Authors: David Samuels
years old, and who survived an abusive stepfather to make it to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, and then became the president of the United States. If education remained a way that the children of the poor and low-born might achieve success in America, the meritocratic system was also in some part a fraud that existed to perpetuate the privileges of the wealthy. As such, the college admissions system that guarded the doors to America’s elite universities became a magnet for frauds, who invented new histories for themselves in order to achieve the social benefits and class distinction that an Ivy League degree might confer. There was Lon Grammer, the Yale
transfer student with a straight-A transcript and a colorful career as a minor league baseball player who was unmasked six weeks before graduation as a C student from Cuesta Community
College in California; he had forged a new transcript and written his recommendation letters himself. “I definitely feel I belonged,” an unrepentant Grammer told the
New York Times,
adding, perhaps ungraciously, “I’ve met lug-heads there.”
At Duke, Maurice de Rothschild made a splash throwing lavish benefit parties for the
swim team and purchasing bunches of
Gloriosa rothschildana,
the Rothschild lily, from Campus Florist in Durham; his career as a campus Rothschild ended when he was eventually revealed to be Mauro Cortez Jr., the thirty-seven-year-old son of Mexican migrants who lived in El Paso.
Gina Grant’s story was perhaps the best known. Applying for admission under her own name,
she was admitted to Harvard, which then revoked its offer once it found out that she had
bludgeoned her mother to death with a lead crystal candlestick, a detail that might have been lifted from a gothic novel.
Beneath the old-fashioned, black-and-white phrases— “fraud,” “con artist,” “impostor”
—that were used to describe the offenders in these and other publicized cases of successful imposture at Americas elite colleges and universities, it was possible to feel a very unreportorial anger at work. The
New Republic
denounced “upwardly mobile delinquents and professional wild children,” whose hankering for advancement and degenerate interest in wild partying set them miles apart from the magazine’s sober-minded editors, who studied hard and were often the products of distinguished families. The Lon Grammer case led editorialists at the
Yale Daily
News
and the
New York Times
to question the integrity of the elite college admissions process, which routinely asked tens of thousands of high school seniors to twist themselves into odd shapes and take on meaningless extracurricular activities in order to satisfy the weird social and class preferences of admissions officers and alumni. “[We] were . . . impressed to know what it would be like to be or know a Rothschild,” assistant dean Paul Bumbalough of Duke admitted to a reporter to
Rolling Stone,
by way of explaining why admissions officers, faculty, and students at Duke did not notice that the Rothschild among them couldn’t speak French.
The angry denunciations of “frauds” and “impostors” on university campuses neatly
avoided any examination of the increasing importance of credentials obtained at the age of
eighteen with the help of elite coaching and well-connected parents, and tended to obscure rather than reveal the sources of what was, after all, the defining American act. As a nation, America had created itself through a collective act of self-invention, rebelling against the English colonial government and asserting the right to self-determination of a people that had no prior existence in history or law. Enshrined in the Constitution, the freedom to create one’s own individual identity had defined American literature since its beginnings in the
Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin,
the story of the poor printer’s apprentice who had scrimped and saved to become one of the richest men in the thirteen colonies. That Franklin’s autobiography was riddled with lies only underlined the truth of its author’s assertion that Americans would be free to invent
themselves in whatever image they chose, transcending the established boundaries of history, tradition, race, creed, gender, and class to become self-invented women or men. A partial list of Americans who invented themselves in this fashion would include P.T. Barnum, Thomas Alva
Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Clark Gable, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix,
Madonna, Jay-Z, and Eminem, as well as millions of other immigrants, inventors, writers,
preachers, shouters, movie stars, bankers, thieves, cranks, gurus, promotional wizards,
mountebanks, rap artists, and American presidents from Washington and Andrew Jackson to
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The major theme of American lives,
self-invention and the lies that people tell when making themselves up from scratch is also a subject of most great American novels, from Melville’s
The Confidence Man
to
The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Augie March,
and
The Invisible Man
.
The darkness present in these stories is not always acknowledged by their protagonists, their readers or, for that matter, their authors. Still, it is there.
James Hogue returned from Cambridge to New Jersey for his sentencing on December
18, 1992, and served five months. The same day that he was released, he was arrested for the theft of the gems. His time in jail was uneventful, his cell mate Donald Salentre Jr. remembered.
He kept to himself. “It looked like he was in his own little world. He wasn’t in jail.” Salentre said that Hogue would sit on the top bunk of their two-person cell, put a blanket over his head, and read, losing himself in the highly abstract universe of
Life in Moving Fluids
and other books about engineering, mechanics, and physics. Another favorite book was
Mineral Lands and
Mining
. He told Salentre that he hoped to stake a claim to mining lands out west when he got out of jail: he served an additional seventeen month jail sentence in Utah for violating his parole and the theft of the gems. And then, once more, he disappeared.
X. The Bicycle Thief
On the evening of July 15, 1997, Officer Jeff Harmon of the Aspen police department
took a complaint from a man named Michael Otte about the theft of a Schwinn bicycle. Officer Harmon remembered seeing a similar bicycle the night before, locked to a tree by the Hyman
Avenue pedestrian mall. The next evening, Harmon and his partner, Vicki Nail, found the stolen bicycle, locked to a tree in the same area. James Hogue was working the lock.
“Police! You’re under arrest!” Nall shouted. Hogue shoved her backward, turned around,
and ran into Harmon. Nall handcuffed him and took him to the Pitkin County jail. Hogue’s arrest and subsequent conviction, on a second charge of bicycle theft, became part of the Pitkin County records and eventually led me to his address.
Through these records, and others, I had discovered many interesting facts about the life
of James Hogue. He was born in Wyandotte County, Kansas, in 1959. I had visited the house
where he grew up—a small, single-story ranch house in a working-class neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas. I found classmates of his from high school in Wyandotte County and from his
college years, which were spent in Laramie, Wyoming, and Austin, Texas. As I peeled away the layered fictions in which he had robed the actual facts of his life, I became particularly interested in defining the relationship between Hogue and the famous character he had created. Alexi
Santana, it seemed to me, had balanced out the parts of James Hogue that were unstable and
weak and most in need of protection. Now that protection was gone. Hogue moved from rented
room to rented room in the mountain resort towns of Colorado. He spent some time in Telluride, where he did construction work. Once I felt sure about the outlines of Hogue’s life, I mailed a package to a post office box in Aspen containing a videotape and a letter that expressed my desire to learn more. When he didn’t answer, I went to find him. But he left Aspen shortly before I arrived.
The videotape I sent contained a few brief segments of interviews I had conducted with
people Hogue had known while growing up in Kansas. Among the segments on the tape was a
long conversation I had with Keith Mark, a labor lawyer from Kansas City whose bowl-cut hair increases his already strong resemblance to his boyhood hero, Pete Rose.
Like Hogue, Mark grew up in Wyandotte County, ran track at Washington High School,
and had a father who worked for the railroad. Hogue had been his closest friend. When Hogue went to McDonald’s, Mark remembered, he always ordered a Big Mac without the burger. He
slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and read running magazines. He ran with bells on his feet so that he would be more aware of the rhythm of his stride. Photographs of Hogue running show a lean, movie-star-handsome kid who holds himself with the easy confidence of a champion. In
many of the photographs, Hogue is wearing dark aviator-framed sunglasses, to make it harder for competitors to read him.
Running, Mark explained, was a ticket out. It was a chance to follow in the footsteps of
famous Kansas milers like Glenn Cunningham and Jim Ryun, and to win an athletic scholarship to college. Hogue excelled in school, where he did well in chemistry and mathematics, and read
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Rabbit, Run
. He liked to listen to his mother’s classical records, but he ran to rock and roll. He would run to anything from Ted Nugent to REO Speedwagon to
Boston. The two runners swapped songs that might inspire them to run farther and faster. For a while, Keith Mark remembered, Hogue was hooked on the trashy Jefferson Airplane pop song
“Miracles.” He got so lost in the song that he ran on and on with the floating chorus “If only you believe like I believe, baby/We’d get by” repeating in his head before he realized that he was fifteen miles away from where he had started.
Hogue liked making an impression on people, Mark remembered. He set his watch in
synch with the Master Clock at the Naval Observatory in Colorado Springs. At parties, he might bum a cigarette, so that people would say, “Oh man, that’s Jim Hogue smoking, how does he do that?”—even though he didn’t really smoke. He didn’t wear his letter jacket in the glass-walled breeze-way where the other athletes hung out between classes at Washington High so everyone could see how cool they were. He didn’t need the cheerleaders coming up to him and saying,
“Oh, you’re Jim Hogue.” After Jim won a BlueCross BlueShield Road Race in Kansas City, he
was running back with Keith Mark to his car, and the two runners passed a lady standing on the corner with a little kid who was bawling his eyes out. “Jim said, ‘Hey, stop crying,’” Keith Mark remembered. “And he gives the kid his plaque or his medal, man. Never missed a beat. He just kept on going.”
Hogue never seemed to care about the medals he won. But making a good impression
was important to him. When Hogue won a race, he would go out to his father’s car and change his clothes. When the announcer called his name after the race, he would step up to the podium to accept his medal, neatly attired in slacks and a dress shirt. At a meet at Shawnee Mission, a wealthy suburb in Johnson County, outside Kansas City, Hogue ran and won a race, quickly
changed, and sat on the rock wall above the track. Keith was sitting below him on the track in his sweats. One of the prettiest of the Shawnee Mission cheerleaders came over and looked up at Hogue. “Didn’t you just run? Didn’t you just win?” she asked. Hogue answered, “Yes, I did.” He looked over at Keith Mark to make sure he had taken in the scene. “See, they notice,” he said. He never wore anything that said “Washington High School” on it.
His room at home was equally bare of the kinds of identifying details that are dear to
novelists and policemen alike. There were no posters or pictures of his family or a favorite girl at school. There was a clock on the wall, Mark remembered. Hogue kept his running shoes on the floor and his sweats in a cardboard box under his bed. It was the kind of neat setup that
suggested that the occupant of the room was a transient who might be gone in a matter of weeks or days, or had never really been there at all.
Hogue’s father, Eugene, was a fixture at the races, Mark remembered. He stood by
himself and rooted for the Washington High School runners to win. Hogue’s parents were quiet and not particularly demonstrative. He used to see them together, a nice older couple, walking around the neighborhood after dinner, not talking much but standing close to each other and often holding hands. What the parents of Wyandotte County wanted for their children was a life that would allow them to spend weekends with their family and then to wake up Monday
morning, put on a suit, and drive to the office in a shiny new American-made car. Their children would never have to climb telephone poles in a jumpsuit that said Union Pacific, carry heavy boxes, or stand like prisoners out in the rain and cold.
Jim Hogue was the most interesting person that he had ever known. There are things that
he wishes he hadn’t done over the course of his eventful life, but the thought of altering them doesn’t make sense. It is more like an entire series of actions that he would need to change or alter since the beginning of time. In order to understand why that was so, it was necessary to understand who he was and where he came from—an assertion about the rootedness of the
individual personality in which Jim Hogue had no particular interest, although he was sometimes willing to play along.
Growing up in Kansas City, you play with your friends and go to school. His
neighborhood was made up of streets of row houses on what most people would consider to be
pretty big lots. His next-door neighbor on one side was an airline pilot. The guy on the other side ran the Kansas turnpike. The couple across the street was retired. Most of the people in the neighborhood were blue-collar professionals. His parents fit the neighborhood pretty well. They were above average in intelligence and about average in education. His father never talked about his work, and he didn’t compliment his son very often. Jim liked running because you know