Noah Dietrich

Noah Dietrich (February 28, 1889 – February 15, 1982) was an American businessman, who was the chief executive officer of the Howard Hughes business empire from 1925 to 1957. He graduated from Janesville High School in 1906, married in 1910, and became a bank cashier in Maxwell, New Mexico, for the next six months. They then moved to Los Angeles, where he became an auditor for the Los Angeles Suburban Land Co., and then the Janass Investment Co. In 1917, he became an assistant comptroller for Edward L. Doheny Oil companies in New York City. Then Dietrich, along with his family now consisting of his wife and two daughters, decided to move back to Los Angeles, where he worked for the CPA firm of Haskins and Sells, which later merged into what is now Deloitte. There he passed the California Board of Accountancy exam in 1923.

Career "Noah Can Do It" In November 1925, at the age of 36, Dietrich met 19-year-old Hughes, who had gained control of Hughes Tool Company after buying out the other family heirs. Started by his father, Howard R. Hughes, Sr., Hughes Tool Company – or Toolco – manufactured oil drilling equipment, especially the multiple-edge, revolving-teeth roller cutter drill bits the elder Hughes invented. 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." When he later wrote his own memoir, The Hoax, Irving corroborated the hypothesis posited by the Time article, writing that he indeed obtained and made a copy of a draft of Dietrich's manuscript, which he then used as source material for his fabricated Hughes autobiography.

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.

Death On February 15, 1982, Dietrich died of heart failure in a hospital in Palm Springs, California. He was just thirteen days short of his ninety-third birthday. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.

TV/movie adaptations Noah Dietrich has been portrayed within several adaptations: Ed Flanders portrayed Dietrich alongside Tommy Lee Jones as Hughes in the 1977 mini-series The Amazing Howard Hughes. Released one year after Hughes' death, Dietrich's role is highlighted from his commencement with Hughes as Accountant, his subsequent contribution in restructuring Hughes Empire, and his later departure. Eli Wallach portrayed Dietrich in the 2006 film The Hoax, about author Clifford Irving's faked Howard Hughes autobiography. John C. Reilly portrayed Dietrich alongside Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes in the 2004 film The Aviator. A criticism of this adaptation was that it downplayed the role Dietrich played in assisting Hughes in amassing his fortune. Martin Sheen portrayed Dietrich in the 2016 film Rules Don't Apply. As mentioned in this article, there was a time when no one knew where recluse Howard Hughes was, while Noah Dietrich was in charge of the various Hughes enterprises. The film Diamonds Are Forever makes reference to that, with Charles Gray playing a character running the missing billionaire from the aerospace industry.