The Clifford Irvings of Ibiza

IT is the sort of Hemingwayesque life--sunny, charmed with cheap, good wine, the artist flourishing among Spanish peasants--that a generation or more of wistful, frazzled American writers have dreamed of escaping to. Clifford Irving was an itinerant aspiring novelist when he first discovered the island of Ibiza (the setting for the movie More) off Spain's Mediterranean coast more than 15 years ago; he soon settled there. Now, with his fourth wife Edith and two sons, Ned, 3, and Barnaby, 2, he lives in a 300-year-old whitewashed stone farmhouse two miles from Ibiza's town square.

The house, an angular maze of rooms and staircases', is comfortably but somewhat shabbily furnished. Irving has said that he is trying to sell it and move to better quarters higher on the hill overlooking the sea. But his style of life prompts some speculation about the financial well-being he has described in the midst of the Hughes affair. Irving has claimed that his wife is "independently wealthy," with $100,000 in stocks, plus additional capital yielding $10,000 a year. On occasion in recent weeks he has bristled at the suggestion that he might be looking for quick money, pointing to his $150,000 four-book contract with McGraw-Hill, signed in 1969, and claiming that film producers have had under option the rights to four of his seven books.

But some recent visitors to Ibiza have suspected that the Irvings are considerably less than affluent. According to some reports, he has lost heavily at poker on Ibiza and has lOUs out. (The dust jacket on his novel The 38th Floor calls him a onetime "professional poker player.") Neither he nor his wife dresses in a fashion indicating much wealth.

The Irvings rarely mix with the other writers and artists on the island, or with the hippie population that has been drawn to Ibiza's primitive simplicity. Their relatively sedate life was interrupted by the Hughes case. A long stream of journalists appeared at their door with note pads, microphones and cameras. "Hello, I'm Helga," Edith would say with a bright smile in the days before the Irvings flew to New York late last week and admitted that she had indeed been posing as Helga R. Hughes.

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Impromptu press conferences on Ibiza turned into parties, with Edith serving drinks and snacks. One evening, reports TIME'S Roger Beardwood, the group was joined by Elmyr de Hory, the master Hungarian art forger about whom Irving wrote his best-known book, Fake! Something of a personage on Ibiza (he sports an English shooting jacket and a monocle), De Hory confided that it was "possible but not probable" that anyone could have forged a nine-page letter from Howard Hughes. "He would have to be a genius," De Hory whispered. "And Cliff, dear boy, is no genius at anything." Whether Cliff is guilty or innocent, the remark has some force.

It is said that Edith, an abstract painter, has the business sense in the family. She is a gay, spontaneous woman with long, dark-blonde hair. Throughout the siege, she has maintained her wit and poise. "If I'd taken that $650,000," she joked at one point, "do you think I'd be sitting here with this man?" There are even those who subscribe to a Lady Macbeth scenario of the Hughes affair.

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Until he became linked with Hughes, Irving devoted himself to a life of semi-bohemian writing and wandering. The son of Cartoonist Jay Irving, who drew the comic strip Pottsy, Clifford Irving was born in New York City and graduated from Cornell in 1951. He traveled, took odd jobs --brush salesman in Syracuse, machinist's helper in Detroit--lived on a houseboat in Kashmir and taught creative writing at U.C.L.A.

On Ibiza, he finished his first novel, On a Darkling Plain, which was published in 1956. Since then he has produced three more novels. His nonfiction works were notable for their inaccuracies. His first marriage was annulled; his second wife died in a car crash in 1959, and he divorced his third wife, a London model, in 1965. Four years ago, Irving married Edith Sommer, a Swiss divorcee whose first husband, she says, was a German businessman and something of a "stiff."

Until recently, at least, the Irvings' island life was pleasantly anonymous. The natives recognized Irving only as the star center of the Ibiza basketball team.

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