AUTHENTICITY EB

Alice Sherwood

• Publisher: Mudlark
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008412654
• eBook ISBN: 9780008412630
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

'Wide-ranging, witty and fresh … a stimulating read. Authentic fun'
Tim Harford, Financial Times Best Summer Books 2022

'Brilliantly witty, profoundly illuminating, Alice Sherwood is a master storyteller' Simon Schama

'Thought-provoking and beautifully written' Adrian Wooldridge, Washington Post

'A sweeping and persuasive manifesto … witty and wide-ranging … a pleasure'
Literary Review

'Terrific … the sheer breadth of her subject matter is extraordinary'
Matthew d'Ancona, Tortoisemedia.com

'Alice Sherwood is the real deal' Marcus du Sautoy

'Fascinating and hugely entertaining' Brian Eno

'Unfailingly compelling and often shocking' Philip Mould, presenter of Fake or Fortune?

'Riveting … captivating … a thoroughly enjoyable debut' Financial Times

We live in an age when the pursuit of authenticity – from living our 'best life' to eating artisan food – matters more and more to us, but where the forces of inauthenticity seem to be taking over. Our world is full of people and products that are not what they seem. We no longer know whether we are talking to a person or a machine. But we can fight back – and this award-winning book shows us how.

Authenticity argues that, although our counterfeit culture is shaped by the most powerful forces of evolution, economics, and technology, we can still come together to reclaim reality.

Along the way, we meet the world's greatest impostor, who finally became what he'd pretended to be; the wartime counterfeiter who fooled a nation; nature's most outrageous deceivers; the artist who encouraged people to forge his pictures; the 'authentic' brand that was anything but. But we also meet people living unexpectedly rewarding lives in virtual worlds, and foot soldiers in the 'armies of truth' who are taking down today's conspiracies and cons.

Provocative, insightful and original, Authenticity is that once-in-a-generation revelation: a work rich in histories but supremely and urgently of our own time. You'll never think about deception and reality in the same way again.

PART 1

BASIC INSTINCTS

1

ASPIRATION

The Impostor Who Became What He Pretended to Be

‘One man’s life is a boring thing. I’ve lived many lives. I’m never bored.’

Stanley Clifford Weyman

Aspiration is a uniquely human quality. We are the only animals that can choose to pretend to be something other than what we are. To be human is to be able to imagine yourself as someone different, to picture yourself living a life more exciting than the one you were born to, to fashion yourself into the person of your choosing. But is it possible to aspire to glory without some degree of imposture? Can we ever make it without to some extent faking it?

Stanley Clifford Weyman [1] was the ultimate self-made man. A charming and successful serial impostor, he made a career of pretending to be people other than himself. Flitting easily between re-inventions, he was at different times: a series of high-ranking officers in the US Navy; an officer in the French Navy; an officer in the British Army; a psychiatrist; a lawyer; Peruvian ambassador to the USA; a high-ranking official in the US State Department. He was a medical officer turned sanitation expert in Lima, where he was renowned for throwing lavish parties, and later a lecturer in medicine and representative of the New York Lunacy Commission. In 1920 he played the part of Consul General for Romania; when he visited a naval dockyard, attired in top hat, tailed morning coat and striped trousers, and inspected the USS Wyoming, a 21-gun salute was fired in his honour. More than once, Stanley played two parts simultaneously: he was the Serbian military attaché and a lieutenant in the US Navy, who helpfully wrote references for each other; he was personal physician to a Hollywood star grieving the premature death of her lover, and at the same time the public relations impresario organising the lover’s funeral. Eventually he became a successful and accredited journalist and broadcaster specialising in Balkan and Far Eastern affairs, spending two years in Washington and at the United Nations, and mixing daily with leading statesmen of the time.

Stanley’s deceptions were journeys of self-exploration and self-expression, the trying on of new skins in the hope of finding one that fitted best. He slipped easily from being S Clifford Weinberg to being Ethan Allen Weinberg, Rodney S Wyman, Sterling C Wyman, Allen Stanley Weyman, C Sterling Weinberg, Stanley C Weyman; the pseudonyms he chose rendered him so readily identifiable that they could scarcely count as concealment. The greatest impostor of the twentieth century was a man whose life’s work was self-discovery and self-creation – what we would see today as the hallmarks of a search for personal authenticity.

We are perhaps more tolerant than previous generations. We make allowances for individual aspiration and re-invention. We understand that sometimes you need to revise your past in order to devise your future, that being true to yourself may not always mean being true to the world. In a sense, Stanley’s was a very modern condition. Unwilling to stick with the cards he had been dealt, he was determined to live life not at the periphery, but at the centre of things. Wherever there was excitement and fun, a newsworthy event or the popping of flashbulbs, that was where you would find Stanley Weyman.

Stars of the Silver Screen

Perhaps his greatest triumph was in 1926. Already ten years into his career as an impostor, Stanley propelled himself into the epicentre of the most exhilaratingly newsworthy event of the year, the death and lying-in-state of Rudolph Valentino, silent-film star and legendary silver-screen lover. [2]

In the summer of 1926, Valentino had fallen suddenly and violently ill. His devoted fans were treated to daily bedside bulletins. He died on 23 August, aged 31, leaving two ex-wives and a current lover, the sultry Hollywood star Pola Negri. Stanley the impostor rose magnificently to the occasion. He appointed himself not only Miss Negri’s personal physician, Dr Sterling C Wyman of Flower Hospital (‘Rudy would have wanted me to take care of you, my dear’), but also, with a different name and persona, public relations adviser to the dead star’s manager, George Ullman. More or less single-handedly, Stanley seems to have taken charge of the arrangements for Valentino’s funeral in New York. Always at home in the eye of a news storm, he proved invaluable in the mayhem, soothing distraught fans, speaking to reporters, and issuing daily bulletins to the press.

When Valentino’s body was laid out in the Gold Room of Campbell’s Funeral Parlor on Broadway and 66th Street, over 30,000 mourners converged on the building to pay their final respects to the Sheik. It was an extraordinary outpouring of public emotion for a man who had done nothing more than make a career out of playing people other than himself. [3] Breaking through the plate-glass window, the crowd surged into the room, nearly knocking over the casket, and the corpse was hastily transferred to a more robust coffin. Mounted police charged to stop the mob from overrunning the building, injuring more than a hundred mourners in the process. Fortunately, Dr Sterling Wyman of Flower Hospital was on hand to set up a temporary infirmary to take care of the injured and over-emotional fans.

If Dr Wyman was not entirely the genuine article, nor were many others in the media circus surrounding Valentino’s death. Although it took place almost a century ago, the fake news, PR fabrications and celebrity stunts lend the story a curiously contemporary feel. Frustrated by the absence of any photograph of Valentino’s corpse, the New York Evening Graphic pasted up shots of an empty coffin with a photo of the star’s head superimposed. Even before Valentino’s body had reached the funeral parlour, the paper ran a front page ‘composograph’ – that is, a photomontaged image – of the Great Lover lying in state. (Later, the Graphic was to excel itself with a further composograph, this one showing Valentino in heaven with his fellow Italian, the operatic tenor Enrico Caruso.)

Fig. 1.1. Composograph by the New York Evening Graphic of Valentino in heaven with Enrico Caruso.

Four uniformed and black-shirted ‘Fascisti’ stood guard over the body – a tribute to Valentino’s home country supposedly sent ‘on orders from Rome’ – and among the rows of floral tributes was a wreath marked ‘From Benito’. But Mussolini cabled to deny any involvement, and the guards were most likely actors hired by Campbell’s Funeral Parlor. A distraught and tearful Pola Negri flew in from California to be beside the casket. She knelt by the body for fifteen minutes, collapsed, then held back her tears just long enough to murmur, ‘It is true; we were engaged to be married!’ before swooning again.

It was towards the end of Valentino’s lying-in-state, as mourners rioted, that the newspapers discovered Stanley’s double imposture. Stanley, in his medical ducks as Dr Wyman, was ministering to a fainting female fan and yelling ‘Stand back and give this woman some air!’ when a reporter recognised him from earlier impersonations. The game was up. Although Valentino’s manager, George Ullman, rapidly disowned him, Pola Negri did not; she was reported to say that Stanley was the best doctor she had ever had.

The papers were initially reluctant to expose the man whose announcements they had recently been printing so avidly. But within a few days, the New York World decided that the story was just too good not to print. A veritable avalanche of exposure followed, as journalists competed to uncover Stanley’s spectacular history of imposture. There were days when his press coverage exceeded Valentino’s.

Most impostors fear exposure: the cold sweat as chance discovery walks past, the relief when it passes by. But when the New York Journal-American interviewed Stanley at his home in Brooklyn, they found him open and unrepentant. ‘What is the sense in all these exposés?’, Stanley asked. ‘I wish you would let me alone. I am not doing anything wrong.’ He went on to explain his credo: he deceived to achieve. He did not act out of malice; he simply claimed the right to reinvent himself whenever the opportunity presented itself. This, combined with an honest pursuit of fame, was Stanley’s version of the American Dream.

I am an American boy, one hundred percent, born in Brooklyn. From my earliest days as a kid, I have been imbued with the go get ’em spirit. Now one of the things that an ambitious lad learns is that every opportunity for increasing his fame must be taken advantage of. Take off your coat, jump right in when you see the advantageous gulf at your feet. And if the opportunities don’t materialize spontaneously, there is just one thing to be done and that’s to create them. That’s been my motto all along and people who have made up their minds that I’m cracked or have some sinister motive are simply deluding themselves.

Stanley was an impostor, not a conman. His career was one of aspiration, not deception. The impostor only wants to change himself – for him the imposture is the achievement. By contrast, the conman’s imposture is a means to an end: he will change himself, his surroundings, his relationships, deceive whoever he needs or is able to in pursuit of some other goal – most often money but sometimes revenge for actual or imagined slights. And unlike a conman, Stanley was open and honest. He was remarkably frank about his life, including his mental illness – what today we would call bipolar disorder – and the many spells in prison he underwent as a result of trying on new identities and new skins. [4]

The authorities seemed baffled by this impostor without criminal intent. Stanley was always in plain sight, never left Brooklyn, never hid from the police even when he knew there was a warrant out for his arrest. In time, the police found it easier not to go to Brooklyn at all when they wanted to pick him up, but simply to turn up at the most newsworthy event of the day. If Stanley wasn’t orchestrating it, he would at least be likely to be taking part. And it was always easy to recognise him: despite his fondness for dressing whatever part he was playing, he never shaved off his 1920s-style pencil moustache.

The Power of Context

‘How do they get away with it so easily?’ is the question people often ask about impostors. Part of the answer is that we use just a few indicators when making our initial judgements of people. We identify a person by appearance and job description – ‘the blonde lawyer’, ‘the good-looking window-cleaner’ – and by voice, body language, and manner. And in the moment of judgement we assume identity is singular. We forget that we are all able to present different faces in different places; that we all change our clothes, our voices, our personae to suit different situations; that we become someone else when we change our job, or our hairstyle, or even our mood. When making a judgement, it’s easier and quicker to prioritise the surface textures of life, the exterior and the immediate. We don’t stop to check that every doorman is a real doorman, that the policeman in the street is a real policeman, that the pilot making his way through the cabin with a broad smile is a real pilot. We rely on probability to tell us that the man in a blue uniform with a peaked cap, striding from First to Economy and glad-handing the passengers, is what he appears to be. Above all, we rely on context. As Sarah Burton points out in Impostors: Six Kinds of Liar (2000), in a hospital setting, the masked man holding a knife over an unconscious naked body is likely to be a surgeon; in a horror film, we can safely assume that he is a homicidal maniac.

It’s easy to underestimate the power of context in everyday life. For instance, I bear a very passing resemblance to the glamorous wife of a friend who used to be the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper. Every year at the paper’s summer party, at least half a dozen people I’d never met before would advance on me with outstretched arms and broad smiles. Because of my resemblance to Fiona (as I’ll call her), I moved up in status from just another guest to the one you flash your most ingratiating smile at and pay court to. I’d get a small thrill at being mistaken for someone prettier, younger, and richer, but an even bigger thrill at passing for someone else, living someone else’s life, for one evening at least. People expected to see Fiona at the party; they may not have known her all that well, the lights were dim, and, if in doubt, it was clearly in their interest to err on the side of being nice to the editor’s wife. In that context, even people I know used to mistake me for Fiona. But no one has ever mistaken me for her in any other setting.

The syntax of social situations permits an almost infinite variety of readings. The grammar of life is expansive. People, and the settings in which you come across them, are the building blocks of everyday life, and the impostor equation is the meaning you derive from the two combined – what you project upon what you see.

Stanley Clifford Weyman was born Stanley Jacob Weinberg in Brooklyn on 25 November 1890. He was the oldest, brightest, and most talented of the four Weinberg children. Good-looking, eloquent, and with charming manners, he was indulged by parents who envisaged a dazzling future for their son. To be a parent is in many ways to encourage imposture. We congratulate our children on their ambition and indulge their aspiration. Alert for the slightest precocious talent, we find reasons to cheer them on. If a child argues back, why surely they have a future as a barrister! A great bedside manner presages a career in medicine. So it was with the Weinbergs. The young Stanley’s orations had his mother declaring he was a born lawyer. If he wanted more praise and attention, he would play doctor. Once he found red spots on his youngest brother and told the family it was chickenpox, a judgement that proved to be correct. His family, delighted with his medical prowess, declared they had a doctor in the making – a diagnosis not uncommon in Jewish families.

Stanley told his parents that he planned three careers for himself: as a diplomat, a doctor, and a lawyer. His father, a real-estate broker who had never been to college, was broadly supportive. He offered to help with the cost of college, provided Stanley limited himself to studying for just one of his potential careers. But Stanley was impatient; as a judge was later to observe, he said to himself at an early age, ‘If I can’t climb the ladder, I’ll jump it.’ Rather than go to college, he began to make his first appearances on the stage of imposture. In 1910, aged 20, he turned up as US Consul General at Algiers (a wise choice, given that few Americans of the time would have been able to pick out Algeria on a map), and proceeded to entertain the great and the good of the diplomatic and social worlds at a consular banquet. Unable to pay the bill, Stanley found himself charged with fraud and sentenced to do time in a correctional institution. When he was released in 1911, his father dispatched him to River Crest Sanitarium, a mental hospital in Queens. He underwent a course of treatment intended to help him understand his impostor urges; if the treatment worked, it certainly didn’t cure him of them.

A typical escapade occurred in 1917 when he was 26 years old. In the words of St Clair McKelway, chronicler of the New York of the 1920s and 1930s:

On that day, nothing much was going on in Manhattan, but there was a military shindig in progress at an armory in Brooklyn … [Stanley] was in the dress uniform of a rear admiral of the United States Navy – a striking outfit, with a high-crowned cap, epaulets, flotillas of brass buttons, and garlands of gold braid. It was the sort of naval uniform that is never seen anymore except in movies or on the covers of historical novels. After returning the salute that the Army sentries at the entrance to the armory gave him, Weyman sailed inside, received and r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note To Readers
• Praise for Authenticity
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• ON AVERAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 – BASIC INSTINCTS
• 1 ASPIRATION: The Impostor Who Became What He Pretended to Be
• 2 DECEPTION: The Anatomy of a Con
• 3 COMPLICITY: Lothar and the Turkeys
• PART 2 – NATURAL-BORN FAKERS
• 4 MIMICS: Nature’s Impostors
• 5 FREE RIDERS: The Great Egg Race
• 6 COMPETITORS: The Hunter’s Dilemma
• PART 3 – ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THINGS
• 7 MULTIPLIERS: Death of a Counterfeiter
• 8 ATTENTION SEEKERS: The Authentication Game
• 9 ABUNDANCE: The Battle for Tuxedoland, or Why We Overrate Originality
• PART 4 – SELLING AUTHENTICITY
• 10 INTANGIBLES: A Visit to the Fake-Hunters
• 11 MYTHMAKERS: How Snapple Lost Its Juice
• 12 EXTERNALITIES: China’s Gift to the World
• PART 5 – A VIEW FROM NOW
• 13 THE IMPOSTOR I KNEW: A True Story
• 14 REAL LIVES: Virtual Worlds
• 15 RECLAIMING REALITY: Armies of Truth
• ON AVERAGE – SOURCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PICTURE CREDITS
• PICTURE SECTION
• INDEX
• About the Author
• About the Publisher