Richard Gere's Role Of A Lifetime
If you are under the age of 40, the name Clifford Irving may not be familiar, but in 1970, Irving took the publishing world by storm when he announced that billionaire businessman Howard Hughes had chosen him to help write Hughes' autobiography.
This was more than just a literary coup – Irving claimed the famously reclusive Hughes had revealed shocking details of business dealings that could wreck political careers high up in the Nixon White House.
The book was poised to become a bestseller, but there was one serious problem: Irving never met Howard Hughes. He made up the whole thing.
Now the movie "The Hoax" examines Irving's life. Richard Gere plays a charming but complex con man based the writer.
For almost thirty years, Gere has usually been the suave leading man who gets the girl. He played a soldier in "An Officer and a Gentleman," a seducer in "American Gigolo," a savior in "Pretty Woman," and a showman in "Chicago." But now at 57, Gere says he has found the role of a lifetime.Photos: The film's New York premiere
"I kind of imagine Clifford sitting around at a dinner party," Gere told 48 Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty in an interview for Sunday Morning. "And by all accounts, he was an incredibly charming guy. And saying 'What if you wrote a book' — mixing drinks — 'what if you wrote a book about someone who could never refute it because he is too crazy to refute it?'"
According to Gere, playing a charming con man wasn't that much of a stretch.
"We've all lied," he said. "We all know what it's like to lie. And you get away with it. This was a way to show them that (Irving) was actually smarter than them. He was a better writer than they ever thought he was. Because he created a whole other reality that they bought into big time — millions of dollars."
With brown hair dye and a different haircut, Gere looks remarkably like the real Irving who was 40 at the time. In the movie, Gere re-creates the way Irving and his long time friend and fellow writer Dick Suskind — played by Alfred Molina — took turns pretending to be Howard Hughes to create interview transcripts that they then took to editors at McGraw-Hill.
But if it's a dream role for Gere, the real Clifford Irving thinks it's a "second-rate, silly story."
"Except for the fact that this guy commits a hoax, gets caught and goes to prison: Those three points were real," he said. "Everything else was fiction. Made up."
Now 76 and living in Aspen, Colo., Irving is anxious to set the record straight and to hear him tell it - the whole story is more high jinks than hoax.
"It seemed like a great idea at the time," he said. "It wasn't that I needed money. I had plenty of money. It wasn't that I needed fame. I didn't think I was gonna become famous. I just did it because it seemed exciting."
Irving says the idea came from an article in Newsweek that convinced him that Howard Hughes had become so reclusive he'd never go public to say the book was a fake. Irving persuaded Suskind to help him, along with Irving's wife at the time, Edith.
"Well, we didn't really know if we could fool everybody," he said. "But we thought it was worth a try. We thought the worst thing that could happen — we said in those days — was they'll find out. We'll admit it. And it will be published as a novel. I never once, neither did Dick and neither did Edith, think it was a crime."
Irving began by forging a letter from Howard Hughes that convinced McGraw-Hill that the billionaire had chosen him to help write his autobiography.
"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."
