Telling Tales (21 page)

Six months after publication, with the book going down a storm on both sides of the Atlantic and already being spoken of as one of the most important – not to mention diverting – literary discoveries of a generation, the essentially fair-playing King-Hall decided she really ought to confess her little ‘joke’: the stunt she had pulled to spice up a boring summer in Hove was plainly getting out of hand. So she told her publishers the truth, concerned about what their reaction might be. They did not, however, run to the newspapers with the story or send out a heart-felt apology to all the critics and historians who had printed encomia about the book. In fact, as was revealed in a magazine article some weeks later, D. Appleton and Co. did absolutely nothing to alter the sales and advertising blurb for her
Diary
. Once the story had finally leaked out to enough journalists to make further denials futile, however, a representative from the firm assured
Time
magazine reporters that they had been quite convinced the work was genuine when they published it, and were as shocked as anyone to discover it was not.

Unlike the publishers Simon & Schuster, who were also hoaxed by a fake memoir-peddling young woman in the 1920s and, realizing they were dealing with a serious con-artist, made a public vow to reimburse any reader who felt let-down, King-Hall’s editors knew they were dealing with a good-hearted girl whose prank had inadvertently taken on a life of its own. It was not even a particularly carefully crafted hoax, and she had certainly engaged in no further deception after her initial submission of the manuscript. Therefore, no dramatic acts of apology were required of anyone involved. As Magdalen herself said, ‘I wrote the book in a few weeks, but, if I had realized so many distinguished people would have taken it seriously, I should have spent much more time and pains upon it.’

The book went out of print in 1984, but, despite going on to develop a prolific career as the author of such rip-roaring historical novels as
Jehan of the Ready Fists, Gay Crusaders
and
Sturdy Rogue
, Magdalen King-Hall has been largely ignored by compilers of literary encyclopaedias and histories. Yet there was a time when her work was considered the best example of its kind. Writing for both children and adults, her passion for history and love for the Irish countryside where she lived most of her life was infectious and anyone with an interest in the castles and manor houses of old Ireland should seek out her many novelized histories of them.

As a hoaxer, she sought neither wealth for herself nor humiliation for others. She was simply a girl with a fun idea who loved writing and whose amused enthusiasm for her chosen subject bursts off every page of her
Diary
. And although no one ever debunked her, leaving her to do the honours herself, like all good literary tricksters, she had left a clue in her text which would have eventually led any sceptical critics to the real truth: the name of the seat of her heroine’s family was the Irish version of her own.

I
F YOU WERE
a young reader in the seventies, eighties or nineties, the chances are that you got your first taste of what class-A drugs might be like by reading the salacious book
Go Ask Alice
. The anonymous ‘diary’ of an innocent middle-class girl turned drug-fiend, it was published in 1971 and almost immediately became a huge success for its author. But it would be several years before the world found out who that author really was.

The work is most famous for its lurid descriptions of being high, paranoid and hallucinating, but its graphic sexual references were what got it banned or restricted from school libraries. ‘Another day, another blowjob’ is one memorable quote from the section where the narrator (not, in fact, called Alice – the title refers to a quote from the Jefferson Airplane song ‘White Rabbit’ but the unnamed protagonist has come to be called Alice for convenience’s sake) turns to prostitution to feed her habit. But perhaps the most shocking element of it is in fact the way the diarist gets involved in drugs in the first place.

Unpopular and unhappy, having moved to a new town, Anonymous is concerned at first only with looking nice and meeting boys. Then one day she gets invited to a party where her sensible soft drink is spiked with a large dose of LSD. Tripping wildly, she is of course terrified and goes home to let the strange feelings and visions wear off. But everyone knows one drug leads to another and before the month is out she is injecting speed, smoking dope and embarking on a year of psychotropic experimentation that will land her in hospital. Her poor parents, we are told, ‘keep saying that they know I am a good, sweet girl, but I’m beginning to act like a hippie’. Soon she is having sex with dealers, suffering pregnancy scares, running away from home and encountering America’s sleaziest low-lifes. Periodically she returns home, seeking familial forgiveness and help, and the book almost ends on a happy note when she seems to have got clean. But a chilling afterword records that she was found dead soon after the last entry.

If the book was meant to warn children off the dangers of drugs and under-age sex, as it turns out it was, the author ought perhaps to have made the narrative a little less extreme and the bizarre symptoms of the drugs a little more believable (no one is going to be put off doing LSD by the fear of feeling a bit itchy). And the fact that drug use and general delinquency has increased amongst teenagers since the book was published in 1971 suggests that Beatrice Sparks, the middle-aged Mormon woman who actually wrote the book, was barking up the wrong tree.

Sparks came forward nearly a decade after the book’s publication – when it was being roundly praised by teens, librarians and drug-counsellors alike (albeit for different reasons). She admitted at first that she had ‘edited’ the diaries of a girl she had counselled who had indeed died after being addicted to drugs. But copyright records have her listed as the sole author of the work and she has never been able to substantiate claims that there was a real diary and real girl on whom Alice was based. She was also unable, in that first confessional interview with Aileen Pace Nilsen of the
School Library Journal
in October 1979, to provide details of the doctorate that allows her to call herself Dr Beatrice Sparks. What did come across plainly was that as a respected member of the Mormon community, she felt it was her duty to warn young people off the dangers of un-Osmonds-like behaviour, and was prepared to sink to any literary depths to do so. Being unable to provide the original documents from which
Go Ask Alice
was produced – she claimed she had thrown the loose sheaves of paper away after transcribing them – immediately sets her alongside the panoply of hoaxers who make up tall tales about manuscripts found in caskets or given to them by anonymous strangers. But what sets her apart from most others is her strong religious conviction and the fact that she was almost certainly not doing this for money: her husband, Lavorn Sparks, was a wealthy property developer who donated millions to charity and moved their large family from California to the well-to-do Mormon enclave of Provo (where the Osmond family live, in fact).

Regardless of Sparks outing herself as the ‘editor’ and considerable flesher-out of
Go Ask Alice
, the book continues to this day to be read as pure fact. There is everything about the look of it and the words ‘diary’ and ‘Anonymous’ on the cover to suggest to a thrill-seeking teenager that it is real, and nothing to suggest it is the weird propaganda of a smart old lady you might think would be more at home doing the church flowers than writing about drug-fuelled sex sessions. It would of course be wrong to suggest that Mrs Sparks got any kind of pleasure from vicariously living the life of a crack-whore, but she did get a taste for something about that kind of writing, because she would go on to write many more such fake teenage diaries on subjects ranging from teenage pregnancy to satanic cults and devil-worship.

It was her inability to know when to stop that would finally discredit her. When should she have stopped? Before devil-worship, as it turned out, because it was her Satanism-themed ‘teen diary’ that did the most damage of any of her books.
Jay’s Journal
describes a downward arc much like that of Anonymous in
Go Ask Alice
: nice, hard-working boy from a God-fearing family who gets sucked into the ‘weirdo sick . . . superstitious, stupid, childish . . . kookie, hair-brained thing’ that is killing kittens in the name of devil-worship. These words, from the supposed diary of Jay, who ended up committing suicide after fully losing his soul to the forces of darkness, are not, you will notice, the kind of words that teenage boys use. ‘Kookie’ particularly. Certainly, that was what the parents of the real-life boy behind Jay’s diaries thought when they saw what Sparks had done with their son’s story. Mr and Mrs Barret of Sparks’ adopted Utah had initially approached her with the diaries of their son Alden, a highly intelligent young man who had succumbed to depression and died several years earlier, hoping that she could make something worthwhile out of Alden’s writings which would encourage other young people in his position to seek help before it was too late. Absolutely nowhere in any of his diaries was there the merest mention of devil-worship.

Clearly, the tragic demise of an adored son was not juicy enough for Sparks, who knew full well that it was
Alice
’s salacious content that kept it flying off the shelves. To cynically insert a made-up, uncharacteristic and silly element into the story of Alden’s life and to let readers believe it was real – just as they believed Alice was real – was an act that incurred the wrath of all those who knew the real-life Jay. The vast majority of journal entries were not Alden’s and even if, as may well be the case, the remaining ones (including the Satanism sub-plot) were based on what Sparks knew or thought she knew about other disturbed teens of her acquaintance, that was no comfort to a family and a community who felt their son’s memory had been outraged. Such was the anti-Sparks feeling in Utah in the 1990s that a rock-opera based on Alden’s life and the
Jay’s Journal
outrage was staged in 1997, painting Sparks as a ruthlessly ambitious writer with much less compassion for her subjects than she would have us believe.

The truth about Beatrice Sparks is doubtless somewhere between angel and devil, just like the rest of us (even Mormons). Now in advanced old age, widowed and living out her days in comfortable seclusion in Provo, the creator of
Go Ask Alice
will never have to answer for her actions in this world, but we can assume that a woman of such strong religious conviction believes that what she did, she did to save our souls: to stop us from killing kittens and injecting speed and running away from home and fornicating.

T
HE CASE OF
Laurel Rose Willson is particularly horrifying. Not because, as she testified in her memoir under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford, she was imprisoned by ritual sexual abusers and made to sacrifice three babies to the devil. Nor because, as she later claimed under the alias Laura Grabowski, she was an Auschwitz survivor who had been tortured by Josef Mengele. It is horrifying precisely because all her claims are untrue, and were used by her to elicit attention, fame and money from a number of people who really had been abused by Satanists and Nazis.

Needless to say, Willson was seriously emotionally disturbed and did not make up her stories with the same calculating knowingness that a cold-blooded hoaxer might have done. But neither was she unaware of her lies or the effects they had on others. Sometimes, throughout her lifetime of concocting increasingly far-fetched tales, she would admit to friends that she had made up stories to impress people and get attention; and her habit of changing her name and identity after each hoax was uncovered points to high levels of self-awareness as well. But one of the most surprising things about her story is that she was a committed member of various Christian churches on the west coast of America where she lived, and was intricately bound up in the religious communities she lied to for so long. She was, everyone who knew her agreed, the very picture of a good Christian woman. At least until you saw her close up.

Her real story, as uncovered in a painstaking and sensitive investigation by the Christian magazine
Cornerstone
, bore some structural similarities to the autobiography she detailed in the first of her three books,
Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape
(Harvest House Publishing, 1988). Adopted as a baby into a strict Christian household after her unmarried Polish-Catholic mother gave her up, she and her sister Willow were often afraid of their parents’ bad moods and marital problems. After some years of domestic discord her father, a doctor, left and moved away from the family home in Tacoma, Washington, and an increasingly unstable Laurel, who had already run away from home once, went to live with him in California while she finished her education. Her teachers reported that she was an excellent student and her greatest talent was music, which she went on to study at university and make the centre of her contribution to the churches with which she became involved. But even as a teenager she showed signs of pathological lying, telling friends she had been sexually abused by a teacher, or driven to a part of town known for kerb-crawlers to be pimped out by her own mother. When staff looked into these stories and questioned her on the details she admitted they were made-up to ‘impress’ her friends. At one stage she even pretended to have gone blind, until she accidentally pointed out a local monument from a moving car.

A sad history of self-harm and suicide attempts began when her father, Frank, died in 1960 but she stayed on in Southern California where they had lived together, attaching herself to various other families she met through church but always ending up alienating them with her obsessive, attention-seeking behaviour and constant emotional crises.