From the archives: "King Con"
the true crime that's worth your time
Hey, friends — unexpected scheduling conflict at BE HQ today, so I’ve grabbed a book review of Paul Willetts’s King Con from a few years ago. More good stuff like that behind the paywall, if you don’t already have a key…
…and we’ll see you tomorrow! — SDB
The crime
From the book jacket: "Edgar Laplante was a small-time grifter, virtuoso singer, and handsome young charmer. ... In the fall of 1917, he reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: a buck-skinned, feathered-headdressed war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, leader of the Cherokee nation -- and total fraud." This, mind you, is after he'd reinvented an actual person named Tom Longboat, as himself. It also does not mention the bigamy and morphine addiction. After international authorities finally coordinated their efforts to stop him from jumping hotel bills in half a dozen European countries, he went to jail in the late '20s, then returned to the States and to small-time vaudevillean grifts, but the world had left his brand of flimflam behind.
The story
King Con: The Bizarre Adventures Of The Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor is about an American, posing as a Native American, but not written by an American -- which in my opinion is a good thing. Paul Willetts doesn't feel obliged to manufacture or reiterate dudgeon about cultural appropriation, or textually roll his eyes every time ugly language is used to describe first peoples. He largely lets the ignorance of the time, and how capably Edgar Laplante leveraged it to monetize tall tales in a performance setting (and this was more or less Laplante's career in the late teens and early '20s: declaiming his history and accomplishments, with a couple of songs mixed in), speak for itself.
But Willetts's underplaying cuts both ways; there is both less and more to Laplante's story than Willetts's presentation. Less, because what the book does in 300 pages, you could really do in a sentence if you had to, namely that Laplante succeeded at a fairly uncomplicated scam -- lying -- so well for so long because it was a hundred years ago; hotels didn't require a credit card, jurisdictions seldom communicated, and if you were disciplined, you could keep doing "fundraisers" and then splitting town with money you'd promised the orphans' home. Hell, Laplante wasn't disciplined and he still got by with it on two continents for a decade. It's not uninteresting, but it's not that complex.
Complex or not, though, Willetts doesn't do much analysis of Laplante; he seems almost actively to avoid generalizing about, for instance, the role of Laplante's substance abuse in the manner of his con, or the role of Laplante's sexuality in the substance abuse. On page 15, Willetts's mention of "the overpowering compulsions that drove him, compulsions destined to push him into ever more extreme scenarios" is foreshadowing, of a sort...but while Laplante's drive to find morphine and cocaine in every city he visits is mentioned frequently, it's almost in passing. So too his affairs with men, some of whom he positioned as "traveling secretaries" so as not to draw the attention of the authorities. "Worse still, [Laplante's first wife] Burtha probably discovered that his relationship with Eugene was not purely professional" (140) is a typical note -- "surely Edgar would have" this, "we can assume his contacts had learned" that. I don't need a detailed accounting of his vices or liaisons, but there's something larger that ties all of it together, the cultural willingness to believe in Laplante as a (massive air quotes here, obviously) "good Indian," the purposeful ignorance of contemporaries about his addiction and sexual fluidity, the apparently intense personal charm that allowed him to fleece two contessas of nearly their entire shared inheritance.
Willetts gives quite a good sense of the time, and of the argot. He talks about hopscotching; he describes the privations of long train rides, and the second-class accommodations suffered on the vaudeville circuit; the day-in-the-life overview of vaudeville starting on page 34 is savory, but not overly detailed. There is a dry British approach to the "this fucking guy" relation of Laplante's tall tales that's enjoyable to read: "Outside his fecund imagination, the closest he'd been to gridiron stardom appears to have come through his stepmother's job as an inspector of footballs at a sporting goods plant." But that's on page 8. By page 128, you're starting to wonder if Willetts is going to wind up his mercilessly detailed diary of Laplante's travel plans, the weather and menus he experienced in various cities, and the contents of the talks he delivered, and offer a broader perspective on how this was accomplished, and why. But that doesn't occur.
So do I recommend King Con? I can't say it's quite satisfying enough to purchase at full price. Willetts's writing is very very good, he steeps the reader in time and place, and I don't regret reading it, but his apparent refusal to speculate too far outside of source materials is, while a valid choice, not necessarily the one that serves this material and this personage best. I got my copy at good ol' Herridge Books in Wellfleet, so I'd suggest picking one up at a used bookstore or checking the library.
[originally published to the TBP Patreon 11/1/19]
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