The Secret Life of Clifford Irving

THE grand jury was sending out subpoenas like invitations to an enormous masked ball, with an improbable guest list, ranging from ex-convicts to publishing executives to members of Author Clifford Irving's sometimes exotic circle on the Balearic island of Ibiza. The Howard Hughes affair was turning into a still more absorbing drama, with among other things an emotionally fascinating subplot of adultery. The unmasking of the plot would come soon, it seemed—perhaps this week. When it does, Irving confided cryptically to a friend in Manhattan, "you'll be amazed at how simple it is."

Last week legal authorities in the U.S. and Switzerland were rapidly working to unravel the mysteries surrounding Irving's supposed "autobiography" of Howard Hughes. U.S. postal investigators were checking hotel records in Florida and other places to determine whether Irving ever met Hughes, as he claims, for more than 100 hours of talk. Other federal men pursued a lead that Irving may have needed money to pay off loan sharks of the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino. Meantime the Internal Revenue Service signed tax liens against all of Irving's 1971 earnings, including the $650,000 in publisher's advances to "H.R. Hughes" that the Irvings had banked in Zurich. Swiss officials issued warrants for the Irvings' arrest.

Three Questions. The investigators who descended on the Hughes case were picking away like archaeologists at what now appear to be the ruins of Irving's story. Initially, there were three major questions: 1) What became of the $650,000 that McGraw-Hill thought that it was advancing to Howard Hughes for the book? 2) Did Clifford Irving ever meet with Howard Hughes? and 3) If they never met, then where did Irving get the material for the book?

The money question has been substantially solved. Irving admits that his wife Edith, posing as a woman named Helga R. Hughes, opened an account at the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich, deposited the McGraw-Hill checks made out to H.R. Hughes and then withdrew the money and salted it away in several other Zurich banks. Irving claims that he made the arrangements at Hughes' request. Last week, however, a few more details of those transactions came to light.

For one thing, Edith opened one of the secondary accounts in the name of Hanne Rosenkranz. Edith's first husband, a West German businessman named Heinz Deiter Rosenkranz, is now married to a woman named Hannah, whose West German identity card Edith evidently used in opening the account, using the diminutive Hanne. Edith forged the specimen signature to do so. In addition, Swiss authorities found that Edith's "Helga R. Hughes" passport was actually a Swiss passport that had been issued to her in the fall of 1968, after she had reported her old one missing.