Word: hoax
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...widely reported that Hughes left Nassau because the Bahamian government suddenly found that several of his aides-the "Mormon Mafia" -did not have the work permits required of foreigners. Actually, the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, which is conducting a grand jury investigation of the Irving hoax, had issued a subpoena for Hughes to testify. On Valentine's Day, U.S. postal inspectors appeared in Nassau with the summons; federal officials intended to impanel a grand jury in either Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands to hear Hughes -at night, if he so desired. The postal inspectors consulted...
That authenticity now seems explained. Irving's hoax worked because the base on which he built was largely genuine. In subject matter, Irving's 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...
...Irving, with seven published books, had gone farther than thousands of other young men of his generation who grew up trying to be writers in imitation of Hemingway. Still, Irving was in the literary backwaters. Then, by transferring all of his fictional dreams to nonfiction form -in a grand hoax-he finally performed an act of daring imagination. Through his Howard Hughes, through all of the minutely conjured secret rendezvous, through the forgeries, Irving, in some perhaps sleazily refractory way, entered a world of tabulation in which he was simultaneously living and creating high adventure. "Cliff lives in a world...
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...
THEORY II: PARTIAL HOAX. Irving came up with authentic Hughes material, but did not obtain it in the way that he said he did. How else could he have...