Category: Literary Hoaxes

Caveat emptor: Robert Hilferty, critic for Bloomberg News talked with Clifford Irving about “The Hoax” movie. Irving also writes about the movie (which he says he has not seen) on his Web site, where you can download a pdf version of “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes”. A few chapters are free. The whole book is $5.95 which he says, “is a discount of $154 from the Amazon.com price,” although as of today, the book is unavailable on Amazon.com.

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Clifford Irving Faked Hughes Book for Fun, Derides ‘Hoax’ Film
By Robert Hilferty

April 25 (Bloomberg) — Clifford Irving, who spent more than a year in prison after writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes in the 1970s, says the new Richard Gere film about the hoax is also phony.

“From the first time I read the script, I thought it was a silly, defamatory story about a crackpot, desperate man who by some coincidence bears the same name as mine,” Irving, 76, said last week in a telephone interview from his home in Aspen, Colorado. The movie is supposedly based on his own account, “The Hoax,” written before he went to jail.

Hilferty: Do you consider the “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” to be your masterpiece?

Irving: No. It’s just a very good book. I’ve written better books, but the autobiography is unique insofar as it is a novel in the form of an autobiography. It’s the most famous unpublished book in America.

Hilferty: It certainly took a lot creativity to make up those conversations.

Irving: We didn’t make them up. We actually had the conversations. My friend Dick Suskind and I set a Sony tape recorder on the table and we’d switch playing the roles of Howard Hughes and Clifford Irving. We got into it as actors. Continue reading “A hoax interview about a hoax movie about a hoax book”

Submitted by Erin Clermont:

I was obsessed by Clifford Irving back in the day. And I happened to be working at CBS News, so I got the dope on a daily basis. My obsession was based on my unerring (IMHO) instinct that he was lying, from day one, so it was a fantastic experience watching the whole thing unravel, over months, at a network news organization. My boss, Walter Cronkite, wasn’t as interested.

No more than two years later I was working at a literary organization. We didn’t have a receptionist, so whoever was closest to the door answered it. That day I answered a knock and a presentable though borderline seedy guy said, proudly, “I’m Clifford Irving!” I was speechless. All I could think to say was “I always knew you were lying!”–so I passed on the hello.

That face-to-face ranks as one of the most celebrity non-thrill sightings of my life. I still have no respect for Irving. He was a swindler, which is not a “prank” — he went for major bucks, which was $1 million in those days, though it sounds like chump change now. Seeing “The Hoax,” I now realize Irving was fresh out of jail when I met him. Ha. OTOH, the movie made me reasess the quality of the Hughes bio he wrote, which, after all copies were destroyed, has never been reissued. Irving was rather brilliant as a hoax biographer and, using investigative reporter techniques, fashioned a credible biography of the reclusive Hughes.

Gere may have topped his career with this performance. He’s terrific as Irving. Cast in the role of Nina Van Pallandt, who turned her Irving sexual liaison into a Hollywood career, is the delicately beautiful and talented Julie Delpy. Unlikely choice–Nina was a big Nordic beauty. And wasn’t she in Gigolo with Richard Gere? Ironic.

Lots of great, early ’70s decor and props in this film. So-called stock footage is used for a scene of a Washington demo against the Vietnam War. Front and center is a guy who looks just like Joey Skaggs. Coincidence?