THE tale was Rashomon in a James Bondian world, an intricate fantasy of scramblers on telephones and double identities, of 5 a.m. rendezvous in wigs and false beards, of exotic island fastnesses that pulse with secret electronics and the glint of fortunes in transit. Its protagonist could only be Howard Hughes, 67, the archetypal, anchoritic billionaire brooding over one of the world's great pools of wealth. He has always been an elusive, somehow haunted presence, sending out his commands from a bewildering entombment in desert or tropical hotels. Obsessively shy, devoted to intrigue, suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, Hughes last week had begun an emergence that was at least as strange as his radical withdrawal from the public world more than a decade ago.
What brought him forth was a controversy that had been building since the announcement on Dec. 7 that McGraw-Hill would publish The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, and LIFE would print excerpts from it. In one of the oddest consultations since those of the Cumaean sibyl, Hughes (or a man purporting to be him) spoke from Paradise Island for 2 hours with reporters arrayed before a telephone amplifier in a California hotel. The disembodied voice denied any knowledge of the book or its author. Later Hughes' agents sought an injunction to prevent its publication.
The battle is potentially much larger than a quarrel over a rich eccentric's privacy, a manuscript's authenticity, or the authorization to print it. Directly or indirectly, the controversy could conceivably endanger a sizable part of Hughes' wealth—including $300 million tied up in his Nevada properties, $145 million in a lawsuit against Hughes by TWA, and $50 million in a suit by the former head of his Nevada operations, Robert Maheu. These stakes could affect the future of the entire Hughes empire, which encompasses more than 50,000 jobs and a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion.
The casus belli is a manuscript compiled by an expatriate American novelist and biographer named Clifford Irving, 41, who lives on the small Balearic island of Ibiza, off Spain's Mediterranean coast. Irving claims that the book is a first-person account of Hughes' life, based on at least 100 hours of interviews with Hughes. The publishers agree with him that the manuscript's authenticity is beyond question. The book, says TIME Inc. President James Shepley, "goes into elaborate detail about the personal and business life of Howard Hughes. It talks about the details of his relationships with women. It talks about the dealings of the Hughes Tool Co. and TWA, about Hughes' relationships with the Presidents of the U.S." Others who have seen it find no less than devastating the defiant candor with which Hughes, almost as if he were talking to an analyst, exposes the personal and business relationships of his CinemaScope career. And no one who has read the manuscript so far doubts its genuineness.
Fallen Short. Over the years, novelists and moviemakers have fictionalized the Hughes saga, but apparently their fantasies have always fallen short of the facts. Various people have besieged him with requests that he write his story or help them tell it. By his account, Clifford Irving is the man who gained Hughes' confidence and won the prize.
The son of New York Cartoonist Jay