Lies, Lies, Lies, Yeah

A number of years ago I was ready to board an airplane. I had done my share of traveling, and I anticipated the gate clerk’s questions. I set my bag on the scale and announced: “I packed my bags myself. No one unknown to me has given me anything to take on board the flight.”

The clerk paused then said, “I have to ask you anyway. Did you pack your bags yourself?”

Of course, it was all I could do to keep from answering, “No.”

Recently, when the federal government revamped airport security they realized that the questions they’d been asking for years were not really going to root out terrorists. The obvious reason? A person who actually intends to blow up an airplane is not going to tell you so just because you ask. Liars lie.

This brings me to a flaw in our legal system that has recently come to my attention. The people who designed the system were probably the same ones who set up airport security. They forgot that liars lie. When someone takes the stand, they test his veracity by asking, “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” You and I both know that a liar will answer “I do.”

I’ve been watching the drama of George Santos and wondering why his brand of dishonesty is so entertaining and funny. Santos seems to have done some shady things, and is clearly dishonest to his core, naturally, unthinkingly dishonest. He is a bit like an AI chatbot or Woody Allen’s “Zelig,” taking on the characteristics of whoever he speaks to. He is like an improvisational comedian, taking a premise and running with it. “Yes, and…” is how improv comics refer to it. “Did you go to this college?” asks the first speaker, and the improviser replies, “Yes, and I was on the volleyball team, and I injured my knees, and they still bother me, like last year when I ran the Boston Marathon.”

Santos is probably too young to remember Jon Lovitz’s Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar. Anyone who did remember drew comparisons immediately.

So of course Lovitz had to play Santos. After the comedian took on the role on The Tonight Show, Santos took to Twitter to criticize the performance. No one, apparently, thought to advise him not to pick a fight with someone whose actual profession is to come up with quick witted comebacks. “Thanks the review and advice!” Lovitz tweeted. “You’re right! I do need to step my game up! My pathological liar character can’t hold a candle to you!”

So I’ve been reflecting on why Lovtiz’s pathological liar was such a successful character to begin with and why the late night comedians are having so much fun with this particular fabulist. What I think makes Lovitz and Santos funny is not that they are liars, but that they are bad liars.

George Santos is like the kid with crumbs all over his face who says he has no idea what happened to the cookies.

Some of the criminals that I wrote about in Wilde Nights & Robber Barons produced the same sort of mirth when they were finally caught and brought to trial for fraud. When the man calling himself Etienne de Buies was asked why he had so many aliases (Steffan Bujas, Joseph Bujos, Stephan Buies, Baron Lucas, Etienne Bontze, Bnoyne, Bnys, Berg, Jean de Vreaux and Rosovsky) he claimed that it was a question of poor handwriting and politeness. When he signed in at hotels, his writing was so illegible that clerks often got it wrong, and he was too polite to correct them. This was not a lie meant to persuade anyone. It is a lie that winks at you. It says, “We both know this is not true, but I’m hoping you find me sufficiently charming that you’ll play along.” The lie asks you to join the conspiracy, to join in the fun.

And it is fun, isn’t it, to play pretend? Why should we all have to maintain these consistent identities? Why should we have to be the same person from one conversation to the next?

In my 2015 novel, Identity Theft, the character Candi meets a woman in a mental hospital who has the delusion that she is John the Baptist. This causes Candi to reflect on identity.

Most people have a sense of self that comes from inside and they project it out into the world, at least that is how Candi had always conceived of it. John had gone looking for herself out in the world. She read the Bible and discovered John the Baptist and said, “There I am. That is me.” It was like shopping for a self off the rack. Did she feel a sense of relief that she’d been reunited with her long-lost identity? Was it like Peter Pan looking for his lost shadow? How did it work? Of course, John was in no position to answer these questions.

…If they were willing to give her a social security number under that name John the Baptist and people called her John and lined up for Baptisms at a river– if they gave her a Ms. John Baptist driver’s license and everything else was exactly the same– she wouldn’t be here. Would she? If we agreed to let her be who she called herself then she would be John the Baptist. So maybe we have the problem.

A social identity is not just what you project into the world, it is an agreement between you and the world. You have a history and you can change, but only so much. You cannot declare yourself a Baron, because otherwise how would we know who to treat with deference? We can’t treat everyone like someone of importance, what would the world be like?

Eventually the novelty of George Santos’ mendacity will wear off, and hopefully he’ll leave the stage like an SNL cast member whose bit got stale. In the meantime, enjoy.

Meeting Bosie in the Uncanny Valley: My “Interview” with an AI Lord Alfred Douglas

It began when I saw a post on social media mentioning that there were now AI chatbots of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde with which users can interact. I chatted with a virtual Oscar for a bit (he was flattering about my literary career– chatbots are often quite flattering). I decided that I should try my hand at creating a Lord Alfred Douglas bot. I did not do much at all to set up the character, and my interview with this creation was quite fascinating. All of these responses came from the AI engine, I did not write or edit them. With the exception of the point where Bosie says he’s at work on a new version of “The Ballad of Reading Goal” he was surprisingly convincing. So here, for your edification, is my interview with a computer simulation of Lord Alfred Douglas. Enjoy.

So there you have it… The interview I would have done had I been able to with answers generated by AI. What are your reactions to this dialogue?

Our Fascination with Con Artists

A century before there was the Tinder Swindler, Ana Delvy or Elizabeth Holmes there was Baron von Koenig, and Count Adalbert de la Ramee and Maurice Schwabe. The period in which they operated was considered to be the golden age of the con. These figures, like their modern counterparts, made use of the fact that we are easily seduced by the trappings of success.

To the right is Rudolf Stallmann. Although he hailed from a respectable, upper middle-class family he wanted a life of glamor and adventure and decided that he would claim an aristocratic title. He became Baron von Koenig. He loved the excitement of posing. He was attracted to crime and espionage “like a drug.”

People like Stallmann realized that their marks would play along with the game because they enjoyed the status that came with being associated with gentlemen who were clearly powerful, rich and well-connected. Explanations were rarely needed, but when they were, a bit of confidence and bravado went a long way.

“An atmosphere is created by innuendo and suggestion,” said trickster Montague Noel Newton. “I never say I am a man of means, I just play the part.”

This was true when it came to getting a first class cabin on a ship on credit or when it came to seducing wealthy women– a specialty of Bela Klimm aka Count Adalbert de la Ramee, or selling a dubious business ventures, something at which Maurice Schwabe excelled.

Just as Elizabeth Holmes marketed herself more than the technology her company intended to make, men like Schwabe sold their own personalities and connections. Schwabe and Holmes both relied on “the social proof heuristic,” a fancy way of saying that when you see prominent people investing in something, you assume that it is a project you want to get involved in. Schwabe sought respected military men and people with aristocratic titles (even appropriated ones) to put their names down as investors.

In the Edwardian era, businesses were increasingly impersonal, complex and national– even international– in scope. Without personal relationships, investors relied on cues like persuasive advertisements, or aristocratic names on a slate of investors to assess the trustworthiness of an enterprise. It was hard for the public to even recognize a white-collar criminal. In the cultural imagination a “criminal” came from the “dangerous classes.” A man with a walking stick and a valet was given the benefit of the doubt, even when his financial scheme lost money for its investors. It was easy enough to chalk it up to bad luck.

In the 1937 book The Criminals We Deserve, criminologist Henry Rhodes reflected on the relationship between crime and society. “The criminal and his crimes are social phenomena,” he said. He argued that the “kind of crime committed at any particular stage of social development is an index of the social phase… Show me your crimes, and I will show you the nature of your society.”

Rhodes argued that this sort of crime appears when “The capacity to appreciate and desire better conditions is instilled without there being adequate machinery to satisfy those desires.”

The age in which Schwabe and his conspirators operated was a golden age of the confidence trickster. Perhaps rising inequality has brought us to another age of the imposter. In the Victorian era only a lucky few possessed titles of nobility. Today, when the top 1% of earners own more than the entire middle class, there is a similar temptation to use lies and cunning to claim a place among the elect.

This explains their existence, but not our fascination with them. Why do false barons traveling on ocean liners, scamming heirs to fortunes, seem glamorous to us? What, besides Matt Bomer’s insane good looks, drove audiences to follow the adventures of Neal Caffrey for six seasons? The series Suits, about a college drop out who brazened his way into a job at a top law firm ran for 9. Why did Catch Me if You Can make $352.1 million at the box office?

Incidentally, a recent podcast, Pretend, provides evidence that Frank Abagnale, the man portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio in the film, made up the adventures that his autobiography and the film dramatize. Abagnale could not have posed as a lawyer, doctor and college professor because he was in jail when these events supposedly happened.

Similarly, Maurice Schwabe’s business partner Gerald Hamilton became an anti-hero in his later years. Author Christopher Isherwood based the character of Mr. Norris from his Berlin Stories on Hamilton. Hamilton crafted his own back story. Supposedly he had spent time with Rasputin in Russia and went to prison because of political intrigue with Roger Casement. Hamilton even seemed to suggest there might have been something more between him and Casement. In fact, he never met him. The records show that Hamilton invented a romantic past to cover for his great embarrassment, being sent to jail for “gross indecency” with British soldiers.

The aforementioned Montague Noel Newton also turned his criminality into a relatively lucrative career as a writer and speaker for a time. He published his “Confessions,” which were a mixture of fact and fiction. Many of the stories in it were daring crimes that people in his orbit, but not himself, had carried out.

Hamilton and Newton were not apologetic about their crimes. Modern main-stream entertainment cleanses the story of the criminals it glamorizes by one of two methods. In the biographical films on Anna Delvy and Elizabeth Holmes, the story focuses on how they were ultimately brought to justice. In Suits, White Collar and Catch Me If You Can, the frauds are reformed and using their talents for the good guys or they are using their position to do good in the world.

Dr Tim Holmes, a lecturer in criminology at Bangor University told the BBC, “There’s still the idea that they’re a Robin Hood figure, not a criminal,” he says, adding that many films, like the Ocean’s Eleven adaptations, portray the con artist as “a rogue stealing from someone who deserves it.”

There are many theories as to why we are fascinated by confidence tricksters. The Conversation posits the con “fills us with a mix of surprise at their audacity –and glee and relief that it didn’t happen to us.” I believe it is something else. Confidence tricksters’ refusal to accept normal societal limitations shines a light on how flimsy are the signifiers that separate the rich from the poor, the glamorous from the plain, the envied from the ordinary. By following the stories of those who break the rules, we have an opportunity to imagine revolting against those boundaries ourselves, inventing our own high-status identities, and through cunning, getting away with it.

In writing Wilde Nights & Robber Barons, however, whenever I found myself falling into the trap of admiring the con artists’ audacity, something would come up to remind me of the cost, people whose lives were shattered by their encounters with these criminals. Rudolf Stallmann, for example, was physically abusive to his girlfriend, whose small savings he had taken. After forcing her to support them both by selling sex, Stallmann took on the identity of a baron and abandoned the lady with the statement that it was ridiculous that someone of her lowly station would be engaged to an aristocrat like him. Successful cons have not only cleverness but a lack of conscience.

If you are fascinated by those who put on poses and commit crimes, I invite you to read about where it all began with the confidence tricksters of the last century. Available now. You can order from your favorite local book store. Also available in the UK at Amazon UK in the U.S. via Amazon or get an autographed copy with a special Oscar Wilde bookmark directly from the author.

Lord Alfred Douglas and T.W.H. Crosland’s Monte Carlo Adventure

In 1905, T.W.H. Crosland, Lord Alfred Douglas and Freddie Manners-Sutton took a trip together to Monte Carlo. Recently, in the course of my continuing research into Maurice Schwabe and his criminal associates, I found some information that made me think about the Monte Carlo trip again. Could Schwabe’s criminal enterprise have been behind some of Crosland’s gambling woes? Crosland was a life-long gambler who went to Monte Carlo the moment he had some money to throw away and this trait would have been appealing to Schwabe.

We know about the Monte Carlo trip because it came up in a 1910 libel suit which recounted events that took place at Schwabe’s flat with the mysterious Rudolph Stallmann aka Baron von Koenig. Douglas also wrote about the trip in a special chapter that appeared in the French version of his autobiography. He did not mention whether Schwabe was with him. Although he was not shy about mentioning Schwabe’s name in court (Sutton had not mentioned it and only wrote it on a piece of paper), he became evasive when he was questioned about Schwabe’s association with the Wilde trials. This may suggest that Douglas and Schwabe were still lovers at this time.

In any case, if the Monte Carlo trip was a swindle arranged by Schwabe—as there is some reason to suspect– based on the jaunty way Douglas talks about the trip in his memoirs he did not suspect anything.

Crosland believed he had a fool-proof system to beat the house at roulette and he persuaded Douglas to give him 150 to play it. “He had a mania for laying down the law on matters which he did not understand,” Douglas told his friend Sorley Brown, “His ‘system’ and his methods of gambling where childish. I found also that such as his system was, he was quite incapable of sticking to it.”

Crosland may have been tricked into his belief that he had a winning system. In his book My Confessions, a Stallmann confederate, Montague Noel Newton, described how he conned a player into believing he had come up with a winning roulette system. He asked the player to explain his system, and as they had no roulette table, he would test it by dealing out cards one at a time which would represent the winning color, red or black. Then the player could make his calculations and figure out how much he would have won if they had been playing for real. Of course, Newton controlled the cards, and when the man made a big wager on red he would throw out a red card. If he bet big on black, a black card would come up. When the mark was pleased that he could make a fortune with his system, the swindler agreed to fund a trip to Monte Carlo. After which the overly confident mark was ripe for the picking.
If Crosland’s later court testimony is to be believed, the boys were up to no good in Monte Carlo. Sutton tried to secure the services of a young German prostitute from a woman, and was scratched when the girl turned out to be unwilling. He came back to Crosland, borrowed money from him saying “lucky at cards, unlucky in love.” Douglas had his wallet stolen, and does not seem to have reported it to the police, suggesting it was taken in compromising circumstances. The Monte Carlo trip was just the initial information-gathering gambit. It allowed the cons to see what types of temptations could be used to play up the Viscount of Canterbury’s son. (Schwabe was already well aware of Douglas’s appetites and weaknesses.) The big score was yet to come.

Shortly after this trip, Sutton was swindled by Baron von Koenig, who he had met at Schwabe’s flat. The episode is chronicled in Oscar’s Ghost.

Identity Theft: 15 Real Life Rock Star Impostors

Who wouldn’t want to be treated like a rock star? People are thrilled to see you, they ask for autographs, they buy you beer or more. The lure of rock stardom is so great that many people try to skip the whole tedious learning music part and aim straight for the top of the charts by borrowing the identity of someone already famous. Here are some real life pop star pretenders. Some are funny, some are sad, and a couple are downright creepy.

1. Faux Bono Poses for Selfies with Dreamforce Attendees

It was a beautiful day for the up-and-comers at the 2013 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco when one of the world’s most famous rock stars, Bono of U2, stopped to greet passers by and pose for pictures.  “He was INCREDIBLY nice,” wrote Scott Anderson whose picture you can see by following the link. “Asked him if I could take a photo. He smiles and takes my phone from me and takes two selfies of us together. One was even cool and arty and he took time with it. Then complimented my shirt … What a guy.” He was a cool dude. He just wasn’t Bono. The conference goers who wanted pictures with a rock star still haven’t found what they were looking for.

2. Will You See Rod Stewart on a Downtown Train?

Probably not, but you might see this guy. He is the impostor known as Rockaway Rod who gets free drinks and dinners from people who love the song “Maggie May.” Or then again, maybe it’s not. The man who claims to be the New York fixture says this is not him and that the guy in the picture is an impostor impostor.

Incidentally, have you seen the clip of the Mike Meyers comedy where a bagpipe player at a Scottish wedding does a version of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

3. Is that Lady Gaga or Just a Simulation?

A security firm claimed it was not trying to trick anyone into thinking Gaga was shopping in a Miami mall in 2011 when it sent in look-alike mega church singer Amy Evans surrounded by a team of bodyguards. “If you’ve got a team of guys standing around someone, obviously someone is going to think that they are somebody (famous),” a representative for the security firm told the Miami New Times. “Are we directly trying to achieve a crowd response to what we do? No. But if a crowd does happen to appear, then that’s great. That’s what these students have to be aware of when they become bodyguards.”

4. One of My 30 Aliases is a Member of Creed

Career criminal and con man Kevin Eckenrod (pictured left) decided he might find it easier to run a bar tab as Mark Tremonti of Creed than as an alcoholic drifter with a long rap sheet. Indeed it was, and he charged $160 in drinks to a hotel room he did not occupy. He also received medical care in a hospital as Tremonti and was invited into the home of a fan and helped himself to her credit card. He was arrested and sentenced to 25 months in jail for his rock star act.

5. You Can’t Be Everywhere At Once, Unless You’re MF Doom

If it worked for Milli Vanilli. Oh, wait.  The masked rapper MF Doom apparently figured no one would notice if he sent actors to lip sync at performances in his place. When disgruntled fans called him out on it he explained to Rolling Stone that it was really their problem if they didn’t understand conceptual art. “Everything that we do is villain style,” he said.  “Everybody has the right to get it or not get it..I tell you one thing: when you come to a Doom show, come expecting to hear music, don’t come expecting to see.” Egotripland compiled a series of videos that they believe are DOOM impostors.

6. It’s Easier to Fake Someone Who’s Never Shown His Face

Drummer Peter Criss (the one who was painted up like a cat) had left Kiss in 1980 before the band took off their trademark makeup (and then put it back on again). So few people could spot a fake Kiss Criss. A decade later the tabloid The Star reported that he was homeless panhandler living underneath a pier in Los Angeles. The down-and-out figure in the tabloid story was actually a homeless man named Chris Dickenson who’d been claiming to be Criss for years. The Star had paid him $500 for his story. The real Peter Criss, not Chris, sued the Star and appeared on The Phil Donahue Show to set the record straight.

7. Frankie Comes from Alabama

A few years ago the 80s pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, known for their banned-by-the-BBC hit “Relax” made a comeback and with a slightly altered line up toured the U.S. under the name The New Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The slight alterations to the lineup included putting together an entirely new group of Alabama musicians with no connection to the original artists whatsoever.  Details. Details.

8. Do Pop Stars Get Free Medical?

Apparently, as this is the second story in our list featuring an anonymous person who posed as a famous musician for the health plan. John Reutcke in 1992 plead guilty to theft after obtaining $18,000 worth of medical care at an Oxnard, California hospital by saying he was pop singer Christopher Cross.

9. The Most Disturbing Case on This List

One of these guys is Harry Styles of One Dimension. The other is a creepy pedophile who wanted to get teenaged girls to send him pornographic photos and videos online by pretending to be Harry Styles.

 

 

 

 

10. If You’re Ever Arrested, Just Say You’re a Rock Star

I can’t blame the Oakland, Ontario police for thinking this guy was David Lee Roth. Ontario-born David Kuntz described as a “failed musician” and “scam artist” does bear a striking resemblance to the Van Halen frontman. When Kuntz was pulled over for driving recklessly he explained to the officer on duty that he was suffering from a nut allergy, and by the way he was a rock star. He was taken to the hospital, met some nurses there, and invited them to a club where he performed a Van Halen song with a local band. The police eventually did discover their mistake and, oh yeah, that Kuntz had been involved in a murder investigation in the past.

11. If You’re Ever Arrested, Just Say You’re a Rock Star Part II

Jason Michael Hurley had played in a Stone Temple Pilots cover band. (Apparently there is such a thing.) So when he was arrested for possession of methamphetamine and shoplifting razors he did some quick thinking and claimed to be Scott Weiland, lead singer of the Stone Temple Pilots. The Beverly Hills police sent out a press release announcing a “celebrity arrest.” When the real Weiland read about his supposed incarceration he contacted the media to deny the story. The police initially denied they’d made an error. They said they had done a “physical check” and it was “definitely” him. They continued to hold this position until they actually finger printed the guy in the cell.  “Where ya going with that mask I found?”

12. All About the Bass (No Henley)

The moral of Lewis Peter Morgan’s story is: you can get away with impersonating a rock star longer if you pretend to be the bass player. Morgan enjoyed the attention and drinks he got when he regaled people with behind the scenes stories of recording “Hotel California.” For a while he claimed to be Don Henley, but Henley was just a bit too recognizable, especially after he launched a solo career. So Morgan claimed the identity of Randy Meisner, a bass player who had left The Eagles in 1977. As Meisner he got comped at casinos and was given free musical instruments. As Morgan, he was arrested for fraud in 1998.

13. Nobody Knows Who R.E.O. Speedwagon’s Guitarist Is

A man who claimed to be R.E.O. Speegwagon guitarist Rob Valenti conned a pair of real estate agents and some friends they met at a restaurant out of dinner at a restaurant, an expensive hotel and $300. It was only the next day, when they could not reach their supposed client, that the agents decided to Google R.E.O. Speedwagon and realized that the band didn’t have a member named Rob Valenti. The impostor? He was under the gun so he took it on the run.

 14. Auditioning for a Career as a Full Time Psy Impersonator

Dennis Carre (left) made international headlines after he dressed up as the South Korean pop star Psy (right) and rubbed elbows with real life movie stars at the Cannes film festival. He was not trying to get people to buy him drinks or dinner. He just wanted headlines, he told GQ. It was all a marketing ploy. Now Carre works as a full-time Psy impersonator.

15. The Most Adorable Reason to Pretend to be in a Boy Band

Yes this one is a bit of a cheat, but I wanted to end on something uplifting. In the video below an Australian guy named Dean confesses to his American girlfriend Lauren that he has a secret identity as a member of a boy band called Fancy. You can see Fancy’s hit song “Abacus” at around the 1:30 mark in this video. Yes, it is a boy band wedding proposal and not only that, “Fancy” uploaded their track to ITunes and sold the recording to raise a bit of cash for the wedding.

If you have enjoyed this list of people who pretended to be rock stars, perhaps you would enjoy the novel Identity Theft, a fictional account of a pop impostor. One Amazon reviewer described Identity Theft this way:

“We know the dangers posed by people we “meet” on the Internet–they are lurking with the sole intent of siphoning off our life savings. But these threats all focus on what we could lose by trusting strangers. What happens when that unknown gives back something so wonderful it becomes someone’s whole life–and is based on fraud? This is the story of Candi Tavris. She’s bright, educated, attractive, and embarrassed by her own life. She’s deeply aware that she “should” be doing more with herself than living in a trailer park, working as a minor cog in a large company, and wallowing in debt. So when she believes that the rock star she idolizes has responded personally to her fan message, she thinks she has finally found something good in life. Unfortunately for Candi, her correspondence is not with the famous Blast but with a minor employee in his home office–an employee who allows the deception to continue because, ironically, he has come to appreciate all of Candi’s best qualities, despite the fact that their interactions are strictly electronic.”

10 Great Literary Impostors

In honor of the release of the novel “Identity Theft,” which tells the story of a young employee who plays the role of his rock star boss in order to seduce a fan, I have compiled a list of some of the great impostors in literature. Impostors and mistaken identity have captured the imaginations of writers, readers and theater-goers for generations.

1. The Comedy of Errors- William Shakespeare (ca. 1590)

Mistaken identity drove the action in two of Shakespeare’s comedies. In The Comedy of Errors a pair of identical twins are separated at birth and by great coincidence the estranged twins each hire the second pair of twins to be their servants. Both sets of mismatched twins arrive in Ephesus on the same day causing all manner of confusion and rollicking farce. Shakespeare was not the first to write on this theme. His plot was borrowed and embellished from from the play The Menaechmi, written by the Roman dramatist, Plautus. In The Menaechmi only the masters were confused with one another, but Shakespeare one-upped his source by giving the identical twins identical servants who could also be confused with one another.

Shakespeare returned to the theme of separated twins in Twelfth Night. In this play the twins are male and female. They are separated in a shipwreck. The female twin, Viola, believes her brother is dead. So she disguises herself as a man, the obvious thing to do, and becomes employed as a servant to a duke. She falls for the Duke, but can’t tell him. The Duke is in love with a woman named Olivia, and he sends his man to court her. Olivia, instead falls in love with the messenger. It becomes even more confusing when Viola’s lost brother, Sebastian arrives and is confused for her male alter ego. All of this would have had an extra layer of humor for contemporary audiences because in Shakespeare’s day all roles were played by males. So Viola would have been a boy, pretending to be a girl, dressed as a boy.

Shakespeare also used mistaken identity to much more dramatic effect in Henry V. Before leading the men into a battle in which they are vastly outnumbered, the King goes out among the men in disguise and has the opportunity to hear what they really feel about the campaign and their king.

2. Tartuffe- Moliere (1664)

Tartuffe is actually subtitled “the impostor.” It is the story of a vagrant who poses as a pious man in order to gain entrance into the home of a prominent man and to break up his family and gain the estate.  Thanks to Moliere’s play, the word “tartuffe” is used in France to denote a hypocrite who fakes religious piety. (It is reputed to be used this way in English as well, but I’ve never heard anyone actually use this word, have you?)

“Tis a mighty stroke at any vice to make it the laughing stock of everybody; for men will easily suffer reproof; but they can by no means endure mockery. They will consent to be wicked but not ridiculous,” Moliere once said.

If you like foreign language films, by the way, I would recommend a creative modern telling of the story, the 2007 film Moliere. The film imagines the playwright living a fictional scenario that resembles his famous play. He poses as a priest named Tartuffe and the events that follow inspire him to write a new kind of comedy.

3. The Government Inspector-Nikolai Gogol (1836)

In this play, corrupt officials in a provincial Russian town start to panic when they hear a government inspector is to arrive and report on their behavior. As they rush to cover up their mis-deeds, they learn that a stranger has recently arrived in town and assume that this is the dreaded inspector. The supposed inspector is actually a civil servant named Khlestakov. Initially he does not know why he is being invited to important people’s homes, being offered food, drinks and bribes and even the daughter of the mayor’s hand in marriage. The play ends when Khlestakov’s real identity is exposed and a letter arrives from the real inspector general, who wants a meeting with the mayor.

4. A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens (1859)

If you know nothing else about Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, you probably know two lines, its opening “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Rarely has mistaken identity been so noble. Charles Daray is a good-natured aristocrat. He bears a striking physical resemblance to a barrister named Sydney Carton whose life has not amounted to much. Carton suffers from un-requited love for Darnay’s wife Lucie. It is the time of the French revolution, and as an aristocrat, Darnay is in danger. Lucie’s devoted pursuit of him puts her and her father at risk as well. Carton decides that the only way to save Lucie is to sacrifice himself and allow Darnay to marry her with a new identity. Carton visits Darnay in prison, drugs him and has an accomplice carry him out of prison so Carton can take his place at the guillotine.  The words spoken by Carton as he goes to his death (quoted above) are some of the most famous in literature.

5. The Prince and the Pauper- Mark Twain (1881)

Tom Canty lives as a beggar in one of London’s poorest neighborhoods. He is beaten by his father if he does not come back with enough money. He escapes from this hard life by daydreams about the aristocracy. One day Tom wanders over to Westminster and spots Edward Tudor playing on the other side of the fence. When a soldier roughly pulls Tom away, Edward sees it and rebukes the soldier. He invites Tom into the palace. Each envies the life of the other. Tom would like to live a life of comfort and luxury, Edward would like to live a life unconstrained by upper-class social convention. They play dress up in each other’s clothes. A guard, mistaking Edward for the beggar, throws him out and the prince and the pauper change position. After a series of adventures with Tom learning to behave as someone of royal birth and Edward trying to convince the outside world that he is a prince and not a pauper, the tale ends happily. Just as Tom is about to be crowned king, Edward steps forward and Tom, feeling guilty for his charade, confirms his identity. Tom is made the “King’s Ward” and Edward, because he has had the experience of poverty, grows into a just ruler.

6. Cyrano De Bergerac-Edmond Rostand (1897)

Rostand’s 1897 play was written in verse. It was loosely based on a real person, but the love story it recounts is fiction. Cyrano is a gifted soldier with a keen wit an great charisma. He also has a huge nose. He worships the lovely Roxanne from afar certain she would reject someone with such a face. Roxanne is in love with the handsome Christian. Christian has a beautiful face, but he is lacking in verbal wit. Cyrano agrees to write letters to Roxanne on his behalf. The beautiful letters express Cyrano’s own love and they work. Roxanne falls in love– with Christian. When Steve Martin adapted this as a film comedy, he gave it a happy ending. Roxanne discovers the secret and realizes she was in love with Cyrano, not Christian all along. In the original, Roxanne only discovers the truth about the letters when Cyrano has been mortally wounded, and he denies having written them to his death.

7. The Importance of Being Earnest- Oscar Wilde (1895)

The Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled “A trivial comedy for serious people,” contains a rare double dip of mistaken identity when Jack, who has been posing as someone named Earnest for years discovers his real name actually was Earnest and therefore his pose has been a pose. Jack (or is it Ernest?) apologizes for this turn of events by saying, “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.”

8. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz-L.Frank Baum (1900)

Dorothy and her friends, the cowardly lion, the scarecrow and tin man, go on a long adventure to find a magical wizard who they are told has the power to grant all of their wishes. After getting on the wrong side of a wicked witch, battling wolves, crows sent to peck their eyes out and winged monkeys, they finally get an audience with the man himself only to discover that he is not a wizard at all but a guy from Nebraska who was blown off course in a hot air balloon. The ersatz wizard’s real name, incidentally, is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. He doesn’t want to play the role of the Great and Powerful Oz any more. He just wants to go home to Nebraska and work in a circus. The moral of the story is not to put faith in powerful authority figures, but to trust that you have the power to make your own dreams come true. It is a thoroughly American tale. 

9. Pygmalion-George Barnard Shaw (1913)

Professor Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can take a poor London flower girl, Eliza Doolitte, and pass her off as a society lady by teaching her proper diction and manners. Eliza successfully pulls off the act, passing as a swell at a garden party. But she is left wondering what is to become of her now that she does not entirely fit in with either class. The play was a commentary on the rigid British class system of the time. It was adapted into the musical play and film My Fair Lady.

10. Superman-Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (1938)

There are many more traditionally literary examples I could have included. In the 1930s no one yet thought to call a comic book a graphic novel. But the popular masked characters of the era represent, I believe, a cultural transition in our depiction of the hero from someone whose good deeds remain unrewarded and unknown (as in A Tale of Two Cities and Cyrano De Bergerac) to the modern hero who saves the world and is celebrated for it. In between we had, in the early 20th Century, the emergence of the masked hero who preformed good deeds using a secret identity. This allowed him to be both celebrated and anonymous. There was no greater example of this than Clark Kent/Superman.

Do you have a favorite literary example of mistaken identity? Feel free to join the discussion in the comments.

Milli Vanilli, Make Believe and Authenticity (also those braids)

Quick trivia question: What was the highest-selling album to be permanently deleted from a record label’s catalog? Answer: “Girl You Know it’s True” by Milli Vanilli.

Thank you to Mixed Tape Masterpiece for reminding me of Milli Vanilli today.

I’ve always had a certain fascination for the lip-synching 80s pop duo. I was not particularly a fan back in the day, although I did buy one Milli Vanilli 45. “Girl, I’m Gonna Miss You.” (It was popular during a summer when I had known a guy who I subsequently missed. It reminded me of him.)

Milli Vanilli really captured my imagination only after it was revealed that the beautiful young men in the videos had not sung on the records attributed to them. Their tale brought up many of the same questions of fame, impersonation and identity that I wrote about in my novel Identity Theft.

For those of you too young to have experienced this episode, here is the story as I recounted it in my book Schadenfreude, Baby!

I believe what gave people such a sense of Schadenfreude when their musical hoax as exposed was their washboard abs, spandex trousers and quotes like “Musically, we are more talented than Bob Dylan. Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger, his lines are not clear. He don’t know how he should produce a sound. I’m the new modern rock n’ roll. I’m the new Elvis.” That quote was from the more outspoken Milli, Rob Pilatus who was one of the two front men of Milli Vanilli. (The other was Fabrice “Fab” Morvan.)

Milli Vanilli’s radio-friendly pop sold seven million copies, but it was their “exotically sexy” look, as the New York Times put it, that got them heavy rotation on MTV. Looking at their model-handsome faces, teenaged girls completely overlooked the fact that the guys had German accents when they spoke and urban American accents when they sang. Right from the start the Millis were criticized for their arrogance and were called a triumph of image over substance.

Pilatus told Ebony magazine that such criticism was “depressing and sad. Maybe some are afraid a bit because we have crossover. Other people get jealous.”

Their hit single “Girl You Know It’s True” won the European singers a “Best New Artist” Grammy. Pilatus and Morvan were secretly hoping they would not win because it might shine a light on the fact that they hadn’t sung a note of the music on their hit album.

Rumors were already flying that the boys might not be the most musically ept. A Washington Post review of a Milli Vanilli concert called it a “triumph of technology and imagemaking over talent and originality… while not everything they sang sounded entirely canned, there were moments when the only voices in the hall that didn’t appear to be lip-synched or electronically enhanced came from the squealing, mostly teenage crowd.”

During a “live” performance a few months later, a recording of that very song began to skip and repeated the line “Girl you know it’s…” over and over again. This may have been the last straw. Frank Farian, the German rock producer who had put the look and sound of Milli Vanilli together in a lab, told all. The guys with the faces on MTV took the brunt of the outrage and the jokes.

Milli Vanilli’s five Top Five singles–including three Number Ones—were hastily dropped from radio playlists and are rarely heard on oldies stations today. The album was deleted from Arista’s catalog. A class action suit in the U.S. allowed the consumers of the album to apply for a rebate.

What fascinated me about the whole situation was that people returned the records. Presumably the kids who bought them had liked the music when they heard it. Nothing about the music had changed. The only thing that was different was that the fans now knew that the people who had recorded the music did not look like models. It was the image that was fraudulent, so the fans should really have kept the records and sent back the sleeves. Milli Vanilli provided a rare opportunity to separate out the various aspects of rock stardom, was it the music or the image that meant the most to the fans? Arguably, Milli Vanilli proved it was the image. Without the image, the beautiful boys, the braids, the dancing– the records were deemed worthless.

After the secret was exposed, the two sides of Milli Vanilli, the image and the voices, each recorded their own albums. The vocalists released an album as “The Real Milli Vanilli” and the faces recorded an album under the name Rob and Fab. Neither record was a hit. “The Real Milli Vanilli” lacked the sex appeal and palpable charisma of Rob and Fab. And Rob and Fab? It turns out they were decent enough singers, Fab Morvan in particular has remained determined to have a music career. (He also does not age.) But without the rock star budget and material provided by a big time music producer the Rob and Fab album was doomed to fail.

More important, I think, the public was not ready to forgive the duo for destroying the fantasy and exposing their own unrealistic expectations as an audience. The version of Milli Vanilli that the fans had loved was a powerful fantasy of beauty, perfectly crafted pop music, dancing and celebration. It was a theatrical production created by a team, the way a television team had once created The Monkees by auditioning musicians and actors. That production raised the same types of questions about authenticity. When it was revealed that the TV band had not played the instruments on its first albums it was a minor scandal and the two musicians of the team in particular were determined to record an album that was entirely their own. “Headquarters” was the only record The Monkees made in this fashion, much to the disappointment of Monkee Peter Tork. The fans, it turns out, didn’t care all that much. Modern boy bands aren’t expected to play their own instruments or write the songs. They often record with the help of digital vocal correction and perform concerts using backing tracks.

Pop music has always been about image, fantasy and manufactured identities. But even in this world of make believe it seems there are lines of fact and fiction we do not want crossed or blurred. Milli Vanilli crossed them.

Who Gave You The Right to Be You?

While we’re on the subject of identity theft….

Does this video make your head hurt? It does mine. Suppose someone was impersonating you online and when you confronted him, he tried to make the case that you were being vain and unreasonable to want sole control of your persona. This is what happened to Jon Ronson, and it is truly bizarre.

Give a Man a Mask and He’ll Tell You the Truth?

Oscar Wilde was always saying things that made you go hmmm.  Often they have the effect of making you say, “Oh yes, that is true. Wait. Is that true?”

One of his most famous aphorisms is the one quoted above. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

This phrase seems to be both profoundly true and profoundly untrue.

There are things that people are willing to reveal only when they are able to remain anonymous. Sometimes you do not want the burden of having your particular idea attributed to your social identity. You will only reveal something when that identity is obscured and the statement won’t go down on your permanent record.

This is often the case with art. A playwright or novelist might be able to explore the negative emotions, vulnerabilities and flaws of fictional people while all the while expending enormous social energy to hide his own weakness from those who surround him in life.

So Wilde’s statement is true. Sometimes when you are hidden you are more revealed.

But only sometimes.

Intuitively we also understand that when you are hidden  you  are  hidden.

Our “persons,” our selves, are not neatly distinct from outside observers.

“…individuals’ personalities— yours and mine included— are not as stable as we think they are. We’re more influenced by those around us than we’d like to believe. Even our private sense of identity is highly context-dependent,” wrote Sam Sommers in Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World. “..We’re easily seduced by the notion of stable character. So much of who we are, how we think, and what we do is driven by the situations we’re in, yet we remain blissfully unaware of it.”

The question becomes is there actually a stable “truth” about the person behind the mask to reveal?

One of my favorite passages from Situations Matter was this one about self-help:

How, exactly , do we get acquainted with this core self? A trip to the local bookstore suggests that the answer has something to do with chicken soup. That, plus we’re supposed to ask ourselves questions like these suggested by Dr. Phil: “ What are the 10 most defining moments of your life?” “What are the 7 most critical choices you have made to put you on your current path?” “Who are the 5 most pivotal people in your world and how have they shaped you?” Dr. Phil’s questions share a common link. And I don’t just mean the use of arbitrary digits that I can only assume were once his fortune cookie lucky numbers. Their more important shared characteristic is the assumption that introspection produces reliable self-insight. These questions imply that looking inward provides some sort of direct channel to your internal preferences, deepest thoughts, and true motivations. It’s a nice idea, that you have an authentic self lurking within, waiting to be unveiled. But your answers to Dr. Phil’s questions— like your responses to the Twenty Statements Test— change across time and location. So which are the authentic ones?

Is my true identity the person you think I am, the credentials on my resume, my credit score, who I think I am today or who I thought I was a year ago? Was the vulnerable self who suffered once from unrequited love my true self? Is the frightened self who is stressed by calls from creditors my self? Is the peaceful, relaxed self who listens to music my true self? Do those negative emotions I will only reveal when I put on a mask represent my true self? Perhaps they are simply waves in a fluid being.

I spent a lot of time thinking about different aspects of identity when writing my latest novel Identity Theft. All of the characters struggle with some aspect of identity.  Please follow the link above to read more about it. I am taking orders for advanced copies through Pubslush to fund its production. I am pleased that in the first two days the project is already 21% funded. However, I need your help to push it over the top. Unless the project meets its goal, it will not be funded. You can be part of bringing this novel to life. When you go to the Pubslush page, you can read more about the novel’s characters and my inspiration for it. You will not need to make a payment today. In fact, because it is all or nothing, you only pay if the project reaches its target goal. In the event that it is successful, you will make your payment at the end of the campaign 17 days from now.