Word: clifford
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...Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving investigation continued to twist like a whodunit written on a helix, the editors realized that a cover story on Irving was in the offing. Which artist should paint de portrait? The ideally ironic choice seemed to be Elmyr de Hory, Irving's neighbor on the Balearic isle of Ibiza and the subject of Fake!, Irving's book about a master art forger...
...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...
...flew to Zurich, where they tried to induce the Swiss to reduce their charges against Edith. They received a cool reception. For weeks Zurich Prosecutor Peter Veleff had been horrified by the publicity surrounding the case and by the lack of cooperation from U.S. legal authorities. The spectacle of Clifford and Edith blithely appearing on television was especially galling when she, a Swiss citizen, had been charged with-and had even admitted-that she violated the Swiss sanctum sanctorum, its banking system...
...most intriguing figure in the case becomes not Hughes but Clifford Michael Irving. Why did he do it? Why did he think he could get away with it? What hubris made Irving imagine that he could bluff his way to more than a half million dollars by stealing a manuscript, challenging the entire Hughes empire, and dealing in recklessly prolific forgeries? Some of the answers may lie in Irving's career as a nomadic, minor league novelist of a post-Hemingway generation...
Just weeks ago, Clifford Irving was looking forward to the publishing coup of the decade. He had control of well over half-a-million dollars in publishers' advances and prospects for immense royalties. Last week, with his story in a shambles, he sat in a Manhattan hotel waiting for the law to close in. The Irvings had been caught in forgery; his version of how he had acquired the book in personal meetings with Hughes was seriously shadowed. He tried to bargain with federal authorities for immunity-for himself or for Edith-in exchange for the full story...