Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud

In 1922, a recent high-school graduate from Berkeley, California, moved to Los Angeles, with the hope of becoming an actress. She called herself Helen Joan Lowell, eventually dropping the Helen and going by Joan. She got work as an extra in “Souls for Sale,” a movie about a young woman who tries to become a Hollywood star. The bit part didn’t attract much attention but, later that year, a detail from her biography did: Lowell told a reporter that, from the time she was an infant, she had lived on a four-masted ship, the Minnie A. Caine, captained by her father. She had spent sixteen of her nineteen years on the schooner, she said. Living on land was still new to her.