The real Howard Hughes story was wild enough, but Clifford Irving had other ideas

Fifty years ago, a second-division novelist decided to make a name for himself by writing Howard Hughes’s amazing life story.

At the end of 1971, author Clifford Irving was sticking to his guns that he had written a biography with the help of Howard Hughes.

By 1969, Howard Hughes had gone from being one of the most conspicuous and successful men on the planet to an unseen hermit who watched films on repeat for months on end, would bathe irregularly while rarely trimming his hair, fingernails and toenails. Once a year was mostly enough. Reports, many of them extravagantly beaten up with wild speculation, hinted at psychiatric illness, reporting that Hughes was stricken by fatal diseases or that he had indeed died.

Eventually, all three turned out to be the case – just not yet.

For decades the world was fascinated by the extraordinary playboy life that could have been scripted for a Hollywood blockbuster, and that had spectacularly, but mostly privately and pitifully, fallen apart.

Using funds from his father’s tool company – which he rapidly expanded – Hughes taught himself how to fly early aircraft, bought Hollywood studio RKO and then directed its films, having film-star girlfriends along the way including Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Janet Leigh, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and Olivia de Havilland.

He bought Trans World Airlines, designed and built aircraft and then set records in them – including the notorious Spruce Goose, a behemoth almost 60m long, 25m high and with a wingspan of almost 100m, until very recently the largest aeroplane to fly. He bought large tracts of land very cheaply that became the favoured suburbs of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a town he shaped.

He helped design bomber aircraft in World War II along with Lockheed and Boeing jets, and was first to develop and employ countersunk rivets to minimise drag across the wings and fuselage. Traumatised by the deaths of his parents, he formed the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which enjoys an endowment of $US20bn.

Howard Hughes at the controls of his eight-engined Spruce Goose. Picture: AP

His company built Surveyor 1, the first American spacecraft to conduct a controlled landing on the moon and which collected data on temperatures, topography and the load-bearing strength of the lunar surface that made possible the Apollo 11 landing three years later.

But by then Hughes was playing hide and seek, moving around the penthouses of America’s grandest hotels in Boston, Beverly Hills and, of course, Las Vegas where, when asked to vacate the penthouse suite, he bought its Desert Inn hotel. He would jet to the Bahamas, or Vancouver – but he stuck to his simple eccentric routines of watching films, many his own, in the dark, naked, endlessly using Kleenex tissues lest he come into contact with germs – the threat of which had fixated his mother.

No one needed to invent wild stories about Hughes. He was one. You couldn’t make it up. Then someone decided to.

Clifford Irving had graduated from Cornell University in 1951 with a degree in English and an ambition to travel the world in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, and to have adventures about which he would write. He wrote occasional novels, but in 1969 landed on the real-life story of notorious master Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory. After World War II, de Hory started selling cheap copies of pen-and-ink Picassos that many mistook to be genuine, then found he had a skill in copying masters such as Modigliani, Renoir and Matisse. With terrific confidence, he convinced collectors and dealers that he was from aristocratic stock whose family had expansive collections of works by the most popular of European painters.

Some keen-eyed galleries saw a similarity in their style and over 20 years de Hory was regularly charged with art fraud (although he denied this, saying he never signed them with the artist’s names).

Hughes with actor Ava Gardner in 1946.

By the time Irving chanced on de Hory, the artist had collected convictions from across the world: France, West Germany, the US, Italy, Britain, Mexico and Canada. Irving wrote his biography as Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time and it proved popular, making something of a reborn star of de Hory, who went back to his genuine art to try to surf the wave. Orson Welles would chime in a few years later with a dramatised documentary on de Hory called F for Fake, in which a by-then-discredited Irving played himself.

But the ease with which de Hory had hoodwinked international “experts” must have appealed to Irving. So many wanted to believe the works were genuine. The following year he hatched a plan to write a fake biography of the unreachable Hughes, working out that, as with the Hitler Diaries a decade later, context would give the story credibility. And he understood how many would want to believe in the Hughes story. The Hitler Diaries and Irving’s “biography” shared a fate as the two most famous unpublished books of the 20th century. Irving guessed, wrongly, that the ailing and reclusive Hughes would not bother resurfacing to deny its accuracy. Few people had seen Hughes since the mid-1950s and Hughes had never emerged to deny many other fanciful news reports about him across the previous 14 years.

Irving recruited an old friend, Richard Suskind, who lived near him on the Spanish island of Ibiza, to start on research of Hughes’s life while he bought a yellow legal pad and learned to copy Hughes’s writing style, which he had seen published in Newsweek.

He concocted a story that he had long known Hughes; indeed, it was the first sentence in his book: “Howard Hughes and I first met in Hollywood on the set of The Outlaw which would place the date as circa 1940.” The Outlaw, a retelling of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, was one of Hughes’s RKO pictures starring his girlfriend Jane Russell, and was made in 1943. Irv­ing couldn’t even get his lies right.

But he persevered, inventing an imaginary relationship that developed, awkwardly at first, after Irving sent Hughes an inscribed copy of Fake! According to the never published biography, Irving (who finally, almost proudly, put it online in 1999) wins Hughes’s trust in a serious of letters to which Hughes unexpectedly responds, writing on a legal pad. It was a daring bluff, brazen and remarkably unsophisticated. Irving approached his publisher, the respected McGraw-Hill, with the story of his unfolding friendship with Hughes and the news that Hughes has chosen him to write his life story. In the end McGraw-Hill agreed to an advance of $US765,000 – a lot of money, equal to about $US5.5m today.

It was reported that Irving’s wife Edith banked the cheques – much of the money was meant to have been a fee for Hughes’s co-operation – in Swiss accounts, but she denied even knowing who Hughes was. She said she had never heard of him “until Cliff came home waving this letter from Hughes. He had to explain to me who he was,” she told the New York Post.

As the excitement about the Hughes biography gripped the New York publishing world late in 1971, some more sceptical souls saw holes in the story. Hughes’s employees had never heard of Irving and doubted their odd boss would suddenly start talking to a biographer after so many years. But graphologists studied the Hughes letters, declared them genuine, and Irving passed a lie-detector test.

On Friday, January 7, 1972, one of the most unusual press conferences unfolded for one of the world’s strangest men. Hughes was in the Bahamas, at the Xanadu Princess Resort. He was put through to a number in Los Angeles at Hollywood’s Sheraton Universal Hotel. Gathered there were seven reporters, most of whom knew Hughes and had dealings with him in the 1950s. They were familiar with his voice, demeanour and his complex businesses – and they cross-examined their unseen subject for several hours, all of which was caught on film. None thought other than they were talking to Hughes. It was clearly the 66-year-old industrialist.

He was dismissive of Irving’s book and insisted they had never met. He sounded tired and perhaps defensive, particularly about his physical condition. His pronounced Texan drawl sharpens when one of the reporters asks about his health. “I have always kept my fingernails at a reasonable length,” he counters when asked if they were unduly long. The reporter asks is it true that Hughes weighs as little as 94 pounds (about 42kg) and has a beard to “your waist”: “Well the statistics are that I am 6 feet three and three-quarter inch, which is what I’ve always been. My weight I would guess would be in the 140 to 150 area (150 pounds – about 68kg). I am thin, I’ve always been thin.”

Irving at first said the caller on the phone that day was a fake. More than a few people by now assumed he’d know one. He quickly altered his story and said Hughes had changed his mind about co-operating on the biography. Three weeks later the hoax collapsed. The book was not published.

Months later, convicted of fraud, Irving started a 14-month jail sentence. Suskind served half that and Edith received a suspended sentence, divorcing her husband soon after. Within months Irving had unashamedly written a book about his role in the deception – Project Octavio: The Story of the Howard Hughes Hoax – with co-conspirator Suskind, for which they were reported to have received not that much less than the money they returned to McGraw-Hill. He died in Florida four years ago aged 87. (After his wife fled, Irving had a long affair with Nina van Pallandt, one half of the ’60s Danish singing duo Nina and Frederik. Baron Frederik was a distant part of European royalty, a keen sailor and, after divorcing Nina, relocated to The Philippines, became involved in drug trafficking and was shot dead in May 1994, almost certainly by his Australian connection, who owed Frederik millions.)

Hughes returned to his neurotic, sunless life of anonymity and oddness; at one point early in 1976 a group of his shareholders even demanded they be given proof he was alive. When he died a few weeks later, it was in a Lear jet on his way from Mexico to a hospital in Houston. He was emaciated, covered in bedsores and weighed just over 40kg. His nails were reported to be long, as was his hair. Five detached syringes remained in his arms. He was 70. You wouldn’t read about it.

Doctor Lawrence Chaffin was with his patient when Hughes died. Chaffin was 83 and had been treating Hughes since 1932. Chaffin described his patient as “wilful”, saying he would refuse tests while eating only lollies and drinking milk: “You could ask, why in God’s name wasn’t something done for him? But with Howard Hughes you just couldn’t do things.”

But no story as big as Hughes’s ends with his death. Soon after, a handwritten, misspelled and smudged document turned up at the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, Utah.

This purported will had been written in 1968 and was very good news for a Nevada service station owner named Melvin Dummar, as it left him $US156m. It was quite a lot then. It’s quite a lot now.

Dummar said that in 1968 he had encountered a dishevelled, unwell man on a desert road whom he had helped into his car and driven, at the man’s request, to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. As they approached it Dummar’s passenger revealed that he owned the Sands and that he was Hughes. Dummar claimed to know nothing of the will.

Later, when detectives found his fingerprints on it, Dummar recalled that a well-dressed man had left it at his service station asking him to pass it on to the Mormons to whom it bequeathed a 16th of Hughes’s vast wealth. Dozens of wills were contested, but no signed, witnessed document was ever located. After years of court battles the billions were divided between the descendants of the childless eccentric’s mother and father.