ONE SURE WAY to judge the relative force of books, movies, and TV is the number of impostors a given vehicle brings out of the woodwork to torment the successful creators, when they can be found.
Books, even very successful books, seldom register on what I call the Impostor Index. I don’t know of many book writers who are seriously pestered by people pretending to be them. A few writers do have stalkers: I had one myself for a number of years, which is still rather different from having someone pretending to the public that they are you. This is different too from the new active crime of identity theft.
Many movie stars have stalkers, but few impostors, since the crowd at large would be so familiar with the star as to make imitation difficult. A star’s looks are part of his or her currency. Woody Allen recently collected $5 million from a company that had improperly used his image, and he was right to go after them, I think.
Nowadays, though, television, not movies, is the medium with the longest reach, the solidest base. I had never lost a wink of sleep over the possibility of having an impostor, but then Lonesome Dove came out and all that changed. That miniseries, as I’ve mentioned, has been seen by over one hundred million people, I’m told, which is a lot more people than usually see most films. Films made of books by Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) and J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter) have been seen by more, but those are exceptions.
Most writers have to worry that their numbers are too low—not so high that they bring out endless hordes.
The huge popularity of Lonesome Dove rapidly gained me at least five impostors. First came a call from a woman in Dallas who claimed that I slept with her on Thanksgiving Day—a claim easily disproved since I was with my family that day. Still, I had to hire a detective to dissuade her from this notion. The detective eventually sustained files on four different Larry McMurtry impostors, all of whom were middle-aged bullshitters, none of them attractive. One, who hailed from Green Valley, Arizona, liked to hang out at filling stations in south Tucson, attempting to entice promising girls with a part in his new film, a sequel of course to the wildly popular Lonesome Dove. One young lady was initially tempted but her father figured out the scam and quickly put a stop to it. This gentleman’s only connection to the movies was a trained dog.
A more enterprising impostor turned up in Houston, where this person pretending to be me had conned a young lady to such a point that she was prepared to marry him. She had worked full-time at a McDonald’s, supporting the man who was pretending to be me. In the mug shot my detective procured, the fellow had clearly been rather badly punched about. I got wind of the impending marriage in New York and called her mother, who did not appreciate being told that her daughter was not marrying Larry McMurtry, me, but some nameless scrounger whose driver’s license she does not appear to have looked at. The mother was indignant. Indignant at my unwillingness to become their son-in-law.
At one point, as I’ve said, I was up to five impostors, but soon most of them began to lose steam and fade out. The one who didn’t lose steam was Sam Botts. He hails, I believe, from Fort Worth, Texas; his parents are in the phone book there, and Sam began his career by pretending to be me in dinner theaters in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Perhaps he scored a few dates by pretending to be me, but I don’t know that; in any case Sam soon shifted his base of operation to the Mexican Riviera: Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, and places further south. His run in Mexico lasted about a decade. He clearly had a likable side, but, unfortunately, also an unlikable side. Evidence of his likable side exists in a stream of Christmas cards from families he met, all addressed to Sam as me.
I would have liked to make a legal response to Sam, but I could not find that he had committed any crime. He carefully stayed within the limits of the law—now and then he’d get some innocent Midwesterner to cash a check for him, but they were all for small sums. One hundred dollars was about as high as he went.
Now and then he flew off the handle, threw sand at somebody, spat at the bartender, rowdiness of that sort, which, in a country where beheadings are becoming increasingly common, also did not interest the law. Copies of my books signed by someone other than me began to trickle into the L.A. market, when there was one. I was asked to rule on a few signatures, most of which I rejected, but there are plenty of forgers and I can’t prove that Sam indulged in that sport.
I do understand that Sam, in his role as me, has been banned for life from the Hard Rock Cafes in both Puerto Vallarta and New York City.
Lately I have heard that Sam Botts has moved back to Texas, where he is said to be working, once again, the dinner theater circuit where he first got the idea of being me. This is a little dangerous, because quite a lot of Texans know me, and the Dallas Morning News went so far as to publish pictures of both of us, side by side, so patrons of the bars and honky-tonks won’t be taken in, though probably some gullible folks still are.
At his best Sam Botts must have been very persuasive. When I walked into the executive air terminal at Hobby Airport in Houston to be flown back to Van Horn, where a movie crew was waiting, the two pilots who were to fly me west looked really startled when I shook their hands.
“Is something the matter?” I asked.
“It’s just that you don’t look like yourself,” one said.
“How would you know—we’ve never met,” I pointed out.
They looked at each other in dismay.
“Oh yes,” one said. “We had drinks with you two nights ago, in Cabo San Lucas.”
I told them about Sam’s long-running role as my principal impostor, but I’m not sure they were entirely convinced, which is perhaps why they initially set me down in Alpine, rather than where I needed to go.