Fact. Fact. Bullsh*t!

by Neil Patrick Stewart

  Fact. Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, who ordered Che’s execution, died in a mysterious helicopter accident two years later. Colonel Roberto Quintanilla, an intelligence chief who fingerprinted Che, was murdered in Germany. General Juan José Torres, a member of Barrientos’s joint chiefs of staff, was himself executed, as was Honorato Rojas, the farmer who revealed Che’s whereabouts. General Gary Prado, who arrested Che, was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich, who participated in Che’s capture, was savagely beaten to death. Even the CIA-trained Félix Rodríguez, who helped track down and capture Che, and famously took his picture with Che’s corpse, claimed that he developed asthma suddenly afterward. He had never had asthma before, while Guevara suffered from it his whole life. The man who shot Che to death, Mario Terán, to this day lives in hiding, apparently afraid of the curse.

  Bullsh*t! Hooters has never, to my knowledge, launched a Che advertising campaign.

  In a bizarre twist of irony, these days you can find images of Che, who gave his life to fighting capitalism, on just about every conceivable kind of commercial product out there, including bikinis, as Gisele Bündchen so provocatively demonstrated during Fashion Week.

  NAPOLEON!

  Before Napoleon Bonaparte became the emperor of France, he was actually born with the name Napoleone di Buonaparte to parents Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino on the island of Corsica, giving rise to the argument that Napoleon was actually Italian.

  Napoleon spent the last few years of his life in exile on the isle of Saint Helena. There were numerous plots to rescue him, including one that hoped to spirit him away in a submarine. He died in 1821, before the plot could be carried out.

  Napoleon was extremely short, even for his time. A theory that he was aggressive because of his height led psychiatrists to coin the phrase “Napoleon complex.” Experts have posited that as much as 9 percent of the United States population suffers from the syndrome.

  Fact. Corsica was traded to the French in 1764, but the island resisted. France took complete control in 1770, the year after Napoleon was born. Napoleone di Buonaparte changed his name to Napoleon Bonaparte while he was in his twenties, in order to sound more French. His parents were of noble Italian ancestry.

  Fact. An American inventor, Robert Fulton, had developed one of the first versions of the submarine ever, the Nautilus, for Napoleon in 1800. Although the prototype was successful, the military lost interest in it.

  After Napoleon’s exile, French Bonapartists commissioned a smuggler named Tom Johnstone to rebuild the Nautilus and use it to rescue the former emperor. Unfortunately, Napoleon died before the plan came to fruition.

  Bullsh*t! The idea that Napoleon was comically short is false. Historians estimate that Napoleon was around 5 6, which, at the time, was the average height for men. British propaganda of the era derisively portrayed Napoleon as extremely short, which is the most likely source of the ongoing misconception. Historians also note that Napoleon was often accompanied in public by his personal guard, who were elite soldiers and of above-average height, which would make him appear short by comparison.

  The “Napoleon complex” is primarily a cultural invention, and is not an actual syndrome recognized by psychiatry. There is no professional consensus on its existence, let alone its prevalence.

  ANNE FRANK!

  Anne Frank was born Marie Anna Frank on August 12, 1932 in Amsterdam. In 1945, the Nazis took over the city, and the Frank family went into hiding in a secret two-room attic above the house of a family friend, where they remained for sixteen months. In 1946, the hiding place was discovered by accident, and Anne Frank and her family were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

  When the Nazis arrested the Frank family, they scattered her diary pages all over the floor of the Secret Annex. Although apparently they intended to destroy the book, they ended up making it possible for the diary to be pieced back together and published under the name The Annex after Anne’s father was released from Auschwitz.

  In 1958, Holocaust deniers, as part of their ongoing assertions that Anne Frank never existed, challenged Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal to find the man who arrested her. Wiesenthal found the Nazi arresting officer, Karl Silberbauer, in 1963. Silberbauer recalled Frank vividly, and even reported that he had told her father, “What a lovely daughter you have.”

  Bullsh*t! Anne Frank was born Annelies Marie Frank on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany.

  The family fled to Amsterdam in 1933, after Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany.

  In 1942, Frank and her family went in hiding in a secret three-story, five-room apartment on top of an office. The family was in hiding for two years and one month.

  Their hiding place was betrayed by a secret informant, and the family was arrested and sent to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of typhus at the age of fifteen while in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

  Fact. Miep Gies, a family friend and former employee of Anne’s father Otto Frank, and one of the people who hid and protected the Franks, was able to collect the scattered diary pages. She saved them and gave them to Otto Frank when he returned to Amsterdam after the war ended. Before it would be published worldwide as The Diary of Anne Frank, it was published as The Annex, and then as The Diary of a Young Girl.

  Fact. For years after its publication, Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers openly challenged the idea that the diary was written by a young girl, and, in fact, asserted that Anne Frank never existed at all.

  Wiesenthal’s discovery of Karl Silberbauer dealt a major blow to their claims. In an effort to erase all doubt, several groups applied both forensic tests and handwriting analysis to the manuscript, proving each time that the diary was real, and written by Anne Frank.

  WALT DISNEY!

  Before he created Mickey Mouse, Disney had created a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney created several cartoons for the character before he lost the rights to the rabbit in a budget dispute with Universal. Disney started from scratch, creating Mickey, and deliberately designed him to be extremely similar in personality and appearance to Oswald.

  Disney was a progressive visionary not just in business, but in politics. He supported workers’ rights as a way to support families–because he relied on families doing well to make his fortune.

  The last two words that Walt Disney scribbled down before he died in 1966 (from complications due to a heart attack) were “Kurt Russell.” The actor Kurt Russell said, “I don’t know what to make of that.”

  Fact. Disney had recently begun his own animation studio when he signed with Universal to make a series of cartoons starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When Disney asked Universal for an increase in budget, he was coldly informed that he would be forced to take a budget cut, and that almost all of his animators had been secretly signed to direct contracts with Universal.

  Disney, ever proud, turned them down, and lost most of his animators along with his star character. He started over from scratch and created Mickey, who was very similar in appearance to Oswald.

  Of course, history shows that Disney had the last laugh. Mickey was an instant hit, and Oswald became only a footnote in the annals of animation.

  Bullsh*t! Disney was a staunch conservative. When workers at his studio engaged in a strike, he called it an example of “Communist agitation,” even taking an ad out in Variety to proclaim it so. In reality, his animators were receiving lower wages than their counterparts at other companies, and Disney had a reputation among them as a hamhanded and insensitive boss.

  Disney and his anti-Communist alliance issued a pamphlet called the “Screen Guide for Americans,” with the goal of instructing filmmakers on how to avoid Communism in their films. Rules in the pamphlet included: “Don’t smear wealth,” “Don’t glorify the collective,” and “Don’t deify the common man.”

  Fact. At the time, Kurt Russell was a child actor signed to the Disney studio. Nobody knows what Disney
meant by writing down those words.

  MARILYN MONROE!

  Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, married twice: once to the baseball player Joe DiMaggio and later to the playwright Arthur Miller.

  Monroe was found dead in her bedroom on August 5, 1962. She was thirty-six years old. Her death was ruled a suicide, and no official major inquiry was launched. However, conflicting testimonies, evidence at the scene, and the information learned from her autopsies show that Monroe was almost certainly murdered or else killed accidentally.

  To pay the rent during her early years in Hollywood, she posed for nude photographs as Mona Monroe.

  Bullsh*t! A child of foster homes, Monroe first married at age sixteen, to James Dougherty, in order to gain her independence. According to reports, his mother, a family friend, had asked him to marry her so that she would not have to go to an orphanage when the foster family caring for her could no longer keep her.

  Fact. Here are just a few of the pieces of evidence that are suspicious:

  Monroe was found dead on her stomach in bed (with her hand resting on the telephone), but the autopsy showed that she died on her back. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, was present when she died, and she had changed the linens on the bed after Monroe died, washing the dirty sheets before she called the police. Monroe’s psychiatrist and Murray spent four hours with the body before calling police.

  The autopsy concluded that the lethal amount of barbiturates in her system (enough to kill ten people) had not been swallowed, and must have entered her body a different way. Prescription bottles were littered around Monroe’s nightstand, but there was no drinking glass at the crime scene and the water was off in the house. The autopsy also ruled out injection, leaving a suppository or an enema as the only possibility.

  LAPD officer Jack Clemmons, who was first on the scene, stated that it was “the most obviously staged death scene I have ever seen.”

  Eunice Murray was evasive during questioning, changed her story many times, and then left the country immediately.

  Fact. Before she landed big roles, Monroe posed nude to make ends meet.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON!

  Thomas Jefferson was a governor of Virginia, the first secretary of state, the third vice president of the United States, the fourth president of the United States, and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

  Jefferson was an extremely outspoken proponent of the abolition of slavery and of the integration of blacks into American society. He wrote several essays on the subject, including An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage as well as A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks, both from 1789.

  Jefferson created the Jefferson Bible by cutting massive sections out of his own Bible with a razor while he lived in the White House. Congressman Keith Ellison was sworn into office with a copy of Thomas Jefferson’s personal Koran.

  Fact. That one was a gimme!

  Bullsh*t! All of those things can be accurately said about Benjamin Franklin.

  Thomas Jefferson was deeply racist and bought and sold hundreds of slaves in his lifetime, and rationalized slavery more than once. He did eventually acknowledge that slavery should be discontinued, famously saying, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” He argued that blacks could not live in the same society as whites, and that freed slaves should be deported and resettled in Africa.

  Fact. Jefferson was famously pragmatic and intellectual in his approach to religion. In creating the Jefferson Bible, he distilled it to just the moral teachings of Jesus Christ and removed all references to mysticism, miracle, or magic, such as the virgin birth.

  Ellison, a U.S. representative from Minnesota, is the first Muslim to be elected to the federal government. He chose the Koran from Jefferson’s library in hopes to counteract opposition to his use of a Koran at all. It didn’t work: Virginia Representative Virgil Goode and a score of conservative pundits called it a threat to American values.

  It’s not surprising that Jefferson owned a copy of the Koran–as a man of learning he would have studied any book that has such a huge influence on the world.

  CLEOPATRA!

  The most famous Cleopatra–subject of numerous movies, plays, histories, and books–was queen of Egypt during the Classical period. While never a pharaoh (pharaohs had to be men), she considered herself to be a reincarnation of the Egyptian goddess Anuket.

  Cleopatra was married to two of her own brothers while they were young boys. Three of her four grandparents were siblings, and she only had four great-grandparents. (You and I have eight.)

  After the deaths of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, their children were adopted by Octavia, Mark Antony’s former wife, whom he had abandoned to be with Cleopatra, and who was also the sister of Octavian, the man Mark Antony and Cleopatra had gone to war against.

  Bullsh*t! Cleopatra ruled Egypt during the Hellenistic period. She was Greek, and not only was she a pharaoh, but she was the last pharaoh Egypt ever had. After her reign, Egypt became a Roman province. Cleopatra often represented herself to be the reincarnation of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

  Fact. At the time, it was common for royal families to form incestuous unions and engage in inbreeding. Doing so kept the royal bloodline “pure” and kept the balance of power more squarely in the hands of one family. Of course, then, as it would now, the practice resulted in numerous stillborn babies and birth defects.

  History shows that Cleopatra married her brothers Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV to keep with tradition only. Technically, each marriage made them co-rulers of Egypt, but she kept the power for herself.

  Fact. The three children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony were indeed cared for by his former wife after the two committed suicide. Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar was killed.

  MOZART!

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart in January 1756. He composed over 625 works in his lifetime, the first being “Andante in C,” which he wrote when he was five years old.

  Peter Shaffer’s play based on Mozart’s life, Amadeus, premiered on Broadway in 1976, and ran for a total of 490 performances. Mozart was played by Barry Bostwick, and Salieri by George C. Scott. It was nominated for four Tony Awards, but only won one: best actor for Scott.

  Mozart was extremely bawdy with friends and family, and had a tremendous fondness for scatological humor. He composed a canon in B-flat for six voices called Leck mich im Arsch, and also wrote the lyrics to Wenzel Trnka’s Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber, each of which roughly translate to “Lick Me in the Ass” and “Lick My Ass Nice and Clean,” respectively.

  Fact. To be fair, “Andante in C” was only ten measures long, and, though composed by Mozart, was written down by his father.

  Mozart, with more than 600 works, was extremely prolific, but Georg Philipp Telemann is said to have composed more than 3,000 works. Telemann, however, lived more than twice as long as Mozart.

  Bullsh*t! Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus premiered on Broadway in 1980 and ran for just shy of 1,200 performances. The production starred Tim Curry as Mozart and Ian McKellan as Salieri. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards, and won five, including best actor (McKellan), best director (Peter Hall), and best play.

  Fact. Mozart wrote several other bawdy songs, and frequently made scatological references in his letters, signing off on a love letter to his cousin with the following: “By the love of my skin, I s**t on your nose, so it runs down your chin.”

  Many scholars and historians have been thoroughly baffled (and, likely, embarrassed) by Mozart’s stinky side, seeing that he was such an elegant, refined, and accomplished member of the courts. Others have decided that it was precisely because of the stuffiness of polite society that he turned to such humor.

  To me, it says
he was human, and for that makes him all the more likable.

  AMELIA EARHART!

  Amelia Earhart was a founder (and in 1931 was elected the first president) of the Ninety-Nines, an organization for the advancement of women pilots, which still exists to this day. Members during Earhart’s time included Opal Kunz, Bobbi Trout, and Pancho Barnes.

  Amelia Earhart created and marketed her own fashion line and a luggage collection, she was a celebrity endorser for Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she was an associate editor for Cosmopolitan magazine.

  Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Indian Ocean, somewhere near Heard Island, in 1932 during an attempted transatlantic flight in a fixed-wing Du Temple Monoplane.

  Fact. The organization got its name from the number of charter members, ninety-nine. Since its inception, the Ninety-Nines has had over 20,000 woman pilot members, and has 179 chapters in sixteen countries.

  The Ninety-Nines Inc. maintains and operates the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum.

  Fact. Earhart was one of the first celebrities to endorse and market a fashion line. Amelia Earhart Fashions was carried at Macy’s. Amelia Earhart Luggage was advertised as being “built like a plane–not just for one.” She used Cosmopolitan as a forum to promote women in aviation.

  Bullsh*t! Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937, over the Pacific Ocean, near Howland Island in her attempt to circumnavigate the globe. She was flying a Lockheed Model 10 Electra.