Clifford Irving: Howard Hughes: My Story

These ‘research’ trips had an additional purpose. Irving was in the midst of an affair with Nina Van Pallandt who was famous as one half of a folk-singing duo with her husband Frederick, a Danish Baron. Irving’s meetings with ‘Hughes’ became the cloak to arrange clandestine trysts with Van Pallandt in Mexico and California.

Becoming more and more involved and fascinated by their subject, Irving and his sidekick Suskind did a huge amount of original research, digging through newspaper files and tracking down people who had known Hughes intimately. Life magazine had bought the serialisation rights to the book, and Irving talked his way into the Time-Life library. ‘Octavio’, he explained, ‘keeps getting pissed off at me when I don’t have the background information’. In the Time-Life library he photographed a treasure trove of files crammed with unpublished interviews, correspondence and personal notes.

And he enjoyed even more extraordinary strokes of luck. On a visit to Palm Springs, he ran into an old friend who happened to be looking for someone to rewrite an unpublished manuscript of the memoirs of Noah Dietrich, who had been Hughes’ right-hand-man for more than 30 years. Irving turned down the offer – but was able to copy the manuscript, and mine it for gems that went into his own book.

Walking into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, he and Suskind were amazed to be told that three boxes of material about Hughes, donated by his former publicity man, had been delivered that same day. No one had yet read them. Among the papers was an extraordinary three-page memo from Hughes to a studio executive in which he applied his engineering expertise to the problem of how best to cantilever the miracle of natural design that were Jane Russell’s breasts. ‘That went straight into the book,’ Irving says.

Back in Ibiza, Irving and Suskind began the painstaking task of assembling the material into the ‘interview transcripts.’ ‘We’d sit there with a tape-recorder and a mountain of notes and research documents. And literally, I would ask, ‘Dick, do you want to be me today or do you want to be Howard? And then we’d start recording.’

So convincing was the voice of ‘Hughes’ emerging from these conversations that it soon became apparent that an autobiography would be a much more readable proposition than a biography – and spare Irving the tedious effort of rewriting the material into the third person. Irving duly created a letter from ‘Hughes’ giving approval to that concept, and in the autumn of 1971, barely nine months after first approaching McGraw-Hill, the author delivered the finished manuscript.

Irving’s introduction to the book alone is a tour de force. In utterly plausible language he describes his astonishment on first receiving a letter from ‘Hughes’ expressing his admiration for Irving’s book on Elmyr de Hory. He describes his various meetings with Hughes, their sparring conversations, and the growing bond between them. ‘You’re an outsider, of a sort’, ‘Hughes’ tells Irving, ‘a kind of cultivated maverick… a selfish son of a bitch… I have to like any man who goes his own way, as long as he doesn’t step on my toes.’

Piling irony on duplicity, ‘Hughes’ counsels Irving not to trust his publishers, insisting he should be in the room as they read stages of the finished manuscript. ‘Don’t go to their offices. You’ll go out to take a leak and they’ll have two hundred pages Xeroxed before you zip up your fly.’

The book reveals a Howard Hughes that had never been seen before (largely, of course, because he didn’t actually exist). He flew secret combat missions with the RAF in World War II; he visited Albert Schweitzer in Africa; he befriended Ernest Hemingway in Cuba. His womanising had always been an open secret, but here he reveals that he enjoyed affairs with even more Hollywood starlets than anyone had hitherto suspected (sadly, all of them had passed away long before the book’s publication and were therefore unable to confirm or deny Hughes’s boasts). But his greatest, and most secret, love, it reveals, was the wife of a diplomat, whom Hughes names only as ‘Helga’ (by a strange coincidence the same name as the signatory to Irving’s Swiss bank-account). In a moving denouement, Hughes describes how, in a quest to free himself from ‘the bondage of money and power’ he journeyed to India, where he squatted beside the Ganges in the guise of a penniless beggar.

Did Hughes really buy a dozen Monet, Degas and Renoir oils on the international art-market only to keep them locked in a storage facility in Orange County? Was it really Hitler’s carpet on the floor of Hughes’ suite at the Desert Inn Hotel? These were precisely the kind of eccentricities that people expected of the world’s most enigmatic billionaire. The more outlandish the stories that Irving spun about Hughes’ life, the more his publishers believed them.

‘The editors felt they were getting something unique – a wholly new story. They loved that. And I did too.’

Perhaps the most extraordinary invention concerned Hughes’ alleged loan of $400,000 to Richard Nixon before he became President. In the course of their research, Irving and Suskind had stumbled upon a story that Hughes had once loaned $205,000 to Nixon’s brother Donald, to start a chain of hamburger restaurants in Southern California. Irving says, ‘I remember saying to Dick, this is bizarre, but the amount’s not big enough. Let’s double it…’

Extraordinarily, it was later revealed in a scholarly biography of Hughes that the $400,000 figure that Irving conjured out of the air was very close to the truth. According to the biographer, the White House was receiving reports of Irving’s supposed dealings with Hughes from the FBI and managed to acquire a copy of the still-secret galleys of Irving’s book from a Republican source at McGraw-Hill. Believing that Irving was a long-standing Democrat – ‘I wasn’t’, he says, ‘I’m a political nihilist’ – and worried about what else he might be telling the party about Hughes’ loan to Nixon, the White House conspired to burglarize Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate building.

So Irving was responsible for the impeachment of Richard Nixon?

He laughs. ‘If I felt I had really been a prime mover in the capsizing of the Nixon administration, I would want that carved on my tombstone. If only I could do the same thing for George W. Bush!’

McGraw-Hill made strenuous efforts to keep the book under wraps. But when news of its impending publication was finally announced, Hughes’ representatives immediately cried ‘Hoax!’ McGraw-Hill accepted Irving’s explanation that so strong was Hughes’ desire for secrecy that he had kept even his closest associates in the dark. And then Frank McCulloch, a Time bureau chief, who had been the last person to interview Hughes 14 years earlier, received a telephone call from a man purporting to be Hughes, stating that he had not cooperated with Irving in any way and that the book must be a hoax.

But after reading the manuscript and cross-examining Irving about his meetings with the billionaire, McCulloch became convinced that Irving was telling the truth. Even if it was Hughes on the telephone, the journalist reasoned, it was consistent with his character to dictate his autobiography and then deny all knowledge of it.

And then, even more incredibly, Noah Dietrich, Hughes’ former right-hand man, came forward to confirm the book’s authenticity, unaware that several anecdotes in it had been shamelessly pilfered from his own unpublished autobiography. In a surreal twist, Dietrich told reporters that he had heard that Clifford Irving had been invited by Hughes to the Bahamas, and interviewed The Man with a glass partition separating them to ward off germs.