Revisionist History - "Oh Howard, You Idiot!”

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

A billionaire turned recluse befriends a minor novelist. Together they seize the public’s imagination. Kind of. The true story behind the greatest autobiography you’ve never read.Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm.Credits:BBC Motion Gallery / Getty ImagesFootage supplied by CBS News The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos, and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In the middle years of the 20th century, Howard Hughes was one of the richest and most famous people in the world. He was tall. He was handsome. He took his father's drill bit business and turned it into a corporate colossus. He owned half of Las Vegas.

He designed some of the most technologically advanced planes of his era. And once, after he flew around the world in record time, he was given a ticker tape parade down Broadway. He drives slowly through the man-made canyons of Manhattan while paper streams from off his windows of lower Broadway. Thus New York pays honor to the pilot who has carried the name of its fair around the world and home again. Hughes even owned a Hollywood studio, directed his own movies, and squired every famous actress of the day around town. Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner. Today, we have a category

for the celebrity playboy, a category for the entrepreneurial genius, a category for the eccentric billionaire. In his day, Howard Hughes was all those things, all in one. But over the last 20 years of his life, Hughes became a reckless. He vanished from sight, never seen, never heard. With the exception of an interview he gave in the early 1970s, where he was asked about his relationship with a man named Clifford Irving. Yeah, I actually knew his dad, Jay. He was a funny guy, a cartoonist, I think. Met him

in L.A. when he was out on a publicity trip. Do you remember when this was? 1940 or maybe 41. I was shooting The Outlaw with Jane Russell. Jay came on the set. We stayed in touch on and off. He had a little boy

with him. Eight, nine, Clifford. I always thought that was an old man's name. Strange to see a kid Clifford. I always thought that was an old man's name. Strange to see a kid Clifford. The kid Clifford grew up to be a writer. One day, he sent me one of his books out of the blue. Biography of some painter.

God knows how he found me. This must have been 68, 69? A good 30 years later. And I thought, what the hell? Every other son of a bitch has told my story. Why not me? Hughes wrote back, Dear Mr. Irving,

Thank you for the gift of your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It seems to me that you portrayed your man with great consideration and sympathy when it would have been tempting to do otherwise. For reasons you may readily understand, this has impressed me. Yours truly, Howard R. Hughes. The note was handwritten, undated, on yellow legal paper. Hughes always wrote by hand on yellow legal pads. Clifford Irving recalled years later that Hughes' handwriting, quote,

extended well over the ruled left-hand margin, the way a schoolboy might write, unquote. Clifford Irving read that note and thought, oh, this isn't a thank you for a book. It's an invitation to write a book. Hughes wants me to help him tell his story. And so Clifford Irving did, in an insane and wonderful work called The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a book report, like the kind you did in middle school, only with a twist. Actually, a lot of twists. So many twists! Like I said, the book is kind of insane, but also wonderful.

From all of us here at Revisionist History, the autobiography of Howard Hughes gets two thumbs up. When Howard Hughes disappeared from sight in the last decades of his life, it set off a frenzy of tabloid speculation. He was the most famous man in the world, and all of a sudden, he was just gone. There were rumors that he'd gone crazy, had hair down to his waist, was living in squalor in a Vegas hotel. He'd become the American Loch Ness Monster, a giant exotic creature

submerged in the murky depths of his own celebrity. As you can imagine then, the publishers at McGraw-Hill were dumbfounded when Clifford Irving told them that he'd been in touch with Hughes and that Hughes wanted to collaborate on his memoirs. Irving was a minor novelist. Why on earth would Hughes have picked him?

But then Irving explained the family connection and reminded them of Hughes's known eccentricity, and McGraw-Hill realized they had been handed the publishing coup of the decade. They offered a $750,000 advance for the book. This was in 1971. That was an extraordinary sum of money. Irving told Hughes the news. Hughes responded immediately.

Told Irving to check into a hotel in Manhattan and wait for a call. At 3 o'clock the next morning, Hughes was on the line. He summoned Irving to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. There, Irving waited in a hotel for two more days until a man named Pedro called him. Pedro said, please meet me in front of the hotel at dawn. The two men drove to the top of a mountain, pulling up alongside another car. Irving got out, slid in on the passenger side, and there he was. Irving would later write this of his first encounter with the mysterious Hughes.

He wore a cheap, short-sleeved shirt of nondescript color, a tan cardigan with a button missing, creaseless brown slacks, and a pair of loafers into which his socks somehow always managed to slip and vanish, so that when he crossed his legs, there was a gap of bony white shin between the sliding sock and the trouser cuff. The two men then began an extraordinary partnership. Over the next few months, they would meet for mammoth interview sessions in Paradise Island in the Bahamas, Palm Beach, Puerto Rico. Irving recorded hours and hours of Hughes's recollections. The result was a book told entirely in Hughes's voice that in manuscript form ran to more than a thousand pages. Anticipation for the autobiography ran so high that Irving was booked on 60 Minutes for his sit-down with Mike Wallace. Is he a good-looking man, still?

He has the good looks of a man who once was extremely handsome and has dignity in his face. Does he wear a beard? Not a real one. Not a real one? What I mean is he has on occasion worn false beards and false mustaches and wigs. With you? Mike, I said there's a James Bond set-up here

that's out of the worst possible detective novel you could ever read. Everyone was hungry to know about the mysterious Howard Hughes. Clifford Irving held press conferences. Life magazine paid a fortune to run excerpts of the forthcoming autobiography. The bidding for paperback rights went through the roof. The world thought the autobiography of Howard Hughes would sell millions upon millions of copies. Except...

McGraw-Hill never published it. No one did until 1999 when a now defunct outfit called www.terrificbooks.com out of Santa Fe, New Mexico printed it up and put it for sale online. I found my copy in a used bookstore in England. The autobiography of Howard Hughes

all but disappeared. And why? Because just as the book was about to come out, Howard Hughes called a press conference. He was in his penthouse suite at the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island in Nassau, speaking to an assembled group of journalists by phone, because, of course, Howard Hughes never showed his face in public,

Hughes declared that he'd never met Clifford Irving. Ever. Well, this must go down in history. I only wish I was still in the movie business because I don't remember any scripts as wild or as stretching of the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be. I'm not talking about the biography itself because I's never read or seen or participated in or even heard of the book that's supposed to be his own autobiography. I don't know what's in it, but I mean, this episode is just so fantastic that it taxes your imagination to believe that a thing like this could happen. No, I never saw him. I never even heard of him until a matter of days ago when this thing first came to my attention.

Can you believe it? Everything was made up. The autobiography was a work of fiction. Howard Hughes never wrote Clifford Irving a letter on a yellow legal pad. The two of them never met in Oaxaca or Palm Beach or Puerto Rico. And as for the interview with Hughes about meeting Clifford Irving as a kid, I made that one up just to get in the spirit of things. For a brief moment in the literary life of 1972 America, Clifford Irving was a major scandal.

He wound up in prison. His marriage fell apart. He tried to capitalize on his hoax with a memoir called The Hoax. It was made into a movie with Richard Gere, which Irving hated, in yet another of Irving's many feats of chutzpah, because he thought it took too many liberties with the truth. But I'm not all that interested in Irving, the hoaxer. I'm more interested in the hoaxy Howard Hughes. This entire book report is really just a meditation on those two absolutely baffling sentences from the real Howard Hughes's phone call with the media. I never read it. I don't know what's in it. An accomplished writer writes a fake autobiography of you and you set out to squash it.

You make it disappear. Turn it from what would have been an enormous bestseller into something you can only get years later from terrificbooks.com. And you didn't even read it? Oh, Howard, you idiot. It's been said that nice guys finish last. But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question.

Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos. And we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper and dare to confront a formidable empire. The art of fairness on Cautionary Tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Well, what in fact made you decide to pull this hoax? After he was discovered, Clifford Irving sat down with one journalist after another, trying to explain himself. This is an interview with the BBC, but all the interviews he did are the same. Basically, Irving can't explain himself. Well, undoubtedly some streak of lunacy, a screw loose somewhere, spirit of adventure, greed, the literary challenge involved, middle-aged boredom, a whole combination of things. It's a

lot easier after the event to analyze why you did what you did, but generally you're wrong. I don't really know deep down why I did it. Irving wasn't desperate or broke. He was a pretty successful writer. He had a four-book deal with McGraw-Hill for $150,000, which would be close to a million today. Irving lived in a charming 17th century finca on the island of Ibiza. He was handsome and dashing. He had a beautiful wife and two small boys, plus a mistress, a blonde Danish aristocrat who was also a world-famous calypso singer, apparently because in the 1970s you could be a blonde Danish aristocrat and still plausibly call yourself a calypso singer. So why did Irving risk it all for a hoax?

Irving died in 2017, but he planted some clues scattered throughout the various autobiographical accounts he left behind. For instance, there's his run-in with Chief Red Fox. Chief Red Fox was a Sioux Indian actor and performer who was a kind of minor celebrity in the late 1960s and 70s. He claimed to be the nephew of the famed Sioux chief Crazy Horse, and he made no less than five appearances on The Johnny Carson Show. May I ask when you were born, Chief? I was born June 11, 1870. This was 1967,

which would have made Chief Red Fox 97 years old. Now I guess you want to know what kept me so young. The showbiz? Yes, partly. But smoking 18 good cigars each day. Chief Red Fox got a big book deal from McGraw-Hill for his memoirs. But when Irving met him at Red Fox's book party in Manhattan, he came away convinced the chief was neither a chief nor close to 100 years old.

And in fact, and I'm quoting now, he resembled nothing so much as an old retired shopkeeper sitting on a stoop of a Brooklyn tenement rattling on about his youth. Just imagine what must have gone through Irving's mind. This guy can get a big publishing deal? Then there's the book Irving wrote just before his Hughes autobiography. That one was called, and you can't make this up, Fake. It's non-fiction, the biography of one of Irving's friends from Ibiza, an accomplished art forger named Elmir de Horry, whose real name, it turns out, was probably not Elmir de Horry, but whatever. In one of the many Byzantine twists to the Irving story, and as I warned you, there are a mountain of twists here,

Orson Welles optioned fake and did a kind of postmodern documentary on de Horry. It's Welles' next-to-last film, and maybe his least watchable, but there's a fantastic moment where Wells interviews Irving about De Horry's technique. And I asked Elmer to do three drawings for me, two Matisse and a Modigliani, which he did before lunch, and put a little coffee stain on the edge of the Modigliani to make it look really as if Modigliani had done it in some Paris café. I then took the three drawings to the Museum of Modern Art. The museum examined them for two hours and came back with the verdict that they were absolutely genuine,

and in fact were horrified that I wanted to sell them. Two Matisses and a Modigliani, painted before lunch by Elmire de Horry and verified by the Museum of Modern Art. The point is, Clifford Irving did not have good role models. He was surrounded by people who got away with making things up. So one day, he gets together with one of his best friends, a writer named Dick Suskind, and he says, hey, Dick, why don't we try this forgery thing for ourselves? Let's forge an autobiography of the most famous man in the world. Why, in fact, did you choose Hughes?

He was there, like Mount Everest, to be climbed. He was inaccessible. No one had interviewed him in the last 20 years, and he could not step forward in public, in court, or in person to the media or anybody to deny it. Irving's gamble was that Hughes wouldn't say anything. The man was, after all, a complete reckless. And if he did write an angry denial, no one would believe him. Irving could simply say, that's not really Hughes, that's an imposter. And who would know? When I said that Hughes was like the Loch Ness

monster, I meant it. There was a constant swirl of tabloid gossip and innuendo and speculation about him, and no one knew what was true or what was made up. Worst case scenario, Hughes does come forward and denounces the autobiography and convinces everyone that he is in fact Howard Hughes, but then Irving figures it's still okay. He can say,

I was duped. Irving tells his publisher that Hughes has strict conditions for cooperating on the book. One condition is that only he, Irving, can act as go-between. Irving will handle the money. Then he tells McGraw-Hill to make out the $750,000 advance to H.R. Hughes, initials only. Crucial detail, because once he has the check, Irving then takes one of his wife's old passports. She's Swiss. And he forges a new name in it. Helga Renate Hughes. And has her use that

fake passport to open a Swiss bank account in the name of H.R. Hughes. And just like that, they're rich. It's so brilliant, he could easily have gotten away with it. How do you set about writing a book, inventing the story? Well, my collaborator, Dick Suskin, and I did an awful lot of hard research. We traveled back and forth across the United States and wherever we could through libraries, newspaper files, to get information on Hughes. We amassed a huge amount

of data. We had access to Time Life's secret files, which were excellent. What they're interested in most is Hughes's speech patterns, his expressions and inflections. The book was written as one long conversation between Irving and Hughes, so they wanted their fake Q&A with Hughes to feel real, particularly to those who had years ago met the real Hughes and knew how he talked. Irving would come up with a story about how Hughes had summoned him, Palm Springs, the Bahamas. Then he and Dick Suskind would fly there, check into a hotel, generate receipts, go through all the motions in order to have the most perfect cover story, and then hang out in their hotel room and actually conduct the quote-unquote interview.

I mean, what do you do? Sit down and talk to each other? Just sit down, put a tape recorder going. I said, I've got a hangover today. You be Howard, I'll be Clifford. And after a while, when that turned stale, we'd switch roles, and then we edited the tapes, erased them because we didn't want them to fall in the hands of anybody else and then after it was all typed and transcribed we edited it to make it even more interesting. And the result fools everyone. Everyone.

His publishers at McGraw-Hill read the manuscript, go over it with a fine-tooth comb, give it to their lawyers, show it to skeptics. Irving forges letters that are supposed to be from Hughes. McGraw-Hill asks handwriting experts to verify their authenticity. They do. People who read the manuscript, who know Hughes, come away saying, this is Howard.

It could only be Howard. It's Howard's voice, his phrases, his way of thinking. Only a handful of people expressed any doubts, like Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, famously the toughest, most skeptical, most unrelenting journalist in America. Were there any witnesses to your meetings with Howard Hughes? Any other human beings? Yes, there were. Who? A researcher.

By name? A man named Richard Suskind. Irving says, Dick Suskind, my collaborator. And then he adds a little perfect whimsical touch. Who accidentally happened to be sitting with me in a room when Hughes arrived too early. Suskind stood there. Hughes stood there, I stood there, and finally I said, well, this is Dick Susskind who's doing some research for me on a project.

And Hughes said, I suppose you know who I am. Susskind, unfortunately, instead of taking that opportunity to slip out of the room, said, yes, I do, Mr. Hughes, how do you do? He started to stick out his hand and withdrew it instantly because Hughes is not very keen on shaking hands. And then, after another moment of awkward silence, Hughes reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag. We still disagree.

I say it was a cellophane bag. Suskin says it was a paper bag. And he said to Suskin to have a prune. Hughes carries a bag of prunes in his pocket? Of course he does. Irving tells the story to Mike Wallace as they sit in overstuffed armchairs in front of a fireplace. Wallace then turns to the audience and concludes, Is the autobiography genuine? I can only say that it is laced with detail that one would think that only Howard Hughes could know. Mike Wallace can't shake Irving's story.

Irving's that good. Now, if you detect a certain affection in my voice for Clifford Irving, you won't be wrong. I mean, the whole thing is just so audacious. He's pranking the whole literary world, plus one of the world's richest men, the stuffed shirts at 60 Minutes, the Swiss banking system, on and on. This is the irresistible temptation with the Irving hoax, to get caught up in the wild genius of Clifford Irving.

But like I said, this episode isn't about Clifford Irving. It's about Howard Hughes. It's been said that nice guys finish last. But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India

on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos, and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire. The Art of Fairness on Cautionary Tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Howard Hughes was born outside of Houston in 1905. His father was in the oil business and made a fortune by inventing a new drill bit for oil wells. Hughes' mother died when he was 16 and his father died when he was 18,

turning Hughes into one of the wealthiest orphans in America. Making news then as now, millionaire sportsman and industrialist Howard Hughes unveiled his new mystery plane in Los Angeles. The racer boasted a thousand horsepower motor and could outstrip any plane ever built in America. Almost immediately, Howard Hughes moved to Los Angeles. And there he took up the three great passions of his life, airplanes, movies, and women. He founded an aviation company, he bought a movie studio, RKO Pictures, and he pursued beautiful actresses obsessively and compulsively.

How much genuine charm and charisma does he have? And how much is it simply a transaction on both sides of the relationship? I think it depended on the woman. I'm talking with Karina Longworth, author of the most fascinating of the Howard Hughes biographies, of which there are many. Hers is called Seduction, Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood. And certainly, I think later, there was very little true feeling in these relationships. But Billy Dove, the silent film actress who was his first major girlfriend in Hollywood, she reported feeling like they were really in love.

Katherine Hepburn in her memoirs paints a picture of them being really in love, which I've chosen to believe, even though there has been some skepticism about Katharine Hepburn in terms of her relationships with men. There seems to be, just reading your book, deterioration in the quality of his relationships over time. Yeah, I mean, I do think he got the part of his personality that was more of a collector started to take over. And so it became less about being associated with one woman, usually one very famous woman, and more about making sure his bases were covered so that if he lost one, he'd have three more. Ostensibly, Hughes was looking for actresses to star in movies, but his studio really didn't make

that many movies. And after he sold his studio, he still kept collecting for actresses to star in movies, but his studio really didn't make that many movies. And after he sold his studio, he still kept collecting young actresses. He would stash them around Los Angeles, in houses and apartments, each with their own minder. Longworth says that sometimes people compare Hughes to Harvey Weinstein, but to her, that's an inexact comparison. Hughes wasn't a predator. He's something else.

You talk about how there were so many of these starlets under escort who would go out, they would go out to restaurants, and there would be the restaurant, the fancy restaurant in wherever, Beverly Hills, would be full of tables made up of his various starlets with their, it's like crazy. Yeah. And they were always being escorted by the chauffeur or whoever he had sort of assigned to look after them. None of them were there with Hughes. I think, I mean, this was at a point where he wasn't really going out to dinner much at all. And a lot of these women who were under contract to him never met him, never saw him.

They were just sort of in the stable, you know, if he per chance decided at one point to put them, to pay them a visit. And they all thought that they were going to be in movies. But by that point, he had not made movies in years. Hughes was deeply weird in other ways, too. He was a germaphobe. He was emotionally arrested. He once proposed to the actress Faith DeMarig by saying, I love you, Faith.

I want to marry you. You're the child I should have had. Another time, he puts his head in the lap of the mother of the actress he's dating, starts crying and says, Helen has you. I don't have anybody. I'm an orphan. And then there's this story from the actress Janet Leigh. All I know is that when I would, if you and I had a date, right, and we went out to dinner, suddenly there would be a third place there and Howard Hughes would show up. I see. I see. Leigh was once one of Hollywood's

biggest stars, which meant, naturally, that she was pursued by Hughes. She talked about it later with the journalist Skip Lowe. And, you know, all of a sudden I'm, I go on a date with a, with a, with a gentleman, and we're supposed to go sailing, and we end

up on his plane in Grand Canyon. I see. And then Las Vegas, and I, you know, I thought the nightmare would never end. He drove me crazy. And finally at one time I said, for God's sakes, why do you manipulate? I hated that. Yes. You know, I said, if you want to ask me out, ask me out like a man. Don't sit there and arrange like, you know. And he said, all right, will you go out with me? And I said, no. Mr. Hughes, there's something else I think a great many people would like to know about. There have been some very absurd descriptions of your physical appearance.

Even in the press conference that Hughes gives in 1972, where he's just there to denounce Irving, the matter of his weirdness keeps coming up, like his fingernails. A former Hughes associate had once told the press that Hughes never cut his fingernails, that they had grown to six inches long. Hughes responds to this allegation in two parts. To be merciful, I'm only going to play you part two. I don't ever have manicures. I do it myself. I never have had manicures. I don't know. Maybe it is an outgrowth of my childhood

when I used to tease people about having, that is, males, about having manicures. Anyway, I never had them, ever. But I've always kept my fingernails a reasonable length, and I cut them with clippers, not with scissors and nail files the way some people do. I use clippers because they don't leave a rough edge afterwards. Anyway, I take care of them the same way I always have.

And then someone asks him if he's happy, and Hughes starts up again. I'm not very happy, I'll tell you that. And one of the primary reasons is because of some of the things we've been discussing here tonight. That is to say, in other words, the impediments upon my freedom and activities imposed by all of this litigation and these overhanging threats of various types, this threatened autobiography and so forth, all these matters are very draining in

their effect upon me so if you your question was am I happy and content the answer is no There's something tragic about Hughes orphaned, lonely and they're content. The answer is no. There's something tragic about Hughes.

Orphaned, lonely, compulsive, damaged. Do you think that he had a kind of, was suffering from some kind of mental illness throughout his life? And what's your sort of broader explanation of some of his behavior? So I'm not a medical doctor, and so I can, you know, only state my opinion based on what I've read. I think that he exhibited signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder over the course of his whole life. But I think that the bigger factor

in what we could call the deterioration of his personality and his mental state seems to be the head injuries. Hughes survived multiple plane crashes, including one where he crashed into a house in Beverly Hills and nearly died. And I think especially what we know now about head injuries based on what we've learned from football and other sources, we can really see the impact of these things in a way that it wasn't understood during his lifetime. Howard Hughes, famous flyer and sportsman, was dragged out of this wreckage of an experimental plane he was testing. He was seriously injured. America's aviation trailblazers willingly pay the price in man's conquest of the air. But as weird and damaged as Hughes was, he didn't want to be seen as weird and damaged.

He wanted to be seen as heroic, swashbuckling, a brilliant entrepreneur. And from the moment he arrived in Hollywood, he took great pains to create that mythical version of himself. He put together a massive publicity operation. In the Hughes archives at the University of Las Vegas, which incidentally aren't actually his archives, but the archives of his PR firm, there's a transcript of a conversation between Hughes and a magazine writer. The writer is working on a story about him, and Hughes is basically going through the draft, line by line, dictating what should and shouldn't be said.

He's one of the richest men in the world, and he's line editing some poor schmuck's copy. When he first gets to Hollywood and successfully builds his PR machine to put this image out there. What is the, is it possible to kind of describe precisely the image he is trying to create for himself? Well, I think this is actually somewhere where a comparison to Trump is useful because, you know, what does Trump want us to know about him or to think about him? That he's rich, that he's a ladies' man, that he lives in a golden castle. And these are very similar things to what Hughes wanted out there. He wanted people to think

that he was the richest man in America, if not the world, that he was a ladies' man who could have any woman that he wanted, when in fact, he did have wealth, but his wealth was entirely dependent on his father's tool company, which he kind of helped run into some financial straits. And which they were really only saved because of World War II when they became defense contractors. And then in terms of women, he certainly dated a lot of women, but they report that he was awkward and not a ladies' man, not suave. From the very, very early on, he was having, you know, sort of private detectives follow women around. And he would use sort of go-betweens to do the flirtation so that he wouldn't have to bother with it. So, yeah, but he didn't want any of that out there. He wanted just this image of him, you know, at the Coconut Grove with Ginger Rogers or whoever it was out there. Hughes's myth-making works to perfection for years.

And then, after the war, the machinery starts to falter. The world begins to see little glimpses of a very different Howard Hughes. And so he retreats, almost in embarrassment and shame. And just as that retreat seems permanent, a minor novelist from Ibiza named Clifford Irving decides to write a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes to do, in a sense, the very thing that Hughes himself has been trying to do for most of his life, create a new version of Howard Hughes out of whole cloth. Clifford Irving does a Howard Hughes on Howard Hughes.

The genius of the autobiography of Howard Hughes is that everything checkable is true. Dates, timelines, key figures. It's a genuine biography. But mixed in amongst the truths are small, unverifiable details that are entirely imaginary. And it is not easy, at least at first, to tell which is which. Such as Hughes on the set of The Outlaw personally designing a special brassiere to maximize the ample endowments of Jane Russell. That's actually true. But Irving throws in a memo written by Hughes,

stipulating in highly technical engineer's language just how the bespoke Jane Russell brassiere was to be constructed. I don't know whether that's true. Could be. Who knows? Or that there was once a ticker tape parade down Broadway in Hughes' honor. Totally true. But Irving's book adds that Hughes ducked out of the parade early and jumped in a cab uptown in order to have sex with Katharine Hepburn. Don't think that's true. But then again, Hughes actually was the kind of shy, self-absorbed type who would think nothing of ducking out early on a ticker tape parade in his honor, particularly where Katharine

Hepburn was involved. About a hundred pages into the autobiography of Howard Hughes, I figured it out. Here's how to untangle fact from fiction in Irving's book. Hughes was so creepy and strange that if you run across any detail that makes Hughes out not to be creepy and strange, then Irving and Suskind probably made it up. In real life, Hughes pursued very young young buxom starlets in vast quantities and to ill effect. But in Irving's book, Hughes has a real adult relationship, a true love, a sophisticated woman named Helga, trapped in an unhappy marriage with a diplomat. Helga is neither

young, nor buxom, nor a starlet. Hughes happens to sit next to her on a flight from San Francisco to New York, exchanges a few magical, charged words with her, then falls asleep. Let us return to our fictional Howard Hughes to hear from the fictional autobiography of Howard Hughes. After dark, I fell into a kind of doze, and I swear I don't know how this happened, but when I woke up, this woman and I were holding hands. Isn't that incredible?

We talked, and one thing led to another. This is not true. Irving made this up. Now, if you'll remember, Clifford Irving forged his wife's Swiss passport in the name of Helga R. Hughes so she could cash checks made out to H.R. Hughes. So the Helga in the book is a kind of insurance policy in case things go badly wrong.

But that's not the important thing here. The key fact is that as far as we know, Howard Hughes had exactly one fulfilling romantic relationship in his life, and that relationship took place in the pages of Clifford Irving's fake autobiography. Irving gives Hughes a friend as well, another obvious invention, because the real Hughes didn't exactly have friends. Now, if you were Irving and Suskind, sitting in the sun in Ibiza, trying to come up with a perfect friend for Hughes, who would you choose? It would have to be someone famous and interesting, because otherwise, why bother, right?

And also someone dead, because otherwise they'd just deny it, or maybe even sue. So they pick the most dead, most famous person they can think of, Ernest Hemingway. The occasion arose just after the war, sometime in the winter of 1948, when I went out to look over Sun Valley, Idaho, with the idea in mind of buying it and making it into a popular resort area. I flew out there in my bomber, a converted B-25. I knew Ernest was there with his family and he was hunting, and so I found out where he was living. I did something wholly uncharacteristic.

I marched right up to his door and knocked on it. He opened it. In a brilliant move, Irving has Hughes use a fake name with Hemingway, Tom Garden. So the reader understands that Hemingway liked Hughes for who he really was, not because of his fame and fortune. Hemingway loves Tom, and Tom loves Hemingway, calls him Hem. They talk for hours.

Then they go up in the B-25 bomber, and Hemingway says to him at the end, with a touch of awe in his voice, Tom, you're a hot pilot. Hughes goes to visit Hemingway in Cuba. They go out on the water in Hemingway's boat. And this is maybe my favorite passage in the whole book, because it is so ludicrously, gloriously, brilliantly bananas.

After a while, Ernest said, let's go for a swim. Bare ass, Tom. I pulled off my skivvies and we dove over the side into the gulf, which was perfectly flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for me because we were grown men. I was 48 years old and Ernest was somewhat older. And there we were in the water, naked, and Ernest started playing games. He would dive under the water and come up under me and tip me over by the ankles. One of us had to be a shark and the other had to be a killer whale or a swordfish and we would fight. Yell, shout, warn each other. Watch out, whale, here I come, splash around like children.

And it was marvelous. We let our imaginations run amok. We created a portrait of the billionaire in search of his soul, which was a hell of a damn sight. More exciting, I think, than Howard Hughes's life. I don't think a proper or straight biography of Howard Hughes could ever be written, could it? I mean, the man himself is a mythic creature,

a product of press clippings, and it seems to me the best biography or autobiography would simply be the most interesting. That's right, I believe that. And perhaps we, in our wild imagination, got closer to what he was like in his dreams and in his fantasies than the reality of the man himself. Two writers got together and created a better version of the Hughes fantasy than Hughes himself could create. Of course they did this without Hughes's permission.

And along the way, they violated every known journalistic standard and code, raising questions about their moral fiber in the line between truth and fiction and blah blah blah. Enough! I think we should reserve our outrage for outrages that are truly outrageous. If someone attacks you, you don't always have to retaliate. And if discretion is the better part of valor, sometimes doing nothing at all is the better part of discretion. At the time Irving's hoax biography appeared, the real Hughes was sitting in the dark in a hotel room in the Bahamas, addicted to painkillers, watching the same movies over and over again, and worrying about his fingernails. Meanwhile, what did Clifford Irving have Hughes

doing in the twilight of his life? It's all in the last chapter of the greatest unread autobiography of the 20th century. Irving's Howard Hughes went to India, had a darshan with a guru, where he at last found a measure of peace and self-understanding. Then Irving's Howard Hughes, famous germophobe, stripped down to his underwear and sat by the Ganges in the lotus position, joining all the other beggars on the riverbank. And I was deluged with money, with dollars, with rupees, with English pounds, with yen, with marks and franks.

People couldn't pass by without giving me something. Indians, Asians, Europeans, everyone gave. You see, money just gravitates to some people, whether they're accumulating TWA stock or sitting by the side of a muddy river in India. They're money magnets, and money is like metal shavings. I'm one of those people. Clifford Irving elevated Howard Hughes into something other than a broken-down old man in a hotel room.

He turned him into the richest beggar the Ganges had ever seen. Everyone who read Irving's book believed that passage. They thought it was real. Everyone at McGraw Hill, people who had known Hughes for years, believed it. Everyone.

And the whole world would have believed it, too. All Howard Hughes had to do was read the book. Oh, Howard, you idiot. is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Louise Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to our voice artist, Alex Robertson, and to the Pushkin crew,

Heather Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrill, and of course, El Jefe Jacob Weisberg. I'm Martin Dabble. To be continued... me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos, and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.