Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: In the middle years of the twentieth century, Howard Hughes
Speaker 2: was one of the richest and most famous people in
Speaker 2: the world. He was tall, he was handsome. He took
Speaker 2: his father's drill bit business and turned it into a
Speaker 2: corporate colossus. He owned half of Las Vegas. He designed
Speaker 2: some of the most technologically advanced planes of his era,
Speaker 2: and once after he flew around the world in record time,
Speaker 2: he was given a ticker tape parade down Broadway.
Speaker 3: He drives letter through the man made canyons of Manhattan.
Speaker 3: Wild paper streams from off his windows of Loud Broadway.
Speaker 3: Thus New York pays honor to the pilot who has
Speaker 3: carried the name of its far round the world and hermagain.
Speaker 2: Hughes even owned a Hollywood studio, directed his own movies,
Speaker 2: and squire every famous actress of the day around town.
Speaker 2: Ava Gardner, Katherine Hepburn, Lana Turner. Today we have a
Speaker 2: category for the celebrity playboy, a category for the entrepreneurial genius,
Speaker 2: a category for the eccentric billionaire. In his day, Howard
Speaker 2: Hughes was all those things all in one. But over
Speaker 2: the last twenty years of his life Hughes became a
Speaker 2: reckless He vanished from sight, never seen, never heard, with
Speaker 2: the exception of an interview he gave in the early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies where he was asked about his relationship with
Speaker 2: a man named Clifford Irving.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I actually knew his dad, Jay. He was a
Speaker 4: funny guy, a cartoonist. I thing met him in LA
Speaker 4: when he was out on a publicity trip. Do you
Speaker 4: remember when this was nineteen.
Speaker 5: Or maybe forty one.
Speaker 4: I was shooting The Outlaw with Jane Russell. Jay came
Speaker 4: on the set.
Speaker 5: We stayed in.
Speaker 4: Touch on and off.
Speaker 5: He had a little boy with.
Speaker 4: Him, eight nine Clifford. I always thought that was an
Speaker 4: old man's name. Strange to see a kid, Clifford.
Speaker 2: The kid Clifford grew up to be a writer.
Speaker 4: One day he sent me one of his books, Out
Speaker 4: of the Blue, biography of some painter. God knows how
Speaker 4: he found me. This must have been sixty eight sixty nine,
Speaker 4: a good thirty years later, and I thought, what the hell?
Speaker 4: Every other son of a bit just told my story.
Speaker 5: Why not me?
Speaker 2: Hughes wrote back, dear mister Irving, thank you for the
Speaker 2: gift of your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It
Speaker 2: seems to me that you've portrayed your man with great
Speaker 2: consideration and sympathy when it would have been tempting to
Speaker 2: do otherwise. For reasons you may readily understand, this has
Speaker 2: impressed me yours truly, Howard R.
Speaker 1: Hughes.
Speaker 2: The note was handwritten, undated on yellow legal paper. Hughes
Speaker 2: always wrote by hand on yellow legal pads. Clifford Irving
Speaker 2: recalled years later that Hughes's handwriting quote extended well over
Speaker 2: the ruled left hand margin, the way a schoolboy might write.
Speaker 2: Clifford Irving read that note and thought, oh, this isn't
Speaker 2: a thank you for a book. It's an invitation to
Speaker 2: write a book. Hughes wants me to help him tell
Speaker 2: his story, and so Clifford Irving did in an insane
Speaker 2: and wonderful work called The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. My
Speaker 2: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 2: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is a
Speaker 2: book report like the kind you did in middle school,
Speaker 2: only with a twist. Actually a lot of twists, so
Speaker 2: many twists. Like I said, the book is kind of insane,
Speaker 2: but also wonderful. From all of us here at Revisionist History,
Speaker 2: the autobiography of Howard Hughes gets two thumbs up. When
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes disappeared from sight in the last decades of
Speaker 2: his life, it set off a frenzy of tabloid speculation.
Speaker 2: He was the most famous man in the world, and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden he was just gone. There were
Speaker 2: rumors that had gone crazy, had hair down to his waist,
Speaker 2: was living in squalor in a Vegas hotel. He'd become
Speaker 2: the American Lockness Monster, a giant exotic creature submerged to
Speaker 2: the murky depths of his own celebrity. As you can imagine. Then,
Speaker 2: the publishers at McGraw hill were dumbfounded when Clifford Irving
Speaker 2: told them that he'd been in touch with Hughes and
Speaker 2: that Hughes wanted to collaborate on his memoirs. Irving was
Speaker 2: a minor novelist, why on earth would Hughes have picked him?
Speaker 2: But then Irving explained the family connection and reminded them
Speaker 2: of Hughes's known eccentricity, and McGraw hill realized they had
Speaker 2: been handed the publishing coup of the decade. They offered
Speaker 2: a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars advance for the book.
Speaker 2: This was in nineteen seventy one. That was an extraordinary
Speaker 2: sum of money. Irving told Hughes the news. Hughes responded
Speaker 2: immediately told Irving to check into a hotel in Manhattan
Speaker 2: and wait for a call. At three o'clock the next morning,
Speaker 2: Hughes was on the line. He summoned Irving to Wahaka
Speaker 2: in southern Mexico. There, Irving waited in a hotel for
Speaker 2: two more days until a man named Pedro called him.
Speaker 2: Pedro said, please meet me in front of the hotel.
Speaker 2: At dawn. The two men drove to the top of
Speaker 2: a mountain, pulling up alongside another car, Irving got out,
Speaker 2: slid in on the passenger side, and there he was.
Speaker 2: Irving would later write this of his first encounter with
Speaker 2: the mysterious Hues. He wore a cheap, short sleeved shirt
Speaker 2: of nondescript color, a tan cardigan with a button missing,
Speaker 2: creaseless brown slacks, and a pair of loafers into which
Speaker 2: his socks somehow always managed to slip and vanish, so
Speaker 2: that when he crossed his legs. There was a gap
Speaker 2: of bony white chin between the sliding sock and the
Speaker 2: trouser cuff. The two men then began an extraordinary partnership.
Speaker 2: Over the next few months, they would meet for mammoth
Speaker 2: interview sessions in Paradise Island and the Bahamas, Palm Beach,
Speaker 2: Puerto Rico. Irving recorded hours and hours of Hughes's recollections.
Speaker 2: The result was a book told entirely in Hughes's voice
Speaker 2: that in manuscript form ran to more than a thousand pages.
Speaker 2: Anticipation for the autobiography ran so high that Irving was
Speaker 2: booked on sixty minutes for a sit down with Mike Wallace.
Speaker 1: Is he a good looking man still?
Speaker 6: He has the good looks of a man who once
Speaker 6: was extremely handsome and has dignity in his face.
Speaker 1: Does he wear a beard?
Speaker 6: Not a real one? Not a real one. What I
Speaker 6: mean is he has on occasion worn false beards and
Speaker 6: false mustaches and wigs. With you, Mike, I said, there's
Speaker 6: a James Bond set up here that's out of the
Speaker 6: worst possible detective novel you could ever read.
Speaker 2: Everyone was hungry to know about the mysterious Howard Hughes.
Speaker 2: Clifford Irving held press conferences. Life Magazine paid a fortune
Speaker 2: to run excerpts of the forthcoming out of biography. The
Speaker 2: bidding for paperback rights went through. The roof the world
Speaker 2: thought the Autobiography of Howard Hughes would sell millions upon
Speaker 2: millions of copies, except mcgrahill never published it. No one
Speaker 2: did until nineteen ninety nine, when a now defunct outfit
Speaker 2: called www dot Terrific Books dot Com out of Santa Fe,
Speaker 2: New Mexico, printed it up and put it for sale online.
Speaker 2: I found my copy in the Ugh's bookstore in England.
Speaker 2: The Autobiography of Howard Hughes all but disappeared. And why
Speaker 2: because just as the book was about to come out,
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes called a press conference. He was in his
Speaker 2: penthouse suite at the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island
Speaker 2: in Nassau, speaking to an assembled group of journalists by phone. Because,
Speaker 2: of course, Howard Hughes never showed his face in public.
Speaker 2: Hughes declared that he'd never met Clifford Irving.
Speaker 5: Ever, Well, this must go down in history. I only
Speaker 5: wish I was still in the movie business because I
Speaker 5: don't remember any scripts as wild or as uh stretching
Speaker 5: of the imagination is this yarn has turned out to be.
Speaker 5: I'm not talking about the biography s over, because I've
Speaker 5: never read it.
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes says he's never read or seen or participated in,
Speaker 2: or even heard of the book that's supposed to be
Speaker 2: his own autobiography.
Speaker 5: I don't know what's in it, but I mean, this
Speaker 5: episode is just so fantastic that it taxes your imagination
Speaker 5: to believe in a thing like this could happen. Norm
Speaker 5: I never saw him, I never even heard of him
Speaker 5: until days ago, when this thing first came to my attention.
Speaker 2: Can you believe it? Everything was made up? The autobiography
Speaker 2: was a work of fiction. Howard Hughes never wrote Clifford
Speaker 2: Irving a letter on a yellow legal pad. The two
Speaker 2: of them never met in Wahaka or Palm Beach or
Speaker 2: Puerto Rico. And as for the interview with Hughes about
Speaker 2: meeting Clifford Irving as a kid, I made that one
Speaker 2: up just to get in the spirit of things for
Speaker 2: a brief moment in the literary life of nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: two America. Clifford Irving was a major scandal. He wound
Speaker 2: up in prison, his marriage fell apart. He tried to
Speaker 2: capitalize on his hoax with a memoir called The Hoax.
Speaker 2: It was made into a movie with Witch of Gear,
Speaker 2: which Irving hated in yet another of Irving's many feats
Speaker 2: of hutzba because he thought it took too many liberties
Speaker 2: with the truth. But I'm not all that interested in
Speaker 2: Irving the hoaxer. I'm more interested in the hoax e
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes. This entire book report is really just a
Speaker 2: meditation on those two absolutely baffling sentences from the real
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes' phone call with the media. I never read it.
Speaker 2: I don't know what's in it. An accomplished writer writes
Speaker 2: a fake autobiography of you, and you set out to
Speaker 2: squash it. You make it disappear, turn it from what
Speaker 2: would have been an enormous bestseller into something you can
Speaker 2: only get years later from terrific books dot com. And
Speaker 2: you didn't even read it, Oh, Howard, you idiot?
Speaker 1: Well what if fact made you decide to pull this hoax?
Speaker 2: After he was discovered, Clifford Irvings sat down with one
Speaker 2: journalist after another trying to explain himself. This is an
Speaker 2: interview with the BBC, but all the interviews he did
Speaker 2: are the same. Basically, Irving can't explain himself well.
Speaker 6: Undoubtedly some streak of lunacy, a screw loose somewhere, spirit
Speaker 6: of adventure agreed. The literary challenge involved middle aged bored him,
Speaker 6: a whole combination of things. It's a lot easier after
Speaker 6: the event to analyze why you did what you did,
Speaker 6: but generally you're wrong. I don't really know deep down
Speaker 6: why I did it.
Speaker 2: Irving wasn't desperate or broke. He was a pretty successful writer.
Speaker 2: He had a four book deal with McGraw hill for
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which would be close
Speaker 2: to a million today. Irving lived in a charming seventeenth
Speaker 2: century finca on the island of Ibiza. He was handsome
Speaker 2: and dashing. He had a beautiful wife and two small boys,
Speaker 2: plus a mistress, a blonde Danish aristocrat who was also
Speaker 2: a world famous calypso singer. Apparently, because in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies you could be a blonde Danish aristocrat and still
Speaker 2: plausibly call yourself a calypso singer. Why did Irving risk
Speaker 2: it all for a hoax? Irving died in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: but he planted some clues scattered throughout the various autobiographical
Speaker 2: accounts he left behind. For instance, there's his run in
Speaker 2: with Chief Red Fox. Chief Red Fox was a Sioux
Speaker 2: Indian actor and performer who was a kind of minor
Speaker 2: celebrity in the late nineteen sixties and seventies. He claimed
Speaker 2: to be the nephew of the famed Sioux Chief Crazy Horse,
Speaker 2: and he made no less than five appearances on The
Speaker 2: Johnny Carson Show.
Speaker 4: Huh Ma, asked when you were born, Chief, I was
Speaker 4: born June eleventh, eighteen seventies.
Speaker 2: This was nineteen sixty seven, which would have made Chief
Speaker 2: Red Fox ninety seven years old.
Speaker 4: Ah, yes, you.
Speaker 3: Want to know what kept me so young?
Speaker 6: The show biz?
Speaker 3: Yes, park me, but.
Speaker 4: Smoking eighteens good cigars each day.
Speaker 2: Eighteen Chief Fred Fox got a big book deal from
Speaker 2: McGraw hill for his memoirs, but when Irving met him
Speaker 2: at Red Fox's book party in Manhattan, he came away
Speaker 2: convinced the Chief was neither a chief nor close to
Speaker 2: one hundred years old, and in fact, and I'm quoting
Speaker 2: now he resembled nothing so much as an old retired
Speaker 2: shopkeeper sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn tenement, rattling
Speaker 2: on about his youth. Just imagine what must have gone
Speaker 2: through Irving's mind. This guy can get a big publishing deal.
Speaker 2: Then there's the book Irving wrote just before his Hughes autobiography.
Speaker 2: That one was called and you can't make this up fake,
Speaker 2: It's nonfiction, the biography of one of Irving's friends from Ibiza,
Speaker 2: an accomplished art forger named Elmir Dehoy, whose real name,
Speaker 2: it turns out, was probably not Elmir Dhore but whatever,
Speaker 2: in one of the many byzantine twists to the Irving story.
Speaker 2: And as I warned you, there are a mountain of
Speaker 2: twists here. Orson Wells option fake and did a kind
Speaker 2: of postmodern documentary on Dhore. It's Wells's next to last
Speaker 2: film and maybe his least watchable. But there's a fantastic
Speaker 2: moment where Wells interviews Irving about Dehoy's technique.
Speaker 7: And I asked Elia to do three drawings for me, too,
Speaker 7: Matisse and a Modiliani, which he did before lunch, and
Speaker 7: put a little coffee stain on the edge of the
Speaker 7: MODORIANI to make it look really as if Modiliani had
Speaker 7: done it in some Paris cafe. I then took the
Speaker 7: three drawings to the Museum of Modern Art. The museum
Speaker 7: examined them for two hours and came back with the
Speaker 7: verdict that they were absolutely genuine, and in fact were
Speaker 7: horrified that I wanted to sell them.
Speaker 2: Two Matisis and a Medigliani painted before lunch by elmir
Speaker 2: Dehoy and verified by the Museum of Modern Art. The
Speaker 2: point is Clifford Irving did not have good role models.
Speaker 2: He was surrounded by people who got away with making
Speaker 2: things up. So one day he gets together with one
Speaker 2: of his best friends, a writer named Dick Suskind, and
Speaker 2: he says, hey, Dick, why don't we try this forgery
Speaker 2: thing for ourselves. Let's forge an autobiography of the most
Speaker 2: famous man in the world.
Speaker 1: Why in f how did you choose Hughes.
Speaker 6: He was there, like Mount Everest to be climbed. He
Speaker 6: was inaccessible, and no one had interviewed him in the
Speaker 6: last twenty years, and he could not step forward in public,
Speaker 6: in court or in person to the media or anybody
Speaker 6: to deny it.
Speaker 2: Irving's gamble was that Hughes wouldn't say anything. The man was,
Speaker 2: after all, a complete reckless and if he did write
Speaker 2: an angry denial, no one would believe him. Irving could
Speaker 2: simply say, that's not really Hughes, that's an impostor. And
Speaker 2: who would know. When I said that Hughes was like
Speaker 2: the loch Ness Monster, I meant it. There was a
Speaker 2: constant swirl of tabloid gossip and innuendo and speculation about him,
Speaker 2: and no one knew what was true or what was
Speaker 2: made up. Worst case scenario, Hughes does come forward and
Speaker 2: denounces the autobiography and convinces everyone that he is in
Speaker 2: fact Howard Hughes. But then Irving figures it's still okay.
Speaker 2: He can say I was duped. Irving tells his publisher
Speaker 2: that Hughes has strict conditions for co operating on the book.
Speaker 2: One condition is it only he Irving connectes gobtuim. Irving
Speaker 2: will handle the money. Then he tells mc graw hill
Speaker 2: to make out the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: advance to h R. Hughes initials only crucial detail because
Speaker 2: once he has the check, Irving then takes one of
Speaker 2: his wife's old passports. She's Swiss, and he forged a
Speaker 2: new name in it, Helga Bernade Hughes and has her
Speaker 2: used that fake passport to open a Swiss bank account
Speaker 2: in the name of H. R. Hughes, and just like
Speaker 2: that they're rich. It's so brilliant he could easily have
Speaker 2: gotten away with it.
Speaker 1: How do you set about writing a book inventing the story?
Speaker 6: Well, my collaborator, Dik Sessket, and I did an awful
Speaker 6: lot of hard research. We traveled back and forth across
Speaker 6: the United States and wherever we could through libraries, newspaper
Speaker 6: files to get information on Hughes. We amassed a huge
Speaker 6: amount of data, and we had access to Time Life
Speaker 6: Secret files, which were excellent.
Speaker 2: What they're interested in most is Hughes's speech patterns, his
Speaker 2: expressions and inflections. The book was written as one long
Speaker 2: conversation between Irving and Hughes, so they wanted their fake
Speaker 2: Q and A with Hughes to feel real, particularly to
Speaker 2: those who had years ago met the real Hughes and
Speaker 2: knew how he talked. Irving would come up with a
Speaker 2: story about how Hughes had summoned him palm Springs the Bahamas.
Speaker 2: Then he and Dick Suskan would fly there, check into
Speaker 2: a hotel, generate receipts, go through all the motions in
Speaker 2: order to have the most perfect cover story, and then
Speaker 2: hang out in their hotel room and actually conduct the
Speaker 2: quote unquote interview.
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you do? Sit down and talk
Speaker 1: to each other.
Speaker 6: Just sat down, put a tape recorder going. I said,
Speaker 6: I've got to hang over today, Ub Howard, I'll be Clifford.
Speaker 6: And after a while, when that turnstile, we'd switch rolls.
Speaker 6: And then we edited the tapes, erased them because we
Speaker 6: didn't want them to fall in the hands of anybody else.
Speaker 6: And then after it was all typed and transcribed, we
Speaker 6: edited it to make it even more interesting.
Speaker 2: And the result fools everyone everyone. His publishers at mcgrahill
Speaker 2: read the manuscript, go over it with a fine toothcomb,
Speaker 2: give it to their lawyers, show it to Scout Irving
Speaker 2: Forge's letters that are supposed to be from Hughes. Mcgrohill
Speaker 2: asks handwriting experts to verify their authenticity. They do. People
Speaker 2: who read the manuscript who know Hughes come away saying,
Speaker 2: this is Howard. It could only be Howard. It's Howard's voice,
Speaker 2: his phrases, his way of thinking. Only a handful of
Speaker 2: people expressed any doubts, like Mike Wallace of sixty Minutes,
Speaker 2: famously the toughest, most skeptical, most unrelenting journalist in America.
Speaker 1: Were there any witnesses to your meetings with Howard Hughes
Speaker 1: any other human beings?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 4: There were?
Speaker 6: Who a researcher my name, A man named Richard Suskin.
Speaker 2: Irving says, Dick Suskan Mike collaborator, and then he adds
Speaker 2: a little perfect whimsical touch.
Speaker 6: And how accidentally happened to be sitting with me in
Speaker 6: a room when Hughes arrived too early. Suskand stood there.
Speaker 6: Hughes stood there, I stood there, and finally I said, well,
Speaker 6: this is Dick Suskin, who's doing some research for me
Speaker 6: on a project. And Hughes said, I suppose you know
Speaker 6: who I am? Suskan. Unfortunately, instead of taking that opportunity
Speaker 6: to slip out of the room, said yes I do,
Speaker 6: mister Hughes, how do you do? He started a stick
Speaker 6: out his hand and withdrew it instantly, because Hughes is
Speaker 6: not very keen on shaking hands, and then, after another
Speaker 6: moment of awkward silence, Hughes reached into his pocket and
Speaker 6: pulled out a bag. We still disagree. I say it
Speaker 6: was a cellophane bag. Suskan says it was a paper bag.
Speaker 6: And he said to Dick Suskin to have a prune.
Speaker 2: Hughes carries a bag of prunes in his pocket, of
Speaker 2: course he does. Irving tells the story to Mike Wallace
Speaker 2: as they sit in overstuffed armchairs in front of a fireplace.
Speaker 2: Wallace then turns to the audience and concludes.
Speaker 1: Is the autobiography genuine?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 8: I can only say that it is laced with detail
Speaker 8: that one would think that only Howard Hughes could know.
Speaker 2: Mike Wallace can't shake Irving's story. Irving's that good. Now,
Speaker 2: if you detect a certain affection in my voice for
Speaker 2: Clifford Irving, you won't be wrong. I mean, the whole
Speaker 2: thing is just so audacious. He's pranking the whole literary world,
Speaker 2: plus one of the world's richest men. The stuffed shirts
Speaker 2: at sixty minutes, the Swiss banking system, on and on.
Speaker 2: This is the irresistible temptation with the Irving hoax to
Speaker 2: get caught up in the wild genius of Clifford Irving.
Speaker 2: But like I said, this episode isn't about Clifford Irving,
Speaker 2: It's about Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes was born outside of
Speaker 2: Houston in nineteen oh five. His father was in the
Speaker 2: oil business and made a fortune by inventing a new
Speaker 2: drill bit for oil ill wells. Hughes's mother died when
Speaker 2: he was sixteen and his father died when he was eighteen,
Speaker 2: turning Hughes into one of the wealthiest orphans in America.
Speaker 8: Making news then as now millionaire sportsman and industrialist. Howard
Speaker 8: Hughes unveiled his new mystery plane in Los Angeles, Racer,
Speaker 8: most of a thousand horse power motorold outstrip any plane
Speaker 8: ever built in America.
Speaker 2: Almost immediately, Howard Hughes moved to Los Angeles, and there
Speaker 2: he took up the three great passions of his life airplanes, movies,
Speaker 2: and women. He founded an aviation company, he bought a
Speaker 2: movie studio Rko Pictures, and he pursued beautiful actresses obsessively
Speaker 2: and compulsively. How much genuine charm and chrismon does he
Speaker 2: have and how much is it simply a transaction on
Speaker 2: both sides of the of the relationship.
Speaker 9: I think it depended on the woman.
Speaker 2: I'm talking with. Kareeina Longworth, author of the most fascinating
Speaker 2: of the Howard Hughes biographies, of which there are many.
Speaker 2: Hers is called Seduction, Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard
Speaker 2: Hughes's Hollywood.
Speaker 9: And certainly I think later there was very little true
Speaker 9: feeling in these relationships. But Billy Dove, the silent film actress,
Speaker 9: who was his first major girlfriend in Hollywood, she reported
Speaker 9: feeling like they were really in love. Katherine Hepburn and
Speaker 9: her memoirs paints a picture of them being really in love,
Speaker 9: which I've chosen to believe, even though there has been
Speaker 9: some skepticism about Katherine Hepburn in terms of her relationships
Speaker 9: with men, just.
Speaker 2: Seems to be just on reading your book. Deterioration and
Speaker 2: the quality of his relationships over time.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I do think he got the part
Speaker 9: of his personality that was more of a collector started
Speaker 9: to take over, and so it became less about being
Speaker 9: associated with one woman, one usual, one very famous woman,
Speaker 9: and more about making sure his bases were covered so
Speaker 9: that if he lost one, he'd have three more.
Speaker 2: Ostensibly, Hughes was looking for actresses to star in movies,
Speaker 2: but his studio really didn't make that many movies, and
Speaker 2: after he sold his studio, he still kept collecting young actresses.
Speaker 2: He would stash them around Los Angeles in houses and apartments,
Speaker 2: each with their own minder. Longwerre says that sometimes people
Speaker 2: compare Hughes to Harvey Weinstein, but to her, that's an
Speaker 2: inexact comparison. Hughes wasn't a predator. He's something else. You
Speaker 2: talk about how there were so many of these starlets
Speaker 2: under escort who would go out. They would go out
Speaker 2: to restaurants, and they would be the restaurant, the fancy
Speaker 2: restaurant in wherever. Beverly Hills would be full of tables
Speaker 2: made up of his various starlets with there. He's like crazy, yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And they were always being escorted by the chauffeur
Speaker 9: or whoever he had sort of assigned to look after them.
Speaker 9: None of them were there with Hughes, I think. I mean,
Speaker 9: this was at a point where he wasn't really going
Speaker 9: out to dinner much at all, and a lot of
Speaker 9: these women who were under contract to him never met him,
Speaker 9: never saw him. They were just sort of in the stable,
Speaker 9: you know, if he perchance decided at one point to
Speaker 9: put them to pay them a visit, and they all
Speaker 9: thought that they were going to be in movies, but
Speaker 9: by that point he had not made movies in years.
Speaker 2: Hughes was deeply weird in other ways too. He was
Speaker 2: a germophobe. He was emotionally arrested. He once proposed to
Speaker 2: the actress Faith Demeeric by saying, I love you, Faith,
Speaker 2: I want to marry you. You're the child I should
Speaker 2: have had. Another time, he puts his head in the
Speaker 2: lap of the mother of the actress he's dating, starts
Speaker 2: crying and says, Helen has you. I don't have anybody.
Speaker 2: I'm an orphan. And then there's this story from the
Speaker 2: actor christ Genant Lee.
Speaker 10: All I know is that when I would if you
Speaker 10: and I had a date, right and we went out
Speaker 10: to dinner, suddenly there would be a third place there
Speaker 10: and Howard's Hughes would show up.
Speaker 1: I see, I see.
Speaker 2: Lee was once one of Hollywood's biggest stars, which meant
Speaker 2: naturally that she was pursued by Hughes. She talked about
Speaker 2: it later with the journalist Skip.
Speaker 10: Low and you know, all of a sudden, I go
Speaker 10: on a date with a with a with a gentleman,
Speaker 10: and we're supposed to go sailing, and we end up
Speaker 10: on his plane in Grand Canyon and then Las Vegas,
Speaker 10: and I, you know, I thought the nightmare would never end.
Speaker 10: He drove me crazy, And finally, at one time, I said,
Speaker 10: for god sakes, why why do you manipulate that?
Speaker 5: I hated that.
Speaker 11: Yes, you know, I said, if you want.
Speaker 10: To ask me out, ask me out like a man,
Speaker 10: don't sit there and arranged like you know. And he said,
Speaker 10: all right, will you go out with me?
Speaker 8: And I said, no, mister Hughes, There's something else I
Speaker 8: think a great many people would like to know about.
Speaker 4: There have been some.
Speaker 1: Very absurd descriptions of your physical appearance.
Speaker 2: Even in the press conference that Hughes gives in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, where he's just there to denounce irving, the
Speaker 2: matter of his weirdness keeps coming up, like his fingernails.
Speaker 2: A former Hughes associate had once told the press that
Speaker 2: Hughes never cut his fingernails, that they had grown to
Speaker 2: six inches long. Hughes responds to this allegation in two parts,
Speaker 2: to be merciful. I'm only going to play you part two.
Speaker 5: I not ever have manicures. I do it myself. I
Speaker 5: never have had manicures. I don't know. Maybe it is
Speaker 5: an outdroves of my child ed when he has to
Speaker 5: teach people about having that is, males about having manicures.
Speaker 5: I never had them ever. But I've always kept my
Speaker 5: finger nails a reasonable length. Uh. I thought them with clippers,
Speaker 5: not with uh scissors and nail file the way some
Speaker 5: people do. I use clippers because they don't leave her up.
Speaker 5: Uh it's afterwards anyway. I take care of them the
Speaker 5: same I always have.
Speaker 2: And then someone asked him if he's happy, and Hughes
Speaker 2: starts up again.
Speaker 5: I'm not. I'm not very happy, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 5: And one of the primary reasons is because of some
Speaker 5: of the things we've been discussing here uh tonight. That
Speaker 5: is to say, in other words, the the impediment impediments
Speaker 5: upon my freedom and uh uh activities imposed by Honorius
Speaker 5: litigation and uh these overhanging uh threats of uh various
Speaker 5: types uh this uh threatened autobiography and so forth. All
Speaker 5: these matters are very draining in their hypoppy of the
Speaker 5: if you, Uh, well, your question were Am I happy?
Speaker 2: And and no, there's something tragic about Hughes orphaned, lonely, compulsive, damaged.
Speaker 2: Do you think that he had a kind of was
Speaker 2: suffering from mental some kind of mental illness throughout his life?
Speaker 2: And what's your sort of broader explanation of some of
Speaker 2: his behavior.
Speaker 9: So I'm not a medical doctor, and so I can
Speaker 9: you know only only state my opinion based on what
Speaker 9: I've read. I think that he exhibited signs of obsessive
Speaker 9: compulsive disorder over the course of his whole life. But
Speaker 9: I think that the bigger factor in what we could
Speaker 9: call the deterioration of his personality and his mental state
Speaker 9: seems to be the head injuries.
Speaker 2: Hughes survived multiple plane crashes, including one where he crashed
Speaker 2: into a house in Beverly Hills and nearly died.
Speaker 9: And I think, especially what we know now about head injuries,
Speaker 9: based on what we've learned from football and other sources,
Speaker 9: we can really see the impact of these things in
Speaker 9: a way that it wasn't understood during his lifetime.
Speaker 8: Howard Hughes, famous player and sportsman, was dragged out of
Speaker 8: this wreckage of an experimental plane he was testing. He
Speaker 8: was seriously injuring America's aviation trail. Basers willingly pay the
Speaker 8: price in Man's conquest of the air.
Speaker 2: But as weird and damaged as Hughes was, he didn't
Speaker 2: want to be seen as weird and damaged. He wanted
Speaker 2: to be seen as heroic, swashbuckling, a brilliant entrepreneur, And
Speaker 2: from the moment he arrived in Hollywood, he took great
Speaker 2: pains to create that mythical version of himself. He put
Speaker 2: together a massive publicity operation. In the Hughes archives at
Speaker 2: the University of Las Vegas, which incidentally aren't actually his archives,
Speaker 2: but the archives of his PR firm, there's a transcript
Speaker 2: of a conversation between Hughes and a magazine writer. The
Speaker 2: writer is working on a story about him, and Hughes
Speaker 2: is basically going through the draft line by line, dictating
Speaker 2: what should and shouldn't be said. He's one of the
Speaker 2: richest men in the world, and he's line editing some
Speaker 2: pushmuck's copy. When he first gets to Hollywood and successfully
Speaker 2: builds this PR machine to put this image out there,
Speaker 2: what is the Is it possible to kind of describe
Speaker 2: precisely the image he is trying to create for himself.
Speaker 9: Well, I think this is actually somewhere where a comparison
Speaker 9: to Trump is useful, because you know, what does Trump
Speaker 9: want us to know about him or to think about him.
Speaker 9: That he's rich, that he's a ladies man, that he
Speaker 9: lives in a golden castle. And these are very similar
Speaker 9: things to to what Hughes wanted out there. You know,
Speaker 9: he wanted people to think that he was the richest
Speaker 9: man in America, if not the world, that he was
Speaker 9: a lady's man who could have any woman that he wanted,
Speaker 9: when in fact, you know, he did have wealth, but
Speaker 9: he his wealth was entirely dependent on his father's tool company,
Speaker 9: which he kind of helped run into some financial straits
Speaker 9: and which they were really only saved because of World
Speaker 9: War Two when they became defense contractors. And then in
Speaker 9: terms of women, he certainly dated a lot of women,
Speaker 9: but they report that he was awkward and not a
Speaker 9: ladies man, not suave. From the very very early on,
Speaker 9: he was having you know, sort of private detectives follow
Speaker 9: women around and and he would use sort of go
Speaker 9: betweens to do the flirtation so that he wouldn't have
Speaker 9: to bother with it, so yeah, but he didn't want
Speaker 9: any of that out there. He wanted just this image
Speaker 9: of him, you know, at the coconut grove with Ginger
Speaker 9: Rogers or whoever it was out there.
Speaker 2: Hughes is myth making works to perfection for years, and
Speaker 2: then after the war, the machinery starts to falter. The
Speaker 2: world begins to see little glimpses of a very different
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes, and so he retreats, almost in embarrassment and shame.
Speaker 2: And just as that retreat seems permanent, a minor novelist
Speaker 2: from Abiza named Clifford Irving decides to write a fake
Speaker 2: autobiography of Howard Hughes, to do, in a sense, the
Speaker 2: very thing that Hughes himself has been trying to do
Speaker 2: for most of his life, create a new version of
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes out of whole cloth. Clifford Irving does a
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes on Howard Hughes. The genius of the autobiography
Speaker 2: of Howard Hughes is that everything checkable is true, dates, timelines,
Speaker 2: key figures. It's a genuine biography, but mixed in amongst
Speaker 2: the truths are small, unverifiable details that are entirely imaginary,
Speaker 2: and it is not easy, at least at first, to
Speaker 2: tell which is which, such as Hughes on the set
Speaker 2: of The Outlaw personally designing a special brazier to maximize
Speaker 2: the ample endowments of Jane Russell. That's actually true, but
Speaker 2: Irving throws in a memo written by Hughes, stipulating in
Speaker 2: highly technical engineer's language just how the bespoke Jane Russell
Speaker 2: brazier was to be constructed. I don't know whether that's true,
Speaker 2: could be who knows. Or that there was once a
Speaker 2: ticker tape braid down Broadway in Hughes's honor totally true,
Speaker 2: but Irving's book adds that Hughes ducked out of the
Speaker 2: parade early and jumped in a cab uptown in order
Speaker 2: to have sex with Catherine Hepburn. Don't think that's true,
Speaker 2: But then again, Hughes actually was kind of shy, self
Speaker 2: absorbed type who would think nothing of ducking out early
Speaker 2: on a ticker tape parade in his honor, particularly where
Speaker 2: Katherine Hepburn was involved. About one hundred pages into the
Speaker 2: Autobiography of Howard Hughes, I figured it out. Here's how
Speaker 2: to untangle fact from fiction. In Irving's book, Hughes was
Speaker 2: so creepy and strange that if you run across any
Speaker 2: detail that makes Hughes out not to be creepy and strange,
Speaker 2: then Irving and Suskand probably made it up. In real life,
Speaker 2: Hughes pursued very young buxom starlet's in vast quantities and
Speaker 2: too ill effect. But in Irving's book, Hughes has a
Speaker 2: real adult relationship, a true love, a sophisticated woman named
Speaker 2: Helga trapped in an unhappy marriage with a diplomat. Helga
Speaker 2: is neither young, nor buxom nor starlet. Hughes happens to
Speaker 2: sit next to her on a flight from San Francisco
Speaker 2: to New York, exchanges a few magical charged words with her,
Speaker 2: then fall asleep. Let us return to our fictional Howard
Speaker 2: Hughes to hear from the fictional autobiography of Howard Hughes.
Speaker 11: After dark, I fell into a kind of doze, and
Speaker 11: I swear I don't know how this happened, But when
Speaker 11: I woke up, this woman and I were holding hands.
Speaker 11: Isn't that incredible? We talked and one thing led to another.
Speaker 2: This is not true. Irving made this up. Now, if
Speaker 2: you'll remember, Clifford Irving forged his wife's Swiss passport in
Speaker 2: the name of Helga R. Hughes so she could cash
Speaker 2: checks made out to H. R.
Speaker 7: Hughes.
Speaker 2: So the Helga in the book is a kind of
Speaker 2: insurance policy in case things go badly wrong. But that's
Speaker 2: not the important thing here. The key fact is that,
Speaker 2: as far as we know, Howard Hughes had exactly one
Speaker 2: fulfilling romantic relationship in his life, and that relationship took
Speaker 2: place in the pages of Clifford Irving's fake autobiography. Irving
Speaker 2: gives Hughes a friend as well, another obvious invention, because
Speaker 2: the real Hughes didn't exactly have friends. Now, if you
Speaker 2: were Irving and Suskin sitting in the sun in Abiza
Speaker 2: trying to come up with a perfect friend for Hughes,
Speaker 2: who would you choose? It would have to be someone
Speaker 2: famous and interesting, because otherwise why bother right, And also
Speaker 2: someone dead because otherwise they just deny it, or maybe
Speaker 2: even sue. So they pick the most dead, most famous
Speaker 2: person they can think of, Ernest Hammingway.
Speaker 11: The occasion arose just after the war, sometime in the
Speaker 11: winter of nineteen forty eight. But I went out to
Speaker 11: look over Sun Valley, Idaho, with the idea in mind
Speaker 11: of buying it and making it into a popular resort area.
Speaker 11: I flew out there in my bomber, a converted B
Speaker 11: twenty five. I knew Ernest was there with his family
Speaker 11: and he was hunting, and so I found out where
Speaker 11: he was living. I did something wholly uncharacteristic. I marched
Speaker 11: right up to his door, knocked on it. He opened it.
Speaker 2: In a brilliant move, Irving has Hughes use a fake
Speaker 2: name with Hemingway Tom Garden, so the reader understands that
Speaker 2: Hemingway liked Hughes for who he really was, not because
Speaker 2: of his fame and fortune. Hemingway loves Tom, and Tom
Speaker 2: loves Hemingway calls him Hem. They talk for hours. Then
Speaker 2: they go up in the B twenty five bomber, and
Speaker 2: Hemingway says to him at the end, with a touch
Speaker 2: of awe in his voice, Tom, you're a hot pilot.
Speaker 2: Hughes goes to visit Hemingway in Cuba. They go out
Speaker 2: on the water in Hemingway's boat, and this is maybe
Speaker 2: my favorite passage in the whole book. Because it is
Speaker 2: so ludic, sleep gloriously, brilliantly bananas.
Speaker 11: After a while, Ernest said, let's go for a swim.
Speaker 11: Bear ass Tom. I pulled off my skivvies and we
Speaker 11: dove over the side into the gulf, which was perfectly
Speaker 11: flat and beautifully blue. That was an extraordinary experience for
Speaker 11: me because we were grown men. I was forty eight
Speaker 11: years old and Ernest was somewhat older. And there we
Speaker 11: were in the water naked, and Ernest started playing games.
Speaker 11: He would dive under the water and come up under
Speaker 11: me and tip me over by the ankles. One of
Speaker 11: us had to be a shark and the other had
Speaker 11: to be a killer well or a swordfish. And we
Speaker 11: would fight, yell, shout, warn each other, watch out well
Speaker 11: here I come, splash around like children, and it was marvelous.
Speaker 6: We let our imaginations run a mark. We created a
Speaker 6: portrait of the billionaire in search of his Soul, which
Speaker 6: was a hell of a side more exciting, I think
Speaker 6: than Howard Hughes his life.
Speaker 12: I don't think a proper or straight biography of how
Speaker 12: Hughes could ever be written good. I mean, the man
Speaker 12: himself is a mythic creature product of press clippings and
Speaker 12: seems to be the best biography or autobiography would simply
Speaker 12: be the most interesting.
Speaker 6: That's right, I believe that, and perhaps we, in our
Speaker 6: wild imagination, got closer to what he was like in
Speaker 6: his dreams and in his fantasies than the reality than
Speaker 6: the himself.
Speaker 2: Two writers got together and created a better version of
Speaker 2: the Hughes fantasy than Hughes himself could create. Of course,
Speaker 2: they did this without Hughes's permission, and along the way
Speaker 2: they violated every known journalistic standard and code, raising questions
Speaker 2: about their moral fiber in the line between truth and
Speaker 2: fiction and blah blah blah. Enough, I think we should
Speaker 2: reserve our outrage for outrages that are truly outrageous. If
Speaker 2: someone attacks you, you don't always have to retaliate, And
Speaker 2: if discretion is the better part of valor, sometimes doing
Speaker 2: nothing at all is the better part of discretion. At
Speaker 2: the time Irving's Hoake's biography appeared, the real Hughes was
Speaker 2: sitting in the dark in a hotel room in the Bahamas,
Speaker 2: addicted to painkillers, watching the same movies over and over again,
Speaker 2: and worrying about his finger nails. Meanwhile, what did Clifford
Speaker 2: Irving have Hughes doing in the twilight of his life.
Speaker 2: It's all in the last chapter of the greatest unread
Speaker 2: autobiography of the twentieth century, Irvings. Howard Hughes went to India,
Speaker 2: had a darshan with a guru, where he at last
Speaker 2: found a measure of peace and self understanding. Then Irvings
Speaker 2: Howard Hughes, famous Germaphoe, stripped down to his underwear and
Speaker 2: sat by the Ganges in the lotus position, joining all
Speaker 2: the other beggars on the riverbank.
Speaker 11: And I was day loosed with money, with dollars, with rupees,
Speaker 11: with English pounds, with yen, with marks and francs. People
Speaker 11: couldn't pass by without giving me something. Indians, Asians, Europeans,
Speaker 11: everyone gave.
Speaker 5: You.
Speaker 11: See, money just gravitates to some people, whether they're accumulating
Speaker 11: twa stock or sitting by the side of a muddy
Speaker 11: river in India. They're money magnets, and money is like
Speaker 11: metal shavings. I'm one of those people.
Speaker 2: Clifford Irving elevated Howard Hughes into something other than a
Speaker 2: broken down old man in a hotel room. He turned
Speaker 2: him into the richest beggar the Ganges had ever seen.
Speaker 2: Everyone who read Irving's book believed that passage. They thought
Speaker 2: it was real. Everyone at McGraw hill, people who had
Speaker 2: known Hughes for years, believed it. Everyone and the whole
Speaker 2: world would have believed it too. All Howard Hughes had
Speaker 2: to do was read the book. Oh Howard, you idiot.
Speaker 11: Revisionist History is produced by Mea LaBelle and Leeman Gistu,
Speaker 11: with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna Nahim. Our editor
Speaker 11: is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Louise Gera, mastering by
Speaker 11: Flon Williams. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to
Speaker 11: our voice artist Alex Robertson and the Pushkin Crew, Heather Faine,
Speaker 11: Carl Migliori, Maya Kanig, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell
Speaker 11: and of course el Hefe, Jacob Wiseberg.
Speaker 2: I'm mackin dappo