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  Just the day before Chief White Elk’s widely promoted lecture, the Belgian daily newspaper Le Peuple announced that the event had been canceled. “Indeed, serious doubts have been raised about the claims of the alleged Indian chief,” the article disclosed. “Knowledgeable people state that, contrary to what he said, he never addressed the League of Nations, and he has never been asked to represent anyone.” Concluding the article was the pronouncement “Human credulity is a wonderful thing.”

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  Overnight the situation changed. Edgar’s powers of persuasion were probably behind La Lanterne Sourde reversing their earlier decision to cancel his lecture. It would now be going ahead at the advertised time and place—8:30 p.m. in the Free University’s main auditorium, which had a capacity of one thousand, provided everyone packed in tightly.

  With an hour and a half to spare, fifteen hundred people flowed through the entrance on the rue des Sols, jostling their way into the auditorium. Two thousand more who wanted to hear Edgar were shut outside, where they expressed their frustration by shouting and screaming.

  Fresh waves of raucous people kept turning up over the next hour, yelling, singing, pushing, trampling on other people’s feet, and crushing their ribs. Half an hour before the show, some four thousand of them were gathered in front of the auditorium, the pressure splintering its doors, which eventually gave way. Other members of the riotous crowd ripped the windows off their hinges and climbed across the shoulders of the people inside. Someone was soon swinging from a light fixture. Elsewhere fights broke out.

  When Edgar showed up, he found the hallways leading into the auditorium clogged with people. Though he wasn’t wearing his chief’s costume, he was recognized by at least one of those people, who made threats against him, which precipitated his hasty departure. And his lecture was called off for a second time. Then the authorities began to evacuate the dense crowd. All told, this took an hour, during which the police rolled up and the casualties were taken to a hospital.

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  The article that appeared in one of Belgium’s most prominent newspapers the next morning was not calculated to appeal to Edgar’s vanity. In describing the previous night’s chaos at the Free University, Le Vingtième Siècle stated, “White Elk, who never flinches at the sight of a buffalo on the prairie, had a moment of heroic inspiration—frightened for the first time in his life, he fled.”

  With the connivance, perhaps, of the publicity manager from Famous Players–Lasky, who had been detailed to promote his tour, Edgar endeavored to restore his tarnished public image among the city’s French-speaking population. No sooner had the article appeared in Le Vingtième Siècle than someone posing as his secretary contacted its rival French-language newspaper. At the request of Edgar’s fictitious secretary, La Libre Belgique agreed to publish what purported to be a letter from Chief White Elk to Spotted Eagle, an equally fictitious Comanche chief. Supposedly translated from White Elk’s native language into French, his self-aggrandizing letter sought to ingratiate himself with the Belgian people. It also offered a face-saving corrective to the previous account of his cowardice in the face of the unruly mob.

  “Spotted Eagle, oh great leader!” it began.

  Having been summoned by telegram, I’m now in the main village of the Belgian tribe, where the people are very pleasant. I’ve had huge success. I’ve attracted sympathy and curiosity. All the major newspapers marked my arrival with enthusiastic biographies of me, accompanied by photographs of me in my war bonnet. This was organized very well by my manager. I’ve only one worry, that the press hasn’t paid sufficient attention to the number of languages I know. In different articles these vary from five to seventeen, but the public was generous enough not to notice. And, in any case, I’m learning a sixth, or perhaps an eighteenth language, thanks to a tutor who was found for me by the porter at the hotel where I’m staying. This tutor is teaching me Flemish, the main language of the people here.

  Edgar’s letter went on to refer to “the wisdom and perfection of Belgian institutions” and the economic hardships being endured by many people in Brussels. “A student body had bestowed on me the great honor of inviting me to speak one evening at a hall in the university,” his letter continued.

  I was planning to get there at about nine o’clock, but my manager warned me not to go because I could lose my feathers, which are worth a lot of money in this country. Curiosity drove me there, however. I quickly acquired a traditional Flemish costume and, in this disguise, went to the university. It was awful yet moving! Moving because the show strongly reminded me, in this faraway land, of scenes from home, of victorious warriors taking part in a frenzied scalp dance.

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  A couple of days after the publication of his letter, Edgar headed through Brussels to the venue for his rescheduled lecture. Despite being staged on a Monday afternoon, the event sold out. No trouble broke out this time, though. Instead, the enthralled audience listened politely to Edgar’s long talk about the language, customs, religion, outlook, and aspirations of Native Americans.

  To illustrate aspects of what he was saying, he reminisced about his imaginary grandmother who, he claimed, was 108 years of age. He told his audience that people had a garbled notion of what American Indians were like, a notion based upon the misrepresentations of popular nineteenth-century novelists such as James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans. “I heard kids on the boulevards say that I was not a real Indian because I did not have a scalp on my belt, a knife in my teeth, and a tomahawk in my hand,” he added. “Indians today have taken on the customs of their white brethren. They have shown themselves capable of the same qualities of heart and mind, but nobody has written about this.”

  Enthusiastic applause was unleashed when his talk ended. The ovation persisted for so long that he was able to bow three times before it faded away.

  In the audience was a reporter from a newspaper based in the city of Charleroi. Edgar persuaded the reporter that any lingering rumors about him being an impostor were the product of malice. He also went some way toward mending the damage to his reputation caused by the story about him fleeing from the crush at the Free University. After hearing his lecture, the reporter wrote, “We have no doubt that he is a very brave man—very intelligent, too.”

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  Around the stationary bus were some two hundred children. They belonged to the Boy Scouts of Belgium. Edgar had earlier that morning treated them to a talk and a selection of songs. He’d also enlisted his stepson’s assistance in demonstrating an Indian war dance.

  Now—at lunchtime on Sunday, March 9, 1924—he was sitting on the bus with Leslie and Ethel. A disabled Belgian war veteran and close to a dozen other people were aboard as well. Through the windows they could see the Boy Scouts assemble into formation, like a troop of miniature infantrymen. Soon the formation was escorting the bus as it crawled north down the boulevard Adolphe Max, one of the most fashionable shopping streets in Brussels. On either side were tall, flamboyantly ornamented nineteenth-century buildings. When Edgar’s bus reached the T-junction at the far end, it made a right onto a broad road that skirted a park and a hospital. Dominating the park was a domed hothouse. Beyond that, Edgar’s procession turned onto the rue Royale, home of the midwife he’d bamboozled. No fewer than twenty minutes after setting out, he and the others approached the Colonne du Congrès, a giant monument that resembled Nelson’s Column.

  They stopped near the terrace on which the monument stood. It overlooked the city, lit by bright spring sunshine. A stone balustrade separated the terrace from the street, where a policeman guarded the entrance. Startled by the procession’s sudden arrival, the policeman went up to the bus and said “people in carnival-style costumes” weren’t permitted to enter the area around the Colonne du Congrès.

 
On being informed that what appeared to be a carnival costume was, in fact, Chief White Elk’s national dress, the policeman’s officiousness mutated into flustered embarrassment. Edgar couldn’t hide his own amusement at this turn of events.

  The policeman apologized and then allowed the procession onto the graveled terrace that formed an apron around the monument. At its base, a pair of bronze lions stood sentinel. Belgium’s Unknown Soldier had been interred there eighteen months previously, his burial a symbolic acknowledgment of the many unidentified combatants who had perished in the Great War. A mound of wreaths lay on his tomb. It had already become a pilgrimage site for visiting monarchs, presidents, and generals. Edgar was keen to buttress his perceived regal status by taking part in a ceremony there. More than likely notified by his publicist from Famous Players–Lasky, a press photographer was on hand to record the occasion.

  Row upon row of Boy Scouts watched as Edgar advanced toward the tomb, carrying a wreath. Alongside him was the Belgian war veteran who had been on the bus. Two walking sticks were required for the veteran to hobble across the terrace. In deference to his fallen comrades, he removed his hat.

  Leslie joined the Boy Scouts in saluting as Edgar placed the wreath on the tomb. Affixed to the wreath was a card reading, “From Chief White Elk, on behalf of the North American Indians.”

  Minus their Boy Scout escort, Edgar and Leslie—and presumably Ethel, too—were then treated to a sightseeing tour by a journalist. Their car took them past the Belgian parliament, the sumptuous mansions of the avenue Louise, and the remains of the city’s fortifications. Many of the streets were chockablock even though it was a Sunday. Naturally, the tour encompassed the Manneken Pis fountain, a small statue of a naked boy from whose penis water traced a gentle arc. Leslie broke into wild laughter as soon as he set eyes on it. Edgar kidded about lending the naked statue a feather, which could be deployed in lieu of a fig leaf.

  From the Manneken Pis, their driver chauffeured them the short distance to the Grand Place. In this cobbled, gently sloping plaza, bounded by remarkable medieval buildings with spires, turrets, and pointed gables, was a market selling flowers, small animals, pigeons, and other birds. The journalist tagging along with Edgar ushered him into a tavern on the plaza, where he sampled several bottles of kriekenlambic, the local specialty beer, made from Morello cherries. Edgar pronounced it “a first-rate drink.” It primed him for an evening at one of the city’s cabarets.

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  Edgar had cause to feel pleased because his wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier earned him a place on the front page of two of Belgium’s national newspapers. Over the following days, he also visited a military hospital, where he gave injured war veterans a performance of his tribal songs and dances. And he attended a high-society masked ball, organized by the city’s Jewish community.

  Several fellow guests at the ball were surprised to see Edgar in a tuxedo rather than his familiar garb. When someone commented upon his more ordinary getup, he came out with a mischievous reply: “I thought, ‘Good, since this is a Parisian-style ball, I’ll disguise myself as a European.’ ”

  Moving in such deep-pocketed circles, his earnings from promoting The Covered Wagon and scamming the locals failed to keep pace with his high-rolling expenditure, which probably featured not just alcohol and drugs but also costly souvenirs that he’d either lose or give away in a display of princely largesse. Though he swallowed his pride and supplemented his income by working as a dishwasher, he was still unable to support his wife and stepson. Other problems meanwhile threatened to bushwhack him before he and his family headed back to France for the final leg of his tour.

  Until now, his victims’ sense of shame had insulated him from the legal repercussions of his activities in Brussels. Most of his wealthy Belgian victims couldn’t bring themselves to admit they’d been fool enough to fall for such baloney. Even the dowager bankrupted by Edgar balked at pressing charges against him. Yet the midwife who had lent him seven thousand francs could afford no such inhibitions. Belatedly cottoning on to the fact that he wouldn’t be repaying her, she complained to the Brussels police, whose interest in him was magnified by an allegation that he’d recently robbed a chorus girl. Edgar could now look forward to being grilled by the authorities, slung into a jail cell, and ultimately deported to the United States, where he still faced a number of outstanding charges. The way things were going, he was looking at years in jail, exiled from the luxury and the deluge of praise to which he’d become so accustomed.

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  Without settling what was probably a colossal hotel bill, Edgar and his family left town near the end of March. From Brussels, they returned to Paris, its streets yet to feel the warm hand of spring. Instead of keeping Edgar company on the last stretch of his tour, Ethel and Leslie stayed in the French capital while he journeyed four hundred and ten miles south to the Mediterranean. He didn’t endear himself to his wife by providing her and Leslie with next to nothing on which to live, their penury leaving them well-placed to test the adage about Paris being “the cheapest city in Europe to starve in.”

  Edgar was now in the cosmopolitan port of Marseilles, famed for its menacing backstreets, bustling quayside, quaint-looking commercial sailing vessels, and crowded main thoroughfare. Once he’d completed his contribution to a brief series of screenings of The Covered Wagon, he traveled along the coast to the Riviera, a narrow, flower-scented ribbon of countryside sandwiched between the bleak Maritime Alps and the rocky promontories jutting into the ever-tranquil blue sea. Long established as a byword for wealth, glamour, titled privilege, and the type of moneyed decadence that attracted the drug dealers on whom he depended, the Riviera was in those days at its busiest during the winter. Its mild climate enticed an annual tide of well-heeled foreign visitors, many of them from England and America.

  The holiday season had already started to wane by the first week of April when Edgar—going under the moniker of Prince Tewanna Ray, Chief White Elk—arrived in Nice. A huge crowd greeted him. With them was a newsreel cameraman who filmed Edgar as he stepped into a specially decorated carriage, waiting to transport him across the beautiful, polyglot city.

  He took up residence at one of Nice’s most lavishly appointed hotels. The majority of these stood on the shoreline, where the wide, palm-fringed Promenade des Anglais paralleled the long, graceful curve of the pebbly beach and the bay beyond. Strolling past the giant hotels, the adjacent mansions, and the Jardin Albert Premier, its flower beds frothing with brightly colored blooms, were some of the most ravishing women in Europe, arrayed in the latest Parisian creations. Not to be outdone, Edgar wore his pastiche Cherokee costume, now incorporating numerous fake jewels that winked in the crisp, spring light.

  Stories about Edgar and his League of Nations mission meanwhile appeared in the local papers. Though the Riviera press carried recurrent warnings about the confidence tricksters who preyed upon the city’s tourists by posing as retired bankers, affable priests, or wealthy philanthropists, Edgar exuded such charm and plausibility that he was taken at face value.

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  Late each morning and evening, the balmy sunshine eventually giving way to a nocturnal chill, Edgar had to report to the Maison Berger. A downtown property spanning a full block, it housed a photographer’s studio, a tobacconist, and other small businesses. It also housed the Mondial Cinema, where The Covered Wagon was making its Riviera debut. Luckily for Edgar, who hadn’t lost his thirst for alcohol, the movie theater had its own bar—next to a small dance floor.

  He gave politely applauded talks in French before each screening and then collected donations from his audience, who were urged to help impoverished “little Indian children.” (In truth, the money went toward helping a certain impoverished Rhode Islander who qualified as neither a Native American nor a child.)

  Between his modest work commitments, E
dgar insinuated himself into the world of tea dances, soirées, and grand receptions, frequented by aristocrats such as Prince Aga Khan, Grand Duke Cyril of Russia, and Prince Haidar Fazel of Cairo. Within that refined milieu, Edgar fell in with many of the visiting blue bloods. And he befriended the officers from the USS Pittsburgh, a visiting American warship, jokily dubbed a “playship” because its function was to tour foreign ports where the crew was expected to schmooze with civilian and military dignitaries. Edgar would, of course, have had no difficulty trading seafaring reminiscences over a few glasses of cognac.

  Among the people he chanced upon in Nice was the fittingly surnamed Dr. Perry Chance, a rich, middle-aged dentist from Ohio, whose past patients included the German royal family. For more than two decades Dr. Chance had been living in Europe. He and his wife had a combined dental surgery and home just up the street from the Promenade des Anglais.

  One of his treasured possessions was an improbable keepsake from the United States—an authentic Native American feathered headdress, for which he’d paid a lot of money. Edgar sweet-talked the doctor into letting him borrow it. He donned it whenever he gave his presentations at the Mondial Cinema, where, on at least one occasion, he arrived in such a soused condition that the bartender refused to serve him.

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  After his third lunchtime show in as many days, Edgar headed into the Mondial’s lobby. Together with his publicity manager, who masqueraded as his secretary, he began hobnobbing with a gaggle of VIPs. In so doing, he received an introduction to Contessa Antoinette Khevenhüller-Metsch, who had come to the Mondial with another young contessa. Antoinette, known by friends and family as “Atta,” was a beautiful, dark-eyed twenty-seven-year-old Viennese brunette with a pale, broad face. She favored heavy lipstick and a fashionable hairstyle, cut just below her ears, gentle, permed waves rolling out from a side part. Sympathetic toward the supposed plight of Edgar’s people, Atta handed him a very generous donation of three hundred francs. Naïvely, she thought the money would go toward “the needs of Indian orphans.”