Ferdinand Waldo Demara
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Ferdinand Waldo Demara (1921- June 8, 1982), known as "the Great Impostor", masqueraded as many people from monks to surgeons to prison wardens.
Demara was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. A Roman Catholic, he tried unsuccessfully to enter a Trappist monastery in 1935. Two attempts later it seemed that the cloistered life did not agree with him and he joined the U.S. Army in 1941.
The following year Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and went AWOL. After two more tries in monasteries he joined the Navy. He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously oriented psychologist. Both Navy and Army caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison. A string of pseudo-academic careers followed.
During his "careers", he was, among other things, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher. One teaching job led to six months in prison. He never seemed to get much monetary gain in what he was doing - just temporary respectability.
Demara's story was recounted in the 1960 book,The Great Impostor, written by Robert Crichton and published by Random House; the book was a New York Tmes bestseller and adapted into a 1961 film by the same name starring Tony Curtis as Demara. Curtis bore little physical resemblance to the six-foot Demara, who weighed as much as 350 pounds. The film is entertaining but highly fictionalized. A second book by Crichton, "The Rascal and the Road," recounted Demara and Crichton's experiences together as Crichton conducted research for "The Great Impostor."
Many of Demara's unsuspecting employers, under other circumstances, would have been satisfied with Demara as an employee. He was apparently able to memorize necessary techniques from textbooks and worked on two cardinal rules: The burden of proof is on the accuser and When in danger, attack. He described his own motivation as "Rascality, pure rascality".
His most famous exploit was to masquerade as surgeon Joseph Cyr aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. He managed to improvise successful surgeries and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin. Apparent removal of a bullet from a wounded man ended up in Canadian newspapers. One person reading the reports was the mother of the real Dr. Joseph Cyr; her son at the time of 'his' service in Korea was actually practicing medicine in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. When news of the impostor reached the Cayuga, still on duty off Korea, Captain James Plomer at first refused to believe Demara was not a doctor (and not Joseph Cyr). The Canadian Navy chose to not press charges, and Demara returned to the United States.
After this episode he sold his tale to Life magazine and worked in short-time jobs, since he was now widely known. He resorted to drinking. Only after he continued to use his old tricks and got fake credentials could he get another job at a prison in Huntsville, Texas. According to his biographer, Demara's past became known and his position untenable when an inmate found a copy of Life with an article about the impostor.
He continued to use new aliases but by then it was harder than before.
In 1960, as a publicity stunt, Demara was given a small acting role in the horror film The Hypnotic Eye. He appears briefly in the film as a (genuine) hospital surgeon. Ironically, the impostor who fooled so many people in real life reveals a total lack of acting ability in this brief role. By this point, Demara's girth was so notable that he could not avoid attracting attention.
In 1967 Demara received the Graduate Certificate in Bible from Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon.
Demara died on June 8, 1982 due to heart failure. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he had been living in Orange County, California, for eight years. During that time he had worked as a Baptist minister, then as a visiting counselor at Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim until illness forced him to stop, in 1980.
[edit] Books
- Robert Crichton, The Great Impostor (Random House 1959), ISBN 0-394-42714-9.
- Robert Crichton, The Rascal and the Road (Simon & Schuster 1961), ISBN 1199399906 OCLC 1372850
[edit] Films
- The Great Impostor (1960), a fictionalised version of his life starring Tony Curtis as Demara.
- Jarod, the protagonist in the TV series The Pretender is inspired by (but not based on) Demara.
[edit] Trivia
- In one episode of the TV comedy M*A*S*H {#18 Season 1}, Hawkeye Pierce discovers a visiting surgeon is an imposter and gives him an hour to leave before calling the MPs. The imposter later turns up as a chaplain. This was an extremely fictionalized version of Demara’s “service” in Korea; for example changing the location from the Canadian Navy ship to a U.S. Army MASH hospital.
