Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

What’s the top?

Three billion one. And if I wanted to use an optimum figure, including my Indonesian oil, it’s pushing three and a half billion. That makes me nearly twice as rich as Getty. The others, Hunt and the Mellons and Bob Smith, don’t even come close. The one who’s creeping up is Ludwig, the shipping guy. And of course one day someone’s going to invent a computer that the average citizen can use in his home, and a way to write and pay your bills with it and communicate with other computers, and that man or woman will automatically make $10 billion and be on top of the heap. And it will be some twenty-five-year old whiz kid, because the computer industry is a young man’s game.

I’ll change my question. What does it mean to you to be the richest man in the world?

Not a damned thing. Money is of no interest to me anymore. All I care about is that I have a little peace in the rest of my days, and freedom from the seven internal foes of humankind. You remember?

Not offhand, but I’ll look it up. Who are you leaving all that money to that doesn’t interest you anymore?

That’s in my will. Of course I won’t have it published before I die. Nobody knows the contents of my will but me, not even the people who helped me draw it up.

I worked out all the variations, the ways in which I planned to divide my property on my death, and had a dozen typists type them up. I’ve done this several times. I had different sets of different bequests, all sorts of possibilities – I threw in a batch of red herrings. I had each of the secretaries type up a different version of the will, with each clause on a separate page. It was like taking a deck of cards and shuffling them. They couldn’t possibly know the eventual outcome. In one paragraph I’d leave Toolco to the Hughes Medical Institute. In another I’d leave Hughes Aircraft to the United States government, ha ha ha. And in another to my cousins in Houston, or a dog pound in Las Vegas, or a guy who once gave me a lift in the desert when I ran out of gas. When I got all these pages back I threw out what I didn’t want and arranged the right ones in the correct final order, and I had the last page, with my signature, witnessed by people in my organization. They saw only the last page.

The secretaries couldn’t figure it out by seeing which pages were discarded, because I personally burned them and flushed the ashes down the toilet. You can reconstruct the writing on paper that’s been burned, you know. But I doubted that anyone was going to climb down into the cesspools under Los Angeles or Las Vegas to find the ashes.

And I have one more question, if you don’t mind. A naive one.

I know your naive questions pretty well by now. What’s this one: how many people have I murdered in my lifetime?

I just wanted to ask you, after all you’ve gone through, in a long life with many achievements and many sorrows, what you believe in. Do you have a philosophy of life now? A guiding principle?

That certainly is a naive question, but I’ll answer it. I can put it in one sentence. Live and let live . Privacy is all we’ve got – you, me, anybody. You can take any road in this world and if there are other people on it, no matter how crooked that road is, no one will pay serious attention to you except to flatter you and get things they want from you. But people will think you’re ‘normal.’

If you cut your own road, go your own way without inviting anyone along, then everyone in the world will say you’re crazy, you took the wrong road. Because it is your own. You made it. People can’t stand that, unless of course you invite them along – in which case it’s not yours anymore and you might as well cut your losses and start all over again.

Did it ever occur to you that it doesn’t make any difference what road you take, even if there are other people on it, as long as you’re independent? ‘If you are alone, you are your own man’ – according to Leonardo da Vinci.

I like that. It could serve as a motto on my nonexistent family crest. You’ve said something intelligent. Now, why don’t you ask me an intelligent question instead of things like, ‘What’s your philosophy of life?’ and ‘How does it feel to be the richest man in the world?’

What would you consider an intelligent question?

Why don’t you ask, ‘Did you enjoy your breakfast today?’ That’s a question that makes sense.

Did you enjoy your breakfast?

Yes, I did. Fresh fruit is a gift from the planet. And since I’ve reached what’s undoubtedly the final decade of my life, you could also ask me what is my greatest ambition at this point.

What is your greatest ambition, Howard?

To enjoy my breakfast tomorrow.

What about Sai Baba’s question? ‘In the years remaining, if you knew beyond doubt that you wouldn’t fail, what is the one thing that you would do?’ What is that one thing?

Don’t you know?

Not really. Unless it would be to seek enlightenment.

That would have been a magnificent task, but beyond my spiritual capability and the years I had left to me. What I chose to do was tell the story of my life, warts and all. And I’ve just finished.

IN FEBRUARY 1972 Howard Hughes fled Paradise Island in the Bahamas to take up residence on the top floor in yet another hotel, the Intercontinental Managua in Nicaragua. During the four remaining years of his life, he never returned to live in the United States. In December 1972 he moved to England, to London’s Inn on the Park; a year later he was back in the Caribbean in the Xanadu Princess Hotel on Grand Bahama Island; and two years later he flew to Mexico, to a hospital bed in the penthouse of the Acapulco Princess Hotel.

In 1972 Hughes finally relinquished control of Toolco and allowed it to become a public company; he soon sold all his shares. A holding company, Summa Corporation, was created, and all of Hughes’s property except for Hughes Aircraft was placed under its umbrella.

Many witnesses, including a four-man medical team, later testified that by 1973 Hughes had become a hopeless drug addict, and that the chief purpose of his move from the Bahamas to Mexico was to insure a steady supply of codeine for his habit. (One of his doctors said under oath that Hughes’s drug usage had risen to between 25 to 45 grains of codeine and seven to fifteen ten-milligram Valium tablets per day.) In the last year of his life he shrank three inches, a tumor protruded from the side of his head, his teeth were almost destroyed, his arms and thighs were a maze of needle tracks, his prostate was radically enlarged, and he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He was starving.

On April 3, 1976, after a period of delirium, he lapsed into a virtual coma. On April 5 he was flown in a private plane from Acapulco to a hospital in Houston, the city where he had been born. He died before the plane crossed the border.

In 1983 the wooden flying boat – the Hercules, or Spruce Goose: 750 feet long with a wingspan of 330 feet – was moved from its hidden hangar by the City of Long Beach, California, and placed on exhibit in the world’s largest geodesic dome as a tourist attraction. A decade later it was disassembled and moved to McMinnville, Oregon by the Evergreen Aviation Educational Center. There she still sits.

The original H-1 racer is on exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

FOR PERPETRATING the hoax, Clifford Irving was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison. Richard Suskind, his researcher and co-author, served five months, and Edith Irving, as a co-conspirator, was sentenced to sixty days by the U.S. courts and to one year by a Swiss tribunal.