Is it known how many copies of the fake Hughes biography were bought by unsuspecting members of the public before the scandal broke? And were they able to get their money back if they wanted? I wondered if maybe a class action lawsuit was brought against McGraw-Hill for selling a book under false pretences?
share[deleted]
They might be, just as collector's items, since once the hoax was admitted, the publisher supposedly destroyed all the manufactured copies of the book.
So, if there are any still in existence, they would number in just the hundreds is my guess.
However, my reasoning is that nothing that he wrote about Hughes' life was false, since he gleaned all that info from official documents and various journal entries. The "hoax" part was that it was Howard Hughes dictating it to him. So, if he would have made it a regular biography, instead of "authorized autobiography", there wouldn't have been a problem. But then, he probably wouldn't have gotten such a huge royalty (million dollars plus) and all that national publicity.
By Irving's own account in his book HOAX, many of the incidents in Hughes 'autobiography' were absolute fabrications "out of whole cloth". Some sections are re-printed in the book HOAX. They are preposterous. They were totally made up by Irving and his co-conspirator Dick. So much so, that both Irving and Dick reasoned that if ever they were revealed to be frauds, and they still published this book -- they would call it a 'novel'. A fictional novel, because of all the stuff they made up regarding Hughes. Yes, there are many substantiated episodes in the book to give it credibility, but there's also an equal amount of total BS to give it spice.
shareI just watched this movie on Starz tonight and looked it up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Irving. From the Wikipedia article, it doesn't look like any copies of the book were released in 1972, but in 1999 it was released as a private edition and in 2008 it was reprinted as a novel. Excerpts are available on Clifford Irving's website: http://www.cliffordirving.com.
share