Word: faking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Impromptu press conferences on Ibiza turned into parties, with Edith serving drinks and snacks. One evening, reports TIME'S Roger Beardwood, the group was joined by Elmyr de Hory, the master Hungarian art forger about whom Irving wrote his best-known book, Fake! Something of a personage on Ibiza (he sports an English shooting jacket and a monocle), De Hory confided that it was "possible but not probable" that anyone could have forged a nine-page letter from Howard Hughes. "He would have to be a genius," De Hory whispered. "And Cliff, dear boy, is no genius at anything...
THEORY I: TOTAL HOAX. Clifford Irving invented the entire autobiography. To do so, however, Irving would have to be a near genius of a writer. He would also have had to forge a body of documents, among them the Hughes letter to Irving acknowledging receipt of his book Fake!; four handwritten letters, including the nine-page letter to the McGraw-Hill president; and checks-made out to Hughes for $700,000 as payment for the book, endorsed by Hughes and cleared through a Zurich banking house called Credit Suisse. Irving would also have had to forge Hughes' handwriting...
...considerable length with airplane design and performance. There are glints of characteristic Hughes wit. He scoffed at Richard Nixon's Checkers speech, for example: "I always thought he must have had an onion hidden in his handkerchief." Such details would have been extremely difficult for Irving to fake. Indeed, the Hughes camp seemed ready to base its case less on the authenticity of the book than on whether or not it was authorized...
...perspectives tilt irrationally and contradict one another, the façades are cardboard, the inhabitants ghosts. "These characters in costume who gesticulate under a 'real' sky, in the middle of 'real' nature, have always given me the impression of something as stupid as it is fake," De Chirico wrote later. He was speaking of theater, but the preference is equally true of his early painting. De Chirico had intelligently brought some of the flattening devices of Cubism to bear on a wholly anecdotal art. The fragments of memory found their distorted space; the means...
...Does he have something new to tell us? Is his theatricality so exciting as to justify telling us nothing? Does he extend the forms of drama? If all the answers are no, as in Handke's case, he should be accorded no more attention than a purveyor of fake antiques. In reality, such a playwright is insulting the audience-what the Germans call Publikumsbeschimpfung. That was the title of an earlier Handke play in which four actors simply revile the audience. Slightly more subtly, he's done it again...