The Hughes Mystery Deepens

THE Howard Hughes affair, already one of the more mysterious episodes in publishing history, grew still more bewildering last week. New questions surrounding the reclusive billionaire's supposed autobiography arced between Manhattan and a Swiss banking house on Zurich's Paradeplatz. For the moment, the puzzlements were sufficient to persuade McGraw-Hill and LIFE to announce that they were "holding in abeyance action on the publication of the Howard Hughes manuscript"--which had been scheduled to be excerpted in LIFE'S Feb. 11, 18 and 25 issues and to appear in book form on March 10.

The most intriguing new speculations revolved around the $650,000 that Howard Hughes is supposed to have collected from McGraw-Hill for pouring forth his autobiography in at least 100 hours of interviews and tapings with Author Clifford Irving.* The $650,000 was allegedly paid to Hughes in the form of three checks--a cashier's check from Irving for $50,000, a McGraw-Hill check for $275,000 and a McGraw-Hill check for $325,000. Irving claims that he gave two of the checks to Hughes in person and the third to a trusted Hughes intermediary; by Irving's account, Hughes personally acknowledged a half-hour later that he had indeed received the third check. Last week at a New York State Supreme Court hearing on the case, Irving showed photostats of the three checks, all bearing the endorsement of "H.R. Hughes" and cleared by the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich.

No Taxes. Hughes' aides deny that he ever received the money. Attorney Chester Davis has asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate where the funds went, and insists that Hughes will pay no taxes on money he never received. In the New York court last week, Davis brought forth another disavowal of the entire project from Hughes. It was in the form of two pages of typewritten questions with longhand answers allegedly written by Hughes. Said one query: "Did you at any time authorize McGraw-Hill or Clifford Irving or anyone other than Rosemont [a publishing company set up by Hughes] to publish your autobiography or any material relating to you?" The scrawled reply: "No. I would like to see these forgeries." "When is the last time you personally endorsed a check for any reason?" "More than ten years ago." At the bottom of each page of the questionnaire was the signature "Howard R. Hughes." In addition, each page bore a set of fingerprints said to belong to Hughes.

What, then, became of the $650,000? This Swiss Credit Bank account through which the three checks had cleared became the focus of an intensive investigation. No one, of course, ever imagined that Hughes had personally gone to Zurich to open the account. The more pertinent question: Was whoever opened it acting for Hughes, or for someone else? Even before last week, LIFE and McGraw-Hill had been troubled by some of the circumstances surrounding the account. At McGraw-Hill's behest, officials for the canton of Zurich were investigating the matter, and last week that investigation and others turned up some curious information.

The account was opened last April at the Swiss Credit Bank in the name of "H.R. Hughes" by a slim, attractive blonde woman, 42 years old, 5 1/2 ft. tall, weighing 100 lbs., who spoke English and very bad German. She carried a Swiss passport issued in 1969 by the Swiss consul in Barcelona, Spain. It identified her as "Helga R. Hughes." To open the account, the woman signed "H.R. Hughes" on a signature card. A bank officer compared the writing with her passport signature. The two seemed to match, and the woman deposited 1,000 French francs ($180) to open the account. Interestingly, all of the contracts and documents in the venture were made out by McGraw-Hill to H.R. Hughes, at what was taken to be his insistence.

About three weeks later, the woman appeared at the bank to deposit the first of the three checks--this one for $50,000. In a bank officer's presence, she endorsed the check "H.R. Hughes." In early fall, the woman appeared again, this time to deposit the $275,000 McGraw-Hill check made out to H.R. Hughes. Again she endorsed the check in the presence of a bank officer. The third check, for $325,000, arrived by mail, already endorsed, early last December.

New Theories. The bank account was used only for converting the checks into cash. About two weeks after each deposit--it takes approximately that long for an overseas check to clear--the woman appeared and withdrew the money in Swiss currency. She carried it off in sizable bundles in an airline flight bag, since the largest denomination of Swiss currency, a 1,000-franc note, is equivalent to only $258. The account now is virtually empty; apparently only the original 1,000 francs is still there.

The revelations about the bank account invited new theories about the entire Hughes project. Was "Helga R. Hughes" acting for the real Hughes, who is now for whatever reasons trying to cover his tracks? Was she part of a conspiracy to collect on a totally phony Hughes "autobiography," or to peddle his authentic autobiography, fraudulently obtained? If so, was Irving part of the conspiracy? Or was he taken in by the conspirators? As Irving succinctly puts it, there are only three possibilities: 1) he is an impostor; 2) he is the victim of an impostor, and 3) whoever opened the Swiss account was a trusted Hughes agent acting on Hughes' behalf to collect the money secretly for him--the so-called "faithful servant" theory. But why would Hughes design such an elaborate system in order to cash three checks?

If "Helga Hughes" did indeed endorse two of the three checks in the presence of a bank officer, then the holographic evidence on which McGraw-Hill and LIFE have been basing their case for authenticity might be called into question. The reason: endorsements on the last two checks were part of a chain of handwriting evidence. The New York experts, Osborn Associates, had concluded that those two checks were endorsed by the same hand that wrote nine letters and other documents to Irving and McGraw-Hill during the book project. In turn, all of those recent samples, Osborn found, matched samples of Howard Hughes' handwriting dating back to 1936. That is manifestly impossible in at least one instance if the Swiss are correct in saying that the second check was signed in a bank officer's presence (the first check was not available to Osborn at the time the 19-item chain of holographic evidence was assembled and attested). But that one break in the chain may not necessarily invalidate all the other links.

Late last week Irving left New York to fly to his home on Ibiza, one of the Balearic Islands off Spain's Mediterranean coast. LIFE immediately issued a statement: "We were opposed to his departure at this time . . . We thought it was a very bad time to go, while developments were still taking place in Switzerland and while we're hopefully awaiting more information from the Swiss police that might resolve if there is a fraud and who perpetrated it." But Irving was said to have left for only a brief visit with his family and promised that he would return immediately if he was needed in New York.

All of the intrigue about Helga R. Hughes obscured discussion on the crucial question of whether or not the Hughes "autobiography" is indeed genuine. Even if fraudulently obtained, the book could well be real. All his life Hughes has been a compulsive dictator of memos on nearly every aspect of his activities. Millions of words by Hughes exist on paper, a reservoir that could be tapped by a disgruntled associate to fill a book. McGraw-Hill and LIFE said in their statement: "We continue to believe that the material we have contains the authentic language and views of Howard Hughes."

With McGraw-Hill and LIFE at least temporarily suspending their plans to publish, the New York State Supreme Court took no further action on a motion by Hughes' lawyers to enjoin publication. Before the matter became moot, however, Irving filed with the court a minutely detailed affidavit describing the numerous meetings during which Hughes supposedly recited his extraordinarily confessional autobiography. If Irving is lying, he has obviously left himself open to comprehensive perjury charges, for his account is remarkably explicit. He and Hughes first met by prearrangement, says Irving, in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Feb. 13. By Irving's account, the meetings continued over the next ten months, in automobiles and motel and hotel rooms in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Nassau; Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, Calif.; Key Biscayne and Pompano Beach, Fla.; and somewhere near Miami.

Irving's story bristles with specifics--exact dates and times and a wealth of dramatic detail. In Tehuantepec, Mexico, for example, on Feb. 14, Irving says that after a meeting with Hughes, "the man known to me as Pedro gave me what appears to be a Polaroid photograph, taken of me by a Hughes aide as I descended from the plane at Mexico City Airport en route from New York. This, it was explained to me, was for identification purposes and to insure that I was not accompanied by newsmen."

Live Witnesses. Later, during a recording session at Pompano Beach, according to Irving, Hughes posted a 24-hour guard at Irving's motel bungalow to make sure that none of the tapes were removed: "Mr. Hughes informed me that the guard would always carry a cane and be under 40 years of age and that if I saw a man lurking in the vicinity, I was not to molest him."

Chester Davis countered: "We will produce live witnesses to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was impossible for Irving to have met or seen Howard Hughes on those occasions." Then, later in the week, came the typewritten questionnaire with answers by Hughes. Besides adding fingerprints and signatures for authentication, that document took the same position that Hughes--or someone purporting to be Hughes--adopted earlier this month in a telephone press conference with seven reporters in Los Angeles: that the autobiography is at the very least unauthorized, if not an outright fraud, as Hughes' lawyers have claimed since the book was first announced on Dec. 7.

Thus, swearing to a complex scenario of secret encounters, Irving continues to insist that the manuscript is genuine. A still-unseen Hughes denies it, now gaining at least some psychological advantage because of the suspicions that the Zurich episode has aroused. The only certainty was that someone in the case is an extravagantly imaginative liar and possibly an epic swindler as well.

*According to a contract that Hughes--or someone else--signed with McGraw-Hill, Hughes was also guaranteed the first $100,000 in royalties for the book, bringing his total payment to $750,000.

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