In addition to being an early music video pioneer (Elephant Parts), Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper and he inherited a substantial amount of money from this.
Dolenz could play the guitar and auditioned for the show with that instrument. But he was told they were interested in him for the drummer role so he claimed he could play the drums also, figuring he would learn them as quickly as possible.
I probably know more about The Monkees than any other rock group due to the books and interviews I’ve read. Kind of embarrassing since it’s debatable whether they were a “real band”. I got hooked on the repeats in the '80s and then suddenly there was an explosion of info as they got really popular again from other fans of the repeats and the first reunion tour.
Jones and Dolenz were both former child stars. They bonded almost immediately, were roommates while the show was on the air, and, unless they’ve had a falling out in the last couple of decades, have been best friends ever since. On one interview Dolenz said it’s a shame he and Jones weren’t gay as they’d probably have hooked up the day they met and never split up and it would have saved them both a fortune in alimony.
Jones’s biggest role had been the Artful Dodger in Oliver! on Broadway, but by the time he auditioned for the Monkees he was broke and living with friends. Mickey had starred in the TV series Circus Boy, which is forgotten now but he was still getting recognized for it at the time of the auditions. Dolenz was a college student at the time who had pretty much decided to give up acting if he didn’t get something very soon, but of course he got The Monkees. Between the show’s end and the band’s resurgence in the '80s he moved to England (where he was still close friends with Jones) and made a good living making TV commercials.
Tork and Nesmith were the odd men out- neither was ever particularly close to the other members of the group. Tork is from a distinguished academic family (not a musical one) and was a major pothead and party-boy who spent his money as soon as he made it and had a lot of hangers on. During the course of Monkee-mania he went from living in a tiny dingy basement apartment to living in a mansion to living in a tiny apartment again- no real middleground; at one point he was teaching yoga and giving music lessons in Venice Beach.
Nesmith made a bunch of business and music ventures after The Monkees, some of the musical ones very acclaimed critically and some of the business ones not a bad idea in and of themselves, but he was broke and deeply in debt and, per him, having to watch while the IRS tagged his furniture for seizure; he was rescued from total ruin by swallowing his pride and asking his mother for help (which he’d tried not to do).
There was apparently some resentment that Nesmith only took an interest in the Monkee reunion tour after it became a huge success; it quickly went from county fair type venues to selling out stadiums, at which point he started appearing on stage with them (to enormous applause and cheers). On an interview when the other Monkees said this accusingly he basically responded “Hell yeah! I worked my ass off to build my company and wasn’t going to leave it to go play to a half empty grange hall in Bugtussell!” (my paraphrase of a similar comment he made). The last tour with all four of them was apparently a disaster with Nesmith and Tork having a huge fight and basically all of them saying “it’s over”, though I think they’ve done some occasional gigs and reunions since.
Getting back to OP, one of the “untrue” things that surfaces is “Charles Manson and Neil Diamond both auditioned for The Monkees”. In truth, Manson was still in prison at the time, and while Diamond did write I’m a Believer he didn’t audition for the show/band. Paul Williams did- he’s talked about it on talk shows- and by some accounts Stephen Stills, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not as I’ve read mixed accounts.
I first heard that some 40 years ago; I think it must be true. The story goes that he was rejected because he had bad-looking teeth.
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman has (in a footnote) a multi-paragraph quote from Giacomo Casanova (volume XII of his memoirs) concerning how a gentleman should always be prepared to make himself a good breakfast, wherever he may be. I thought for a long time that it was an actual quote, and now (maddeningly) can’t find where I learned that it had been made up by one or another of the authors for the book.
In A House Like A Lotus, Madeleine L’Engle refers to a fictional Pacific island called Baki. There was an ancient statue on the island known as the “Laughing Christ” (the name arose, IIRC, from either a syncretic belief or confusion of the islanders between their god and the Jesus of Christian missionaries). I always thought that even if the island wasn’t real, she’d based it on some actual statue, but it appears she made it up out of whole cloth.
The last part of what he says is Ezekiel 25:17, though. A paraphrase, I think, but not a total fabrication.
“And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
The giant thunderbird photo.
I’m still slightly heartbroken to find out that Nessie isn’t real. 
Bigfoot, Abominable Snowman, all those others were just boring and stupid. But Nessie? A living dinosaur in a hard-to-reach lake in Scotland? With photographs taken by an actual doctor? What 7 year-old would not want to believe in that?
I was taken in by The Princess Bride as well. I really spent quite a bit of time looking for the real thing. You would think the fake country the author was from would have clued me in.
That book is still getting kids. My daughter’s English teacher assigned it as summer reading for all his classes (the advanced students in all grades). She had to convince more than one kid that S. Morgenstern didn’t exist. She gave up trying with a few of them.
I was taken in by the Passangers Soudtracks album in which UEno* created some fake films to put music to. At least one was real and I think a couple others were actual projects that never saw the light of day, which aided the deception. Reading the notes some of them sounded a bit implausibly pretentious, but I didn’t know the real story until later. This wasn’t helped when some lazy reviewers claimed they were all fake; reliable sources were hard to find.
*(One half of U2 plus Brian Eno)
One that I just read for the umpteenth time in a book I like: “Before Columbus most people though the world was flat.”
NO THEY DIDN’T. This has been debunked a zillion times. Illiterate people probably didn’t give a lot of thought to it one way or the other but those who could read and had any type of education had known it was spherical for more than a thousand years; Aristotle was a proponent of a spherical Earth and Eratosthenes had calcuated its circumference with amazing accuracy two centuries before Jesus was born. In fact the whole entire point of Columbus sailing west into the Atlantic was because they knew the Earth was round, they just weren’t sure if it was a short cut to Asia.
What irks me is that it would be so easy to use an accurate statement:
“Before Thomas Edison people thought that a night time room as bright as day was an impossibility” or “During the Civil War doctors didn’t feel the need to waste time washing their hands or their instruments” or even “Thousands of people briefly believed there were oceans and batmenon the Moon” or “Many intelligent and well educated people believed in witches centuries after Columbus” (not that there’s any relationship to Columbus), etc… That one’s just kind of a pet peeve to me.
Similarly, I didn’t realize until my early 20’s that Jackalopes weren’t real. My grandfather had a stuffed one and I really believed the story he spun of how he shot it while hunting, I just assumed they were another crazy midwest animal like armadillos or rattlesnakes.
Well, honestly, armadillos ARE pretty weird looking.
Until Warren Buffet’s biography Snowball came out I believed for years that he was Jimmy Buffet’s uncle.
Buffet even helped with the ruse by including some verses about his rich uncle in his song “It’s my Job”.
I unwillingly shared my previous belief with many friends who considered me the guru of all things musical.
Bare Naked Ladies had me convinced for years that John Davidson was dead.
The amusing thing about the Columbus legend is that it is pretty well the opposite of the truth.
Legend: Columbus had a hard time getting sponsorship because people believed that he was going to sail off the edge of the earth. Columbus = visionary with a true view of the world; his critics = unscientific fools.
Reality: the critics of Columbus new full well that the Earth was round. More, they had a very good idea of the size of the world, and a sort-of idea of the size of eurasia. Using this data, they reasonably concluded that it was impossible using the ships of their day to reach Asia. They were right.
Columbus was a crackpot who vastly underestimated the size of the world and overestimated the size of Eurasia, leading him to think he could sail straight there. When he found the Carib islands, he thought he was in Asia. He was of course wrong, and merely lucky for him that there was land where he found it - he would never have been able to sail straight accross the Atlantic and the Pacific.
I saw Field of Dreams when I was a kid and spent a lot of time looking in various area libraries for Terence Mann’s “The Boat Rocker.”
Much later, I read the book “Field of Dreams” and learned that the Terence Mann character in the film had been J.D. Salinger in the book, and, well, guess what “The Boat Rocker” was the stand-in for?
Armadillos are up-armored opossums.
In a world that has managed to produce a platypus I don’t doubt anything.