About this app
Rich people are good already because others can earn money on them. As did Clifford Irving and Dick Saskind, who decided to earn extra money on Howard Rowbard Hughes, a man as rich as he was strange, falsifying his autobiography. When they were caught, they wrote a second book - already about the technology of falsification. And although they did not become famous writers, their names were nevertheless inscribed in the history of the 20th century - in the history of hoaxes.
Howard Rowbard Hughes was fabulously rich. He made a fortune in the production of oil production equipment, then founded Hughes Aircrafts (later transformed into Trans World Airlines - TWA), later became the owner of RKO (Radio Keith Orpheum) Pictures, one of the largest movie studios in Hollywood, and most of the entertainment industry in Las Vegas, a company Hughes Tools and real estate in the heavens of the globe.
Since the late 1950s, he lived as a recluse. Journalists swarmed after him, but he always slipped away. Access to his hotels in Nevada, his home in Palm Beach, and the Bahamas was denied access. Almost none of those who worked with him in recent decades knew his face and did not hear his voice: he was afraid of germs, and the presence of strangers led to a violation of sterility. Strange rumors were circulating about him: he wears Kleenex cardboard boxes instead of shoes, he has huge toenails and hands, he does not sign papers and does not appear in banks. He chose to pay $ 137 million, but did not appear in court in the TWA case. He has not been photographed for 20 years. Hughes’s Byior Agency, Rosmont’s PR company, and its Intertel personal police, faithfully did their job.
About once every six months, somebody tried in vain to get the right to write a biography of Hughes from them. And it was because of what. It would include the story of his 1947 film The Outlaw, which made a profit of $ 3.5 million with an initial budget of $ 250 thousand, and three American speed records in the air (one of them Hughes set in 1937, when he crossed the USA in 7 hours 18 minutes), and six plane crashes, and a huge Spruse Goose plane, gathering dust in a hangar in Mexico, and novels with a dozen Hollywood stars of the 1930-1940s (including Ava Gardner and Olivia de Haviland), and all the mania and quirks of the rich man. They even said that he had died a long time ago, but did not order to talk about it.
Clifford Irving, a more or less successful writer, lived with his family (wife and two sons) in a bohemian writing paradise - on the Spanish island of Ibiza. His wife Edith, a German by birth, was a good abstract artist. They received an inheritance of $ 100 thousand from Edith's parents, and Cliff worked on a contract - $ 150 thousand for four novels. This is the prospect for the coming years - good, but not very.
It was then that he caught the eye of Life magazine with the article "The Invisible Billionaire." Scrolling through the article, he invited his friend and colleague Dick Saskind to a cafe and offered to compose Hughes a life that he himself would like to live.
The plan was simple and insane: friends told McGraw Hill, a reputable New York-based publisher, that the elusive Howard Hughes had ordered Clifford an autobiography. Like, Hughes is old, sick and lonely and, foreseeing the imminent end, wants to leave to the descendants the true story of his life. Here, by the way, is his correspondence with Clifford. As it should be, on yellow lined paper, since it is known that he writes only on such (at least, wrote 15 years ago) and only with an ink pen. (Faking handwriting is a special art. But Clifford's handwriting was surprisingly similar to the tycoon’s handwriting — those six lines that Life photographed. Later, the "letters" will brilliantly pass the examination at Osborn & Osborn, the best graphological agency in the USA, which will conclude that they are 100% Authenticity: Hughes' handwriting has been found to be fake.)
