Cult US author JT LeRoy exposed as literary hoax.
That was the gist of reports published in various media on both sides of the Atlantic over the last couple of months, beginning with a lengthy New York magazine article by novelist and critic Stephen Beachy last September, later picked up by the Washington Post. The story continued to circulate the Internet coming up to Christmas, and the traditional January void was filled with LeRoy stories. The Guardian in the UK ran a lengthy profile and interview of the author by Laura Barton. Then the New York Times weighed in, and the controversy even spread to mainstream UK publications such as the Daily Telegraph.
The revelations concerned the tale of Jeremiah ‘Terminator’ LeRoy, the 25-year-old writer who became something of a sensation amongst literary, musical and film circles following the publication of his novels Sarah (2000) and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2001). The books were ostensibly based on his childhood experience as a cross-dressing ‘lot lizard’ (truckstop hustler), taken from foster care as a young child and dragged around the American south by his pill-popping punk rock-obsessed mother, who allowed him to be abused by her boyfriends when she wasn’t dumping him with his bible-bashing grandparents.
After his mother died of an overdose, LeRoy survived as a San Francisco street kid in the early '90s before being rescued by Brooklyn-born singer and outreach worker Emily Frasier (also known as Laura Albert and/or Speedie) and her husband Geoffrey Knoop (Astor). LeRoy was advised by a psychologist to write about his experiences as therapy, and the resulting notebooks were passed onto a literary agent. By the age of 17, he had a deal with Bloomsbury. Disorientated by this sudden upturn in his fortunes, LeRoy shied away from writing fiction for a while and sustained himself with journalistic assignments for various small magazines, along the way establishing contact with literary figures such as Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Mary Gaitskill. With their encouragement, he wrote Sarah in a few months, the story growing from a short fiction about raccoon penis bones – the amulets worn by lot lizards and their johns in West Virginia – to a 38,000-word novel. On publication, it boasted an impressive array of jacket blurbs by Joel Rose, Suzanne Vega, Lydia Lunch, Chuck Palahniuk and Hubert Selby Jr.
By the time his second book, a collection of short stories written before Sarah, appeared a year later, LeRoy had amassed a roll call of fans that included Tom Waits, Shirley Manson, Courtney Love and film-makers such as Gus Van Sant and Asia Argento (who would eventually make a relentless and uncompromising film version of The Heart, featuring cameos from Peter Fonda and Marilyn Manson). His readings became media events, mainly because the androgynous author, who professed himself too shy to perform and only appeared in public disguised in a blonde wig and shades, had begun enlisting high profile admirers to read in his place.
JT’s publicity machine moved up a gear. There were features in The Face and Vanity Fair and the New York Times. He scored lucrative journalism assignments. His story Harold’s End was published by David Eggers’ McSweeney’s journal, and later issued as a handsome novella. He contributed lyrics to songs by a band called Thistle, founded by his surrogate family Speedie and Astor. He was photographed by Mick Rock. He wrote the first draft of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and received a producer’s credit on the film (Van Sant had originally been slated to make Sarah; when he passed on it Secretary director Stephen Shainberg expressed an interest). He edited the Da Capo book of music writing in 2005. His circle of pedigree chums expanded to include Madonna, Lou Reed, Carrie Fisher, Winona Ryder, Tatum O’ Neill, Liv Tyler, Billy Corgan, Mike Pitt, Debbie Harry and Pink, many of whom had become confidantes of LeRoy via phone and e-mail. There was talk of him writing an episode of David Milch’s Deadwood. There were rumours he’d undergone a sex change. There were more rumours he was suffering from AIDS.
And there were also murmurings of discontent. Dennis Cooper, self-styled literary outlaw, queer-core lit pioneer and author of Try and Closer, was an early champion of LeRoy’s, but his voice was conspicuous by its disgruntled tone in a 2003 Vanity Fair feature. Before long he was taking acidic swipes at LeRoy on his website.
Then, last autumn, Beachy published his 7,000-word plus article, suggesting that LeRoy was a hoax. In the piece, a labyrinthine web of speculation that the writer had been shopping around magazine circles for some time, it was alleged that LeRoy was an elaborate construct, a fake name and identity created as a front for Laura Albert, the outreach worker who rescued LeRoy from the streets. Beachy seemed convinced that it was Albert who’d written the books and maintained the various correspondences with writers, actors and musicians, with help from a young actress employed to play the part of the reclusive LeRoy at public appearances. He also claimed that the advance for Sarah was paid to Laura Albert’s sister Joanna, and further payments were made to a Nevada corporation called Underdogs Inc, whose president was Carolyn F. Albert, Laura’s mother.
Beachy’s piece was a persuasive piece of writing, almost pathological in its attention to detail. It plumbed the history of Speedie and Astor’s previous musical incarnations, spoke to sources that claimed to have read early drafts of Laura’s work remarkably similar to Sarah and The Heart, and speculated that Albert may have employed skills learned as a phone sex technician to forge intimate telephone relationships. The reader was left to wonder whether Beachy’s findings were the painstaking grunt-work of an investigative reporter or the over-elaborations of a fabulist with an axe to grind. In other words, the story he put forward seemed even more incredible than LeRoy’s own. Shortly after it broke, the JT camp contacted this writer and asked if I’d like to write their side of the story in a piece for the New York Times.
I had a four year history of e-mail and phone communication with JT LeRoy, although like the dozens – if not hundreds – of writers and artists he’d befriended, we’d never met in person. I first heard JT’s name in June of 2001 on a trip to Madison, Wisconsin to interview Garbage, who asked me to write the blurb for their third album beautifulgarbage, which contained a paean to the writer called ‘Cherry Lips’. Singer Shirley Manson urged me to check out his work. On the way home, I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair at the stopover in Chicago. By one of those strange coincidences that one only divines in retrospect as being of any significance, the magazine contained an interview with LeRoy conducted by no less than Tom Waits, and a Mary Ellen Mark portrait shot of the author as a sort of transgressive Tinkerbelle that was compelling and disturbing in equal measure.
Soon after returning to Dublin, I sought out LeRoy’s work. Both books were indeed extraordinary artefacts, a collision between the old world of Tennessee Williams’ baby whores and the modern urban vignettes of Kids and My Own Private Idaho, with a dash of Flannery O’ Connor’s salty vernacular in the dialogue. Rendered in a style that could best be described as punk surruralist southern gothic with a side order of magic realism, they reignited in this reader a love of fiction and storytelling that had grown dulled over years of cramming dry biographies or dull grey flannel tomes ingested in preparation for interviews with the occasional English or Irish author. By contrast, this stuff was lurid day-glo. I found myself possessed by a hunger for new yarns and followed the paper trail of references on LeRoy’s website, seeking out books by Denis Johnson, Joel Rose and Tom Spanbauer (whose book The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon was an obvious – and still largely overlooked – influence on Sarah).
I contacted JT’s publisher Bloomsbury for an interview. When I rang the contact number given, I was greeted with what can only be described as an automated filter system, whereby I was put on hold while the party on the other end screened the call. No one picked up, so I left a message. After several days, I finally got JT on the line. We spoke for about 40 minutes. He struck me as a charming little tyke: warm, witty, even flirtatious. His voice was, as a friend described it, a perfect cross between a southern gentleman and a southern belle. As we spoke, he took my e-mail address, and by the time I hung up he’d sent a message petitioning me to write a letter of complaint to the New York Times about what he felt was a clumsy review by Ann Powers. I was bemused and amused by his cheek, not to mention the similarities between the street hustling and literary rackets.
The subsequent interview appeared in Hot Press in October 2001 under the title ‘Wonder Boy – The Ballad Of JT LeRoy’. JT e-mailed to compliment me on the piece and we maintained a regular correspondence and over time grew quite close. Evangelistic about the books, I offered to act as his literary pimp wherever I could, passing on copies to friends, contacts and interviewees, including Everett from the Eels, Lou Reed (who in turn passed them onto Antony Hegarty) and Tim Wheeler from Ash, who later invited JT to pen the liner notes for their Meltdown album. I posted a copy of The Heart to Bono on the eve of their US autumn tour. A month later he was raving about it in Rolling Stone. JT and entourage ended up attending U2’s after show party in LA and he wrote me an e-mail account of the night that was highly libellous and wickedly funny, like Tom Wolfe doing Truman Capote doing Terry Southern.
Over the next couple of years we collaborated on the odd journalistic assignment. JT sent me an early draft of Harold’s End and a chunk of an as-yet-unpublished third novel with the working title of The Pants, plus demos of Thistle, who were sniffing out record and management deals. In May of 2003, JT’s assistant Nancy Murdock, a schoolteacher who’d been acting as his unpaid secretary for the previous couple of years, visited Dublin bearing gifts from JT’s camp. We had dinner, and she struck me as a warm and decent individual, and obviously devoted to serving LeRoy’s work.
Then, somewhere around the summer of 2003, JT’s phone calls tailed off and the e-mails became more sporadic. He appeared to have gone to ground, and while I missed hearing from him, I was also glad he’d undertaken the business of hibernation necessary to get any serious work done on his third book. In the meantime, Thistle added an LLC to their name and continued to play the odd gig, gradually seeming to ascend in JT’s list of priorities (although somewhere along the way the vocal role had been vacated by Laura Albert and fell to a young actress and singer Jennifer Hall, who inherited the name Speedie).
We remained in contact, although now his e-mails seemed less preoccupied with the written word and more enthralled by the subject of identity, image manipulation and the dissemination of gossip and propaganda (he famously planted a hokum story in the press that he’d gotten Asia Argento knocked up, later claiming he was speaking metaphorically about the film). In public and private he was prone to extolling the virtues of historical figures as diverse as Napoleon and Andy Warhol. The tone of his dispatches became more pluralistic and seemed to emanate from multiple addresses. I’d bat a note off to LeRoy and get a reply from Nancy, or vice versa. Occasionally, it seemed like the author communicated in several distinctly different tones, sometimes an aw-shucks parody of a southern drawl, sometimes savvy and extremely precocious for a 20-something.
At no stage did I suspect JT wasn’t who he claimed to be, although at times I privately wished he’d quit with the peripheral stuff and get back to the tedious, gruelling work of writing. What I’d read of The Pants was extremely promising, but required the hard labour of polishing and shaping. Still, I held my tongue for fear of throwing him into one of his funks of self-doubt.
Around the time Asia Argento’s film premiered to mixed but mostly respectful reviews in May of last year, JT invited me to a reading in London but I cried off, citing work commitments and low cash funds. But more than that, I was also wary of meeting him for the first time in high-profile celeb-heavy environment. I’d heard reports that he could be somewhat vague and distant in person, even with long-time correspondents.
Then, last September, I received an e-mail from JT’s camp warning of the incoming controversy in the form of Beachy’s article, and all kinds of bad vibes emanating from the Cooper camp. My immediate reaction was that it was no more than an inevitable backlash following four years of literary It-boy adoration, and that JT should just keep his head down and wait for the whole thing to blow over. I assured him it’d amount to no more than a fringe literary bitch slap session.
I was wrong.
Do You Want To Write The Definitive Story ’Bout JT?
The message in my inbox was from Nancy Murdock. JT wanted me to write a piece for the New York Times as a response to the Stephen Beachy story, offering complete access. Somewhat taken aback, I contacted the Times and within a couple of days received a call from journalist Warren St John, who’d interviewed JT in person and written a sympathetic profile in late 2004. But now, speaking on the phone, it was clear that the reporter was now having serious doubts as to JT’s identity, although he did concede that if the LeRoy camp coughed up a social security number or passport, he’d accept it as proof.
Finding myself in the unwitting position of middleman, I relayed this message. Nancy called back with JT on the line. Neither showed any interest in responding to St John’s terms. I stated my position: I was willing to go to bat for JT, but first I needed something to bat with. Privately I wondered why they were asking me, a writer thousands of miles away, to tell the story. I felt suspicious, then guilty for feeling suspicious, then foolish for feeling guilty.
I finally took the time to print out and go through Beachy’s expose. After reading it I felt confused, angry, indignant, sceptical, and most of all, utterly conflicted. My feelings on the matter seemed to undergo polar swings as I weighed the evidence. I felt gullible and embarrassed when I considered the story might be true. Then I felt like a louse for doubting my friend. What if he really was a recovered heroin addict and street kid? What if the whispers I’d heard about him suffering from AIDS were true? What kind of fair-weather friend was I to doubt him at the first sign of a backlash?
But while Beachy’s piece raised far more questions than it answered, there was something about it that instilled in me a gut-level foreboding. Yes, the truth it proposed seemed more unbelievable than fiction (Beachy himself pointed out the uncanny similarities between the JT story and Armistead Maupin’s 2000 novel The Night Listener). Furthermore, the magazine committed a pretty grievous foul-up in captioning a picture of Pink with JT’s name. Still, experience told me that a clerical office error need not reflect on the text submitted by the journalist.
I cast my mind back to all the people who’d met, dined and collaborated with LeRoy. Gus Van Sant, Asia Argento – these people were Hollywood pros. Surely they weren’t that easy to hoodwink? More worryingly, I recalled how a friend from London described meeting JT and Laura/Speedie once, and how the latter shepherded him about like an over-protective mother and acted as mediator between him and the public.
In the end, I abandoned any thoughts of writing a piece for The Times or anyone else. The state of mind I was in, I could barely substantiate my own existence, much less that of a cross-dressing transsexual author I’d never met.
Instead I took time to re-read LeRoy’s books in the light of all the controversy. My opinion of them had changed little, although I now felt that Sarah – which I’d initially believed the better book – hadn’t aged as well as The Heart, which was even more powerful for all its rawness (an exact inversion of the author’s own opinion). I sent a message of support to JT, which he posted on the website alongside those from people like photographer Mick Rock, Mary Gaitskill and Shirley Manson. After a few days had passed, I felt pretty philosophical about the matter. If JT was a hoax and I was a mug, then I was just one of a long and distinguished line of mugs far smarter and shrewder than myself.
Besides, portraits of JT as a huckster, shyster and exploiter of suggestible hacks didn’t chime with experience. In my case, the traffic went both ways. JT was always generous with his contacts, from Courtney Love to Billy Corgan to Coldplay. If I was having difficulty snagging an interview through conventional record company and PR channels, I could always count on him to pitch in and grease the machinery. More than once, his intervention meant the difference between getting a story and not getting it. He was also instrumental in hooking me up with a couple of journalistic assignments for American publications, and solicited submissions from me for the Da Capo book.
I pondered all this as the fallout from Beachy’s story continued over Christmas, and the New York Times, having recently published a travel piece by JT about Disneyland Paris (and no doubt chastened by recent journalistic hoax scandals), reassigned a story they’d commissioned from him on Deadwood.
Then, on January 4th, The Guardian published a lengthy profile by Laura Barton, who’d travelled to LA to interview Laura Albert and JT at Carrie Fisher’s house. Barton’s piece was fair and balanced, and although she remained unconvinced that the person introduced to her as LeRoy was the same one who’d written the books, she did put the accent back on the work.
“It is all a matter of authenticity,” she wrote. “Is it because if JT LeRoy is not a drug-addled hobo hooker made good, we feel embarrassed because we’ve been conned, as if we paid full price for a Louis Vuitton purse only to find it was a fake? But nothing has been taken from us. The books remain: as startling and disturbingly beautiful as they ever were. There is nothing that has sullied the New York Times’s assertion that “his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt”. And what strikes me more than anything is that in this age of overblown celebrity, where people such as Paris Hilton can be famous purely for being Paris Hilton, mightn’t JT LeRoy represent the precise inversion of this? The work is all. The identity is irrelevant.”
Fair enough. But it wasn’t over yet.
On January 9th, Warren St John published his piece for theTimes. It contained another bombshell: photographs he’d discovered of the girl who’d masqueraded as the bewigged and shaded JT at public events and in interviews. The person in question was one Savannah Knoop, half sister of Geoffrey, aka Astor, Thistle guitarist and Laura Albert’s husband. LeRoy’s own agent Ira Silverberg identified her as the person he’d believed to be JT LeRoy. So did film producer Lilly Bright, who’d worked with LeRoy on the set of The Heart.
By now it seemed the whole debacle had become like some Life Of Brian version of Spartacus in which any civilian with an e-mail address could claim to be JT LeRoy. Or to mix cinematic metaphors, the last act of Tootsie, where everybody felt not just fooled, but hurt and bereft, grieving for someone they’d come to love, a character who was essentially an actor playing a role. Here was JT as a cross-dressing transgender Simone – a notion that wasn’t lost on author William Gibson, who posted the following message on his blog on January 19th:
“I guess this is the literary equivalent of phantom limb syndrome, but now that I’m pretty much convinced that JT LeRoy never existed, I catch myself regretting never having met him. I think that might mean that he was America’s first idoru, in the fullest Japanese sense, paradoxically manifesting mainly on our oldest mass-media platform, the printed word.”
So – was JT a genius satirical comment on the gullibility of media apparatus operators and slumming celebrities? A brilliant exercise in mass manipulation, an elaborate Situationist prank?
I could make my peace with that idea, if not for a couple of crucial queries. Had JT’s camp solicited money or favour on false pretences? And where did that leave Nancy Murdock, a schoolteacher who has worked as JT’s unpaid secretary, editor and support system for years, and still remains unbending in her dedication? And what about those who fell in love with JT’s words and adopted him as their own patron saint, an urchin symbol of backwoods fabulous and ghetto made good? And still, the million-dollar question persists: Does JT LeRoy exist?
The short answer to that one is, I don’t know. Maybe JT’s holed up in a room writing his next book, licking his wounds and cursing those who persecuted and abandoned him. Or maybe Laura Albert is chewing her fingernails, wondering how on earth she can ever extricate herself from this mess and enjoy the literary glory that is her due without the attendant wrath of those who feel duped by her machinations.
One thing’s for sure: if Laura Albert did write those books and orchestrate the scam, she’s a very smart woman, albeit one with a lack of confidence in her own gift as a writer. Or maybe she’s just sussed enough to realise that fiction sells better when spiced with titillating autobiography. Maybe she harvested stories from street kids – or just one street kid – through her experiences as an outreach worker. It wouldn’t be the first time a writer has exploited the subject of their own philanthropy. Perhaps she simply uses her imagination. The books do, after all, reside under the heading of fiction; a get-out clause that A Million Little Pieces author James Frey had plenty of time to rue not utilising, having felt the heat of Oprah’s ire.
But most of all, if Laura Albert can conjure up a world as rich as that of the lot lizards and create a character as powerful as JT, then I wish she’d come clean, if only so as I can interview her without all the smoke and mirrors.
At the time of going to press, I continue to exchange e-mails with JT LeRoy. Call it an act of faith. Like the man said, in the beginning was the word. If either LeRoy or Laura Albert publishes another novel, I’ll be first in the queue to buy it. After all this controversy has blown over, and JT is revealed to be either a recovered child prostitute and drug addict made good, only to be wronged by doubting Thomases, or (s)he’s the perpetrator of one of the biggest literary shuck jobs in recent history, the books will still be there. My position on the matter remains as it was when I sent that message of support last October, quoted by Laura Barton as the kicker to her Guardian piece:
It all boils down to this. I can’t prove the existence of god, but I sure do love the bible.