Customer Reviews

Autobiography of Howard Hughes

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Please don't purchase this book from Amazon's sellers if you have any doubts about the authenticity of it (the physical book, not the actual story!) or its seller. Especially if they say Clifford Irving is offering to sign it for you!

Clifford Irving is currently selling the e-book version of this entire book through his Web site at the whopping price of $5.95, and from what I have read he is not a seller on Amazon himself. And he also has several chapters up on his Web site for free. I would advise checking out www.cliffordirving.com.

As for the book itself...

Clifford Irving is an excellent writer. His words, his sentences, flow to create a story that is both detailed and personable. Though Hughes' "autobiography" is a fraud, the characterization is intriguing.

While reading it, I found myself mentally splicing what Irving was really doing according to history (visiting exotic locations with his mistresses, etc.) with what he said he did with Hughes (traveling through the Mexican jungle in a car with a tall, aging recluse). This book is like a glimpse into his mind as a storyteller - you could almost visualize him lying across his bed in some hotel in Florida writing and rewriting in his mind what he talked about with the fictional Hughes before flying back to his publishers in NYC.

At the same time, it seems somehow amazing that no one could conclusively catch him at lying about his real relationship with Hughes. The fact that the two of them watched a Dodgers game together and that "Howard" was so personable strikes me falsely right at the beginning of the book - don't powerful men with acute social issues typically have more suspicious and recalcitrant personalities?

And that may be what is so brilliant about this story. A false tale inspired by what - greed? fame? personal problems? writer's block?! - the coup of it was that everyone believed Irving and believed in the Howard Hughes he created. Even Richard Nixon.

An interesting look at what, today, some might call the first Million Little Pieces. Irving chose to make up a story about someone famous instead of himself, though, which makes his book all the rarer and more daring for it.

We've all heard the story of the biggest literary hoax of all time -- such a mind-boggling story that it tends to overshadow the work itself. Clifford Irving's "Autobiography of Howard Hughes" never made it to print in 1971, which is a shame, because it's a damn good read. We finally know this because some 10 years ago Irving made the book available for download on his website, for the modest sum of $5.95. And if you read it -- minus the context of the story behind its creation -- you can't help but be enthralled. Let's just say that it's a hundred times the book Howard himself would have written. We have a worldly and successful man, with his fingers in everything, who tells his story and tries to make sense of his life. He doesn't entirely understand his afflictions -- the obsessive-compulsive disorder, his isolation and everything else -- but he's honest enough to tell us about it. And he speaks with a consistent voice throughout. It all makes sense. Irving himself is a character in the book, posing questions that frequently challenge Hughes, and spinning a yarn of his clandestine and secretive meetings.

I've read several books about Hughes, among them the Noah Dietrich biography from which this book borrows many of its facts. (It hadn't been published at the time Irving turned in his manuscript.) And I have to say that the Irving version is the most compelling of them all. Of course, you'd expect that -- because so much of it is Irving's own fantasy, and he is a novelist, after all. But still...

I should point out one bonehead mistake -- Hughes tells an anecdote of his childhood, at age six or seven, in which he was playing in the garage, fiddling with a radio. Ahem. This would have been approximately 1912, when radios were enormous and expensive things used mainly for morse-code ship-to-shore communications. Radio broadcasting didn't start until the twenties. Though Hughes' wealthy father was mechanically minded, it's kind of hard to believe that he would have had a radio, that it would have been left in the garage, and that young Hughes would have been allowed to fiddle with it.

And then we have Irving's less-obvious inventions -- like Hughes' friendship with Ernest Hemingway, who would have been ten years in the grave at the time Irving submitted the manuscript, and unable to challenge the story -- the sort of thing where we have to say, well, it could have happened that way. Hughes has a long-term affair with a mysterious woman named Helga -- well, maybe that could have happened, too. And naturally we have to be suspicious of the parts where Hughes describes his first sexual experiences and so forth -- these sorts of stories aren't the sort that Irving might have found in an old newspaper clipping file somewhere, and no doubt were baldfaced fabrications. But so much of the story is true that we can only be astonished at Irving's research. This book couldn't have been easy to write.

If Irving had changed the names and turned his book into a roman a clef, we'd be able to see it in an entirely different light. So how should we regard the book? As fact-based fiction? A new sort of literary experiment? Or should we simply dismiss it as so many have done over the years, as the product of an enormous hoax?

Irving's criminal intentions aside, I am inclined to regard his book as a sort of literary invention -- a experiment in biography, sort of like the more recent biographies of Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy that have gotten so much derision in the press, because they mingle fiction and fact, treat the subjects' lives with a novelist's approach, and challenge our notions of the form.

Irving published his book between hard covers a few years ago, but the book has fallen out of print, which explains why copies now sell for hundreds of dollars. Only his website makes the book accessible. Pity that no one saw fit to give it a wide release when the film "The Aviator" came out, or later, "The Hoax" -- interest in Hughes and Irving's book no doubt peaked at that point. The book has merit; it deserves better than the obscurity in which it languishes, and someday ought to return to print.

Erik Smith
Olympia, Wash.

The infamous AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES is a great read. Transport yourself to the crazy real and imagined world of Irving, also staring Howard Hughes, Ernest Hemingway and others.

Now available on Kindle:

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES

Fabulous stuff!

I am currently reading 'The Hoax' which I picked up at a yard sale. It is certainly interesting, but I was curious so I went to Amazon to see what the buzz was about it and if he really did write a book on Hughes that was totally fake.
The NERVE of this guy. Are you telling me he presented this book to the public as fact and then said later on that is was not? How could he do such a thing, and didn't we learn from Orson Welles huge egg that hoaxing the public is childish and makes you look desperate?
So, poor old James Frey had to go down in front of the Queen herself and we all just think this Clifford was 'clever'?
Sheesh.
Also, what is this OTHER Howard Hughes book that he wrote, Howard Hughes: My Story? Is that a hoax, too?