The Secret Life of Clifford Irving

THE grand jury was sending out subpoenas like invitations to an enormous masked ball, with an improbable guest list, ranging from ex-convicts to publishing executives to members of Author Clifford Irving's sometimes exotic circle on the Balearic island of Ibiza. The Howard Hughes affair was turning into a still more absorbing drama, with among other things an emotionally fascinating subplot of adultery. The unmasking of the plot would come soon, it seemed--perhaps this week. When it does, Irving confided cryptically to a friend in Manhattan, "you'll be amazed at how simple it is."

Last week legal authorities in the U.S. and Switzerland were rapidly working to unravel the mysteries surrounding Irving's supposed "autobiography" of Howard Hughes. U.S. postal investigators were checking hotel records in Florida and other places to determine whether Irving ever met Hughes, as he claims, for more than 100 hours of talk. Other federal men pursued a lead that Irving may have needed money to pay off loan sharks of the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino. Meantime the Internal Revenue Service signed tax liens against all of Irving's 1971 earnings, including the $650,000 in publisher's advances to "H.R. Hughes" that the Irvings had banked in Zurich. Swiss officials issued warrants for the Irvings' arrest.

Three Questions. The investigators who descended on the Hughes case were picking away like archaeologists at what now appear to be the ruins of Irving's story. Initially, there were three major questions: 1) What became of the $650,000 that McGraw-Hill thought that it was advancing to Howard Hughes for the book? 2) Did Clifford Irving ever meet with Howard Hughes? and 3) If they never met, then where did Irving get the material for the book?

The money question has been substantially solved. Irving admits that his wife Edith, posing as a woman named Helga R. Hughes, opened an account at the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich, deposited the McGraw-Hill checks made out to H.R. Hughes and then withdrew the money and salted it away in several other Zurich banks. Irving claims that he made the arrangements at Hughes' request. Last week, however, a few more details of those transactions came to light.

For one thing, Edith opened one of the secondary accounts in the name of Hanne Rosenkranz. Edith's first husband, a West German businessman named Heinz Deiter Rosenkranz, is now married to a woman named Hannah, whose West German identity card Edith evidently used in opening the account, using the diminutive Hanne. Edith forged the specimen signature to do so. In addition, Swiss authorities found that Edith's "Helga R. Hughes" passport was actually a Swiss passport that had been issued to her in the fall of 1968, after she had reported her old one missing.

The second question--whether Irving ever met with Hughes--brought a compelling refutation last week in the form of a willowy Danish aristocrat named Nina van Pallandt, 38, a well-known folk singer in Europe. Now on her own, she used to appear on television and in supper clubs with her husband, Baron Frederik van Pallandt, from whom she has been separated since 1969. For years she has had an Ibiza villa. "Whenever Nina's name was mentioned," a friend of the Irvings says, "Edith would climb the wall."

Last week Edith had more cause to be furious. Nina, who was vacationing in Nassau--ironically close to Hughes' reclusive penthouse on Paradise Island--confirmed that she had accompanied Irving on a five-day trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, last February. In his exhaustive affidavit explaining how he had obtained the autobiography, Irving claimed to have held two secret meetings with Hughes during that Mexican trip. But Nina said that such meetings would have been impossible, since Irving hardly ever left her side. The total time they were apart, she said, was for "an hour, an hour and a half." clearly too short a time for the elaborate rendezvous with Hughes that Irving had described.

Nina's appearance in the case gave it some new aspects of glamorous international soap opera. When she returned from vacation to London last week, Nina told reporters: "He loves me. He has asked me to marry him, and I am sure that is why he thought I would stand by him."

Intermediary. With Irving's claims of having met Hughes tarnished, the major remaining mystery was whether Irving compiled the manuscript with the help of material purloined from Hughes' files--possibly in the form of a computerized bibliography of nearly everything that has been printed about Hughes. Perhaps to explore this aspect, two of the federal grand jury subpoenas last week were issued for Robert Maheu and his son Peter. The older Maheu was head of Hughes' extensive gambling and real estate interests in Nevada before the billionaire abruptly fired him in 1970. He has had access to Hughes papers, but has denied any role in the case.

As part of the same quest, an eclectic consultant, John Meier, appeared before the federal grand jury in New York, which is looking into the possibility of mail fraud and fraud by wire (telephone). Meier, who worked for Hughes in the late '60s as a scientific expert in Nevada, is now seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico. After his grand jury appearance, Meier told reporters: "I never met Clifford Irving or his wife, and had not heard of either of them before I read about the 'Autobiography of Howard Hughes' in the newspapers." Yet when he faced the grand jury. Meier pleaded the Fifth Amendment. In addition, Mrs. Martin Ackerman, the wife of Irving's former attorney, is said to have identified Meier as the key figure in the mystery, possibly the Hughes "intermediary" Irving called "George Gordon Holmes."

Irving's own character became one of the larger bewilderments of the Hughes affair. On the evidence, he had used his wife as a pivotal figure--to open the Swiss bank accounts under a false name and forge signatures, leaving her vulnerable to jail. Yet before his story began disintegrating, Irving had told TIME'S Roger Beardwood on Ibiza: "Do you seriously think I would have involved my wife in something --my wife, whom I love, the mother of my children, whom I love?"

Others in the tight Ibiza circle--a raffish collection reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart's Beat the Devil--added color to the story. There was Elmyr de Hory, the slightly flamboyant art forger who is the principal figure in Irvine's book Fake! Another good friend is Gerry Albertini, an idle millionaire with dual British-American citizenship who, apparently as a favor, once kept Irving's Hughes manuscript in his safe on the island.

Then there was Richard Suskind. a corpulent writer and researcher who lives on the nearby island of Majorca. Irving hired Suskind--for $50,000 --to do some of the research for the Hughes book, and he is the only person besides Irving who supposedly met Howard Hughes during the project. It was allegedly a brief encounter in a Palm Springs, Calif., motel room where. Suskind has sworn. Hughes offered him an organic prune. Suskind will testify this week in Manhattan. Others who drifted in and out of the Ibiza circle included Robert Kirsch, a longtime friend of Irving's and the book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Just weeks ago, Clifford Irving was looking forward to the publishing coup of the decade. He had control of well over half-a-million dollars in publishers' advances and prospects for immense royalties. Last week, with his story in a shambles, he sat in a Manhattan hotel waiting for the law to close in. The Irvings had been caught in forgery; his version of how he had acquired the book in personal meetings with Hughes was seriously shadowed. He tried to bargain with federal authorities for immunity--for himself or for Edith--in exchange for the full story, but the Government, apparently convinced that it has a solid case against the Irvings, was not interested.

Gullible. Yet for all that, Irving seemed almost eerily unconcerned. He bounced out of the courthouse with a smile and handshakes for newsmen friends. He even left the two children with a sitter and took Edith out for a night on the town. One can only guess at the conversation between them. But perhaps, being a modestly talented novelist with the look of a sardonic Danny Kaye. Irving was actually enjoying the knowledge that the story he was living was far more interesting than anything he ever put on paper.

Interviewed on Ibiza for a 1969 television documentary about De Hory, Irving spoke with prescient irony: "All the world loves to see the experts and the Establishment made a fool of, and everyone likes to feel that those who set themselves up as experts are really just as gullible as anyone else. And so Elmyr, as the great art faker of the 20th century, becomes a modern folk hero for the rest of us."

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