The Great Imposter

In early 1975, I saw the movie the "Great Imposter," starring Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. and then read the two biographical books written by Robert Crichton, "The Great Imposter" and "The Rascal and the Road." On May 14, 1975, I rode with my dad to the New Brunswick New Jersey Public Library and I spent about a dollar making nickel copies of microfiche of a feature article about Demara published in Life Magazine in July 1959.

I became fascinated by the real-life adventures of a famous individual who never finished high school, and yet successfully undertook a wide variety of career choices and excelled at many of them -- before getting caught, exposed and only once ever prosecuted. He was something of a hero to me, someone who never had to grow up and commit to a particular life's course. I wrote book reviews and term papers on his life for school.

Fred Demara was born ninety years ago in Lawrence, Massachusetts and lived in relative comfort until his father's and uncle's motion picture theater business ownership failed during the First Great Depression. He did not take the socioeconomic fall well, and ran away at age sixteen to the Rhode Island Cistercian Monks, where he stayed until joining the US Army in 1941. A year later, he went AWOL with the identity of an army buddy, and entered other monasteries in succession before joining the US Navy, and then he faked his death and deserted.

Fred obtained the identity of Dr. Robert Linton French and taught psychology in a Pennsylvania college, served as an orderly in a California sanitarium and taught at St. Martin's College in Washington. The Federal Bureau of Investigation eventually caught up with him on the wartime desertion charge, but only imprisoned him for eighteen months.

After Fred's release, he assumed the identity of Brother John Payne and studied law at Northeastern University and then founded a state-chartered college with the Roman Catholic Brothers of Christian Instruction in Maine. It was there that he met and obtained the identity of Dr. Joseph C. Cyr and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy. As Dr. Cyr, he served as ship's surgeon on the HMCS Cayuga destroyer in the Korean War, and was found out after he successfully operated on more than a dozen seriously wounded soldiers, saving all of them, and resultant publicity was discovered by the real doctor's mother. Modern historical accounts of the Cayuga, scrapped in 1964, include proud reference to the "Great Imposter" having served on board. The Canadian Navy declined to press charges and he returned to relative obscurity in America -- until I found him.

I was a regular visitor to the East Brunswick New Jersey Public Library, often asking my parents to take me there after school so I could read or play Star Trek with Tim, Mike, Preston and occasionally Lee on the library's computer terminal. The terminal, not a graphical display monitor, was housed in a small closet with a window on the door, and it had enough room for a large green-bar paper printer and keyboard, a chair and a small table on which there was a telephone and an acoustical modem -- the kind into which the telephone receiver was pushed after calling the Rutgers University data center ten miles away.

In the Spring of 1978, my final year living in New Jersey, a class project required us to subscribe to or regularly obtain the New York Times newspaper for several weeks to gather articles on current labor relations events. One weekend, I visited the library to catch up on a few back issues of the newspaper, and happened across a very small article that announced that "The Great Imposter" was working as a religious counselor at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim California.

Years before cell phones, Internet and personal computers, I called Fred -- immediately. I walked into the computer terminal closet and instead of dialing the phone number for the computer at Rutgers University, I pressed zero.

I needed to only ask for the Long Distance Information Operator for Anaheim California. No, I did not know the area code. Yes, she would be happy to look up the area code and then the phone number for the Good Samaritan Hospital and also connect me. I was extremely elated to have come this far without impedance and was anxiously expecting to talk to my personal hero.

The receptionist at the Orange County Good Samaritan Hospital answered.

Eagerly I inquired, "Hi, may I please speak to Reverend Demara?"

My heart leaped at, "One moment, please."

Alas, the respondent at the line to which I was transferred said, "I'm sorry, Reverend Demara is out. May I take a message?"

I said, "Would you ask him to call Mitch, please?" and gave my home phone number.

It would be a seemingly interminable two-hour wait before my ride home arrived, and my dad came to pick me up. Before the car door closed, I was breathlessly telling my story, and my dad didn't believe me, because he told me that a half hour earlier, someone had called for me and left a long distance phone number with the name of Fred Demara. My copy of the New York Times article convinced him, as he had been aware of my previous research on Fred. I asked if I could call him back and the answer was yes. I went into my dad's office and shut the door and called and talked to Fred for the better part of an hour.

Twenty years earlier, Robert Crichton had asked Fred about the secret to his successful impersonation of others, and Fred said that he believed that in all organizations there is a "lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without alienating anyone," and that, "if you want power and want to expand, never encroach on anyone else's domain; open up new ones."

By the time I talked to Fred, none of his antics were glorious to him anymore.

Fred told me, "Be yourself, Mitch."

Fred and I enjoyed a few more phone calls, during which he always downplayed his life experiences, because he didn't want to encourage anyone else to do those kinds of things. I was about as old as he had been when he originally left home. We spoke about events in my life. He seemed genuinely regretful about his past experiences but was generally happy with his current life. He, as Fred, was a respected member of the Good Samaritan Hospital community.

I last spoke with Fred that summer, after which his health significantly declined. He passed away on June 7, 1982. 

Fred Demara sent me a Christmas card in 1978. The Great Imposter was my friend.