In the last part of his life, when he began to buy into Las Vegas and surround himself by what the press called "the Mormon Mafia," Hughes became outspoken and profoundly eccentric, a will-o'-the- wisp who vanished from sight for months at a time. He was reputed to be so fearful of germs that he walked around in Kleenex boxes instead of shoes. In seclusion, it was said, he had grown eight-inch fingernails and toenails.

When a California court levied a judgment of $137 million for his refusal to appear to defend against a stockholders' lawsuit, Hughes abandoned his industrial empire, fled from the USA, and fled into hiding on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

Now, the McGraw-Hill Book Co. claimed, Hughes had struck a deal with writer Clifford Irving, an expatriate novelist living on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. The hitherto reclusive billionaire had met clandestinely with Irving in Mexico and the Bahamas, in order to tell the 40-year-old author the true story of his life.

"This must go down in history," he said. "I only wish I were still in the movie business, because I don't remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be. I don't know what's in [the autobiography]. I don't know [Clifford Irving]."

McGraw-Hill, Irving, and Life, which had bought serialization rights, were not fazed by the denials. Clutching a bulky manuscript annotated with hundreds of Hughes' alleged handwritten comments, the author appeared on 60 Minutes after the 1972 Super Bowl to tell Mike Wallace: "For better or for worse, I think I know Howard better than any man alive. The autobiography is genuine."

Mike Wallace had read the manuscript; he believe that Irving was telling the truth?

For months the debate was front-page news, often eclipsing the Vietnam War. Publishers Weekly quoted a McGraw-Hill spokesperson: "No one who has read [the autobiography] can doubt its integrity." Some said that revelatory material in the book might topple the Republican administration. Albert Leventhal, editor-in-chief of McGraw-Hill, chiding the idea that the autobiography was not authentic, announced that "We who have had the privilege of reading the manuscript know that it would take a Shakespeare to invent such a work."

Veteran Time reporter Frank McCulloch said, "I've covered Howard Hughes for twenty years, and having read the autobiography there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it could only have come from him. Howard has to deny its authenticity because his lawyers have told him he's gone too far in his revelations about the Nixon bribes."

During that time, the book was to have an unprecedented first printing of 400,000 copies. Book-of-the-Month Club paid their highest price in history for the publishing rights. But the book was never published.

Yet by the end of January 1972 Clifford Irving did an about-face, stunning his army of supporters with a confession that the autobiography was a hoax. His Swiss wife, Edith, had traveled under the false passport of Helga Hughes to cash the publisher's checks in Zurich. "I never met Howard Hughes," Irving now said. "It was a caper, nothing more." The book had resulted from a combination of careful research and daring imagination; when he wrote it he was off traveling in Mexico with his mistress, Danish baroness and singer Nina van Pallandt, who later betrayed him to the U.S. authorities.

Amid massive worldwide publicity, Irving was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison only two months after he had appeared on the cover of  Time. His co-author and researcher, Richard Suskind, was sent to prison in New York State. Edith Irving returned voluntarily to Switzerland, where she served one year for cashing the checks.

Los Angeles Times book critic Robert Kirsch had read the manuscript. Kirsch wrote: "[Irving] weaves the story so skillfully that it's almost impossible to tell where fact leaves off and fiction begins, if indeed such a distinction can be made. It's a hypnotizing narrative, witty and wickedly outspoken, with poignant insights about male sexuality. It's also the best primer around on how to become a billionaire—a study of money's power to corrupt absolutely. Whether genuine or a hoax, it's a crime not to publish it."

More and more pundits began to say that the Republican administration could not afford publication of the autobiography because it revealed details of an alleged $405,000 bribe from Howard Hughes to Richard Nixon.

In his 1985 biography, Citizen Hughes, Michael Drosnin wrote:

"The account of the Hughes-Nixon dealings in Irving's book was quoted in an unpublished Senate Watergate Committee report. H.R. Haldeman started getting FBI reports on the Irving affair directly from J. Edgar Hoover, and in early 1972 the White House managed to obtain a copy of the still-secret manuscript from a source at McGraw-Hill ... 

"Nixon read at least a summary of Irving's account. It came as quite a shock. The $400,000 figure [which Irving had only guessed at] was probably not far off the mark." The secret figure was so close to fact, John Ehrlichman later suggested, that the Hunt-Liddy team was sent to burglarize National Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate in order to discover what Irving might have told the Democrats about the Hughes-Nixon loans. The infamous 17-minute ``gap" in the Nixon White House tapes allegedly dealt with that specific subject.

In 1976, aboard a private jet flying from Acapulco to Houston, Howard Hughes died under what, at the least, were bizarre circumstances. Newspaper reports claimed that he had become a codeine and Valium addict who weighted only ninety pounds.

Until last year the manuscript of the Autobiography reposed in a carton that Clifford Irving carried with him wherever he moved: to prison camp in Pennsylvania, to the shores of East Hampton, to a medieval village in France, to the ski slopes of Aspen, and to the mountains of Mexico. The International Herald Tribune called it "the most famous unpublished book of the 20th century."

When Irving first announced that he might present the text to the world, Rosemont Corporation, an entity controlled by the Hughes empire, sued to prevent publication. The Appellate Division of the New York State courts ruled in favor of the author's right to publish it.

After what amounts to a virtual 27-year publishing ban on the manuscript, The Autobiography of Howard Hughes is at last being made public.

If Howard Hughes didn't dictate it, as Irving first claimed, why should it be published?

Here is one answer.

In 1971 before they heard the book was a hoax—Book-of-the-Month Club called The Autobiography of Howard Hughes "the most important document in American literature published in forty years."

And in a recent interview, Clifford Irving said: "I had access to the secret files of Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times. I dug up unpublished memoirs and private tape recordings of conversations with Hughes. I interviewed men and women who knew Hughes intimately and had never been willing speak to anyone about him. I grew to understand the man. The truth of a life is elusive and always subjective. The novelist is a kind of channeler—he can often get deeper into the subject than the historian, especially when the subject is a reclusive phantom like Howard Hughes. He was a tremendous force in 20th-century American technology and finance. His views are raw, powerful. His revelations are stunning. His life was a modern myth."