I, Libertine

In 1956, the pioneering radio host Jean Shepherd orchestrated one of the great literary hoaxes of all time, the saucy novel "I, Libertine."

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Transcript

I, Libertine

The pioneering radio host Jean Shepherd was born in 1921 and raised in the small town of Hammond, Indiana. His bitterly comic memories of growing up in a small town as a boy named Jean inspired his friend Shel Silverstein to write the Johnny Cash hit "A Boy Named Sue." 

In 1955 he came to New York, which he called "the East of golden promise." In many ways, New York City was peaking in the mid-50s, and he loved it right away. "Do you realize how fortunatewe are?" he asked his radio listeners in 1960. "You have no idea what a terrible lure this place is to people who live outside of this place." He felt especially at home in Greenwich Village, among the jazzbos, Beat writers, and assorted eccentrics and misfits. He started hanging out there the instant he arrived and lived in the neighborhood from the 1960s into the late 1970s.  

In 1956 Shepherd hosted a late-late night, 1 to 5 a.m. program, which he filled with long, wandering monologues, many of them loosely based on his Midwest boyhood, and others satiric observations of contemporary life in America and New York. "I used radio the same way that a writer uses a sheet of paper, to say what he has to say about the world," he later explained. Some of this material appeared in his books In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters. Along the way he spun recordings of jazz and wacky old-time music, sometimes playing along on a jaw harp or nose flute. He chatted with listeners who called, though with the technology at the time only his end of the conversation went out over the airwaves. He was inventing free-form radio before there was a term for it.

He quickly developed a small but devoted following. He described them as Night People – also"'soreheads,' 'eggheads,' 'long-hairs,' 'outsiders,'" -- as distinguished from the dull, conformist, nine-to-five Day People. Unlike free-thinking Night People, he believed, Day People were such sheep they'd clamor to buy any book, see any movie, or line up outside any restaurant that the media was buzzing about. 

One night in the spring of 1956 he decided to test this hypothesis. He asked his listeners to help him invent a fictitious book. He and his callers came up with a juicy title for it, I, Libertine, and afictitious author, Frederick R. Ewing, retired from the Royal Navy, a gentleman scholar specializing in eighteenth-century erotica, currently residing in Rhodesia. They gave him a fictitious British publisher, Excelsior Press. 

Shepherd then asked each of his listeners to go into a bookstore the next day and ask for a copy of I, Libertine. If the clerk asked who published it, they were to reply indignantly, "Excelsior, you fathead!" Excelsior happens to be the motto of New York State. “Excelsior, you fathead!” wasShepherd’s.

His listeners did as he asked, and the results exceeded his expectations. One listener called to tell him that when he went into the famous Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village and asked for I, Libertine by Frederick Ewing, the smug, all-knowing guy behind the counter sniffed, "Ewing. It's about time the public discovered him." A woman wrote Shepherd that when she brought it up at her weekly bridge party, three ladies said they'd read it "and two of them didn't like it." Within a month, the syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson was claiming to have had lunch with Ewing and his wife Marjorie on their way to India. In two months hoaxers at various newspapers in the US and Europe were slipping I, Libertine onto their best-seller lists. The Archdiocese of Boston banned the book sight unseen. 

By then Shepherd figured it had gone far enough. He cooperated with a Wall Street Journalreporter to expose the hoax in August. That only sparked a new round of articles worldwide, including one in Pravda.

Meanwhile, a friend of Shepherd's, the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, had told him that Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books was frantically trying to secure the paperback rights to the nonexistent book. When Sturgeon and Shepherd had lunch with Ballantine and explained the hoax, he said he'd publish I, Libertine if they wrote it. 

They delivered the manuscript after a three-week marathon. Ballantine rushed it out in September 1956 as a thirty-five-cent paperback with a small run of hardcover review copies. Shepherd held a book signing in a Times Square drugstore. The cover art was by Kelly Freas, an illustrator for MAD magazine. 

I, Libertine was the hoax that became a runaway best-seller. Reportedly 200,000 copies were sold in the first three months. And as a final comeuppance to all those Day People who rushed out to grab their copies, I, Libertine turned out to be so dull and plodding it was nearly impossible to read, relentlessly the opposite of a racy, exciting thrill. Freas’s cover art was the only bawdy thing about it.

Shepherd used the radio for other experiments in crowd control. He liked to demonstrate his sway over his devoted fans by staging impromptu gatherings he called "milling," a precursor to flash mobs. On his Friday night show he'd invite his audience to meet him in Washington Square Park the next day to "mill around." That Saturday hundreds of young people, Shepheard’s core audience, would turn up in the park, chanting “Excelsior!” He also solicited donations from his followers to help John Cassavetes raise the forty thousand dollars he needed to make his first film, Shadows. The opening credits declare that it's "Presented by Jean Shepherd's Night People." 

Shepherd left radio in the late 1970s to chase elusive success in movies and television. He’s probably best known today for the wacky 1983 holiday movie, A Christmas Story, the one about Ralphie and his fear of Santa Claus, which he wrote and narrated. After that he withdrew to Sanibel Island off the Florida gulf coast, where, a self-professed sorehead, he lived in relative seclusion until dying of natural causes in 1999. He would no doubt be pleased to know that collectors still seek out and pay handsomely for copies of I, Libertine, one of the great literary hoaxes of all time.