Clifford and Howard

The Hoax is a hoax, and that’s one of its many pleasures. This new Richard Gere movie purports to tell the true story of the not-very-successful novelist Clifford Irving and his notorious 1972 attempt to convince McGraw Hill, Time Inc., and the entire world that he was the authorized ghostwriter of the autobiography of Howard Hughes–a person who was then still alive, if not very well, somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, and who blew the whistle on Irving the moment the book was published.

The central character of The Hoax is named Clifford Irving, and the 57-year-old Gere is even made up to resemble the then-41-year-old-Irving (complete with delightful early-’70s sideburns). But the resemblance to the real man ends there. Screenwriter William Wheeler and director Lasse Hallström have taken many of the details laid out in Irving’s own memoir (also titled The Hoax) and fictionalized them wherever and whenever they find it convenient.

The actual Clifford Irving is a classic, now vanished, American type–an Upper West Side Jew playing at being a citizen of the world, escaping the drab bourgeois nightmare of the United States to live the glamorous but weirdly seedy life of a literary expatriate smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean. At the time of the hoax, Irving was a resident of the island of Ibiza, had many marriages and children scattered across the globe, and was conducting a tortured, long-term affair with a gorgeous but not very talented Danish pop singer who was married into nobility if not into riches.

In his own memoir of the events, very much worth reading, Irving says he ginned up the idea as a comic stunt, just to see how far he could get with it. Along the way, a series of astonishing coincidences made the project ever more viable, until he began to fantasize that he could really get away with it. He became inordinately proud of the book he produced and remains so (you can buy it online at his website). He believed that he had somehow managed to uncover the deep truth about Howard Hughes–even though he never met the man, and invented most of the anecdotes he relates in the course of the book. It’s the weirdest example of literary vanity in our time, and only the overwhelming power of vanity can explain Irving’s heedless rush toward self-destruction.

Gere’s Irving is a literary hustler, a man entering middle age still trying to hit it big by writing polished imitations of successful novels. As the movie begins, he is attempting to sell his publisher on a novel entitled Rudnick’s Problem, to be published only two years after Portnoy’s Complaint. Premature praise from his editor leads Irving to go out and buy himself a Mercedes convertible even as his furniture is being repossessed from his Westchester County home. Then the novel is rejected, and he’s stuck with the car and no sofa. He and his schlubby, gregarious, even more desperately unsuccessful writer friend Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina) concoct a screwy scheme to squeeze some money out of Irving’s publisher by showing off a few letters with a forged Howard Hughes signature that claim Hughes has chosen Irving as his authorial vessel. Suskind, Irving’s partner-in-crime, is passed off as his research assistant.

Irving reckons that Hughes will never sue them because he’s too crazy by this point to know that anything might be going on, and in any case, he can’t set foot in an American courtroom without being subject to a $137 million judgment by the shareholders of TWA. And so Irving and Suskind are off and running. They spin tales about meeting with Hughes in Mexico, where Hughes hands out organic prunes.

“The more outrageous I sound,” Irving notes, “the more believable I sound.”

They succeed in purloining a tell-all manuscript about Hughes by his longtime second-in-command. (A wonderful scene has Suskind at some prehistoric version of Kinko’s making Xerox copies of a huge pile of paper one sheet at a time, since copier feeders had not yet been invented.) And they are flummoxed when, out of nowhere, comes word that yet another writer is claiming to be the ghostwriter of a Hughes autobiography.

“It’s a hoax!” Irving cries, so deep into his own fake portrait of the man that he has the nerve to be outraged by this infamy.

The Hoax gets into some silliness near the end about how the Irving book may have led to the Watergate break-in the following June, but otherwise it’s a refreshing piece of work–a deftly written, sharply observed social comedy about how some very august and pompous institutions were snookered in part because of their own prideful assurance that no one would ever dare to try and put one over on them. You want Irving and Suskind to get away with it even though you know they’re not going to.

Richard Gere is not a great actor by any means, but he tears into the part as though it were a birthday present, and his sheer ferocity carries the day. His costar, Alfred Molina, is a great actor by any definition, and his amusing, soulful performance as a loser who knows he’s a loser gives the movie a heart as well as a brain.

Clifford Irving has been complaining about the movie’s inaccuracies; but then, what standing does a man who served a couple of years in prison for perpetrating a preposterous fraud have to whine about people who take liberties with the truth? His unhappiness with The Hoax is lagniappe–the perfect conclusion to his ludicrous life story.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.