Word: affair
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tale came wrapped extravagantly-boxes within boxes, each festooned with its own diminished fantasies, each gaudily papered in ever thinner tissues of lies. The serial revelations in the Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving affair became an extraordinary popular entertainment, a top of the TV news, a front-page divertissement that evoked the distractions of an earlier, less desperate age. Like the Americans who once crowded the docks waiting for the latest chapter of Dickens to arrive by boat, devotees anticipated the next surprises...
...grand jury was sending out subpoenas like invitations to an enormous masked ball, with an improbable guest list, ranging from ex-convicts to publishing executives to members of Author Clifford Irving's sometimes exotic circle on the Balearic island of Ibiza. The Howard Hughes affair was turning into a still more absorbing drama, with among other things an emotionally fascinating subplot of adultery. The unmasking of the plot would come soon, it seemed-perhaps this week. When it does, Irving confided cryptically to a friend in Manhattan, "you'll be amazed at how simple...
Irving's own character became one of the larger bewilderments of the Hughes affair. On the evidence, he had used his wife as a pivotal figure-to open the Swiss bank accounts under a false name and forge signatures, leaving her vulnerable to jail. Yet before his story began disintegrating, Irving had told TIME'S Roger Beardwood on Ibiza: "Do you seriously think I would have involved my wife in something -my wife, whom I love, the mother of my children, whom I love...
...must return to the streets of coldest Cambridge, the two find some time for a pinch of intrigue, a snort of cocaine, and a fair helping of sex (including one of the longest bouts of screen kissing since Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway locked jaws in The Thomas Crown Affair). Again, not surprisingly, once home Peter soon realizes how much of Susan he misses and John kindly agrees to finance her passage East if she too will bring in some dope...
...that, he insisted, was the extent of his lying in the affair. He declared that, contrary to the bank's version, Edith had never endorsed any of the checks in the presence of bank personnel. He claimed that he had given all of the checks to Howard Hughes during their various meetings when they were taping the story of Hughes' life. Hughes, said Irving, had endorsed the checks and then handed them back to Irving with the understanding that Irving, for a fee of $100,000 from Hughes, was to salt the money away in a Swiss bank...