The Hoax Read online

  The letter from Tel Aviv had kept us at bay for more than a year, but in the winter of 1968, on Ibiza, we met again. Our affair had never ended and we came to believe that it would probably never end. We would make no promises, we would have no hopes, but we would take from each other whatever sustenance and joy was there when the season was ripe. To both myself and Nina I said repeatedly: “Edith must never know. Edith must never be hurt.”

  And Nina would echo my words and add: “She loves you too much, and I know you love her. You’d be a fool to leave her, because what we have together is good the way it is. And I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me …”

  She and Frederik had finally separated. He had his own apartment in London. He had fathered a child by another girl. That, for Nina, had stifled whatever qualms she may have felt about declaring her independence. We saw each other when and where we could, without rocking my domestic boat, from 1968 onward. Of necessity, I lived with the assumption that Edith suspected little and knew nothing. In July, returning from my father’s funeral in New York, I stayed three days with Nina in her London flat.

  The only real crisis of those years came two weeks later, on Ibiza. A rapprochement had been in effect for a long time; the island was small, we had too many mutual friends not to meet from time to time at a party or at the Salinas beach. For her birthday party, Nina asked Edith and me to dinner together with a dozen other people. Throughout the evening Nina and I never danced, never touched. Once, at the candlelit dinner table in the big beamed kitchen of Nina’s finca, we looked at each other. The look was neither brief nor long. No word was spoken. But what passed silently between us across the pine table must have had an eloquence that neither of us knew how to conceal.

  Driving home, Edith said: “I know now. And I think I’ve always known. You looked at her in a way you haven’t looked at me since the time we first met.” Her voice was weary, almost dispassionate. “You’re still in love with her. What I beg you — don’t deny it.”

  And at home, in the living room, after we had talked until four o’clock in the morning, I no longer tried to deny it. I dug for the truth, but all I reached was confusion — and Edith’s tears. “Do you want to go with her?” Edith cried.

  “No.”

  “Then will you give her up? Will you stop seeing her?”

  “I can’t do that,” I said, and felt I would strangle on the words.

  Two days later, on a hot July afternoon, Edith drove out the Santa Eulalia road and up the mountain to Nina’s finca. It was the first time in more than three years that they had ever talked alone. All Edith demanded to know was what Nina wanted from me. “Do you love Cliff?” she asked, and Nina replied: “I don’t really know …”

  “I can’t live with him, this way, with a man divided, killing him and killing me worse. If you want him,” she said brutally, “you take him. I pack his clothes and he’ll go.”

  “I don’t know if I want it,” Nina said. “And I won’t break up a marriage. You have two children. He loves them, and he loves you. I couldn’t do it.”

  “Then let him be,” Edith pleaded. “Don’t see him again. Can you at least save my life and agree to that?”

  “Yes,” Nina said at length. “I won’t see him any more.”

  Edith returned to the house on the San José road. She had humiliated herself, but she had won. “And you?” she said to me. “Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said, because there was no other way.

  That was where things stood in December of 1970, five months after our promises, on the day that Edith found Nina’s letter waiting for me at the bank and on the same day that I returned to Ibiza from Palma where I had said to Dick Suskind: “I’ve got a wild idea …”

  Chapter 3

  The Ibiza Mob

  Peace returned swiftly to our household. After all, it was Christmas. In our living room we laid the new red and gold carpet we had bought in Germany and carried down on the rack of the Mercedes. After an hour of sweating and tugging I fell heavily into the big purple easy chair.

  “Beautiful!” I surveyed hearth and home. “And now I need a drink.”

  Sipping a bourbon, I remembered for the first time the discussion that Dick and I had in Palma the morning before. The monkey munched ferociously in her cage and Edith settled down on the sofa to work on the sweater she was knitting for Barney. The Christmas tree winked and blinked in the corner, almost touching the thousand-year-old sevinas beams of the roof. I put a Mozart quintet on the record player. In half an hour Nedsky and Barney would come barreling in from the other side of the house where Rafaela, our Spanish maid, tried to keep them in check until seven o’clock in the evening. Domesticity! The beast was in his habitat, at rest. I thrived on it; we were content. Swiss tooth and claw only showed when the feline Dane cried softly from the steamy depths of the jungle.

  “I had a funny talk with Dick,” I said. “Came from an idea I got on the boat. I was reading Newsweek …” I started to sketch out the general idea and Edith glanced up from her knitting, bewildered.

  “Who’s Howard Hughes?” she asked.

  “One of the two or three richest men in the world.”

  “Then he must be a schmuck,” and she went back to knitting, having disposed of the invisible billionaire with one philosophical stroke.

  I explained, as best I could — since I knew little more than what I read in the magazine — why Hughes was a man of many parts and why people were interested in him. I was vague in declaring that the book itself would be a hoax and soon I realized that Edith’s attention was wavering.

  “Come on,” I said, “you always complain that I never talk to you. So now I’m talking to you. And what do you do? You knit!”

  She looked up sharply. “I don’t understand whether you know this man Hughes or you don’t know him, or you’re going to meet him or not meet him. But whatever, my advice is you should finish your novel first, that is more important than a book about a crazy man with a billion dollars.” I must have looked slightly crestfallen, because she suddenly dropped her knitting and floated across the room to pat me on the cheek. “Do your novel, darling. If you write this book afterwards, about the crazy man, it must be full of soul-vomit. You know? A man who tells everything! You say he builded all these airplanes and drilled for oil in Texas …”

  “No, his father invented a drilling bit. Hughes went to Hollywood and made a movie called Hell’s Angels —”

  “Okay. But make sure the book’s got plenty of soul-vomit. That’s what the kitchen maids like to read.”

  I fell silent, thinking of the implications. Edith had not understood the nature of the project, she provided me with a key. Soul-vomit was one of her favorite expressions: the uninhibited pouring forth of emotion and sentimentality, of love and hate, aspiration and frustration. Soul-vomit — in this case, the accumulated wisdom, or lack of it, of a long and hyperactive lifetime; all the quirkiness and eccentricity which a billionaire recluse could manifest and which he had dammed up inside of him for lack of a suitable audience. If we chose, he would be a mouthpiece for all the opinions which Dick and I had only occasionally voiced in our own books — because who, after all, was interested in the philosophical meanderings of a couple of journeyman writers? But Hughes? I thought of the old Jewish folk saying: “When you’re rich, you’re handsome, you’re intelligent, you have impeccable taste, and, my, how beautifully you sing!” Hughes was rich, and if we did the book, he would sing …

  “That’s wonderful, darling,” I said, “that’s …”

  But Edith was no longer with me. She was slowly turning the pages of a book on Salvador Dali. And a minute later the children thundered into the room, Nedsky yelling to be hoisted to my lap and Barney heading straight for Eugen’s cage, rattling the bars and cooing his adoration.

  I woke next morning with a cold and a fever, and spent the day in bed dosing myself with a variety of vitamins and antibiotics. It wasn’t until
the third day after my return from Palma that I went to the studio, intending to work. The telephone began to ring as I was inserting the key in the lock.

  It was Dick, more frustrated and anxious than I had ever heard him. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for two days!” I started to explain but he cut me off. “Listen. We’ve got to get this thing on the road!”

  “What thing?”

  “The Hughes thing, schmuck!”

  “I want to finish my novel first,” I said patiently.

  “Forget it! You can always write a novel, but you only get one chance to do the authorized biography of Howard Hughes. If he’s not dead already, he’s old and sick. Suppose he kicks off before the spring? You’d piss and moan for the rest of your life.”

  “Dick, I’ve got other troubles. Edith went to the bank for my mail …” He chopped me off again before I could tell the woeful tale. “Suppose someone else comes up with the same idea? You know how often two books on the same subject are published at the same time. Hughes is in the air right now. He’s there to be plucked! Anyone might do it, and if ifs not us you’ll kick yourself in the ass till you’re black and blue. Now listen …” He went on and on, giving one reason after another why we should plunge immediately into the project, until finally I grew testy and said: “I can’t sit here and bullshit with you by the hour. I really want to finish this novel first, and I’ve been sick, and I haven’t had the time to look for your goddam finca. Why don’t you come over for a couple of days? We can talk about it and you can check out the housing situation.”

  I expected him to suggest visiting in a week or two, but he said: “Great. I’ll be on tomorrow morning’s plane,” and hung up before I could object.

  It was a cold blustery day, with gusts of rain beating against the glass door that led to the terrace of the studio. Formentera, smallest of the Balearic Islands, hung as a gray smudge on the horizon. Yesterday, when I had spoken to Dick on the telephone, it had been so cleanly incised against the sky that I could count the houses scattered like cubes of sugar along the coast.

  Dick was hunched down in the big green armchair with his hands under his oak-like thighs. The electricity had broken down, as it often did during a rainstorm, and the butane heater wasn’t working because it had run out of gas.

  “I still think we should wait until I’ve finished my novel,” I said.

  “I thought we’d settled that. Anyhow,” he held up his hand to forestall my objection, “let’s leave it for now and talk about the project. First: how do we sell it, and who do we sell it to?”

  “Well, if we do it, I guess we try McGraw-Hill.” I hesitated, bothered instantly by the thought. They had been publishing me for nine years — of course they were the logical choice. They had the money and they knew I delivered on my promises, and usually without too much delay beyond the supposed deadline. “But I hate to go to them. They trust me. They have confidence in me.”

  Dick raised his eyes ceilingward in silent supplication. “Schmuck,” he said, a measure of pity in his voice. “That’s the name of the game.”

  I smiled ruefully. “I see the point. You’re driving me nuts. Okay. In a few days, when everyone’s recovered from New Year’s, I’ll write them a letter. I’ll let it drop that I’ve been in touch with Hughes, that I sent him a copy of Fake! and he liked it. That’s innocent enough, and it doesn’t commit me to anything. One step at a time, yes?”

  Dick nodded his approval. “Who will you write to? Beverly?”

  Beverly Loo was then subsidiary rights editor, and the only one of the old guard — from the early 1960’s when I signed my first contract with McGraw-Hill — who still remained in the Trade Book Division. A round-faced Chinese-American girl born in Los Angeles, she was the daughter of a veteran Hollywood actor who had played the parts of several hundred Chinese, Japanese, and North Korean villains. Over the years we had become friends, and Beverly had once flown down from the Frankfurt Book Fair to spend a week with us in the finca on Ibiza, where she drove Edith crazy by breakfasting on cold baked beans and bloody marys and talking nonstop about publishing and publishers. She was single, living alone in a small but chic 57th Street apartment with her dog, who seemed to be one of the two major passions of her life. The other was the McGraw-Hill Book Company. She was a company woman wrapped up in the cocoon of the publishing world almost to the exclusion of all other pursuits. If she grumbled to me occasionally that McGraw-Hill paid her less than she was worth — because she was a woman, and company policy decreed that women received less pay for equal work — the discontent rarely lasted. The thought of leaving Mother McGraw for richer pastures at another publishing house never seemed to touch her mind. “But if you ever do go,” I had said to her, “I go, too. I can’t have loyalty to a company. Only to people.”

  “That’s another thing that troubles me,” I said to Dick. “She’s a friend. I may be a prick about women and a few other things, but I don’t stab my friends in the back. If I get Beverly involved …”

  He snorted. “She won’t be the one making the decisions. This kind of thing will go right to the top.”

  That —” the top “ — was anonymous enough to quell my first uprising of conscience. “Okay,” I promised. “I’ll write to Beverly.”

  “And then?”

  “You sound like Nedsky when I tell him a bedtime story. ‘And then? And then, Daddy?’ Then we’ll have to wait. We’ll see what she says. If they swallow the bait, I’ll wait a month or two and then take a crack at writing a letter from Hughes to me. I can use that Newsweek inset as a model.”

  “What do you mean?” Dick’s eyes widened. “You’ll forge a letter?”

  “How the hell else am I going to convince them that I’m in touch with Howard Hughes? What did he do, parachute out of the sky over Ibiza, land in our rose garden, and say, ‘Clifford Irving, I dub thee my biographer’?”

  “Can’t you just say he called you?”

  “Then all I’ve got going for me is my word on it. McGraw-Hill trusts me and loves me, but it’s not puppy love. You said it yourself — they’re a big, conservative publisher. They’re not going to give me a contract just because I tell them I’m talking to Howard Hughes on the telephone. Put yourself in their place. Would you believe me?”

  “I might,” Dick said brightly.

  “Well, that’s why you’re a starving writer and not the head of the McGraw-Hill Book Company. And even if you believed me, Señor McGraw, would you sign a six-figure contract and put up the money?”

  Dick’s brightness faded. He shook his head glumly.

  “So the only thing to do,” I said, trying to cheer him up a little, “is write a letter from Hughes to me.”

  “But how can you do it? For Christ’s sake — forgery is a profession.”

  I could hardly argue the point. In the mid-1940’s, as an art student at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, I had helped my father with the lettering on his comic strips, “Willie Doodle” and “Pottsy.” In those same years I was a Dodger fan and one September I cut school three or four times and journeyed by subway out to Brooklyn to cheer the Flock to victory in a crucial series against the Cardinals. Such absence from school required an explanatory note from a parent. On two occasions I lettered the notes in my father’s familiar printing. Please excuse my son’s absence from school on Thursday. He had a cold. Yours truly, Jay Irving. And that was the extent of my experience in the arts of forgery.

  “But I can try,” I said to Dick. “After all, what are they going to compare it to? There’s only that little inset in Newsweek. They don’t have any letters from Howard Hughes lying around the office. Hell, I could use any handwriting I wanted, just so long as it was on yellow legal paper.”

  Dick was beaming again. He gave a little chuckle, like a happy Buddha. “You may be right.”

  “The only problem is I don’t have any yellow legal paper.”

  “I do,” Dick said. “About half a pad. I’ll s
end it to you from Palma.”

  We drove back through the rain to the finca. Edith had set out a bowl of salad and plates of cold cuts, with a bottle of red Rioja to wash it down. Food and wine vanished, our appetites whetted by the morning’s conversation. Chortling like a child with a new toy, Dick examined one facet after another of the project. Edith listened, trying her best to understand. “The best thing we’ve got going for us,” Dick said for the tenth time, “is Hughes’s absolute refusal to appear in court.”

  “But suppose this time he does it? What then?”

  “Ach, Mensch!” Edith’s eyes sparked. “Then you look at him and say: ‘Aber — but you’re not Howard Hughes!’”

  “Sure.” Dick said. “You say, ‘Help! I’ve been duped.’”

  “You mean Max duped me?” I said.

  “Who’s Max?” Dick asked.

  “Max? Don’t you know Max? Max is a con man. He’s one of Howard’s doubles.”

  Dick’s eyes shone with delight. “He looks like Hughes, he speaks like Hughes, he knows all about Hughes. But is he Hughes?”

  “Nein!” Edith cried, jumping to her feet and thrusting out her almost-flat chest in a heroic pose. “He’s Supermensch!”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said to Edith. “You don’t even know what this is all about, so you can keep out of it. And stay out — don’t get involved with two lunatics.” I turned to Dick. “And you’re talking like we’ve decided to do this thing. I’m a slow thinker. I’ve told you nineteen times already that I want to finish the novel before I even think about doing this. Why the hell are we going through these contortions?”