Noah Dietrich - Personal Life

Personal Life

Dietrich was married three times (he held Hughes' demands on his time responsible for the collapse of his first marriage) and had five children and two stepchildren, including Peter Fonda's first wife Susan Brewer.

Toward the end of Howard, Dietrich wrote that, no matter how their relationship ended, he never regretted his career with Hughes. "I much preferred the exciting life," he said. He said he wrote the book to leave his children and grandchildren a record of the role he played in the Hughes business empire, in part to show them what can happen when wealth is misused or abused. But he also admitted he'd have been tempted if Hughes should have called him one more time in the dead of night pleading for help: "And do you know what I'd say? 'OK, Howard, tell me what it is, now'."

Time revealed in 1972 that a copy of an early draft of the manuscript for Dietrich's memoir, ghost-written by journalist James Phelan, may have fallen into Clifford Irving's hands, and identified the draft as a key element in Irving's being able to convince publishers and others that his hoax Hughes autobiography was genuine. "The instances of duplicated material are numerous," the magazine wrote. "In some cases, the books are virtually identical in detail. In others, they are substantively the same, although the Irving manuscript has been reworded and otherwise disguised. One curiosity: the writing in the Irving manuscript is much better than that in the hastily drafted Phelan version. It is ironic that Irving may be more convincing as a forger than as an author in his own right — just as Elmyr de Hory, Irving's Ibiza friend and the main character in his book Fake!, is much better at doing Picassos and Modiglianis than he is at doing De Horys."

Dietrich and Phelan eventually settled for $40,000 after Dietrich became dissatisfied with Phelan's work. He then turned the project over to another journalist, Bob Thomas, who finished the Dietrich memoir within six weeks.