Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Novelist wrote fake ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes
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), the world’s most reclusive billionaire and, almost by chance, a president. By some accounts, it may have triggered the Watergate break-in that brought down Richard Nixon.
The hoax’s perpetrator, globe-trotting novelist and Howard Hughes “biographer” Clifford Irving, died Dec. 19 at a hospice near his home in Sarasota. He was 87 and had been diagnosed last week with pancreatic cancer, his wife, Julie Irving said.
Irving had lived nearly as swashbuckling a life as Hughes when he contacted the publisher McGraw-Hill in early 1971, declaring that he had obtained Hughes’ permission to write a tell-all biography of the aviator and movie mogul.
His act of literary forgery was inspired by a neighbor on the island, Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory, who became the subject of Irving’s book “Fake!” (1968). The book chronicled de Hory’s career creating sham works by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani and inspired the Orson Welles movie “F for Fake.”
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.
He soon received a $750,000 advance from McGraw-Hill and a sizable check from Life magazine, which planned to publish excerpts from what became known as “Autobiography of Howard Hughes.”
With the help of a researcher and co-author, Richard Suskind, Irving began studying the details of Hughes’s life, gathering old news stories and reference materials.
He 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.
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 remainder of 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 sentence. (His wife was also imprisoned in Switzerland for her role depositing the checks; they divorced after her release.)