The Liars Club

In the Paddington, London, office of Debrett’s Ltd., one of several outfits devoted to cataloging Great Britain’s titled aristocracy, there resides a collection of note cards—numbering in the hundreds—neatly filed away in a set of drawers known colloquially as “the bogus boxes.” Each card bears the name, or names, of a sham baron or counterfeit countess, like the fellow who began calling himself Lord Peter Beauclerk some years back, only to be exposed as a fraud after the notice of his engagement to a young lady from a prominent family was printed in the paper. The brother-in-law of the genuine Lord Beauclerk confronted the man and, as Charles Kidd, coeditor of Debrett’s Peerage, says with a note of approval, “He threw him into a hedge, as I recall.”

    The history of society is, of course, littered with such cases, be they pretenders to the throne, such as the faux Anastasia Romanov, née Anna Anderson, and Perkin Warbeck, the servant boy who was mistaken for the missing (and presumably murdered) Richard Duke of York and went on to challenge the rule of Henry VII, or scoundrels like Arthur Barry, a self-styled “extra man,” who was frequently seen at the better tables in Roaring Twenties New York while secretly pursuing a rewarding sideline as a jewel thief.

    Such charlatans continue to thrive. In an era when cosmetic surgery is all but obligatory, when one’s actual age is a matter of utmost secrecy and when the makeover is regarded as the highest form of self-expression, the line between shading the truth and out-and-out fraud is as blurry as the Vuitton logo on a fake Murakami handbag.

    Obituary writers couldn’t resist a bit of moralizing when David Hampton, who masqueraded as the son of Sidney Poitier and was the inspiration for John Guare’s hit play Six Degrees of Separation, died quietly from an AIDS-related illness last July (“No celebrities keened by his bedside,” taunted The New York Times). But the parade of apparent fakes continued unabated. Around the same time, a man claiming to be a grandson of William Randolph Hearst was featured on a VH1 reality show behaving in a manner that Victoria Hearst, for one, considered unbecoming of the family name, according to a story in the New York Daily News. After the family complained that the man was a fake, VH1 pulled the program pending an investigation. (W’s attempts to locate the gentleman were unsuccessful.) In October, Christophe Rocancourt, the grifter who passed himself off as a Russian nobleman, a French prizefighter, the son of Dino De Laurentiis, the nephew of Oscar de la Renta and, most famously, a Rockefeller heir, was sentenced to four years in prison—on the very day that a fraudulent prince was jailed in Tokyo after allegedly staging an “imperial wedding” and graciously accepting more than $100,000 in gift money from well-wishers.

    One of the more successful of these modern-day mountebanks is Duncan Roy, whose exploits also rate a mention in the Debrett’s bogus boxes. Roy was in his teens—roughly the same age as Perkin Warbeck or Christophe Rocancourt or David Hampton or, for that matter, Tom Ripley or James Gatz (who styled himself Jay Gatsby)—when he took on his own high-born alter ego, quickly worming his way into a wealthy coterie of expat British aristos living in Paris in the early Eighties.

    Roy, whose autobiographical feature film, AKA, earned him a BAFTA award nomination and opens in New York on December 12, says his charade began almost by accident. Having grown up in modest circumstances in Whitstable, Kent, and, he says, having been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, he ran away from home and talked his way into a job at the Bond Street Yves Saint Laurent boutique owned by Lady Clare Rendlesham, a London social fixture and former fashion editor of Harpers & Queen. When she fired him a few months later, he lit off for Paris, where he began posing as Lord Anthony Rendlesham, Lady Clare’s son. (She did in fact have a son around Roy’s age, the Honorable Charles Thelluson.)

    ”It wasn’t as though I set out deliberately to deceive,” Roy says now via cell phone, as he navigates a crowded sidewalk in London’s Vauxhall section. (Fittingly, it’s Halloween night, an increasingly popular holiday in England, and Roy interrupts his narrative to describe with irritation the clusters of costumed ghouls roaming the streets.) As he tells it, he first identified himself as Lord Anthony sardonically, never really expecting to be believed. But when the doors of society miraculously clicked open for Rendlesham, Roy—who’d been living on the streets at the time—simply went along for the ride. “I was just kind of coasting and enjoying not being Duncan Roy,” he explains. “I didn’t realize it would spin out into six years. People might think I was more complicit than that, but you can kind of fall into it.”

    ”It’s amazing the number of impostors who just start out with a chance thing like that,” says Sarah Burton, author of the recent study Impostors: Six Kinds of Liar, published by Viking. “It’s often somebody being mistaken for someone else” and deciding, on the spur of the moment, to keep quiet, she adds. “Each time you lie, it becomes less of a taboo, and harder to retract. And each time someone introduces you to someone else, they’re re-inscribing the identity on you without your having to do anything.”

    Without once breaking character, Roy found work as a fashion stylist. He hobnobbed with the likes of Jane Wellesley, Sabrina Guinness and the notorious Marquess of Bristol, and he became a lover of Andy Warhol’s business partner Fred Hughes (who was not above a bit of pretense himself, occasionally claiming to be related to Howard Hughes). Not long before Roy’s identity came to light, he claims, he even cruised the Peloponnese in the company of the Prince of Wales. The whole adventure came to an end when investigators from Barclaycard, where he had run up a long-neglected balance of around 10,000 pounds, caught up with him. After receiving a new moniker—”Lord of the Lies”—from Britain’s tabloids, he was convicted of criminal deception and spent 10 months in prison.

    Interestingly, Roy’s credit card was actually in his own name; he thinks his greater crime was that by cracking through the upper crust, he “breached the protocol of being British,” as he puts it. “People were mortified that anyone from the working class could be anything but what they were.”

    Although he has since become a strident republican, vilifying the royal family as a bunch of “tax-guzzling parasites,” he says showing up the well-to-do was never his intention. He simply wanted to be one of them and to escape the torments of his childhood. Pulling off the ruse was all too easy. “To this day, I’m amazed at the people who made fools of themselves, pretending to know me!” he marvels. “Everybody just seemed to want to believe it.”

    Rocancourt evidently received a similar reception. “I forced no one to believe the characters I invented,” he writes in his memoir, I, Christophe Rocancourt: Orphan, Playboy and Convict, which was published in France in 2002 and is being shopped to American publishers. “I was the mirror of people’s vanity.”

    Burton agrees. “They’re appealing to the worst in everyone else,” she says. “Blue blood goes a very long way, even these days. And people want to believe that they’ve met a viscount or a lord. So if you add people being trusting to people being snobbish, we’re actually incredibly soft targets for someone posing as aristocracy.” (In Roy’s case, you might also add people being a bit woozy. Clarissa Pilkington, who occasionally bumped into the faux Lord Rendlesham on the party circuit, recalls with a laugh, “People in that set were taking a lot of drugs and were quite out of it, so you probably could have got away with anything, frankly.”)

    In any event, Roy says his eventual exposure was a tremendous relief. “It was driving me insane,” he says. “I had made really close and enduring friends during that time, and I hated the idea that I was lying to them. I couldn’t bear it anymore. The idea of waking up and being someone else and meeting people whom you loved and who loved you—it was debilitating.”

    While such elaborate deceptions remain anomalous, lesser examples of pretense are all too common in society’s upper strata. The gala committee lists are littered with questionable von’s and de’s, and stories abound of top-tier hostesses who’ve omitted stints as flight attendants, retail clerks or worse from their CVs. “Once they marry the money, they go hog wild inventing who they were before,” notes Jane Stanton Hitchcock, a social figure and author whose most recent novel, Social Crimes, is a potboiler involving identity theft among the upper classes. “There are some grandes dames who have embellished those histories to a fare-thee-well. The tip-off is where you were educated: ‘Oh, I’m half-Bulgarian, half-Romanian, I went to school in Switzerland, but then we moved, and I went to school in Transylvania….’ You know, the untraceable, implacable background.

    ”I knew one girl was an impostor because she said she’d been educated at Miss Porter’s School,” Hitchcock adds, “whereas anyone who ever actually went there always said, ‘I went to Farmington.’”

    Gary Boyd Roberts, senior research scholar at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, routinely fields calls from suspicious hostesses wondering if a new face on the scene is the genuine article. (He says he’s safeguarded Newport society from a spurious d’Orleans and a dubious Vanderbilt, among others.) “Someone comes into your social group or is going to marry a friend, and something about them makes you think they’re an impostor,” he explains, “so you start looking around, but you do so very discreetly.” Most often, he says, the culprits are new arrivals from the continent. “Europeans come here and try to make a splash, passing for something they’re not.”

    Roberts adds that what such impostors don’t seem to understand is that these days, it’s hardly necessary to go to such lengths to be accepted into society. “They can almost just be themselves,” he says, laughing. “All you have to do is live well on nothing, and lots of handsome young men can pull that off! Start getting invited to parties, and you can get yourself an heiress. Her father would probably be very suspicious, of course, but it can be done.”

    Roy agrees. “If you want to be in society, you can,” he says. “You don’t need to pretend to be anything. You’ve just got to be smart or funny or artistic. If you have something interesting to say and can earn your place at supper, you can be there.”

    Which seems to be what Roy himself has done since becoming a filmmaker—carving out his own niche among London’s artistic set. He is an acquaintance of the art dealer Jay Jopling, and for a time he was romantically linked with Lucy Helmore (the former Mrs. Bryan Ferry), though he says they “have recently stopped” dating.

    What’s more, the other night at a gallery opening, he ran into the social doyenne Lynn Wyatt, whom he’d originally met years before in his more glamorous guise. He immediately fessed up. “You know, I’m not Lord Rendlesham anymore,” he told her. To which Wyatt replied, “Yes, honey, but you’ve still got your dimples.”

Source: W
Date: 1/1/2004