Charles Higham (pronounced HYE-um; 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 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. Higham published two books of verse in England, before moving to Sydney, Australia in 1954. There he became a journalist and critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and, later, the Sydney Daily Mirror. Higham became literary editor of The Bulletin, the country's leading weekly, in 1964, and published three more collections of verse.
In the 1960s, Higham compiled a number of horror anthologies for the Australian publisher Horwitz. The majority of stories in the anthologies were by writers from the US and UK, with many being reprinted from Montague Summers's 1936 anthology The Grimoire and Other Supernatural Stories. Australian writer Terry Dowling acknowledged the influence of Higham's horror anthologies on his own writing in an essay published in Stephen Jones Horror: Another 100 Best Books.
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. Friends of Welles, in particular Peter Bogdanovich, criticized this thesis; some writers have found it insightful. "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.
Higham's first bestseller was Kate (1975), the first authorized biography of Katharine Hepburn. This success was followed by Bette: the Life of Bette Davis, a biography of Lucille Ball, and The Duchess of Windsor (1988, 2005). In the book about Wallis Simpson (later the Duchess of Windsor), he claimed she had learned unusual sexual practices in the brothels of Peking and was the lover of Count Ciano and Ribbentrop. Journalist Paul Foot described Higham's biography of Wallis Simpson in the London Review of Books as "an important book. But there is a great deal wrong with it. He has provided his critics with plenty of hostages. Again and again, he quotes the most scurrilous and unlikely gossip, without proving it."
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. Barbara Shulgasser, in The New York Times wrote that the book's "obsession with Grant's sexuality is more a reflection of the authors' keen perception of what sells books than of any allegiance to the dictates of ethical journalism."