FALSE WITNESS RICHARD GERE FINDS THE TRUTH IN THE CLIFFORD IRVING STORY - IF THERE IS ANY.

Byline: Glenn Whipp

Film Writer

The caper movie "The Hoax" opens like this: It's 1971, and writer Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) is standing on top of a Manhattan skyscraper with editors from the publishing house McGraw Hill, waiting for Howard Hughes' helicopter to land. Irving has collaborated with Hughes on Hughes' autobiography, a work whose authenticity has been called into question, and now Hughes is arriving to authenticate the project.

Of course, the helicopter never lands because the helicopter really doesn't contain Howard Hughes. Irving staged the whole thing to maintain the illusion that he really did write the autobiography of the famously reclusive tycoon -- something he didn't actually do. Irving never met Hughes. But that didn't stop him from pocketing McGraw Hill's $750,000 advance and maintaining until the end -- right before the book made it to the stores, right before he had to 'fess up -- that he was on the level.

The helicopter story wasn't in Irving's book, "The Hoax," the account of the Hughes con job he wrote while serving 17 months in a federal prison. But he told it to producer Josh Maurer, who acquired the rights to Irving's book. Irving described the helicopter incident in tremendous detail, telling how he planned and staged it, having the fictional Hughes demand that McGraw Hill rip out the carpet, black out the windows and prepare the launching pad.

"I thought, 'God this is fantastic,' I've got to put this story in the movie ... nobody has ever heard it before," says "Hoax" screenwriter William Wheeler. "And then Clifford said later, 'Ummm ... I'm not sure about that. I can't recall whether that happened or not.'

"He's still the same all these years later," Wheeler says. "He's still an operator."

Or, as Gere puts it: "I think Clifford Irving is an unreliable witness to his own life."

Irving's scheme was inventive. You had to give it that. Even Hughes, in the 1972 teleconference he held denouncing the writer, said, "I wish I were still in the movie business. I don't remember any script as wild."

In fact, the story's fantastic elements concern "Hoax" director Lasse Hallstrom, who believes younger moviegoers might think the filmmakers made the whole thing up. (The movie opens Friday.)

"I worry," Hallstrom says. "I wish it was more clear that this is basically a true story."

Irving, a marginally successful writer, convinced McGraw-Hill that Hughes had commissioned him to write his autobiography.

Irving and friend Dick Suskind forged letters and legal documents purportedly from Hughes, cashed a huge advance from the publisher, wrote the book and banked on the belief that Hughes was either too sick or too weird to come forward and call them out.

"You'd think people would have seen through it," Gere says. "When you look at the forgeries, they're ludicrous. A reasonably energetic child could have done better.

"But there was something to gain for everyone -- money, prestige, power," Gere adds. "If you were in the publishing business, you'd salivate. You'd want it to be yours."

Adds Wheeler: "Clifford's methodology was: If you get in trouble, double the lie. Distract people with the hugeness of it, and back it up 10,000 percent."

In that respect, those involved with "The Hoax" see Irving's episode as analogous to the White House's selling of the war in Iraq. The movie's political resonance is further fueled by the fact that Irving's shenanigans ended up stoking Richard Nixon's paranoia, prompting the second Watergate break-in.

"The Bush administration is like Clifford -- sell, sell, sell this notion of the big lie," Wheeler says. "It worked for a long time, but now you see the house of cards start to crumble."

"As a nation, we're still dumbfounded that the attorney general does something illegal or that the president lies," Gere says. "America was supposed to have lost its innocence with Watergate.

"Then we lost it again on 9/11. There's a character in the Tennessee Williams play 'Camino Real' who, miraculously, every full moon, gets her virginity back.

I think we're a little like that."

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

[e-mail]

Hoax was no joke to Nixon

If Clifford Irving hadn't written a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, would Richard Nixon have finished his second term as president?

The most intriguing notion explored in "The Hoax" is that Nixon, paranoid about what Irving's book might reveal, ordered the second Watergate break-in to discover what Irving might have told the Democrats about Nixon's financial and political dealings with the reclusive billionaire.

"It's this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern view of history where this guy stumbles into this historical moment," "Hoax" screenwriter William Wheeler says. "Clifford Irving did this thing for personal gain, and he somehow became a football in a game between the gods."

Adds Richard Gere, who plays Irving in the movie: "Clifford tells this great story that while he was in the federal prison in Danbury, two guys came up to him, minor characters in the second Watergate break-in, and said, 'You're the reason we're in jail.'

"Now, did he make it up?" Gere asks. "I don't know. But it looks like he guessed right about a lot of things."

Irving's Watergate connection was explored somewhat in memoirs written by Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and White House counsel John Dean. It was confirmed in Michael Drosnin's Hughes biography, "Citizen Hughes," a work based on thousands of Hughes' own personal documents.

"Nixon read at least a summary of Irving's account," Drosnin writes. "It came as quite a shock. The $400,000 figure (concerning the 'loan' from Hughes to Nixon, the amount of which Irving had only guessed at) was probably not far off the mark.

"The secret figure was so close to fact, (Nixon's chief domestic adviser) John Ehrlichmann later suggested that the Hunt-Liddy team was sent to burglarize Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate in order to discover what Irving might have told the Democrats about the Hughes-

Nixon loans. The infamous 17-minute 'gap' in the Nixon White House tapes allegedly dealt with that specific subject."

Says Gere: "The power of one small man to change the universe. It certainly is bizarre."

-- G.W.

Even now, what really happened is fuzzy

On his Web site, writer Clifford Irving says he hasn't seen the movie version of "The Hoax," but decries it as a Hollywood treatment of his story, calling it "a hoax about a hoax."

Director Lasse Hallstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler dispute that on two levels.

"According to sources I have, he saw the movie and loved it," Hallstrom says. "Now he doesn't love it anymore. His story changes with the wind."

Adds Wheeler: "It's ironic that Clifford is crying foul that we weren't truthful, but the difference between truth and fiction and fact and hoax is really what the movie's all about."

The filmmakers do readily admit to taking dramatic license, however.

The two key differences:

Irving lived in Ibiza, Spain, not in upstate New York, during the time he and collaborator Dick Suskind wrote Hughes' autobiography.

"We had to put Clifford on the road," Wheeler says. "Otherwise, we wouldn't have scenes with other actors. It would have been Clifford on the phone and writing letters from Spain, which makes for a pretty boring movie."

"We didn't have the money to shoot in Spain anyway," adds Richard Gere, who plays Irving in the film.

Irving and Suskind (played by Alfred Molina) were more co-conspirators than the movie suggests. In the film, their relationship is contentious, leading to a brutal betrayal on Irving's part that is completely fictional.

"Suskind was much more of a Jimmy Breslin type," Gere says. "Tougher."

Says Wheeler: "Clifford was lying to everybody close to him, and I wanted to follow that trajectory in his relationship with Dick.

"Clifford maintained there was an honor among thieves, but I wanted to dramatically explore where all these lies where heading.

"When I met Clifford," Wheeler adds, "he wanted the movie to be 'Butch and Sundance.' And a little bit of that does make it into the film. Clifford saw himself as the hero. And he's so charming and interesting, by the end of an evening with him, you start to see it that way, too."

-- G.W.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, 2 boxes

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) APRIL FOOLS

Richard Gere gives us the lowdonw on 'The Hoax'

(2) Richard Gere as author Clifford Irving in "The Hoax"

(3) IRVING

(4) NIXON

Box:

(1) Hoax was no joke to Nixon (see text)

(2) Even now, what really happened is fuzzy (see text)