How Clifford Irving Sold By SteDhen Tcaane By Stephen Isaacs Wm*hin#Con Poit fluff Writer NEW YORK, Jan. 29 Suppose you are a book pub- liaher. Further, suppose one of your authors offers you a crack at one of the polish- ing coups of all time. orm he u C0U £’ you are ass ured, will be the 100 per cent bona fide autobiography of Howard R. Hughes, the most secretive and perhaps the most fascinating man in the world. TU) McGraw-Hill His You have your doubts. After all, this author has always been one of your well . . . your more flaky au- thors, a bit of an adven- turer, a promiser of big things, who always delivers too late, who always tries to nudge a bit more in advance royalties. After all, every other au- thor and journalist in the world wants to get at the re- clusive Hughes. Maybe it’s just another promise. But, because you want the coup — if it’s there to be had — you humor him, you say we’ll go along if it's real. Soon, you start finding out it’s not just talk. Corrob- oration starts flowing in. The author is calling you from this place and that, saying he’s meeting Hughes! And, the next thing you know, he has documented prof, letters from the man himself. The excitement of the im- pending coup overwhelms your customary caution. Since you want to believe it, you talk yourself into believ- ing it. And you get had. This, apparently, is what has happened to the Mc- Graw-Hill Book Co., a pub- lishing house noted for its integrity, a house known for its high-priced "and authori- tative technical publications. — and for the "autobiogra- phy" of Howard R. Hughes. Early Questions On Dec. 7, 1971, when McGraw-Hill announced hurriedly that it was publish- ing Hughes’ own life story, this reporter asked Donald THE WASHINGTON POST Sunday, Ian. 30. 1972 £ Latest Project Wilson, corporate vice presi- dent of Time, Inc. (which was, for $250,000, to run three excerpts of the book in its Life magazine), how he was so sure that this was the real item. “Oh, we're absolutely posi- tive” Wilson confided. “Look, we’re dealing with people like McGraw-Hill. And, you knpw, we’re not exactly a movie magazine. This is Time, Inc., and Mc- Graw-Hill talking. We’ve checked this thing out. We have proof.” He seemed offended, as did A1 Leventhal, vice presi- dent of McGraw-Hill’s book division, that anyone would have the temerity to ques- tion the veracity of one of their undertakings, Thev had all become true 7 believers, because they had wanted desperately to be- lieve. Because they wanted the coup, neither of the publish- ing firms did any checking into the author’s claims They wanted the coup so badly that they feared, as the author warned them, that they might lose what they had if they probed too far. All they had for corrobor- ation was 999 pages of what the author, Clifford Irving, said was a transcript of 100 hours of tapings he had with Hughes, Irving’s travel and expense receipts, several let- ters purported to be in Hughes’ hand, and two can- celled checks, totaling $600,000, with the endorse- ment of H. R. Hughes on the backs. They checked . the hand- writing with one graphology firm v and it said the writing was Hughes’. Tilt was all. No pictures of Hughes. No nothing. Irving said the man forbade that. Garry Valk, Life’s pub- lisher, was not even told de- tails of the project Several days after the announce- ment, he told this reporter that “I was afraid I might blurt out something at a party. So I told Ralph (Ralph Graves, Life’s man- aging editor) not to even tell me what he was doing.” Irving had them sewn up. Manuscript Convincing He had also provided them wih a whale oj: a man- uscript. Graves will say in an arti- cle to be published in Life’s issue on sale Monday that “I was skeptical about any- thing involving Howard Hughes” but was convinced by those 999 pages of tran- script. » “It was marvelous stuff,” his article says. “Outspoken, full of rich and outrageous anecdotes, as well as de- tailed accounts of Hughes’ youth, his movie-making. h*s career in aviation, his busi- ness affairs, his private life, his opinions and crotchets. “He explained why he phoned people on business matters in the middle of the night (he kept strange hours anyway, and it caught them at their weakest moment). “He explained his philoso- phy of business negotiation (one man always plays lion, one man plays donkey, and it is always better to be the /lion and eat the donkey). “He told business yarns ranging from high finance in TWA (Trans World Air- lines) to the time a high- ranking corporate friend was caught swiping a box of cookies from the supermar- ket. Even the boring parts were persuasive: Howard Hughes has always been fas- cinated by the minutiae of aircraft design and perform- ance, and the transcript had lots of it I think we had all sat down to read with hope but with severe doubts. We finished with the conviction that these 1.000 pages of talk were authentic.” From - that moment. Graves and his assistant managing editor, David Ma- ness, were certain they had Hughes’ life story, and they planned to syndicate ex- cerpts abroad, as well as publish three 10,000-word segments in Life, along with Irving’s own story of how he got Hughes’ cooperation. They did not, however, show the manuscript to their own Frank McCulloch head of the Time-Life news service in New York. Mc- Culloch, a tough, highly re- spected newsman, was one of the last journalists known to have interviewed Howard Hughes — back in 1957. Expert Was Sure When McCulloch did read the book, it was only after the Howard Hughes he knew had talked to him over the telephone on Dec. 14 and told him the autobiogra- phy was a fake. Even after McCulloch was told that, and was given the manuscript, he was sure the manuscrip was authentic. But he and Graves then undertook an investigation to find out if Irving had been telling the truth about how he got the information for the book. On Jan. 20, Graves and McCulloch grilled Irving for four hours. Irving stuck to his story. Thursday night, Irving fi- nally told McCulloch fh^t the two McGraw-Hill checks I made out to H. R. Hu^h and another for $50,000 that he had purchased to the order of H. R. Hughes, had been deposited by his wife Edith, in a Swiss bank, and the money later withdrawn by her. With Irving’s credibility now somewhat in question there remains, of course how he got the material— a '. T * question still very much un- answered. It began a year ago, when Irving called his editor at McGraw Hill, Robert Stew- art, to ask Stewart whether he could tell Howard Hughes, supposedly the real Howard Hughes, that Mc- Graw-Hill was his publisher. He told Stewart that he had sent Hughes a copy of his last book. “Fake,” (which McGraw-Hill published in 1969) and that Hughes had written him a letter praising his sympathetic handling of the subject of the book, El- myre de Hory, an alleged art forger Irving had met on the Spanish island where he lives. u#«a aiewart that, furthermore, Hughes had written him two more let- ters both in January, and he thought he might be able to talk Hughes into collabo- rating on a biography. Stew- art, after conferring with Leventhal, told Irving to go ahead. Soon thereafter, Stewart and Leventhal started get- ting calls from Irving from various places where, Irving told them, he was meeting with Hughes. Last March, Irving ap- peared in New York bearing a book contract between him and Howard R. Hughes, signed by him and Howard R. Hughes, and dated March 4. any checking, however. Irv- ing insisted that Hughes had told him he would back out of the project if that were done— that Irving had to guarantee complete secrecy. Leventhal, anxious to preserve the coup, complied On March 23, Irving got McGraw-Hill to sign a con- tract with him for the Hughes book for $500,000 in advance royalties. Irving was paid $100,000 of that three weeks later. The Selling Game McGraw-Hill then immedi- ately went to work selling It confided its coup to Dell Publishing Co. and con- tracted with it (for several hundred thousand dollars) for paperback rights, and with the Book-of-the-Month Club for book club rights.