Clifford & Edith & Howard & Helga

THE Hughes affair appeared last week to be headed toward a denouement. Its elaborate mysteries began to unravel a bit. Its bafflements still invited ingenious hypotheses, yet it seemed likely that after episodes as odd as the circumstances of Howard Hughes' own life, the truth of the matter was about to emerge. In a reverse jigsaw-puzzle effect, the outlines of the truth began to take form as Author Clifford Irving's account of how he had assembled the Hughes manuscript began to crumble.

The initial break concerned the identity of "Helga R. Hughes," the mysterious woman who used a Zurich bank account to collect $650,000 in publisher's fees meant for Howard Hughes. On first hearing that the depositor was a woman, Irving feigned astonishment and confusion. "One day I hear she was a blonde," he said at his farmhouse on the Spanish island of Ibiza, "the next that she is a brunette. I don't know where the truth is." A great many people instantly noted that Helga Hughes' description matched to a suspicious degree that of his wife Edith. Irving warned newspapermen that he would sue anyone who tried to suggest a connection.

But the pressures on Irving began to build. Swiss police asked him to come to Zurich, pointedly requesting that he be sure to bring Edith along. The Swiss authorities were acting at the instigation of McGraw-Hill, which had originally planned to publish the Hughes book in March. Much of the information the police worked with had been gathered by LIFE, which was to excerpt the autobiography in three issues this month.* They also had an interest all their own, since Helga had employed a forged Swiss passport in opening the Zurich account. On the other side of the Atlantic, there was also official interest: New York County District Attorney Frank Hogan, the U.S. Postal Service and the Justice Department had launched investigations into what was beginning to appear to be a very complicated piece of fraud.

Irving chose the U.S. rather than Switzerland, flying to New York in midweek with Edith and their two children. After a private session in Hogan's office, Irving and his attorney, Martin Ackerman, were holding a late-night post-mortem in Ackerman's town house when TIME'S Frank McCulloch and John Goldman of the Los Angeles Times angled their way in. Until then, Irving had never varied in pitch or detail his account of the entire Hughes caper, as he traced and retraced his steps under intense questioning. This time he cracked.

Yes, he admitted, Edith and Helga R. Hughes were one and the same person. It was his wife who deposited two of the three checks (one came by mail); it was she who had thereafter withdrawn the money in cash, carrying it off in airline bags.

But that, he insisted, was the extent of his lying in the affair. He declared that, contrary to the bank's version, Edith had never endorsed any of the checks in the presence of bank personnel. He claimed that he had given all of the checks to Howard Hughes during their various meetings when they were taping the story of Hughes' life. Hughes, said Irving, had endorsed the checks and then handed them back to Irving with the understanding that Irving, for a fee of $100,000 from Hughes, was to salt the money away in a Swiss bank account. The reclusive billionaire could not open such an account himself, said Irving, and did not want any of his subordinates to know of its existence; hence the subterfuge. According to Irving, Hughes planned to "settle up" the taxes on the money later, after the book was published.

According to Irving, Edith made six visits to the bank, each time covering her dark blonde hair with a brunette wig, wearing glasses and heavy makeup and speaking very bad German--despite the fact that she is German-born. As soon as each check cleared, Irving claimed, Edith withdrew the money and "took it across the street" to another, unnamed Zurich bank, where she deposited it to await Hughes' instructions for pickup.

Flimflam Man. Irving held firm on the rest of his story: how he had gathered the manuscript in more than 100 hours of clandestine meetings with the real Hughes in hideaways in the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico and California. Yet the edges were fraying. At one point, during the nighttime interview, he replied to a question: "Yes, I could have been dealing with an impostor [for Hughes]. It might have been a flimflam man." Then he veered back: the man he had met for all those hours could only have been Hughes. Finally, exhausted and suffering from a case of laryngitis that reduced his normal baritone to a whisper, Irving ended the interview with a shrug: "God, I just don't know."

The news that Helga was actually Edith exploded like a bombshell. Its concussion immediately threw all of Irving's past assertions into a new perspective and, at the least, severely damaged his credibility. Ackerman immediately withdrew from the Hughes case. "I think he needs a criminal lawyer in a situation like this," Ackerman said. McGraw-Hill and LIFE both indicated they would hold off publication of the Hughes material indefinitely.

The swift succession of events produced fresh rounds of speculation about how and where the Hughes manuscript had originated. Assuming that Irving was telling the truth about the rest of his story, one theory still held that Howard Hughes had indeed met with the writer and poured forth his autobiography; then Hughes' associates persuaded him that he would have to disown the book or risk damaging financial and legal consequences. In this theory, Irving could be telling the truth about arranging the Swiss account at Hughes' request.

Hughes, in any case, has been capable of baroque deviousness. Robert Maheu, a longtime Hughes associate dismissed in 1970 as head of his Nevada operations, recalls one anecdote: "Once we were in a court fight, and without telling any one of his lawyers what he was doing, Howard sent someone else around to try to settle the case. Then he sent someone else around to block the attempt to settle."

A variant of that theory is that Irving was duped by a highly sophisticated ring of swindlers, including both a man posing as Hughes and a master forger. Some federal authorities are fascinated by the possibility of a hoax resembling the swindles engineered during the 1920s and 1930s by large-scale confidence men. During that period, some legendary conartists like Joseph ("Yellow Kid") Weil took in millions in an operation they called "the Big Store." As many as 20 or 30 swindlers--forgers, embezzlers, impersonators--would take part. Sometimes they rented an office in a bank building and set up a phony stockbrokerage firm, complete with bustling "customers" and "clerks." Thus it might have been possible for someone to assemble a crew of actors to dupe the publishers--and possibly Irving. One trouble with this theory is that it is very difficult to imagine any actor who could master his script so well as never to falter or make Irving suspicious in more than 25 hours of taping--and was a master forger as well.

Richard Hannah, a spokesman for the Hughes interests in Los Angeles, declared: "We don't believe that just Irving and one or two others are involved. We think this plot is dark and deep--a well-financed, intricate plot that was hatched over a long period of time." The Hughes organization has been gathering legal evidence that he could not possibly have met with Irving at the times and places the writer claims. Hughes' "Mormon Mafia," his security agents and two physicians have reportedly sworn to affidavits that Hughes was in his suite in Nassau's Britannia Beach Hotel on the dates when Irving says his meetings with Hughes took place.

All such conjectures leave unanswered the question of whether the manuscript is authentic, no matter how it was obtained. Those who have read the Irving book still agree that it contains the words and thoughts of Howard Hughes. TIME has learned that such material may in fact have come from an extraordinary computer printout that has been compiled for eventual use by Hughes. The document, supposedly available to a few current or former members of the Hughes organization, contains virtually everything that has ever been published about Hughes, as well as thousands of memoranda dictated for and by Hughes--material enough for a dozen "authentic" books.

The likeliest scenario is that Irving somehow obtained some or all of the material in the printout. It has been rumored, for example, that an angry former employee from the Hughes operation brought the material to Irving. If this story happens to be true, Irving would probably not have needed many accomplices--except for an excellent forger, and his wife, who opened the bank account.

New Lawyer. The plot could have been maliciously inspired by a former Hughes man who masterminded it. If the material simply fell into the Irvings' laps as purloined goods, some think that Edith could have been the brains behind the operation. A longtime friend of the Irvings' observes: "Edith is essentially an adventurer. She wouldn't be interested in it primarily for the money. She'd like to do it because of the intrigue, the danger." In fact, says the friend, if the banking arrangements had been left strictly to Edith, "there probably wouldn't have been any hitches. She understands money. Cliff doesn't."

As of last week, the original $650,000 was down to $450,000, which had been given to a second Zurich bank to invest in stocks. It is said that Irving is now frantically trying to raise $200,000 in order to replace the money that has been spent, should he be required to refund it to McGraw-Hill. The fact that the money remains in the Irvings' accounts is one of the best arguments against the theory that an impostor posing as Hughes duped Irving; presumably such an impostor would long since have absconded with the money.

Late last week Irving hired a new lawyer, Maurice Nessen, who has wide experience in criminal cases. Together, they spent the weekend--part of it in a northern Connecticut house--preparing their case. Early this week Irving was to appear before a New York County grand jury investigating possible charges of perjury and obtaining money (from McGraw-Hill) under false pretenses. Then Irving would have to face a federal grand jury looking into possible additional charges of mail fraud.

Presumably the case will become clearer this week in court. It remained certain that even if he is at last telling the truth, Irving still has a great deal of explaining to do.

* According to an escape clause in its contract with McGraw-Hill, LIFE can retrieve all of its investment in the project. LIFE has thus far paid $100,000 of a total of $250,000 the contract called for. Harold McGraw Jr., president of McGraw-Hill Book Co., says his firm has invested something less than $800,000, counting the $650,000 that went into the Helga Hughes account.

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