Clifford Irving

  • Born: November 5, 1930
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: December 19, 2017
  • Place of death: Sarasota, Florida

American novelist

Also known as: Clifford Michael Irving (full name)

Early Life

Clifford Irving developed an interest in the arts early in life. He grew up in New York, the only son of illustrator and cartoonist Jay Irving and his wife, Dorothy Irving. Irving’s father, who had created a popular newspaper cartoon called Pottsy, had high ambitions for his son and sent him to New York’s High School of Music and Art, where Irving enjoyed considerable success. After graduation, he enrolled at Colgate University and began keeping company with a group of aspiring writers. His popularity there led him toward an epicurean lifestyle, and over the following twenty years he traveled across Europe, had numerous affairs and several unsuccessful marriages, and eventually settled in Spain, where he met and married Edith Sommer, who would later play a role in his downfall.

Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six, and by the time he turned thirty, in 1960, he had established a relationship with the prestigious New York publishing company McGraw-Hill. Through the 1960s, Irving found considerable success with the publisher. One of his works, titled Fake (1969), tells the story of an infamous art forger, Elmyr de Hory, whom Irving had come to know while living in Spain.

Criminal Career

In 1971, Irving told executives at McGraw-Hill that reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes had asked him to assist in writing Hughes’s autobiography. Irving produced several letters purportedly written by Hughes confirming the request and demanding that the arrangement be kept confidential. The McGraw-Hill executives could hardly contain their enthusiasm for the project and eventually agreed to an advance of $750,000, most of it handed to Irving in checks written to Hughes.

In actuality, Irving had engineered the entire affair himself, forging the letters and inventing the circumstances around Hughes’s unlikely request, including a claim of hundreds of hours of secret interviews with Hughes. He recruited a friend and colleague, Richard Suskind, to assist him in researching the book, and had his wife, Sommer, launder the checks written to Hughes through a Swiss bank account. In a stroke of good fortune, Irving was invited to help rewrite a biography of Hughes that had been cowritten by one of Hughes’s former associates and rejected by numerous publishers. Instead, Irving made a copy of the work and used much of the material to write his own book.

When McGraw-Hill announced the book, Hughes’s business colleagues challenged its authenticity, and Hughes himself broke his seclusion to conduct a telephone interview with seven journalists in which he denied any involvement in the work. Irving continued to defend the book, even appearing on the popular television newsmagazine 60 Minutes, but when Hughes sued McGraw-Hill, subsequent investigations revealed the similarities between Irving’s book and the manuscript from which he had stolen the material, as well as discrepancies in the dates of Irving’s purported interviews with Hughes. Around the same time, Swiss police were investigating the Swiss bank account Irving had used to launder the checks written to Hughes. By the end of January, 1972, Irving was forced to confess to the hoax.

The state of New York charged Irving, Sommer, and Suskind with fourteen criminal counts, including possession of forged documents, intent to defraud, grand larceny, perjury, and conspiracy, and the U.S. government indicted Irving and Sommer on two counts of mail fraud. All three defendants were convicted. Irving served fourteen months of a thirty-month sentence in federal prison and was forced to reimburse McGraw-Hill a total of $765,000. Sommer served two months in the Nassau County Jail and Suskind five months in a New York state prison.

Impact

After fourteen difficult months in three different federal prisons, Clifford Irving was released on parole and eventually settled in Mexico. Though many publishers were hesitant to work with him following the Hughes affair, he eventually built a successful career as a novelist, primarily writing thrillers, such as The Death Freak (1976) and The Sleeping Spy (1979), but also several historical novels, such as Tom Mix and Pancho Villa (1982) and The Angel of Zin (1984). Ironically, though Irving’s notoriety came from his fraudulent research in the Hughes episode, he became so invested in researching the facts for his book Daddy’s Girl (1985), on a lurid 1980s murder trial in Houston, that he eventually was called as a witness in the trial. In the 2010s, he self-published several works in e-book form.

Shortly after his release from prison in 1974, Irving sued for the rights to what he would publish as The Autobiography of Howard Hughes and entertained contacts from several publishers hoping to benefit from the widespread publicity generated by the incident. Though he won the suit, he lost interest in the project after deciding that the book’s appeal was primarily as a novelty item rather than a literary work. The Autobiography of Howard Hughes was eventually published over the Internet in 1999, but in spite of the historical significance of the book, the event attracted little attention. A film about the hoax was released in 2005. Irving died of pancreatic cancer on December 19, 2017, in Sarasota, Florida, at the age of eighty-seven.

Bibliography

Ambrosius, Lloyd E. Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Bartlett, Donald L., and James Steele. Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Fay, Stephen, Lewis Chester, and Magnus Linklater. Hoax: The Inside Story of the Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving Affair. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Irving, Clifford. The Hoax. New York: Permanent Press, 1981.