Word: doctorings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seven further novels about himself after the death of the detective's creator. Still, most of those who find themselves appearing under other names have a tendency to seethe. The reason for their umbrage frequently has less to do with egos than with wallets. The model for the romantic doctor in W. Somerset Maugham's story The Happy Man was typical. The author had profited handsomely from his tale, complained the original, but where was the fee for the man who had lived it? A Swazi warrior named M'hlopekazi was more succinct. He was the inspiration for Umslopogaas...
Thus John Flood, her first husband, appears in the narrative in three incarnations. He is the young doctor pursuing a brilliant future while his equally young wife sells her first book and discovers his infidelity with a night nurse. He is then the aggrieved ex-husband, complaining that Margaret's popular second novel, a "revenge tragedy" about their broken marriage, has damaged his reputation. And he is also the man, now a respected heart surgeon and administrator in Baltimore, to whom Margaret runs with a plea for a second opinion and chance: "Give me borrowed time, six months...
Theatrical Agent Tony Rivers came right to the point: "I can't send you out as Joan Molinsky. You've got to change your name." The struggling nightclub comic did not waste a second: "Okay, I'll be Joan Rivers." The single-minded doctor's daughter from Larchmont, N.Y., helped herself to her agent's name, competitors' jokes, employers' postage stamps and free hotel rooms until her big break came on the Tonight show...
...press made much of reports that Mabel Normand, the heroine of Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops comedies, was seen rummaging through desk drawers in search of her old love letters. A Paramount executive was sitting in front of the fireplace burning papers. A man claiming to be a doctor examined the corpse and announced that Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage. Only an hour later did an official turn the body over to find that he had been shot in the back with a .38 pistol...
Paris 1986: Surprise! Shi Peipu was a male transvestite who somehow managed to perpetrate a 19-year hoax on the unsuspecting Boursicot by faking femininity and pregnancy and providing a baby boy who had been bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang region. Boursicot claimed that he did not discover the truth until he was arrested by French intelligence agents on charges of espionage. After hearing the strange case, seven judges last week sentenced both the hapless accountant and the former dancer to six years in prison. Their "son," Shi Dudu, now 20, was in the Paris courtroom...