The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  “Harold, I’ll lay it on the line to you. My wife is tired of my being away. There are personal things that enter into this. She wants me back home, and I’ve got no genuine excuse for not going. I can’t fight this lawsuit for you. That’s a lawyer’s job.”

  Shelton Fisher had other things on his mind, and he brought up the question of who had witnessed my meetings with Hughes. He knew of Dick’s prune affidavit, and of George Gordon Holmes, and Pedro the Mexican pilot, and Jorge the Puerto Rican go-between. He coughed delicately. “I’ve also heard,” he said, “that Hughes introduced you to Spiro Agnew in Palm Springs.”

  “We’ve checked that out,” Ralph Graves said. “Agnew was in Palm Springs that weekend.”

  “How would it be,” Fisher said thoughtfully, “if Andy Heiskell and I reached the Vice-President, which I think we could do through some contacts in Washington, and asked him for a confirmation?” He mused for a while, then answered his own question. “Hell, even if he admitted it privately, he’d never make out an affidavit saying it was true.”

  I nodded glumly.

  Fisher looked at his watch. I had already had the uneasy feeling that they were waiting for someone else to arrive, and now he confirmed it. “We’ve had lawyers in Zurich all week. They should be here by now. There’s something goddam funny going on. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but the Credit Suisse gave them some information about that account of Hughes. They don’t think it belongs to him. What they said, if you want to know it precisely, was that in their opinion it couldn’t belong to Howard Robard Hughes the American industrialist.” The emphasis was on the word couldn’t.

  I frowned. “Meaning what?”

  “Hell,” he drawled. “I guess it either belongs to a dwarf, a black man, a very young man, or a woman. For some reason I got the idea they think it was a woman.”

  Ten minutes later, Oresden Marden of White and Case walked in the door; he had landed at Kennedy Airport just two hours ago and he looked exhausted. He confirmed Shelton Fisher’s statement. The account had neither been opened by Howard Hughes nor belonged to Howard Hughes. More than that he didn’t know or wouldn’t say.

  “We left it in the hands of the Zurich district attorney,” Marden said quietly. “And there’s something I think had better be understood by everyone present.” He turned slightly toward me. “It’s out of our hands now. That’s the way Swiss law operates. Whatever they turn up, they’ll use, and we can’t stop them.” He shrugged, as if in apology.

  The meeting was about to break up when Harold McGraw stopped me by the door. “If you can possibly stay …”

  “I’ll call Edith,” I said. “If she’ll come to New York with the kids, I’ll stay a week or so. But if she refuses, Harold, I’m going.”

  Back at Marty Ackerman’s and alone on the fifth floor, I was able to take stock. Stunned by the revelations, yet thrown off guard by the friendliness with which they had been offered me, I had been able to offer no solutions to the questions, direct or implied. I had gone through the afternoon solely on the momentum of the past two weeks. A dwarf, a black man, a very young man, or a woman. If that much was known, it wouldn’t take long before the dwarf, the black man, and the very young man were eliminated. So it was a woman. But which woman? Would the Credit Suisse dare reveal her identity? What about Swiss bank secrecy? It suddenly seemed to me impossible that they would go further with their revelations, either to McGraw-Hill or the Zurich district attorney. What Swiss law had been broken? Someone had entered the bank with a valid Swiss passport bearing the name of Helga Renate Hughes and had opened an account in that name. The three checks that had passed through the account were legitimate. The Swiss bank can’t say any more, I decided. And even if they did, what connection could be established between this unknown Helga Hughes and Edith? A theory could be offered, a theory hopefully incapable of destruction, that a trusted servant of Howard Hughes bearing the passport of Helga Hughes had handled the checks for him and acted as courier, exactly as Edith had done but with rather than without his knowledge. And who would she be? I remembered, in the transcript, how Dick and I had laughingly assigned the name Helga to the woman whom Howard loved in his declining years …

  There could be no link between Helga and Edith. Of that much I was certain. And suddenly I relaxed. The strain vanished and I felt as if a heavy log that I had been bearing on my shoulders had been removed. Marty was in his office.

  “How do you figure this?” he asked me.

  “There were three possibilities,” I argued, recapping some of that afternoon’s debate at McGraw-Hill. “Let’s consider them all. Let’s be unsentimental.” I had hoaxed McGraw-Hill completely; I had met an impostor posing as Hughes; or I had met Hughes, and the Zurich account had been opened by a loyal servant. “The first one,” I said, “would mean that I concocted the transcripts, and we know that’s an impossibility. Right?” Marty nodded. “The second one, the impostor theory, has some merit — at least in theory. There might be something planted in that book that could ruin the Hughes empire. But we can’t find anything like that in the manuscript. It couldn’t have been Maheu, because the impostor rips into Maheu and calls him every name in the book.”

  “An impostor could have done it for another motive,” Marty pointed out. “The money.”

  “But think what that would mean. They would have had to dig up an actor who resembled Hughes physically — six-foot-three, 130-odd pounds, 65 years old. He’d have to be indoctrinated for at least a year on the private and public life of Howard Hughes. He’d also have to be a master forger, because the man I met wrote two of the letters in my presence, on Paradise Island last September. He’d have to have at least five or six accomplices. The Mexican airline pilot, the Puerto Rican who met me in San Juan, this guy who calls himself George Gordon Holmes, the man who posed as Agnew in Palm Springs, and two or three men who guarded the bungalow at Pompano Beach. The cost of pulling off a hoax like that would run to two or three hundred thousand dollars. Which means their profit over the course of two years would be about $400,000 — divided five or six ways.”

  Marty shook his head. “It wouldn’t make sense. A gang that brilliant wouldn’t knock themselves out for peanuts like that.”

  “So we’re left with only one conclusion. The loyal servant theory. I met Hughes, but someone else — someone he trusted implicitly — opened the account in Zurich for him. Man or a woman … doesn’t matter. Maybe that person even knows how to sign Hughes’s name. It wouldn’t be so difficult, I imagine, to learn to forge just a signature. But the letters! No one could forge twenty pages of handwritten letters. Why would they go to all that trouble? So it was Hughes.”

  Marty agreed. “I called Edith,” I said, “She won’t come to New York. She wants me home.”

  “You better tell that to Shelton Fisher,” Marty decided. “Promise him you’ll fly right back if they need you. And then get the hell out, fast.”

  I called Shelton with my decision. I could feel that he wanted to protest more than he did, but I had made my announcement with no hint that I could be swayed. In the late afternoon, just as I was clearing my desk and getting ready to pack my suitcase, Frank McCulloch arrived with Bill Lambert, Life’s Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter. “We know you’re busy,” Frank said, “and we know you’re leaving tonight. We won’t take up much of your time — we want to zero in on one thing. The key to the whole mystery is this man George Gordon Holmes. Tell us everything you can remember about him.”

  I gave the description again in detail — about 180 pounds, six feet tall, dark hair — adding one or two bits of trivia that I had forgotten. The cigarettes that he chain-smoked, for example, were either Winstons or Marlboros.

  “You gave him the manuscript in Los Angeles,” Lambert said. “Is that correct?”

  “Right. Hughes was sick and Holmes called me and arranged a meeting place.”

  “Where?”

  “A street corner. He told me to drive to
a certain place and wait for him. Then this guy walked up, gave me the code word, and took the book from me. That was Holmes.”

  “What street corner? Can you remember it?”

  I had to hunt quickly in my mind for a likely place. I remembered taking some shirts to a laundry near the corner of Sweetzer and Sunset Boulevard.

  “I think it was Sweetzer, just off Sunset.”

  Lambert and McCulloch looked at each other sharply. “Listen,” Frank said, “we think we know who Holmes is. Your description fits the man perfectly. We’ve had a hunch all along that confirms it. Do you know a man named John Meier?”

  “I know who he is. He worked for Howard in Nevada. Something to do with mining claims or the AEC, I don’t really remember.”

  “His office,” McCulloch said triumphantly, “is in Los Angeles, at the corner of Sweetzer and Sunset.”

  That evening on the Iberia 747 from New York to Madrid I tried to make sense of it. I had pulled an address out of the hat and it had tied in with a former Hughes aide whose physical description fit the nonexistent George Gordon Holmes. Absurdity and coincidence had once again won the day over all the laws of logic and probability. McCulloch and Lambert were hot on the trail, and the trail would lead to nothing. Adding to the lunacy of it, Lambert had thrown a final curve ball at me before the meeting broke up and I ran to catch the plane. He had contacts, he claimed, inside the Hughes organization. They had told him that a letter to Hughes written and airmailed by me to the fictional Holmes c/o General Delivery in Miami — a mid-December letter — written at Shelton Fisher’s suggestion and with a carbon copy sent to him — begging Howard to do something about Toolco’s denials regarding the autobiography — had been picked up at the Miami post office by someone in the Hughes organization. Impossible, I thought — but I only nodded. “That proves the link,” Lambert said. He and Frank had then asked me to help them set up a trap. At their direction I wrote two brief notes to Howard and put them in the airmail envelopes addressed to George Gordon Holmes, General Delivery, Main Post Office, Miami, Florida. “We’ll mail them,” Frank explained, “and then we’ll stake out the post office in Miami. Someone will go there eventually to pick them up — Meier, or Holmes, or whoever — and we’ll be waiting.”

  Dazed as I was, I made one final effort during the flight to Madrid. I had Helga on my mind — the Helga of the Zurich bank account and the Helga of the transcript. If it came to light that the loyal servant who had gone to the Credit Suisse was indeed a woman, I had to keep Edith free from suspicion. Let them believe there was a live Helga still in Howard’s life.

  Rummaging in my straw basket, I pulled out a pad of yellow lined legal paper. Appropriate, and good for a private chuckle.

  Dear Frank (I wrote),

  I’ve been sitting on the plane thinking & thinking about our discussion this afternoon, and playing detective, & a light bulb has exploded in my brain — triggered by some of your questions, particularly about the room & the house in Florida on the last trip. I’m not sure of the significance; & memory can play tricks especially when you’re forcing it as hard as I am now.

  But, for whatever it’s worth …

  I remember some more details of the bedroom in which I last saw Hughes. I think I told you there were blinds on the windows. There were also, I believe, flowered curtains — or at least patterned chintz-type curtains. The bedspread, I believe, matched them, or was similar. The furniture was relatively light in both color and appearance, and in good taste but not showy. The easy chair in which I sat was not a big chair, or so I remember it. In other words, what I’m trying to say is: in retrospect it does not strike me as being a man’s bedroom.

  Also: and maybe even more significant — on both the Dec. 3rd and Dec. 7th meetings, I’m sure that Holmes left the room for several minutes prior to my final departure. On both occasions he came back to get me, lead me into the hallway, blindfolded me, and guided me out of the house. On the second occasion (Dec. 7th), I’m almost positive the car was not in front of the steps where Holmes had originally parked it. I remember his having to guide me some distance along gravel or concrete. I got in first; then he got in behind the wheel. He muttered something I didn’t catch, and then shoved the seat back. The sound is unmistakable. As I’ve told you, Holmes is about six feet tall. Also, he turned the air-conditioning on full blast (as he always had it), and as it must have been when we originally arrived at the house.

  The conclusions, unless I’m really losing my memory or fishing blindly, are obvious. I don’t know what significance they have, but I’m zeroing in on this curious hint that the person opening the account in Zurich may have been a woman …

  I went on a bit further. What good it would do, I didn’t know; but one more act would hardly involve me more than I was already involved.

  I posted the letter from the Madrid airport. It was a quixotic and fruitless effort.

  I was still on the base paths, making a last desperate effort to steal home — but the ball game was over. The crowds had left the stands and I was out there, all alone, and blind. Worse, when I came to bat again, it would be under a new set of rules which none of us had ever dreamed possible.

  Chapter 18

  Nightmare in Paradise

  The first hint came to me on the flight from Madrid to Ibiza. It came with all the subtlety of a knee to the groin. I was stuffed into a seat with no leg room, overtired and unable to sleep, when a short pleasant-faced man came down the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Irving?”

  “Yes?”

  He smiled gratefully. “I was afraid you wouldn’t admit it, and I wasn’t even quite sure it was you. I’m Dick Eder of The New York Times.”

  He dropped into the seat opposite me. Whatever there was to say about the Hughes controversy I had said in New York, and I steered the conversation away from the subject as best I could. I was going home for Rest & Rehabilitation and the last thing I wanted was more speculation or debate about Howard Hughes. “How come you’re going to Ibiza?” I asked.

  A mild look of stupefaction crossed Dick Eder’s face. He smiled at me as though I were slightly backward. “Haven’t you heard the news?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “I’ve sworn off reading the newspapers. I’ve read so much crap in the last week that I …”

  “Well, I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, “but you’d be better off if you were prepared. The Swiss police have identified H. R. Hughes as a woman. They’ve issued a warrant for her arrest, and have a description. She’s evidently a German-speaking blonde in her mid-thirties.”

  “A German-speaking blonde in her mid-thirties?” Eder nodded. “That can’t be,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

  “That description fits your wife. I met her last week on Ibiza.”

  “That’s why it’s impossible. Or something worse than impossible.”

  “There’s a story,” Eder went on quietly, “that two arrests have been made here in Spain by the Spanish police.”

  “Oh my God … Where in Spain?”

  “I don’t know. It could be a rumor, but it came from a very reliable source. Where’s Edith now?”

  “Waiting for me at the airport in Ibiza. With my kids.”

  “I hope so,” Eder said. “I really hope so.”

  The plane swooped down over the Salinas beach and bumped across the landing strip on Ibiza, coming to a final halt a few hundred yards from the white terminal building. Eder, who had a slight limp, fell far behind me as I strode, half-running, past the stewardess at the wingtip and toward the gate. Halfway there, with my mouth sour with fear, I saw a furry fox coat and two curly blond heads bobbing up and down beside it. Edith grinned at me from the distance. I turned, waved happily at Eder, then charged again toward the gate.

  “Not a word to the man on the plane with me,” I said, after I had hugged the kids and drawn Edith to my chest. “He’s a reporter.”

  “One reporter?” Edith laughed richly. “What yo
u think is happening here on the island? There is dozens of them! They come crawling round the house day and night and in town they come up to me at the Montesol and say, ‘What you think of this, Mrs. Irving? What you think of that?’ I keep telling them, ‘This man Hughes is crazy. Didn’t you know this always?’ I have fun with them, but it’s ridiculous now. It’s a bore.”

  “You have no idea how glad I am to see you here,” I said. “Come on, we’re going back to the house and then for a walk in the country.” I was afraid by then that the car, the house, the studio, had all been bugged.

  “Don’t you want a little sleep?” Edith asked. “You must be worn out.”

  “Later. I’ve got to talk to you first. Unless this reporter’s trying to trap me, Helga’s been blown. They think it’s you. The Swiss are cracking wide open. And they’ve described you as a blonde.”

  An hour later, after leaving Nedsky and Barney with Rafaela in the sandpit, we parked the Mercedes on a side road overlooking the harbor of Ibiza. It was a gray day with an unsettling damp wind blowing from the south, from North Africa. Edith’s confident good mood was on the wane.

  “How can they say I was a blonde? I always wore a black wig!”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the bank teller’s confused.”

  “No.” Edith trembled a little “It’s — what you call it in English? Eine Verschwörung … A frame-up! A frame-up, what is the most insane thing in the world could happen!” She started to laugh. “The Hughes people got to Zurich, to the banks. They’re trying to frame me for something not that I didn’t do, but that I did. It’s the last lunatic thing in this whole business!”

  “Let’s go back to the house. We’ll just have to hang on and see what happens next.”

  But they were waiting for us back at the finca: Eder, Bob Kirsch, a man from Newsweek, the UPI correspondent from Madrid, and a young Swiss reporter from one of the Zurich illustrated papers. There was no avoiding them, and it was only the start of the invasion. We were too tired to resist, and Edith broke out a bottle of wine and a pot of coffee, while I collapsed into an easy chair. What made it worthwhile, amid the constant questioning, was the fact that we were receiving far more information than we were giving. Kirsch was there as a loyal friend; he knew nothing and he only wanted to help, to take up some of the strain. The others, including a later arrival — Roger Beardwood of Time and then Rudy Chelminski of Life’s Paris bureau — were in constant touch with their home offices and fed us the reports and rumors as fast as they came in. Hughes had filed an affidavit in the Rosemont suit, stating once again that he had never met me and never cashed any checks from McGraw-Hill. It was notarized by one of the Mormon inner circle, Howard Eckersley, and bore what appeared to be a complete set of Hughes’s fingerprints as purported proof of identification.