For about two weeks in 1972, newsfolks were enraptured on the topic of a forthcoming book from McGraw-Hill: The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. The elusive billionaire had long been so maniacal about his privacy that he hadn't been seen or heard in public for decades, and had forfeited at least $100 million because of lawsuits that he could have won, had he just walked into a courtroom and appeared before a judge. So had Hughes really forsaken his passion for secrecy and dictated his autobiography?
No, said his business representatives, none of whom had even met their employer in person. Yes, said McGraw-Hill, explaining that one of their authors, Clifford Irving, had developed a friendship with Hughes, persuaded him to tell all, and conducted a hundred hours of in-person interviews. For a time, the weight of the argument was on the publisher's side: Hughes was so unpredictable that he might not have told his people. McGraw-Hill had a manuscript that had convinced all who'd read it, plus they had handwritten correspondence from Hughes. Two of the nation's leading handwriting analysis firms had verified the authenticity of the documents. One cited the odds on the letters not being Hughes as "a million to one."
But the book turned out to be a sham and publication was canceled. Irving and his researcher, Richard Suskind, had cobbled together a bogus autobiography via diligent research, a lot of imagination, and the luck to stumble across the then-unpublished memoirs of a former Hughes associate, Noah Dietrich. The handwriting seemed less explainable but it just turned out that the experts weren't so expert. Irving had concocted the questioned documents, despite being an amateur to the art of forgery. (It may interest someone who reads this site, by the way, to know that Irving was the son of a cartoonist. His father, Jay Irving, did the long-running newspaper strip, Pottsy.)
One of the many factors that exposed the hoax was that Howard Hughes actually broke his long silence. He still would not appear in public but he agreed to a telephonic interview with several newsmen. You can click below and hear an MP3 file of about a minute of Hughes denying the existence of an autobiography…
What's interesting about the clip today is not just that it's a rare chance to hear the voice of the colorful Mr. Hughes. It's that since he died, it's been revealed that he was out-of-sight all those years because he had gone steadily out-of-mind. He was now spending his life in a hotel room with the windows covered, usually lying naked on a Barcalounger, covering everything he touched with Kleenex in order to ward off imagined germs. For purposes like the interview, he was capable of occasionally donning what reporter James Phelan called, "a mask of sanity," and being coherent on the phone. Other times, he lived in near-darkness, allowing his nails and beard to grow to absurd lengths as he fiddled with insignificant paperwork and watched his favorite movies (especially Ice Station Zebra) over and over. So if you listen to the audio clip, that's what you're hearing: A billionaire who was completely out of touch with reality pretending to be sane in order to denounce a fraud. Who says there's no honesty in the world anymore?
