About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Clifford Irving

Encyclopedia : C : CL : CLI : Clifford Irving

Clifford Irving in February, 1972
Enlarge
Clifford Irving in February, 1972

Clifford Michael Irving (born November 5, 1930) is a US writer, best known for his "authorized autobiography" of Howard Hughes which turned out to be a hoax.

Growing up in New York, Clifford Irving was the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a magazine cover designer and the creator of the syndicated comic strip Pottsy about a New York policeman. After graduating in 1947 from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Irving attended Cornell University, had a two-year marriage (to Nina Wilcox) and worked on his first novel, On a Darkling Plain (Putnam, 1956). He worked on his second novel, The Losers (1958), as he traveled about Europe. While staying on the island of Ibiza he met a British woman, Claire Lydon, and they married in 1958, moving to California. The marriage came to a tragic conclusion when she was killed in an automobile accident.

On a Darkling Plain and The Losers were not financially successful but received excellent reviews. On a Darkling Plain was sometimes compared with another novel set at Cornell, Charles Thompson's [Halfway Down the Stairs] (1957). John O. Lyons, in his survey, "The College Novel in America: 1962-1974" (Critique, 1974) saw a tendency toward pranks and put-ons in Irving's early work:

Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) continues the iconoclastic Cornell Bildungsroman of the fifties by Clifford Irving, On a Darkling Plain (1956); Charles Thompson, Halfway Down the Stairs (1957); and Robert Gutwillig, After Long Silence (1958). The oscillation between weltschmerz and pranks in these novels was undoubtedly an influence on "The Whole Sick Crew" of Pynchon's V.
His third novel, The Valley, is a Western, published by McGraw-Hill in 1960. Irving moved in 1962 to Ibiza with his third wife, English model Fay Brooke. In 1967 he married Swiss/German artist, Edith Sommer, and they had two sons. He was acquainted with art forger Elmyr de Hory and wrote his biography, Fake! (1969).

Contents

Hughes' autobiography

After 1958, Howard Hughes had become a recluse who hated any kind of public scrutiny. Whenever he found out that someone was writing an unauthorized biography about him, he bought the writer off. By the 1960s he even refused to appear in court. According to various rumors, he was either terminally ill, mentally unstable, or even dead and replaced by an impersonator.

In 1970, in Spain, Irving met with an author, Richard Suskind, and created the scheme to write Hughes' "autobiography". Irving and Suskind believed that because Hughes had completely withdrawn from public life, he would never go public to denounce the book. Suskind would do most of the necessary research in news archives. Irving started by writing letters in which he imitated Hughes' handwriting, which he had seen in letters displayed in Newsweek magazine.

Irving contacted his publisher, McGraw-Hill. Irving claimed that he had corresponded with Hughes because of his book about Elmyr de Hory and that Hughes had expressed interest in letting him write his autobiography. The McGraw-Hill board invited him to New York where he showed them three forged letters, one of which claimed that Hughes wished to have his biography written but that he wanted that the project to remain secret for the time being. The autobiography would be based on interviews Hughes was willing to do with Irving.

McGraw-Hill agreed to the terms and wrote up contracts between Hughes, Irving and the company; Irving forged Hughes' signatures. McGraw-Hill paid an advance of $100,000, with an additional $400,000 that would go to Hughes. Irving later bargained the sum up to $765,000, with $100,000 going to Irving and the rest to Hughes. McGraw-Hill paid by cheque, which Irving had his wife deposit to a Swiss bank account.

Irving and Suskind researched all the available information about Hughes. Irving also created faked interviews supposedly made all over the world, due to Hughes' penchant for meeting in secluded places, which did fit with his contemporary image. One of them supposedly happened on a Mexican pyramid. Actually, Irving was meeting his various mistresses in the stated places.

Irving and Suskind also gained access to the private files of Time-Life, as well as a manuscript by James Phelan, who was ghostwriting memoirs of Noah Dietrich, former business manager to Hughes. Mutual acquaintance Stanley Meyer showed Irving a copy of the manuscript—without Phelan's consent—in the hope that he would be willing to rewrite it in a more publishable format. Irving made a copy of it for his own purposes.

In the early winter of 1971 Irving delivered the manuscript to McGraw-Hill. He also included notes in Hughes' forged handwriting that a graphologist declared genuine. Hughes experts were also convinced. McGraw-Hill announced their intention to publish the book in March, 1972.

Several representatives of Hughes' companies and other people who had known him expressed their suspicions. Irving stated that Hughes had not told them about the book. Journalist Frank McCulloch, who had interviewed Hughes for the last time years before, received an angry call from someone claiming to be Howard Hughes. But he read the Irving manuscript and declared that it was indeed accurate. Mike Wallace interviewed Irving for a news broadcast. Wallace later said his camera crew told him Irving was "a phony. They understood. I didn't. He got me."

McGraw-Hill and Life magazine, which had paid to publish excerpts of the book, continued to support Irving. Osborn Associates, a firm of handwriting experts, declared the writing samples were authentic. Irving had to submit to a lie-detector test. For weeks there was no sign of Hughes.

On January 7, 1972, Hughes finally contacted the outside world. He arranged a telephone conference with seven journalists that had known him years before. It took place two days later and was televised. Hughes denounced Irving, said that he had never even met him, and said that he was still living in the Bahamas. Irving claimed that the voice was probably a fake.

Hughes' lawyer, Chester Davis, filed suit against McGraw-Hill, Life, Clifford Irving and Dell Publications. Swiss authorities investigated a bank account in the name of "H. R. Hughes", which had received $750,000. Edith Irving had opened it with the name "Helga R. Hughes". When Swiss police visited the Irvings on Ibiza, they denied everything, although Clifford Irving tried to hint that he might have been dealing with an impostor. Then James Phelan read an excerpt of the book and realized that a few of the facts had been taken from his book. Finally the Swiss bank identified Edith Irving as the depositor of the funds, and the jig was up.

Eventually the Irvings gave up and confessed on January 28, 1972. They and Suskind were indicted for fraud and appeared in court March 13 and were found guilty June 16. Despite the efforts of Irving's lawyer James E. Sharp, Irving was convicted and spent 17 months in prison, where he stopped smoking and learned to lift weights. He voluntarily returned the $765,000 advance to his publishers. Suskind was sentenced to six months and served five.

Following his release, Clifford Irving continued to write books, including some bestsellers. The fraudulent autobiography was published on the Internet in 1999. In July 2005, filming began in Puerto Rico, New York and New Jersey on The Hoax, directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Richard Gere as Clifford Irving. Others in the cast include Marcia Gay Harden, Alfred Molina (as Richard Suskind), Julie Delpy, Eli Wallach (as Noah Dietrich), Hope Davis, Michael J. Burg (as Truman Capote) and Jane Gray (the daughter of Meryl Streep). Scripted by William Wheeler (Empire, The Prime Gig), this film is loosely based on the events of the hoax. Irving has said of the project, "I had nothing to do with this movie, and it had very little to do with me." However, his name appears in credit lists as "technical consultant."

Books of Clifford Irving

Works about Hughes autobiography affair

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: