Issue #2- April 6, 2007

The Hoax

The Movie About a Man Who Wrote a Book and Went to Jail

me of the other characters in it are Truman Capote, played by Michael J. Burg, Cyd Sherise, played by Stacy Lynn Spierer, and others identified as “McGraw Hill Security Guard,” a “bowling alley attendant,” a “salesman,” “feral girl #2,” “Daniels” and “Topless hippie,” played by Olja Hrustic.

The movie was filmed on a tight 41-day schedule in Fajardo, Rio Grande, San Juan, Manhattan and White Plains. One interesting scene was filmed at the Central Park Boathouse.

The incident that landed author Clifford Irving in jail occurred in 1971. At the time, he was living in East Hampton, making his living as a writer authoring books of fiction and non-fiction. Among his successes was a biography of a well-known art forger named Elmyr de Hory. Irving decided, after the publication of his de Hory work, that if de Hory could do a forgery, so could he. He would fake the biography of Howard Hughes, the notoriously reclusive billionaire and richest man in the world. Irving figured — in fact, the whole project was based on the belief that — Hughes would never go public to denounce it, since to do so, he would have to come out of his jealously-guarded seclusion. Irving cooked up the idea with another author, Richard Suskind (who served 5 months). Suskind would do the research. Irving would write it. At one point, the pair were secretly able to obtain the manuscript — never published — of a memoir set down by the chief aide to Howard Hughes, a man named Noah Dietrich. It came from a friend of theirs, and they were only supposed to look at it briefly, but they made a copy before returning it. After the publication of the biography and Hughes’ vehement denunciation, the man who had ghostwritten Noah Dietrich’s memoir, James Phelan, found that Irving had used much of the material and plagiarized different passages from his manuscript. That he could prove this in court is what brought the roof down on Irving. The Irvings and Suskind, after briefly declaring that they must have been hoaxed by somebody else, eventually pled guilty and threw themselves on the mercy of the court.

Personally, I came to know Clifford Irving fairly well in the early 1970s. He was a tall, utterly charming, hard drinking, dashing figure who was a ladies’ man and a serious romantic — he seemed to fancy himself an F. Scott Fitzgerald. He never seemed to have any money. And he was often living in other people’s houses. I recall visiting him in a mansion in the Georgica section of East Hampton one time, where he lived with a girlfriend, and in the course of conversation learned that, accurately or not, he knew the owner of the mansion, and had an open invitation to be living there, but at this particular time the owner did not know he was there because Irving had not yet gotten hold of him. About a week later, he called to ask if I knew of any other place he might live.

Without a doubt, Clifford Irving was a fine writer. Not a great one, perhaps, but an excellent turner of phrase. Over the course of his career, he wrote five books, On a Darkling Plain (1956), The Losers, The Valley (1960), Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory The Greatest Art Forger of Our Time (1969) and The Hoax (1981). He also wrote Sam Houston and Pancho Villa and a book called The Trial. He also did a lot of ghostwriting for others.

In 1971, the richest man in the world was Howard Hughes. Hughes was running his empire from a penthouse apartment in Las Vegas, where he had lived for twenty years, guarded by a small army of Mormon security people. He never left the apartment and he never met anyone face to face. It was widely reported that he wore a bathrobe all day, or nothing at all, that he had a full white beard that came down to his waist and that he had let his fingernails grow out six inches or more. But nobody really knew the truth.

To sell the “biography,” Clifford Irving went to a publisher and said he had Hughes’ blessing and had met him and discussed his life many times. He presented handwritten notes from Hughes, written to him about various events in his life. He did all this without ever having met the man. On this basis, Irving sold the book to McGraw Hill in Manhattan for $500,000 — one hundred for him and four hundred for Hughes, which Irving promised he would personally deliver to the billionaire. McGraw Hill read the outline, read Hughes’ notes – they even had a handwriting expert look at it – declared it authentic and wrote Irving a check. (Samples of Hughes’ handwriting had appeared in Time Magazine. Irving learned it.) Irving obtained an advance of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill. There were also arrangements for it to be excerpted prior to the publication date in Time and Look Magazine. Irving then settled down to write.

The book never came out. The public was so eager to see it, and the publisher was so eager to promote it, that excerpts of certain chapters appeared in LIFE Magazine prior to publication. And when Howard Hughes read them, he exploded. Although he still would not appear in public, Hughes arranged for a press conference by telephone from his apartment, at which time, with almost the entire world listening in, he denounced Clifford Irving and declared that The Authorized Biography of Howard Hughes was a hoax. He’d never met the man.

“I only wish I were still in the movie business,” Hughes said wistfully, referring to his years as a filmmaker in the 1930s, “because I don’t remember any script I ever saw in Hollywood as wild or imagination-stretching as this autobiography yarn has turned out to be.”

What happened after that dominated the national news for much of 1972 — the trial and conviction of Clifford and Edith Irving, and a police raid on an art exhibit in Southampton at the Tower Gallery, which I attended, where Irving’s wife Edith and her paintings were being showcased. This raid, authorized by the Internal Revenue Service, was at the order of the court that convicted Clifford Irving, seeking restitution from the Irvings for the fraud they had perpetrated on McGraw-Hill. Irving and his wife were arrested — he for defrauding McGraw Hill and she for putting the cash into a Swiss bank account — and all the copies of the Hughes biography were destroyed. In the end, Edith received a jail sentence (that got suspended) and Clifford served a year and a half in prison.

And so we come to today — and the premiere of The Hoax, the telling of this amazing story. Although no part of this film was made in the Hamptons, much of the action took place here. Irving wrote The Autobiography of Howard Hughes while living here, and after he was arraigned, he hired a local attorney, William Power Maloney, to represent him.

And there are numerous other Hamptons connections. This is a New York media story, after all. Eli Wallach, one of the stars of The Hoax, lives here with his wife, Anne Jackson. Truman Capote lived here. Marcia Gay Harden won an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Jackson Pollock’s wife in Pollock, which was filmed here. The Hoax is also a great accomplishment for the Sag Harbor publishing house known as The Permanent Press. Blackballed by the publishing world, Irving had found an ally in this small, Sag Harbor publishing house co-founded by Marty Shepherd. This book is the basis for the movie, and has recently been reissued by Hyperion. “On the day that filming began,’’ Marty told me, “the producers made a payment to exercise their film option, bringing the combined earnings of author and publisher to well over $500,000.’’

As for Clifford Irving, he returned to East Hampton after his stint in jail, and after that, lived for a while in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He divorced Edith, and she moved to Ibiza, Spain. Today, Irving lives in Aspen, Colorado and is still writing away. His most recent book is The Spring (1996). He’s been paid for the rights to his life story and the rights to The Hoax and he doesn’t have a problem with that.

“I made 21 cents an hour while I was in prison,” he said. “It balances out.” ---------