Word: zurich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...initial break concerned the identity of "Helga R. Hughes," the mysterious woman who used a Zurich bank account to collect $650,000 in publisher's fees meant for Howard Hughes. On first hearing that the depositor was a woman, Irving feigned astonishment and confusion. "One day I hear she was a blonde," he said at his farmhouse on the Spanish island of Ibiza, "the next that she is a brunette. I don't know where the truth is." A great many people instantly noted that Helga Hughes' description matched to a suspicious degree that of his wife...
...pressures on Irving began to build. Swiss police asked him to come to Zurich, pointedly requesting that he be sure to bring Edith along. The Swiss authorities were acting at the instigation of McGraw-Hill, which had originally planned to publish the Hughes book in March. Much of the information the police worked with had been gathered by LIFE, which was to excerpt the autobiography in three issues this month.* They also had an interest all their own, since Helga had employed a forged Swiss passport in opening the Zurich account. On the other side of the Atlantic, there...
...time covering her dark blonde hair with a brunette wig, wearing glasses and heavy makeup and speaking very bad German-despite the fact that she is German-born. As soon as each check cleared, Irving claimed, Edith withdrew the money and "took it across the street" to another, unnamed Zurich bank, where she deposited it to await Hughes' instructions for pickup...
...personally acknowledged a half-hour later that he had indeed received the third check. Last week at a New York State Supreme Court hearing on the case, Irving showed photostats of the three checks, all bearing the endorsement of "H.R. Hughes" and cleared by the Swiss Credit Bank in Zurich...
What, then, became of the $650,000? This Swiss Credit Bank account through which the three checks had cleared became the focus of an intensive investigation. No one, of course, ever imagined that Hughes had personally gone to Zurich to open the account. The more pertinent question: Was whoever opened it acting for Hughes, or for someone else? Even before last week, LIFE and McGraw-Hill had been troubled by some of the circumstances surrounding the account. At McGraw-Hill's behest, officials for the canton of Zurich were investigating the matter, and last week that investigation and others...