The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  I cabled Ralph Graves that evening: NEGATIVE OCTAVIO STOP POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION ONE OF HIS ASSOCIATES AND PERHAPS OCCASIONAL DOUBLE REGARDS EDITH, and sent a follow-up letter to the effect that someone close to Hughes had made the identification and then Howard himself had confirmed it.

  The next afternoon I decided it was time to visit Paradise Island, not exactly to beard the lion in his den — since I never came up with a single piece of evidence to indicate that he was caged there — but simply to have a look at the place. “Come along,” I said to Edith, and we took a taxi across the bridge, paid the $2 toll, skirted the Britannia Beach Hotel and then paid an additional fee for entry to the beach. It was a fine curving strand backed by a forest of palms and casuarina trees. We wandered hand in hand until we came to some shabby wooden buildings set back among the palms.

  “That’s where Howard really lives,” I said.

  It turned out to be a yoga colony, run by a Swami Devananda whose headquarters were in Montreal. The buildings were rickety, and the beds, glimpsed through rusted window-screens, were unmade. A few people began to gather for the afternoon exercises: some girls, a handful of middle-aged men and women, a croupier from the casino, and a white-haired old man. “Howard in disguise,” I explained to Edith.

  “Stop kibbitzing and go exercise with them,” she said. “It will do you good. You’re getting fat.”

  “All right. What about you?”

  “Me? Are you crazy, Mensch? I’m a decadent European lady. I watch. You’re the one who’s sportif.”

  The group had laid out mats on a large cement court. I spread a hotel towel, and after ten minutes I was soaked in sweat, breathing hard.

  “Headstands,” the instructress called. I watched carefully, tucked my head into the crutch of my arms on the towel, arched my back, walked toward my head, lifted my legs, and crashed to the concrete with a terrible thump.

  “Let me help you,” the instructress said, and stood behind me. I wavered in the air a second and then toppled, cracking my knee on the concrete. From the shade of a palm tree I heard Edith’s laughter. The rest of the group, including the old man, arched beautifully, feet pointed quivering toward the sun.

  Back in the hotel I came out of the shower to find Edith on the floor between the bed and the window, head sunk into a pillow and feet braced against the wall. Her face was the color of a tomato. “Go away,” she gasped.

  “I didn’t have a wall to lean on.”

  “You didn’t think of it. I have to cheat. I’m an old lady.”

  “Good luck,” I said, and lay down on the bed with the copy of the 1947 Senate hearings I had swiped from the library. Three mornings later I was nearly to the end of the 1800-page volume and Edith was in the center of the room, perfectly arched and upside down, standing on her head, smiling crookedly up at me. She flipped over at last, puffing. “I did it! It makes you feel wonderful. Come, I help you.”

  I squatted between the bed and the window. She lifted my legs and I braced them against the wall; she let go, and I fell, socking my shin against the frame of the bed. When I finished cursing I said: “There’s no room there for me to fall.”

  “Lean against the door,” she advised.

  Wearing only my underpants, I did as Edith instructed. Head on pillow, tucked well into arms. Swing legs up. Brace against door. View of Edith upside down. Ready to try …

  At that point I heard the sound of a key turning, and before I could move or shout a warning, the door swung open to admit the Bahamian maid, carrying a mop and fresh linens. She saw a man upside down, toppling toward her, and she shrieked three times in a row. I fell, scissoring her head between my legs, taking her with me in a jumble of dropped mop and flying linen to the corridor floor. In the midst of my apologies and attempts to calm the howling maid, I was aware of Edith in the room behind me, having her own brand of hysterics.

  Later that day I called Dick at the Towers Hotel in Houston. “It’s going pretty well here,” I said. “Not too much hard information, but I’m soaking up atmosphere and Edith’s getting a few laughs. There’s a yoga colony on Paradise Island and I think we can make Octavio a member of it. We’ll have him trying to stand on his head by the door and one of the Mormon Mafia opens it and he falls out and —”

  “What the hell are you doing down there?” Dick interrupted. “Are you drunk or smoking pot, or what?”

  “I fell out of a door,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, stop falling out of doors and get to work,” he growled, and proceeded to tell about his trip.

  I had left him in the apartment in New York, where the only room in an approximate state of cleanliness was the kitchen. I had propped a note for him on the kitchen table, against the sugar bowl. “Don’t let dirty dishes accumulate in the sink. They bring roaches.” And I signed it: “Your Jewish mother, Cliff.”

  “That note made me feel better,” Dick told me on the telephone. “You have no idea how depressed I was after you left.” This was his first visit to the United States in over five years, and every time he walked down the street, read a newspaper, or turned on the television, it occurred to him that he had finally succeeded in expatriating himself: like me, he was less at home in New York, his native city, than he was in Ibiza or London or Paris.

  Work was the anodyne. In the public library, Dick plowed through every volume of The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, beginning with the volume that covered 1905, the year of Howard’s birth. He Xeroxed almost all the articles about the Hughes family and then went to The New York Times Index and repeated the process. After I called from Washington and told him about TWA and Ethiopian Airlines, he ordered photocopies of half a dozen contour maps of Ethiopia.

  There were two portable typewriters in the apartment, a Royal and an old Remington Noiseless. We had already decided we would need a machine on which Hughes’s mystical manservant, Pedro, would type the first part of the transcript. “We can’t use the Royal,” I had told Dick. “I used it to type the outline of The 38th Floor. McGraw-Hill’s got that on file.” Dick took the Remington to a typewriter repair shop in the neighborhood and told them to clean it and put it in shape. He finished his work two days later, and the next afternoon checked into The Sands in Las Vegas.

  “The first thing I did,” he told me on the telephone, “was drop about sixty bucks in the slot machines. ‘Schmuck,’ I said to myself, ‘if you’re going to lose money gambling, do it with style, not like some little old lady from Des Moines’ — so I dropped three hundred playing blackjack and another five hundred shooting crap. I had visions of becoming another skeleton in the family closet, like my uncle, Cold-Deck Charlie.” Cold-Deck Charlie had made a living as a professional card cheat on the transatlantic liners. He had died with 150 suits in his closet and $11 .60 in his pockets.

  “Listen,” I said, “this call is costing a young fortune. Tell me what you did in the way of research.”

  What he had done was Xerox all the Hughes material in the morgue of The Las Vegas Sun, get a list of properties bought by Howard Hughes and some of his front men, and have lunch with a Mr. Henry Vermilion of the Atomic Energy Commission. In Houston, then, he spent three fruitful days in the public library going over microfilm copies of The Houston Post and The Houston Chronicle dating back to the early 1900’s. He went slowly, making notes of the manners and mores of the period, writing down the names of department stores, prices of clothing, tools, automobiles, and houses. He also checked out the two or three decent bookstores in Houston and had shipped about twenty books to Ibiza. “I saw a coffee table volume about the Eighth Air Force, but it’s expensive. Fifteen bucks. What do you think?”

  “Get it.” We had already decided that Howard was going to be a secret hero in World War II, flying reconnaissance missions over France on a top-priority pass from President Roosevelt. This was, of course, unknown to the general public, as was the fact that prior to his 1938 round-the-world flight, Air Corps General Hap Arnold had commis
sioned Howard to penetrate German air space and photograph the military build-up on the Polish border. It was unknown to Howard, too, but we thought he would appreciate the heroics if he were properly shy about their significance when it came time to tell me the tale.

  Dick had one unlooked-for stroke of luck in Houston. He decided to hire a cab for the day and the driver, a one-legged, sixty-year-old former croupier, revealed himself as a true source of folklore about the wildcatters and highrollers who had made Texas synonymous with big money. He drove Dick to Yoakum Boulevard, where the Hughes family had lived for many years. Howard’s childhood home had been torn down, replaced by the St. Thomas School, a red-brick building with white columns. Dick told the cabdriver he was doing a magazine article on Hughes, and the driver began talking about Hughes Sr., whom he claimed to have known personally. He mentioned Jakie Friedman’s gambling place on Main Street, too. “All the wildcatters used to gamble there,” Dick reported. “Big Howard was one of the highrollers — dropped a lot of money. But the Rangers closed Jakie down and drove him out of town. Guess where he went?”

  “I give up.”

  “Vegas. He’s the Jakie Friedman, the guy who built the Frontier Hotel, which our boy bought when he moved there in ‘66.”

  “Good, good. See if you can come up with more juicy tidbits like that.”

  “Okay,” I heard Dick yawn, “that’s all for now, bubby. You’re leaving for Ibiza soon, right?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m home. Stay away from the casino.”

  That night Edith and I visited friends whose ketch was berthed in Nassau harbor, listened to two strolling Bahamian troubadors sing bawdy songs, and the next day we boarded the plane for London, with connections to Ibiza. Beverly Loo was in London on business and I called from the airport to her room at the Ritz. “How did it go?” she asked anxiously.

  “Fine. It was a little tough at the beginning, but he started to open up toward the end. It’s going to be a great book — if I can stand the pace.”

  Chapter 7

  Helga Takes a Trip

  Edith laughed easily. She wore a dark skirt, black boots, conservative brown silk blouse, black raincoat, and a diamond ring sparkled on her left hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so dressed up,” Beverly Loo said on the way to Ibiza airport.

  “If I wear what usually I wear,” Edith explained, “they stop me at customs, the same what they do to all the hippies. And I go to see my daughter in Frankfurt, too. I want people to know I’m her mother, not her sister.”

  Beverly had flown down from London and stayed with us at the finca for three days. It had worried me slightly, since I was fresh from the trip to Nassau and expected a salvo of questions about Hughes and the time I had spent with him, questions to which I had not yet prepared solid answers. But Beverly was either uninterested or being discreet; it was hard to tell which. I told her one or two tales of Edith having to leave our hotel room at odd hours so that Howard would not be embarrassed by her presence, and then I clammed up. I had already booked Edith’s ticket, Ibiza-Frankfurt-Düsseldorf-Ibiza, on the assumption that Beverly would stay on the island for nearly a week.

  Then Beverly suddenly decided to see Madrid. “I’ll fly with you as far as Barcelona,” she announced to Edith. And there was nothing to be done about it.

  … and I always hate to fly, always, so my fright gives me wet hands and wet feet, and I was uncomfortably flying to Barcelona, with Beverly Loo sitting next to me chattering, with the sun red like a blood-orange and carrying the old-new Swiss passport, the passport of Helga Renate Hughes with my black-wigged photograph with the cheeks puffed out. The passport felt like a big stone, or, no, like a big bomb in the bottom of my handbag. I thought it would go bang when I left Barcelona or when I landed in Frankfurt and passed through customs and immigration. I thought — I had a fantasy: they would see the ends of my nerves sticking out of my skin, and I thought it was not worth it. What I was doing was so foolish and crazy, what I was doing … except maybe it would keep Cliff away from Baroness von Slut; he would be busy with his book about this crazy rich man and would have no time to see her and might even stop thinking about her. I could kill her! No, I knew I couldn’t … but I could knock all her teeth out — except maybe that might make her sing better …

  Beverly said goodbye and I rushed off for my next plane, and suffered through the second horrible flight. I cursed Howard Hughes. All this because of him! “Why can’t he fly to Zurich to deposit his own checks?” I had yelled at Cliff, who just laughed.

  I took a cab from the airport to the train station in Frankfurt and bought a ticket to Zurich. It was hot in Germany, much hotter than Ibiza. and I was sweating not only on my hands and feet but all over my body. I could smell myself.

  I got into an empty compartment, but soon a young American couple came in and sat down facing me. They wanted to be friendly, like most Americans traveling in Europe, and talk. I smiled and nodded but didn’t talk back. I was afraid. I was traveling on my own passport as Edith Irving — maybe a little more blonde than natural, which is any woman’s privilege — but Cliff had told me to stay in Zurich on the Helga Hughes passport and of course I had to look like this crazy Helga. Before we reached Zurich I would have to put on my black wig and glasses in the toilet compartment of the train, and so I didn’t want to become friendly with the friendly Americans and tell them some things about myself and have them maybe ask to stay at the same hotel with me and, yes, wouldn’t it be lovely to see Zurich together? No!

  But they talked and talked even though I said nothing. They were from Ohio, I think, or Indiana, and this was their first trip to Europe, and wasn’t it wonderful, so old and full of culture and cathedrals. I excused myself.

  I took my bag and went to the toilet just before we reached Zurich. I put on the wig and the eyeglasses and waited by the door of the platform a few cars further down. From the station I took a cab to the Hotel Baur au Lac — I knew it from my childhood because I had stayed there with my parents. And then it began, those coincidences that came again and again on all my trips. Call it magic or happenings, but it was terrible. They had no rooms free in the Baur au Lac and the man at the desk said he would call another hotel. It’s not so easy to find rooms in Zurich — all those people rushing in and out of the city with suitcases full of funny money to put in and take out of the banks. And so I waited and a minute later there they were: the friendly American couple from the train, looking at me with their mouths open like fish. Here was the blonde woman they had shared a compartment with for six hours; here she was in a black wig and glasses. And I thought, oh, God, if they should hear my name, if the clerk should say, “All right, Frau Hughes, we’ve found you a room,” it would somehow not be good.

  So I quickly grabbed my bag and dashed from the Baur au Lac into another taxi and went to the Hotel Glarnischof near the Paradeplatz, the big square in Zurich. The Glarnischof had a room. I felt funny in my wig and spectacles and the heavy makeup to make me look older, but no one else seemed to think I looked funny, or maybe it’s because the Swiss are so very polite and used to asking as few questions as possible. Whatever, Frau Hughes — or Hoogus, as the Swiss pronounced it — went and ate a good but indigestible dinner and took two ten-milligram Valiums because it had been such a frightening day.

  I slept well until the morning, then put on all that horrible makeup again and went outside to look for a bank. Cliff hadn’t told me which bank to choose, so I picked the first one I saw, naturally one of the biggest: the Swiss Credit Bank, right there on the Paradeplatz, the main square. It was a big place, a big old building, it looked so safe and secure. That was good, I thought, and I went in, wet hands and wet feet and all.

  I was amazed how easy it was. I thought I would have to have a long, serious talk with the director of the bank to open an account, but there were two pleasant girls at the information desk who said, “Oh, no! You just fill out these papers.” When I had filled
them out, I handed them to a man at a desk and gave him a thousand Swiss francs, which was what I had to do, they explained, as a Swiss citizen, to open an account. He made out a receipt on which he wrote Frau Helga Hughes, but in speaking he pronounced it yukus, which means “joke” in Schweizerdeutsch.

  And so I waited and then a little man with a Hitlerian mustache brought me a checkbook made out in the name of Frau Helga R. Hughes, with the name on all the checks. Cliff had warned me that this might happen and that it could ruin everything, so I said: “No, that’s no good. I have a business in Paris and New York and my business runs in the name of H. R. Hughes — women have a hard time in business, you know — and so I must have the bank account only under the first initials and then the last name, Hughes. I use this account only for business,” I told him, “and I don’t want to mix it up with my personal account. I get mixed up very easily” — which was certainly the truth.

  He said, “Come back in an hour, please,” and I did. He gave me a new checkbook and new receipts, all made out to H. R. Hughes. I asked if I could now deposit the $50,000 check I had shown them, the one Cliff had given to me, and he said, smiling, “Certainly, Frau Yukus.”

  Then I had a terrible fright. I thought I would faint. The teller at the window said: “Frau Hughes, you must sign the check on the back. You must endorse it. “

  What could I do? I said, “All right, just a minute,” and carried the check to one of those stands in the middle of the marble floor, and I took out the Hughes passport and copied the signature as best I could, but my hand was shaking and I knew they didn’t look the same at all. But when I brought it back to the teller she took the check and didn’t compare the signature with anything.

  And in this way started my business relationship to this man Howard Hughes, Cliff’s good friend.

  The train didn’t leave for Frankfurt until 11:30 in the morning, so I walked down the Bahnhofstrasse. I bought some sweaters for the children and some marzipan for Cliff, a big block of Lübecker chocolate-covered marzipan that would last him maybe two days and give him a bellyache, which he deserved for the bellyaches he had given me while I was in Zurich.