Dick left, and an hour later I placed the call again. Beverly’s secretary put me through to her.
When I opened the front door, Edith was gathering a litter of toys from the living room floor and Dick was sprawled in the overstuffed armchair. I slumped into another chair, showing the gloomiest expression I could muster.
Dick frowned. “You didn’t reach her.”
“Beverly? I reached her.” I waved feebly at Edith. “Darling, I need a stiff drink. Bourbon on the rocks.”
Dick’s frown deepened. “What happened?”
“I told her the story. I told her I’d got the letters from Hughes and then he’d called me before I had a chance to write back. The moment I got to the bit about the authorized biography and meeting him in Nassau, she said, ‘Oh, my God, not you, too? That happens twice a year to every publisher in New York. Some writer always gets the brilliant idea that he’ll pretend he’s in touch with the elusive Howard Hughes and that Hughes wants an as-told-to autobiography. It’s the most common con in publishing. But that you should try it! Cliff! You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And so I had to apologize. I made her promise she wouldn’t tell anyone else up at McGraw-Hill.”
Dick looked ten years older, and Edith, on her hands and knees by the toybox, stared at me. “Are you serious?” she said.
“You think I’d joke about something like that? I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. She called it a cheap, common stunt. That’s what hurt me the most. I thought it was so original.”
“Oh, well,” Dick signed. “Back to Richard the Lion-Hearted.”
“I had to squirm out of it some way, so I told her it was really your idea …” I leveled an accusing finger at him, “and you pushed me into it. That’s what softened her up.”
“You sonofabitch,” Dick murmured. My expression of gloom had broken; he saw the sparkle in my eye. “Come on! what did she really say?”
“They want it. They believe. They want it so bad I could hear them salivating four thousand miles away. They want me to drop work on the novel and get cracking on it right away. They want me to find out how much Hughes wants, see him, sign him up, and get to work. They believe everything — so far.”
“I’ll have a bourbon, too,” Dick said to Edith. He learned toward me, eyes glittering. Again he was like a child about to hear his favorite bedtime story. “Tell me everything. Tell me all she said. I want to hear all the details.”
Chapter 4
South of the Border
On February 4th my aunt telephoned from Florida to tell me that my mother had died early that morning.
I had grieved for my mother for more than three years, since the summer on Ibiza when she had suffered a stroke which had left her almost completely paralyzed, speechless, and retarded to the point where one felt there was neither sense nor justice to the human condition. Those last three years she had spent in a New York nursing home. My father’s visits had sustained her and then, that past June, my father had died of a heart attack. My mother lingered eight months longer, living in that terrible mute loneliness.
I cried a few tears, offered a brief thanks to the God in whose compassion I had long since lost faith, and then left the studio and went home to tell Edith.
That same afternoon I called Dick in Palma. Throughout the past three weeks I had been in erratic communication with McGraw-Hill, keeping them informed of my mythical progress with Howard Hughes, who was still no more to me than a disembodied voice on the telephone and the author of a scrawled, almost child-like handwriting. Howard and I were getting to know each other and talking about a meeting in the spring. I had proposed that I write his authorized biography, that we meet and tape a series of interviews and that he write a preface to the work giving it his imprimatur. The consummation of the deal, I explained, hinged on our meeting. We might hate each other — after all, I drank, smoked, and fornicated, and legend had it that in his mellowing years Hughes had abjured such sins and disapproved of them in those close to him.
He had also made known to me his financial demands. He wanted a million dollars, and out of this sum he would pay me a fixed fee for my services. I had tried to explain to him that from a publisher’s point of view this was impossible; and in any case, writers didn’t work that way. “Well,” Howard said, “we’ll talk about all that when we meet.” These conversations were reported to Beverly Loo, who had been horrified at the outset and then mollified when I explained: “Howard thinks in round numbers, but I can talk him out of it.” I knew, of course, that the demands were outlandish, but I wanted McGraw-Hill to balance two concepts in their corporate mind — they were dealing with a difficult man, but I was on their side and could bring him around to reason.
“My family’s holding up the funeral for me,” I explained to Dick on the telephone, “I’m flying out tomorrow. The best connection is by way of London. I have to spend half a day there and catch the night flight. Look …” I took a deep breath, “I’m a little shaken up, but it wasn’t unexpected. And I can’t help thinking about other things. Maybe it’s a defense …”
“You could see McGraw-Hill while you’re in New York,” Dick said quietly.
“That’s what I was leading up to. I didn’t want to get cracking this early, but if I’m going to New York I might as well save myself a trip later on. I’ll sound them out. I’ll start the ball rolling and see where it leads.”
For some reason — perhaps the muted emotional turmoil it brought in its wake — the news of my mother’s death enabled me, however briefly, to see my world steadily and see it whole. The hypocrisies and rationalizations with which I had cohabited for so long were swept from my head, as if by a riptide, and what was left was a naked strand of shore with every pebble and piece of driftwood etched in almost too-sharp relief. I saw, first of all, that despite my constant cries of “if,” I was fully committed to the hoax.
But why? I looked at myself. How and why could Clifford Irving, a man who projected an aura of contentment and emotional stability, allow himself to take that leap, that risk, to veer so far from the clearly marked track of his life? He was forty years old. He had worked hard. He was an established although hardly a wildly successful writer; but he had done the best he could and he was not ashamed. He was free to write as he pleased — and more than that no writer in his right mind would ask. Married to a woman he loved, with two children he adored and another son whom he saw seldom but loved deeply, he lived where and as he pleased, with all the material comforts a man needed. Still, in his private life, with Edith and the children balanced against Nina, he risked everything. Damn the cost, he would have his cake and eat it, too.
And I saw that I had lived for too long as a man deliberately projecting an image of contentment. I was not content, and I doubted that I could ever achieve that state before I was old and unburdened of mundane desire. The objects of desire were illusion; their attainment gave only ephemeral satisfaction. The risk itself provided the sense of being alive. “Frei lebt wer sterben kann,” Isak Dinesen had said. Men climbed Himalayan mountain peaks “because they were there” — and for me, the hoax “was there.” I had formulated my own challenge, and that was motive enough. The rest was peripheral — rewards that might or might not come, but in any event would have little meaning after the challenge had been met and resolved, either in triumph or disaster. The means were the end. I could turn my back on the challenge and I knew without a doubt that I would be a wiser man for having done so. It was an aberration — in one sense, highly civilized; in another, deeply primitive. But I was driven. I had known almost from the beginning, without having the courage to admit it, that the if was a poor delusion to help me over the first obstacle: the realization that I would take the risk.
I dawdled for a while, putting it off as long as I could, and then I called Beverly Loo. I told her that my mother had died and that I was flying to New York. “And Hughes called this morning,” I added. “He said he was sorry and then he said, ‘Well, it’s fate.
’ He wants me to stay at a certain hotel in the city and he’ll contact me there, and then I’m supposed to come down to Nassau and meet him. So the timetable’s changed.”
Then I called Nina in London. “I’m catching the Iberia morning flight. I’ll probably hang around the airport until the evening. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“I’ll meet the plane,” she said.
She was there, in leather coat and sunglasses, looking pale and worn out by the long London winter and the effort to revive her career now that she was on her own without Frederik. “It’s so goddam slow,” she said. “And it’s a drag and it’s such a phony business, and I loathe it. But someone’s got to pay the bills and the kids have to go to school, and there’s just nothing else I can do. I’ve got a new manager. You won’t like him — I don’t like him, either — but he’s working hard for me. I’m doing television guest spots and charities and maybe cutting a record in the spring. How are you, my sweet?” She looked at her watch. “Come back to the flat for lunch. There’s time, isn’t there?”
Time? There was always time. That was the dimension one could manipulate more easily than any other. One could compress it, expand it, make an hour more beautiful or hellish than a year. It was a gray London afternoon. The apartment in Chelsea, just off the embankment of the Thames, was quiet and warm. We sat drinking coffee in Nina’s kitchen and I munched chocolate biscuits from the children’s tin. We talked for a while about my mother. Then I said: “You look like you need a holiday.”
“I do,” she admitted. “I’m exhausted.”
“I’ve got to fly to Nassau next week on some business, some research for a book. Why don’t you come with me?”
We never planned these things. We took our moments together when they were possible, by accident and coincidence rather than by design. We had learned that to plan something meant that inevitably it wouldn’t work; something always cropped up in one of our lives to cancel it. And even then, when I suggested a week in Nassau, I knew that Nina had work to do, that she was waiting for auditions and interviews.
“You know I want to,” she said, “but I can’t.”
Later in the afternoon I told her about Hughes and showed her his three letters.
“What a groove,” she said. “Howard Hughes! Can’t you stay overnight and catch a plane in the morning? I could run you out to the airport.”
I called Pan Am, canceled my reservation and booked for the morning flight to New York. That evening her new manager, John Marshall, arrived with his wife. He was a short, smartly dressed, smooth-talking Englishman with superficial charm and rampant ego. He owned a stable of horses and a country manor, wore Gucci shoes and Savile Row sporting jackets. He had no telephone and he used Nina’s apartment as his office. He barged in the front door, shrieking: “Nina Superstar!”
After dinner he and I were alone. “You know,” he said, “for an American you seem like a reasonably intelligent man. My star tells me that you’re rather fond of each other, and that you’ve invited her to Nassau for a week. I think it’s a bloody good idea. My star needs a holiday, and I’ve given her my permission to go.”
“That’s very kind of you, John.”
Later I took Nina aside and repeated the conversation.
“Does that mean you’ll come?”
“If you still want me to. Oh, God,” she sighed, resting her head on my shoulder, “I’d love it.”
The next morning she drove me to Heathrow Airport and we bought a round-trip ticket for her from London to New York. We would meet there and go on to Nassau, where if all went well in New York, I was to meet Howard Hughes.
The day after my mother’s funeral, wearing a gray suit and black tie, I appeared at McGraw-Hill. I knew the 20th floor of the Trade Book Division well; twice in the past five years I had been given office space there to rewrite and polish the final drafts of books which McGraw-Hill had then published. I had been around the company longer than any of the editors currently in residence. The Trade Book Division seemed to have a quick turnover. “Cliff’s practically an employee,” Beverly Loo had once said at a cocktail party, to which I countered, “Then why won’t the company let me join their Blue Cross plan?”
“Well, you’re not really an employee. But you are our author. You’ve been with us longer than any other writer we’ve got on our list.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I said. “They don’t seem to stick around very long.”
Five years ago I had been working in the office on the galley proofs of my novel, The 38th Floor, when I had been invited upstairs to a company Christmas party. I hadn’t shaved that day and I wore a sweater with leather elbow patches and a pair of baggy corduroy trousers. That was the first time I met Harold McGraw, President of the McGraw-Hill Company, one of the two divisions of McGraw-Hill, Inc. Harold had approached Ed Kuhn, then Editor-in-Chief of Trade, and pointed me out. “I thought it was company policy,” he said reproachfully, “that all employees wore jackets and ties. That young man looks like a bum.”
“That’s an author,” Ed Kuhn explained. “He writes books for us.”
“Oh,” Harold said. “I’d like to meet one.” And so we were introduced.
That February morning I breezed through to Beverly Loo’s office, stopping to chat for a few moments with secretaries and typists I knew.
Beverly and I had seen each other the night before for a drink, and now she marched me down the hall to Albert Leventhal’s spacious corner office with its view of Wall Street and the Hudson River. Albert — a vice-president and head of the Trade Book Division-was a small, dapper, nut-brown man a year away from retirement, with a reputation in the book business that was both impeccable and hard-earned. He had a quick, dry wit, but there was a permanent quiver in his voice and a cloud of worry hidden behind the pleasantness of his smile, as if he felt the world were capable of crumbling around him at any given moment.
Condolences for my mother’s death were offered, and then the point was reached.
“What I don’t understand,” Albert said shrewdly, “is why a man like Howard Hughes, who’s avoided publicity all his life, should suddenly want to have his biography written. And with all due respect to you as a writer, why he should choose you to work with him.”
“He had to choose somebody,” I said, sidestepping the first question. “Whoever he chose, you could ask: ‘Why him?’”
Beverly came to my aid. “Albert, he certainly wouldn’t pick someone very well known — someone like Norman Mailer — would he? Then the book would be Mailer, not Hughes. Cliff’s a perfect choice. He’s a professional. He delivers. And he knows how to keep his ego in check.”
“That makes sense,” Albert halfheartedly agreed. “Well, let’s see these famous letters.”
I produced them from a battered folder and dropped them on Albert’s neat desk. He and Beverly Loo read carefully.
“This much is certain,” Beverly said. “It’s no practical joke. These are from Hughes.”
Albert keep reading. “How do you know that?” I asked Beverly.
“For one thing, he always writes on that yellow legal paper. For another, I can recognize that’s his handwriting. There was a reproduction in Life of a long letter he wrote to somebody, firing this man Robert Maheu. I’ve seen it. And that’s exactly the way he writes, right out to the margin.”
“Have you got that issue of Life here?”
“No, but I’ll find it. Let me read, please.”
Albert Leventhal had finished. “I take it all back,” he said. “Now I understand. You only have to read this part. Beverly, pay attention. Hughes says: ‘I am not entirely insensitive to what journalists have written about me … ‘ And then he goes on: ‘It would not suit me to die without having certain misconceptions cleared up and without having stated the truth about my life. The immortality you speak of does not interest me, not in this world. I believe in obligations. I regret many things in the past, but I have little feelings of shame about them.’”
“That’s very interesting,” Beverly noted, “where he says, ‘not in this world.’” I had thought so, too, when I had written it.
“But it’s all very clear.” Albert tapped the pile of yellow paper. “And he says it with dignity and eloquence. He’s a sick man and he wants the truth told.”
“That’s my guess, too,” I said.
I had also provided McGraw-Hill with carbon copies of the first rough drafts of my letters in reply to those of Hughes. The originals, I explained, I had handwritten — it seemed a proper gesture in view of Howard’s laborious efforts with the pen and his disdaining the use of a secretary. What surprised me was that no one asked me to what address I had written, or where Hughes’s letters were postmarked; if they did, I would have had to make up the answers on the spot. But in the excitement of the moment, such omissions were certainly understandable. In my first apocryphal letter, dated January 4th, I had written:
On the basis of your kind note you may think the following presumptuous of me, but I’m a writer and I can’t help thinking as a writer. I am aware of your reputation for carefully guarded privacy; but that itself can cause some powerful misinterpretation of a man’s life and motives for living it as he chooses without regard for mass opinion. Your life — the surface details that one gleans from hearsay and the press, however distorted — fascinates me. Obviously, the truth is more fascinating; and deserves (though rarely achieves) the last word for definitive immortality. Have you ever considered an authorized biography of yourself? I would consider it a privilege to write the book …
Then, after receiving the affirmative reply on January 28th I had written again:
I must tell you first of all that I couldn’t be more pleased — and agreeably surprised — at your response to my suggestion. But you undoubtedly realized this. It was good to talk to you on the telephone, too; it made things more real to me, and I hope, as you said, that we will be talking again within the next few days …
The Hoax Page 5
