Telling Tales (23 page)

Sarah
told the story of a boy called Jeremiah (the ‘J’ in LeRoy’s name – the ‘T’ standing, apparently, for Terminator) who lives in a motel at a truck stop with his prostitute mother. Sometimes dressed as a little girl, and known by the nickname Cherry Vanilla, Jeremiah’s ambition is to become an even more successful ‘lot lizard’ than his mother and after a few years as a petty shoplifter he finally graduates to working for a sadistic pimp, who abuses him terribly. The jacket image featured a mussed-up Barbie doll in a silver mini skirt tip-toeing across a dark parking lot towards a Tonka-toy vehicle. The whole package was positively dripping with edgy cool and reviewers marvelled at the young author’s lyrical evocation of the lowlife. Soon a number of celebrity fans jumped on the bandwagon as well, kick-started by the pop star Shirley Manson, lead singer of the band Garbage (most famous song: ‘Stupid Girl’) who wrote on her blog that she was reading and loving the book. She then became one of LeRoy’s email buddies, and even wrote a song about him called ‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)’.

By the 2001 publication of LeRoy’s second book,
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
, all the coolest players in the American film and music scene were queuing up to be friends with the damaged, reclusive young writer: Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins (who it is widely believed was in on the deception from quite early on) and even Madonna were all said to have pledged support and friendship to the ailing youngster. And ailing he was – he let it be known that not only was he pathologically shy, but he was HIV positive. This was also of great concern to the group of well-known contemporary American writers like Sharon Olds and Mary Gaitskill whose personal attention and professional advice he had been seeking (again, never in person but by fax or telephone) since the mid-nineties.

It was the crippling shyness that was blamed for him not appearing in public but rather conducting his interviews and business meetings over the telephone or by email. But in 2001, this suddenly changed. J.T. began to turn up to photo-shoots and public readings of his work. As everyone who saw him agreed, the figure who appeared at these events was clearly a bundle of nerves: a whispering, twitching, ungainly gamine who was always protected from the world by sunglasses and a hat (both of the coolest possible varieties of course) and a close-knit group of friends. His long, straw-like hair looked like it could be a wig, but he was such an extraordinary character all round – hiding under tables while others read out extracts from his books at signings; bouncing up and down with a fairy wand in his hand – that a wig seemed like the least weird thing about him.

While the cult of personality could have sustained him for a while, the fact that he spent the entire first half of the 1990s consistently visible above the cultural radar was due, undeniably, to the quality of his writing. His journalism as much as his stories displayed a witty, unusual, intimate prose style that readers simply wanted more of. He was commissioned to profile other celebrities, to write tongue-in-cheek travel pieces and even to create a screenplay for the 2003 film
Elephant
by cult director Gus Van Sant. And a production company called Antidote Films was collaborating with him on a film version of
Sarah
.

In short, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy’s zeitgeisty star was very much in the ascendant. That is until 2005 when, after years of personal appearances in which his undeniably feminine appearance was put down to his being in the process of gender realignment (another of his outlandish claims), a number of American journalists decided to go public with their misgivings about him. The unmasking of LeRoy, and the revelation that his creator was a struggling musician in her forties called Laura Albert, was more akin to the slow exposure of a Polaroid than the sudden swishing back of the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, and it began with a piece in
New York Magazine
in October 2005 by the writer Stephen Beachy. The article, headed ‘Who Is J.T. LeRoy? A Search for the True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler’, was a masterpiece of investigative journalism. Beachy, who had been following LeRoy’s career with interest since its outset, managed to identify and analyse almost every named person with whom the young author had been publicly associated, and one by one to weed them out of his long-list of potential targets. The only people he was left with after questioning the various editors, publishers, directors and writers who had known J.T. as a correspondent but never spent any length of time with him (and if they had, they seemed convinced that the figure in sunglasses and a hat was not the same intelligent, lucid figure with whom they had been corresponding), were the two people with whom he lived.

These were his adopted family, Speedie and her partner Geoffrey, sometimes known as Astor. Speedie had been appearing alongside J.T. for years at his public events, helping him cope with the crowds and often speaking and reading for him. Sometimes, when Speedie was not there, a woman who looked uncannily like her, calling herself Emily and speaking in a British accent, would be there instead: she said she was the outreach worker who had rescued J.T. from the streets. Now, not only was J.T. living with Speedie and Geoff and claiming to be helping them raise their young child, but he said he was in a band, Thistle, with them. And this is where Beachy struck gold: Speedie had been a singer in bands before, on the San Francisco gigging circuit, including one called Thistle. Astor had been her guitarist. And one very telling track from the pair’s incarnation as a group called Daddy Don’t Go features Speedie enacting a sexually explicit conversation with her partner which could have come straight from the pages of
Sarah
: in twisted, mother/lover tones, she upbraids a young boy who might be a girl, saying he/she is nothing more than a tease and deserves to be pimped out to paying customers. This – along with reader reviews on the website
amazon.com
in which someone with the same name as Albert praised
Sarah
as ‘the most extraordinary and lucid book I’ve read in a long time’ – was evidence enough to suggest that J.T. and Laura Albert were in fact one and the same. Who it was behind the sunglasses and wig was not yet known. Nevertheless, this opened the floodgates for all the people who had secretly suspected J.T. of not being who he said he was, and three months later another article, this time in the
New York Times
, saw the journalist Warren St John revealing photographic evidence that the person playing the part of J.T. in public was in fact Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Laura’s partner Geoff.

Only Geoff was an ex-partner now, and a few weeks later, although he never sought to humiliate the mother of his child, he felt more free to speak candidly about her writing life. On 7 February 2006, St John wrote a follow-up article containing an interview with Geoff in which he told Laura Albert’s secret to the world. He admitted that Laura had written all the books and articles by LeRoy, who she had invented as an alternative literary persona, but said ‘It’s not a hoax. It’s a part of her,’ calling the reasons for her act ‘very personal’.

In the face of this, and with the newspaper and magazine editors J.T. had written for hurriedly reassessing their relationships with him, there was no way Albert could go on with the deception. She confessed, agreeing to only one interview (with the
Paris Review
, which famously allows its subjects copy approval before going to press) but pleaded for understanding on the basis that she herself had suffered an abusive childhood just like J.T. and the only way she could deal with it was by taking on another personality to write through the trauma. When, some time later, she agreed to a recorded conversation with James Stafford, a friend who was also a journalist for the
Independent
, she tried to explain further (22 July, 2007):

I don’t go to sleep and another personality takes over. I’m aware, I’m conscious, but it’s like I’ve moved to the back of the bike and they’re driving . . . J.T. was the more dominant twin. I was just an appendage. But I loved him . . . I was never laughing at people thinking ‘Ha Ha, I’m fooling them.’

And of the patriarchy that led her to take on a male persona:

‘I grew up believing that a boy’s pain was always more valid. An abused girl must have been flirtatious, somehow deserved it. An abused boy was more transgressive.’

Albert’s troubles did not, however, end with professional ignominy: in 2007 she found herself defending her project to a courtroom full of jurors in New York, after being sued for fraud by the film company which had paid thousands for the right to develop
Sarah
into a movie. Ordered to pay $60,000 in damages, she was faced with the miserable prospect of being in debt for the rest of her life. However, certain pressure groups have since lent their support to her suggestion that the court’s guilty verdict was a ‘first-amendment issue’. In August 2008, for example, the Author’s Guild released a statement which spoke of the ‘repercussions extending into the future for many authors’ of Albert’s conviction. It said that ‘the right to free speech, and the right to speak and write anonymously are rights protected by our Constitution, and the district court’s decision which holds that Laura Albert’s use of pseudonym breached the Option and Purchase Agreement, is one that will have a chilling effect upon authors wishing to exercise their right to write anonymously.’

None of which has stopped Laura writing as J.T. LeRoy. In 2005 a new book was published, along the same lines as the others but with a slightly cuter twist:
Harold’s End
is beautifully illustrated by the Australian artist Cherry Hood, bound extravagantly and decorated with a plush satin ribbon, and tells a tale not only of under-age rent-boys and heroin addicts on the streets of San Francisco, but of the animals the young boys take as pets. A delightful snail is one of the protagonists.
Labour
, a sequel, also in collaboration with Hood, is in the pipeline, and fans of LeRoy’s output will no doubt keep buying copies – and there are still many, including Dave Eggers, whose praise of J.T.’s ‘perfect and bizarre eloquence’ adorns Albert’s lovingly maintained website
jtleroy.com
. Maybe even enough for Albert to make a dent in her legal costs.

It is now more than a decade since the teenage rent-boy, who claimed an intellectual patron at the truck-stop had got him into literature, slunk on to the literary scene. And still, we are no close to working out what exactly this complex chimerical figure really represents. Is his success a function of our desire to turn suffering into art into money, or simply of his creator’s personal problems? Was it, as the
San Francisco Chronicle
said, ‘the greatest literary hoax in a generation’, or should Albert be believed when she promises J.T. was never a hoax, merely a veil? Ultimately, the strange case of the cross-dressing rent-boy who never was raises more questions than it answers. Only one thing is for certain: for those few years that he was real, he was the coolest guy on earth.

H
EREFORDSHIRE IN WESTERN
England is where the formidable Special Air Service is based, and in certain parts of the county you can’t move for burly, steel-eyed men with half-moon moustaches and checked shirts looking strangely out of place but utterly unarguable with. In the 1970s and eighties, one of these men was Philip Sessarego. To an outsider’s view, he looked just like one of the club. But in fact – as his wife Diane and children Claire and Paul well knew – he was a pretender. Having failed the SAS’s punishing entry tests due to an injury, he was never allowed officially to join the group he had idolized all his life. Having done a few years in the regular army, he had a taste for military hardware and fatigues, and even managed to get a job as an assistant to an SAS leader. But although he drank in the same pubs, wore the same clothes and talked the same talk as the big boys, he always felt a failure.

But in the late 1970s there was a growing sector in the UK which gave mercenary and intelligence roles to tough ex-soldiers, ex-policeman and general hard-nuts. What is now a multi-million dollar global private security industry was just emerging as a legitimate (albeit informal) profession, and as luck would have it Sessarego was invited to join a number of foreign missions as a paid gunslinger.

First there was a trip to Sri Lanka to help train their army in new techniques, then a role in the attempted coup on the Maldives. Neither of these postings gave Sessarego the real battle experience he craved, but before long, in the early 1980s, the call came to go out to Afghanistan to assist the Mujahidin in their fight against Soviet forces. Finally, he had got what he wanted: to run around in hostile environments with a big gun in his hand.

During this tour he proved himself to be a brave and competent soldier, and after his return soon won contracts in Africa, South America and the Balkans. Now divorced from his wife and estranged from his children, in 1991 he committed his first act of extreme dishonesty: he faked his own death, putting it about that he had been blown up in an explosion in Croatia. He re-invented himself under a new name – Philip Stevenson – and told army friends that he had been forced to do this for mysterious international security reasons. Many suspected that the real reason, however, was to escape alimony payments to his wife.

It was while living as Philip Stevenson that he – like the rest of the English-speaking world – learnt of Andy McNab, the
Bravo Two Zero
author who was making a killing out of his books about killing for the SAS. In search of a new project, new money and, no doubt, a new way to assert to himself and others that his experiences in the field were every bit as valid as those of an official SAS man, he put pen to paper and started to write about his experiences in Afghanistan:

The butt of my deadly Kalashnikov pressed into my shoulder as I let go a long, vicious burst of fire. A Russian special forces soldier and two Afghan regular troops clambering over the wall only noticed me as they were poised in mid-air. By then it was too late. My weapon bucked and climbed as it spewed out bullets. They had no chance . . .