interview | RICHARD GERE - Faking it
The Hoax star Richard Gere gets a perm and dons a false nose to play one of the biggest scammers in publishing history
By Earl Dittman
In December 1971, publishing house McGraw-Hill announced that the autobiography of Howard Hughes would snake through its massive printing presses sometime the following year.
The tome about the once-great aviation genius, Hollywood mogul and billionaire playboy who turned into an obsessive-compulsive recluse was expected to be one of the literary landmarks of the 20th century.
“Howard Hughes was still a big deal in those days, and his whereabouts was a favourite with the tabloids and even the mainstream press,” explains Richard Gere during a recent interview in New York. Gere, now 57, was in his early 20s when that press release was sent out. “Even a lot of younger people knew who he was. No one could escape all the constant headlines of him supposedly in hiding, becoming a hermit and travelling incognito all the time. People wanted to know what was up with the guy.”
That’s exactly what the folks at McGraw-Hill were banking on.
|
Richard Gere as Clifford Irving in
The Hoax
|
A writer named Clifford Irving had handed them a trio of letters in which Hughes claimed he wanted to write his memoir to clear up any misconceptions about of his life. It was also expected that the book would be a kiss-and-tell about his affairs with iconic actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Hughes had only one stipulation. Irving — who said he was in contact with the recluse because Hughes was a fan of one of his books — would have to ghostwrite the autobiography.
Hughes agreed that, through a series of taped, in-person interviews with Irving, he would recall his entire life in return for $750,000 (U.S.), $100,000 of which would go to Irving. (During negotiations, Irving also asked that his journalist friend Dick Suskind be hired on as a fact checker.)
While McGraw-Hill initially balked at the steep price, handwriting experts proved the skeptics wrong by authenticating Hughes’ signatures on the letters and contracts, and the publishers agreed, figuring they would make a mint on what should be the best-selling autobiography of the century.
|
But there was one tiny secret that Irving had kept to himself.
“It was completely bogus, probably the biggest scam anyone has ever tried to pull off, and no one wanted to or had the brains to figure it out,” explains Gere, who plays Irving in The Hoax, director Lasse Hallström’s take on the incident.
“You can call it my Buddhist beliefs or whatever you want, but whatever goes around, comes around. And that’s just what happened. The more I found out about him, I learned he was a very complex and confident man, and he was pretty sure he was going to pull it off. He just wasn’t counting on the one most unlikely thing to happen to prove it false. Fate came calling.”
Actually, it was Hughes.
After remaining out of sight for more than 14 years, not just to the media, but to employees, family members and what few friends he still had, Howard Hughes set up a telephone conference call with seven handpicked journalists. He told them he knew nothing about the book and had absolutely no idea who Clifford Irving was. The entire interview was televised.
Yet, even as Hughes proclaimed the book and Irving a hoax, the writer stood his ground, even going on 60 Minutes to insist that the project was genuine. But when McGraw-Hill refused to publish the book, Irving, his wife Edith Irving (who had cashed the $750,000 worth of cheques that had been made out to H.R. Hughes) and Suskind confessed to the fraud.
The trio was charged with a total of 14 criminal offenses, including grand larceny, perjury and conspiracy, possession of forged documents, intent to defraud and mail fraud. Their trials made front-page news in major dailies across North America.
Unintentionally, Clifford Irving had become a media star.
“Usually, I just try to create a character from within,” explains Gere, grabbing a bottle of mineral water from a table in his Big Apple hotel. “Some prosthetics and too much makeup can be a distraction, but since Clifford Irving has continued to be a media figure since the Howard Hughes fiasco, I felt like I should at least try to look a little like him.” So Gere permed his hair, shaved back his hairline and wore a prosthetic nose.
Edith Irving (played here by Marcia Gay Harden) would do two months in jail, and Suskind (Alfred Molina) did five months. But Irving ended up with considerably more time in the slammer, 17 months to be exact. The upside was that he was finally able write his book about Howard Hughes, The Hoax, which chronicles the events of the scam and was the basis for this film’s screenplay.
“Expect a lot of action,” says Gere. “I would guess we improvised a third of the movie, maybe more, but we also had a very good script to start from. Lasse would just say, ‘Okay, let’s now shake it up and just improvise a whole different thing and make it rock.’”
After a week spent filming in Puerto Rico (a stand-in for the Bahamas), the better part of The Hoax was filmed in New York City and Upstate New York, another reason Gere was enticed to make the film. With wife Carey Lowell (a Law & Order alumnus), their seven-year-old son, Homer, and Lowell’s 17-year-old daughter, Hannah, from a previous marriage, Gere is a full-fledged family man who tries to work as close to home as possible.
“I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll make a decision to do a movie based on how long we will be apart, so, certainly, the location is an influence,” he says. “It doesn’t always matter when you film in places like Toronto or New York, but if I have to go to Europe for a long time, I probably will turn down the project.”
Unlike most parents, Gere hopes his children don’t follow in his footsteps. “I don’t know anyone who’s an actor that would ever want their kids to act,” he says with a heavy sigh. “That’s because there’s one, maybe half-a-percent of actors that actually work. There’s such an enormous amount of rejection from the beginning, but it doesn’t stop. There’s an enormous amount of focus on external factors, and none of these things are particularly healthy for anyone.”
“I think that there are healthier ways for people to live,” he continues. “The cliché is true. If there’s anything else that you can do besides acting, do that. If this is all you can do and you’re totally focused on it, then great. Fine. My stepdaughter, for instance, is totally focused on this. There’s no way of dissuading her from this. There is no way. This is where she’s going, and that’s fine. She does the school plays, does her voice lessons…and that’s that. That came from her even with all the dissuading, with all of the ‘Please don’t do this. Don’t you want to be something else?’ ‘No, this is it.’ So that, you can’t argue with.”
Earl Dittman is an entertainment writer based in Houston, Texas.