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Double Life. Irving says the project began for him in late November 1970, when he mailed a complimentary copy of Fake!, along with a brief covering note, to "Howard Hughes, c/o Desert Inn, Las Vegas, Nev." His associates insist no package thus addressed could have reached him, since his aides, at his request, shield him from most outside communications; moreover all mail is logged in on arrival, and his aides claim to have found no entry for the book. But according to Irving, Hughes replied with a longhand thank-you note in which he mentioned Irving's father and complimented Irving on treating a rather odd figure, De Hory, "with great consideration and sympathy." Irving took the hint, and an exchange of letters followed. When Irving suggested writing a book about Hughes, Hughes asked how he would proceed and enclosed the name and general-delivery address of an intermediary to whom Irving should reply.
Next, says Irving, he received a series of telephone calls directly from Hughes. In the months that followed, Irving and Hughes met numerous times. Nervous about "leading a double life," Irving made a habit of mailing a postcard to his publishers at McGraw-Hill from the cities where the encounters took place. On one occasion, Hughes' intermediary arranged an airline flight for Irving; instead of being able to pick up the ticket at the airport, he found that the ticket had merely been ordered. He had to pay for it himself. Says Irving: "That seemed like something Hughes would do."
Series of Tapings. Irving says the first meeting occurred, characteristically for Hughes, in the front seat of a car in a parking lot at 7 a.m. Hughes looked to be in good health, with modishly long gray hair and a mustache—but not the Vandyke beard he had worn for years. (Associates who claim to have seen Hughes recently say that he is still—or once again —wearing the beard.) The next day, amid similarly elaborate precautions, the two met again. In the course of the eleven-hour session, Hughes left the room frequently.
Weeks later, in another city outside the U.S., Irving checked into a hotel to await instructions. A man named George called at 5 a.m. and directed Irving to a car parked several blocks away. Irving slipped into the driver's seat beside Hughes, who was wearing a wig. With Irving driving and Hughes navigating, the writer says, they motored through a forest, where Hughes finally got down to preliminary contract talk. At a second meeting in the same city, Irving says, he began insisting that he would have to get to work and start making tape recordings of their conversations.
Why did Hughes agree to talk to Irving at all? Says Irving: "The man is in the last decade of his life. He believes he has been maligned, lied about. He has received a bad press. As he said himself, he 'wanted to restore the balance.' " He had a message to convey, Irving suggests, perhaps an elusive one. "But one thing he said sticks in my mind,"