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.
[11] "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 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.
"[13] 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.
He also published Sisters: The Story of Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine in 1984, about the long running feud between the sister-actresses.
[4] Higham published his autobiography, In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer's Memoir, in 2009, which was both criticized as "unashamedly self-promoting"[3] and praised as "very good"[18] and unsparing of himself.
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.
In this biography he alleged that Errol Flynn was a fascist sympathizer, who spied for the Nazis before and during World War II[20] and a bisexual who had affairs with many men.
"[21] 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.
"[22] 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.
Higham received a Prix des Créateurs from Eugène Ionesco in 1978 for his biography of Marlene Dietrich,[25] and a poetry prize.