Strawberry Shortcake Purple
For the love of Strawberry Shortcake & The Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak! Who is Rory Emerald?
Rory Emerald is a professional hoaxter extraordinaire, and pretty good at it. He is famous for telling everyone that he was Elizabeth Taylor’s new high-status man candy, that he was Mia Farrow’s personal shopper, and my personal favorite, that he found a prosthetic nose near Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He currently lives in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills, take your pick. He is taking care of Elizabeth Taylor and is best friends with Jodie Foster.
ANAHEIM, Calif. — For a man who spent his summer building a national reputation as a full-time slinger of bull, Rory Emerald is perversely honest.
For example, Emerald, 38, will tell you straight up that his name is fabricated. He was born Julian Lee Hobbs, but changed it to a combination of “Rory,” the first name of a dead guy he once knew, and “Emerald,” a nickname he went by when he was a younger man and, he swears, his eyes were “greener.”
He’ll also own up to a few stints in jail, for passing dubious checks and driving a car he didn’t, per se, own.
As he sits in his cluttered Anaheim, Calif., apartment, smoking and fidgeting and smoking some more, he’ll even admit that, no, he wasn’t really Mia Farrow’s personal shopper in 1993 or, frankly, ever. This contradicts what he told police that year. Likewise, Emerald now says he was “flat out lying” back in 1990, when he convinced the Associated Press, among others, that he was Elizabeth Taylor’s new boy toy.
That particular fiction got Emerald’s name on the cover of Star magazine. If you missed it, he’ll pull the copy from a file he keeps, and put it in your lap.
But all this honesty just confuses the issue.
Emerald describes himself as a fabricator, a man who’s tether to the truth, if not reality itself, is frayed to the point of breaking.
“Hoaxter extraordinaire,” Emerald says of his current occupation.
“There are only a few of us out there,” he adds, quietly, as if speaking of some mythical hoaxter’s union.
“We don’t communicate much.”
Which may or may not be true.
What is true — what even Emerald himself can’t confuse — is that Emerald’s inner bologna peddler is on a roll.
Since June, he’s published ads in the “found items” area of the classified section in more than a dozen newspapers around the country, claiming to have found different things.
Each found item has been interesting, and many were found in amusing places. Most sparked phone calls to Emerald’s apartment. A few generated stories in the local press.
Like many great liars, he starts with a glaze of truth.
He reads up on the towns or cities in which he’s placing ads. That way, he says, the places he mentions and the terms he uses are familiar to local readers.
But every item found, every incident described, is fiction. Every word Emerald prints is a flat-out, in-your-face lie.
Still, alleged experts have been fooled.
“It seemed unusual, but not impossible,” says Ryan Menard, a reporter with the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., which published two stories after Emerald ran an ad claiming to find a Hasty Pudding pot, an award given annually by Harvard to somebody show business.
The first story in the Quincy paper was a front page call to whatever celeb might have lost the award. The follow-up ran a day later, also on A-1, informing readers that it was a hoax.
“When we found out the truth, it was pretty frustrating,” Menard says.
In North Dakota, Emerald claimed to have found an Elvis tour bus “w/many personal items still inside” behind a ranch house. In San Diego, he found a baby panda “desperately needs mother” near the zoo.
A Sponge Bob Square Pants ice sculpture turned up in a walk-in freezer in Waco, Texas. A few lost Warhol paintings emerged in Buffalo. A kitten with two heads was found in San Francisco; a cat with three eyes in Baltimore.
And, of course, there was the ad that Emerald describes as his “masterpiece” — a prosthetic nose supposedly found in a park near Santa Barbara.
That ran in June, when the Michael Jackson trial was intergalactic news. And it ran near Neverland, Jackson’s famously infamous ranch.
Emerald sighs when discussing the aftermath of that ad.
“So many people called. Just … so many.”
Most, he says, laughed. Some cursed. A few laughed and cursed. And many wanted to chat.
“I loved that,” Emerald says.
“I felt like there was something profound in what was happening.
“That one; the Michael Jackson ad,” he adds, looking directly into a visitor’s eyes.
“That’s the one that got me started on all this.”
Except, of course, that’s a lie.
About 15 months ago, a full year before he claimed to find anything in Santa Barbara, Emerald ran an ad in this newspaper claiming to have found a time capsule in San Clemente. A month after that, he ran another ad in this newspaper claiming to find a baby giraffe in Coto de Caza.
“I got a call from a Fish and Game person,” he says. “She said if I have a giraffe, it needs to be placed in a place where it can be cared for.”
And back in 1991, when Emerald was still getting work as an extra in TV shows and movies, somebody placed very expensive, full-page ads in newspapers in Florida and Washington that ran just one line:
“Who is Rory Emerald?”
Good question.
“I’m an artist,” he says. “I sell my art. It’s how I make money.”
He pulls out some of that art. It’s tiny and cluttered.
“I also do Tarot readings, but only part time,” he says.
“You know, that just takes a lot out of me. You have to give so much of yourself.”
He’s not talking about the old, full-page ads, which probably ran up more than $50,000 in unpaid bills.
He’s also not inclined to say if his current spate of fake ads generates any revenue stream. None have mentioned money and Emerald says he hasn’t asked anybody for anything.
As the interview ends, Emerald walks down the steps of his apartment and into blistering heat. As he stands, sweating slightly, he swears this reporter to confidence about his next set of ads.
“I know you won’t tell,” he says, finally.
“You’re honest.”
He’s right. He’s planning to say he’s found some of Einstein’s lost papers.
The Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak
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