Bittersweet Infamy - #26 - FAKE!

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

Josie tells Taylor about the web of lies behind a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Plus: Bar 9Eleven, the bar where you never forget.

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Wyndham rewards membership may be required. Restrictions apply. Welcome to Bitter Sweden for me. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in envy, shocking the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. Truth may be bitter, stories are always sweet. We have a running gag on this show where one of us will mention a year, a date, 1950, and say, oh, what were you doing in 1950?

And I'll say, you know, putting grease in my hair and punching a jukebox, or whatever it is, right? Yeah. Very rarely, though, we are seriously asking, like, what were you doing on a particular date? And this is one of those times. Oh. We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the September 11th. Terrorist attacks on the United States. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, hilarious. Yeah. 20 years. Goddamn. 20 years. What were you doing on September 11th, 2001? My dude, it was a Tuesday. It was a school day.

I remember that much because I definitely went to school that day. Yeah. I don't know why I'm thinking Tuesday, but that's coming to my brain. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. I woke up from the alarm clock that was going off, and 100.7 Jeff and Jer was on, and they were the jokie traffic guys, and they were talking about it, and it woke me up, so I didn't really know what they were talking about.

But then I actually woke up and went downstairs and saw the news, because I was on West Coast. It was early. It was like 6.30 when we got any of the news. And I knew it was really weird because my mom was like rattled, and the news, everything was just like vibrating, you know, it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, I think that for me too, that was my sense that this was, I don't know, different from other alarming news stories in that all of the grown-ups seemed very disturbed. And obviously, it's not that as a kid, you don't have the memo that death is bad, but

you don't maybe have the same sense of the precariousness of human mortality, and also, I didn't know what the World Trade Center was. I had no idea either. I was like, oh, that's okay. It's a landmark of some kind. It's like, in my head, it's like, oh, kind of like the Empire State Building, which I guess is like, true when you boil it down, right? Yeah.

But it was more the enormity of the reactions of people around me that let me know that, okay, this is something of great historical significance, like this is gonna really change a lot of shit. And of course, it did. Yeah. In a big way. Yeah. I have this vague memory of being in the library at some point watching the TV on the cart.

I know that we had the radio on the whole day. Okay. How did your school handle, like, because there was a real, how do we talk to our children about what is happening? I definitely remember that. We had a huge assembly, like an all-school assembly, and we talked about it, and then we broke out into smaller groups based on grade and had conversations about that. And I still remember in that session, everyone was like, I'm scared, or like, I don't know

what's happening. And I remember Chelsea Allen saying that she was excited, but that she felt really strange about being excited. Like, she knew that something historical was happening. Right. But obviously, it wasn't like a happy, wonderful thing. No. It was kind of a complex thought that she expressed pretty well for, you know, being a 7th grader.

But it was definitely, like, exciting in its strange way in the way that, you know, I'm sure that the Kennedy assassination, for example, while horrifying and upsetting was also, you know, you were quickly ensconced in a period of rapid change, kickstarted by this violent act or whatever. It's exciting in the most physical sense, right? Like your adrenaline goes up, your run of races. You consider all of these questions that you hadn't considered before, right? I mean, the 20th anniversary of September 11th comes, right, as there's all of this

news around the US withdrawing from Afghanistan one year later, and the repercussions of that, right? So it's not just this one thing that happens, right? There's all of this fallout from it. And now my idea of 9-11 is so, like, I see it through the lens of the last 20 years, right? Yeah. There's this opportunity for some pretty intense American jingoism to come through that's played

out in very strange, very strange ways. With all that said, if you want to mark the occasion and you feel like putting a couple clicks on the odometer, you might make the long drive to Fort Worth, Texas to go to Bar 9-11, which is exactly what it sounds like, a 9-11 themed bar and eatery. Oh, no! Oh, no! It adjoins a restaurant under the same ownership called Rio Mambo Tex Meximas, which opened September 11th, 2001.

Oh, okay. Still not excusable, making more sense. Bar 9-11 existed for years under a different name, but around 2012. When we have a little more distance, okay, okay. Well, the owner, Brent Johnson, heard about a poll that kind of nobody can really verify the existence of this poll. But this survey supposedly claimed that 80% of people did not know what major anniversary was arriving in September.

And emboldened by this, Johnson renamed and redecorated the bar to make sure that patrons never forget. Never forget. So from there, Bar 9-11 lived quietly in Fort Worth until 2020 when a customer's tweet sent it viral. In terms of decor, the 9-11 theming seems mainly to consist of several large-framed photos accompanied by text that tells interwoven the twin stories of the September 11th attacks and the opening of Rio Mambo in Fort Worth.

I love your use of the word twin, too. They're twin stories, truly they are. They truly are. That's the theme here. Whoa, dude, what the balls. So let me read a little bit of text from these pictures. I thought you were just bringing me, like, let's ruminate on September 11th. You're bringing the heat, dude.

No. No, listen. You're bringing the goofy heat. I love it. There's a bar in Fort Worth that we really need to talk about. Obviously. Yeah. This is laid over a picture of the towers have not yet fallen, but there's smoke billowing

from them. The first entry is about 846 AM, and it talks about how the aircraft entered the tower in tact, dragging combustibles with it. A power shockwave travels down the ground and up again. The combustibles and remnants of the aircraft are ignited by the burning fuel. People below the severed stairwells begin immediate evacuation. No one above the impact zone will make it home today. Dot, dot, dot.

Oh my God. 849 AM, the phone at Rio Mambo text messy mass rings for the first day of operations. Enthusiastically, I answer the phone with pride and anticipation. Roseanne, my wife, informs me that reports out of New York indicate some type of aircraft has collided with the World Trade Center, but details were sketchy. I'm hosted over 400 people the previous night to christen the ship and at the end of a long hands-on construction journey that began with John Paul, my son and I ripping out pink carpet on July 2nd.

My response was predictably short. Honey, our restaurant will open in less than two and a half hours. I cannot talk on the phone. After 71 straight days of physical labor, interviewing, hiring, training, and negotiating with the immense sacrifice of my family to include my daughter Mallory, my brother and sister-in-law, Roland and Vivian Martinez, and nephew Ryan Martinez, we were poised to introduce Rio Mambo to Fort Worth. I hurried back to moving equipment and preparing for what I anticipated to be one of the greater

memories of my life. I was wrong. Oh my God. So it's just got these stories documenting side by side like, okay, you know, here is when the second plane hit the tower. Here's when I started to notice that there weren't a lot of people at my restaurant, you know. Here's when the chips started to really warm up under the heater.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. I was making guacamole. In some ways, I really enjoy it because it's exactly the question you asked me, like, where were you on this day, you know? And so there's something nice about the archiving of that small moment, but then there's something very strange about displaying it that way.

I don't know. The original person whose tweet went viral about this guy named Jesse Tyler, who's at Jesse B Tyler on Twitter, he added in his follow up blown away by this work of creative nonfiction depicting the owner of a Tex-Mex restaurant in North Texas as the main character of our nation's darkest day. Okay, that nails it. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that's good.

I think if you say I started and whenever invariably, whenever you discuss this day, it is what were you doing? What was it like for you? I said to you, how did the school handle it for you? Yeah. Yeah. No, true. True.

Are there any, like, not like, okay, tell me more. What else about like the bar? It just seems to be a bar with these like frame mementos where you can have a drink and never forget. Uh-huh. It's attached to this Tex-Mex place and I gather this guy has like, this is now a franchise. So Brent Johnson and Rio Mambo have done well for themselves. He's got like four restaurants.

Good. Good for him. But it's lived in Fort Worth like this since 2012 and nobody has really, it got like an initial profile. It was written up in 2016 by Fort Worth Weekly and they said, quote, if it's possible to tastefully theme a bar after a national catastrophe, bar 9-11's owners have done it. Kudos. Kudos.

I think there's a sort of earnestness to the whole thing that carries the day. Yeah. Yeah. There's no like, two for one shots on any 11th of the month or something like that. Like there's not kind of grossy stuff like that. That we know of. Yeah. Dude, we should go though.

Yeah. Next time you're down in Texas. If we're ever going through Fort Worth. Might as well. For whatever reason. Yeah. And we're thirsty. And, you know, we want to remember.

Yeah. Maybe we forgot and we need to remember. So you're probably wondering what the fuck was that music? That beautiful jingle. What the fuck was that beautiful music? We had a friend of the podcast and a more than friend of Josie's write that for us. We asked Mitchell Collins. So he's Josie's boyfriend.

He's Batman's stepfather. Yeah. And if you're one of our fans, our bittersweethearts, I've heard we're calling them now. Thank you Saturn. A little shout out. Yeah. It was much better than my option, which was bittersweetinfants. That's another classification.

Yeah. If you're part of the podcast, faithful, Mitchell was our first guest host. He hosted episode 16, told us the story of the deaths on the set of the Twilight Zone movie. A really good episode. And when the sky opened. Yeah. It's a great episode.

Give it a listen. Also, Little Known Fact is the originator of the name bittersweetinfamy. Fact. Little Know. Which we didn't give him credit for at the time and now we're making up for that now. And he writes a mean little jingle. He's a accomplished musician, wrote that for us. When you hear that noise now, you know the Memphis is over, go take a pee, have a cigarette,

you know, take your ponytail out and redo it so that the hair is all in the ponytail. Just really, really. That's actually a good little self check in. I like that. Yeah. So thank you very much to Mitchell Collins for preparing that for us. Yeah. All right.

Lay it on me, Josie. What kind of waking nightmare are you going to subject me to this week? Oh. Well, I do have to say that speaking of creative nonfiction, I got really into our sex cult, the one taste episode. And I kept working with the fictionalized beginning. Yeah. Sex cult.

Josie is back. I can't. The people, we have gotten letters on letters on letters. Let me tell you what happened to that nice young woman in the clip. I have had a few people who lovingly listen and they've been like, I was thrown. I did not know what was going on. Josie, I didn't know that happened to you. Are you okay?

Well, I kept working with the piece because it was really interesting to me and I had all this research right. So I kind of put it in there and I kept writing it and I wrote it as a short story though. Oh, interesting. As fiction. Yeah. Because that's like, that's my wheelhouse more or less. And I submitted it to a magazine, a smaller magazine, but they got back to me and they're

like, we love it when we want to publish it, which is like, I don't have a lot of stuff published. But they said that they want to publish it as nonfiction. Oh, yeah. And I know, but it didn't happen. I know. Is this real? This actually happened?

Well, I mean, so I, but I don't know, but I don't know if I should have it published that way. You got me. I totally got you. I don't submit shit anywhere. I thought I was so excited for you. I was so excited for you. But thank you for your excitement.

That felt really good. I should see that more. No, I was excited. I was happy for you. Thank you. Thank you. Because, you know, we support, is this a supportive circle? Supportive?

Supportive, not really a circle if there's two. I guess we can make a circle. It's a supportive line. It's a line of support. Yeah. It's a, it's a, what's it called? It's a double, double this, this of support. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. So, so yeah, so I want you to keep that, that feeling of a thin line of fiction, a nonfiction. The, the JT Leroy line. The JT Leroy line. I want you to pull that, pull that close because I, I'm going to tell you a story. I can't wait to hear it. All right. It's the late 1960s and we're on the island of Palma, which is in the Mediterranean off

the coast of Spain. It's right by Ibiza. Okay. Or Ibiza. I don't know where, where you're coming from. Someone's done a gap here. There's so much about myself. So late 60s, a little known American author named Clifford Irving.

Okay. He, he meets up with his longtime friend, Richard Susskin. It's named Dick, Dick Susskin. And Dick is a children's book author and they meet to discuss some stuff that they kind of bandied around. They'd have, you know, a few beers, a few glasses of wine and they talk about this casual plan of theirs. They're not, yeah, probably.

Have they, they've each had like six, seven drinks and they're mixed in beer and wine. I cannot, on the, on the nonfiction fiction line, I cannot, I cannot confirm nor deny. Understood. Yes. But they start getting a little deeper, getting plans a little bit more solid for something that they've bandied about before, but now they're seriously considering this project, which is writing the certified, verified autobiography of Howard Hughes. Okay.

That's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh. I want to write somebody else's autobiography. That sounds like an interesting experiment. Mmm. I know.

Especially if that someone is a known wackadoodle, more or less. Yeah. Recluse fucking. Pretty scientific term. Yeah. Yeah. Totally off the grid, but very much in the newspapers. Yeah.

It's a big name. Like even if I don't know exactly who and what Howard Hughes is, I know, like I have an image of like Mr. Burns as Howard Hughes in my head. Boom. Boom. I think there is, there is an episode where Mr. Burns puts the Kleenex boxes on his feet and he's. Yeah.

And he's got the long talents. Yeah. And the long talents. And he looks at Smithers and he's like, get in Smithers. Yeah. And then he pulls it. Smithers is like, I can't get in on that. Mr. Burns pulls a gun on him.

Yeah. So get in. I love So Sorry Sidebar. Mr. Burns and Marge are my two favorite Simpsons characters. Oh, really? If you ever need to know for like newly wed game. Oh, okay. Mr. Burns.

Marge is number one. Marge is always going to be my homie. Yeah. A homie. Yeah. And number two is Mr. Burns. I feel like I can crack into your bank account now. Like that'll be one of your security questions.

You don't have to change them all. Dammit. So yeah, let's talk a little bit more about senior Howard Hughes. So. Please. Because I don't actually know that much about him in spite of his reputation. I know. Well, he's, I think part of it is that he had, or he wore many, many hats through his

life. So it's kind of all, if he did one of these things, it'd be like, oh yeah, he's their playing guy, but he did that and all this other stuff. Yeah. So he was born outside of Houston, Texas. Yeah. And he married the daughter of a very rich man who actually founded Rice University, which is a major university in Houston.

Okay. He had a lot of family wealth and then he married some more family wealth. So he kind of exploded on that account. Exponential wealth. Exponential. Too much money. Way too much money. So they move out to LA.

He gets into the Hollywood film business and he creates movies. He made the film Hell's Angels. I've never seen that in 1930. He produced Scarface in 1932. It's actually little known fact in the original Italian. It's actually pronounced Scarface. Scarface. Scarface.

Perfect. Perfect. He had this huge Hollywood production company and then he had this tool business. He got really into real estate, of course, because he's a super rich guy. So what do you do? But then he also was really into aviation and aerospace. He conducted an around the world flight he himself did. But then he produced a lot of or not like produced like the movies, but like production

of a lot of airplanes and aircrafts. It's almost akin to these kind of billionaires now who've taken up space as a recreational hobby. It feels like if we give Elon Musk like 20 years and he starts like having a pet roach that lives on his shoulder, like that's Yeah. Whoa. Wow. Howard Hughes came back. Elon Musk.

Wow. Yeah. That kind of vibe. Did Howard Hughes have a pet roach that lived on his shoulder? No. I just kind of adapted it for the modern times. You need to be careful. I'm sorry.

People think we're telling them the truth. I know. It's so confusing. So he had aircrafts. He made one of the largest like called the Spruce Goose. I know the Spruce Goose. You know the Spruce Goose? I know.

So I know it was his like big fucking airplane, right? It was huge. The largest aircraft of non-strategic materials or whatever. It was just giant fucking enormous. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. He owned and ran his own airline.

What was it called? Transworld Airlines, TWA. Cool. So. Howard Hughes said trans rights. We love to see it. I know, right? So good.

So good. So he has a lot of financial stuff. He's known as like one of these big, big old school millionaires. Exactly. He had some connections to Richard Nixon and Watergate. He apparently gave Richard Nixon's brother some money. And there was some issues there. Who wasn't given Richard Nixon's brother some money?

I know. I know. Yeah. Smoke him if you got him. If everyone else is, I'm not going to be the only rich guy who's not into Watergate. Fuck. Fuck. I know.

I know. It's true. It's true. Why miss out? Watergate, by the way, as depicted in the documentary, Dick. I love that movie. It's so weird. How did that movie get me?

That's got to be somebody's like passion project, right? It's so bizarre. That's my next story. The making of Dick. The documentary Dick. Please. Please. Please.

So later in Hughes life, there are reports that due to brain trauma from previous accidents and just some obsessive compulsive disorder that got really out of hand, most likely kind of undiagnosed at that time and not really understood. He kind of goes off the deep end, if you will. Right. He's not making all the most sense in the world. He's really germaphobic. So he lives in spaces that have to be disinfected.

Anything he touches has to be disinfected. Right. He would have hated this situation. Oh God. It would not. Or, I don't know, maybe everyone would be like, he's on to something that hard, Hughes. Yeah, Howard Hughes. Let's get on the big fucking plane right now.

Yeah. Even though he was a germaphobe, he grew his nails out really long. Dirty. So dirty. Yeah, some kind of inconsistencies in his, you know, idiosyncrasies. He grew his hair out really long. Like he had been this like, you know, slick back, tiny mustache, 1930s film producer. And now it's kind of like very mountain man look.

Right. And it's almost that Michael Jackson thing where you can kind of point to this person's radical change of image as almost like a turning point in what his perception was amongst the wider public. Yeah. Yeah. And he had to be extremely, extremely demand. I mean, he has all this money so he can demand anything and everything, but it's, he has

no, there's no logic to his demands. So they feel very strange. And one, I'll give you a small example. Right. So Hughes was really a big fan of Baskin Robbins ice cream. And he in particular loved the banana nut ice cream. Nice. And so he wanted that flavor on tap where he was living.

He was living in a, at the top of a hotel. What a way to live. I know, right? So they put in a request for, you know, his people, his team of people put in this request of Baskin Robbins and they had to get the smallest amount, which was 350 gallons. Like for a special order, that was what it, what it was. Right. And they learned that the flavor had been discontinued.

So they paid extra so that the company would make a whole batch like that, a 350 gallon batch. And they had it shipped from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. He was living in the Las Vegas area. And when, when it arrived, he of course enjoyed a few bowls. And then a few days later, he was like, you know what, I don't really like this flavor. I think I like the French vanilla better. Oh, what a, oh, the pointlessness, the pointlessness of wealth.

My goodness. He was living on the top floor of the desert Inn. And so the desert Inn, which was a functioning hotel, distributed the ice cream free to all the casino customers for a year. That's how much ice cream there was. Why not just keep some of the ice cream in case you decide you like, he really just had like a couple bowls and was like, I'm bored of this. In a 1996 interview, the ex-Howard Hughes chief of Nevada operations, Nevada operations,

there's multiple ones, said there's a rumor that there's still some banana nut ice cream left in the freezer. It's most likely true that river. Good, good. So that's a very like tight and it wasn't even that summarized version of Howard Hughes, but he's like big money went, went undiagnosed and did not really listen to doctors. It seemed and became very unstable. Right.

So sweet tooth also a big sweet tooth. Yeah. So Clifford Irving, this author, a little known American author. Yes. He uses this plan because Howard Hughes is so unreliable and so such a recluse. He hasn't been interviewed for the past six years. I don't think he's been seen for the past 15. Like he is totally recluse.

And so Clifford Irving is like, he'll never come out of hiding to disprove this. This will never happen. So I can write this autobiography. I can be this great, wonderful writer. I can be the next Hemingway, Shibu Shabao, whatever. And this is my ticket. That's the next Hemingway. I know, right?

So Clifford Irving, let me tell you a little bit about Clifford Irving. Okay, sure. Yeah, no, wait on me. His father was a cartoonist and a cover illustrator for Collier's Magazine. Clifford grew up helping his dad fill in the lines and sign his name even. Do all the lettering, all the coloring and stuff like that. And Clifford's mother was a housewife. They lived in New York.

They were a nice Jewish family who lived in New York just outside of the city. From the time he was in high school, when a teacher read his poem aloud to the class, being like, this is a great poem, guys. Oh, don't, you can't tell kids they're gifted. It doesn't. Oh my God. They just, they take it. They trust me.

Yeah. Trust me, I know. They run. They'll take that to the bank. Clifford says that what was really impactful was after the teacher did that, all the girls started talking to him in class. They wouldn't talk to him before and now they would. Because he's a celebrity now. He's a celebrity.

So he wanted to be a novelist ever since then. He went to the high school of music and art in New York and then he graduated early. He skipped a few grades and so he was 16 when he went to Cornell. Precocious. Very young. So he was out of college with an English degree at age 20. Precocious again. Yeah, but I'd argue if he was really smart, he wouldn't have gotten an English degree.

Carry on. Oh, shots fired. I think I'm just chat because I was going to go into an English degree and in the end, he just took too long to respond so I went into creative writing, which was absolutely the right decision. Oh yeah, totally. For years afterwards, everyone was just like, how's your English degree going? And I was like, it never happened. I've been in a different thing for like three years.

It didn't happen. Did you tell everybody you're like, I'm going to be an English major? I think so. So maybe this is just sour grapes. Maybe I'm just like a spurned, washed up, never was English major and then I've got all these regrets. Aw, that's cute. I like that. That's a good quality in a person.

Yeah. I'm resentful, deeply resentful about not getting accepted for an English major. So our dude Clifford, big fan of Hemingway, as I said. So once he graduates from college, he kind of takes the Hemingway line. He's like, I'm going to get all these strange, weird jobs that'll look good on the back of a book jacket. So after college, he moves to Detroit and he works in a factory. He works on a shrimp boat in Florida. He's some like painting job.

Like he does all these kind of weird things across the country. And he earns enough money so that in the August of 1953, he sails to Europe and he travels around Europe. He eventually lands in Ibiza or Ibiza. He was, he wanted to go see Avicii. Like he was just, he was ready. Yeah, he's right. He has multiple wives throughout the course of his life. I think he's married about six times.

Yeah, the first one was a gnoll. At this point in the story, I don't even know who he's married to. I don't think he knows who he's married to. It's fine. Gosh you, it's right. This isn't, if this were Henry the Eighth, I might have a problem with that. It's not perceived. Great, good.

So by 1970, he's been living on Ibiza this whole time. And he's written four novels, which have been published. Right, good friend. So yeah, yeah. Not just novels sitting on the desk, like novels published. And for the last nine years, McGraw Hill has been his publisher. Okay. Which is a pretty major New York publisher, da, da, da.

They actually published the textbook for the comp classes I teach. Interesting. Thank you for that bit of context. It really took me there. Jerk. So I don't know, I don't know why I got a roast you over nothing. It's a part of my, it's a problem with my person. It's nothing to do with you.

So on Ibiza, I don't, do I sound like a jackoff saying Ibiza? No, just say Ibiza, you listen, just say it, listen. As the Hilaria Baldwin of the group, I give you permission. Okay. I confer upon you permission. I want you. In fact, I will now be offended if you don't pronounce it Ibiza. Okay.

Ibiza. Ibiza. All right. I'm in. I'm in. Doven. Okay. So on Ibiza, Clifford meets this man named Elmir de Jorge.

Elmir de Jorge? Uh-huh. Sorry. How's that spelled? E-L-M-Y-R Elmir. Okay. Yeah. And then Jorge is H-O-R-Y.

Okay. He's not Spanish. No, he's Hungarian. Got you. Okay. Okay. So it's not Elmir de Jorge. No.

It's Elmir Jorge. It's Elmir Jorge. Yeah. Or that's my non-Hungarian way of botching it. Right. But yes. Okay. Good.

Okay. Yes. Yes. And even that, it might not even be a Hungarian name because Elmir had quite a few different names. As you do. Elmir de Jorge was a Hungarian artist in mid-century era, and he is known for faking, not multiple, not a few, but thousands upon thousands of post-impressionistic artwork.

Prolific. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. He is an art forger of like the most absurd quality. Oh, I'm jealous. Yeah. I love those.

What's it called? Murder among the Mormons. That gentleman who, there's a Netflix. We actually talked about this in a pit part that we cut from another episode. I'll mention it again. Sorry. There's, no, you were right to do it. There's a Netflix special called Murder Among the Mormons.

Very good. I won't spoil it. You should watch it. But it's also about one of these very high quality art forgers. And I was watching it like, you're so cool. Yeah. I wish I could forge like you. How do you do it?

How do you do it? Yeah. Yeah. So Elmer, supposedly, not a lot of his information can be confirmed, confirmed. But supposedly he was the son of Hungarian aristocrats. He grew up with a lot of money, kind of old world, wealthy. He ate every meal on a silver in the China. Oh my God.

They're all the baronists too. They're all, there's so many kids of aristocrats just running around, plying their bullshit, isn't there? Rough. He was also Jewish. Okay. He was in his 20s and his late teens by the 1940s. So he's Jewish in 1940s Europe.

He's also homosexual in 1940s Europe. He lands in a prison camp in Transylvania. And the only way that he claims he survived was the commandant of the camp wanted his portrait done by him. Oh wow. And so he just had to keep being like, I'll do it next week. Oh my pencil broke. Exactly.

Also because. Oh, he actually did that? Yeah. Because they were up in the mountains. It was fucking cold. And the commandant's quarters had a stove. And so he was like, oh, I need to do this part over. Oh, this part.

Oh, no. Your beard grew a bit. Oh. Yeah. So it took weeks and weeks and weeks. So he was released from that prison camp. And I'm fairly certain it was a prison camp and not the concentration camp. I'm not too sure.

Right. The details are a little shaky, but he's released. So that makes me think not a concentration camp. Right. Quickly he's arrested again. The Gestapo beat him so badly that he lands in a hospital outside of Berlin. He recovers from his broken leg. And he notices one day that the gates to the hospital are open.

Yeah. And he's like, might as well give it a shot. He walks right out. Yes, bitch. Yes. I'm gonna forge some paintings. At that point, the war has ended, but his parents, according to him, are dead. All the family money is gone.

And so he moves to France to become a painter. He has some diamonds sewn into the lining of his coat, some small diamonds. Small diamonds. Yes. Yes. And he lives in a garret in France and he becomes an artist. He is making absolutely no money with his own art. The one day a rich friend of his comes by to visit his studio and she asks about a painting that's on the wall that she says that's a Picasso, isn't it?

That's an early, that's his Greek period where he didn't sign them very much. Yes. And Elmer was like, what makes you think that? And she's like, I'll give you 40 pounds right now. And he's like, take it. And so that's the start of his forgery career. That rich friend comes back to him a few weeks later and says, you know, I hope this doesn't offend you, but I sold that Picasso and I got $150 for it or 150 pounds. Right.

So he's like, well, that's bullshit. I should have gotten that. And he goes back to his studio and he studies and he studies and he studies Picasso. He studies Mogdilioni. He studies all these post impressionist people and he starts drawing and drawing and drawing and he whips off these little sketches or these like more intense full on oil paintings. Does it matter? And he walks into an art dealer and he earns himself 400 pounds. At a boy.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Once he had made some money, got a little comfortable. He went back to his own paintings, but they weren't selling. So he had to go back to the forgery. He traveled already. He was, you know, this exquisite personality and now he just could dress like it.

He would wear suits and ask us and he had a gold monocle. Yes. What a lovely story about a young entrepreneur. Right. Thank you. Who's the victim here? Picasso? He's doing fine.

These rich people you're calling. Who cares? Go do. Oh my God. There's such a beautiful quote from this man. I don't feel bad for Mogdilioni. I feel good for myself. Ah, yes, bitch.

I love him. I love him. Give him whatever he wants. He travels through the U.S. and he loves America because Americans are like, oh, you're smart. You have a monocle. I'll pay for this. You look like that emoji that I like. No, probably.

Exactly. He's very exacting about his forgery. That's a great fucking quality in a forger if you ask me. So he talks at length about how there were certain artists that he really vibed with. You know, he's like, Picasso, I can do Picasso all day fucking long. It's totally fine. Right. Like we're very similar.

So that's why that kind of worked. Mogdilioni. Oh gosh. I could do him. No big deal. There's totally an affinity between us. That's totally fine. The most difficult are like Cezanne and Brock.

He says Cezanne is very technical, very cerebral and it's not, you know, he's more into like the one line and he's done kind of thing. But he does say of Miro. He says, oh, I never did Miro. It seemed to me so terribly easy that I never did dare to try it. Even the real Miro's feel like fakes. Skating. Skating.

I like that though, because like, for example, why bother doing a Cezanne instead of a Miro if your goal is turning over money? Answer. Artistic challenge. Every master in their craft wants to feel engaged and challenged in some way, right? Yeah. So that's interesting to me, right? That even a forger, when you think like, whatever, I can do the easiest in order to turn over

the most money. Yeah. So those are your two factors, right? Yeah. How many can I do? And how little effort and how much will I make on them? But this guy is literally just like, Miro, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. Which is fun. I know. He's got a monocle. The way that he studies the art too is like really intense and he's like, he notices that, okay, my hand is a little steadier than Magdalione. Like I need to kind of pause. And then I need to, and like, it's an artistry in and of itself.

We're coming out so pro-forging. I know. It's great. Who knew? Anyways, go ahead. Sorry. We do a podcast where we take stories, research stories and turn them around. Play drives them.

Anyway. Yeah. There's reports of people learning that they had an Elmir and they were like, oh, oh shit. Can I get this authenticated as a Picasso by Elmir? That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I want the Elmir version of anything. That sounds cool. Yeah. No. Totally. Totally. The only problem is that it is illegal. So.

Yeah. But that's a lot of, so is jaywalking. I fucking do that every morning. What do you want? So it does go a little south for Elmir because he gets in with some art dealers who sell too many of his, uh, his fakes to this Dallas oil man and the oil man realizes and so he pushes on Interpol and so Elmir has to go to jail for a few years. But in 1969, he meets our boy Clifford Irving on a beach.

Right. I forgot that this, I forgot this story had any Elmir seduced me. There are layers here, my dude. As there is with any good forgery. You've got to make sure that your layers are good. It's true. It's so true. In 1969, he meets Clifford Irving.

In that exchange Irving is like, I want to write a book about you. And I mean, anybody with a gold monocle is like, of course you do. If they haven't already written the book about themselves. Exactly. Right. So Irving writes a book, writes the biography of Elmir de Hori and it is called fake exclamation point. Yeah.

The story of Elmir de Hori, the greatest art forager of our time. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's cool. I'm interested. Yeah. I know.

A nice little treat when you get out of jail. You get to be the subject of a book, right? Which is all any good narcissist wants. Like you're telling me that what's his name, Joe Exotic wasn't lapping up. True. Being the Tiger King. You know what I mean? Very true.

Very true. And not only is he the subject of a book, but Orson Welles picks up on this story and Elmir becomes a thread of this docu film called F is for Fake. Have you seen it? I've heard of it. I've heard of it and it's been on my list to watch forever. Okay. I haven't watched it yet, but I have.

I have heard of this movie. Yes, I have. It's an essay. It's a docu essay. Right. Like there's a lot of Orson Welles like in a cape and a hat talking at the camera. Sure. It really feels like you're stuck at this very nice, very fancy dinner party with Orson

Welles and it's just like you can't get out of the fucking house. He's always like, let's have another glass and you're like, I really want to go and get in my pajamas and do not listen to your bullshit anymore, Mr. Welles. So that's not a recommendation. It's no, it is and it isn't. I think it's, I think it is really interesting. It's like, it's on the criterion list. Do you know what I mean?

Like it's one of those movies that like. It's interesting. A lot of the appreciation that you might have of it is, oh, isn't it interesting that Orson Welles used this approach to talk about it in this way at this time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but as an actual sensory moving experience, it kind of just feels like you're being droned out a bit. A little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. It's also much like this story. A lot of white dudes who think that they're very important talking about other white and very clever. They think they're very important. Yeah. And all the way down the line to Picasso himself, right? Oh, you nailed it, dude.

You fucking. It's an Auroboros. No, it totally is. Totally is. Sorry. Didn't that guy say he wanted to be the next Ernest Hemingway? Yeah. No, exactly.

The same, the same. But the line between fiction and nonfiction is very interesting, and the editing is wild. So people were complaining in the 80s about MTV and like, did anybody see F is for fake? Because that turns your fucking head around. It's crazy. So we'll come back to F is for fake in just a little minute here because we need to return to to Cliff, to Clifford. Clifford Irving.

This is a lot of balls in the air. A lot of a lot of white dudes and a lot of balls in the air. You're right. So Cliff, we're going to call him Cliff. Why not? I don't think he went by Cliff, but welcome to the podcast Cliff and his friend Dick Susskind. So they're kind of cooking up this plan about the autobiography, the certified autobiography of Howard Hughes included in these plans to a varying degree.

We don't really know and I'll tell you a little bit more about why we don't know. But Cliff's wife, her name is Edith Summer. She is his third wife and she is a Swiss citizen. So they live on Evitha with their two kids. They've got two, two young boys. So Clifford has some success with fake exclamation point, the biography of Elmer, but it's not exactly what he wants, right? And it's interesting being, and I'm sure you'll find it interesting too, like being

a writer. The guy has like five books under his belt and he has a major publisher and he like lives on an island in the fucking Mediterranean. It's like, why do you? He's doing great. Yeah, you're doing fucking gnarly town. Can I ask what is the reception to his earlier books? Are they noticed by critics or any of them particularly good sellers?

Any awards? Right. A little bit of traction, but not much. It's his first nonfiction. Because everyone has a novel, right? It's very much a thing of like alchemy and having the right kind of money behind you and whatever, whether your novel is big or small, right? But I feel like nonfiction, one, for people who listen who don't know like writing industry

trends, nonfiction outsells fiction like a bajillion to one, like it's not even close. And then two, if you have like a really interesting story or a really interesting subject and you can half-ass tell it well, like I was sitting there transfixed by your telling of this story, right? Yeah. Because one, you're telling it well and two, it's a really interesting story. So I would imagine. Well, and three, you have in the back of your head like, this really happened.

You know? Yeah, this really happened. The exact same fucking thing that we're trading in here talking to you. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah, no exactly. Why he, Cliff gets interested in an autobiography too, because he's like, well, I had some success

with fake and the story of a forger. So let me see what else I can do there. Also interesting too, because he's like been thinking and talking and working around this idea of forgery and these questions of like, well, is it bad or is it just another form of art? And is the art market creating forgers and is that, you know, like what is that? What is the real ethical dilemma there? I think the ethical dilemma for me changes depending on how successful is the artist

whose forgeries you are forging. Yeah. For example, if you were to forge a Banksy to me, who gives a shit Banksy himself probably wouldn't give a shit. No. You'd love it. I don't know. I don't know Banksy.

If to me, if you're doing something like forging indigenous art, that's shitty. Boom. Yeah. You know what I mean? So there's. There's a line there to me where like some forgery is troubling, some forgery is not. The stuff that to me I don't really give a shit about is like, if it's really Banksy losing out on like 500 grand, whatever.

That's okay. Everyone's okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, yeah. That's a good point. And I think maybe we'll talk about this too. The difference between forging art and writing, writing a fiction and selling it as nonfiction.

Like there's something there. That has its own set of ethical implications as well. Right. Yeah. That is more than forgery. There is more than forgery happening there. Yeah. There's quite a bit of instances where you have to lie and I'll show you just how many.

So at first Irving Irving comes to Suskind because Suskind is a really crackerjack researcher. He does children's books, but he does them on like historical elements, whatever. And he has some success with getting those published, but their old friends and Irving knows Cliff, our bud Cliff knows like, okay, Dick's got it. He's my, he's my like right hand man in this one. So at first Cliff is thinking that he would tell McGraw Hill. He would tell his publishers about this secret. And so they could kind of like all work in cahoots.

And then he started thinking about it more and it's like, he couldn't do that. He can't, he can't figure out a way to include them in on what he calls a hoax. So he has to come to them with as much factual seeming information as he can. So what his beginning story is, is that his father was a cartoonist for Collier's magazine and Hughes I think was a huge benefactor of Collier's in some way. So he makes that connection. Yeah. He was in like newspapers and stuff.

Exactly. Yeah. So Cliff claims that his father knew Hughes and that his father's dying wish, Cliff's father's dying wish was that Cliff would send out more of his work to these contacts that his father had through the magazine business and he really, oh my God, oh my God. After his father's death, he just rattles off this little note, sends his book fake exclamation point to Howard Hughes and he just forgets about it, he doesn't think about it again.

Lo and behold, a few weeks go by and a letter arrives for Cliff and it's written by hand on yellow legal pad and it is from Howard Hughes. Apparently, Howard Hughes, this multi-millionaire billionaire, he would never type anything. Everything was handwritten, everything was handwritten on yellow legal pad. Like that was kind of a known quirk of his. So that gets in there and through this handwritten correspondence on yellow legal pad, they get to Hughes asking Cliff if he would write his autobiography. This is bullshit.

This is so, I don't, this man needs to work on his forgery skills I think, but go on. Well he takes it to McGraw Hill, he takes it to his publisher and he's like, I don't know where this came from, I don't know how this happened to me, but this is what it is, Howard Hughes, the Howard Hughes, wants me to write his autobiography. What is the, you might get to this and if so please just ignore me. What is his end game in this? Is he planning to keep it secret forever or is he intending that it be revealed as a hoax at some point and that become part of the art?

His initial, and I think he holds that too close to the end is to pass this off as real. That Hughes will never come out of hiding to. To rebut it. To rebut. Yeah. Why would a famous recluse want his autobiography published? I guess he's banking on the fact that he wouldn't care, that he sucks a recluse, that he wouldn't care.

And then there's also the fact that like in presenting something like this to a publisher, see what you're hoping is that the dollar signs that they see overcome their better logical thinking. Yes, but also his subject is so unstable and so unpredictable that anything that he claims that Hughes says in terms of like I need more money or I'm going to meet you here, wait no I can't, I feel sick or like ooh the, you know, the water wasn't the right temperature I'm out of here. Like any of that passes because that's what's known about Hughes.

Yeah. It is an interesting subject to pick, the very famous recluse, you have all of this material of them as a public figure to go on and they won't come out to say that it's bullshit. Right. It's sort of genius. I think it's unethical as hell. Sort of genius, yeah.

So Cliff takes these letters which he has forged himself. He Newsweek just published something DIY baby with Howard Hughes's letters in it chronicling the yellow notepad blah blah blah and so Cliff studies it. He writes his own and he brings it to his agent and McGraw Hill, Beverly Liu and Beverly looks at them and she's like these can't, these can't be real but then she keeps reading them and she's like it does kind of sound like him. So they get in a handwriting expert and the preliminary finding is that it's a match. It is totally Howard Hughes.

Yeah, because it was deliberately done to look as such. Right. Well and also that handwriting expert is using the Newsweek article Cliff used to. Yeah. No, beautiful. Of course. Yeah. Of course because it's the only source so everyone's looking at people.

Is handwriting analysis held in high esteem in courts or is it seen as like outdated? Do you know anything about that? I don't know. I think probably for this time in the early 70s it had a lot more clout. That's back when we thought that if your handwriting sloped slightly to the left it meant that you were brave and if you're, you know, so I got a book from Mexico about that. I look at it from time to time. So McGraw Hill is just hearing exactly what they want to hear, right?

And they're just like seeing dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign. So they're like, we can do this. This is cool. Yes. This is going to be the book of the fucking century. Cliff is like, well, here's the thing. Hughes is so reclusive. He will only talk to me.

He will not talk to anybody here. And they're like, oh, no, he's a wild guy. Totally. We respect that. Senior Hughes understood. It's okay. So they put together an offer for the book, which some of it will go to Howard Hughes and then some of it will go to Irving, to Cliff.

What of this money that's going to Howard Hughes? Where's that going? Well, of course, it's going right back into Cliff's pocket, right? Yeah, but like, how is the magic trick done there? Do you just like open up a fake account in Howard Hughes' name that like they notice and they're like, wow, we thought Howard Hughes would have more money than this. You know what the wild magic trick is? Your wife is a Swiss citizen.

Oh my God. This is not bad. You know what? I was apparently she's got a spare passport. There was some issue with the passport office in Switzerland and she has a spare floating around. So you tweak that spare passport. She uses her real passport to fly and cross the border to Switzerland, cross borders to

Switzerland. You don't need to make your wife an accomplice in this. Apparently she was down according to reports. According to reports. This is such a bad idea, though. I mean, it's, it's, I love it in a very like Ocean's Eleven heist coming together kind of way. Yes.

I love it. Yeah. But like, I am too much of a Virgo to participate in a scheme like this. Put it that way. Okay. No, fair enough, fair enough. Hale puts together an offer that is $75,000, which in today's money is $3.1 million. It's not bad.

Not so bad. Fuck inflation is real. Oh God. Big time. That's a real, real job. Jesus Christ. And so McGraw-Hale is like, well, we really need Hughes to sign this and get it notarized. And Cliff is like, Oh, well, that's, I just, I really don't think it's going to happen.

I mean, we can try. I can ask. I can ask, but I just, I just don't think I mean, this guy is so stressful. Why would you want to run anyway? And so McGraw-Hale is like, you know what, Cliff, you've been with us for nine years. We trust you as long as he signs it in front of you. Easy for Cliff. He knows how to forge that signature.

No, no, no, McGraw-Hale links up with Life magazine because life is interested in serializing the story and publishing it in the magazine. Would they publish it? Would you say then as a life serial? That was. Thank you. Any hoot. Cliff asks life.

He's like, well, I know you guys have tracked Hughes's life like to the nth degree as much as possible. Can I see those files so I can do some more research besides just my interviews with Hughes? And they're like, sure, but they're very secretive. So you cannot make copies. You cannot bring in Susskind. You can't bring in Dick, your buddy. You can't take any photos.

Nothing. You just have to sit there and read through them and take a few notes of the thing you got to get out. And Irving, Cliff is just like, oh, well, of course, of course, of course, of course. So he goes in and then he takes upwards of something like 400 photos of the documents. Even though he's told not to. But. Yeah, but if this is a con, you got to do that, sorry.

In for a penny, as they say. I won't take photos of the documents. That would be unethical. So now he knows exactly what life magazine knows and what in exchange of information, what McGraw-Hill knows. So now he's in this perfect position where he knows what his publishers know. So he needs to go and find information that they don't know and make sure that it is true to some degree, that it can be confirmed by some other people.

So he has this friend of a friend situation and he gets in touch with this man named Dietrich. Dietrich was an associate and he worked under Howard Hughes for something like 30 years. Dietrich has a book that's written about his time working at Hughes Tool Company. And he wants somebody to proofread it for him. He wants somebody to like read through and make sure that it's publishable. He's an older guy. He's like, I just want this published before I die. And so Cliff steps in.

He's like, well, I'm a published author and I'm working on a piece about Howard Hughes. I would love to read it. Thank you so much. So he reads it. He doesn't really read it in that moment. He illegally, again, Xeroxes the copies. Dietrich has asked him not to. He does.

Yeah, of course. And then he comes back to Dietrich and he's like, I'm so sorry, but let's be honest this is a horribly written book. There's just no way that this will ever be published. That's so mean. Yeah. Apparently the grammar and the spelling were Herosius. Is that a word?

See, literally. And you have a fucking master's. It doesn't matter. It was Herosius. And so Dietrich is like, OK, well, that's horrible. I know. That's so mean, man. But now Cliff has all of this inside information that he can overlay with the

Life Magazine stuff and be like, well, he takes Dietrich's account is completely true because he has no reason not to and know a thing else to go off of. And so he has information that life doesn't have, but he does have some information that maybe some other journalists or some deeper files in the life account that he wasn't able to access that can verify that what he knows is true. So this becomes a huge boon for Cliff and Suskind. They fake interviews with Hughes as in like recorded interviews with him.

And they transcribe them based on all the data that they've collected. So some very deep, intense research, very, very gnarly. Does it not twig to anyone? Sorry, sorry, go ahead. I'm just, I'm vocalizing. I have problems with the con and they're just coming out of my mouth. No, it's fine. No, there's a lot of problems with the con and it's just amazing that it went as far as it did.

So at some point, this guy had to produce Howard Hughes in order to be legitimate. And that was impossible and that should have stopped the whole thing, right? But Howard Hughes is just such a reckless. He would never show. That's why it's, no, that's why it's impossible. But like at some point you got to be like, okay, if I'm not even allowed to have contact with this Howard Hughes entity, maybe they're, maybe it's fake. Like they had to have thought of it, right?

Well, this is how deep, how deep McGraw Hill goes. So they're dummies, by the way. Sorry, go ahead. This time, the ladies home journal publishes an excerpt of an autobiography on Howard Hughes, written by a whole nother author, Robert Eaton. Robert Eaton has the similar yellow notepad letters to authorize him to write the biography. He, wait, there's another guy running the same con?

I don't know. What? Nobody knows if it was real or fake because it becomes a, because this con that I'm sharing got so much further or, or the real book by Eaton never took off because this con overshadowed it. So it becomes a footnote in this story. There's no real development. I bet the guy with this Robert Eaton, I bet he started his con without doing his

research, realized there was someone like 10 steps deeper in the same con. And he's like, I'll just sell fake necklaces. Like it's not right. It's fine. Yeah. Here's a watch. So, okay, but this is how deep McGraw Hill goes. They hear about this and their initial reaction is, okay, well, either Eaton, the

other writer is faking it or Hughes is double dealing cliff. Oh, no, no, no, the answer is right there. The answer is right there. You just like, totally like jumped right over it so blindly. That's tough. So I can't believe Melinda McGraw and Peggy Hill would be so blind. So to counter this and to get Hughes on board with McGraw Hill, Irving claims Cliff comes to them and he says Howard is, is really upset by what's happening.

And he wants more money. He wants Howard Hughes wants more money. Yeah. He wants a million dollars. He doesn't want yours and 350 gallons of banana ice cream. Please and thank you delivered to the desert. Okay. Just postmark desert.

Yeah. This is a real like trickery vibe on Cliff's part because all he's done is he's made a larger distraction, right? He's like, don't look over here. Look over here. It's like total sleight of hand magic. I love the manic energy of the con. That's where I'm split in half here is I think it's a dumb con because it only ends

in desert. There's no way you're pulling this off. It's too big an ask. Sorry. I quibble with some of your methods, but I love the energy. I love like the real, he's really given this a go. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And he gives it a go so far that he tells McGraw Hill. He's like, here's the money back. Here's the advance. Here's the good guy here. Here's a hundred thousand that you gave us as an advance and we are going to, we're just going to walk away and fuck for me, like this is just so stressful. I, I don't even know if I want to do this anymore.

And like, this is just too much. Yeah. No, Howard's got other hobbies. I've got a life. Yeah. He's getting into trans music. Exactly. And then McGraw Hill is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's okay.

We get it. Howard uses his busy man, a million dollars makes sense. Yes. So, not at all. The publishers get ahold of the manuscript in process, meaning Irving's manuscript. Um, they read it and the editors at life fucking love it. I'm sure they do. All the information that they know from the files they shared with Irving,

which of course, but it corroborates the files that they didn't share with Irving. So they're like, fuck, this guy's it. He's like, really talking to Hughes. He has information that no one else would have. But I've fallen for Collins before. I shouldn't judge. I know. It does happen.

McGraw Hill reads the, the draft and they're like, you know what? There's a lot of discussion of Richard Nixon here and the payments. And we just, that's just a little too political for us. So we're going to, we're going to edit those out. Irving comes back and he's like, Hughes is pissed. He doesn't want those out. He wants those in. You got to keep those in or he'll, he'll walk fuck.

He'll just buy a whole publishing house. He'll just get rid of all the idiots here and keep the printing machines. And they're like, okay, okay, we'll keep it in. I wonder if part of the motivation here is that by assuming the mantle of Howard Hughes, he's not this random semi-anonymous white dude author anymore. He has, he has taken on the mantle of someone more powerful and important. People are curious about this man. The mere mention of this man's name stops and he can, he can take on this

guy's cloak and really just check his weight around, huh? Yeah. That must, that must be an appealing power fantasy to build into one's con. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. They get this gnarly big check. They get this million dollar check from McGraw Hill.

So the whole plan is to have Edith, his wife, Irving's wife, uh, the Swiss citizen to go and open a Swiss bank account. She gets a cheap black wig. She gets a flight. She needs to stay in Switzerland for like two weeks or so to kind of make sure that it's not just this like, you know, one and done looking kind of thing. She opens an account in the name of H R Hughes. So Helga R Hughes is the name that she puts, but she wants her initials.

Simple, simple, but effective. And they have McGraw Hill make the check out not to Howard Hughes, but to HR Hughes. It's an anonymous, you know, he wants to stay anonymous. So just use those initials. I love, I love a criminal in a wig. You know, I tell you, they, they make out most of my business. Yeah, that's, that's wild. I love, thank you.

That was the magic trick that I wanted to see. I'm glad that I got to see it. That's, you wanted the cheap wig. Okay. Good. Yeah, that's the magic trick. I'm so glad. Back in New York, McGraw Hill wants to announce the book, but Irving says, Oh,

that's fine, but we need a little bit more money. Hughes wants a little bit more money. And so they're like, you know, whatever, whatever. Why did they think Howard Hughes is gouging them? The man has a lot of problems, but money doesn't seem to have been one. You know, I guess that's how the rich stay rich. They keep asking for more money. I don't know.

Yeah, I guess so. No, that's, I mean, yeah, that's, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah, I think he nailed it. Go on. So McGraw Hill, they tell Cliff, they're like, listen, to really cinch this, to really make this book fly off the shelves. We want Hughes to write the prologue at the most, or at least sign

somewhere in the book, like have that in the printing of the book. And Irving is like, Oh, well, you know, actually Howard's kind of sick these days. He's not feeling super well. I bet he'd get better if you give him some more money. Exactly. Right. So now Life Magazine is getting a little like, what the fuck is going on? So they bring in another handwriting expert at this point.

And that handwriting expert determines that those letters are most definitely from Hughes. There's one million to one that it's not Hughes. Jesus. Why do you, why do you have to be so hyperbolic in your like diagnosis of handwriting that it's unnecessary? I have no idea. You can't back that up.

You think that's, you don't have an algorithm. It's like 1968. Your eyeball. Totally. What, sorry. When are we again? Actually, this point we're a little further, probably like 71. Okay.

Okay. Now we start to hear from Howard Hughes people. His personal lawyer, Chester Davis gets in touch with McGraw Hill and says, Howard, he says, never met that man, Clifford Irving. And he has no idea what this book is about. At the same time, Dietrich, the guy who had the book that Cliff was like, oh, there's a piece of shit on it, but he steals it. He goes to the LA times.

What a villain. Cliff. Cliff. Yeah. Unnecessary roughness. Totally, totally, totally. So Dietrich goes to the LA times and starts kind of talking, not about Cliff, but about some of these experiences with Howard Hughes.

So there's more information coming out. And it's like, well, wait, how's this all going together? But we're getting closer and closer. Right. There's a manuscript that's been written, fact checking, quote unquote, has happening and they start to get a lot of traction too. Like book of the month has started making payments so that they could have a first time rights.

Oh yeah. This would sell like, reprint rights are all over the place. The final edits begin on the book. Now we get the last reporter who Hughes had ever spoken to, which was six years ago, Frank McCull. Now Frank McCull is called in because Hughes wants to talk to McGraw-Hill and to sell them, Hey, this isn't, this isn't it. And then when he wants to do that through his lawyers, of course, McGraw-Hill is

like, we don't, how can we even trust? We don't even know. We don't even know. So they devise a plan where Frank McCull will call Hughes and verify that it is Hughes who was on the phone. It's a little weird and shaky, right? Cause it's a voice. It's on the phone, whatever.

Yeah. And they've already fabricated recordings, right? So, so presumably they, they would have built into their thing a way of fabricating Howard Hughes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So McCull hears it.

He talks with Mr. Hughes and he's like, well, that's definitely him. And he definitely, Million to one shot. And he definitely doesn't know who Clifford Irving is, but he also caveats that. And he says it is entirely within Hughes personality to record and work on a memoir with somebody and then to deny every last bit of it. Cause he's so, oh, what are you, this story is so wild.

Cause the door so many times almost closes on Cliff Irving, almost. And then somebody just like cracks it open a little bit for him and he still gets to be there. It's like, what the fuck? How does this even happen? Uh, so there, everybody is like, well, Hughes says that he doesn't know you. So Cliff, can you take a lie detector test? And he's like, of course.

And then the results of the lie detector tests are inconclusive. Cause lie detector tests are fucking bullshit. They're not science. They don't mean anything. Nothing whatsoever. At that point, Hughes holds a press conference with seven newspapers. It is not in person. He is on the phone.

He is, you know, like a, he's a phone and then everybody else is in person. And, but he hasn't done anything like this for fucking years. No, this still sounds major. Like when you said that they got what seemed to be him on the phone earlier, I was like, yeah, yeah, he must really deny this. So he denies knowing Irving at all and that the book is not real at all. And McGraw-Hale is still convinced it's real. They still have the handwriting.

They still have the details. They still have the strangeness of it all there. And, and also they have, you know, a book that will make them millions of dollars. Cliff Irving goes on 60 minutes with Mike Wallace and he's relatively convincing. Still, apparently he like looks really tired and he's like, not in the greatest shape, but he still has this like knowledgeable energy. You know what I mean? Like that look in the eye.

Yeah. Yeah. The look of a con artist. Yeah. That shiny little con eye. Yeah. The publishers go into the final proofing and printing. And that is when McGraw-Hale learns that the checks were cashed out of the country.

The checks made to out to HR Hughes and the account was opened by an unknown woman. They don't know who it could have been, but it certainly wasn't Hughes, which of course is not going to be fucking Hughes. So that's the line that Irving takes. It's like, well, it's a trusted advisor or whatever. Hughes, and if you didn't know this before, had his own, almost like private CIA called Intertell. It sounds like a telecom company, but great.

They're hunting down the ice cream, I guess. I don't know. What a job. I guess I have a real job now because they're putting pressure on the Swiss government to really investigate who this woman is and to find out because they're like, it's not anybody we know. So who the fuck is it? Reporters are crawling all over Ibiza where Cliff and Edith live, and Irving finally tells

a lawyer, his lawyer, that Edith was Helga Hughes, that that was not true. He kind of, he goes through the state of telling all these kind of half lies. He's like, well, it wasn't Helga, but I did talk to Hughes. Trying to, trying to bargain his way down. Yeah, yeah. The district attorney gives him an opportunity for immunity deal for Edith, so that she wouldn't be prosecuted at all. But through these half lies, that deal gets thrown out the window.

Right. Because he's not being cooperative. It is becoming clear that it's worse. Yeah, the post office is actually the one that tracks down Edith because of male fraud and stuff like that. And so they nail her that way. Irving is still trying to work with lawyers to reduce the sentence for Suskind and for Edith because they're all implicated.

And at this point, it is 1972 and Irving, Suskind and Edith are indicted for conspiracy to defraud through use of the males. And they plead guilty to grand larceny and conspiracy and a variety of other smaller charges, male fraud being one. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the time in these kind of complicated schemes, you look at the things and you're like, that's, you know, 30 counts of male fraud, 40 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. And then they just stack them all up because if you're doing one, you're

probably doing like 40. Yeah. Irving is sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. And he ends up serving 17 months of that sentence. Okay. Suskind is given six months and he serves five. Edith was sentenced to two years, but she only serves two months. She gets out and then the Swiss government comes after her and she's

given a two year sentence in a Swiss jail that she does the entire sentence. Wow. Interesting. So she's the one of all of them who's imprisoned the longest. She did open up the bank account under a false name, which it's in fucking Switzerland. They're not going to like that. Yeah.

They're not going to like that. Yeah. It's a big end. There are people who are doing like far more than two years on petty drug charges, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Blonde white lady doing white collar crime in the late 60s, early 70s.

Yeah. Nobody enjoys doing two years in the clink. All things considered, it could have gone worse. My other thought too was like, I wonder like what a Swiss jail is like. Like it might be kind of nice. It runs in copper. Well oiled machine. Time magazine gives Clifford Irving the cover with the title.

Instead of man of the year, he's con man of the year. Whoa. I bet he loved that though. You hang that in the cell. You frame that con man of the year. What have you done? Right. Right.

Apparently the portrait that was used was painted by Elmer de Horre. Oh, wow. Good callback and the whole thing comes full circle. Yeah, baby. Apparently Cliff really did not like the portrait. He was like, that's fucking ugly, gross. Listen, your rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic here is not the point. The portrait is not the point.

So funny that you say that he should hang the time portrait in his cell. Oh God. 2006. So we flash forward a few years and the movie starring Richard Gere, the hoax comes out. Never heard of this. I had never heard of it either. I did watch it though. And it is based off of a book that Suskind and Cliff wrote.

That's the story of the hoax. Story of the of the Howard Hughes hoax. Well, yeah, it's sitting right there, isn't it? They published that in 72. They're like looking at jail and they're like, well, we can whip this thing out real quick. We have it all down. So is it not also the case that if you are in prison, you are not allowed to like profit off of your crimes.

So you can't, depending, I would assume state to state or whatever, you can't necessarily write and sell a book about what you did. I think so. It's to keep every murderer from publishing their autobiography and making money off it. I think that might be the case, but this movie does get made. It's a few years down the road. So there might be a statute of limitations on that, but Richard Gere plays Irving. It is, yeah, it's a good movie.

It's fine. It's okay. Richard Gere sounds about, you know, that sounds like it would be fine. Like a solid, like if it's good, fine, it's probably like 59% on Rotten Tomatoes. If it's on the bad side of fine, maybe 42, you know, exactly, exactly. Not ambitious, not not too ambitious. Relatively well received. One of the final scenes, Richard Gere is seen in his prison cell with the portrait, the

Time Magazine cover above his bed in the cell. So pay me, Hollywood. I write this shit for free. No, you can write this stuff. Pay me. You write this stuff. Thank you. Conman of the Year right here.

And what was Cliff's reaction to the 2006 film? He said that it was a distorted cliche of the story. He said, describing the events portrayed in the film, that it was absurd, even more than inaccurate. I feel like he may have surrendered his ability to judge accuracy and inaccuracy, but whatever, whatever. Some people are, I think just kind of born cons that way, where it's just, it's all part of the script, but then you lose yourself in the grift.

I think that again, to loop it back, I called this guy a narcissist. And if you think he might be something like that, any person like that doesn't want to hear someone else's version of their own story. They want to hear themselves telling their own story in a way that kind of like emphasizes how clever and good and smart they are. No, exactly. So Irving had been credited as a writer for the film, but he had that removed and he was just listed as a technical advisor in 2012.

The autobiography of Howard Hughes, the one that was written by Clifford Irving and Dick Susskind, is published on Kindle and Nook. Good. Oh, I'd read that. I'd read that. That sounds really interesting. It's out there. And like the blurb on the cover is something like the most talked about

unpublished book of the century. It does not talk at all about the hoax. It goes straight in with my dad was a cartooner for this magazine and he knew Howard Hughes and his dying wish was I sent him a copy of my book. Any kind of epilogue from Clifford Irving or anything like that. It was just the book. No context. Not in the edition that I saw.

No. Interesting. Yeah. That's an interesting choice. There's for sure a legal thing that you can't publish a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes with no context. That was the whole thing. Unless you label it as fiction and you just never talk about that.

Ah, these murky lines, these murky lines between fiction and nonfiction. So true. So true. My goodness. So Clifford Irving's legacy is that he self published all his pieces of writing on Kindle and Nook, six books in total, including his prison journal. And then in 2014, Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas announced that they had acquired all of

Irving's literary and personal papers. So he is archived over there in Austin for all his controversy and quote unquote talent. I don't know. We'll see. I mean, there's a there's a talent. Yeah. There's a talent to all of this bullshit.

Maybe the talent is just audacity. Yeah. Yeah. Then exactly. That's that's very well put. Maybe the talent is just audacity. That's good. I think that's what we're looking at here.

And I'm going to leave you with a little word from Elmere de Herre, the expert forager, right? Yes. So we were talking a little bit about the difference between forging visual artwork and forging fiction is nonfiction. So this kind of touches on it in an interesting way. This is from Irving's book, fake exclamation point about Elmere. I read somewhere Elmere said that David Stein, the Englishman who did a few

chagalls and Picasso's and right away got caught, claimed that he put himself into the mind and soul of the artist. If he was painting chagall, he became chagall. If he was painting Matisse, he became Matisse. I personally think that's all the worst sort of nonsense. Could you write a story like Hemingway by trying to put yourself into Hemingway's mind and soul? Could you become Hemingway?

No, it's a terribly vulgar and romantic explanation. Though I'm sure the public eats it up. Oh, what I did was study very, very carefully the man's work. That's all there is to it. So I too could be the next Elmere DeHoy. My dude, do it. DeHori? I think Hori.

Yeah. He has a few, I mean, that's not even confirmed as his real name. But of course, I guess my quibble and I'm far be it for me to quibble with anything this genius forger says, because he knows, he knows more than me. I think that forgers are different, like people are different. And I bet they all do it in different ways for different reasons with different, you know, I like what he said in terms of, I feel like writers can be too sentimental about the craft sometimes and express it in ways that I'm like, okay,

enough, wrap it up. And I feel him there, you know. Yeah, yeah. And I should say, before I forget, F is for fake, the Orson Welles film. Right, right. Elmere is just one aspect of the film because what Orson Welles does is he ropes in Clifford Irving's story. And originally the film was supposed to be about Elmere.

And then it turned out that the guy who wrote the biography on the forger was telling this grand lie and this huge hoax about writing a by an autobiography of somebody else. And so that gets pulled into F is for fake. And then Orson Welles gets to dwell on his own career of fakery in terms of like Citizen Kane was meant to be about Hearst and then they kind of switched it and he just wanted to be in there. Oh yeah.

War of the Worlds was a, you know, a fake attack or whatever. You know, he totally just wants you to like sit around, have another glass of wine, don't leave me alone in this huge house. That was a killer Orson Welles out of nowhere. Congratulations. Yeah, dude. Wow. Yeah, no, that's a lot of layers.

A lot of layers in that story. A lot of layers of fakes and you know what? Maybe it's all a fake story. I don't know. Who knows? You got me. You did got me right off the top. It's true.

You did tell me a fake story. I, uh, I'm too credulous. I'm too credulous for my own good. See, I do believe con sometimes. I'm fascinated by the con, the hoax. Love a hoax. I love a hoax more than a hoax. I love a con, a big scale, opening up a Swiss bank account.

Kind of con. This may spark your forgery career, Taylor. I'm like, I'm waiting for some wonderful, you know, modern arts and banksies to come out of Vancouver all of a sudden. Counterpoint. Maybe I just plagiarize all of your writing and make it big that way. If you can make it big on it. Walk our two.

Yeah. I'll kick you back some money. I'll keep Batman fed. It's okay. He gets like the fancy organic food. So be careful what you say. Listen, for most people, I would say no for Batman, anything. Not a person, but okay.

I mean, listen, thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just telling a friend, stay sweet.

The sources that I used for this episode were the book fake exclamation point. The story of Elmer de Hore by Clifford Irving himself. I also looked at Clifford Irving's book, autobiography of Howard Hughes published in 2012 on Kindle. I watched the film The Hokes starring Richard Geer came out in 2006. I listened to the podcast, Perfetti and Pickles with Vicks Richardson. And lastly, I listened to another podcast, third story with Leo Sedran episode 53, Remembering Clifford Irving.

The song you are now listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.