THE WORLD’S GREATEST CON
Clifford Irving got rich with a bio of Howard Hughes. It was fake news before its time,
The greatest literary hoax of the 20th century — call it a prank, scandal, adventure, criminal conspiracy, or an early piece of “fake news” — fooled lie detectors, handwriting experts, publishers, journalists, Swiss bank officials and very nearly the entire United States.
It featured disguises, an arcane code name (Project Octavio) and the world’s most reclusive billionaire.
The hoax’s perpetrator, globe-trotting novelist and Howard Hughes “biographer” Clifford Irving, died Dec. 19 at a hospice near his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87 and had been diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Julie Irving.
Though known mainly by a small community of writers and artists, Irving had lived nearly as swashbuckling a life as Hughes when he contacted the publisher McGraw-Hill in early1971, declaring that he had obtained Hughes’ permission to write a tell-all biography of the aviator and movie mogul.
The son of a prominent New York cartoonist, Irving wrote novels, reported on the Middle East for NBC and moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he met at least three of his six wives.
His act of literary forgery was inspired by a neigh- bour on the island, Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory, who became the subject of Irving’s book Fake! (1968). Sometimes described as a novel — as with much of Irving’s life and work, the lines between fact and fiction were blurred — the book chronicled de Hory’s career creating sham works by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani.
In a letter to his publisher, Irving said that he had sent a copy of Fake! to Hughes, who was reportedly living in near-total isolation inside a hotel in the Bahamas. The billionaire, he said, replied with a thank-you note praising Irving’s sympathetic treatment of the subject, which Irving took as an opening to suggest a biography of Hughes himself.
Irving assumed that Hughes had become so reclusive and private that he would rather stay silent than come forward and deny the book was real. He soon received a staggering $750,000 advance from McGraw-Hill and a sizable cheque from Life magazine, which planned to publish excerpts of the book.
With the help of a researcher and coauthor, Richard Suskind, Irving began studying the details of Hughes’s life, gath- ering old news stories and reference materials. The duo took turns “interviewing” one another, pretending to be Hughes as they transcribed imaginary conversations.
Irving travelled to Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas to “meet” with Hughes in parked cars and motel rooms — much of the time he was actually seeing his mistress, Danish singer and actress Nina van Pallandt — and placed international calls to his publisher to create a heightened air of authenticity.
He studied examples of Hughes’ handwriting to forge letters by the billionaire, encouraging the book’s publication; appeared on 60 Minutes to try to convince skeptics the biography was real; and was aided throughout by his wife, the former Edith Sommer, who used a false passport to deposit the publishers’ fees in a Swiss bank account under the name H.R. Hughes.
By late 1971, however, Hughes and his lawyers had apparently had enough of the story and announced the book was fraudulent.
Even then, Irving nearly succeeded. Hughes had such a reputation for reclusive eccentricity that some journalists theorized that the billionaire, not the writer, was lying. Perhaps, the theory went, Hughes had agreed to be interviewed for the book but later decided that it would compromise his finances and reputation.
The story fell apart entirely in early 1972, just before the book’s scheduled publication, when investigators linked Edith Irving to the Swiss bank account and after van Pallandt announced that she had been with Irving on some of the dates he allegedly interviewed Hughes.
Irving, his wife and Suskind returned the money they made during the incident and pleaded guilty to charges of grand larceny and conspiracy. Each of them spent time in prison, with Irving serving about 16 months of a 2 1/2-year sentence. (His wife was also imprisoned in Switzerland for her role depositing the cheques; they divorced after her release.)
“I don’t see it as a crime worthy of society’s customary revenge,” he later told the reference work Contemporary Authors. “Had I succeeded, no one would have been hurt . . . If I had it all to do over again, I would do it all, with one difference. I would succeed.”