Howard Hughes (42 page)

IN FEBRUARY 1972 Howard Hughes fled Paradise Island in the Bahamas to take up residence on the top floor in yet another hotel, the Intercontinental Managua in Nicaragua. During the four remaining years of his life, he never returned to live in the United States. In December 1972 he moved to England, to London’s Inn on the Park; a year later he was back in the Caribbean in the Xanadu Princess Hotel on Grand Bahama Island; and two years later he flew to Mexico, to a hospital bed in the penthouse of the Acapulco Princess Hotel.

In 1972 Hughes finally relinquished control of Toolco and allowed it to become a public company; he soon sold all his shares. A holding company, Summa Corporation, was created, and all of Hughes’s property except for Hughes Aircraft was placed under its umbrella.

Many witnesses, including a four-man medical team, later testified that by 1973 Hughes had become a hopeless drug addict, and that the chief purpose of his move from the Bahamas to Mexico was to insure a steady supply of codeine for his habit. (One of his doctors said under oath that Hughes’s drug usage had risen to between 25 to 45 grains of codeine and seven to fifteen ten-milligram Valium tablets per day.) In the last year of his life he shrank three inches, a tumor protruded from the side of his head, his teeth were almost destroyed, his arms and thighs were a maze of needle tracks, his prostate was radically enlarged, and he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He was starving.

On April 3, 1976, after a period of delirium, he lapsed into a virtual coma. On April 5 he was flown in a private plane from Acapulco to a
hospital in Houston, the city where he had been born. He died before the plane crossed the border.

In 1983 the wooden flying boat – the Hercules, or Spruce Goose: 750 feet long with a wingspan of 330 feet – was moved from its hidden hangar by the City of Long Beach, California, and placed on exhibit in the world’s largest geodesic dome as a tourist attraction. A decade later it was disassembled and moved to McMinnville, Oregon by the Evergreen Aviation Educational Center. There she still sits.

The original H-1 racer is on exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

FOR PERPETRATING the hoax, Clifford Irving was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison. Richard Suskind, his researcher and co-author, served five months, and Edith Irving, as a co-conspirator, was sentenced to sixty days by the U.S. courts and to one year by a Swiss tribunal.

Irving was twice transferred from prison to prison on charges of possession of contraband; at the final stop, Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, where he was co-chairman of the Inmate Committee, he was placed in solitary confinement and formally accused of organizing a work-stoppage and riot. When Irving demanded that lie-detector tests be given to him and his accusers, the charges against him were dropped. Twice denied parole by the Nixon administration, he finally achieved it by filing a writ in federal court against the prison authorities. He kept a prison journal; an excerpt was published in
Playboy
.

Freed, Irving resumed his career as a novelist, and he has since published ten books. The
New York Times Book Review
has called him ‘a born storyteller.’ Ernest Lehman wrote: ‘With
Tom Mix and Pancho Villa
, Clifford Irving takes his place among the giants of contemporary literature.’ In the
Los Angeles Times
, Caroline See lauded Irving as ‘a master,’ and William Safire in the
New York Times
called Irving’s
Trial
‘the novel of the year.’ Thomas Keneally wrote: ‘In
The Angel of Zin
, Irving has given the concept of murder an enlarged dimension… a totally engrossing thriller.’ Donald Westlake said of
Final Argument
: ‘Every part of it is terrific. What a wonderful piece of
storytelling.’
Booklist
called
The Spring
‘extraordinarily entertaining and thoughtful.’

Joseph Persico, Colin Powell’s biographer, wrote: ‘No writer today surpasses Clifford Irving in making fiction ring like truth.’ Portrayed by Richard Gere, he is the subject of the 2007 Miramax film,
The Hoax
; but Irving maintains that ‘The movie is itself a hoax’.

With his Australian wife he lives in Colorado and Mexico, writing and painting, although his chief preoccupation, he says, ‘is to understand some small part of the nature of existence’.

On a Darkling Plain

The Losers

The Valley

The Battle of Jerusalem

Spy

The 38th Floor

Fake!

The Global Village Idiot

The Hoax

Death Freak

The Sleeping Spy

Tom Mix and Pancho Villa

The Angel of Zin

Daddy’s Girl

Trial

Final Argument

The Spring

I Remember Amnesia