Telling Tales (20 page)

I
N NEW YORK
in the 1920s there was no shortage of glamorous, independent young women who liked nothing more than to prop up bars and be bought lunches while telling outrageous stories to enthusiastic male listeners. This was the age of female pilots, female lion tamers, female sharpshooters and a host of other newly trouser-wearing, cigarette-smoking girls. One such woman was young Joan Lowell who, in 1928, was the talk of the town not only for her impressively robust physique, spirited personality and deep brown eyes, but for the wonderful tales she told about her time at sea. Apparently a very accomplished sailor and swimmer, she would from time to time give lectures about her exploits on her father’s trading vessel, the
Minnie A. Caine
, on which she had spent the first seventeen years of her life as the only woman on board.

One day the PR man Edward Bernays, who was a friend of hers and knew she had been thinking of making her memoirs into a book, introduced her to a literary agent called George Bye, who in turn was so impressed by her anecdotes that he set up a meeting with her and the then editor of the
Pictorial Review
with a view to getting her published. That editor, Arthur T. Vane, was so impressed by her tales of seafaring derring-do that he was inclined to publish them without delay; but after every other person in his office implored him not to on the basis that they were too far-fetched to be believable, he held his fire. And how pleased he must have been.

The two publishers Max Schuster and Richard Simon, then just at the beginning of what would become one of the biggest ventures in global publishing, were not so sensible. They had in fact rejected some proposed manuscripts of Miss Lowell’s some months before on the basis that the writing was too rough, but now, thanks to George Bye, who introduced them to the appealing authoress at one of his regular literary lunches, they decided to take a punt on her. With a little polishing, they decided, her memoirs could be formed into just the sort of book that their adventure-hungry readers would devour.

So, delighted to have finally scored an inroad into the hottest publishing house in town, Joan Lowell set about completing her manuscript. She called it
Cradle of the Deep
and filled it with breathless accounts of all the extraordinary things which had befallen her as a young girl at sea. She told of how the sailors dressed her in flour-sack dresses as a baby and put her in the care of a kindly old sail-maker called Stitches. By her third year she could swear outrageously, and not long after that she learnt to play poker. Strip poker, if you please. When she was old enough, she was covered in tar and coconut husks in a secret seaman’s initiation rite, and then at sixteen she not only watched a man be eaten alive by sharks but performed an amateur amputation on one crewman’s gangrenous limb. Although rarely putting in to port, the ship, with its cargo of dried coconut, occasionally alighted on South Sea islands where young Joan witnessed all sorts of unusual scenes, such as the mass-consummation of a group marriage on a windswept beach. She traded trinkets, picked up various local patois and then, when tragedy struck and the boat caught fire and sank off the coast of Australia, she found herself swimming for a mile against a powerful rip-tide to shore, carrying two mewling ship’s kittens on her shoulders.

Unbelievable though it sounds in retrospect, the two experts (a pair of aged former sailors) to whom Simon & Schuster sent the text for authentication decided it would pass, and advised publication to go ahead. The buyer of Baker & Taylor, a major book distributor, however, was not so sure. He told the publishers straight that in his opinion
Cradle of the Deep
was ‘the biggest hoax of the century’. But he knew that people would want to read it anyway. Perturbed by this, Simon, who had a particularly close relationship with Joan, appealed to Joan to tell them whether parts of the book hadn’t been somewhat embellished for effect. He assured her he’d publish it anyway, but needed to know the truth so he could market the book correctly and avoid embarrassment for everyone should things turn out not to be quite as they seem. But Joan swore a seaman’s oath that her stories were all true, and the book went to press in March 1929.

As soon as it was published, copies went out to nautical experts on all the major newspapers. The
New York Times
gave it a fairly noncommittal appraisal, but the literary editor of the
Herald Tribune
sent the book to be reviewed by one of the most formidable seamen in America. Lincoln Colcord had himself been born at sea – in a squall off Cape Horn – to a ship’s captain father and a tough-as-old-boots mother who had circumnavigated the globe three times prior to her son’s birth. He knew the ways of ships and sailors better than anyone, and as soon as he had ploughed his way through Miss Lowell’s volume he wrote a review that utterly demolished it, taking its author’s credibility down with it. The terms in which he couched his disregard for the book – which, he said, contained scores of basic nautical inconsistencies and made-up terms – were so strong that his editor, Irita van Doren, refused to publish it in case the paper were sued for libel. But she did contact her friends at Simon & Schuster and suggest a meeting between them, their author and her reviewer.

This uncomfortable get-together happened a week later at the publishers’ head office. Colcord, a domineering man and a plain speaker, put a series of questions about life at sea to the young author, none of which she was able to answer to his satisfaction. He then listed the fifty or so inaccuracies he had identified in her text and asked her to account for them. Indignant, her dark eyes flashing, Lowell at one point flexed her powerful swimmer’s biceps and invited her interlocutor to take off his glasses and prepare for a drubbing, if he were going to continue calling her a liar. But a few minutes later, realizing she was heaping unprofessionalism on unprofessionalism, Joan burst into tears and had to be comforted by Mr Schuster who, like his business partner, still had a considerable soft spot for her.

Joan never actually admitted her deception that day, but her publishers knew they had to limit the damage she had done with her lies, so made sure that the bestseller lists on which
Cradle of the Deep
was already beginning to appear classified it as a fiction title rather than a non-fiction. They also released a statement explaining the developments and saying that the book had been ‘published in good faith, not as a literal autobiography but as a teeming yarn, fundamentally a true narrative but inevitably . . . embroidered with some romanticised threads’.

Despite making an offer to refund any customer unhappy with their purchase of the memoir, Simon & Schuster received hardly any requests for money back, and with the book selling so well it was making a tidy sum for all involved. But it was not long before one New York newspaper decided to look more closely in to the real story of Joan Lowell, and what the investigative journalists on the
Evening Post
found would destroy the book’s reputation forever.

She was not Joan, daughter of a Montenegrin-Australian father and a mother who was a member of the prestigious Boston Lowell family. She was Helen Joan Wagner, a bit-part actress and performer from California who had hardly spent any time at sea at all. Her father had once worked on a ship called
Minnie A. Caine
for about a year, and at one point she and her mother had made a trip on it with him. But no one from that voyage remembered anything about initiation rites, under-age gambling or a shipwreck: the worst that had befallen the vessel was a small fire while in dock in the Antipodes, but there was no record of Lowell, then thirteen, even being on board when it happened. The ship had never plied tropical waters with a cargo of copra and, far from having sunk in fiery circumstances, it was currently languishing happily in port at San Francisco.

The full extent of their author’s bold fabrication had the ambitious young publishers Simon & Schuster well and truly rattled. Rival bookmen – and some in their own house – were openly laughing at their credulity in the face of a pretty, sassy girl with a tall tale to tell. Simon was said to have suffered a minor nervous breakdown over the affair, and an unrepentant Miss Wagner went off travelling and then pursued a new career as a journalist, aided, no doubt, by the $40,000 she had received for the book – a huge sum for an unknown writer in the 1920s. As for Mr Simon and Mr Schuster, they were terrified of making the same mistake twice, and it was probably because of this anxiety that they turned down another fantastical-sounding volume of memoirs that came their way a couple of years later:
Education of a Princess
by the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, a book which went on to sell 200,000 copies for rival publishers Viking.

The feisty Lowell, for her part, continued to live her life large and undimmed, working for a time as a newspaper reporter in Boston before moving to Brazil to live out her retirement surrounded by wild nature and exotic men, just as she had always wished.

V
ERY OCCASIONALLY A
literary trickster comes along who is universally forgiven for their deception and whose writing continues to be enjoyed by anyone fortunate enough to find a copy of their out-of-print masterpiece in a second-hand bookshop. The young Anglo-Irish writer Magdalen King-Hall, who
Time
magazine described in 1926 as ‘brown and shingled of hair, blue of eye, pert and minxful as her [heroine]’, was one such character, and her
Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion
still stands today as an unparalleled meditation on the subject of lusty eighteenth-century aristocrats abroad and the increasingly difficult romantic and sartorial decisions they must make.

Magdalen was the youngest child of Admiral Sir George King-Hall, at whose family seat in Ireland she spent her early years. In 1911, when she was seven, the family followed Sir George to Australia where he had been made a naval commander-in-chief, but two years later they were back in England for good, living in the quiet south coast resort of Hove, near Brighton.

It was here that Magdalen took up writing as an antidote to the decidedly staid and geriatric social scene in her new hometown. Having enjoyed the benefits of extensive foreign travel, and having a mother, Lady Olga, who not only wrote books herself but did so in Italian as easily as in English, it was no surprise if Magdalen felt a little more sophisticated than her peers – and by the dawn of the roaring twenties she had cut her hair short and set her heart on a career as the author of fiction. Medieval history was her passion, and she studied keenly the background to the stories about crusaders and feudal lords that she loved to write and would, eventually, become known for. But her attempts to get published so far had rewarded her only with a stack of rejection letters. She began to wonder if historical fiction was such a good idea after all. Perhaps her talents would be better spent in a different genre? Then, one slow summer’s day in 1924, she struck upon an idea. As she said later, ‘I got the idea of writing a “diary” ’.

Those inverted commas are crucial because it was not her own diary she had decided to write (although that would have been of more interest than the diaries of most girls of her age). What she came up with was the ventriloquized journal of an eighteenth-century ‘young lady of fashion’, Miss Cleone Knox. Still a teenager when she started researching the book, Magdalen knew that, although her idea for crafting a picaresque romance in the mould of Tobias Smollett (but a whole lot girlier) was a good one, her historical knowledge of the period was sorely lacking: ‘I’m afraid I knew very little about the 18th Century when I began. It is really the Middle Ages that thrill me. However, I went to the town library at Brighton and read up several 18th Century books. They were really all I had to go on. I was so surprised when my “diary” was printed . . .’

But printed it was, and with a considerable fanfare. Magdalen had had the nous to know that an American publisher would be the best target for her Englisher-than-English creation, so with an editorial note explaining that the diary had come into her hands as a descendant of Miss Knox, she sent it off to the popular publishing and retail company D. Appleton in New York. As soon as Appleton’s readers had a taste of the book’s heady mix of almost-titillating romance and rare historical record, they knew that this would be one of the books of the year, if not the decade. In the publicity campaign that followed, potential readers both lay and academic were promised private encounters with figures like Louis XV and Voltaire that young Miss Knox had written about in her intimate, gossipy journal.

The book tells the story of a romance-obsessed young Irish gentlewoman being taken on a tour of Europe by her father, and trying desperately to avoid being married off to a dry but suitable old bachelor instead of the dashing Mr Ancaster, with whom she is secretly, passionately in love. On every page there are minute descriptions of lovely dresses, irascible aunts, splendid country houses and men who look marvellous in riding boots. And no sooner has one of these sights been colourfully evoked than a bitingly bitchy remark about some
beau monde
luminary would be delivered. Cleone Knox was the impossible love-child of P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen.

Her impression, for example, of the great Enlightenment writer Voltaire (who, she recalled ‘received us in a chintz dressing gown’) was that he was ‘Peevish. To tell the truth, he reminded me of nothing so much as a chattering old magpie. We listened, silent, with the Respect which is due to Genius, however Wearisome it may be.’

Note her frequent use of capitals, which was one of the short-cuts to authenticity she learned from the old books at Brighton public library. This simple technique, alongside a few examples of strange, old-fashioned spelling, gave the manuscript a veneer of authenticity which ran deep enough to have many critics and reviewers fooled on the book’s publication. By the time it appeared in bookshops in January 1926,
The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764–65
by Cleone Knox was being compared, earnestly and rapturously, to the diary of Samuel Pepys. The real author must have been astounded. One critic enthused that: ‘No modern girl will ever write a diary like this. Cleone Knox breathes the very spirit of the witty, robust, patriotic, wicked, hard-drinking, hard-swearing 18th century.’