The autobiography of Howard Hughes, once the world’s richest man, opens with an anecdote in which his ghost-writer Clifford Irving recalls the first time that the pair met, on a movie set, when he was a young boy chiefly interested in sneaking peeks at the bountiful bosom of the film’s star, Jane Russell. It may be the only true thing in the book.
In 1972 Irving was revealed as having perpetrated one of the great literary hoaxes. He had convinced a leading US publisher, the American media and its public that he had been collaborating with the reclusive Hughes on a sensational, revelatory memoir. The record first run of 400,000 copies had to be pulped and Irving ended up in prison.
The idea had come to him after reading in Newsweek that Hughes was living in a hotel in the Bahamas. Aside from his closest advisers, no one had seen him in a dozen years. He was rumoured to have become a long-haired, germ-phobic eccentric who ate only banana nut ice-cream and shuffled about in slippers made of Kleenex boxes.
Yet in his prime in the Thirties, Hughes had been a dashing figure whose family wealth, derived from oil-drilling equipment, had enabled him to become a significant Hollywood producer and aviation pioneer. He had later owned TWA, the airline, and helped to develop Las Vegas into the nation’s playground. Among the many actresses he had beguiled were Rita Hayworth and Ginger Rogers.
Irving, who had published several novels, told his editors at McGraw-Hill in 1970 that Hughes had contacted him asking for help with a potential memoir after enjoying Irving’s recent study of the art forger Elmyr de Hory. This might have raised red flags, but for Irving producing proof in the form of letters — in fact, forged from samples of Hughes’s writing in the Newsweek article.
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Later, Irving would insist that he had never thought that he was committing a crime. The impulse to prove himself may have been a midlife crisis: his father had just died and his career was making scant headway. Of course, it was never about the money.
This, however, must have become a consideration when he (notionally with Hughes) was offered a publishing deal and serial rights totalling about $1.5 million (now £8.5 million). Thereafter, he concocted ever more elaborate, if plausible, stories of interviews with Hughes — who adopted the codename “Octavio” — at remote sites in the Americas.
These “research trips” were cover for an affair Irving was conducting with Nina van Pallandt, the Danish-born baroness and folk singer who, with her former husband Frederik, had previously enjoyed hits such as Little Donkey.
As the chapters began to come in, his publishers grew ever more excited. Had Hughes really made love to Lana Turner on the leather divan of his private aircraft? Who knew that he had secretly flown with the RAF in the war? Or travelled incognito with Ernest Hemingway — “Hem” to his friends? Who could have guessed that Hughes had wandered naked beside the Ganges in a rebuke to the vanity of riches?
All this hokum had been cooked up by Irving and Richard Suskind, a roguish children’s writer co-opted as his research assistant. “We’d sit there with a tape recorder and a mountain of notes and documents,” Irving recalled. “And literally, I would say, do you want to be me today or do you want to be Howard?”
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Between them, they caught the authentic-sounding voice of the tycoon and allayed the publishers’ doubts further by such devices as “Hughes” insisting on complete secrecy and at the last moment demanding a large increase on the advance supposedly payable to him.
The pair were also aided by extraordinary strokes of luck, such as encountering an acquaintance who happened to have a draft of a memoir by a former associate of Hughes, which allowed them to add seemingly irrefutable touches of detail.
Chancing to come across a cache of material deposited in a Hollywood archive the very day they visited, they even found a memo by Hughes providing an engineering solution to the problem of buttressing Russell’s charms.
The entire scheme, however, depended on Irving’s gamble that Hughes would not come forward to challenge the authenticity of the book. Once its existence was announced, shortly before publication, doubts were raised, but Irving passed a lie detector test and graphologists pronounced genuine the letters from Hughes. When a journalist who had interviewed the billionaire received a call from someone claiming to be Hughes and disputing Irving’s story, he convinced himself the voice was phoney.
In January 1972, however, the real Hughes made a conference call from Nassau to seven journalists in Los Angeles. “I wish I was still in the movie business!” he said of the chutzpah with which the swindle had been carried out. The emperor’s clothes began to vanish, but even then Irving put in a bravura performance on television, claiming perhaps he had been hoodwinked by an impostor.
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The clincher was the discovery by Swiss authorities that the cheques from McGraw-Hill to “HR Hughes” had been deposited in an account belonging to one Helga R Hughes by a woman who resembled Irving’s artist wife, Edith Sommer. Three weeks later, he confessed.
“By the end a deep interior gloom had settled,” Irving said. “I had to keep playing the game.” He served 17 months in prison, while Suskind got six. Edith did rather more time in the US and Switzerland. Irving repaid the advance he had received — but was made to pay tax on it. Together with his legal fees, it bankrupted him.
Clifford Michael Irving was born in New York in 1930. His father, Jay, was a cartoonist for Collier’s, a weekly magazine; his real surname was Rafsky, but to avoid shaming his parents, who thought he sold insurance, he worked under his middle name.
After reading English at Cornell, Clifford joined The New York Times as a copy boy, ferrying typed-up stories between reporters and sub-editors. In 1953, in thrall to Hemingway, he set off to see the world.
After stints as a brush salesman and a potato-picker on a kibbutz, he claimed to have had adventures including riding into Tibet and sailing a three-masted schooner before settling on Ibiza. By 1960 he had published three novels, although much of his time was devoted to exploring the island’s sybaritic aspects.
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His first marriage, to his college sweetheart Nina Wilcox, was annulled after two years in 1952. Irving was to marry another five times — “I was brought up to be in love.” In 1958, he married Claire Lydon, an Englishwoman, but she died in a car accident in California the next year. His third wife was also English – Fay Brooke, a model, to whom he was married for three years before their divorce in 1965. They had a son, Josh,
He and Edith Sommer married in 1967. They had two sons, John Edmund (“Nedsky”) and Barnaby. Two weeks into Irving’s prison term, she filed for divorce. She and Nina van Pallandt had found out about another dalliance of his — with a scuba-diving instructor.
Irving later married yet another Englishwoman, Maureen Earl, an author. They lived together in San Miguel de Allende, a haunt for expatriates in Mexico, but he met his sixth wife, Julie Schall, skiing in Aspen. After their marriage in 1998, they settled in the Colorado resort, where he painted and for a time was deputy coroner, despite having no relevant qualifications.
Yet their house was a rented one, because although he went on to write another dozen novels and true-crime books, for many years publishers were not interested in his output. “I’d pissed on publishing . . . They were shown to be greedy, foolish and ego-driven,” he said. Latterly, living in Florida, he had made his books available online.
His purported memoir of Hughes was published in 1972, while he was in prison, and re-issued in 2006 when a film of the episode was made as The Hoax, with Richard Gere as Irving.
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“We were grown men playing games,” he reflected latterly. “Maybe they were amoral — or immoral — but we didn’t grasp that. I don’t want to sound like an innocent. We knew we were doing something wrong. But boy, did we have fun doing it.”
Howard Hughes died in 1976. He never did write his autobiography.
Clifford Irving, author and fraudster, was born on November 5, 1930. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 19, 2017, aged 87