Word: demara
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AGAIN ! the headlines shouted one day last January, and millions of readers pounced on the latest chapter in the amazing adventures of Ferdinand Waldo ("Fred") Demara Jr., the most spectacular impostor of modern times. A sick, brilliant, 37-year-old alter-egotist who never finished high school, Demara by main nerve and native intelligence has carried off careers as military surgeon, psychology professor, cancer researcher, dean of a school of philosophy, language teacher, law student, assistant prison warden, Trappist monk and the devil knows what else (TIME, Dec. 3, 1951; Feb. 25, 1957). Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this...
Having long behaved like 36 characters in search of an author, Demara finally found the author in the person of Robert Crichton, 34-year-old son of Author-Editor Kyle (The Proud People) Crichton. The result is this slight, bright, abrasively readable biography of a bounder...
...Demara so admired young Dr. Cyr that he borrowed Cyr's name and credentials, was commissioned in the Canadian navy as a surgeon. He performed unnumbered minor operations-and once, with Mitty-like sureness, he presided over a complicated operation on a soldier who had been wounded near the heart. The operation was a huge success-and so was "Dr. Cyr." The publicity that followed this achievement flushed out the real Cyr, and Ferdinand was quietly sacked by the navy...
...friends in Maine were ready to defend Ferdinand, even if he was an impostor. Found guilty by a superior court judge, Ferdinand got a suspended sentence and a gentle lecture. "On each occasion," the judge admitted, "deliberately or otherwise, you were doing some good." Said Schoolteacher Hopkins: "I hope Demara can come back. After all, what has he done but use someone else's name? And all the good he has done must certainly outweigh the bad." Ferdinand himself was not so sure. "Under the circumstances," he remarked blandly, "it would be useless to go back. I would...
With that, the lovable fraud departed, saying that he was going to visit his mother in Lawrence, and after that, look into a job offer from a Canadian newspaper. But at week's end Ferdinand Demara had vanished like a pleasant dream. Now, nobody knows where...