considerable amount of research to give his books a feel of historical accuracy. During their conversation, talk turned to the reclusive film director and one of the men struck upon the idea that there was a lot of money to be made out of a book about the man – if only the public (and the publisher) would believe it was in some way authorized. It occurred to Irving that if his friend were willing to research everything there was to know about Hughes’ life, he himself would write it up and capitalize on his relationship with the respected publishing house McGraw-Hill to get them a book deal.

  They decided to tell the publishers that Hughes had granted a series of exclusive interviews to Irving and had also turned over to him a number of letters and sworn statements for use in what would be the only authorized book ever to be written about the man. Irving would, in effect, be ghost-writing Howard Hughes’ autobiography. By the time he went to his editors later in 1970 he had put together a proposal which they would be made to turn down. Documents apparently from Hughes (in fact forged by Irving on the basis of a handwriting sample he had seen in a magazine) were produced to verify Irving’s claims, and a handsome advance of $100,000 was offered. After some tough bargaining, this was raised to a massive $665,000 for Irving and a further $100,000 for Hughes. Cheques were duly written and paid into Irving’s bank account and also a Swiss account opened in the name of H. Hughes by Irving’s wife Edith.

  Now the job of writing could begin, and drawing on every newspaper and magazine article and official record they could find on the man (plus a few less publicly available sources) enough biographical data was amassed to fill a very authentic-seeming volume of memoir. One of the private sources used by the men was an unpublished ghostwritten autobiography of Noah Dietrich, the man who had for years been Hughes’ closest confidant. Dietrich had worked as Hughes’ general assistant prior to his retirement and, now in his eighties, was seeking help putting his memories down on paper. A writer called James Phelan had been given the job, but it was easy for Irving to get his hands on the manuscript: he let it be known that he – a more accomplished writer – would gladly consider working on the manuscript instead of Phelan (who was not doing a brilliant job), and the editors handed it over.

  Odd though it may seem, one worry Irving and Suskind never seem to have had is that Howard Hughes himself would hear about their ruse and try to stop it. They were convinced that the old director would either be insane and detached enough not to know what was going on in the world, or so paranoid about interaction with the public and ashamed of what he had become that he would never dare come out of his luxurious hermit’s cave to challenge them.

  Assuming these things, Irving blithely presented his manuscript to McGraw-Hill towards the end of 1971. Alongside the text he presented a number of notes written in Hughes’ hand, which he had managed to get authenticated by a graphologist. The publishers must have known that high-profile people who had been close to Hughes were saying that this book could not be for real: that Hughes would never do such a thing. Just to make absolutely certain, they subjected Irving to a polygraph test to make sure he was telling the truth about his meetings and interviews with Hughes. During the test, Irving managed to keep his cool almost perfectly, betraying only signs of ‘inconsistencies’ not outright lies. Apparently, that was to be expected – after all, there would necessarily be some aspects of the Irving–Hughes relationship that were justifiably private. So, as planned, the imminent publication of the book that would finally lift the lid on the most enigmatic celebrity of the twentieth century was announced via a press release, and a lucrative serialization deal was brokered with Time magazine. The preface alone, in which Hughes sets the tone for the confessional mood of the pages to follow, must have been enough to get dollar signs flashing furiously in eyes:

  Since 1957, as is well known,
I haven’t granted an interview or had a photograph taken . . .

  The fact that I shunned publicity had a backlash. Just because I was the richest man in the world and wouldn’t give interviews . . . Every newspaper and magazine in this country has a reporter whose sole job is to snoop into my private life and the doings of my companies . . .

  But now, because I’m nearing the end of my life, I want to set the record straight.

  They tried to put me in an asylum. They wrote outright lies about me. The portrayal of me as an aging lunatic – I won’t have it.

  I want the balance restored. I don’t want future generations to remember Howard Hughes only as an obscenely rich and weird man. There’s more to me than that . . . intend to be dead honest . . . This is the truth about my life, warts and all.

  The veteran television journalist Mike Wallace interviewed Irving about his remarkable coup and, although he believed everything he said, he admitted afterwards that as soon as filming was over, his cameramen and sound technicians had all agreed there was something very suspicious about the writer. As he later recalled ‘They understood. I didn’t. He got me.’

  Then, just as it seemed Irving and his accomplices would get away with it, a strung-out but lucid Howard Hughes broke his silence. In the first week of 1972 he arranged a conference call with a group of journalists he had worked with in the past. By now the news, gossip and entertainment media were baying for blood and even Irving himself must have been longing for a resolution of some kind. Television cameras were set up in the office where the journalists were to receive the call, and at the appointed time, as the world looked on, the phone rang. Hughes, sounding remote but enervated, made it clear that he had never met this Clifford Irving, knew nothing about him, and certainly had not given anyone permission to co-write his autobiography.

  A less desperate hoaxer would have given himself up there and then, but Irving, from his own private hideaway in Ibiza, denounced this phone call as a fake, and then suggested that Hughes, who was obviously of unsound mind, had changed his mind and the book was to go ahead. But with McGraw-Hill now starting to worry about where their money had gone, a full investigation was launched. One of the first things it uncovered was the fact that the bank account in Switzerland into which Hughes’ portion of the advance money had been paid had only been opened recently, and by a woman calling herself Helga Hughes. This woman was quickly identified by bank staff as exactly resembling Irving’s wife, Edith. Even when Swiss police turned up at the Irvings’ home, they tried at first to deny any knowledge of a hoax – hinting merely that someone posing as Howard Hughes might perhaps have taken them in. But by the end of the month it was clear even to the eternally optimistic and ambitious Clifford Irving that the game was up, and on 28 January both he and his wife agreed to make a confession.

  After the trial for fraud that followed, Irving was incarcerated for fourteen months, his accomplice Suskind for five, but Edith’s sentence was suspended. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their marriage was not to last. Hughes would not last much longer either, but he did live long enough to see Irving come out of prison a stronger, fitter man (he had given up his smoking and drinking lifestyle and turned into a gym addict). It must have irked Hughes further to see Irving not only resurrect his novel-writing career but to take it to a greater heights than he ever had before, writing several bestsellers. Finally, in 1981 (once Hughes was no longer around to spoil his fun) Irving wrote his book-length account of the hoax that made his name. And it was this that inspired the 2006 film The Hoax starring Richard Gere as Irving and Alfred Molina as Suskind, which ensured that a whole new generation of cinema-goers are fully conversant with the wild man of Hollywood and the daring schemer who believed he could get away with the grandest identity fraud on record.

  THE HITLER DIARIES

  ASK SOMEONE TO think of a literary hoax and the first one they will come up with is probably the Hitler Diaries. This headline-grabbing affair captured the public imagination not only because the diaries fed into the on-going fascination with the most influential villain in twentieth-century history, but because – despite being very shoddily executed – they hoodwinked some of the most prestigious newspapers and academics in Europe. They were, in the words of the autograph expert Kenneth W. Rendell, ‘bad forgeries but a great hoax’.

  The story began in the early 1980s when Gerd Heidemann, a journalist for the popular German news magazine Stern, came to his editors with the remarkable news that he had found an antiques dealer who had dozens of notebooks in which Adolf Hitler had recorded his innermost thoughts between the years 1932 and 1945. It would be hard to imagine a more significant literary discovery. So much is known of Hitler’s public life but so frustratingly little of his inner life that something like this – a genuine insight into his character and his responses to the evils his regime committed – could well change the understanding of history.

  Heidemann himself was known to nurture an unhealthy interest in the material leftovers of the Third Reich, and was a keen collector of Nazi memorabilia. His most prized possession was Carin II, the yacht once used by the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering, which he had bought in the mid-1970s, having saved up the money during his fifteen-year career as a reporter on Stern. By the early eighties the repairs on the boat were costing him so much he decided to sell, and one of the first people he approached as a likely buyer was a more wealthy memorabilia collector, Fritz Steifel. During a meeting at his house, Steifel revealed that he had in his possession a most remarkable book: a single bound leather volume of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. Heidemann was dumb-struck by this revelation. He had never heard even a rumour that such a thing existed – and quizzed Steifel as to its provenance. He was told the book – and dozens more like it, each covering a six-month period in Hitler’s life – had been found in the wreckage of a plane crash in East Germany at the end of the war and fallen into the hands of a high-ranking official who sold it for hard currency to an antique dealer in Stuttgart. That dealer had then sold it on to Steifel.

  Heidemann, who was known by his colleagues to be a very enthusiastic if somewhat gullible reporter, sped back to Stern with the heady news. But only one of his colleagues paid his unlikely story any credence, the magazine’s historical researcher, Thomas Walde. Together, the two men decided to journey to the site of the plane crash and see for themselves what they could find. They managed to locate the crash site and although there were no remaining manuscripts to be found there, the sight of the mangled plane was enough to convince them the story was true and they assumed all the valuable loot had been taken away by local residents.

  In fact, that part of the tale was true after a fashion. At the end of the war, a plane load of sensitive documents had indeed been removed from Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and flown, for safe keeping, towards Bavaria in a mission called Operation Seraglio. However, the plane had crashed and the papers were lost. After leaving the crash site, Heidemann and Walde then managed to track down the alleged antiques dealer in Stuttgart, who their contacts in the illegal world of Nazi memorabilia-trading had said was called Herr Fischer.

  This Fischer turned out to be a low-rent criminal and forger whose real name was Konrad Kujau. Throughout the 1970s he had been selling phoney artefacts to collectors like Steifel, ‘authenticating’ each one with an official-looking certificate of his own fabrication. He carried on his work untroubled by fears of retribution because he knew full well that if any of his patrons suspected him of fakery, they would hardly go to the police about it. He was not making a fortune, but was doing better than his brother, who was a railway porter in East Germany. One day, on a whim, he had made a single volume of Hitler’s diaries out of an old school exercise book and offered it to Steifel, one of his best customers, but had not been planning to create any more until Heidemann came to him with an offer of 2,000,000 marks for the entire set of diaries. Obviously, Kujau was not about to turn this money down, but he knew he would need time to manufacture the other volumes he h
ad spoken of. He decided to tell Heidemann that he would have to get the books smuggled out of East Germany one by one by his brother (who he elevated to the position of army general for the purposes of the ruse), which could of course take some months or even years. He also stipulated that he would deal with nobody apart from Heidemann himself. All this having been swiftly agreed to, the two journalists now had to persuade their bosses at the magazine to come up with the money to pay for them. When it was pointed out how much extra revenue such a scoop could garner for Stern, they agreed.

  Over the next few years, as the diaries were ‘smuggled’ out of East Germany (in reality they were hastily put together by Kujau), Heidemann would regularly make the trip to Kujau’s office with a suitcase full of cash to pay for each new instalment. But whereas he told the magazine each one cost 200,000 marks, he was actually only paying Kujau 85,000. The huge commission he was dishonestly skimming off Kujau’s fee, in addition to the massive new contract he had negotiated with Stern in return for his work on the diaries, was making him a very rich man.

  By the beginning of 1983 Stern had enough of the small black leather-bound volumes to unleash the scoop of the century on its readers. The diaries may not have contained the extended passages of psychological insight into the Führer’s mind that they had hoped for, but along with accounts of all the meetings and official engagements that he attended, there were glimpses into his private life with Eva Braun and his personal problems with ill-health which would nonetheless make them highly sought after. The magazine began to negotiate syndication rights to other newspapers and media groups, one of which was News Corp, who proposed to buy the British rights to the story and splash it across the Sunday Times. At this point, Stern’s editors also sought independent verification for the manuscripts from a small handful of handwriting experts. Had they been less worried about keeping their scoop a secret, they might have contacted some of the country’s many highly regarded war historians and Hitler experts, but instead they only went to graphologists – and what’s more, the examples of Hitler’s ‘real’ handwriting they produced to compare the diaries to had themselves been faked. By Kujau. A police forensics officer was casually contacted for advice, but by the time his report (which was inconclusive) came through, they had already gone to press.