Film: The Hoax

In 1971, a minor novelist named Clifford Irving convinced his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that he’d been contacted by Howard Hughes to write the reclusive billionaire’s authorized biography. Irving claimed that Hughes had chosen him for the project because Hughes liked Irving’s 1969 biography, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. Now, deciding finally to tell his own story, Hughes planned to meet with Irving for a series of secret interviews to help prepare the manuscript.

It was nonsense, of course, but with the help of a few letters he’d forged, Irving was able to con the executives at McGraw-Hill and Time- Life, who planned to serialize the book in Life magazine. The publishers offered Irving a $100,000 advance, with $400,000 for Hughes. Later, Irving was able to increase Hughes’s figure to $765,000 (the movie claims $1 million), and with the help of his fourth wife, Edith Sommer Irving, he buried the money in a Swiss account. Eventually, when his preposterous scheme unraveled, Irving returned the money, served some jail time, and wrote a self-serving account of the whole affair titled The Hoax (1972), which was full of misrepresentations and wild speculation.

Now, the Swedish-born director Lasse Hallstrom has brought Irving’s story to film. The Hoax is a fast-paced, often intriguing, frequently farcical film that further embroiders the truth.

The original promotional tagline for the film was: “Based on the true story. Would we lie to you?” But the film itself claims to be “based on the actual events.” Hallstrom, a mid-level director, has received three Oscar nominations, and he’s developed a reputation as an “actor’s director,” having directed four actors to Oscar nominations (Leonardo DiCaprio, Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, and Michael Caine). Hallstrom’s most notable films have been the pro-abortion The Cider House Rules (1999) and Chocolat (2000), which equates the pleasures of eating chocolate with sex. Recently considered to be in a slump, Hallstrom chose The Hoax as his comeback film; and, despite its many failings, his casting of Richard Gere (who’s made a career out of portraying smug, charming, cocky, shallow males) as the hoaxster Clifford Irving will probably be recognized at next year’s Oscars.

Irving was a self-admitted opportunist, manipulator, liar, forger, adulterer, megalomaniac, and felon. He was also smooth, smart, and full of bravado. The brazenness of his elaborate con and the eventual un-raveling of his cleverly improvised house of cards make for an interesting tale, and the first 80 minutes of the film move along nicely with an engaging pace and energy, as Irving sinks deeper and deeper into his own deceptions. The problem with the story, as with all stories, is that its audience demands to have some sense of what it all means in the end. Un-fortunately, Gere’s Irving, just like the real-life Irving, learns nothing from his experience. The publishers he cons provide no insight, since they’re all stereotypes portrayed as nothing more than greedy phonies. Even Irving’s only two friends in the film— his researcher, Dick Susskind (Alfred Molina), and his wife, Edith (Marcia Gay Harden)—seem to learn nothing more than to eventually avoid contact with the man. Thus, the film amounts to nothing more than a well-made but superficial narrative about an extremely superficial man.

While it’s certainly true that the real-life Clifford Irving learned very little from his experience, his actual story is far more interesting than indicated in the film, which ignores most of his backstory. Irving, the son of a famous syndicated cartoonist, went to Cornell, lost his second wife in a car crash in Big Sur, and had two children with his fourth wife, Edith. Although his novels were not hugely successful, they were critically recognized, and the movie’s one attempt to provide a motivation for Irving’s actions—that McGraw-Hill rejected his current novel—is inaccurate, since he had a comfortable four-book deal with his publisher. Irving’s real motive seems to have been greed: It was well-known at the time that several other authors who’d begun writing biographies of Hughes had been “bought off” by the reclusive industrialist. For some reason, this is missing from the film, as are many other interesting events that took place during the time of the hoax: his lie-detector test, his rendezvous with his mistress in Mexico when he was supposedly meeting Hughes at a Mayan temple, his conning of Mike Wallace on TV, and his fascinating appearance in F for Fake (1974), a ludicrous documentary about hoaxes directed by Orson Welles, who was still famous for his own 1938 War of the Worlds hoax.

Similarly, despite some grainy newsreel footage, the film does nothing to establish the peculiar celebrity of Hughes, which will be lost on most contemporary viewers, except for the few who saw Martin Scorsese’s dreadful The Aviator (2004). While The Hoax clearly establishes that Hughes was fabulously wealthy and eccentric, the many reasons why the American public would have been interested in his memoirs are left unexplained and unexplored. There’s nothing about his innovative aircraft designs, his airspeed records, his much-publicized dates with movie stars, his various film ventures, his role in the creation of two star actresses (Jean Harlow and Jane Russell), his marriage to Jean Peters, and all the circulating rumors about his years as a recluse—that he was terminally ill, that he was mentally deranged, and that he’d already died and been replaced by an impersonator.

Thus, with little backstory on either Irving or Hughes, the film, struggling desperately for some kind of relevance, falls back on that great liberal demon of the 1970s: Richard Nixon. Irving always claimed that Hughes, in the days before the Nixon presidency, had bribed Nixon by giving money to Nixon’s brother, Donald, and best friend, Bebe Rebozo. The money was supposedly given in exchange for favorable treatment of TWA and Hughes’s other aeronautical interests. Whatever the real connections between Hughes and Nixon, the film (like Irving) also contends that, in the early 1970s, Hughes was furious with Nixon for not supporting the TransWest merger and actually encouraged Irving’s hoax to get back at the president.

But that’s not the end of it. The movie also claims that the underlying motive for the Watergate break- in on June 17, 1972, was that the White House “plumbers” were trying to determine how much the Democrats knew about these allegations, which had been included in the Irving manuscript. Thus, Irving, nudged along by Hughes, created Watergate and the downfall of the Nixon presidency. There’s never been any doubt about Irving’s chutzpah, but we all know what Dr. Johnson said about politics “being the last refuge of the scoundrel,” and that’s exactly where Hallstrom’s shallow film ends up.

Hallstrom, of course, should share the blame with his screenwriter William Wheeler, whose only previous major credit, The Prime Gig (2001), was about telemarketing scams. In his research for The Hoax, Wheeler met with Irving but admits that he found the man “unreadable.” As for Irving, despite the fact that the movie is based on his book, he has claimed, with typical ambiguity, “I had nothing to do with the movie, and it had very little to do with me.” Sadly enough, some reviewers of the film have absurdly contended that Wheeler’s numerous distortions of the truth are somehow appropriate to the subject, calling them “cinematic sleight[s] of hand.” If Irving was a fraud, some have concluded, why shouldn’t the retelling of his story also be fraudulent? So much for the truth.

Incidentally, Irving spent 14 months in jail, where he kicked his smoking habit and took up weight-lifting. Since then, along with The Hoax, he’s written a number of best-selling novels, including Trial (1987) and Final Argument (1990). He currently lives in Aspen, Colorado, and he’s managed to have the last laugh on everyone, especially Hollywood: Hyperion Press brought The Hoax back into print earlier this year as an appropriate tie-in with Hallstrom’s movie.

Author

  • William Baer

    William Baer is a graduate of U.S.C. Cinema where he received the Jack Nicholson Screening Award and taught in the Filmic Writing department. He currently teaches English and Film at the University of Evansville, Indiana and is a frequent contributor to Creative Screenwriting.

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