The Peculiar Truth about Howard Hughes’ Fake Memoir

• 1971: McGraw Hill publishing company stunned the literary world. They proudly announced the soon-to-be-released autobiography of world-famous recluse Howard Hughes. It was a publishing coup.

• Their jubilation ended, however, when they discovered they’d been the victims of a con artist.

• Howard Hughes was a household name. He inherited his father’s business and parlayed that into astonishing wealth.

• Among his many businesses were aviation, motion pictures, oil production, and tool manufacturing. Dashing, adventuresome, and incredibly rich, he dated several Hollywood stars and was a record-setting daredevil pilot.

• Privately, though, he suffered mental health problems. Obsessed with germs, the man sat alone in the nude in a Las Vegas hotel room for four months screening the same movie repeatedly and would only touch things using Kleenex.

• After that, he vanished from the public eye for years, completely shunning the news media.

• Clifford Irving was a 40-year-old New Yorker living on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. He’d written novels and nonfiction books with few sales.

• He shared a scheme with his friend Richard Suskind, a fellow writer. Instead of writing a biography of Howard Hughes, which would have received little attention, he would create an autobiography as if Hughes himself had penned the book. Suskind thought Irving was crazy.

• Irving bet the intensely reclusive billionaire would never challenge such a publication because it would mean facing the public. Howard Hughes’ fear of public appearances had become legendary.

• Even so, how could Irving persuade McGraw Hill to publish such a book? By convincing them that Hughes had chosen Irving to ghostwrite his autobiography and get it into print.

• A problem: McGraw Hill would cut checks to Howard Hughes, not Irving. The solution: Irving’s wife. He sent her to Switzerland to open a bank account under the fake name of Helga R. Hughes. The publisher would then be instructed to cut all checks to H.R. Hughes and deposit them into the Swiss account.

• To further coerce McGraw Hill, Irving created a ruse. He flew to Mexico to meet Hughes in a private (which did not occur). Then Irving flew to New York to tell McGraw Hill of his secret meeting with Howard Hughes in which the billionaire insisted that only Irving write his book.

• McGraw Hill fell for it. They ponied up a half million dollar book advance to H.R. Hughes.

• After that, Irving and Suskind created the fake autobiography. They did research. They floundered.

• Then, by coincidence, Irving learned that Howard Hughes’ actual long-time assistants, Noah Dietrich, was seeking publication of a tell-all book about Hughes. Irving got hold of the manuscript.

• That gave Irving and Susskind the source material to write their own fake book.

• One year later, Irving submitted his manuscript, which was filled with odd lies loosely based on Hughes’ real life.

• Then McGraw Hill announced Howard Hughes’ memoir, and the shit hit the fan.

• Representatives for Howard Hughes quickly called the book a fraud. Hughes himself would say so in public.

• Journalists gathered in a LA hotel room. It was televised. The real Howard Hughes addressed them over speakerphone. He wished he was still in the movie business because he had never read a film script so wild. He stated that he’d never met or even heard of Clifford Irving.

• Rather than buckling, though, Irving doubled down on his lie. He insisted that the man on the speakerphone was not Howard Hughes.

• McGraw Hill sided with Irving. The book would be released.

• But Hughes’ investigators followed the money trail. They learned that H.R. Hughes with the Swiss bank account was a woman - Clifford Irving’s wife.

• The jig was up.

• The fallout: Irving went to prison for fraud. So did his wife, who divorced him upon release.

• 1972: Irving published a book about his criminal misadventures titled What Really Happened. He depicted himself as heroic and showed no remorse.

• 2006: A movie called The Hoax told Irving’s story. Richard Gere played him as a scoundrel.

• Clifford Irving hated it.