[This first posted on March 15. CBS will re-run this episode tonight, Friday April 6] Appearing on Wednesday's (March 14) Late Show with David Letterman, actor Richard Gere declared: “We have a President right now who lies constantly and gets away with it apparently.” Gere's comment, which drew applause from the audience in Manhattan, came in response to Letterman asking Gere, who was on the show to promote The Hoax, a movie opening in April in which he stars as Clifford Irving who wrote and sold a bogus autobiography of the reclusive Howard Hughes: “Is this the kind of thing that can happen now?”
Gere also contended that “the second Watergate where they got caught actually had a lot to do with the material that's in this book, in the fake autobiography, because Clifford made up a lot of things about Hughes and Richard Nixon and they ended up being true. But Nixon was the only one that knew they were true and so the break-in was actually to find out how much the Democratic Party knew.”
Video clip (1:00): Real (1.8 MB) or Windows Media (2 MB), plus MP3 audio (350 KB)
IMDb's plot summary for The Hoax:
“In what would cause a fantastic media frenzy, Clifford Irving (Gere) sells his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a premiere publishing house in the early 1970s.”Yahoo's plot summary
:
“The writer Clifford Irving nearly pulled off one of the most audacious media scams in history, when his 'autobiography' of Howard Hughes was published. Irving claimed the book was based on in-person interviews with the reclusive billionaire, which were in fact completely bogus.”Wikipedia's page
on Clifford Irving.
A transcript of the relevant portion of the interview on the March 14 Late Show with David Letterman on CBS:
Richard Gere: “Hughes was involved with some money-laundering with Richard Nixon and Donald Nixon, which we get into in the film. But, in fact, it's pretty clear now that Watergate -- the second Watergate where they got caught -- actually had a lot to do with the material that's in this book, in the fake autobiography, because Clifford made up a lot of things about Hughes and Richard Nixon and they ended up being true. But Nixon was the only one that knew they were true and so the break-in was actually to find out how much the Democratic Party knew.”
David Letterman: “And is this the kind of thing that can happen now? Probably not.”
Gere: “We have a President right now who lies constantly and gets away with it apparently.”
[Applause]
Letterman: “But in terms of the specific fraud of selling a biography to a publishing house, that probably couldn't happen now.”
Gere: “Of course it could...”
