Word: dietrichs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book is identical at many points with the manuscript of a Long Beach, Calif., writer named James Phelan, who had been hired to ghostwrite the story of the man who knows more than anyone else in the world about the life and times of Howard Hughes. He is Noah Dietrich, 83, who for 32 years was Hughes' chief of staff, hatchet man, fixer and right arm. The conclusion emerging from a study of both manuscripts is that much of Irving's book was lifted from Phelan's writings. Irving could have come into possession of the Phelan...
...that moment, the last of the boxes was being opened. When Phelan's version of the Dietrich book is read in tandem with the Irving manuscript, one essential source of Irving's material becomes obvious (see story, page 17). The instances of duplicated material are numerous. In some cases, the books are virtually identical in detail. In others, they are substantively the same, although the Irving manuscript has been reworded and otherwise disguised. One curiosity: the writing in the Irving manuscript is much better than that in the hastily drafted Phelan version. It is ironic that Irving...
...question still to be fully answered is exactly how Irving got the Phelan manuscript. Noah Dietrich began working on a book about Hughes in Los Angeles during 1969. Jim Phelan, his collaborator, is a widely experienced newspaperman and investigative reporter who has written five magazine articles on Hughes. Says Dietrich: "Phelan would come up to my house in Benedict Canyon and I would dictate to his tape recorder. One hundred hours of tapes. Then he digested this and wrote down a lot of questions, and I dictated a whole batch of memos to my secretary...
Phelan Phase. The project dragged on into 1970. Eventually Dietrich became dissatisfied with Phelan's work ("It was his first book and I guess he was going for the Pulitzer"). Dietrich and Phelan signed a $40,000 settlement. Dietrich hired another writer, Associated Press Hollywood Correspondent Bob Thomas, who finished the book off in six weeks. Dietrich had been having trouble finding a publisher, and was about to accept a mere $5,000 advance for his book when the Irving story broke last December. Dietrich negotiated a $65,000 advance from Fawcett, which will bring out the Thomas version...
...shot in Malta, is surfing the current wave of nostalgia with a re-creation of old Holly wood times. Pint-sized Mickey Rooney and gravel-larynxed Lionel Stander are playing a couple of gangsters, and four Maltese cats are masquerading as Mae West, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich. But what really catches the Zeitgeist of those crazy days is the bit where Rooney gets shot and Stander does a backward somersault into the pool to surface in the middle of a floating...