Word: suskind
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WHAT REALLY HAPPENED by CLIFFORD IRVING with RICHARD SUSKIND 378 pages. Grove Press...
Irving never really intended, he says, to keep the $750,000 that he extracted from his publishers. He and his collaborator Richard Suskind originally planned nothing more wicked than "a gorgeous literary caper." As the plot deepened, he saw it as "a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself." His wife Edith approved, he recalls, and so did his mistress Nina van Pallandt. "You're quite, quite mad," Nina said to Irving when he told her of the project in their Mexican hotel bedroom, "but the world is mad, so what's the bloody difference...
...Once the basic research had been done, Irving and Suskind simply sat down at a tape recorder, interviewed each other, and began spinning tales. They invented scandalous stories of how Hughes seduced his father's mistress while his father was watching, how Hughes once rescued a kleptomaniac aircraft executive from imprisonment for a theft of Oreo cookies, and how Hughes reluctantly went swimming in the nude with-of course-Ernest Hemingway. The imaginary Hughes had originally barged in on Hemingway in Sun Valley, introduced himself as a bush pilot and taken the novelist "for a spin...
What began as a grand and intricate caper, a hoax of hoaxes hatched on a Spanish island, ended last week in two Manhattan courtrooms. Author Clifford Irving, his wife Edith and Researcher Richard Suskind were sentenced to jail terms for fabricating an autobiography of Howard Hughes and selling it to the McGraw-Hill Book Co. for $750,000. In a federal court, Irving was given 30 months, Edith two months, with Edith going to jail first so that their two children will not be deprived of both parents at one time. Suskind, who helped with the research on the bogus...
With that, Irving and his wife Edith pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy. Then they walked a few blocks to the Criminal Courts Building, where they joined their collaborator, Researcher-Writer Richard Suskind. In State Supreme Court all three pleaded guilty to New York's charges of grand larceny and conspiracy in the $750,000 hoax. The Irvings and Suskind were released again on bond to await sentencing on June 16. Even the guilty pleas may not be the end of the tangled story; the federal grand jury in Manhattan continued last week to issue subpoenas...