The Law and the Irvings

The hoax, which had once seemed a thing of dazzling design and theatrical performance, thumped toward an anticlimax. Last week Clifford Irving's elaborate production, the false autobiography of Howard Hughes, was replayed in lumpy, legalistic prose as two grand juries in New York indicted Irving and his wife Edith. One of the juries also indicted their burly collaborator, Writer-Researcher Richard Suskind.

In the indictments, the New York and federal grand juries agreed on the essentials: Irving and Suskind concocted the Hughes "autobiography" 1) through extensive research into material already published about the billionaire, 2) from a pilfered manuscript written by Journalist James Phelan for an old Hughes associate, Noah Dietrich (TIME, Feb. 21), and 3) from their own imaginations. In doing their research, Irving and Suskind visited newspaper and magazine libraries in Las Vegas, Houston, New York and other cities, including that of LIFE, which had a contract to publish excerpts from the manuscript. Thus steeped in Hughesian lore, Suskind and Irving took turns pretending to be Howard Hughes, each alternately being interviewed by the other, to produce the question-and-answer dialogue form that the book eventually took. They apparently thought they could get by with the hoax because they suspected Hughes might either be dead or "not of sufficient mental or physical capacity to denounce" the book.

One of the most persistently intriguing puzzles was who had penned the expert Hughes forgeries that persuaded McGraw-Hill and some handwriting authorities that the autobiography was legitimate. The government answer: Irving himself. The indictments claim that Irving modeled his forgeries on magazine photographs showing lines from a handwritten Hughes letter. During a recent long session with federal authorities, Irving astonished the prosecutors by dashing off a near-perfect specimen of Hughes' handwriting.

Doubts. The indictments left many questions unanswered and many people unsatisfied. Hughes' agents are convinced that more conspirators were involved--including possibly someone who taught Irving how to forge so expertly and some former Hughes associates who may have supplied additional information for the book. Thus, no matter how the present legal case is resolved, Hughes' investigators will probably continue working on the remaining mysteries.

The Government's files are probably closed for the present. The chargees against the three defendants--including grand larceny, conspiracy, perjury and mail fraud--could theoretically result in sentences of more than 100 years in prison for each defendant. But if the three plead guilty this week and can return the $750,000 they extracted from McGraw-Hill, there is a chance that Irving may receive a light sentence and serve as little as six months, with Edith getting a suspended sentence in return for cooperation with authorities and Suskind being sent up for a short stretch in a state prison.

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