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

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. I did what I did for the adventure." The filmmakers, he explained, "couldn't handle the idea of a forty-year-old guy who loves adventure and who doesn't think too clearly about what he's doing."

Irving's decision to criticize the movie for falsifying the history of his lying suggests a capacity for chutzpah rarely found even among the growing cohort of Irving manques: neither James Frey nor Stephen Glass, for instance, appears to have complained so vociferously about his portrayal in the media.

"Why don't I have the right to talk about accuracy?" Irving asked. "Essentially, the filmmakers are telling the public, 'We have the right to lie to you because he lied to you.' "

Irving originally agreed to cooperate with the project but has lately turned on it. "The guy in the movie is such a sleazebag," he said. "I'd shoot myself if I were that guy." He said that he admires Richard Gere but would have preferred to be played by Howard Stern.

He is upset by what he sees as the great number of errors in "The Hoax." His writing partner, Dick Suskind, is portrayed as a coward and a sap, and he was neither, Irving said. He himself is portrayed as a failing writer who is fired by his publisher after turning in a Philip Roth knockoff called "Rudnick's Problem," when in fact he was a mildly successful author in McGraw-Hill's good graces. Both his wife and his mistress, he went on, are portrayed in inaccurate and unbecoming ways: "Edith, my then wife, a woman of great zest, is portrayed as a dull hausfrau, and Nina van Pallandt, my Danish mistress, as barely one level above a New York ...