Word: manuscript
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That authenticity now seems explained. Irving's hoax worked because the base on which he built was largely genuine. In subject matter, Irving's book is identical at many points with the manuscript of a Long Beach, Calif., writer named James Phelan, who had been hired to ghostwrite the story of the man who knows more than anyone else in the world about the life and times of Howard Hughes. He is Noah Dietrich, 83, who for 32 years was Hughes' chief of staff, hatchet man, fixer and right arm. The conclusion emerging from a study...
...Attorney's office in New York City that his baroquely detailed scenario was a fraud. Irving's lawyer, Maurice R. Nessen, had hurried to the Federal Courthouse for the conference after Richard Suskind, a writer and researcher who had worked with Irving on the manuscript, refused to back Irving's story. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, Suskind said he was willing to testify that contrary to his earlier affidavit, he had never seen Hughes; Hughes had never offered him that organic prune he had once mentioned to lend a touch of credence to the tale...
...Irving's attention was diverted. Late on the night of his meeting at the U.S. Attorney's office, Irving received a telephone call at Nessen's office from TIME Correspondent Frank McCulloch. "I want to level with you," McCulloch said. "We've got the Phelan manuscript on the way to New York. Phelan's flying here with it, and we're going to lay it down alongside your manuscript in the morning and read them together...
...that moment, the last of the boxes was being opened. When Phelan's version of the Dietrich book is read in tandem with the Irving manuscript, one essential source of Irving's material becomes obvious (see story, page 17). The instances of duplicated material are numerous. In some cases, the books are virtually identical in detail. In others, they are substantively the same, although the Irving manuscript has been reworded and otherwise disguised. One curiosity: the writing in the Irving manuscript is much better than that in the hastily drafted Phelan version. It is ironic that Irving...
...question still to be fully answered is exactly how Irving got the Phelan manuscript. Noah Dietrich began working on a book about Hughes in Los Angeles during 1969. Jim Phelan, his collaborator, is a widely experienced newspaperman and investigative reporter who has written five magazine articles on Hughes. Says Dietrich: "Phelan would come up to my house in Benedict Canyon and I would dictate to his tape recorder. One hundred hours of tapes. Then he digested this and wrote down a lot of questions, and I dictated a whole batch of memos to my secretary...