The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  I caught Beverly Loo by the door. “Marvelous old man,” I said. “But you know, Bev, I have a whole library at home about the Old West in the 19th century. If Red Fox is a 101-year-old Sioux Indian chief, then you’re the Empress Loo of the Ming Dynasty.”

  Beverly looked alarmed. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Come on, Bev. This is me. I’m practically a McGraw-Hill employee. We can level with each other. This guy’s just not for real.”

  Her alarm changed to indignation. “What basis do you have for saying that? Are you serious?”

  I saw that she was serious, so I laughed. “No, I’m just putting you on. Relax. See you in the office tomorrow.”

  Dick was still awake when I got home. “You know,” I said, “I have a funny feeling that if I ever told them I wasn’t really meeting Howard Hughes, they wouldn’t laugh.”

  “That’s my feeling, too. I just didn’t want to disillusion you. What brought you round to reality?”

  I told him about my meeting with Chief Red Fox and my remarks to Beverly Loo.

  “Were you serious?” he asked. “Did you think he was a phony?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Am I an expert?”

  “Well,” he said, grinning, “it takes one to know one.”

  The following day Beverly and I had lunch. She was unusually silent and preoccupied. We arrived back at her office and I asked: “What’s troubling you?”

  “It’s this man Suskind, this writer you’ve hired to do the research. Does he know about your meeting Octavio?”

  “No. I’ve got a problem there. I haven’t told him.”

  “Where is Suskind now?”

  “Right here in New York, staying with me.”

  “How well do you know him? Are you very close friends?”

  I wondered what she was driving at. “Not really,” I said uneasily. “I’ve known him a long time, that’s all. We’re old chess partners. What’s this all about?”

  “He’s a writer,” Beverly announced. She brushed a strand of straight black hair away from her eye. “Writers steal. Writers talk. And writers are the most jealous people in the world. We’re keeping this on a top-secret basis up here, because if it leaks out to the press Octavio will wash his hands of the whole deal. What I’m getting at is I don’t see any need for this man Suskind to know you’re meeting with Octavio.”

  “Dick’s a good guy,” I said, relieved. “And I’m glad you brought this up. This is something that’s been bugging me. I hate to lie to him. I want to tell him.”

  Robert Stewart, my editor, poked his head in the door, gave a nervous half-smile, half-grimace, and joined us. “Absolutely not,” Beverly said. “I forbid it. God, you’re naïve. Robert agrees with me, too. You think because you’re not greedy and you can keep a secret that everybody else is that way, too. Let me tell you, they’re not. If Suskind found out you were meeting with Hughes, I mean Octavio, and this was an authorized biography, he’d know what kind of money was involved in it for you. I don’t know how much you’re paying him, but he’d be bound to feel it wasn’t enough.”

  “Not Dick. He’s not greedy.”

  “But we don’t want you to tell him,” she said darkly.

  That evening, in the kitchen of my father’s apartment where Dick was eating yogurt and I was knocking off a box of Mallomars, I explained the situation to him. “Sorry, old buddy, but you’re not to know. You’re a writer. You steal, you gab, and you’re jealous.”

  “How the hell could you keep a straight face? You’re a born con man,” Dick said admiringly.

  “And up yours, too.”

  The next day Dick came to McGraw-Hill to meet me for lunch. I took him into Robert Stewart’s office and Dick suggested that McGraw-Hill might be interested in looking at his unfinished manuscript on the exploration and conquest of West Africa. “Sure,” Stewart said, absentmindedly, and then turned his attention to me. “When do you leave?” he asked.

  “As soon as Edith arrives. We go to Washington, then Nassau. Dick’s heading out to Houston and Las Vegas.”

  “Will you meet Hughes in Nassau this time?”

  My eyes flicked to Dick and I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “Robert …”

  “Does he know Edith’s coming with you? Won’t he object to that? From what you’ve told me, I don’t think he’s the sort of man who’ll take very kindly to surprises.”

  I didn’t answer. I shut my eyes a moment, then opened them. Dick was looking coldly at Stewart; then he turned to me, a frowning Goliath. “You sonofabitch,” he rumbled, “is that what this is all about?”

  “He didn’t know,” I reminded Stewart. “You and Beverly made me promise not to tell him. Yesterday, Robert, right over there in Beverly’s office.”

  Stewart coughed, turned pink, muttered something and began to shuffle the papers on his desk. “You and I had better go have a private talk,” I said quietly to Dick. “I have some explaining to do.”

  While I tried to quell my laughter outside in the hallway, Dick leaned against the wall, a contented smile on his face. “I did pretty good in there, don’t you think?”

  “Terrific,” I said. “You’re a full-fledged member of the club now. When we go back in, sulk a little at first, but for Christ’s sake don’t look aggrieved. It’ll make Beverly and Robert too nervous.”

  The check was ready only on Thursday morning, a scant six hours before I was to meet Edith at Kennedy Airport and take off for Washington. It was a McGraw-Hill check payable to me for $97,500 and drawn on Bankers Trust. The total amount for the first part of the advance, “the seed money,” was $100,000, but I had been short of cash in New York during my March trip and the publisher’s treasury had parted with $2,500. Dick and I took the check to the Chase Manhattan Bank, where I had my own checking account. They informed me that it would take three days to clear. “That’s no good,” I explained. “I have to be in Washington tonight, and I need the check broken down into cashier’s checks before I leave.”

  “Go to Bankers Trust,” Chase Manhattan suggested. “It’s their check.”

  Dick and I jumped into a taxi. “Let me see that thing,” he said. He held it carefully, as though it were made of glass, and seemed to study every word and digit. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured, “have you ever seen a check that big?”

  “Paper,” I said. “This is money. This is ninety-seven … thousand … five … hundred … dollars. You’ve got to imagine it in one-dollar bills, 97,500 of them spread out on a carpet or stuffed into a suitcase. Some guys would kill for that kind of money.”

  “For less.”

  It was money, more money than I had ever seen, but money wasn’t the name of the game. It was a necessity, a means, a reward, but it was not the reason I had flown to Mexico and Puerto Rico or lied to Beverly Loo and Harold McGraw, and it was not the reason I was setting out that night for Washington and Nassau to meet a man who wasn’t there.

  But Bankers Trust shared Dick’s attitude rather than mine. I was escorted immediately across a broad blue carpet to an officer of the bank sitting behind a mahogany desk. Dick stood by the door, arms folded across his chest, elephantine and expressionless. Of course, I thought, they’ll assume he’s my bodyguard. And God knows who they’ll assume I am. A capo, probably, traveling with his hit man. I wore a gray suit and my most sincere tie, but somehow I couldn’t make myself feel like a man who should be flashing a check for $97,500. The Bankers Trust officer seemed to agree. I argued with him for twenty minutes that I wanted the check broken down into bank checks, one to H. R. Hughes for $50,000 and the other to Clifford Irving for the remainder. No, that was impossible. I would have to deposit the check to my account elsewhere and wait for it to clear.

  “Look, I’ve got a plane to catch. Let’s do this the easy way. Give me the cash. I’ll buy the bank checks.”

  The banker flushed a little. “Mr. Irving, we haven’t got that kind of cash on hand.”

  “You mean you can’t cover your own check?” I
asked, stunned.

  “Mr. Irving, you don’t seem to realize … this is a large check. This is a lot of money. We can’t …”

  “Call Harold McGraw,” I demanded. “If that check’s not broken down the way I want it broken down, and I can’t get on that plane tonight, that whole green building may topple.”

  The banker asked me to wait. He telephoned to McGraw-Hill. A few minutes later he returned and said that the bank would honor my instructions, and he apologized for having kept me waiting. In the street, with the two checks tucked away in my briefcase, I turned to Dick. A new reality had invaded me. “You were right,” I admitted. “It is money.”

  “I told you so. You’ve met Howard Hughes just twice and already you’ve lost your sense of proportion. But what do we do with it?”

  “Invest,” I said. “Buy a share of American business. I’ll take you over to Merrill Lynch and introduce you to my broker.”

  “I’m not too sure I want a share in American business,” Dick said. “The people who run it don’t seem very bright. The banks can’t even cash their own checks.”

  That afternoon, with the courage of his convictions, and using some of the $10,000 I gave him, he opened a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch and bought three hundred shares of Fuji Photo.

  It was cherry blossom time and the hotels in Washington were filled. The only vacancy American Express could find for us was in a deluxe motel in Alexandria, Virginia. Edith was delighted. “I’ve never been in Virginia.”

  We rented a car at the airport and the next day, a Sunday, drove down through the countryside to the restored colonial town of Williamsburg, which Edith instantly dubbed as “18th century Disneyland.” The following day, after deciding that work had to be done in Washington, we found a small, cheap, pleasant hotel there called the Harrington.

  I spent the morning at the Civil Aeronautics Board, doggedly plowing through thick volumes of dockets containing motions and countermotions relative to TWA and Northeast Airlines, both of which had been reportedly mismanaged to the point of ruin by Howard Hughes. I left with almost two hours of tape and a feeling of total confusion. If I were ever going to understand what I had read and taped, I would have to take a crash course in legal jargon and the intricacies of bureaucratic red tape.

  That same day I telephoned the Pentagon. Before leaving New York I had had an interesting discussion with Martin Ackerman, a friend and my lawyer in a libel action against my last book. Marty was one of the few people outside McGraw-Hill, Life, and the island of Ibiza who knew about my meetings with Hughes. I had shown him Howard’s letters — of course, he had no idea they were part of a hoax. From the outset he was enthusiastic and helpful. More than a lawyer, he was a businessman and a millionaire. He understood big money and the kinkiness of the men who had battled to make it. “I don’t think Hughes will ever give you any real figures on his income and his holdings,” he had said to me, “and that’s something you really should have. Try the Pentagon,” he suggested. “There’s got to be an office that handles defense contracting, and they may have a breakdown on Hughes Tool and Hughes Aircraft. If you can get the information, you may not understand it — but I could make sense of it for you.”

  I was eager to learn and grateful for his help. “What do I ask for?”

  “Don’t tell them you’re looking for information on Hughes himself. Give them some story that you’re doing a study on contractual relations between the Department of Defense and three or four big corporate contractors.”

  When I called the Pentagon I was put through to a man named Otto Pinilus, who had something to do — I never quite found out what — with payments for defense contracts. He sounded interested in my problems and bored with his own, whatever they might be. He invited me to his office that same afternoon.

  The Pentagon was to me, as it must be to most Americans, a forbidding concept. I assumed it would be bristling with grim-faced Marines with machine guns demanding identification at every twist and turn of its labyrinthine corridors. I also assumed, as a matter of course, that I would get lost. I was right in one respect only: I got lost.

  When I entered the building, I was prepared to be fingerprinted, searched, asked for identification and references. I told the girl at the desk I wanted to see Mr. Pinilus and she handed me a map of the building, marked it with arrows and an X, and said: “First left, then the escalator up one flight, then left, then right. It’s on the inner ring. Follow this map.”

  I walked past her. I was inside the Pentagon, and within thirty seconds, following her directions and clutching my map, I was lost. I can’t remember whether I went right when I should have gone left or up when I should have gone down, but I soon found myself in a spacious corridor, alone, outside a door that I could have sworn was marked JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. I looked up and down, needing that Marine now to guide and extricate me; but the door opened and three men stepped out, talking. They were generals and there were more stars piled on their shoulders than on the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza, and more campaign ribbons on their chests than in any hock shop. If I had been a member of Smersh or the Chinese equivalent, I could have eliminated some heavy brass with one burst — and no one as yet had even asked my name.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I cornered the nearest general, “I’m lost. I’m looking for a Mr. Pinilus. Here’s where he lives,” and I proffered my map.

  “Down one flight,” the general said politely, “then turn right and proceed to the inner ring. Then ask again. And good luck.”

  I thanked him, followed his directions and found Mr. Pinilus. He was a pleasant, balding man in his early fifties, and he seemed glad to see someone, even me, come into his office. I explained my problem. I was doing a study on payments to aircraft manufacturers. I wasn’t quite sure if what I was saying made any sense; I was trying to remember the phrases Marty Ackerman had used and I don’t believe that Mr. Pinilus made much sense out of it, either; but he was nevertheless eager to help. “I thought it would be better,” I said, “if I limited the study to four companies — Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, and Hughes. It’s pretty easy to get information on the first three, but I’m having a hell of a time finding out anything about Hughes Aircraft or Hughes Tool. I suppose that’s because they’re privately owned. But they just don’t want to talk to me.”

  “The Hughes people don’t like to talk to anybody,” Otto Pinilus said, with a mixture of sadness and annoyance. “They don’t even like to talk to me. They’re the most difficult people in the country to do business with.”

  “Have you got anything I can take a look at?” I asked hopefully.

  “Not much of it’s classified,” he said. “You can see almost everything we’ve got.” He began piling record books and confidential reports on the desk in front of me. One report contained a breakdown on the entire operation of Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Tool: their government contracts, their facilities and personnel, descriptions of the specific military projects the companies had completed or in which they were still involved, and a further report detailing the government’s analysis of Hughes’s capabilities, problems, and future prospects in the space and aircraft fields. The latter reports Mr. Pinilus’s secretary very kindly Xeroxed for me, and they were all I would ever need to create a portrait of the Hughes industrial complex which would find its place in Howard’s future intimate discussions with me.

  “These reports aren’t really secret,” Otto Pinilus explained to me. “They’re available on a limited subscription basis, although it’s very expensive and not too many people know about it. But we use them all the time.”

  “Who published them?” I asked.

  He checked and showed me the name of the service. “It’s a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill,” he said.

  I had also stopped that first day in the Library of Congress. The taxi had to drop me a few blocks away, since the area around the Capitol building was thronged with police and roaming groups of bearded and mustachioed young men wearing unzipped Army fiel
d jackets and khaki shirts rolled up to the elbows. They were Vietnam veterans protesting against the war. A mild and pleasant spring sun beamed down on the green lawns and impressive white government buildings, but a feeling of unease and caution filled the air. You could see the affront to authority in the persons of men who had risked their lives and killed to uphold that authority, and now repudiated it, making both the police and the government officials nervous.

  It was my first time in the Library of Congress: a beautiful building, with magnificently muraled ceilings and that hush of concentration in the air one finds wherever the keys to knowledge are stored. I had brought my tape recorder with me, and I spent the first part of the afternoon browsing through volumes of Standard & Poors, gathering more dreary information on the Hughes industrial empire. Then, idly flipping index cards in the library catalog, I made a lucky hit. Someone had written a brief thesis on TWA’s role in the development of Ethiopian Airlines. I asked for the book and retired into an alcove near the stacks, where I read quietly into the tape recorder for two hours. Ethiopia in the early 1950’s came alive for me. I saw Howard battling the downdrafts in the canyons along the Blue Nile, landing his DC-3 at deserted strips on spiny ridges. I saw him taking off from the infamous dogleg runway at Danakil. I saw him as both pilot and passenger in aircraft jammed with sheiks, peasants, rank goat hides, live chickens, and screaming children. That he had never been to Ethiopia seemed of no importance. The trip would change his life, bring him face to face with himself in his quest for identity. If he ever read what I would write, he would wish he had gone.

  I wanted one more book: the transcript of the 1947 Senate hearings when Hughes had been accused of failing to deliver on his wartime military contracts and of currying favor with visiting Air Corps personnel in Southern California. I had already discovered that the volume I needed — Volume 40 of the Senate subcommittee’s twelve-year-history — was mysteriously unavailable. An hour later, deep in the bowels of the library, in the annex reached by a tunnel cut under the buildings, I found the book in the stacks. There were three full sets of the 42 volumes, but only two copies of Volume 40. That volume alone ran more than 1800 pages. Hughes himself had testified for several days, filling more than 300 pages with questions and answers. Hunched on a stool in that airless cellar, I began quietly dictating into the tape recorder. In twenty minutes the library closed, and I quit. I slid the volume back into place on the shelf and found my way upstairs to the exit from the annex. The guard stopped me. He was a young, ruddy-faced man with an easy smile.