Caper Sauce

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED by CLIFFORD IRVING with RICHARD SUSKIND 378 pages. Grove Press. $1.95.

What really happened? The title protests a bit too much, implying that after the flood of words already published about the famous fabricated "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, only Clifford Irving, the famous fabricator, can tell the true story. To believe the confessions of Clifford Irving is a little like believing the confessions of Baron Munchausen; yet he tells his tale with a certain bravado. And one may satisfy a morbid interest by watching a man who could write his way into so much trouble (a prison sentence of 2 1/2 years and debts of about $1 million) trying to write his way out again.

Irving never really intended, he says, to keep the $750,000 that he extracted from his publishers. He and his collaborator Richard Suskind originally planned nothing more wicked than "a gorgeous literary caper." As the plot deepened, he saw it as "a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself." His wife Edith approved, he recalls, and so did his mistress Nina van Pallandt. "You're quite, quite mad," Nina said to Irving when he told her of the project in their Mexican hotel bedroom, "but the world is mad, so what's the bloody difference? And I love you."

Even at the end, when Irving pleads guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud, forgery and perjury (by his own account, he is also guilty of theft, plagiarism and libel), he still seems to believe that he hasn't done anything wrong: "I had demonstrated a cool contempt for the underpinnings of American society."

Irving appears to see himself as a defiant Hemingway hero. He begins his narrative with those familiar short sentences: "The Juan March stood off the docks of Palma harbor. I needed coffee." Like so many would-be Hemingway heroes, though, he sees the role largely in terms of self-indulgence. He has a finca and a Mercedes and a pet monkey, and he boasts of his romantic adventures in a prose style that would embarrass even the creator of Across the River and into the Trees. Of Nina, he writes: "Call it love, call it madness --it may have been both."

Yet amid all the now familiar stories about his flights to nonexistent meetings with nonexistent intermediaries of the mysterious millionaire, it is Irving's fantasy of the author-as-hero that provides the most interesting element in the book. This is the fascinating series of imaginary interviews with Howard Hughes.

Fed Up. Once the basic research had been done, Irving and Suskind simply sat down at a tape recorder, interviewed each other, and began spinning tales. They invented scandalous stories of how Hughes seduced his father's mistress while his father was watching, how Hughes once rescued a kleptomaniac aircraft executive from imprisonment for a theft of Oreo cookies, and how Hughes reluctantly went swimming in the nude with--of course--Ernest Hemingway. The imaginary Hughes had originally barged in on Hemingway in Sun Valley, introduced himself as a bush pilot and taken the novelist "for a spin" in his B-25 bomber. Later, "fed up with everything," he went to see Hemingway in Cuba but confessed his identity. "And, well, his attitude changed, and he began to talk about money...I didn't want Ernest pumping me about money."

Irving is so proud of his spurious account of the 13-year friendship between Hughes and Hemingway that he offers almost 20 pages of the transcript from his doomed "autobiography." In a strange way, he is justified. Even though the reader knows Irving never saw Hughes, and that the transcripts are wholly false, they sound more authentic than Irving's account of his own adventures. Hughes emerges as the tormented but rambunctious old pirate that he ought to be. Like Hans van Meergeren, who could forge Vermeers but could create nothing of much merit on his own, Novelist Irving achieved his one triumph by creating a fictional character out of a man who, unfortunately for Irving, was alive enough to rise up and suppress the falsification of his life.

This falsification poisons the prank. We do not ordinarily feel much pity for men like Hughes, but as we come to realize that Irving was planning to appropriate his victim's whole identity, to attribute to him any lie that sounded entertaining, and to rely on the assumption that Hughes was too old and too sick and too neurotic to defend himself, the whole tour de force seems less a caper than an assault. The even more basic flaw in Irving's portrait of himself as heroic caperer is his view that the gullible deserve to be gulled. "The name of the game" is a phrase that keeps coming from Suskind, who also likes to quote W.C. Fields' untrue statement that "you can't cheat an honest man." It is one thing to offer a gold brick to a stranger, but it is quite another to sell watered stock to your neighbors. Irving based his swindle on the fact that his own publishers knew him and assumed that he was honest. From that misguided trust, as much as from Irving's talents as a fabricator, all else followed. Long before Hemingway, Mark Twain's Nigger Jim knew that the Hemingway hero is not to be defined in terms of yachts and blondes. "Trash," said Jim, "is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's." Otto Friedrich

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