Great American frauds - 9 February 1996

There are times when big important news is knocking at the door that you ought to talk about, but something small and fascinating happens that you itch to talk about. This is such a time and although many things happened in this past fortnight - trouble in Bosnia of a sort that we'd feared, with the Muslim arrest and detention of those two Bosnian Serb generals and then the oncoming presidential primaries - yet America has just lost a great fraud and I must talk about him. Every nation has its scoundrels, crooks, criminals and every nation has its frauds but once they're exposed they're usually done for. In America, if a man has the gall, the chutzpah to attempt a really spectacular deceit and then proclaim himself as a fraud, he becomes admired, even lovable, and appears in television talk shows. I'd like to remind you of a couple of famous frauds before we come to the life and death two weeks ago of Rudolf Walter Wanderone.

The first great American fraud who comes to mind was born not a hundred miles from here in a village in Connecticut in 1810. He seems to have had an unremarkable boyhood, except that he was in a place and a time that saw the birth of what was later in the century to be called a travelling circus, colloquially, the round top. The boy we're talking about, Phineas Taylor Barnum, was only six years of age when the rather astonishing news was noised about the countryside that a man just across the Hudson was putting on a show on the village green, guess what, an elephant, something no more familiar to Connecticut Yankees in 1815 than horses were familiar to the American Indian before the Spanish brought them over. Young Barnum saw this show, put on by a man named Hachaliah Bailey who bought the animal from an English sea captain. Pretty soon young Barnum was following Mr Bailey's show as it grew bigger and added monkeys and a bear, a bear that danced. Young Barnum must have had the conman's strain in his blood.

He took a leap in incredulity beyond Mr Bailey. Barnum had little interest in the wonders of nature, He chose to invent natural wonders and then challenge people to believe in them and many did. He was later reputed to say there's a sucker born every minute. At the age of 25 he bought an old negro woman – now this remember was 50 years before slavery was abolished - he bought one Joice Heth and the question is unanswered to this day, whether she told him that she'd been George Washington's nurse or Barnum told her she'd been George Washington's nurse. Washington was born in 1732, so if it was, she'd have had to be at least 110. Young Mr Barnum was not going to split hairs. He said she was just over 160.

He soon set up his own little round top, took Joice Heth around with him, she was surprisingly spry for her age, and dreamed up other freaks. A bearded lady, nobody had ever seen one of them. A two-headed woman, wow. Of course along the way some spoilsport, a doctor, say, would declare that a bearded lady was unlikely and a two-headed woman an anatomical impossibility. So, said Mr Barnum, comical anatomical and I hope he loves his mother, or whatever the Oedipus schledipus crack of the day was.

Just when people began to doubt the freaks of Phineas T Barnum, he produced one that was remarkable but also believable. His masterpiece of this sort was the discovery of a dapper, elegant and apparently entirely unselfconscious midget, whom Barnum christened Tom Thumb, General Tom Thumb. By then Barnum had bought out a New York museum, called it Barnum's American Museum, put together a travelling company of freaks, unlikely animals, more believable physical oddities and General Tom Thumb. Then Barnum looked around for a mate for him and found a pretty, elegant, charming, may I say, little lady. They married and lived happily ever after. Barnum took his museum on a European tour. He called it the Great London Circus and achieved the peak of something or other when invited to Windsor, he presented General and Mrs Tom Thumb, standing arm in arm in twinkling evening dress, on a small side table, to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

It ought to be said that Barnum led a blameless private life, never committed an act of punishable fraud, defended his claims for two-headed women by saying the public knew when they were being fooled, but admired ingenuity and always from him, got more than they paid for. He wrote his autobiography and subtitled it The Prince of Humbugs, which reminds me of another prince, Prince Michael Romanoff, who became a prosperous, even a lovable figure in Hollywood because he was neither a prince nor a Romanoff.

Harry Gerguzin was from birth a mystery child. He was born in Brooklyn or he was born in Lithuania. The immigration authorities said Lithuania. Either way, he was here from the age of six, put into an orphanage, then another one, then tossed out. Right after the end of the First War he showed up in Paris, which was just then bouncing with bogus and some genuine Russian nobility. Harry Gerguzin decided then and there, decided to be Prince Michael Romanoff, the last of the doomed royals. His genealogy was doubted and he was incarcerated on Ellis Island. He escaped. Somehow he did a quick job of rehabilitating or inventing his respectability. He applied for admission to Harvard and was received blushingly by the president of Harvard, no less. The college wanted routinely to have a record of his education. Alas, all his scholastic honours had been burned during the Russian Revolution. The Harvard people smelled a rat. They were right. He was thrown out.

How he kept himself alive and nattily dressed, I don't know but he passed some phoney cheques, he was deported, he went to gaol in France for swindling but somehow stole quietly back into America and next thing you know, I knew, was the desperate Depression winter of 1932-3, a vaudeville theatre on Broadway advertised an act featuring Prince Michael, the last of the Romanoffs. I took this at face value, I knew nothing about him, but I went in, saw him come on stage to the pomp of the old Russian national anthem, a curtain came down bearing the two-headed eagle and out came a squat little man with a toothbrush moustache, jug ears, tails, a white tie, leaning against a collar about eight inches high. Was this a joke? Of course, it was, a gorgeous joke. His act was no more than the recital, in a preposterously grand British accent, of memories of life in the court of Nicholas II. Dim stuff. The band played the anthem again, the curtain fell, a pattering of applause.

He quickly gave up on that act and he drifted out to Hollywood, got a few bit parts, then a couple of writers, humorists – Robert Benchley and the droll man from Georgia, Nunnally Johnson – decided it was a great pity he was losing his invented identity as Prince Michael Romanoff. He was an amusing cove and they raised enough money to back him in a new restaurant to be called Romanoff's. He ran it for the rest of his happy and highly profitable life and you were a privileged character if you could get a superior reservation at this plush restaurant, with the fine food and the formidable double eagle on the plates and the menus. "It just showed," said Nunnally Johnson, "what a good American boy can do if he only applies himself."

And now, while we were all busy watching the Congress shut down by the new young Turk Republicans and dressing ourselves to the eyelashes against the continental ice storm, another truly great fraud died and he must be saluted. Rudolf Walter Wanderone. A fat man and a charmer, he died in late January. For the first 60-odd years of his life he was totally unknown to fame, except among the raffish characters who infested pool halls. Wanderone's meal ticket was his billiard cue. He roamed the country from one dim pool hall to another, taking on all comers and it seems, taking most of the money. He would have remained unknown to people outside this seedy world if, in 1961, there had not appeared a movie. A fine, tense, quietly comical movie, famous and much shown to this day. It was called The Hustler and the fictional hero was just such a character as the fat man from New York City. Quite, I may say, quite coincidentally, the movie hero was called Minnesota Fats. The character was fascinating, marvellously played by a comedian of national fame, playing it very suave and straight, Jackie Gleason. It was a big hit, critically and popularly. It was no sooner out than a man, our fat man and charmer, emerged from the underworld of the pool halls to announce that he was proud to have had a movie based on his career. He was, he said, Minnesota Fats.

The author of the novel totally denied the claim, he'd never heard of Rudy Wanderone but Mr Wanderone resolved to become Minnesota Fats and made a national tour. He went reminiscing on television just like Mike Romanoff Gerguzin. He cashed in in a big way. He didn't care if people questioned him about his name and persona. One journalist wrote grudgingly: "He certainly looked like Minnesota Fats, or some fats." He handled his money well and he retired to a luxury suite in a Nashville hotel. At the end he walked around, feeding pigeons, bowing right and left, signing autographs. It was typical of him that he didn't care about his age. He was, he thought, they thought, 83 or maybe 95, who knows. I think he had his finest hour in death when a banner headline appeared in the New York Times, which is at all times a stickler for respectable accuracy. It said, "Minnesota Fats is dead".

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