Richard Gere's Role Of A Lifetime

In "The Hoax" He Stars As Writer Clifford Irving, Who Fooled The Whole Country

(CBS) 
"Howard Hughes and I grew up in the same public school system and had learned the same penmanship and my handwriting is very similar to his," Irving said.

So similar that Irving was able to fool handwriting experts. But if that took nerve, consider this: Irving, who as a child had once met Hughes, agreed to take a polygraph.

"They asked me, 'Have you ever met Howard Hughes?' and I said 'Yes,'" Irving said. "And it worked on the lie detector. They never guessed that I met him when I was six or seven."

McGraw Hill paid Irving $750,000. Hughes was expected to get most of that for telling his story. Instead, Irving kept the money in a bank account, spending some of it to do intensive research on the eccentric billionaire.

"We created a Howard Hughes," Irving said. "And we created a life for him. And of course, we believed in it. We were working as novelists. That's how I thought of the book, as a novel about Howard Hughes in the form of an autobiography. Everybody believed — the more outrageous the scenes, the more they believed it."

For example, Irving described in detail a swim that Hughes took with the writer Ernest Hemingway.

"They pulled off all their clothes and they swim bare-ass in the Gulf of Mexico," he said they wrote. "And Howard's embarrassed 'cause he's never been naked in front of a man before."

Irving created his own version of Howard Hughes.

"I have no idea what the real Howard Hughes did," he said.

The movie shows how the walls began to close in on Irving. But the more experts he fooled, the more emboldened he became. Those trips he supposedly took to meet the elusive Hughes? In fact, they were romantic rendezvous with a long-time mistress, a beautiful singer by the name of Nina van Pallandt. But Irving said he didn't feel guilty until the end when he realized he had involved his family.

The scam began to unravel when the one thing Irving thought would never happen did: Howard Hughes actually came out publicly and talked to reporters by telephone.

"I only wish I was still in the movie business because I don't remember any script as wild or as stretching of the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be," Hughes said.

A week later Irving agreed to appear on 60 Minutes to answer questions from the toughest skeptic of all, Mike Wallace.

"I didn't decide to go on '60 minutes,'" Irving said. "I was bullied into going on '60 Minutes' by the publishers. And I thought 'Oh my God, how am I gonna do this?' I was terrified."

"You kind of go now, 'God, he was really bad at lying,'" Gere said. "How could anyone have believed this?"

But back then, Irving fooled Wallace as well as millions of Americans.

"I psyched myself up for it," Irving said. "Everyone else had believed me. And I thought if I stick to my guns, he'll believe in me, too. And he did."

But winning over Wallace wasn't enough. The movie shows how Irving's wife Edith, who had deposited the checks written to Howard Hughes in a Swiss Bank account, was caught by Swiss authorities. Irving's year-long charade finally fell apart.

"The floodgates opened and I drowned," Irving said.

Irving, his wife and Suskind were charged with conspiracy to defraud. Irving served seventeen months in prison, Suskind served five months.

"Edith spent a year in a Swiss prison," Irving said. "That time - I'm more deeply sorry about that than anything."

That was the end of his marriage. Clifford Irving now lives with his sixth wife in a rented home in Aspen filled with his paintings. He continues to write novels which he sells on his Web site. And he's making money from the movie, which is actually based on a book he wrote after he got caught — a book that has been reissued.

To this day, Irving's longtime friend and editor - played by Hope Davis in the film - has never forgiven him for damaging her career and others'. While Irving says he regrets hurting her, he seems remarkably without remorse.

"If you try to walk a tightrope across Niagara Falls and the rope breaks, that's what you regret: that the rope broke," he said. "You don't regret what prompted you to do it in the first place. And I did it. I paid the price and it's over."