Before “fake news” had a name, writer Clifford Irving pulled off one of the most audacious literary hoaxes in history: a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. In this Art of the Story, Leo Sidran revisits Irving’s remarkable tale—part scam, part self-mythology, and a strangely prophetic mirror of our media age.
Clifford Irving’s own truth was stranger than his fiction
Long before the term fake news entered the popular vernacular, when a sensational story turned out to be untrue, people might simply call it a sham… a put-on… or, in the case of writer Clifford Irving, a hoax.
Clifford Irving was a novelist and reporter. He published twenty novels. But the work he became famous for wasn’t really a novel at all—and it wasn’t quite nonfiction either. It was an autobiography allegedly told to Irving by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. It remains one of the most audacious literary scams ever attempted… and, depending on how you see it, a kind of accidental piece of postmodern performance art.
Irving told me the story ten years ago, when he appeared on my podcast The Third Story.
“It must have been around 1969,” he remembered. “With a fellow writer named Dick Suskin, I concocted what came to be known as the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax. Out of nowhere we developed this weird idea that Howard Hughes was in seclusion somewhere in the Bahamas. No one had heard from him. And we were gonna write his authorized biography… which ultimately metamorphosed into his autobiography.”
What began as an old-fashioned money grab -a way to cash in on a manuscript he assumed Hughes would never deny - soon grew into something much bigger. Irving didn’t just write The Hoax. He became a character inside it. And for him, that was a perfectly natural place to be.
He told me, “I think most writers who write visual stories do that. I remember somebody saying, ‘Irving always sees himself as if he’s in a movie,’ and that’s how the hoax took shape. Well… yes and no. Of course I saw myself in a movie. But that’s what writers do. You have to see, hear, and feel what your characters do. If you don’t get carried away, you’re not gonna write a good book. And at the same time, you move your mental camera around the action, and try to get into people’s minds.”
Still, not every writer would be bold or brazen enough to attempt something like this. I asked him when he realized he had gone too far. “When the hoax went belly-up,” he declared. “I woke up at the same time and thought… what have I done?”
If all of this sounds like a movie to you, you’re right. In 2007, Richard Gere played Irving in the film The Hoax. Irving died in 2017, but his story -his real story - continues to echo through our current era of truth, fiction, and everything in between.
