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Vittorio Mussolini examined the writing and said it was his father's. An expert from Switzerland's Lausanne University conducted chemical tests, compared the diaries with Mussolini's known handwriting and found the discovery authentic. "Thirty volumes of manuscript cannot be the work of a forger, but of a genius," he said. "You can falsify a few lines or even pages, but not a series of diaries."
They would have made good reading. Written in school exercise books, they contained such sensational Mussolini observations as "Hitler is mad! Our ideas are diametrically opposed." Before anyone bought the diaries, however, Italian police raided the Panvini home, found and seized all except four of them, and charged the two women with forgery and fraud. Rosa admitted that she had spent years perfecting her imitation of Mussolini's handwriting and used her skill to produce the diaries. Both women were given suspended sentences.
Wholly unaware of this background, editors of the London Sunday Times bought the remaining four volumes from the Panvinis in 1968. After paying about $71,400 for them, the newspaper learned of the hoax and aborted publication.
Rosa Panvini died in 1968. Last week Daughter Amalia, now 69, who lives alone with a score of cats, contended that she had confessed only to avoid going to prison. Neither she nor her mother had forged the diaries, she now insisted. Who had? she was asked. "Who knows?" she replied.
As a forger, Clifford Irving was something else: audacious and foolhardy enough to concoct the "autobiography" of a living person who could readily refute it, point by point, if he wished to do so. When Irving convinced McGraw-Hill in 1971 that Howard Hughes had asked him to help him write his autobiography, the New York City-born freelance writer was clearly counting on the reclusive Hughes to remain silent. Carrying out his elaborate hoax, Irving forged letters from Hughes to himself that persuaded McGraw-Hill to give Irving a $750,000 contract to produce a 230,000-word manuscript. Irving even fabricated a contract in which Hughes agreed that the money should be split between subject and writer.
LIFE bought rights to run excerpts from the impending book, but demanded verification of Hughes' assent to the project. The esteemed New York City handwriting-analysis firm of Osborn, Osborn & Osborn compared samples of Hughes' authentic writing with the Irving forgeries and declared, "The evidence that all of the writing submitted was done by the one individual is, in our opinion, irresistible, unanswerable and overwhelming."
As McGraw-Hill began to pay Irving for his work, the writer insisted that all checks be made out to "H.R. Hughes." That permitted his wife Edith, posing as "Helga R. Hughes," to deposit the checks in a Swiss bank account. Irving and a coconspirator, Richard Suskind, carefully researched Hughes' life. They gained access to a manuscript by James Phalen, who was collaborating with a former Hughes associate, Noah Dietrich. That work in progress included rich anecdotes about the eccentric multimillionaire. Thus Irving's manuscript had a solid inside-Hughes ring to it.
Too much so. Phalen