Several celebrities told so many lies about their pasts that sometimes it’s not even known what is and isn’t true. Who are a few examples you can think of?
Some that I’m familiar with:
Enrico Caruso- frequently claimed to be the 18th (sometimes 15th) of 21 children and the first to survive infancy, but was in fact less interestingly the oldest in a family of 3.
Yul Brynner- rarely discussed his past, though when he did it involved BIG FISH style tales of being the son of a Japanese princess and a Swiss nobleman, running away with gypsies as a boy, great adventures in WW2 underground resistance, etc., when in fact he was born to a Eurasian family on Sakhalin, grew up in Paris when his parents separated and effectively sat out WW2 in the US. He sang with gypsies in nightclubs but never joined them.
Al Lewis- best known as Grandpa Munster, among his whoppers are that he’s a gypsy (he’s Jewish and grew up in Brooklyn), that he has a Ph.D. in child psychology from Columbia (he never even completed his BA) and that he was a circus performer and trapeze artist (there’s no record of it and it doesn’t fit with what’s known of his past). His date of birth is also recorded differently in different sources, some placing him in his late nineties and others in his early eighties.
Patty Duke- Perhaps due to the manic-depressive illness that was untreated most of her life or perhaps just show-biz spin, she’s made several odd claims about the foster family who raised her (including tales of an odd device with spinning electric cylinders that she had to lie on that don’t seem to be borne out by other evidence) and claims she became pregnant either by Desi Arnaz, Jr. or John Astin (she’s not sure which) and married Michael Tell, a total stranger who sublet her apartment, in order to avoid the scandal of an unwed pregnancy; 30 years later DNA proved that her son Sean was the son of Michael Tell, though she still denies having slept with him.
Steven Seagal- Claims to be a black belt in several martial arts disciplines that experts who have watched his moves say he doesn’t know the first thing about, has hinted strongly that he was a CIA operative in Japan, claims to have been the prize student of O’Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba) though none of Ueshiba’s other students seem to have known this (they admit he hung around the classes, but never saw him fighting) and claimed to be one of the world’s leading authorities on samurai swords (several claims he made were demonstrably false).
Raymond Burr claimed to have been married three times (twice widowed, once divorced) and said the heartbreak of his only child’s death prevented him from any romantic involvement. In fact while he truly was divorced once (from a very brief marriage) he never had a child, was never widowed and was gay.
Who are some other celebrity prevaricators?
Who are some others who have so fabricated their past as to nearly lose it?