Books: The Liar

SPECTACULAR ROGUE: GASTON B. MEANS by Edwin P. Hoyt. 352 pages. Bobbs-Merrill. $5.95.

Baron Munchausen was a grand character, but he was a fiction. Gaston Bullock Means, however, was for real. When he died at 59 in 1938, he was justifiably reckoned to be just about the most preposterous liar and swindler ever to smile at a sucker. In Spectacular Rogue, Author-Journalist Edwin Hoyt examines that certain smile with more journalistic competence than stylistic flair. Still, Gaston Means himself would be pleased.

The son of a North Carolina lawyer, Means's career in rascality was well under way at the age of ten, when he used to go around eavesdropping on prospective jurors for his father. In 1914, he talked himself into a job working for the famed William J. Burns private detective agency. Gaston loved detecting. And when Burns was hired to head the Justice Department's investigative bureau, Means finagled a job as investigator. This was the Prohibition era and the days when the Harding Administration was brewing up the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Means was all over the place: he hauled in huge profits selling liquor permits (ostensibly for medicinal and other restricted purposes), and became a topflight influence peddler. He wrote a book about President Harding in which he "revealed" that Mrs. Harding herself had murdered her husband with poison. He was tossed out of the Government, eventually nailed on charges of attempted bribery and violating the Prohibition laws, and locked up for more than three years.

The Great Act. It was after he got out of jail that Means staged the greatest act of his career. In 1932, the Lindbergh-baby kidnaping sent the nation reeling with shock. The fat, dimpled charlatan got in touch with Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean,* owner of the famed Hope diamond and estranged wife of the Washington Post publisher. She was a friend of the Lindberghs, and of course would be overjoyed if she could help find the baby. Just leave it to me, said Smiling Gaston. All he needed to turn the trick was $104,000 ($100,000 for the kidnapers, $4,000 for expenses). But this would be a highly secret caper, he warned. He gave Mrs. McLean a code name, "11." He would be "27." A U.S. naval officer and a Roman Catholic priest, whom Means brought into the plans, got numbers "9" and "7."

No. 11 found it all just too exhilarating. It was a compliment to his vast powers of persuasion that Mrs. McLean and the others never took into account his reputation; he could soften any skeptic merely by producing freshly embroidered lies with which he smothered older embroidered lies.

The Fox. After Mrs. McLean gave him the money, Means kept her supplied with startling bulletins. The kidnapers, he reported, were suspicious of Mrs. McLean and would not deliver the baby at the appointed time. He sent her to South Carolina, where an accomplice turned up, identified himself as "The Fox," and proceeded to scare the daylights out of her with threats of violence. Next he sent her—and a nurse she hired—to El Paso; the baby, explained Means, was being held in Mexico, and he himself had actually seen the child. But in El Paso, Means told her that the kidnapers now wanted an additional $35,000. When she tried to hock some of her jewels, her friends became suspicious and warned her that she was being taken.