Look to Clifford Irving for foolish fun

Published 6:00 am Sunday, April 1, 2012

If you were looking forward to reading “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” 40 years ago, you’re time has come — just in time for April Fools’ Day.

    In 1972 publishers McGraw-Hill destroyed tens of thousands of hardback copies of the book. This was done because it was discovered to be a fake. Clifford Irving duped his publishers into thinking he was working directly with Howard Hughes to write it.

    It’s not only the most famous book never published, it’s the most influential. It led to Irving serving 16 months in federal prison. It ferreted out the billionaire tycoon Hughes, who’d been in seclusion since 1958, with a press conference by telephone that was televised, and many credit the book with being partly responsible for bringing down Richard Nixon’s presidency.

    Supposedly Nixon was nervous about the book given his long association with Hughes, and Hughes money, which made it even more important to find out what the Democrats knew in an election year. Throw in Democratic strategists tossing out misinformation, and pretending to know things they didn’t, and the next thing you know the Watergate scandal breaks. Fascinating stuff!

    Last week Irving announced that “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes,” is one of a dozen of his books being released through Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Nobles’ Nook book platforms.

    “This Kindle project,” Irving said in a statement issued Wednesday, “was conceived and set up by my Atlanta-based, computer-savvy son, Josh. He told me it was time to share my books with a younger audience who haven’t read them.”

    Other titles of Irving’s that are available digitally include: “Fake!” which was pulled due to lawsuits from art market moguls after becoming a New York Times best-seller, and “jailing,” his unpublished journal on life behind bars.

    Irving-related films might be a good choice for April Fools’ Day as well. “Fake!” inspired the 1975 Orson Welles documentary “F for Fake,” which The Criterion Collection describes as “a dizzying cinematic journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes — not the least of whom is Welles himself.”

    There’s also “The Hoax,” from 2007 about the weird and twisted development of “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes,” starring Richard Gere as Irving, Marcia Gay Harden as his wife Edith, Alfred Molina as his partner in crime, Dick Suskind, and Julie Delpy as Irving’s mistress, Danish singer and actress Baroness Nina Van Pallandt (who in real life worked with Richard Gere in the film “American Gigolo”).

    Steve Gillespie is managing editor of The Meridian Star. E-mail him at sgillespie@themeridianstar.com.