Word: dietrichs
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Rather Average. Stanley Meyer, an old friend of Dietrich's and a sometime Hollywood producer, learned that Dietrich was preparing a Hughes book and said he could help find an agent. On the advice of Novelist Irving Wallace (The Prize), Meyer suggested Wallace's agent in New York, Paul Gitlin, who handles other authors such as Harold Robbins. Meyer took the manuscript from Dietrich and channeled it, chapter by chapter, to Gitlin in New York...
That process began in November 1970. Gitlin read the chapters as they came in, and sent word to Dietrich that the book seemed "indifferent and rather average." In January 1971, Gitlin sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster, which kept it for two weeks. Then in February, says Gitlin, Phelan on his own submitted parts of the book to Look magazine for possible serialization. Phelan denies that he ever approached Look...
...case, a copy of the manuscript was out of Dietrich's hands for about three months early last year. Phelan completed the manuscript in April at just about the time Irving allegedly began having his first serious interviews with Howard Hughes. It is possible that Irving had already conceived a Hughes project when the Phelan manuscript fell into his hands. He had begun discussing the project with McGraw-Hill in January 1971, when Phelan was midway in his work...
...Irving appeared at a house in Cathedral City, Calif., that belonged to Stanley Meyer's mother-in-law. There, Meyer says, he approached Irving, whom he had known in Los Angeles ten years before, and asked if he would be interested in rewriting the Phelan manuscript for Noah Dietrich. "No, I can't," Irving replied. "I'm already doing a book on the four richest men in the world [including Howard Hughes]." That was not unusual; all through the project, Irving disguised the fact that he was interested only in Hughes by saying he was doing...
...editor than a writer on this project," he said. At the time, that remark seemed a possible reference to the editing of taped interviews with Hughes, but the damning truth now shows through in a comparison of Irving's manuscript with one prepared for former Hughes Aide Noah Dietrich by Reporter James Phelan. Irving brought considerable editorial ingenuity to reworking parts of the Phelan story in order to avoid outright duplication of language. He embellished incidents, arbitrarily changed statistics, had Hughes sometimes doing precisely the same things that the Phelan book claims Dietrich...