Impostor Syndrome

In 1962, Kiryat Yam on Haifa Bay was one of many new communities mushrooming across Israel to keep pace with the immigrants and refugees pouring into the country. My grandparents and my mother had arrived in 1958, from Vilnius, Lithuania, by way of Wroclaw, Poland. They set forth on forging a new existence, modest but determined, eyes forward, hands busy — little chance to tempt fate like Lot’s wife and yearn for the world left behind.

One day, into this dusty moonscape of the recently displaced, arrived a sleek black sedan. When the doors opened, Prince Michael Romanoff — the famous Russian royal; Hollywood restaurateur; original member of the Rat Pack with Bogart and Bacall; regular subject of international headlines — stepped onto the roughly-paved sidewalk on Henrietta Szold Street. He asked the stunned onlookers the whereabouts of Nina Papirmacher, my grandmother. He had come to see her while accompanying Frank Sinatra on his Israeli tour. 

What did this glamorous descendent of the last Russian dynasty want with my grandmother? Before he preferred the title of Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolenski-Romanoff, the Prince was simply Hersh Geguzin, the younger brother of Ida Geguzin, Nina’s mother. He had never completely discarded his modest Jewish identity. Rather, he neatly tucked it away to form a more fantastical persona. Hersh never forgot he was a Geguzin from  Vilna  (the Jewish name for Vilnius). He just didn’t let it get in the way of being a Romanoff as well.

(He ended this one visit to Israel by giving my grandparents $1200, which they used to build and furnish their living room. He also gave them two tickets to that night’s Sinatra concert in Haifa. My mother, the teenager in the house, declined them — her commitment to socialism meant that she could not abide this bourgeois event). 

Unlike most other frauds, Prince Michael was neither rejected nor reviled when unmasked (and he was unmasked remarkably often, especially for an era of slower information gathering). He did not invoke the instant and viral schadenfreude inspired by those outed today: Anna Delvey/Sorokin — who hid her Russian identity, while under the guise of a German heiress, and climbed and swindled her way through the New York socialite scene. There was Billy McFarland of the doomed Fyre Festival and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos — those two loathsome 21^st century millennial can-do concoctions; Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal, who tried to pass in the more classical sense — hiding their race; and most recently — Hilaria/Hillary Baldwin, with her own sui generis Spanish accent and ancestry. You could include Jesse Smollett in this list of “self-enhancers,” and actually, in his standup special, comic Ramy Yousseff makes the case that we all have a little Jesse Smollet in us — “Je suis Jesse Smollett!” though maybe it’s really more like “Je suis Brian Williams.”

Why was Romanoff so differently received? And is this entire rogues’ gallery different in quality or degree from anyone trying to embellish their identity — selling the “best” or “better” version of what they feel is their true self? 

I remember my initial shock when Rachel Dolezal was outed, one that was quickly replaced by another — that for some people this masquerade was not a shock at all. My friends Sam and Erica had completely different reactions, not just from mine, but from most others. (Sam & Erica — not their real names — are native New Yorkers, Sam is Black and from Queens, Erica Jewish from Brooklyn, very different from one another but both almost defiantly genuine with long — real! – resumes of experience in work, life, and the wider world. They don’t speak for anyone but themselves, but they are coming to the conversation with a breadth of experience and sometimes peculiar wisdom that often, to my benefit, catches me off guard). Neither saw her outing as a major revelation. Sam just shrugged, and Erica said, “Yeah people exaggerate and lie about their backgrounds all the time.” Sam had a similar reaction when I told him that the first time I read “Kafka Was the Rage,” by Anatole Broyard, I did not realize that Broyard was Black (Broyard famously hid his race, even from his own children, until his deathbed; and he passed in high fashion — ultimately going Full Connecticut Wasp, almost as far from his defining memoir’s bohemian Greenwich Village as his origins in New Orleans and Bed Stuy). Sam said “So what? People pass all the time.” 

So, when does “mere puffery” (a legal term in advertising that means promotional and subjectively plausible, but not misrepresentative and objectively false) transform or “break bad” into the realm of delusion and deception? And who, ultimately, is the performance for?

What is striking about Romanoff’s deception is the sheer number of times it failed — landing him in jails and insane asylums, run out of every town and country in which he set foot. Not to mention a penury that almost killed him (at one point in 1924 he was sleeping in subways and almost died of hunger). His reign in Hollywood only began in 1939, and reached its peak in the 40’s and 50’s. It was a huge and unlikely last act (he died successful, wealthy, famous and universally beloved). In 1932, The New Yorker published a profile of him that is clearly meant as an epilogue to the tale of a charming failure. Noting Romanoff’s peak as 1922, Alva Johnston wrote, “(Romanoff), who was deported from America this May and placed in jail in Grasse, France, for swindling American tourists, may never take rank in American history with the great impostors…he squandered his genius on petty objectives. Some of his greatest strokes were planned merely to finance himself over the weekend.” 

And yet this born two-bit hustler became the grand persona he always felt entitled to be. The gap between his actual origin story, and his cultivated one, provide a world of armchair insight into why and how people come by the identities they project.

Hersh Geguzin was born in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1890, the sixth and last child of a well-to-do Jewish family. Parents Hinde and Emmanuel owned a successful dry goods business that allowed them a high perch in this bustling center of pre-war Jewish life. Tragically, while Hinde was pregnant with Hersh, Emmanuel died trying to break up a fight. Born to a single mother with a booming business, Hersh was spoiled by his older sisters, but probably neglected by his only parent. Whether because he had room to roam, or because he always opted out of what did not suit him, Hersh often ran away for days at a time. Out of exasperation and fear for his future, Mother Hinde finally shipped him off with relatives who were leaving for America (the relatives added his name to their passports as one of their own children, but he never immigrated under his own name). He was 10 years old and would never see any of them again except for oldest sister Olga who would immigrate to the U.S. 17 years later.

In America, Geguzin honed his skills of evasion against the backdrop of the Lower East Side. He quickly landed in the juvenile justice system, supposedly after a policeman caught him sleeping on the pool table of a Democratic Social Club. After bouncing around different orphanages and institutions in New York, he was placed at the Children’s Village in Dobb’s Ferry north of the city. There he began to cultivate the skill that would enable his transformation — schmoozing his way into the hearts of the well to do. Children’s Village’s set to instill in its charges an ability to connect with adults with means. As Johnston wrote, “The boy had now found his true vocation, that of being the protégé of wealthy persons.” 

Europe now beckoned as life’s only real finishing school, as it had for generations of Americans. Geguzin’s paths to the accoutrements of high culture may have been different than those of Edith Wharton and Henry James, but perhaps only by a matter of degree. On the spectrum of self-improvement, one could say he just started further behind. For as long as he could, Hersh ignored — or simply didn’t understand — the basic European laws of social order that one had to be a gentleman born. Cultivated airs, erudition, the best letters of introduction — none could enable true entry into high society. But he certainly tried. He spent time at Oxford — possibly working as a valet to a student or don there — and picked up enough knowledge and mannerisms to fool almost anyone. He would do the same in the U.S. and during his time in Paris. His ingenious ability to assimilate allowed him to create an uncanny collage. As Johnston noted:

(An) Oxford man, one of the Guinnesses of Dublin Stout lineage, talked Oxford with Mike on another occasion. ‘He knows more about the place than I do,’ said Guinness. Others found the Prince a storehouse of anecdote and legend about Eton. Altogether, it seems probable that Mike is the only living Eton-Oxford-Cambridge-Heidelberg-Yale-Harvard-Princeton man.

Hersh did finally understand the Old World would not tolerate an upstart. His retrofit into aristocracy would now begin. A litany of titles and identities would follow as he tried to find the perfect fit — they included Arthur Wellesley, Willoughby de Burke, William A. Wellington Arthur Edward Willoughby, Count Gladstone, and several others. 

However, England does not easily forgive the crime of faking one’s lineage. Scotland Yard arrested Hersh in 1914 for fraud, categorizing him as a “rogue of uncertain origin.” After spending the war in various English prisons and asylums, Hersh decided to leave his mess in England behind. He landed in Paris, where he could easily renew himself amid the post-war chaos. Because of the Russian Revolution, Russian aristocrats — real ones — abounded in the French capital. Hersh would work alongside two of them as a book shelver in the prestigious American Library. He was certainly more erudite, well-dressed, and charming than the real princes (he was also vaguely British and upper-class by now). These two men unwittingly helped him finally find the best mold into which to pour himself. 

Prince Michael first tried out his new self across the Seine on the fabled 1920’s Left Bank. Michael Romanoff guessed this world of bohemians and American expats, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein — themselves set on personal reinvention — would make a welcome audience. 

Prince Michael was correct. However, at least one American claimed to have cottoned on. Lionel Reiss was a Jewish painter from New York. He had spent years as a commercial artist, saving money for a trip to paint Eastern European Jewish life. For obvious reasons, these paintings (published in a book with text by Isaac Bashevis Singer) would gain a tragic poignancy he did could not have imagined. Lionel Reiss also happens to have been my father’s great uncle. By sheer coincidence, these two great uncles from opposite sides of my family, met in 1920’s Paris.  (My parents met on kibbutz in Israel in 1971– prior to that, their families had no connection, in Europe, America, or Israel).

As Reiss would tell it to my parents in 1977 when this coincidence was discovered at a dinner party to which Reiss was invited along with Emmanuel Piore, the living relative who probably knew Romanoff best — one day in 1922, at his gallery in Paris, Reiss saw Romanoff looking at the scenes Reiss painted of Jewish Vilna. Romanoff told Reiss he knew those streets well. When Reiss asked him how that could be, why would a Russian aristocrat find himself there, Romanoff made some dismissive gestures about visiting his subjects. To my parents, Reiss said, “Yeah, I always knew he was a fraud.” 

Romanoff also became a fixture at the Ritz, across the Seine, where he could find more monied Americans. However, if shnorring wasn’t an option, or wasn’t working, he’d have to pay out of pocket. And his pockets emptied quickly, whether to buy lavish meals, or a new pair of spats. When the U.S. offered free passage to indigent American citizens stranded in France after the war, he saw no choice but to return to New York. He was penniless. 

Before his headlines from Hollywood and membership in the Rat Pack in 1940’s, an episode upon his return to New York in 1922 marks one of his most legendary coups. He was detained at Ellis Island because he had no proof of citizenship. Rather than await a potential deportation, he escaped. Years later he would explain that he did so by, “swimming to the Battery, holding between his teeth a walking-stick to which he attached an oilskin bag containing his most precious belongings.” Others would further embroider this tale by adding that on arriving at the Battery, he was helped ashore by policeman to whom he explained, “Too many cocktails.” (New Yorker). From my family I know that his sister Olga, who was living in New York by then, paid for a lawyer who then probably bribed a few guards to look the other way.

A subsequent press conference at the Hotel Belmont, at which he pronounced his royalty and charmed the newspapermen, would entrench his place in society. The New York Times even published a profile in which they traced his royal lineage back to 1365. 

The Prince regularly put his disarming charm to use, to court friends, and to explain away some of the more gaping holes in this new persona. Most strikingly, he did not speak Russian. His feints included, “Never speak Russian in an American speakeasy, you will soon learn why;” “Let’s talk English. Isn’t it discourteous to our American friends to talk Russian?” (New Yorker) (When he visited my grandmother in Israel, they had to search for a neighbor who spoke English in order to communicate).  And of course, when asked about other pretenders to the Russian throne, such as Madame Tschaikowsky, who claimed to be the daughter of the murdered Czar, he would say, “Confidentially, old man, a colossal fraud.” (New Yorker).

 

A Double Life

In 1922, Hersh discovered that his sister Olga was living in New York, and had been since 1917 (except for his sister Ida who married and stayed, with mother Hinde, in the house they grew up in, the rest of the siblings all left Vilna, either to America, like Olga, or to Moscow and St. Petersburg). Despite his efforts to eclipse his true identity, Hersh did not hesitate to reach out to his favorite sister and her son, Emanuel. They became as much a part of his life as the courtier class in which he counted himself. He was extremely proud of the handsome and talented Emanuel, perhaps filling a surrogate role for the young man who did not have a father in his life. 

Unlike Anatole Broyard, who took great pains to erase his pre-passing past (he had a first wife who was inconveniently Puerto Rican with whom he had a child — and pressed delete on them both), as well as Rachel Dolezal, and Jessica Krug, Hersh seemed to have no preoccupation with having to reconcile all his different lies and lives. All impostors tend to live inside the cage of their unintended Ponzi scheme, either a financial or factual one, always having to outpace their last lie. Or they just bury that one dark secret so deeply that they convince themselves it either is not there, or they live so far above a surface they dare not skim.

For Romanoff, it was all of these and also none. He needed to beg, borrow, and steal to maintain his image and his place in society — to look the part, to attend elaborate parties and also host them — to be himself in other words. He also had to continually add to and ad lib his personal biography, with an ingenious talent for improvisation (such as when having to account for his inability to speak Russian). And yet, he also seemed at ease with himself, rather sure of who he was, even if it was a shape-shifting form. He slipped in and out of every circumstance as if he was meant for it. And few of his “marks” seemed to harbor any resentment for his swindles — financial or otherwise (at least in America).

One arrest, in 1924, was for defrauding a Harvard student. However, when the prosecution called the complaining witness at trial — a young man from a famous New York family — no one rose. The charge — which no one doubted — was of obtaining $150 from the young man under false pretenses. According to Johnston in the New Yorker, “This had not disturbed the friendship. The landlady of the victim, however, put in her oar. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘do you want to be a target for scamps all the rest of your life? Have him arrested.” The student then felt he must at least make the formality of doing so but was conveniently out of the country for the duration of the trial. Moreover, while housed in the Cambridge jail during the proceedings, Romanoff, as always, held court, seeing old local friends — “The Cambridge jail was practically turned into a Romanoff palace, and the guards and turnkeys became members of the imperial household.” (New Yorker).

America during this era of Prohibition proved fertile ground for the fake prince. From New York to Cambridge, to Newport, to society in St. Paul, Romanoff thrived in the era’s glamorous illicit shadows and private parties. Like in Cambridge, he made fast friends with the well to do, threw lavish parties he couldn’t pay for, and occasionally got arrested for doing so. He would cross the country leaving a trail of bad checks, exposed identities, and open warrants in his wake. 

Some felt stung and ashamed when they realized they had been taken. But for the most part, it was his charm and role-playing of himself that were the payoff in the first place — the trap was the lure. As the English journalist Alastair Cook would observe of Romanoff: 

He was in his own person a marvelously sustained gag. He did not pretend to be Prince Michael Romanoff of Russia. He pretended, and managed, to be a great comic pretending to be Prince Michael Romanoff of Russia…(he) was a one-man satire on the whole French and Italian jet set. He simply decided to be a prince and chuckled up his enormous cuffs to see the descendants of genuine noble houses kowtow and haggle for a choice reservation in his restaurant.

Back to the Brink 

After being acquitted in Cambridge, Romanoff returned to New York only to be immediately arrested for his famous Ellis Island “escape.”  With an international criminal file now as thick as the history of the actual Romanoffs, the New York authorities had to decide what to do with him. He awaited their judgment in the infamous Tombs jail in New York, from 1925-1926, where, like everywhere else, he charmed inmates and guards alike. He received a suspended sentence, but not before Edmund C. Collins, a prosecutor who had crossed paths with Geguzin for years, laid all of the information he had on the inmate before him. Indignant, Geguzin said, “You cannot imagine that that person is I.” Collins replied, “You know it is Mike. Why not tell me the truth? I am your friend. You are out of jail. You have paid your debt. Why keep up this pretence?”

Geguzin replied:

Have you ever been in a bare room in a new house with a view overlooking the park? You look at the park and it is marvelous. You look at the bare walls, and you find them absolutely repulsive. They cry for adornment. That is I. I don’t lie because I desire to be a crook and a thief, but because I wish to associate with persons whose lives I believe to be adorned. Frankly, I will lie to you as long as you know me. If I told you the truth, I would feel like a bare wall.” ( New York, p.25)

Adornment, curation, collage — a romantic cultivation that feels truer than the bare facts written in a casefile. Or, at least elevates one above the fate of being merely ordinary? In “Kafka Was the Rage,” Broyard wrote “(these people, these books) moved into the vacuum of my imagination…with them I could trade in my embarrassingly ordinary history for a choice of fictions.” He once described his transformation as a “transfiguration,” reflecting that “when I first came out with that word, I was like someone who sneezes into a handkerchief and finds it full of blood. 

In an essay about Broyard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes about this idea of “authenticity” and self-actualization: “To pass is to sin against authenticity and authenticity is among the founding lies of the modern age. The philosopher Charles Taylor summarizes its ideologies thus: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But the notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”

Romanoff and other impostors may differ dramatically in their lies and schemes, but they all share one thing — a compulsion to rearrange reality to reflect what they believe being human is for them. 

 

The Grand Final Act 

Mike completed his transfiguration in perhaps the only time and place it could be done — Hollywood in its heyday. Los Angeles in the 1930’s and 1940’s was the birthplace of the clichés of Tinsel Town. Mike entered a city of studios and actors living at the edge of reality and the center of American reinvention. 

This was not Mike’s first go at making it in showbiz — he kicked around vaudeville and the sound stages in New York and even tried to make it in LA before. But now the timing was right, or he was just lucky — it still seems so improbable. He finally found a career from commodifying his charm.

Sometime in the late 1930s, Mike began an informal residency at the famed Clover Club on Sunset Boulevard. His regular attendance at the backroom gambling tables began to attract an even greater and more glamorous crowd. He also began appearing in more films (altogether, according to IMDB, he is credited in 22 movies and TV shows, between 1937-1971), but it was this ability to reign over a room that made him a star. He had a talent for creating the right atmosphere; perfect pitch for social situations; an ability to cultivate relationships; and an ingenuity for plying his brand of ersatz Old-World class (in the world of the ersatz, the near-perfect knock-off is king). If the blue bloods of the East indulged it, the newly made of Hollywood devoured it. 

In 1939, with friends and investors like Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, and James Cagney, Mike finally founded his own kingdom. Romanoff’s — a vast restaurant at 326 N. Rodeo Drive just off Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills — enabled its owner to realize the fantasy world he always envisioned for himself. The main dining room seated 170, and to reach it, one would have to pass the curved art deco bar in front and the five booths across from it — the most prized seats in the house, with the first permanently assigned to Bogie, who took lunch there every day. Those valuable high-visibility booths could make or break careers, and part of Mike’s responsibilities and powers included interpreting and enforcing these hierarchies through attention and seating. Here he could create the rules of aristocracy. 

Unlike most other impostors, overselling entrepreneurs (ahem, Adam Neumann), or the merely rabidly ambitious, Romanoff actually did will his vision into being. An article from the Los Angeles Times from 2002, recalled Romanoff’s as a place where:

Errol Flynn hosted feasts of roasted suckling pigs. MCA executives held court to set actors’ salaries. Gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper finally made peace. And the restaurant owner, a self-styled prince who called himself Michael Romanoff, dined daily with his two English bulldogs —Socrates and Confucius — and handed out toothbrushes to patrons.

Once Romanoff crafted this perfect expression of his world — one that could endure — he could enter and never turn back, the technicolor switch had been turned on forever. 

 

Romanoff’s & Europe 

However, at the exact same time that Romanoff’s was soaring, Europe was on the brink of destruction. While he was finding star-studded success, his sister Ida’s family – her husband and two children — was being hunted in Vilna by the Nazis. Ida’s daughter, my grandmother Nina, only 18 at the time, was the sole survivor. It’s her tragedy and her heroic tale — of serving as a paratrooper whose mission was to link the advancing Red Army with partisans fighting in the forests outside Vilna between 1941 and 1944 — through which I conceive of those years.

Nina would eventually create a vibrant post-war life in Vilna, reconnecting with those few who returned (before the war, Vilna had 170,000 Jews; only 10,000 survived), including Joseph with whom she had a beautiful marriage. My mother, Lydia (named after Ida, as am I), was born a year after the war ended. She and my grandparents formed a strong community with the rest of the Jews who were orphaned, traumatized, psychologically displaced. It was a starkly different city — its storied human and physical institutions mutilated beyond recognition. A new world. All of it had to be new, a primordial reset.

Eventually, because of persistent anti-Semitism, my grandparents and my mother would move to Poland and then Israel, starting anew each time. I recall stories from my grandmother about not yet being fluent in Hebrew and spending time each night memorizing whole sentences and paragraphs in this strange language so she could fumble her way through as a teacher. That would be the extent of her and my grandfather’s embellishment or insincerity in their lives. They were warm and fun, they loved people, parties, music and culture, and they held on to an optimism which they acquired before the war. But they also knew what real survival meant for them — and that no one could do it alone. Community and responsibility for the welfare of others was paramount. They also carried with them the sacrifices and losses they suffered, and the entire worlds they could never regain.

I remember one summer afternoon in 2009, when I was visiting my grandparents, sitting in the living room Mike Romanoff paid for. My grandmother’s cousin Ina, who still lives in Moscow, sent her a new article about Hersh/Mike from a Russian magazine. What I remember most was my grandmother’s shame — to the end that was the emotion he evinced in her. She did not see him as a fun and charming scamp. To her, he was a liar and a thief who exploited others. I never completely understood why she took his antics so seriously. But in writing this I finally feel the chasm between their experiences and their feelings of purpose in the world and there is something about trying to fathom this disconnect that fills me with a new sadness I hadn’t felt before. 

(I will say however, upon further reflection, that Nina’s was a distinctly happy childhood and adolescence, raised by parents who doted on her and encouraged her – and  pre-war Vilna did as well; her early world knew no bounds. Hersh was born fatherless and was sent away at age 10. My grandmother was an empathetic woman, I’m sure on some level she understood his manic need for approval and to belong).

According to Jane Pejsa, who wrote the only biography of Romanoff, he did make an effort to get visas for Ida’s family to come to America. But it was too late. Even if Mike did not openly acknowledge his Judaism during this time, he did make some adjustments that hint at an internal fundamental shift.  Prior, perhaps to compensate, Mike was known for his regular open disdain of Jews. Once he was even arrested for inciting a riot with an anti-Semitic rant aimed at Jewish union members in New York. But during the war this all ceased. He would also take steps to raise money for the war effort, hosting several benefits for the American Red Cross (according to Pejsa, the genesis of the celebrity benefit event). It would take several years for Americans to learn of their European relatives’ fates. When Mike did finally hear of what happened to Ida and her family, he vowed to visit Nina in Israel. 

 

The Golden Era 

Romanoff’s would remain a vibrant Hollywood stronghold for more than two decades. Only a slideshow could possibly illustrate the parade of stars and careers that coursed through it. Some of the most famous scenes and photos of the era occurred at Romanoff’s, including that glorious snapshot of Sophia Loren side-eyeing Jayne Mansfield’s breasts. And where else would the Rat Pack create their sardonic rules of engagement? Bogart and Lauren “Betty” Bacall would gather at Romanoff’s almost daily, attracting their usual crowd — one day Bacall walked in, surveyed their group and said, “I see the rat pack is all here.” (Pejsa). A new club was formed, even with mock officers: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice president; Sid Luft, cage master; Swifty Lazar, recording secretary; and Bogie, public relations. Jimmy Van Heusen, Mike Romanoff, David Niven, and Noel Coward were members without portfolio (Pejsa). Mike was more discreet and graceful than the tempestuous rat packers, but he was the main reason they persisted. 

Mike and Bogie were close confidants and when Bogart died of lung cancer in 1957, Mike was a pallbearer. The Rat Pack and Romanoff’s would remain vibrant, but the mood after Bogart’s death, and the passing of the baton to Sinatra, was like the difference between the two men — a blue-blood old-world presence who lived more closely to the vest, versus the more frenetic charm and pace of the young kid from Hoboken. Bogart loved to settle in at Booth No. 1 and take long slow lunches. Sinatra and his pack loved to roam — to Lake Tahoe, to Las Vegas, to London, to anywhere where the party might be. Mike would accompany Frank, with long absences from his kingdom on N. Rodeo Drive. This would trigger the decline of the restaurant — Mike would draw the stars, and the stars would draw each other. Without him, the glitz went elsewhere.

Among the many new friends Mike made at Romanoff’s during its glory days, was the infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In town for some red-hunting, Hoover always dined at his favorite restaurant, noting “Here the phony tinsel is stripped away, and you can see the real tinsel.” (Pejsa). He may have been trying to end the careers of some stars but certainly basked in the magic of their world. He ate there regularly with his team — Roy Cohn, David Schine, and a young Robert Kennedy. Joe McCarthy himself discovered that Romanoff’s (in its second incarnation, further down Rodeo Drive) was a perfect perch for his war on the film industry’s Communists, real and imagined.

In 1958, Hoover and several other prominent friends of Mike, introduced letters of recommendation to a new bill being submitted in the House by Representative Donald Jackson of Beverly Hills. The bill declared Michael Romanoff to be a legal resident of the United States, having entered the country on December 22, 1932. President Eisenhower signed the bill into law. In the New York Times, Inez Robb wrote, with tongue firmly in cheek:

That Mike, nature’s self-made nobleman, should crave the benediction of law in his sunset years is a lamentable triumph of conformity over rugged individualism. In his old free-wheeling, free-loading days, Mike was not so much without the law as above it…He lived on the richest cuffs in the country, and many of us envied him his imperial brass. It seems so sad now, as time is taking its toll on the Russian Romanoffs, that respectability is taking its toll of the American branch…

As part of his citizenship induction ceremony, Mike had to renounce all foreign titles. 

The transformation was complete. And yet everyone knew who Mike was. They always did. 

 

How an Impostor 

In his 2014 memoir, “Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade,” Walter Kirn explores the reasons he was duped by the serial imposter, and convicted murderer, Christian Carl Gerhartstreiter – a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller. 

When Kirn first met Rockefeller, he also had the writer’s curse of wanting to go along for the ride of a good story. But like all of us, that self-awareness is often undermined by vanity — wanting the magic of being the confidant of a Rockefeller, or a Romanoff, or a German heiress with a multimillion-Euro trust fund and art foundation, or a brilliant, young, beautiful scientist who is promising world-saving medical innovation, or the world’s coolest party planner, or anyone who is offering something that may help your mythmaking of yourself.  Our vanity helps complete their performance. 

Kirn writes, “As a college English major I’d learned the phrase “suspension of disbelief” but with Clark you contributed belief, wiring it from your personal account into the account you held with him. He showed you a hollow tree; you added the bees.” Yet Kirn also allows that we are – adaptively – wired to be trusting, that:

We could hardly function otherwise. The cop who pulls us over to write a ticket must be a cop because he wears the uniform; the bank teller to whom we hand our paycheck is depositing it, not stealing it, because he works behind a marble counter… When trust is abused, the need for it persists.

Especially when the impostor seems to seek nothing but your friendship, or personal validation (an even bigger ego trip), this suspension of disbelief (or provision of belief) doesn’t feel like a gamble. Some of these impostors were greedy for money, but most were not – most were trying to realize a self-image they felt entitled to — a different kind of greed.  Some were great at it, others less so – becoming different types of confidence men and women to achieve their goals. At one point, Kirn describes Rockefeller as a “cannibal of souls,” a “Hannibal Mitty.” This would probably apply to many of the serial impostors and frauds listed above. But not Romanoff. And this is probably why he was beloved despite his swindles, his bad checks, his frequent freeloading, his obvious tall tales. 

Hersh Geguzin gave as much as he took, often more-so. He (usually) never sought to cannibalize or exploit for profit. His ledger was an evenly balanced one – he was generous, with his spirit even if not his money if he did not have it. The fictional character that to me most closely aligns with Geguzin’s role as an impostor, is Paul in “Six Degress of Separation.” Played by Will Smith in the film adaptation (1993), Paul suddenly arrives at the Upper East Side home of art dealer Flan Kitteridge and his wife Ouisa, claiming to be a friend of their children at Harvard. He also claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier. After an evening regaling them and their guest (a sinisterly charming Ian McKellan who the Kitteridges hope will buy a $12 million painting) with stories and his obvious intellect, charm, erudition, and gourmet cooking (along with a hint that they might get to star in his father’s new production – a film adaptation of Cats) – all three immediately fall in love with this stranger who just gifted them the most magical evening. His appearance even seems to help them close the sale with McKellan. 

Of course, they soon learn that he is actually not any of the things he said he was. They also learn that other couples with children at Harvard had fallen prey to his charade. They are indignant, they make visits to the police, and some serious consequences arise from his ruse (though none suffered by them). The actual harm to them seems to be to their dignity, though he added a highly colorful anecdote to their lives, which they retell with verve throughout the film.

Yet it is clear that Paul very sincerely wants to be that person in that life – and that to a certain degree he is – the charm was real, the erudition and intellectual engagement and attention he lavished certainly were. And as they argue about whether his lies were harmful, and what exactly makes someone authentic, Ouisa almost angrily points out, “We were hardly taken in – we were taken in for a few hours – he did more for us in a few hours than our children ever did…You were attracted to him – his youth, his talent, and the embarrassing prospect of being in the movie version of Cats.” She insists that he is “More than just an anecdote.” 

The theme of collage appears throughout the film. and in the final scene, Ouisa states, after a discussion of Cezanne at a dinner party, “I am a collage of brush strokes – I am all random. Flan, how much of your life can you account for?”