Liar, Liar.(The Hoax)(Movie review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The new movie "The Hoax" concerns the activities of the literary grifter Clifford Irving, who perpetrated the most intrepid publishing fraud of the modern era when, in the early nineteen-seventies, he sold McGraw-Hill the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, which he wrote without the assistance or the knowledge of Hughes. In the film, which was directed by Lasse Hallstrom, Richard Gere perpetrates a New York Jewish accent while portraying Irving as a comprehensively dislikable man whose motives were base, venal, and, worst of all--for Irving, at least--quotidian.

"It wasn't about the money," Irving said last week by telephone from Aspen, where he lives with his sixth wife and passes his days--he is seventy-six now--writing and "talking to my trees."

He said, "I wasn't broke....

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