Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
Sensing that she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away from him. “If you weren’t so old,” she said, according to Colcord, before sitting back down. “God damn it!” she shouted. “No one has ever called me a liar before!” Both Simon and Schuster hurried to Lowell’s side. “Never mind, Joan,” they told her, according to Colcord. “We still believe in you.”
Days later, “The Cradle of the Deep” became a best-seller. This magazine called it “vivid, rich, and vigorous”; as far away as Honolulu, booksellers struggled to keep the book in stock. At the launch party, celebrities and high-society types gathered on an ocean liner, the Île de France. Griffith was there, as was the adventurer Robert Ripley and the editor John Farrar. “Gee, I can’t tell you how happy I am,” Lowell wrote to her publishers. “I feel as I used to feel on the ship when we were in the center of a hurricane, and the air suddenly becomes still and every heart-throb sounds like a canon.”
That metaphor, with its unspoken promise of imminent peril, was more apt than she knew. Ten days after the book’s publication, the Herald Tribune printed Colcord’s review, under the innocuous headline “Sea Movie.” Based on her descriptions of sailing, Lowell was “far from being a real seaman,” Colcord wrote. In fact, he argued, her book—destined to be the biggest memoir of 1929—read like an elaborate hoax.
After the review appeared, reporters began to dig in. Joan Lowell, they discovered, was not her real name—she had been born Helen Joan Wagner. The Minnie A. Caine had not burned at sea; it was docked in Oakland, California, and very much intact. Four different acquaintances came forward to say that Lowell had attended school with them in Berkeley through middle and high school. An old next-door neighbor of several years said that Lowell was “not gone for extended periods.” A classmate showed the Herald Tribune a photo of Lowell starring as Lady Macbeth in a school play.
Some details held up. Lowell’s father really was a ship captain. And he, at least, had experience with disaster: in 1908, his ship, the Star of Bengal, struck a rock off the coast of Alaska and sank, and more than a hundred crew members died. Lowell was not on that ship, though she did sometimes sail on the Minnie A. Caine as a child. Her mother worked on board as a stewardess, preparing meals for the crew. A sailor named Harvey Jeans said that Lowell gravitated to the books on deck, and had appointed herself the ship’s librarian.
The fraud became a national story. “Any damn fool can be accurate—and dull,” Lowell told one reporter. “I’ll admit that the cats were thrown in for color,” she said. But she was defiant, and would confess to no other major inaccuracies. Meanwhile, the book only grew more popular. The Book-of-the-Month Club offered its subscribers the option to return the book for a full refund, but only a few thousand did. Simon & Schuster reclassified the book as fiction and, to the firm’s surprise, more orders poured in—the following week, the book topped the best-seller list again, in its new category. “The Cradle of the Deep” became the third-best-selling nonfiction title of 1929, and Lowell made forty-one thousand dollars in royalties, equal to more than three-quarters of a million dollars today. By 1930, she had become slightly more candid, allowing that the book was “80 percent true.” But she insisted that at least one of the changes she’d made—the burning of the ship at sea—was a charitable act “to save the hide of the insurance company.”
The literary journal The Bookman published a debate on the moral significance of Lowell’s fraud, and invited Colcord to contribute. “If today we have reached the point of progress where a literary hoax is condoned as good business … then we have fallen on evil times in American literature,” he wrote. Fake memoirs were not new, certainly; the early twentieth century saw a spate of them, including “The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang,” which was ostensibly the autobiography of a Chinese general but was actually spun up by a white American fraudster, and “Long Lance,” the first-person account of a Blackfoot warrior from Montana, written by a North Carolina-born Black man with no documented Blackfoot heritage. (Literary acts of racial fraud constitute a subgenre of their own.) Still, Colcord was not wrong to suggest that something different was afoot.
