Book Read Free

Telling Tales

Page 16

by Melissa Katsoulis


  If the book was meant to warn children off the dangers of drugs and under-age sex, as it turns out it was, the author ought perhaps to have made the narrative a little less extreme and the bizarre symptoms of the drugs a little more believable (no one is going to be put off doing LSD by the fear of feeling a bit itchy). And the fact that drug use and general delinquency has increased amongst teenagers since the book was published in 1971 suggests that Beatrice Sparks, the middle-aged Mormon woman who actually wrote the book, was barking up the wrong tree.

  Sparks came forward nearly a decade after the book’s publication – when it was being roundly praised by teens, librarians and drug-counsellors alike (albeit for different reasons). She admitted at first that she had ‘edited’ the diaries of a girl she had counselled who had indeed died after being addicted to drugs. But copyright records have her listed as the sole author of the work and she has never been able to substantiate claims that there was a real diary and real girl on whom Alice was based. She was also unable, in that first confessional interview with Aileen Pace Nilsen of the School Library Journal in October 1979, to provide details of the doctorate that allows her to call herself Dr Beatrice Sparks. What did come across plainly was that as a respected member of the Mormon community, she felt it was her duty to warn young people off the dangers of un-Osmonds-like behaviour, and was prepared to sink to any literary depths to do so. Being unable to provide the original documents from which Go Ask Alice was produced – she claimed she had thrown the loose sheaves of paper away after transcribing them – immediately sets her alongside the panoply of hoaxers who make up tall tales about manuscripts found in caskets or given to them by anonymous strangers. But what sets her apart from most others is her strong religious conviction and the fact that she was almost certainly not doing this for money: her husband, Lavorn Sparks, was a wealthy property developer who donated millions to charity and moved their large family from California to the well-to-do Mormon enclave of Provo (where the Osmond family live, in fact).

  Regardless of Sparks outing herself as the ‘editor’ and considerable flesher-out of Go Ask Alice, the book continues to this day to be read as pure fact. There is everything about the look of it and the words ‘diary’ and ‘Anonymous’ on the cover to suggest to a thrill-seeking teenager that it is real, and nothing to suggest it is the weird propaganda of a smart old lady you might think would be more at home doing the church flowers than writing about drug-fuelled sex sessions. It would of course be wrong to suggest that Mrs Sparks got any kind of pleasure from vicariously living the life of a crack-whore, but she did get a taste for something about that kind of writing, because she would go on to write many more such fake teenage diaries on subjects ranging from teenage pregnancy to satanic cults and devil-worship.

  It was her inability to know when to stop that would finally discredit her. When should she have stopped? Before devil-worship, as it turned out, because it was her Satanism-themed ‘teen diary’ that did the most damage of any of her books. Jay’s Journal describes a downward arc much like that of Anonymous in Go Ask Alice: nice, hard-working boy from a God-fearing family who gets sucked into the ‘weirdo sick . . . superstitious, stupid, childish . . . kookie, hair-brained thing’ that is killing kittens in the name of devil-worship. These words, from the supposed diary of Jay, who ended up committing suicide after fully losing his soul to the forces of darkness, are not, you will notice, the kind of words that teenage boys use. ‘Kookie’ particularly. Certainly, that was what the parents of the real-life boy behind Jay’s diaries thought when they saw what Sparks had done with their son’s story. Mr and Mrs Barret of Sparks’ adopted Utah had initially approached her with the diaries of their son Alden, a highly intelligent young man who had succumbed to depression and died several years earlier, hoping that she could make something worthwhile out of Alden’s writings which would encourage other young people in his position to seek help before it was too late. Absolutely nowhere in any of his diaries was there the merest mention of devil-worship.

  Clearly, the tragic demise of an adored son was not juicy enough for Sparks, who knew full well that it was Alice’s salacious content that kept it flying off the shelves. To cynically insert a made-up, uncharacteristic and silly element into the story of Alden’s life and to let readers believe it was real – just as they believed Alice was real – was an act that incurred the wrath of all those who knew the real-life Jay. The vast majority of journal entries were not Alden’s and even if, as may well be the case, the remaining ones (including the Satanism sub-plot) were based on what Sparks knew or thought she knew about other disturbed teens of her acquaintance, that was no comfort to a family and a community who felt their son’s memory had been outraged. Such was the anti-Sparks feeling in Utah in the 1990s that a rock-opera based on Alden’s life and the Jay’s Journal outrage was staged in 1997, painting Sparks as a ruthlessly ambitious writer with much less compassion for her subjects than she would have us believe.

  The truth about Beatrice Sparks is doubtless somewhere between angel and devil, just like the rest of us (even Mormons). Now in advanced old age, widowed and living out her days in comfortable seclusion in Provo, the creator of Go Ask Alice will never have to answer for her actions in this world, but we can assume that a woman of such strong religious conviction believes that what she did, she did to save our souls: to stop us from killing kittens and injecting speed and running away from home and fornicating.

  LAUREL ROSE WILLSON

  THE CASE OF Laurel Rose Willson is particularly horrifying. Not because, as she testified in her memoir under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford, she was imprisoned by ritual sexual abusers and made to sacrifice three babies to the devil. Nor because, as she later claimed under the alias Laura Grabowski, she was an Auschwitz survivor who had been tortured by Josef Mengele. It is horrifying precisely because all her claims are untrue, and were used by her to elicit attention, fame and money from a number of people who really had been abused by Satanists and Nazis.

  Needless to say, Willson was seriously emotionally disturbed and did not make up her stories with the same calculating knowingness that a cold-blooded hoaxer might have done. But neither was she unaware of her lies or the effects they had on others. Sometimes, throughout her lifetime of concocting increasingly far-fetched tales, she would admit to friends that she had made up stories to impress people and get attention; and her habit of changing her name and identity after each hoax was uncovered points to high levels of self-awareness as well. But one of the most surprising things about her story is that she was a committed member of various Christian churches on the west coast of America where she lived, and was intricately bound up in the religious communities she lied to for so long. She was, everyone who knew her agreed, the very picture of a good Christian woman. At least until you saw her close up.

  Her real story, as uncovered in a painstaking and sensitive investigation by the Christian magazine Cornerstone, bore some structural similarities to the autobiography she detailed in the first of her three books, Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape (Harvest House Publishing, 1988). Adopted as a baby into a strict Christian household after her unmarried Polish-Catholic mother gave her up, she and her sister Willow were often afraid of their parents’ bad moods and marital problems. After some years of domestic discord her father, a doctor, left and moved away from the family home in Tacoma, Washington, and an increasingly unstable Laurel, who had already run away from home once, went to live with him in California while she finished her education. Her teachers reported that she was an excellent student and her greatest talent was music, which she went on to study at university and make the centre of her contribution to the churches with which she became involved. But even as a teenager she showed signs of pathological lying, telling friends she had been sexually abused by a teacher, or driven to a part of town known for kerb-crawlers to be pimped out by her own mother. When staff looked into these stories and questioned her on the details sh
e admitted they were made-up to ‘impress’ her friends. At one stage she even pretended to have gone blind, until she accidentally pointed out a local monument from a moving car.

  A sad history of self-harm and suicide attempts began when her father, Frank, died in 1960 but she stayed on in Southern California where they had lived together, attaching herself to various other families she met through church but always ending up alienating them with her obsessive, attention-seeking behaviour and constant emotional crises.

  It was in the early 1980s that her neighbourhood, Bakersfield, was first rocked by stories of a satanic sex cult which had been using young girls as slaves. A popular memoir of one victim was published and Laurel was apparently glued to the book. It was not long before she managed to attach herself to the case by befriending the families of people involved, setting up a support group and ultimately pretending that she too had been a victim of a sex cult.

  She began to appear on radio and television and eventually put her bogus memories into a book-length manuscript which, with satanic abuse being such a hot topic at the time, Eileen Mason, the editorial director of Harvest House, jumped at the chance to publish. Satan’s Underground, published under her new, made-up name of Stratford, tells how she was used as the plaything of devil-worshipers, pimps and pornographers for her entire childhood, with the full knowledge of her family. She was repeatedly raped, beaten and forced to witness rituals of human sacrifice. As soon as she was old enough, she was made to produce two babies which were sacrificed in front of her, and another one which she had to give up for adoption. Eventually she graduated to become the personal sex slave of the group’s charismatic leader, Victor, who used her to satisfy his many extreme perversions. Only after the death of her father had she been able to break away from the cult and work through her feelings with therapists. She still bore the physical and mental scars of her years in slavery, she said, particularly from cuts to her arms and wrists.

  The poor woman’s book was a sensation. All America was up in arms about the appalling new scandal of satanic sexual abuse (a phenomenon that was making headlines across Europe as well) and Laurel became a spokesperson for recovering victims. The popular television talk-shows Geraldo and Oprah had this fluffy-haired, bespectacled, crucifix-wearing woman on to talk about her trauma, and the royalties and accolades came flooding in. But a year after publication, spurred on by other abuse victims who claimed Laurel’s story didn’t ring true, the magazine Cornerstone outed her as a fake after it uncovered her real identity as Laurel Rose Willson. They contacted her publishers, who admitted they had seen no evidence to support her claims, and asked friends and family from her school days whether she had indeed been pregnant three times, drugged and covered in injuries. But the most people recalled of her troubles was her inveterate lying.

  The book – as well as her subsequent self-help titles on how she had managed to heal herself – was recalled by the publishers, who realized they were dealing with an unstable fantasist rather than a greedy extortionist, and Laurel was shamed into changing her name and starting a new life away from the Californian evangelical scene.

  What did she do next? She reinvented herself as a Jew. And not just any Jew, but an important victim of the infamous Nazi doctor Mengele, whose cruel experiments had rendered her infertile. Her new identity was Laura Grabowski, a Polish-Jewish war orphan who had been sent to an orphanage in Krakow after doing time in Auschwitz and then was adopted by a Christian couple in America in the mid-1950s. Just as she had once pretended to friends that she was blind, she now said her eyes had been irrevocably damaged by having had chemicals injected into them by Mengele. And just as she had pretended that it had taken years for her to confess to her involvement in the satanic cult, she now told people at survivors’ groups that she had never told anyone about her time in Auschwitz until now, half a century after the event. Although she stopped short of publishing a book about her supposed Holocaust trauma, she did write and distribute a poem, ‘We Are One’, in honour of her fellow survivors, and she struck up correspondences – in a spidery, copperplate scrawl such as you might expect from an old Eastern European lady – with elderly Jews who had lived through the Second World War. And most famously, she made contact with Binjamin Wilkomirski, the fellow Polish child of the camps who also turned out to have added a Holocaust element to his own difficult childhood for the media.

  Another exposé in Cornerstone followed, and by this time Laurel, now becoming frail and losing her grip on reality once and for all, had not the energy to re-invent herself. Some of her friends both from the cult survivors’ groups and the Jewish groups stood by her until her death in 2002, but by and large she had alienated everyone who might have helped her find happiness.

  There are no winners in the sorry tale of Laurel Rose Willson, but there are many casualties, not least the fragile voices of those genuine witnesses to the abuses she described, who feel diminished every time a hoaxer is found in their midst. No one knows the precise nature of Willson’s mental illness, but whatever it was, it reacted spectacularly with a media that was, in the early 1980s, just gearing up for the great era of confessional misery literature which would spawn more hoax memoirists than ever before. She was simply the wrong person in a strange place at the right time.

  ANTHONY GODBY JOHNSON

  IN 1993 A fourteen-year-old boy dying of AIDS in New Jersey wrote a memoir that brought him considerable celebrity and also brought a number of celebrities to him, seeking to help him live out his final days in comfort. His book was A Rock and a Hard Place, his name was Anthony ‘Tony’ Godby Johnson and he was living with his saintly adopted mother, Vicki Johnson, who had rescued him from a life of appalling sexual abuse at the hands of his biological parents. He had been eleven when he discovered he was infected with the virus and by the time his book was published he was seriously ill; but with the support of Johnson, her husband and a coterie of admiring, kindly adults, including an AIDS counsellor from Arkansas called Jack Godby whose name Tony had taken, he was making the most of what time he had left. Vicki had always encouraged him to write his feelings down, and when the Make A Wish Foundation bought him a computer, he was able to complete the manuscript of his memoir, writing against the clock through every numbered day.

  The vogue for misery memoirs was in full swing, but his was not so much a grisly account of being locked in a cellar by his father and raped by paedophiles (although that is what he said happened), but a heart-warming redemption story about how wonderful his new mother was, and how his love of literature had helped him through the dark times. One of the writers he particularly admired was Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City had recently been aired on American radio, and when Vicki encouraged him to make contact with Maupin the pair began a telephone relationship which would bring great comfort and inspiration to them both.

  Anyone who has read Maupin’s The Night Listener, which he based on his experiences with Tony, or seen the film version starring Robin Williams, will know how things turned out. Because although Vicki Johnson (real name Joanne Vicki Fraginals) swears to this day that she did have a poorly, adopted son who wrote a book, every investigator who has looked into the case is certain she made the whole thing up.

  Tony would only communicate by letter, fax, email or telephone. And when he called up his ‘friends’ for one of his long discursive chats, he had a voice that was not only very feminine-sounding, but noticeably similar to Vicki’s. Maupin’s business partner Terry Anderson was convinced from early on that Vicki and Tony were one and the same, but Maupin, who had spent hours talking to the remarkably wise and witty Tony, was confused: ‘My brain was divided down the middle. There were days when I would talk to Tony and think, “this is clearly a boy, why would I ever doubt this?” and other days when I would think, it’s her.’

  The agent Ron Bernstein, who represented Tony and was in the process of selling the rights to his story to HBO, also happened to be working with Maupin in the mid-1990s, and when the
two men got talking about their young associate, alarm bells began to ring for them both. Neither Bernstein nor anyone he knew had ever laid eyes on the child because, Vicki said, he was too sensitive to germs to see visitors or even go outside. But during their cell-phone calls, exterior street noises were clearly audible. Maupin knew that other supporters of Tony, including a rabbi, had flown in to New Jersey to call on the ailing young writer but had been turned away at the door by Vicki, who refused to admit anyone to her apartment – an apartment into which no neighbour had ever seen a child enter, and from which no youthful sounds had ever been heard. Nor had a husband ever been seen or heard of by the many people who lived near her town-centre block or patronized the pharmacy downstairs.

  Due to Tony’s inability to show his face in public or face a film crew, the HBO production was scrapped and his key role in an Oprah documentary about child abuse had to be played by an actor. As the 1990s wore on Tony, now communicating via a blog, announced a series of increasingly terrible physical ailments that were besetting him: paralysis, a stroke, the amputation of a leg and a testicle and TB were just some of the hardships he suffered; but despite having had full-blown AIDS for nearly a decade, he was still very much alive. Maupin, who had written a blurb for his book, was starting to be seriously doubtful that a boy with no immune system could weather so many new illnesses: ‘It did get more and more melodramatic,’ he admitted later. ‘And as it did, my doubts grew.’

 

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