Elmyr de Hory: Bane of the Expert

Whenever one of us walks into an art museum, no matter the level of knowledge of the works or their creators, we enter a contract with our esthetic that what we are looking at is legitimate. The question of authenticity does not cross out minds. We assume this is true; otherwise, the entire experience has no point. It is the art buyer, assumed to be an expert, who determines authenticity, and we place our trust fully in their judgements. What happens, then, when these experts are subverted? When a master forger sells pieces by respected artists, and the pieces are deemed authentic and hang on the wall, we never know the difference. Elmyr de Hory did just this for 25 years, making his living selling forgeries, many of which still may not be identified as such.

Born in Hungary in 1906, supposedly to noble parents, Elmyr de Hory (not his real name, but this fact has been completely obscured, he went by some fifty different names throughout his life, but this was his preferred alias at the end of his life) attended art school and fell in love with painting and the history of art. During his time in school, he also developed a love for both fine living and young men. It was the latter obsession that led to his first prison sentence in a Transylvanian institution for "political dissidents." He didn't stay long and, after release was almost immediately sent to a concentration camp for the dual crime of Judaism and homosexuality. After a severe beating, Elmyr was sent to a hospital outside of the camp, from which he escaped, and fled to France where, now free, tried to make his living as a painter. While he was unsuccessful at selling his own pieces, he did discover that he had an uncanny ability to mimic the work of great artists, particularly Modigliani and Picasso and, after selling one of his drawings to a friend who took it as the real deal, Elmyr realized that if he couldn't sell an Elmyr, he certainly could sell a Picasso he just "found."

Thus begins the career of the greatest art forger of the 20th Century. From this single sale, an unknown number of great works entered the marketplace, all from his "family estate." Most were fooled, some were not. Those who knew the pieces were forgeries would call the authorities to charge him with fraud, but Elmyr was good at staying a step ahead of the law. He travelled all over the US and South America, fooling experts everywhere, paid handsomely for his work. But, by the mid 1950s, it seemed that the jig was up. When the police got too close, he fled to Mexico City, where he was promptly jailed under suspicion of murder. The police extorted money from him, then his lawyer did the same. Elmyr was able to pay him off with a forgery, and returned to the US. Things got much tougher for him at this point. Because of the quantities of fakes he was able to sell, his method of forgery became identifiable, and sales dwindled. He began selling faked lithographs door-to-door, earning just enough to make ends meet, but was spiralling into a deep depression. He tried killing himself but, failing this, moved to Miami, where he met Fernand Legros, an art dealer who knew Elmyr's game and agreed to deal his work for a 40% cut. Elmyr was always happy to have others market the paintings; as time passed, and he became known, he got more and more skittish about approaching dealers himself. Unfortunately, another of Elmyr's traits was that he was a total sap, falling for any lies anybody would tell him. Legros took a much larger cut of the profits, which were grand, and gave Elmyr enough money to live, but not so much that he wasn't hungry.

Eventually, the years of running made his work suffer and he tired of the game. The authorities finally caught up with Elmyr while in Ibiza and, while they never charged him with forgery (nobody could ever prove that he actually signed any of the paintings he made), in Spain he was jailed once again in 1968 for homosexuality. He spent only two months in prison, but was exiled from Spanish soil. A year later, he did return to Ibiza, where he met aspiring writer and future faker Clifford Irving. Elmyr told his story to Irving, who wrote the account in his book Fake! Most of what we know of Elmyr comes from this book, which is of dubious authenticity in its own right. What it did do, however, is raise Elmyr to celebrity status and allow him the opportunity to expound on his disdain for experts, who he'd fooled for most of his life. By now, Elmyr tried his hand, once again, at selling his own original work but it, as it always had, sold enemically and, moreover, he was not out of the woods with the authorities. While the French government was trying to extradite him on fraud charges, Elmyr finally succeeded at what he failed at so many years ago. On December 11, 1976, Elmyr's bodyguard (he had many delusions of people trying to murder him) announced that Elmyr had overdosed on sleeping pills and was dead, never to stand trial for the countless forgeries he had committed, many of which hang in museums today, undetected.

Elmyr states in F for Fake, Orson Welles' film on fakery, that "if it hangs in the museum long enough, does it not become art?" If even experts are fools, then nobody knows anything and our faith in the hundreds of years of art that we love and canonize are no longer legitimate. Which of my favorite paintings are forgeries? Much of what Elmyr said was designed to help justify what he was doing for himself, but these statements give add just enough doubt to make me think twice about genius. Looking at a Picasso, a Matisse, a Modigliani, a Renoir, is this work actually by these artists? Are they Elmyr's, or some other forger yet unidentified? The greater question becomes whether or not this matters to our cultural enrichment through art, and I remain torn.

A few examples of famous Elmyr forgeries

Film Review--The Hoax

Without rehashing the crazy plot of The Hoax, the new film from Lasse Hallstrom, I will simply say that the story of Clifford Irving’s elaborate hoax on the publishing world could not be more entertainingly told. Is it accurate to the actual events? Who knows. Because the screenplay by William Wheeler is based directly (with cinematic liberty) off of Irving’s own account of the situation, the facts are untrustworthy. If I didn’t already know the story as fact, there is no way I’d believe it as fiction. Without doubt, I would mock the many plot twists that have no basis in any reality I’ve experienced. The audacity and lack of conscience that Irving shows to make all this happen is staggering. Anybody giving any credence to the “factual” story here is crazy. The only people who could possibly lend insight died long ago. All except Irving, who’s clearly pretty good at sticking to the yarns he spins. I often feel that the “based on true events” information at the beginnings of “historical” films add undue expectations and detract from a movie’s primary objective: to entertain. The Hoax’s claims to facts are so spurious that the title card saying it seems like a joke. But it’s just this melding of fact and fiction that gives the movie its charm. Some of the creative license gives the movie a Hollywood feel, but to good results. At all points, it’s still a comic thriller about a book, so the extravagances can only take it so far.

What does take The Hoax to another level, however, is the performances. I will admit that this is the first time I’ve ever gone out to see a movie starring Richard Gere, not caring much for his leading man type, but his performance here is extraordinary. With a perm, a fake nose, and a damn good Howard Hughes impersonation, Gere is as believable as anyone could be as Irving. Playing a man half his age, he gives a sense of humanity to a character, otherwise, entirely reprehensible. He cheats on his wife and lies to his best friend with the same ruthless believability that he brings to his agent and to the head of McGraw-Hill to whom he sells the hoax. Yet those closest to him, those who have seen the origins of his lies, agree to believe what he says to them. For some reason, everybody has faith in the man, no matter how slimy he seems. Even the audience wants to believe in Gere’s Irving, no matter what we see. He brings humor and strength of humanity to Irving; it is a surprising portrayal.

It’s certainly not a one-man show, however. Alfred Molina is as good as I’ve ever seen him as Richard Suskin, Irving’s friend and coconspirator, who provides much of the comic relief and serves as the moral compass of the film. [On a side note, Clifford Irving’s main complaint about the script of this film was how they handled Suskin, who he feels was turned into a blithering idiot instead of the literary mind that he really was. Indeed, Suskin was complicit in the act, and I have a hard time believing that he was much of a moral compass in Irving’s life.] While Gere and Molina work very well together both as a comic and dramatic duo, I do wish that they’d spent more time with some of the side characters which often are the real life of the film. I especially wish they’d spent more time with Marcia Gay Harden as Irving’s wife Edith but unfortunately, much like Pollack, in which she plays the same essential character, is more the foil for the hero’s actions than a character unto herself. She’s a very good actress and does the most with the material given, but the motivations for why she commits the crimes for this man are entirely unclear and the story suffers for it. Additionally, look for Eli Wallach as Noah Dietrich, Hughes’ former associate. He is hilarious, as funny as I’ve ever seen him in a scene that plays like it might come out of a Coen Brothers’ film.

Overall, The Hoax is an excellent production, and the best thing Hallstrom has directed since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Veteran period film cinematographer Oliver Stapleton’s photography and Carter Burwell’s excellent score add an overarching sense of paranoia to an already tense situation and helps to establish an urgency of political intrigue. On every level, it is an enjoyable and entertaining film, one that does not take itself too seriously while, at the same time, offers both fantastic performances and a substantial story. That is a tough line to tow, but The Hoax pulls it off.

Clifford Irving: America Seduced By the Absurd

Howard Hughes may be the first figure in US history famous simply for being famous. Outside of having been born into a massive fortune and a few successful business ventures, mostly family supported, there wasn't a whole lot that he did that would give him the renown that the country placed upon him in the middle portion of the 20th Century. Sure, he had some very high-profile girlfriends, he funded some poor but reasonably successful films, and he had crazy schemes like the "Spruce Goose" Hercules aircraft. None of this warrants the fervor that overcame the nation when Hughes went nuts and retreated to his various hotels around the world, never to appear in public again. If Paris Hilton goes mad and retreats to daddy's hotels for the remainder of her days, will we go through the same withdrawls? I sure hope not.

Through these clouds of confusion surrounding the billionaire comes a young writer named Clifford Irving. Irving had a few critically acclaimed novels, but was struggling with popular sales. While travelling in the late '60s, Irving became acquainted with art forger Elmyr de Hory, about whom he wrote Fake! in 1969 which was, ironically, the last "true" thing he would write for many years (Irving, and Elmyr are also the main subjects of Welles' F for Fake). That next year, while on his way to Ibiza where he'd settled, he ran into fellow author Dick Suskind and the two conceived of a plan to fake an authorized biography of Howard Hughes, who had beat back all attempts to document his life in print. With seemingly nothing to go on except the outrageous claim that he'd been approached by Hughes himself, as an admirer of Fake!, to assist in writing his memoirs, publisher McGraw-Hill brought him to New York for a conference. There he produced three signed letters by "Hughes" which confirmed Irving's statements. How the Hughes forgeries came to pass is unclear, maybe they are genuine Elmyr de Horys, but McGraw-Hill believed them, in any case, and paid out a $500,000 advance on the book. Now that Irving and Suskind had the money and the publisher, all they needed was information on Hughes, which had proven absolutely impossible for everybody who had previously tried. Then, in an act of serendipity that should be too good to be true, Irving met with an old friend of his, Stanley Meyer. Meyer just so happened to be on the lookout for somebody to help rewrite his colleague, James Phelan's biography of Howard Hughes, as told by Noah Dietrich, Hughes' former accountant. While Irving had no interest in helping Meyer, he did have interest in what the text contained, so he agreed to "help" and used this manuscript to create a wealth of detail that convinced everybody who saw it of it's indisputable authenticity.

McGraw-Hill was thrilled with what Irving presented to them and, in collaboration with Life Magazine, who would publish excerpts from the book in the weeks leading up to release, announced that Howard Hughes' autobiography would soon be in the marketplace. The book was likely going to have been a massive success, with the public's interest in the recluse growing all the time, but as soon as the announcement was made, questions began to arise about its veracity and close associates of Hughes flatly denied their employer's participation. Even while his story was unravelling, though, Irving was able to continue to convince the publisher that the deniers were the real frauds. McGraw-Hill still held out hope for it after the Phelan manuscript came to life. Irving denied the fraud on national television in an interview with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes, passed lie detector tests, remained unphased when Hughes himself finally came out of the woodwork to appear on TV (well, at least his voice appeared, broadcast through a speaker and filmed), and would continue to deny the fraud until they appeared before the grand jury. In addition to the falsified documents from Hughes, Irving had directed about $750,000 that was supposed to go to Hughes to a bank account, under the name H.R. Hughes. The money was then withdrawn by a Helga R. Hughes (Irving's then wife Edith). Irving would go on to spend two years in prison for the fraud.

However, this is the writing game. Just because you con the highest levels of the publishing industry out of hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn't mean you'll be blacklisted from publication. On the contrary, after his sentence, Irving has published several novels, has become much more successful, and will now be immortalized by Richard Gere. Irving has recently come out against the film, saying that it is mostly made up; a laughable statement from Irving since everything in his life is based on mounds of lies. As a con artist, though, he clearly realizes that everything negative he has to say about the movie (which he calls "a hoax about a hoax") will help sell the film and every person who sees the film is one more potential buyer of his books. It's the perfect con, 35 years in the making, where everyone comes out smelling like roses and Irving goes home laughing all the way to the bank.

The original Time article from 2/21/72 in which the magazine declared Irving, on the cover, as "Con Man of the Year"

Clifford Irving's website, where he has more information from his own perspective

CBS News revisits the story in 2000 with then current comments from Irving

Carlos Castaneda, Cons & Hoaxes

I've been excited to see The Hoax, the new film by Lasse Hallstrom on conman/writer Clifford Irving, who I was first exposed to through Orson Welles' fantastic fake of a documentary, F for Fake. In looking for information of the film, in wide release tomorrow, I ran across this article on Carlos Castaneda and his own series of literary hoaxes that have taken on a life of their own. To lead in my viewing of the movie this weekend (most likely), I will put up a short series of posts about some fairly modern hoaxes that are particularly good.

I can't really say anything about Castaneda that isn't detailed in the article, but I do find it interesting how the idea of using lies to get to a supposed "greater truth" keeps coming back. We've seen it recently with James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces, with Werner Herzog's idea of the "ecstatic truth" in his documentaries, most visibly Grizzly Man, and with our own government's excuses for Saddam Hussein's supposed involvment in 9/11. While I am not discussing the merits of said theory, I will say that, in all of the above cases, the true reasons for the lies are more about money, fame, and special interest than about greater truths. What interests me about Castaneda is not the validity of his books which, despite the fact that Simon & Schuster still classifies his work as non-fiction, are absurd, but the fact that you can still pay $100 and go to a seminar to learn to pass ethereal energy through your body led by a group of women called "The Witches" who disappeared nearly ten years ago but who attend every seminar. Can I see them? No I cannot. This is because they "want this dream to take wing" and they hang out backstage instead. Between the above aricle and the website of Cleargreen, the corporation that puts it all on, all that remains to be said is that if you can say something with enough conviction, you'll get people to pay you for it.