THE GREAT IMPOSTOR (218 pp.)—Robert Crichton—Random House ($3.95).
GENIUS WITHOUT PORTFOLIO UNMASKED
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 Cagliostro is his conscience; more often than not, he commits crimes of kindness and sins of social betterment.
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.
Sacred Mission. The central fact of Demara's life, according to Biographer Crichton, may be that he is a status sucker. He was eleven years old when his father, who owned movie houses in Lawrence, Mass., abruptly went broke. Kicked out of their mansion on Jackson Street, the Demaras landed in a shabby old carriage house on the wrong side of the gloomy old mill town. Fred hated poverty, with its stiff work boots and corduroy knickers, and he refused to face it. Every chance he got he sneaked back to the old house, sat in the attic and "dreamed about things I hoped would come true."
At 16, lulled by a dream about a "sacred mission," Fred ran away and joined the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists) at Valley Falls, R.I. The good fathers viewed the novice with some alarm. The boy already stood 6 ft. tall, weighed close to 200 Ibs., and the way he piled through a plate of turnips suggested strongly that he was riot meant to mortify the flesh. After two years the abbot gently told him so.
Soon afterward, Fred became a teacher at a Catholic school for boys. After a quarrel with the brother superior, he stole the school's station wagon, learned to drive as he went skidding down to Boston, got drunk and woke up the next morning as a buck private in the U.S. Army.