Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud

Published in 1929, The Cradle of the Deep detailed the early life of Joan Lowell, who spent most of her first 20 years aboard a schooner, witnessing all manner of improbable events before abandoning ship in the Indian Ocean to save herself from a fire. At least, that’s what she wrote. Michael Waters’s history of Lowell’s deceptive stories will fascinate anyone who thrills at fake memoir drama. And yet The Cradle of the Deep is only the start of a lifetime of fabrication and self-glorification that just gets stranger and more audacious. Watch out for alligators.

Despite, or perhaps because of, her dubious relationship to facts, she landed a job as a reporter at a Boston tabloid owned by William Randolph Hearst, the Daily Record. Soon, she was churning out scoops that stretched credulity. Among the highlights was her alleged abduction by a naturist colony, in which a group of nude dancers encircled Lowell during a “weird, bacchanalian revel,” and a naked fireman pulled her in for a kiss. Just days after the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh disappeared, in March, 1932, Lowell claimed that she spoke to a woman who knew the kidnappers.

She began pitching a second book, to be titled “Gal Reporter.” The “Cradle of the Deep” fiasco had reportedly given Richard Simon a “nervous breakdown,” and Simon & Schuster did not elect to publish this one—but Farrar & Rinehart stepped in, and it came out in 1933. “I was hailed as a genius, a sensational young-girl author,” Lowell writes. “Book publishers asked me to sign contracts for my next ‘works.’ Cameras clicked, wine flowed, telegrams arrived.” Compared to that reception, “Gal Reporter” got a modest response. Lowell decided to go bigger: in the spring of that year, she announced her imminent departure for a trip around the world, with her aging father, in a forty-eight-foot schooner. At each new port they reached, they would “bite a chunk out of the nearest tree to show we’ve been there,” she told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. They would be at sea for “three to five years,” she said, adding, “If the landlubbers don’t like it this time they can eat it.”