Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

My point was that despite the code we had arranged, I wasn’t satisfied with the reaction I had got from my people, because for all they knew I might have been given drugs by these kidnappers and unable to remember what I was supposed to put down.

When I got back and explained that it was Jerry who had been kidnapped, each of these Mormons said to me: ‘I wanted to pay, Mr. Hughes, but not the other – not him.’

We were faced with an extraordinary situation. The kidnappers had Jerry, who they believed was Howard Hughes – at least that’s what we assumed, even though I realized that Jerry would have told them he was a double – and they were demanding a million dollars for the wrong man.

Someone said, ‘Don’t pay, Mr. Hughes. After a while they’re realize they have your double and they’ll let him go.’

‘They may not believe him,’ I said. ‘They may kill him if I don’t pay.’

You met and discussed all this with your people?

I didn’t meet them face to face. It was discussed on the telephone. But they knew damn well it was me, and they knew damn well I wasn’t calling from some place up near Reno, where the kidnappers were supposed to be. They knew I was right there on the ninth floor on the other side of the wall.

Finally we worked it out. These people, whoever they were, got in touch with us and were told they had the wrong man. They believed it finally, because Jerry had insisted, and although he was my double he didn’t look precisely like me – he had a little nervous tic which I don’t have, thank God – and his voice was quite different, much deeper than mine. I spoke to one of them on the telephone. They realized they’d made a mistake, but they said, ‘If you want this man back alive, it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars.’ Why they selected that sum, I don’t know, but they did.

It was paid in cash, twenties and hundreds left under a cactus bush outside of Reno. It was all done like a cheap Hollywood gangster thriller, and Jerry was delivered unharmed, a little bruised and dirty – he hadn’t bathed in a week – and apparently very grateful that I had saved his skin.

That was the end of it, except that a few weeks later, Jerry quit working for me. He quit under peculiar circumstances. He was being well paid for doing damn little, but he gave some excuse that his wife was sick and he felt he should be with her in the East. And then, before we had time to discuss whatever his real problem might really be, he was gone.

It came out shortly after that – not from me, I wasn’t the least bit suspicious – but from other people who did a little investigating – that Jerry was starting to live pretty high on the hog in the Virgin Islands. Then I realized what had happened. I can’t swear to it, but it looked like I’d been taken for $100,000. And if my people had been more diligent and more deeply concerned about me, I would have been taken for a cool million. There was no kidnapping mob, there was just Jerry and a confederate.

The funny thing is, I didn’t try to track him down. Once I got over my first annoyance at having been bilked, I found I had a secret admiration for the man. He had guts, and it was a clever scheme. I told Helga and she agreed. I saved most of my annoyance for my Mormon bodyguards who would have let me rot.

Finally I decided to leave Nevada. I was too old to be disillusioned. Call it a disenchantment.

A number of things caused it. The Atomic Energy Commission, for one. The AEC put out a brochure about their Nevada test site in which they called it ‘America’s Outdoor Nuclear Explosives Laboratory.’ They presented it like a handbill for tourists. Nevada is relatively uninhabited, so naturally it’s fair game.

The first stage came about when they fired off a hydrogen bomb underground at a place called Paute Mesa, no more than a hundred miles from Las Vegas. Windows broke downtown, people heard it within a hundred miles, and the shock waves were felt in Los Angeles. It clocked well above five on the Richter scale. I left, of course – I slipped away to a safer place.

The other big negatives were the slow collapse of America’s SST program and the fact that I lost the appeal on the original $137 million default judgment in the TWA litigation, which, with lawyers’ fees and interest, had climbed up in the lofty neighborhood of $250 million. The government said, ‘You’ve got to pay.’ And just as I said when the United States Senate demanded I bring Johnny Meyer back to Washington from St. Tropez, I said, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’

But before I left Nevada for good, I decided to take another trip. Not to Mexico this time. Not for pleasure. This time the trip was for a measure of enlightenment, and to save what was left of my life.

DURING THOSE YEARS in Las Vegas I had been involved in a lot of reading. And before that too. Not long after my last visit to Ernest Hemingway, I began reading other things besides novels. I’d always read casually for diversion, but then for the first time in my life I began to read in order to learn. And I don’t mean to learn engineering or anything like that. I got curious about Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I had found very little satisfaction finally in the way I’d grown up, with all the things all American kids are supposed to be proud of being able to do, to repair things and to build things, and to make money. These had become, for me, dry, mechanical operations with no deeper value than practicality. They didn’t answer any of the questions that were looming larger and larger for me.

I was no longer looking for a great teacher or a guru. I didn’t believe in that any more. After my disappointing encounters with men of great reputation, I sort of put this down as a childish notion. In fact, I had concluded that any man whose name was a household word was either corrupted or had the seeds of corruption in him. I felt, for example, that any man who would allow himself to be put in a position like Ernest, where he was so publicized and lionized, was being false to himself. How could he be wise?

I decided that if there were any wise men in this world, their names were totally unknown to me and to you, and to anyone who was reading the newspapers or even reading books.

I read about Bertrand Russell and the peace marches. He seemed an impressive man. I tried to read some of his works and, I confess, they were a little over my head, except for the mathematics. But when I read of him marching down the streets in London, I thought, hell, this is show biz.

Then what should I seek? Should I just look inside myself? I didn’t dare. I didn’t really respect myself as much as I once had, or thought I had. And if I looked too deep, I was afraid of what I’d find.

I considered myself well into middle age at that time – on the cusp of being old, mostly because of the physical damage I had suffered in those various accidents and partly because of the mental pounding I was taking, the constant attacks by these businessmen who were out to strip me of all they could. And partly, I suppose, because when you reach your early forties, you start to feel you’re not young any more, but you don’t want to face it. Then when you get to your fifties, you’ve learned to face it. Unless you’re an idiot, you have no choice. At first it’s a bit of a shock. In the end, however, it’s a good thing – in Asia, you know, they have a proverb: ‘Whom the gods curse, they keep young.’

My first reaction was to say to myself, ‘Well, soon I’ll be an old man and I’d better start thinking like an old man.’

I don’t mean I wanted to jump into my wheelchair. I meant I wanted to assess my life and latch on to some sort of self-understanding – the beginning of it, at least. It seemed absurd to me to have lived some fifty-odd years and have no answers to questions. It wasn’t enough to have more money than anyone else in the world. Most rich people I knew were awful human beings, angry and paranoid and grasping. They can tell you how to steal a company or invest money safely, or what a van Gogh is worth at Sotheby’s, or where you can buy the best bench-made shoes, but they know damn little else. They certainly can’t tell you the meaning of life, except in terms of gross national product and stock splits.