In the last part of Hughes’s life the media went crazy over his whereabouts and wellbeing. Rumors were circulating that in seclusion, Hughes had wasted away to 90 pounds and he had grown eight-inch fingernails and toenails. When a California court levied a judgement of $137 million for his refusal to appear to defend against a stockholders’ lawsuit, Hughes abandoned his industrial empire, fled from the USA, and went into hiding on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. At this time, the McGraw-Hill Book Co. claimed Hughes had struck a deal with writer Clifford Irving, an expatriate novelist living on the Mediterranean Island of Ibiza. The hitherto reclusive billionaire had met clandestinely with Irving in Mexico and the Bahamas, in order to tell the 40-year-old author the true story of his life. It was a no-hold-barred autobiography, “warts and all,” from a living legend who was dying and wanted to set the record straight. First reports hinted that it told of Hughes’ manipulation of the stock market, his bribery of American presidents, his secret wartime combat mission under the aegis of President Roosevelt, his friendships with Cary Grant and Ernest Hemingway, his behind-locked-doors life in Las Vegas- and it revealed details of affairs with movie stars from Katharine Hepburn to Ava Gardner.
McGraw-Hill’s announcement of the impending publication ignited a firestorm of controversy. Executives of Hughes’ corporations insisted the book was unauthorized. Finally on national radio hookup, an invisible Howard Hughes spoke from his darkened hotel suite on Paradise Island. “This must go down in history,” he said. “I only wish I were still in the movie business, because I don’t remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be. I don’t know what’s in the autobiography. I don’t know Clifford Irving.”
McGraw-Hill, Irving, and Life, which had bought serialization rights, were not fazed by the denials. For months the debate was front-page news, often eclipsing the Vietnam War. The manuscript was read by many reporters that had covered Hughes and came to the conclusion that there was “no doubt in [their] mind [s]” that it could only have come from Hughes himself. As a final test to determine authenticity, leading handwriting experts in the United States scrutinized the documentation and matched it against samples provided by Hughes’ lawyers. Their conclusion: the signatures were those of Howard Hughes and “the chances are one in ten million that this many handwritten pages from Hughes to Irving and McGraw-Hill are not genuine. It would be beyond human capability to forge this mass of material.”
By the end of January 1972, Clifford Irving did an about-face, stunning his army of supporters with a confession that the autobiography was a hoax. “I never met Howard Hughes,” Irving now said. “It was a cheap caper, nothing more.” The book had resulted from a combination of careful research and daring imagination. Amid massive worldwide publicity, Irving was sentenced to 2 ? years in federal prison only two months after he appeared on the cover of Time.
It was money that etched Howard Hughes into the public mind. The sound of his name was associated with untold wealth, wealth supposedly accumulated through his gift for turning all he touched to gold. left the world with a spectacular legacy that will be remembered for years to come. His contributions to the film business, such as attention to detail and high budget spending, are still being used to this day. Howard’s cutting edge technology used to build his many planes has let to development of many aircrafts presently in use. In truth, we are left with two Howard Hugheses- the public and the private: the rational disguise and the world of shadows, of instinct to preserve and protect at any cost the image he had created. That it has taken so many years for the veil to part is tribute both to his genius and to his tragedy.
Bartlett, Donald L. and Steele, James B. EMPIRE. New York, W. W. Norton &
Company. 1979.
Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes: In His Own Words. New York, Holt, Tinch and
Winston. 1985.