Clifford Irving: Howard Hughes: My Story

I do remember your father and I was sorry to learn of his passing.

I speculated for a while if this could be a practical joke. Howard Hughes was reputed to be a billionaire, and if I had been asked what kind of stationary billionaires would use, I wouldn’t have answered, ‘Yellow legal paper.’ But if it was a joke there was no foreseeable barb to it, so I began to think about what Hughes seemed to be saying between the lines. I drafted a reply, saying, in effect: ‘Dear Mr. Hughes, I’d like to write an authorized biography of you. If this idea horrifies you, I apologize. If not, let’s talk about it. You certainly deserve a more definitive immortality than the one that’s being forged for you these days by the media.’

I read this to my wife, who instantly advised: ‘Don’t send it. You’re in the middle of a novel and your publishers expect you to deliver on time. Don’t get sidetracked.’

‘Nobody really knows what kind of man Howard Hughes is. That intrigues me.’

‘Anyone who intrigues you,’ she warned, ‘is bound to be some kind of nut.’

But I mailed the letter the following day, and an answer arrived several weeks later, again scrawled on yellow legal paper. My reading between the lines had been accurate. Hughes wrote, in part:

…I am not horrified by your suggestion, although in times past it has come to me from other quarters and was rejected by me. I am not insensitive to what journalists have written about me and for that reason I have the deepest respect for your treatment of de Hory, however much I may disapprove of his morals. It would not suit me to die without having certain misconceptions cleared up and without having stated the truth about my life. The immortality you speak of does not interest me.

I would be grateful if you would let me know when and how you wish to undertake the writing of the biography you proposed… I wish there to be no publicity about this communication for the time being, and I would view a breach of this request very unfavorably.

It’s important to understand that I lived in the boondocks, both mentally and physically; I knew very little about Howard Hughes’ life and the legends that surrounded it. At the time, January 1971, I didn’t know that Hughes hadn’t been interviewed or photographed since 1957, and not a single person was able or willing to testify that they had seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. I knew only that he had reportedly left Las Vegas for the Bahamas and that there was some sort of internecine warfare going on in his business empire. I knew the customary phrases used to describe him: ‘bashful billionaire,’ ‘dedicated recluse,’ ‘phantom eccentric’ – ad nauseam. I didn’t know that one syndicated columnist, quoting ‘absolutely authoritative sources,’ had depicted Hughes as ‘an emaciated invalid with white hair down to his shoulders, shaggy eyebrows… a basket case who has flashes of his old brilliance but spends most of his time in a catatonic stupor,’ or that a witness before a Miami grand jury had stated that ‘the tycoon weighs 97 pounds, has long hair gray hair and a beard, and has fingernails and toenails eight inches long.’

Armed with ignorance and naivete – obviously among my chief assets in this instance – I wrote back and outlined my proposal for the biography.

Then the telephone calls began. The voice at the other end of the line was polite, thin and slightly nasal, bucked sometimes by what I later learned was an amplifier. He said: ‘Look, for Chrissake, let’s make this on a first-name basis or we’ll never get anywhere. Please call me Howard.’

Hughes, as he relates in his autobiography, prefers to place his calls at three or four o’clock in the morning when his mind is clear and the man at the other end of the line may still be bleary with sleep. I have no telephone at home, because home is a 400-year-old peasant farmhouse in the country; the telephone is in my studio, which perches on a rock jutting into the Mediterranean behind the walled town of Ibiza. I was only in the studio during the day, theoretically with an alert mind. If Hughes called at 3 a.m. the phone would buzz in the dark of an empty room – I was home in bed. He had his revenge later.

Our transatlantic conversations pirouetted round the subject of the book, we talked about life in Spain, a new house I was building, my novels (which he was starting to read, one by one) and I realized, after I’d made a mistake in relating a personal tale and been quickly corrected by him, that he had a dossier on me: it wasn’t a detail you could pick from book jackets or any Author’s Who’s Who. We were still just disembodied voices spinning toward each other by satellite and getting regularly cut off by Spanish operators. I had read by now that he couldn’t abide smoking and didn’t drink and had a reportedly puritanical morality. I smoked two packs of black tobacco a day; liked my wine at dinner and my cognac afterward; and morally, for better or for worse, had my feet planted pretty firmly planted in the 1960s and their aftermath.

‘We’d better meet,’ he said, ‘to see if we get along. How about next week?’

‘Sure. Where?’

‘Fly to New York. Stay at the Buckingham Hotel. I’ll get in touch with you.’

‘Hang on a minute, Howard. You have a reputation for leaving people stranded.’

‘I swear I’ll call you as soon as you arrive.’

In early February I flew to New York, checked into the Buckingham on 57th Street, crawled into bed weary from the long flight, and at two o’clock in the morning he called, bright as a robin, welcoming me to his time zone. He asked if I minded more travel to meet him. I said I’d expected that, and he instructed me to stop off at American Express later that day; flight reservations had been made for me. I assumed Nassau but I would have believed Timbuktu. The ticket was waiting when I arrived; I had to take off at seven o’clock the following morning, and I was routed through New Orleans and Mexico City to Oaxaca, a town in southern Mexico.

‘This is paid for, isn’t it?’

‘No, sir,’ the clerk said, puzzled. ‘That’s $316.36. Cash or credit card?’

I paid and left, but I didn’t like that at all.

By now I had told my publishers about the venture, and they were excited but wary. Beverly Loo, the Executive Editor at McGraw-Hill, said, ‘You’ll never get as far as this Oaxaca place. That’s not the way Howard Hughes does things. He’ll have you bumped off the plane at New Orleans or Mexico City, and then you’ll be blindfolded and taken to the Bahamas or Las Vegas.’

In New Orleans airport the following morning I waited to be tapped on the shoulder by an unsmiling courier and then whisked off to an unmarked Lear jet or a 200-foot yacht anchored in the Delta. Nothing happened. In Mexico City I waited for the man again. He didn’t arrive. I flew to Oaxaca, checked into the designated hotel and began the next stage of waiting. I slept badly, hung around the hotel until early afternoon and then hired a taxi and visited the Zapotec ruin of Mitla, where I bought a king-sized serape. I was beginning to think it might be my only souvenir of the trip; there were no messages for me at the hotel when I got back. It occurred to me that I had come a long way and spent a fair amount of money to meet a man who had a reputation for keeping people ‘on the hook’ – as it was called in the multi-leveled ranks of the Hughes organization – for weeks on end, after which they would either be dismissed with some compensation or given a yearly retainer to sit around in some other place for the regal tap on the shoulder that might come or not. I had a wife and two small children waiting for me at home five thousand miles away, I was in a godforsaken town in southern Mexico waiting for a ‘phantom eccentric’ and a ‘bashful billionaire.’ How much of a phantom, and how bashful, could he be?