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Irving and Hughes soon began their real working sessions in Irving's hotel room on Nassau. Hughes regularly arrived at Irving's room at 4 a.m. Irving had to roust his wife up and get her out of the room before Hughes would enter. Over the next eight to ten days, according to Irving, he conducted five long taping sessions of up to four hours each.
Later came another intensive series of tapings, Irving says, which lasted ten to twelve days. All of these were in Irving's motel on the fringes of a city in the U.S. During this period, Hughes prodded Irving to change his rental car every day. Hughes refused to meet Irving's wife, but by chance he did encounter Richard Susskind, a researcher Irving had hired. "Would you like a prune?" Hughes asked. "Yes," said Susskind, "if it is an organic prune."
More tapings followed, although they were not continuous, since Hughes often rambled and was sometimes irritated by the recorder. "Turn that goddam thing off," he once told Irving. "It's driving me crazy." Up to this point, Hughes had been appropriating the tapes at the end of each session and providing Irving with transcriptions later. But since the copies were poor, Irving pleaded to be allowed to transcribe the tapes himself. Hughes agreed, on condition that the tapes never leave the guarded room where they were working. According to McGraw-Hill's Vice President for General Books Albert Leventhal: "Irving was never without a guard, and they took all his materials away when he finished typing."
Strictly Secret. At another session, the two men came to what Irving calls a "tentative but full agreement" that the project would culminate in an autobiography, to be published by McGraw-Hill, that would take the form of a book-length interview.
Nearly a year ago, Irving informed McGraw-Hill of his contract with Hughes. In late March, two contracts were signed—one between McGraw-Hill and Irving, the other between Irving and Hughes. Hughes insisted that the entire project be kept strictly secret.* Last spring McGraw-Hill approached LIFE Managing Editor Ralph Graves, who signed a contract for an option on the first magazine and newspaper serial rights.
For security purposes, McGraw-Hill and LIFE named the enterprise Project Octavio. When LIFE received the transcripts, two editors closeted themselves in a suite in Manhattan's Elysee Hotel and then spent the better part of two days poring over them. Only three LIFE editors and a handful of McGraw-Hill executives knew about the project. Once work began on the actual publication, the book publishers locked away first the transcripts and later the galleys in a vault every night. For fear of theft or bombing, they declined to say whether the vault was in the McGraw-Hill Building. The measures may seem melodramatic, but Irving claims that two men showed up on Ibiza, hinting of murder and demanding information from his wife.
Meanwhile Irving and Hughes continued their