Original subtitles

With no medical training.

A Hollywood producer whose most outrageous story

turned out to be the one about himself.

And a jazz musician whose greatest performance

was the one that was given offstage.

What makes a person want to become someone else?

Is it to escape their life?

Or is it to fool someone?

Or is there an even more profound reason?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

As the Korean War rages around it,

the Royal Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga brings aboard

19 badly wounded South Korean soldiers

requiring immediate surgery.

Dr. Joseph Cyr, the ship's newly arrived physician,

is called upon to perform a series of procedures

to save the men's lives.

There's quite a few wounded men.

They're taken on board, and the ship captain tells Dr. Cyr,

"You have to operate. You have to save these guys."

So, according to all accounts,

Dr. Cyr takes this relatively calmly

and goes to it.

While the patients are prepped for surgery,

Dr. Cyr reviews a medical textbook

in his private quarters to prepare himself

for what would be the defining moment

of not only his career, but his entire life.

He Performs a number of operations

on these wounded South Korean soldiers,

removing bullets, doing chest surgery.

And by all accounts, he was successful.

The story of Dr. Cyr's valiant performance

hit Canadian newspapers and spread like wildfire.

Across the country, people read about the naval doctor's

heroic efforts to save the lives

of the Korean soldiers.

But there was at least one woman who was stunned

by the news that Dr. Joseph Cyr had become a national hero.

And as it turned out, she had a very good reason

to be surprised.

The mother of Dr. Joseph Cyr was reading the newspaper,

and reads this account of her son.

So she phones her son up, and her son is sort of like,

"Uh, no, I'm still posted in New Brunswick.

I'm not on a ship. What are you talking about?"

And it becomes obvious very quickly

that the guy on board the destroyer is an imposter.

The mother of the real doctor contacts the RCMP,

Canada's equivalent of the FBI,

and the shipboard captain on the destroyer is told,

"Uh, well, your surgeon is an imposter.

Uh, we've, uh, got to take him into custody."

He's taken back to Canada, he's put before a court

that would reveal that he's Ferdinand Demara,

of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

An American from Massachusetts

masquerading as a Canadian naval doctor

in the Sea of Japan?

But how?

And why?

Ferdinand Demara

is a very fascinating man.

First of all, he came from a middle-class family.

Very comfortable.

But then they suffered the Great Depression,

They had to move.

They had to downgrade, as it were.

They get to a poor neighborhood,

less of the affluent or semi-affluent amenities.

So he went from a lot to less,

but it seemed to bother him more than his parents,

the best that we can tell.

And therefore, he had to fill in the difference.

By all accounts, he's a very smart kid.

You know, does well at school.

But he drops out of high school,

and he starts this weird sort of moving around

and trying on new personas.

It turns out that he has the ability

to memorize very quickly.

He even claimed that he had a photographic memory.

So that he could look at something,

say, "That really belongs to me,"

and with a very good intellect, he could carry this off.

And he found

he could "borrow" any kind of credential

and become that person represented by that credential.

He starts that from a very early age,

and he joins the military, goes AWOL,

joins other branches of the military.

In one of his very early impersonations,

he pretends to be a Trappist monk

and joins a monastery.

At the time he was pretending to be a Christian monk,

he made friends with a Canadian doctor named Joseph Cyr,

and he then goes to enlist in the Canadian Navy

and announces that he's Dr. Joseph Cyr

and uses the same credentials that the real doctor had.

There's a war going on at the time in Korea,

so they don't ask too many questions.

They're just delighted to get a surgeon.

In addition to posing

as a military surgeon and a monk,

Demara tried his hand at impersonating

a number of other professions, including

civil engineer, zoologist,

psychologist, philosophy professor

and lawyer, among many others.

Demara became so adept at impersonation

that he eventually became known by his most famous alias of all:

The Great Imposter.

Ironically, Demara's life went full circle.

After pretending to be all these different identities

his whole life, in the end he became famous for who he was.

Oh, I've been a surgeon lieutenant

in the Royal Canadian Navy.

-You operated on people? -Mm-hmm.

Isn't that rather dangerous?

-You might say that. -Uh-huh.

Where did you steal your new credentials?

-I acquire these things. -Oh.

I know. You keep telling me that.

I hate to bring the word "steal" into this conversation.

He appeared on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx,

and he makes it clear

that he, "acquired credentials,"

and that he's going to use his prize money

to buy more credentials.

Were you in jail in... in, uh, Canada?

-No, no. -In the United States, have you ever been in jail?

Yes, I have been in jail. I spent a year

in the Texas State Penitentiary.

-Well, it's about time, I... -

that somebody nails you.

What were you in there for?

Uh, I was in there as deputy warden.

As a result of that,

everybody wants to meet him,

wants to talk about him, wants to hear about him.

-Are you Martin Goddard? -Yes, I am.

And your real name is Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr.?

And then when Tony Curtis acted

in The Great Imposter, he became famous

because he could fool the world.

In many respects,

to be an imposter is...

fairly normal, although we think of them as...

somehow pathological.

In fact, there are many people who do it for work.

Actors are a form of imposters.

There are people who put on a costume or a uniform

to transform themselves in some way that gives them

some measure of authority in their work.

Let's face it: at one time or another,

most of us have fantasized about trying on a new identity.

Like when we engage in role-playing games

or wear costumes on Halloween.

For most of us, of course,

the fantasy remains simply that: a fantasy.

But in the case of Ferdinand Demara,

The Great Imposter,

by pretending to be a surgeon,

is it possible that-- in his mind, at least--

he actually became one?

Ferdinand Demara impersonated a surgeon.

He wasn't a surgeon, but during the Korean War

while he was on a ship, he saved lives.

His ability to adapt from impersonation

might have given him the ability to adapt

under a stressful situation.

"Con man," of course, "con" is a kind of a nickname.

The origin of that word is "confidence."

In the case of someone like Ferdinand Demara,

because of his success

in being able to truly believe every one of his fantasies

as one new piece of reality,

he can act it out in such a real way

for a limited period of time.

By the time of his death,

from a heart attack on June 7, 1982,

Ferdinand Demara had spent the last several years of his life

as a Baptist minister

and later a counselor at Good Samaritan Hospital

in Anaheim, California.

In his obituary, Demara's lawyer and good friend, Melvin Belli,

is quoted as saying...

And why should there be?

After all, most of us can only live one life at a time.

Ferdinand Demara was able to live several.

Chris! Chris, Chris!

French movie producer Christopher Reyes

is the talk of Tinseltown.

Where's the girls tonight?

Between a movie deal

with action star Jean-Claude Van Damme,

co-ownership of two chic Beverly Hills boutiques,

a perfume line endorsed by singer Michael Jackson

and a Playboy Playmate wife,

it appears Reyes's burgeoning reputation

as a Hollywood player is secure.

Thanks, Chris.

-Good to see you. -All right.

He would mix with some of the movers and shakers in L. A.

Uh, so he'd throw kind of glamorous dinner parties.

He'd invite all of his friends that he'd met,

and he'd make sure that they saw that he was being generous

during these parties.

He said he was a venture capitalist.

He was in L. A. and he was mixing with the kind of people

who are also millionaires.

He would talk of how he was Sophia Loren's son,

he was Oscar de la Renta's nephew, and there was no reason

for people to disbelieve him.

He would maybe say, "Do you want to invest?

He'd give them an opportunity, and they would think

that they were gonna get something from him.

Chris! Let's go.

To everyone he meets, it seems Christopher Reyes

has perfected the recipe for Hollywood success.

Except there's one key ingredient missing.

Because, as it turns out, the man claiming

to be Christopher Reyes is a bigger fiction

than any conceived by a Hollywood screenwriter.

He is actually a notorious French con artist

named Christophe Rocancourt.

Well, Rocancourt was the world's coolest con man, in essence.

Um, you know, he was smooth, he was charismatic.

He was ambitious.

So, he had all the traits of a classic con man.

By all accounts,

Christophe's approach was very simple, but direct.

He would tell people, you know "If you invest

in my various enterprises,"

you know, "I can vastly increase your money."

So his methods were not terribly,

you know, sophisticated, but they worked,

and he pulled in a lot of money from people.

In Paris, he'd set up this alias for himself,

a wealthy Russian nobleman.

From just sheer confidence and imagination,

he was able to pull off a few scams. Uh, most notably,

when he managed to forge the deeds to a building in Paris

and sell it for over a million dollars.

As he scammed his way across Europe,

Christophe Rocancourt defrauded dozens of victims

under numerous aliases.

But while authorities had a mountain of lies

and fake identities to sort through,

they were missing one elusive truth:

who actually was

Christophe Rocancourt?

Rocancourt grew up, um, in a small town

on the Normandy coast,

uh, just where the-the River Seine meets the English Channel.

Uh, it's a lovely place, um,

but he didn't have the best childhood.

His father was an alcoholic

and his mother had to resort to prostitution.

Here is a young person who is in

a desperate survival mode from the earliest stages.

This kind of person really has no reason to trust the world.

And so he found out

that he can acquire wealth by deceptive means.

There's no reason for him to feel sorry

about the next person, 'cause in his mind,

presumably, no one felt sorry for him.

I think the game had its own reward.

This is a very hostile game,

and this is a wounded, aggressive person.

He wanted to hurt people. He wanted to take their money.

It was a coldhearted transaction.

For most people, the notion of scamming

and conniving their way to wealth and happiness

is unthinkable.

So, what drives serial impostors

like Christophe Rocancourt to use impersonation

to not merely pretend to be someone else,

but to actually inflict harm?

And not just once or twice, but over and over again?

For a lot of impostors that grow up

in a damaged childhood where they're facing abuse

or traumatic events, they have to develop

these sort of coping mechanisms.

One, they start to see themselves on the outside

of the normal reality that everyone else does.

The society as a norm is here,

and they're on the outskirts of that.

So, then they start to categorize people as others.

The second is that they have to be able

to anticipate the actions of their abuser.

So, this starts to form an unusual kind

of predictive empathy in order for them to survive.

No matter the reason for their duplicity,

once discovered, most impostors' lives

are shattered beyond repair.

But while you might think someone

as internationally notorious as Christophe Rocancourt

would stop his antics

after being so thoroughly exposed, well,

you'd be wrong.

Eventually things came tumbling down when people

started suspecting that he was a fraud.

So when he moved from L. A. to New York,

Rocancourt was running the same scams

as he always had done.

He was having lavish dinner parties,

he was inviting exclusive guests.

He was getting them to invest large sums of money,

$50,000 or a $100,000 at a time.

I think people started suspecting Rocancourt

when a few things just stopped adding up.

He was driving a Mazda rather than the kind of car

that you'd expect a millionaire to be driving.

He tasted some wine that was cheap wine,

and he thought it was expensive wine.

Maybe he was just getting sloppy.

And it was an unpaid hotel bill in the end

that was the thing that got him caught.

In 2003, Christophe Rocancourt plead guilty

to charges of bribery, theft and fraud.

He was ordered to pay $1.2 million to his victims

and sentenced to 46 months in federal prison.

After his release in October 2005,

Rocancourt returned to Europe

where his notoriety as a smooth-talking con man

continued to make headlines.

But Rocancourt's deceptions appear almost benign

when compared to those of another famous impostor,

one who became so desperate to hide his true identity

that it not only cost people their fortunes,

it also cost them their lives.

Sandra Boss, a recent Harvard Business School graduate,

marries Clark Rockefeller, a man who is known to her

as a member of one of the wealthiest

and most powerful families in America.

After the couple's fairy-tale wedding,

Sandra went to work

for a prestigious consulting firm in Boston

while Clark resumed working on international poverty relief.

But the fairy tale didn't last long.

He claimed he was working on so many high-level things,

but he wasn't contributing to the marriage financially.

And he said, "Well, to charge these struggling countries

a fee would be, you know, unconscionable."

He didn't seem to want to go out and get a regular job.

And so she was beginning to get tired of this.

After more than ten years of marriage,

Sandra Boss finally had enough and filed for divorce.

It was a decision that would not only unravel her marriage,

but also unravel the strange truth about her husband.

Clark Rockefeller had

no passport, no credit cards, no birth certificate

that she could find.

She can't come up with any documentation.

So she really has the whip hand during the divorce,

and she ends up winning custody of their daughter, Snooks.

He's absolutely gobsmacked by this, and he's miserable,

because he is actually devoted to his daughter.

So he comes up with this harebrained plan

and he kidnaps his daughter.

The FBI immediately launched

a nationwide manhunt,

but Clark Rockefeller had vanished into thin air.

And the reason the authorities had such a hard time

tracking down Clark Rockefeller

was because

there was no Clark Rockefeller.

So, I'm at home. My brother calls me.

He goes, "Turn on CNN right now."

I turn on the TV, and I look, and I go,

"That's Christian Gerhartsreiter."

And it says right across the top, "Clark Rockefeller."

So we called the FBI and said,

"This is Christian Gerhartsreiter."

He was a German exchange student that came to our house.

I was 15 at the time,

and he was 17.

But the FBI, like, they didn't even know his name.

It was covered in all the media, on television,

and when the AMBER Alert was issued, he was apprehended.

He was returned to Boston to face charges.

And that's when his incredible life

of all these different personas unspooled.

At trial, Sandra watched as her husband, the man

she had believed to be a member of the Rockefeller family,

was sentenced to four to five years in prison

for custodial kidnapping.

But what was it that compelled Christian

to lie to his friends, family

and associates for so long?

The phenomenon of an impostor is an interesting dichotomy

that somebody has to live with.

They have two stories constantly colliding.

And often, if you're going to perpetuate that consistently,

you have to almost have a form of delusion,

to be able to compartmentalize one of those realities

so that you can live your life

without having this other one on the back burner.

Are impostors who carry out elaborate deceptions

acting out a kind of wish fantasy?

And if so, how does this fantasy

first take hold in their mind?

For the answer, perhaps it's best to look all the way back

into Christian's past.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter

grew up in West Germany.

By all accounts, he was kind of a bit of an oddball,

prone to fantasy, a little on the nerdy side,

and really wanted to get out of West Germany.

So in 1978, he travels to the United States

and shows up on the doorstep of this family in Connecticut

called the Savios,

and just sort of went into high school,

said he was an exchange student, and things got

progressively stranger from there.

He told me that his father created parts

for Mercedes-Benz.

And, of course, you know, they had money.

You know, servants.

We all knew it was ridiculous.

We laughed at it at the time.

By 1985, Christian had taken up residence

on the West Coast.

He had also taken a new name.

He moved to San Marino, which is a rich community

in Southern California,

and assumed the name Christopher Chichester,

and announced that he was part of the British royal family.

He would go get free lunches at social clubs

and private members clubs.

He'd start schmoozing up all the rich ladies in town,

attends a very fancy church.

Ends up living in the guesthouse

of a local woman named Ruth Sohus.

He lives there rent-free,

and all is well for a while, but then

Ruth's son, John, shows up with his wife Linda.

And John, apparently,

was a bit suspicious of this

strange guy living in Mom's guesthouse.

And then, all of a sudden, Linda and her husband disappear.

Soon after Linda and John Sohus disappeared,

so did Christopher Chichester.

And Christian the imposter moved back to the East Coast,

where he would eventually live under his most infamous alias:

Clark Rockefeller.

The rest, as they say, is history.

But not before this bizarre story

took yet another unexpected twist.

In March of 2011,

after Christian was convicted of kidnapping his daughter,

authorities in California gathered enough evidence

to charge him with a more serious crime

than any he had been charged with before:

the 1985 murder

of John Sohus.

Ruth Sohus had passed away,

and another couple had bought her home

and were installing a swimming pool.

Where Christian lived in San Marino,

they dug up the backyard and discovered human remains.

And the body was cut up into pieces,

but it was wearing the same kind of clothes

that John Sohus typically wore:

jeans and a flannel shirt.

And apparently, parts were in bags from schools

that Christian Gerhartsreiter had attended.

So then he was put on trial for murdering John Sohus.

He was found guilty, and he is now an inmate

in San Quentin Prison in California.

The police detective that I interviewed

said that the motive was money.

He was to inherit a sizable amount of money

from Ruth Sohus, and that's what they believed.

And Linda Sohus had disappeared

off the face of the earth.

What happened to Linda?

That's still an enduring mystery of this case.

Imposters like Christian,

who are willing to lie--

or even kill-- for the sake of protecting an illusion,

would certainly seem to be troubled,

misguided individuals.

But if that's true, then why do so many of us

fall for their deceptions?

Part of the magic story

is using a name like Rockefeller.

It has a mana, a glitter to it.

It draws people.

And there is an element of collusion.

So the inability to catch the warning signs

has to do with the intentional blindness of the victim.

They want something, and they want this story to be true,

so they're participating.

That's really the secret to a con.

It's not about manufacturing a whole fake reality.

Instead, it's finding the story

that people are telling themselves

and just elaborating on it.

They're able to compartmentalize this reality,

because they're not worried about somebody else.

These, together, present opportunity

for somebody to be very evil.

Today, instead of going by the name Clark Rockefeller,

Christian is known as inmate number AR3108

at San Quentin State Prison.

Hopefully, his days of adopting false identities

have been ended forever.

Unlike another imposter,

whose assumption of a new identity was so credible

and so enduring

that many remain convinced that her deception was true,

even decades after her death.

In the case of impostors who have a damaged past,

does the assumption of a new identity help them

to recover the details of a forgotten life?

Perhaps the answer can be found by examining the case of a woman

who many called an imposter,

but who, until the day she died,

insisted she was really

a long-lost Russian princess:

the Grand Duchess, Anastasia.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution,

the exiled emperor, Tsar Nicholas II,

his wife Alexandra, and their five children

are awakened in the night by their captors.

Frightened and confused,

they are herded along with four of their loyal servants

into the basement of the Ipatiev House.

There, while waiting for further instructions,

a group of Soviet secret police

enter and raise their pistols.

The last thing the confused family hears.

Is the sound of gunfire.

After the execution, the bodies of the Romanov family

were burned and then buried in a mass grave.

But in the wake of the killing, rumors emerged

that the youngest daughter, Anastasia,

had survived the slaughter.

I think the idea that An-Anastasia might have escaped,

it seems to be because of the chaos and the time it took

for the true events that night to come out.

It was said that the gunmen were drunk,

and the cellar was full of smoke.

The story, such as it is,

is that she somehow survived the shooting

and that one of the Bolshevik guards

noticed she was alive

and had this residual sympathy for the royal family,

and sneaked her out of the death house

and put her on a horse cart

and rode her to Romania.

The limp body of a young woman

is pulled from a canal

after a failed suicide attempt.

Suffering from traumatic amnesia and severe depression,

she is admitted into a mental hospital.

The doctors, unable to verify the woman's identity,

refer to her as Fraulein Unbekannt:

Miss Unknown.

She became known as Miss Unknown,

which lasted for months.

And she was ripe for having an identity

sort of thrust on her.

Most likely, she has a primary diagnosis

of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Therefore, we have some deficits

in cognition,

we have some bizarre emotionality,

and we have someone who's in a state

of confusion, which comes and goes in different gradations.

Over the course of about a year or so,

another patient sort of notices she looks a bit like

one of the Romanov daughters, and so these rumors emerge

that she's connected to the royal family.

Once they've latched on to some evidence

that she might be Anastasia,

it's all sort of a case of confirmation bias.

Everybody looks for the things.

And I think, in a general way,

people wanted hope out of a terrible tragedy.

It's a human instinct.

And the survival of Anastasia represented hope.

In 1922,

the mysterious woman,

who had also gone by the name Anna Anderson,

was released from the hospital

and soon began calling herself Anastasia.

And it wasn't long before her haunting story

made worldwide headlines,

prompting many to ask,

"Was the woman in Berlin an imposter

or the Russian grand duchess?"

She went viral, in a sense, at that time,

because the world was hungry for that kind of scandal.

Because she wasn't out there

energetically trying to perpetrate frauds

under the guise of being this person.

In a sense, she was just put into a role.

She was somebody who was desperately

searching for a reality,

and she danced through multiple realities.

The question of whether she was intentionally impersonating

someone else or whether that was the truth

is still left up to history.

There were quite a few Anastasia imposters,

but she benefitted from having this sort of definite transition

where she was pulled from the canal.

And the reason for her success was because she was supported

by members of the Romanov family.

Unfortunately, she was also not supported by a lot of them.

She had supporters and detractors.

But I think once you have a grand duke

or a prince on your side,

then people will flock around.

There's these rumors that the Romanovs banked

outside of Russia, that they had millions of rubles

in a British bank and all this.

So the real Anastasia

could be in for a fortune.

So for a period of time was really living it up.

She, at one point, was staying with European royals.

Two of her big supporters

in Germany were aristocrats,

who supported Anastasia, believed in her cause,

even though she was very difficult to handle.

But these people were so sure

that she was Anastasia, they put up with a lot.

Given that she possessed

what was thought to be a Russian accent,

had scarring across much of her body,

which seemed consistent with bayonet wounds,

and cornflower-blue eyes,

which matched those of the missing Grand Duchess,

there was enough compelling evidence to suggest

that the young woman pulled from the German canal

might really be Anastasia.

But given the nature of the tsar's family's

bloody execution,

how could anyone survive?

The young woman claiming to be the Grand Duchess, Anastasia

has taken up residence at Castle Seeon

as a guest of Duke George of Leuchtenberg,

a distant relative of Tsar Nicholas II.

But the aristocrats and European royalty,

who had been hosting the strangely eccentric woman

are beginning to suspect that there is no way

she could actually be the long-lost Russian princess.

Especially after it is reported that Anna Anderson

actually had yet another name.

What happened was in 1927,

a detective looked into her background,

and the detective says, "This is not Anastasia."

This is a Polish peasant girl named Franziska.

And Franziska moved from Poland to Berlin

during the first World War and suffered a severe head injury

while working in a munitions plant.

There was an explosion, so she had brain damage,

went into mental homes after that,

and then all of a sudden jumps into a canal in 1920.

And this triggers this decades-long argument.

You know, is this really Franziska

or is this Anastasia?

In 1938, as the controversy

regarding Anna Anderson's identity reached a fever pitch,

the woman who had by now firmly convinced herself

that she was the real Anastasia

petitioned a German court to try her case

and restore her birthright.

It marked the beginning of the longest-running lawsuit

in German history.

For decades, evidence was presented

both for and against Anna's claim,

including comparisons of handwriting samples

and photographic comparisons of Anna and Anastasia's ears.

Officially, Anna's court case ended in 1970,

with neither side able to conclusively establish

the would-be monarch's identity.

But that was by no means the end of the story.

In 1991, seven years after Anna's death,

the mangled remains of the Romanov family were found

buried in a mass grave just a short distance

from where they were executed.

And the investigators were shocked to find

that the remains of the tsar's son Alexei

and one of the Romanov's four daughters

were missing.

In 1978,

one of the killers of the Romanov family

made a confession, and as a result of that,

bodies were found under some railway sidings.

The guy who found the remains

kept this a secret, though, for two decades

because the communists were still in power

and he kind of sensed this might be a bad idea to tell everybody.

This was in the '90s and Anastasia,

Anna Anderson, had already died, unfortunately.

But it was discovered that two of the bodies were missing.

Two of the bodies missing?

Could it be that Anna Anderson was not an impostor

after all, but the real Anastasia?

When the news came through

that two bodies were missing, everybody was rather excited

and thought, "Well, this proves that Ana-Anastasia lived."

However, the bodies were then tested for DNA.

They compared samples of Anna

and find that she doesn't match the Romanovs at all.

But there is a match between

Anna and her relatives of Franziska.

Later on, a second plot of bodies was found,

and the body of Anastasia is

actually found and DNA-tested.

For a second time, DNA testing is brought in

and said, "No, no, no, Anastasia was buried

along with the rest of her family."

And Franziska was totally deluded.

But even today, there's people who insist that the DNA tests

were all fake and that this really was Anastasia,

and someone really did survive

this brutal slaughter of the royal family.

Strangely, Anna Anderson did

become something larger than life.

She became a legend.

There have been many books.

There have been movies, a musical.

We still love the story,

and when it is retold in the fictionalized versions,

she is always really the princess.

She was just a puppet of forces

that were beyond her.

And she was clearly quite malleable

and was willing to become

the persona that had been assigned to her.

Her capacity to be

delusional clearly played a part in the formation

of this false identity,

which she seemed to live as if it were actual.

Whether Anna Anderson truly believed

or simply wanted to believe that she was Anastasia Romanov,

she never wavered from her claim

even until the day she died.

But what drives someone

to stick to their story, no matter what?

For some, as it turns out, it is not merely

a choice, a con or a delusion.

Some people are simply born to be someone else.

Jazz musician and band leaderpr

during the 1940s and 50s, dies at the age of 74 in his home.

But when the paramedics arrive, they make a shocking discovery.

Billy Tipton was, in fact...

a woman.

Here's someone who was gifted, a great pianist,

a great saxophone player, someone who had dramatic talent.

But every time Dorothy Lucille Tipton

went for a musical audition,

she was turned down regardless of obvious talent.

One day here she is, Dorothy Lucille Tipton

changes her name to Billy Tipton,

cuts her hair short, puts on a suit, goes in, gets the job.

She's got the chops, she's got the talent,

and now she has the work.

And she has a successful career,

decades as a successful jazz pianist.

The Billy Tipton Trio were quite popular.

They played all over the place.

And by all accounts,

they were a well-regarded jazz trio

back in this era, in the '50s, '60s.

Billy Tipton was looking to do something

that was critically important to her life-- to make music

and to be accepted into a society

that would not have her as herself.

She wasn't gonna let something like gender

or prejudice get in her way.

Eventually, Billy became so committed to living as a man

that even his wives, of which he had five

over the course of his life,

claimed to never know the truth about Billy.

The 30s, 40s, 50s were much primmer than today.

Husbands and wives typically didn't parade around naked

in front of each other.

This individual said,

"I have a certain kind of problem

"where I can't have sex.

"It comes from a childhood injury,

"too difficult to explain.

"But I can be a wonderful husband.

I can be a wonderful father."

And, therefore, he was able to carry out

this facade as Billy Tipton.

There are people in certain societies

all over the world who,

by virtue of the prejudice of the society

or the community in which they live,

cannot allow themselves to be themselves,

which seems like a real perversity

that the only way they could be real is to be fake.

Because you are living the secret,

not just living with a secret.

We have many characters within ourselves.

We're not consistent.

We have a business self, we have a social self,

we have a parental self, we have a good-citizen self.

And this brings up some issues about reality.

An old thief once told me that you have to die with a lie.

If somebody finds out that you're a fraud,

they'll think you're a fraud from that point forward.

Billy Tipton died with that lie, but for him, that wasn't a lie.

That was his truth.

For Billy Tipton, living as a man was more than a role.

It was his life.

But when a person commits themselves

to an impersonation so thoroughly,

which part of them is more real?

Who they were?

Or who they've chosen to become?

Perhaps they exist to remind us that who we are

and who we think we are are not always the same.

And that our own carefully constructed facades

could shatter at any moment,

exposing the parts of ourselves we would prefer to keep hidden

and, um... unexplained.