King Con Read online

  To lend weight to what he’d been telling the students, Edgar posed a riddle. He offered a handsome blanket as the prize for the first correct answer. The blanket was, he said, woven by “an Indian princess” on the Cherokee reservation. Many of the students tried their luck before he awarded the blanket to one of them.

  He then milked the adoring students for yet more adulation by soliciting trinkets that he could take back to the children at the Chieasher Indian Mission School in Oklahoma. The recipients of these donations would, he promised, “write to their paleface friends and thank them.” Gifts for the imaginary children attending this fictitious school in this fictitious town swamped him the following day.

  By Friday of that week, he had embedded himself in Eau Claire’s communal imagination no less as a philanthropist than as the owner of fourteen oil wells “running day and night.” Like a drug addict who requires higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect, he had an urge to keep magnifying the scale of his boasts. He took to professing fluency in nine languages, and to presenting himself as a noted runner and footballer; a collector who had amassed historic relics from the world over; and someone accustomed to conversing with “men and women high in the affairs of their nations.” He even posed as a close friend of King Edward VII, whom he said he’d met while touring England.

  So persuasive were Edgar’s self-aggrandizing tales that the Eau Claire Leader ran an article proclaiming, “It is doubtful if any Indian living is so widely known as Chief Tewanna.” One of the reporters on that paper was nonetheless skeptical enough about Edgar to start investigating him.

  The reporter fixed up a Friday afternoon interview with D. L. Hunt, a local man with financial ties to the oil business in Oklahoma, Edgar’s supposed home state. Hunt had also spent a decade living there, running the Southwestern Business College, which left him “extensively acquainted with conditions there.” He could hardly have been better placed to contradict Edgar’s portrait of himself as a well-known Oklahoma businessman and sports personality.

  At the interview, Hunt talked knowledgeably about the “great strides” made by the Cherokee “in the matter of education.” He told the reporter that they had “taken up in nearly all cases the white man’s ways.” He praised them for how well they ran the district’s schools, banks, stores, and other businesses. He referred to their ownership of “vast oilfields valued at millions of dollars.” And he lamented the paucity of wider recognition for their achievements. Unwilling to admit he’d never heard of Chief Tewanna—which represented a freakish stroke of luck for Edgar—Hunt declared that in Oklahoma “the name of Tewanna was a prominent one.”

  It was becoming so in Wisconsin, too. Edgar’s local celebrity could, as his time in California had taught him, be parlayed into friendships with Eau Claire’s most influential and moneyed citizens. Since his arrival in the city on Tuesday evening, several such people had given him presents and hosted meals for him. Each of them was informed that he’d be sending them a large box of Indian blankets, currently stored in Chicago, where he claimed to be scheduled to appear at the Great Northern Hippodrome. Admittedly, he was aiming to leave Eau Claire that Saturday, but he had no such booking in Chicago.

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  —

  Only a day before he was due to depart, Edgar presented himself at Eau Claire’s Grand Opera House, a gabled Victorian redbrick building distinctly lacking grandeur. It didn’t host opera, either. Like most similarly titled small-town venues, its name served not to describe its function but to distract customers from the louche associations acquired by ordinary theaters.

  Edgar had been hired to perform there immediately after that evening’s screening of a new silent movie. Interspersing short movies with vaudeville acts had long been common. Acts such as Edgar’s, which referenced ethnic and racial stereotypes, were a staple of vaudeville. Though the dominant variation entailed white performers wearing blackface makeup and lampooning African Americans, other acts caricatured German Americans, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, and Native Americans.

  In this case, Edgar or his press agent had duped the management into believing that he’d appeared in the main movie about to be screened. Titled Her Own People, it was about a doomed love affair between a white man and a half–Native American girl, played by a white actress. Edgar must have known that some of the Native American actors would—thanks to a mixture of smudgy cinematography, feathered headdresses, and the haze of tobacco smoke in the theater—be hard to identify, enabling him to get away with the audacious claim that he was one of the Native Americans on-screen.

  Music at the show was provided not by a lone pianist but by an orchestra, playing to an audience of about five hundred. Edgar had worked as a pianist at similar venues back east. He couldn’t read music, so the improvisatory aspect of the job was a godsend. It had also helped him to become still more attuned to the art of showmanship, to the ways he could steer the reactions of his audience. Vaudeville audiences—especially those at venues such as the Grand Opera House—tended to be quick to hoot, boo, clap, or heckle performers. But experienced performers like Edgar referred to themselves as “mechanics of emotion,” coaxing the desired response at the desired moment. In that sense, vaudeville artistes had more in common with con artists than they may have cared to admit.

  When the movie finished, Edgar took to the stage and presented a prize to one of the city’s Boy Scout troops. He described the prize as “a beautiful solid silver trumpet, valued at about $75,” though it was actually made from tin and worth closer to $3. After the presentation, he gave a lecture and performed some songs and piano solos. Practiced vaudevillians like him positioned themselves in the footlights’ glare, close to the rim of the stage, from where they were best able to read the audience, establish a rapport with it, and then create an illusion of spontaneity and intimacy. Edgar had a flawless singing technique, probably drummed into him by the music instructor at the surprisingly enlightened reformatory to which he’d been consigned as a fourteen-year-old.

  His act went down so well that people begged him to stay in Eau Claire and play some extra dates. He graciously consented to extend his booking at the Grand Opera House for another couple of days, but dispatched his press agent, Thomas Goodale, to Detroit, where Goodale could solicit publicity that might generate speaking engagements in Michigan.

  Twice daily that weekend, Edgar worked as a support act for movies at the Grand Opera House, yet even that didn’t satisfy the demand. It didn’t satisfy Edgar, either, because he lacked the single-minded patience required to parlay his talent into the big-league vaudeville stardom it deserved. In any case, he needed more than just the applause from a sizable audience and the fat paychecks that came with that. No matter how large the paychecks were, it would never be enough for a spendthrift like him.

  Promising to return to Eau Claire on the final Thursday of that month, he borrowed a suitcase from one person and eighteen dollars from another before heading to Detroit, his press agent’s home turf. Edgar nonetheless had a total of only thirty dollars in his billfold.

  Just prior to his arrival, Goodale bagged a story for him in the Detroit Free Press. Headlined BIG CHIEF OFFERS BRAVES FOR WAR, it plugged his services “lecturing to the palefaces” and applied daring enhancements to the fiction he’d dreamed up. Now his portrait could be seen on the ceiling of the lobby in Detroit’s new Statler Hotel. Now he was “a personal friend” of President Wilson. Now he’d be returning from their meeting in Washington, DC, with a party of forty Indians who, at each stopping place, would perform an opera, written especially for them, all proceeds being donated to the school system.

  Detroit was a flourishing city of grand civic buildings and spacious, remarkably clean avenues, on which the sounds of street piano players and shouts from Italian fruit sellers were common. The city’s early embrace of Prohibition had spawned illicit businesses catering to Edgar’s affinity for the warm,
anesthetic embrace of liquor. Down by the river he had a choice between not only secret rooms housing speakeasies, but also what were known as “blind pigs” or “blind tigers.” These circumvented the law by charging customers to see a blind pig or some other form of sideshow attraction, and then serving a complimentary glass of moonshine—something with which Edgar was well-acquainted in both senses of the word.

  He did not, however, have any significant successes to toast during his short time in Detroit. For all Goodale’s efforts, Edgar failed to secure the bookings he needed to generate the cash he lacked. Still worse, his arrival overlapped with the widely publicized introduction of a government campaign to arrest men who had failed to register for military service. If Edgar was caught, he faced a year in prison—and a lot longer than that if the authorities figured out who he really was.

  4

  Sticking around in Detroit was not a prudent option, yet Edgar took until late June to find a means of escape. It necessitated stooping to the level of the pickpockets who were viewed with such disdain by con artists like him. Preoccupied as he was by status, that wouldn’t have sat easily with Edgar. Whatever misgivings he felt, he stole his press agent’s suitcase, together with some clothes and money. Then he headed more than one hundred miles southwest to Fort Wayne, Indiana, still calling himself Chief Tewanna, his lineage morphing from Cherokee to Sioux.

  He warded off awkward questions about the military draft by claiming he’d already enlisted in the Oklahoma Field Hospital Corps. And he circulated the story that, until he shipped out, he’d be working as an army recruiter “under the direction of Uncle Sam.” Over a period of just three days, he visited a couple of industrial plants and made recruiting speeches to their workforce, his efforts aided by a squad of artillerymen. He also headlined in four “Enlistment Day” vaudeville shows, hosted by the Lyric Theater, which was, name aside, grander than the equivalent venue in Eau Claire.

  Vaudeville programs typically comprised as many as nine acts, each lasting between ten and thirty minutes, the full show spanning upward of three hours, through which the house orchestra provided an accompaniment. Some of Edgar’s colleagues at the Lyric Theater had probably been touring the same act for years, because only a few thousand people at most could see any show in a single day. Changing a successful act was said to bring bad luck, but Edgar’s lack of superstition gave him scope for incessant tinkering.

  The manager of the Lyric would have been responsible for slotting Edgar and the other acts into a well-tested framework, always beginning with a visual routine, since any vocals would be rendered inaudible by chattering latecomers taking their seats. For the show headlined by Edgar—“Chief Tewanna” to the audience—a dance or juggling act would have functioned as the opener. It was followed by singers, a pianist, a comedian, and one of the short films that often featured on vaudeville bills. There was an elaborate theatrical sketch as well. Edgar must have been conversant with the term for this: “a flash act.” Such acts were prone to flashy production values—flashy enough to come with their own scenery on occasion. Flash acts generally preceded the moment when the curtain came down for the intermission.

  As that evening’s headliner, Edgar would have been left to hang around until the penultimate spot in the show—a coveted position that came with the best dressing room and highest salary. While waiting backstage, he’d likely have heard language reflective of vaudeville’s role as family entertainment. Even mild profanities such as “goddamn” were seldom uttered, despite the constant pressure under which he and his fellow performers labored.

  Whenever they went onstage, their careers were at stake. Only a single lucky break away from stardom, they had to hope their acts provoked applause, or “drew blood” in vaudeville slang. The duration and intensity of that applause would be noted on “Act Report” cards written by the theater manager, who also commented on the quality of each act and how suitable it was for families. His report would then be submitted to the central booking office run by that chain of theaters. Were Edgar or any of the other artistes to receive an unfavorable write-up, they could forget about securing any more bookings from other theaters in the same chain. Just the threat of a bad report served to keep performers in line. It was a system sure to exacerbate the often-strained relationship between theater managers and the likes of Edgar.

  Theater managers usually resented the fact that their paychecks were far smaller than those of the performers. And the performers had cause to resent the fact that managers policed the length of every act. For the managers, timing was crucial. If a matinee overran, it reduced the time available before the next show and thus reduced income from the theater’s food and beverage concessions. The repercussions were even more serious when an evening show fell behind schedule. Under those circumstances, the theater risked incurring high-rate overtime payments to the orchestra, the stagehands, and the front-of-house staff. In the event that the artistes going onstage before Edgar were running late, the manager would have visited Edgar’s dressing room and instructed him to shave a few minutes off his act.

  Onstage at last, Edgar sang a patriotic song and performed a couple of his standard Chauncey Olcott numbers, which were, he told his audience, Olcott’s favorites. He added that Olcott himself had suggested he sing them. Also he bragged about his experiences of army life and encouraged members of the audience to enlist in the military.

  Charismatic and talented though he was, show business could at present give him nothing more than a fleeting respite from his money problems. These were compounded by the authorities getting wise to his activities. He became worried enough to drop his Chief Tewanna charade.

  * * *

  —

  Necessity led him to ignore any qualms he had about returning to New York City, where he’d once served jail time for impersonating a government official. By the start of August he was back in the Big Apple, back amid its smoke-wreathed skyscrapers, yellow taxicabs, congested tenements, fashionable women, and jostling rush-hours, the brash modernity and nocturnal sparkle of its streets emblematic of the myriad ways in which the world around him had altered since he was a kid. Not that he had trouble adjusting to new things. One thing that had changed during the time he’d been away was the ubiquitous presence of gaggles of soldiers and sailors on the sidewalks, pestering women who strayed into their orbit.

  Edgar’s return to the city coincided with a protracted heat wave of record-breaking severity. Numerous stores and factories were forced to shut down, their sweat-soaked employees decanted into the parks. Fire escapes and rooftops became improvised bedrooms. Cart horses crumpled in the street. People succumbed to heat exhaustion, too. And wisecracks about the temperature circulated more readily than the clotted air. “It is impossible to get soft-cooked eggs,” one of these went. “The hens are laying ’em hard-boiled.”

  Both the heat and the humidity reached their zenith that Thursday when Edgar crossed lower Manhattan’s financial district, where the streets were shaded by office blocks of up to forty-one stories. Servicing those were men-only lunch counters that attracted the kind of people his father had wanted him to become. Regular people with regular jobs. On Broad Street—a gorge-like thoroughfare culminating in the stock exchange—Edgar would have had to slalom down the sidewalk, which was, despite the heat reflected off all those hard surfaces, crowded with brokers. They formed the chaotic “curb market,” trading securities not listed on the stock exchange.

  Midway down the street, Edgar disappeared into a building where the U.S. Army Transport Service was based. He must have heard they were recruiting civilian crewmen, so he’d gone to sign up, his need to raise some cash and escape from the authorities blending perhaps with a desire for adventure.

  When he showed up at the busy but understaffed Labor Employment Section, he was recognized by one of the officers there. In all probability, the officer—who knew him as Tom Longboat—belonged to the Twenty-Second
Infantry Regiment, which had transferred to New York City from Fort Douglas, Arizona, where Edgar had seven months earlier spent time. Possibly swayed by Edgar’s past experience as a nightwatchman on a merchant ship, his acquaintance at the Labor Employment Section offered him a job as an ordinary seaman aboard the SS Antilles, due to transport American troops to France. The job paid ninety dollars a month. Very low, even with the inclusion of a forty-five-dollar-a-month bonus. To make matters worse, the offer was contingent upon Edgar providing either a passport or a Certificate of Identification confirming his identity. Since he wasn’t the man he said he was, that left him in a bit of a fix.

  * * *

  —

  Squadrons of dark clouds had by lunchtime assembled west of the city, muffled thunder mimicking the ominous, far-off drumroll of artillery fire. Edgar just needed to shut his eyes and he’d be able to imagine himself a hero in the trenches. Within about half an hour, rain started sheeting down. Children shrieked delightedly in the flooded streets. Adults, meanwhile, leaned from windows to savor the refreshing downpour. It didn’t last long, but it left behind much cooler air.

  Before that afternoon was over, Edgar set out for the U.S. Army Transport Service’s headquarters. He could get there via the nearby Hudson Terminal, marked by twin office blocks that resembled a giant tuning fork. From the underground platforms, where nicotine addicts like him were not allowed to light cigarettes or pipes, electric trains slithered beneath the river on their brief journey to Hoboken, the so-called port of embarkation for American military personnel shipping out to fight the Germans. Ironically, it was synonymous with German immigrants, who made up a quarter of its population. Along Hoboken’s waterfront were scores of German saloons and hotels, advertising bock beer—the type of German ale brewed at the plant where Edgar’s father had worked.