Howard Hughes (2 page)

And then, even more incredibly, Noah Dietrich, Hughes’ former right-hand man, came forward to confirm the book’s authenticity, unaware that several anecdotes in it had been shamelessly pilfered from his own unpublished autobiography. In a surreal twist, Dietrich told reporters that he had heard that Clifford Irving had been invited by Hughes to the Bahamas, and interviewed The Man with a glass partition separating them to ward off germs.

A last absurdity: handwriting experts confirmed that the ‘Hughes’ letters had to be genuine, declaring that to consistently imitate the distinctive idiosyncrasies in Hughes’ handwriting would be ‘beyond human ability.’

One can only admire Irving’s chutzpah. He began to feel invincible. So invincible, that in a moment of recklessness, he actually offered to take a lie detector test to prove his credibility. It was a bluff, of course, but McGraw Hill called it. The results were ‘inconclusive’, and McGraw-Hill never raised the matter again.

On January 7, 1972 Howard Hughes finally broke cover. From his hotel suite in the Bahamas he addressed a bizarre televised press conference, in which seven reporters sat around a horseshoe-shaped table addressing questions to a disembodied voice coming from a speaker set on a stand.

Hughes maintained he had never met Irving, and called the ‘autobiography’ ‘totally fantastic fiction.’ He added, ‘I don’t remember any script I ever saw in Hollywood as wild or imagination-stretching as this.’

Irving promptly replied that the disembodied voice was not Hughes, but an impostor. Forced into an appearance on America’s top-rated current affairs programme,
60 Minutes
, he brandished one of his forged letters, and described his meetings with Hughes: ‘He has on occasion worn false beards and false moustaches and wigs. There’s a
James Bond set-up here that’s out of the worst possible detective novel you could ever read.’

But the net was drawing tighter. Swiss authorities had been making their own investigations into the Zurich bank account of ‘H.R. Hughes’, theorizing that it was actually Irving’s wife who was depositing the cheques and withdrawing the money. (There’s a moral here: never trust the ‘confidentiality’ of Swiss banks). In the face of this clinching piece of evidence, Irving finally admitted to his lawyer that the whole thing was a sham.

‘The relief of confession’, he writes in
The Hoax
, ‘was sweet beyond almost anything I had ever known. I constantly had to lie to people, and there came a moment when the weight of that lie asserted itself, when I realised how seriously people were taking what Dick and I thought of as a game. When it all finally began to unravel, a number of newspapers commented on how light-hearted I seemed to be in the face of this; they were all talking about “Irving laughing”. Of course I was laughing. I was rid of the burden! I didn’t have to lie anymore. I was laughing because it was over.’

In June 1972, Clifford Irving was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment on charges of Conspiracy to Defraud Through Use of the Mails. Irving’s wife, Edith, spent one year in a Swiss prison. Dick Suskind was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in New York. Irving returned to McGraw-Hill most of the money, retrieved from its hiding-places in the Ibiza farmhouse and in Swiss banks. But a fair amount had been spent on expenses and lawyers’ fees, and the author had been forced to pay taxes even on the money he returned.

Sixteen months later he emerged from prison with his life in tatters. For a long time, he says, ‘Many publishers wanted to have lunch with me, but none were prepared to publish my books. I’d pissed on publishing. That had never been my intention, but I had embarrassed a great many people who believed in the legitimacy of the autobiography. They were shown to be gullible, greedy, and, above all,
unprofessional.’ It took many years for people to stop regarding the author as Irving the hoaxer, and accept him as Irving the author. Once that happened, his books became best sellers.

In 2007 a film version of
The Hoax
was released, starring Richard Gere as Irving. But for the author the movie misses the point. ‘It depicts the writing of the autobiography as the act of a desperate man, bent on financial gain. The Hollywood gang never grasped that I was enjoying myself by creating a mounting series of intellectual and personal challenges. Maybe those challenges were amoral – even immoral. I’m emotionally too close to the event to comment credibly. But, since no blood flowed and nothing was broken except egos, isn’t the book itself justification enough?’

Is it? Let the reader decide.

For this reader
The Autobiography of Howard Hughes
is a brilliant weaving together of truth and falsehood – one might call it a ‘
metalife
’ – so artfully realised that even today it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

Dick Suskind died in 1999. Edith continues to live in Ibiza, in the same farmhouse where she and her former husband plotted the hoax. Howard Hughes died in 1976, but never took the time to write his autobiography.

‘Perhaps,’ Clifford Irving says, ‘when he read what I’d written on his behalf, he was satisfied with it.’

Mick Brown

The Daily Telegraph

London, 2008

HOWARD HUGHES AND I first met in Hollywood on the set of
The Outlaw
, which would place the date as circa 1940. My father, Jay Irving, was a cartoonist for Collier’s. He also had a mild interest in the birth of the television industry, as did Hughes, and they were casual friends. As a result, one morning my father and I were invited to visit the sound stage at RKO. I can remember sneaking briefs looks at Jane Russell’s breasts – I was only nine years old and other events remain blurred. Although my father later lost touch with Hughes, he had fond memories of him as ‘a shy and considerate man,’ a phrase I’ve heard echoed by others who knew him in those early years.

I grew up and became a novelist, and after a time made my home on Ibiza, one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. I described it in an
Esquire
article as ‘the Saint-Germain-des Pres of the Mediterranean, a lovely island, warm and swinging in summer, bearable in winter, cheap in any season.’ A strange place too, full of borderline lunatics and dropouts from contemporary life. They prepared me for appreciating Howard Hughes, the quintessential dropout.

In 1969 I published my first nonfiction book,
Fake!
, the true tale of an expatriate Hungarian art forger named Elmyr De Hory. My father gave me a list of ‘well-connected’ friends to whom I should send copies; he badgered me, as fathers do, and I took the line of least resistance and faithlessly promised, as sons do. He died in June of 1970
and shortly afterward, feeling remorseful about unfulfilled promises I had made him, I mailed copies of the book to a few people on the list. Howard Hughes was among them. I included a note reminding Mr. Hughes where and when we had met, and then I forgot about it.

Five months passed before I received an undated letter on yellow lined legal paper, the kind you can buy in any office supply store. The scrawled handwriting was firm extended well over the ruled left-hand margin the way a schoolboy might write if he were getting down toward the end of the pad. It said:

I speculated for a while if this could be a practical joke. Howard Hughes was reputed to be a billionaire, and if I had been asked what kind of stationary billionaires would use, I wouldn’t have answered, ‘Yellow legal paper.’ But if it was a joke there was no foreseeable barb to it, so I began to think about what Hughes seemed to be saying between the lines. I drafted a reply, saying, in effect: ‘Dear Mr. Hughes, I’d like to write an authorized biography of you. If this idea horrifies you, I apologize. If not, let’s talk about it. You certainly deserve a more
definitive immortality than the one that’s being forged for you these days by the media.’

I read this to my wife, who instantly advised: ‘Don’t send it. You’re in the middle of a novel and your publishers expect you to deliver on time. Don’t get sidetracked.’

‘Nobody really knows what kind of man Howard Hughes is. That intrigues me.’

‘Anyone who intrigues you,’ she warned, ‘is bound to be some kind of nut.’

But I mailed the letter the following day, and an answer arrived several weeks later, again scrawled on yellow legal paper. My reading between the lines had been accurate. Hughes wrote, in part:

It’s important to understand that I lived in the boondocks, both mentally and physically; I knew very little about Howard Hughes’ life and the legends that surrounded it. At the time, January 1971, I didn’t know that Hughes hadn’t been interviewed or photographed since
1957, and not a single person was able or willing to testify that they had seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. I knew only that he had reportedly left Las Vegas for the Bahamas and that there was some sort of internecine warfare going on in his business empire. I knew the customary phrases used to describe him: ‘bashful billionaire,’ ‘dedicated recluse,’ ‘phantom eccentric’ – ad nauseam. I didn’t know that one syndicated columnist, quoting ‘absolutely authoritative sources,’ had depicted Hughes as ‘an emaciated invalid with white hair down to his shoulders, shaggy eyebrows… a basket case who has flashes of his old brilliance but spends most of his time in a catatonic stupor,’ or that a witness before a Miami grand jury had stated that ‘the tycoon weighs 97 pounds, has long hair gray hair and a beard, and has fingernails and toenails eight inches long.’

Armed with ignorance and naivete – obviously among my chief assets in this instance – I wrote back and outlined my proposal for the biography.

Then the telephone calls began. The voice at the other end of the line was polite, thin and slightly nasal, bucked sometimes by what I later learned was an amplifier. He said: ‘Look, for Chrissake, let’s make this on a first-name basis or we’ll never get anywhere. Please call me Howard.’

Hughes, as he relates in his autobiography, prefers to place his calls at three or four o’clock in the morning when his mind is clear and the man at the other end of the line may still be bleary with sleep. I have no telephone at home, because home is a 400-year-old peasant farmhouse in the country; the telephone is in my studio, which perches on a rock jutting into the Mediterranean behind the walled town of Ibiza. I was only in the studio during the day, theoretically with an alert mind. If Hughes called at 3 a.m. the phone would buzz in the dark of an empty room – I was home in bed. He had his revenge later.

Our transatlantic conversations pirouetted round the subject of the book, we talked about life in Spain, a new house I was building, my novels (which he was starting to read, one by one) and I realized, after I’d made a mistake in relating a personal tale and been quickly corrected by him, that he had a dossier on me: it wasn’t a detail you could pick from
book jackets or any Author’s Who’s Who. We were still just disembodied voices spinning toward each other by satellite and getting regularly cut off by Spanish operators. I had read by now that he couldn’t abide smoking and didn’t drink and had a reportedly puritanical morality. I smoked two packs of black tobacco a day; liked my wine at dinner and my cognac afterward; and morally, for better or for worse, had my feet planted pretty firmly planted in the 1960s and their aftermath.

‘We’d better meet,’ he said, ‘to see if we get along. How about next week?’

‘Sure. Where?’

‘Fly to New York. Stay at the Buckingham Hotel. I’ll get in touch with you.’

‘Hang on a minute, Howard. You have a reputation for leaving people stranded.’

‘I swear I’ll call you as soon as you arrive.’

In early February I flew to New York, checked into the Buckingham on 57th Street, crawled into bed weary from the long flight, and at two o’clock in the morning he called, bright as a robin, welcoming me to his time zone. He asked if I minded more travel to meet him. I said I’d expected that, and he instructed me to stop off at American Express later that day; flight reservations had been made for me. I assumed Nassau but I would have believed Timbuktu. The ticket was waiting when I arrived; I had to take off at seven o’clock the following morning, and I was routed through New Orleans and Mexico City to Oaxaca, a town in southern Mexico.

‘This is paid for, isn’t it?’

‘No, sir,’ the clerk said, puzzled. ‘That’s $316.36. Cash or credit card?’

I paid and left, but I didn’t like that at all.

By now I had told my publishers about the venture, and they were excited but wary. Beverly Loo, the Executive Editor at McGraw-Hill, said, ‘You’ll never get as far as this Oaxaca place. That’s not the way Howard Hughes does things. He’ll have you bumped off the plane at New Orleans or Mexico City, and then you’ll be blindfolded and taken to the Bahamas or Las Vegas.’

In New Orleans airport the following morning I waited to be tapped on the shoulder by an unsmiling courier and then whisked off to an unmarked Lear jet or a 200-foot yacht anchored in the Delta. Nothing happened. In Mexico City I waited for the man again. He didn’t arrive. I flew to Oaxaca, checked into the designated hotel and began the next stage of waiting. I slept badly, hung around the hotel until early afternoon and then hired a taxi and visited the Zapotec ruin of Mitla, where I bought a king-sized serape. I was beginning to think it might be my only souvenir of the trip; there were no messages for me at the hotel when I got back. It occurred to me that I had come a long way and spent a fair amount of money to meet a man who had a reputation for keeping people ‘on the hook’ – as it was called in the multi-leveled ranks of the Hughes organization – for weeks on end, after which they would either be dismissed with some compensation or given a yearly retainer to sit around in some other place for the regal tap on the shoulder that might come or not. I had a wife and two small children waiting for me at home five thousand miles away, I was in a godforsaken town in southern Mexico waiting for a ‘phantom eccentric’ and a ‘bashful billionaire.’ How much of a phantom, and how bashful, could he be?

I was awakened by the jingle of the bedside telephone, which I snatched in the darkness and jammed to my ear. A voice said, ‘Mr. Irving? This is Pedro.’

‘Not good enough,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Pedro.’

‘I’m a friend of Octavio’s.’

I began to realize this was an elaborate and diabolical practical joke, I was already checking over in my mind the list of friends who might be responsible. ‘Pedro,’ I said slowly in Spanish, so he couldn’t possibly mistake the mood – ‘it’s four o’clock in the morning and I don’t want to play games. I’m glad you’ve got a friend named Octavio, but I don’t know what’s going on and I’d be grateful if you’d enlighten me before I hang up.’

He said cheerfully. ‘Octavio is the man you’ve come to see. Can you be ready in two hours?’

At dawn I was outside the hotel when a Volkswagen coasted up to the gate. Pedro was a slim, brown-faced Mexican of about thirty, with a neat mustache. We drove out of Oaxaca and into the countryside, past a small Indio village and then up a narrow paved road in steep spirals that circled an oddly-shaped mountain. The mountainside was lumpy with rough little cubes and pyramids overgrown by seared vegetation: this was Monte Alban, the once-sacred haven of the Zapotec kings who had ruled southern Mexico before the Aztecs came to conquer. The ruins overlooked the three green valleys of Oaxaca. The early morning air was fresh and cool, and the stepped temple buildings were brushed by puffs of clouds that seemed to touch the sky. There was a feeling at Monte Alban of being very close to a child’s idea of a finite and fixed heaven.

Pedro pulled up in a leveled-out space, a sort of dirt parking lot, behind the sunken stone ball court. He indicated another car, the only other car, about thirty yards away. I got out and walked over, scuffing at the dust, opened the door – and slid in next to Howard Hughes.

No eight-inch fingernails, no white hair touching his shoulders or white beard hanging to his belt. The last photograph of him I had seen had been taken in 1957. He looked simply like the same man grown older and thinner; the dark eyes and brows, the mustache, the
sweptback
hair now gray rather than black. He wore a cheap shortsleeved shirt of nondescript color, a tan cardigan with a button missing, creaseless brown slacks and a pair of loafers into which his socks somehow always managed to slip and vanish, so that when he crossed his legs there was a gap of bony white shin between the sliding sock and trouser cuff.

Aside from the mountaintop setting, it was a completely undramatic and anticlimactic meeting; the ‘phantom tycoon’ was a 65-year-old human being. We said all the polite and obvious things, we talked about Mexico, and then took a brief walk in the sunshine to the steps of one the temples. ‘Great place,’ Hughes said. ‘Beautiful,’ I agreed.

He said, uncomfortably, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Same time, but we’ll go somewhere else.’

I had been nervous and so had Hughes, I realized; and I said so. ‘Yeah… well, maybe,’ he said. ‘Thank you for taking the time, anyway.’

Pedro picked me up at six o’clock the next morning and drove me to the airport. He was a pilot as well as chauffeur and we flew in a private single-engine Cessna to Juchitan on the Isthmus of Mexico. We would dip down into the valleys between the sheer slopes of scarred mountains until a village of a dozen mud huts appeared abruptly under the starboard wing, and he would shout gleefully, ‘Look at those people! That is the stone age!’ I said, ‘Fantastic… amazing… ‘and then asked him please to gain some altitude so that we wouldn’t join them, forever, in their mountain fastness.

We landed in Juchitan, and Hughes and I met in a sparsely furnished room in a small hotel in the nearby town of Tehuantepec. He had a jug with him – ‘This place has the best orange juice in Mexico,’ he explained. He drank six cupfuls from paper cups that he took from his briefcase. I don’t know what test I had passed, but the mood had changed completely; he was expansive, and I was relaxed. We talked until early in the evening, the conversations and negotiations punctuated by his vanishing, from time to time, out the door and apparently to another room. The rules were set for the writing of what was then meant to be an authorized biography: we would tape a series of interviews, which he would transcribe, and I would work with them and whatever material I could unearth on my own. ‘None of my people know about this,’ he said, ‘and I want it to stay that way. So you’ll have to do this research that you’re talking about on your own. Don’t come running to me for help. Don’t use my name. And don’t talk about it, and tell your publishers not to talk. If it gets out to the press what we’re doing, the whole goddamnn thing’s off.’