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After spending 17½ months in jail for trying to pass off a fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes as the genuine article, Author Clifford Irving, 44, is now having trouble balancing other books as well. Citing overwhelming financial obligations, Irving last week filed suit for bankruptcy in New York. His total assets, he says, are a $35 typewriter, a $50 tape recorder, a $75 camera and a $100 Mercury convertible named Barbara. Liabilities: $2,900 in hotel bills, $140,000 owed to the Internal Revenue Service, $235,000 in overdue legal fees, a $344,899 debt to McGraw-Hill for advance payments and a judgment against Irving for the Hughes story, and a $55 million claim by Art Dealer Fernand Legros, who asserts that Irving libled him in his book Fake! "This really all came about as a result of the Hughes affair," says Irving. "That man—I should sue him as a public nuisance."
Hoping for a triumphant fall opening on Broadway, Playwright Tennessee Williams instead suffered a swift summer closing in Boston. Williams' The Red Devil Battery Sign had David Merrick as co-producer and Anthony Quinn in the leading role as a brain-damaged mariachi. The play lasted less than three weeks before local critics turned off the lights. "Dreadful," snipped the Boston Globe of Williams' first drama since Outcry in 1973, "a flickering shadow of his former self." The Boston Herald American said the play "teeters and totters eerily between true tragedy and mawkish melodrama." Complaining that "one of the great talents of all time has been treated like an assembly-line butcher," the newly unemployed Quinn snapped: "Just say that I am more proud of being in a failure by Tennessee Williams than in a hit by a shit."