Charles Higham

Charles Higham (; 18 February 1931 – 21 April 2012) was an English author, editor and poet.

After moving to Australia in 1954, Higham began a career in journalism before moving to the United States in 1969. In the United States, he became known as a celebrity biographer, mainly of film stars, such as Katharine Hepburn and Errol Flynn. The latter book, among several during Higham's career, was criticized for fabrications. Close friends of another of his subjects, Orson Welles, in particular Peter Bogdanovich, were critical of Higham's interpretation of his career.

Early life and career Born in London, Higham was the son of former MP and advertising mogul Sir Charles Higham and his fourth wife, Josephine Janet Keuchenius Webb. Higham's parents divorced when he was three, and thereafter Charles lived with his mother. His father died four years later. After Sir Charles' death the family lived in modest circumstances during and after World War II.

Biographies Higham was a regents' professor for a short time in 1969 at UC Santa Cruz. While there he claimed to have found lost footage of It's All True, Orson Welles's uncompleted Latin American triptych of more than a quarter century before. The footage was already known to the studio archivists.

In The Films of Orson Welles (1970) and in Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985), he said that Welles suffered from a "fear of completion" that led him to abandon projects when they were nearly finished because others could then be blamed for their flaws. "It is a facile explanation," wrote Joseph McBride in 1993, "that leaves out much in the way of historical and cultural context but nevertheless contains a germ of truth." In the 1970s, he contributed freelance articles on film to The New York Times, and was a frequent guest on talk shows.

According to Higham and Roy Moseley in their biography of Cary Grant (1989), the actor was on the grounds of the home of actress Sharon Tate on the night in 1969 that she was murdered. Higham admitted in an interview that the association was "poorly documented." The book suffered from many contradictory statements. In a reference to Sophia Loren, Higham described Loren as Grant's former lover four pages after indicating they did not have a physical relationship.

After the publication of Higham's book Howard Hughes, according to Margalit Fox of The New York Times, "his assertions that Hughes had a romance with Cary Grant, was centrally involved in Watergate, offering material assistance to some of the conspirators, and quite possibly died of AIDS all raised eyebrows in the news media." Higham's Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949 and American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst From 1933 to the Present Day presented his claims about the US industry's links with Nazi Germany. He wrote in a tabloid style of investigative journalism. He also published Sisters: The Story of Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine in 1984, about the long running feud between the sister-actresses. He also wrote The Art of the American Film and a biography of Florenz Ziegfeld.

Higham also wrote Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery on the death of William Desmond Taylor and a biography of Jennie Churchill, Dark Lady: Winston Churchill's Mother and Her World (2006). and unsparing of himself.

Higham had his share of detractors. The Daily Telegraph called Higham "a much-feared and notoriously bitchy celebrity biographer whose works fell squarely in the 'unauthorised' category." The British newspaper also observed that "critics remarked on how much of his work was based on the testimony of anonymous witnesses" and that Higham repeatedly mined "the themes of fascism, closet homosexuality and sexual perversion."

Errol Flynn controversy In 1980, Higham's "most sensational work," and a bisexual who had affairs with many men. James Wolcott, writing for The New York Review of Books, described the biography's preoccupation with the subject's sex life as "keyhole-peeping porn, written by a man whose mind has turned to pulp." Members of Flynn's family unsuccessfully sued Higham and the book's publisher for libel, a claim which was dismissed on appeal in 1983 because the suit was on behalf of someone who was deceased.

Tony Thomas, in Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was (Citadel, 1990) and Buster Wiles in My Days With Errol Flynn: The Autobiography of a Stuntman (Roundtable, 1988) identified Higham's claims as fabrications, an assertion substantiated by viewing the FBI documents, which were altered – rather than quoted verbatim – by Higham. In 2000 Higham restated his claim that Flynn had been a German agent, which he said was corroborated by Anne Lane, secretary to MI5 chief Sir Percy Sillitoe from 1946 to 1951, who had been responsible for maintaining Flynn's file there (although he never saw the file, and could not even confirm its physical existence); and also by journalist Gerry Brown, who said he had been briefed by the Ministry of Defence. and a poetry prize.

Books

They Came to Australia (ed. with Alan Brissenden) (1961) Australians Abroad (ed. with Michael Wilding) (1967) The Films of Orson Welles (1970) Hollywood in the Forties (co-written with Joel Greenberg) (1970) Ziegfeld (1972) Cecil B. DeMille: A Biography of the Most Successful Film Maker of Them All (1973) The Art of the American film, 1900-1971 (1973) Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn (1976) Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography (1976) The Adventures of Conan Doyle: The Life of the Creator of Sherlock Holmes (1976) Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (1977) Celebrity Circus (1979) Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980) Bette, the Life of Bette Davis (1981) Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon (1983) with Roy Moseley,

Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949 (1983), Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine (1984) American Swastika: Americas involvement with the Nazis in WWII New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, 1985. Audrey: a Biography of Audrey Hepburn (1985) Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of An American Genius (1985) Brando: The Unauthorized Biography (1987) Cary Grant: The Lonely Heart (1989) The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (1988), (2005) Elizabeth and Philip: The Untold Story of the Queen of England and Her Prince (1991) Merchant of Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, M.G.M., and the Secret Hollywood (1993) Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (1993) Rose: The Life and Times of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1995) Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery (2004) In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir (2009)