Telling Tales (13 page)

A
FTER ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
the next most iconic president of the United States is, without a doubt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. So it is no surprise that he too was the subject of a bold literary hoax involving spurious letters supposedly written at a particularly intense time in his romantic and professional life. But the JFK letters, being ‘discovered’ in the age of multimillion-dollar media deals, did more than embarrass a venerable literary journal: they netted a fortune not only for the perpetrator but for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was taken in by them.

It was in the mid-1990s that Lex Cusack, the son of an attorney who had worked for the Catholic archdiocese of New York, came forward with his revelatory stash of papers. Those papers, which he claimed to have found among his late father’s belongings, revealed that Lex Cusack Senior had been none other than Kennedy’s secret legal advisor and the documents were, without a doubt, absolutely the most inflammatory things anyone with an interest in JFK (i.e. just about everyone) could hope to read. They detailed, both in the form of legal contracts and tear-stained love-letters from a certain ‘Happy Birthday’-singing film star, the full extent of the mess the thirty-fifth president had found himself in shortly before his murder in 1963. He was a bigamist. He had been having an affair with Marilyn Monroe and had paid her a large sum of money to keep quiet about his bigamy, their affair and – perhaps worst of all – his connections with the notorious mobster Sam Giancana and various other underworld figures. And he was afraid that J. Edgar Hoover was on to him and his game would very soon be up.

These three scandals had been the stuff of rumour and gossip ever since the mid-sixties but until Lex Cusack came forward with his father’s letters there had been no material proof of them whatsoever.

In 1985, Lex’s well-known father Lawrence X. Cusack had died, leaving the big names in New York’s Catholic community bereft of one of their most trusted legal aides. His funeral mass was attended by every bishop, priest and nun who was anybody, and his career as a scrupulous and discrete attorney was celebrated lovingly in the press. His practice had spanned the most crucial years in twentieth-century American Catholicism: the period during which the Kennedy clan had risen to prominence amidst unprecedented allegations about rigged elections and double-dealings. If America’s first Roman Catholic president had, as the papers suggested, had a secret first marriage which was never officially ended but rather informally annulled by understanding bishops, Lawrence would have known about it. And so, according to these letters, he did.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, the Manhattan law firm of which he was a founding partner, Cusack & Stiles, instructed one of their clerks, who also happened to be his son Lex, to sort through the thousands of papers left behind in Lawrence’s office. Amongst these papers were, Lex would claim, the 300 or so which revealed the close advisory relationship, hitherto unknown to anyone, between Cusack and Kennedy. Cusack characterized his father as an all-knowing ‘Holmes’ figure to the troubled president, and this special partnership contained such damning evidence as a trust agreement committing Kennedy to paying for Monroe’s mother’s healthcare in return for Marilyn keeping quiet about all she knew of the president’s underworld connections and illegal marriage.

Just as the impulse to consolidate his father’s reputation by linking him with one of the most famous icons of the day is reminiscent of other bygone literary hoaxers such as William Ireland, so too is what Lex – in cahoots with his wife – did next.

According to an investigation by the
New York Times
, the Cusacks decided that if they could get some of the less controversial papers in the collection authenticated by experts, it would make it easier to persuade purchasers that the more shocking documents were also genuine. There was no doubt that the trademark Kennedy scrawl on the notes and cards looked quite genuine to the untrained eye – as did the White House headed paper – but only with the stamp of approval of an expert could they proceed to cash in their treasure trove. They turned to the Connecticut memorabilia dealer John Reznikov, who took a look at the papers and supplied a letter attesting to their authenticity. Then the graphology expert Joseph Maddalena was approached with some equally small-fry letters and was willing to part with a few hundred dollars to buy them for his own collection, but never officially authenticated them. The Cusacks now had credibility enough to start selling the papers to the highest bidder.

It was not long before one of America’s best-known investigative journalists, Seymour ‘Sy’ Hersh sought a piece of the action. He had recently signed a seven-figure contract with Little, Brown to produce the definitive book about JFK’s assassination but once he connected with Cusack he turned his attention from the events of 1963 to the years before Kennedy’s death and the potentially far more explosive stories to be found there. Of particular interest to Hersh was the suggestion, in some of the letters, that the then FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover knew all about Kennedy’s insalubrious dealings with the mob and was using the information to make Kennedy’s life a misery.

Even before Hersh lent his good name to the project, however, Cusack had sold several of the letters to private collectors, earning himself enough money to live in far greater comfort than the average paralegal. His touting of a potential book written by himself about his late father had largely fallen on deaf ears, but once Hersh was on board, deals from big television networks and magazines were there for the taking and the money began rolling in in earnest. Letters such as the one in which Kennedy refers to ‘MM’, with her dangerous knowledge about his private life needing to be sorted out even pointed to the popular conspiracy theory that Marilyn had been murdered by government agents trying to cover up a scandal. And another note, suggesting that just before her demise Marilyn was about to call a news conference and tell-all about the president who had broken her heart, only fuelled the rumours further.

Sy Hersh, who had now used his access to Cusack’s papers to increase his book advance by several hundred thousand pounds, was as much of a Kennedy enthusiast as the next American, but he was also a highly professional journalist with a peerless reputation to protect. So, very sensibly, he began to ask friends and associates of the Kennedys to tell him what they knew about Camelot’s relationship with Lawrence Cusack (or ‘Larry’, as he chummily calls him in the notes). Worryingly, he drew a complete blank. Even Kennedy’s former secretary, whose name appeared on some of the letters, claimed never to have heard of the lawyer. Another graphologist was brought in to scrutinize the handwriting and although she conceded that it looked like Kennedy’s, she was able to discern the tell-tale stops and starts and minute irregularities in pressure that characterize a painstakingly forged script.

By this point, with the finger of suspicion already hovering over Lex Cusack, some fatally damning careless mistakes were found in the letters. On one letter there was a zip code – something that had not yet been invented. Then it was discovered by forensic experts that some of the typewritten papers had been created on a machine which hadn’t existed at all in the early 1960s. But the detail which indicates most emphatically that Lex was the type of underachieving, glory-hunting son to make it all up was the discovery by Hersh that he had lied about his army qualifications and academic credentials in a wedding announcement in the
New York Times
.

Hersh knew full well that hoaxers frequently turn out to have left a trail of mis-truths and self-aggrandizing lies, and eventually he had to admit he had been conned. In 1999 Lex was imprisoned for ten years for defrauding his buyers of a total of $7,000,000.

Astonishingly, despite Cusack’s conviction, and although scraps of paper were found in his office which appear to show him practising Kennedy’s handwriting, some of those buyers were determined to reclaim their property from the government lawyers who seized them in the process of the case. One collector, Mike Stern, who spent $300,000 on forty documents in the mid-nineties, told journalists: ‘We paid for them, we’re entitled to them. Stamp them with the word “forgery” if you have to, but we want to hang them on our walls even if they are fake.’ It seems, then, that the enduring strength of the Kennedy myth is very much above the law, whatever you believe about the man himself.

H
OWARD HUGHES IS
one of the most enduring symbols of Hollywood’s golden age. As a director, he discovered the film stars Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, as a lover he was associated with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Ginger Rogers, and as a pilot and racing-plane designer he broke several world speed records. But the side of his life that fascinated the gossip column-reading public more than anything was his self-imposed exile into his own, reputedly very strange, world during the last fifteen years of his life. After suffering a breakdown in the late 1950s, his obsession with germs and an escalating drug problem led him to isolate himself completely from the outside world, living in a series of sealed-off luxury hotel suites and attended only by a few trusted and hygienic glove-wearing intimates.

Although the full details of his later years were not fully known until after his death from heart failure in 1976, stories would occasionally leak out, and he became known as a madman who never cut his nails or wore clothes and sat naked in a white leather chair all day watching old films. It was at the height of speculation about Hughes that the writer Clifford Irving – a New Yorker living in Ibiza who had written several critically acclaimed novels and, interestingly, a biography of an art forger – came up with the idea for an extraordinary literary hoax. Judging by the fact that his commercially unsuccessful novels had never earned him the kind of money he liked to spend, and that his latest effort had not been accepted for publication at all, it is safe to assume that his chief motivation was financial.

According to his own account of the affair,
The Hoax
, which he published in 1981, he had been in Spain, about to cross over to Ibiza, when he bumped into his friend, the writer Richard Suskind. Suskind was a children’s author who specialized in historical adventure stories and although he was less of a literary player than Irving, he was used to doing a considerable amount of research to give his books a feel of historical accuracy. During their conversation, talk turned to the reclusive film director and one of the men struck upon the idea that there was a lot of money to be made out of a book about the man – if only the public (and the publisher) would believe it was in some way authorized. It occurred to Irving that if his friend were willing to research everything there was to know about Hughes’ life, he himself would write it up and capitalize on his relationship with the respected publishing house McGraw-Hill to get them a book deal.

They decided to tell the publishers that Hughes had granted a series of exclusive interviews to Irving and had also turned over to him a number of letters and sworn statements for use in what would be the only authorized book ever to be written about the man. Irving would, in effect, be ghost-writing Howard Hughes’ autobiography. By the time he went to his editors later in 1970 he had put together a proposal which they would be made to turn down. Documents apparently from Hughes (in fact forged by Irving on the basis of a handwriting sample he had seen in a magazine) were produced to verify Irving’s claims, and a handsome advance of $100,000 was offered. After some tough bargaining, this was raised to a massive $665,000 for Irving and a further $100,000 for Hughes. Cheques were duly written and paid into Irving’s bank account and also a Swiss account opened in the name of H. Hughes by Irving’s wife Edith.

Now the job of writing could begin, and drawing on every newspaper and magazine article and official record they could find on the man (plus a few less publicly available sources) enough biographical data was amassed to fill a very authentic-seeming volume of memoir. One of the private sources used by the men was an unpublished ghostwritten autobiography of Noah Dietrich, the man who had for years been Hughes’ closest confidant. Dietrich had worked as Hughes’ general assistant prior to his retirement and, now in his eighties, was seeking help putting his memories down on paper. A writer called James Phelan had been given the job, but it was easy for Irving to get his hands on the manuscript: he let it be known that he – a more accomplished writer – would gladly consider working on the manuscript instead of Phelan (who was not doing a brilliant job), and the editors handed it over.

Odd though it may seem, one worry Irving and Suskind never seem to have had is that Howard Hughes himself would hear about their ruse and try to stop it. They were convinced that the old director would either be insane and detached enough not to know what was going on in the world, or so paranoid about interaction with the public and ashamed of what he had become that he would never dare come out of his luxurious hermit’s cave to challenge them.

Assuming these things, Irving blithely presented his manuscript to McGraw-Hill towards the end of 1971. Alongside the text he presented a number of notes written in Hughes’ hand, which he had managed to get authenticated by a graphologist. The publishers must have known that high-profile people who had been close to Hughes were saying that this book could not be for real: that Hughes would never do such a thing. Just to make absolutely certain, they subjected Irving to a polygraph test to make sure he was telling the truth about his meetings and interviews with Hughes. During the test, Irving managed to keep his cool almost perfectly, betraying only signs of ‘inconsistencies’ not outright lies. Apparently, that was to be expected – after all, there would necessarily be some aspects of the Irving–Hughes relationship that were justifiably private. So, as planned, the imminent publication of the book that would finally lift the lid on the most enigmatic celebrity of the twentieth century was announced via a press release, and a lucrative serialization deal was brokered with
Time
magazine. The preface alone, in which Hughes sets the tone for the confessional mood of the pages to follow, must have been enough to get dollar signs flashing furiously in eyes: