Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

The coins and bills spilled over my cupped hands into a pile in the dust of the street. No one, not even the other beggars, dared take it from me. They must have thought I was a holy man come from afar, God knows where. I was thin enough, my hair was scraggly enough, my undershorts could have been taken for a loincloth, and I had the vibhuti rubbed into my chest and forehead. Anyone who stole from me would come back in the next life as a cockroach with backache.

I don’t know how much time passed. I only know I was there and doing very well indeed.

I know this because suddenly Helga said, ‘Howard! My God! Are you all right? What are you doing ?’

She stood there in front of me wearing a lovely white silk dress from Chanel.

She had flown into New Delhi, gone to the hotel, found out I wasn’t there, checked around and quickly learned that a car and driver had taken me to Benares. She hired another car.

I wasn’t in any of the good hotels in Benares, but someone – she never knew who it was – said, ‘Madam, I have seen the man you describe. He is down by the river near such-and-such a temple.’

So she came down with a guide and found me. She helped me to my feet and took me back to the hotel. I had tears in my eyes. I don’t know why.

We took all the money with us in a sack. And outside of town, on the drive back to New Delhi, we passed a hospital for the poor. Helga took the sack inside and gave it one of the nursing nuns at the desk. It was a considerable amount of money – the driver had to help Helga carry it. I had done really well.

A GREAT PART of my experience in India – that last part, I mean, when I visited Sai Baba and ended up by the Ganges as a beggar – is of course difficult to explain. Most people wouldn’t believe it, and so I haven’t told it to anybody. They’d think I was cracked. They probably think it anyway, but if I told them about the vibhuti and the rest of it, they’d be absolutely certain.

Helga and I flew down to Rajastan: saw some temples, rode an elephant who tried to pickpocket me with his trunk, stayed in some palaces – played at being tourists.

While we were in Jaipur she said, ‘Howard, my husband knows about us. He doesn’t know it’s you, but he knows it’s someone. He begged me not to leave him for you.’

That made me nervous. I had never asked her to leave her husband.

She knew that. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I told him I wouldn’t. Then he asked me to give up seeing you so that he and I could try to make our marriage work again. I thought about it for a few days and then I agreed to do that, after this trip to India. He and I have a history, you see. History counts.’

‘You and I have a history too,’ I said.

‘I know. Well, maybe we’ll see each other again. Just give me time.’

I told her I understood. We flew back to California, I said goodbye to her at LAX, and then I took off for Las Vegas.

I didn’t feel good about that parting, but nevertheless, in a way, I felt liberated. I didn’t own her. I had fine memories. I still do. We talk now and then, but I haven’t seen her since. Sometimes that saddens me. But I’ve learned to accept it. What can I do? She made a choice. It was the right choice for her and the wrong choice for me. The Mexicans say, ‘ Ni modo ’ – so it goes. It implies the acceptance of suffering as part of life.

As soon as I reached Nevada, I thought, my time here is up. I’m leaving. This is not how I want to live. Let them take their treble damages, I no longer cared. My health was failing, and I had the feeling that there were greener pastures elsewhere, in the Bahamas, where the government was friendly to me, and malleable.

Did you try to buy the Bahamian government?

I didn’t have to go that far. I could just rent it, so to speak, for as long as it was convenient.

I flew out to the Bahamas on Thanksgiving Day of 1970. But that wasn’t a snap decision. In fact it was a decision I had made at least a year before that. I contacted the people I know on Paradise Island and they set it up within two weeks. I took over the top floor of the Britannia Beach Hotel.

Do you like the view better than the one from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas?

There is no view. I had light-proof curtains put up before I moved in. I don’t need a view. The view is in my mind.

Regarding my getaway from Las Vegas, the newspaper accounts, as always, were partly cockeyed and partly accurate. I did contact the people I knew at Lockheed and borrowed one of their Jetstars to fly out of Nevada. But I never got carried down nine flights of stairs and put on any stretcher, and I never will – unless they’re carrying me out feet first to the graveyard, or I’m too sick to walk, or they’ve drugged me and are taking me away to dump me down an abandoned mine shaft. That last carries the highest probability rating, and if you ever hear that I’ve been carried away flat on my back you can tell the world that it undoubtedly wasn’t of my own free will.

I left the hotel in the back of a panel truck and drove out to the airport and flew down to Nassau. I had done that twenty times in the previous five years, although not to Nassau. Only this time the newspapers found out because my people moved out too. And they made a fuss beyond belief.

You wonder why I’ve cut myself off from people? Why I live the way I live? There’s your answer. I fear people because they’re empty-headed and therefore dangerous. How is it possible that I’ve become like a specimen in the zoo when I’m deliberately not living in the zoo? That intrigues me. What an age we live in. I can tell you, I wouldn’t mind getting out of it for awhile, and I’m not talking about using the cryogenic process to deep-freeze my body. With all the fine research facilities I’ve had at my command I should have stolen a page from H.G. Wells and had my people develop a time machine, a time traveler. I suppose if I sunk my entire fortune into it they’d be bound to come up with something that worked.

Where would you go if you had your choice?

I’d go back to China when they were building the Great Wall, and I’d be an engineer and help to build it, and I’d live a quiet life and die in my sleep. Have my Chinese sons bury me. Or out of curiosity I’d go back to America in 1870, to Texas, to see what the real West was like. That would fascinate me. Two-gun Howard, the Yoakum Kid.

But if I had just one choice, one trip, I’d go forward to the year 3000 and see what was going on then. See if there’s anything left.

You don’t regret your life, do you?

No, that would be a useless emotion. All that I really regret is that I was orphaned young, that I was rich much too soon to be able to deal with it properly, and that I couldn’t have lived a more simple life among simpler people.

And what does it mean to you now to be one of the three richest men in the world?

I’ll bet you or anyone else, including Paul Getty, that I’m not one of the three richest men in the world – I’m the richest. Every one of those Nevada properties which everyone thinks are such a bust is going to pay – and what do you think is going to happen when the United States, as it absolutely must, within the next five years, devalues the dollar by letting the price of gold float to its proper level? Do you know how much gold I’ve got, in the ground and out of it?

You have no idea. Well, plenty. And nobody knows how much real estate I’ve got. Not even me. But I can tell you it’s worth a fortune. I have other investments where nobody knows I’ve got them. I put money into Indonesian oil a few years ago. I’m riding that one out, but it’s a handsome profit so far. Getty’s got an oil company and a collection of paintings. Big deal. The Sultan of Brunei is an out-and-out liar about what he owns. I can tell you, the most conservative estimate I can make of what I own – right now, this minute – is two billion nine hundred million dollars. That’s conservative, that’s on the shallow side.