In 1972, Clifford Irving, a low selling and high spending author, almost pulled off the publishing hoax of the century. As a new film called The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, documents, through forgery, plagiarism, and falsifying legal documents, Irving was able to convince a major American publishing house that he had the autobiography of America’s richest, strangest, and most elusive man — the Texan billionaire Howard Hughes.

As the film shows, Irving was counting on Hughes’s notorious oddness and reclusive nature for the success of his scam. The former aviation pioneer and movie mogul had not been seen in public for 15 years. He moved from state to state to avoid paying taxes and it was rumoured that behind the darkened windows of his hotel suite he shunned all physical contact, wore Kleenex boxes as shoes, let his hair and fingernails grow to grotesque lengths, and drank his own urine. Such a man, Irving reasoned, would not want to make an appearance in public, even to denounce an autobiography he hadn’t written. But Hughes did make a return to public life and he did reveal Irving’s book as a fraud. The manner of that return, a bizarre press conference that is only glimpsed fleetingly on a TV set in the film is perhaps the most compelling episode of the entire affair.

Those at the top of the Hughes organization knew that the Irving book was an elaborate hoax from the moment that McGraw-Hill announced that they would publish it. They also knew that they would have a hard time proving it. They issued denials that Hughes had written any book but Irving countered by insisting that he had dealt with the billionaire directly and he claimed to have letters from Hughes to back his position up. A public appearance by Hughes to deny authorship was needed and therein lay the problem. When some in the media first mooted the idea of staging some kind of press conference Hughes protested, “I will not go on television. I don’t want anybody to see the state I’m in.”

Howard Hughes had been a drug addict for decades. As the journalists Donald Bartlett and James Steele reveal in their book, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes, by 1972 he was shooting up massive amounts of codeine, regularly taking doses thought lethal. He had been hooked since a 1946 near fatal plane crash. His doctor had prescribed morphine to ease the pain of what were assumed to be his final hours. But Hughes recovered and the doctor substituted codeine. As the years passed Howard demanded ever larger doses and to meet this demand an illegal supply operation came into being based on getting prescriptions filled under assumed names at dozens of Los Angeles drugstores.