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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."