The Sinking of a Best-Seller

Sensing she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away.”If you weren’t so old,” she said, according to Colcord, before sitting back down. “God damn it!” she shouted. “No one has ever called me a liar before!” Both Simon and Schuster hurried to Lowell’s side. “Never mind, Joan,” they told her, according to Colcord. “We still believe in you.”

Days later, “The Cradle of the Deep” became a best-seller. The New Yorker called it “vivid, rich, and vigorous“; as far away as Honolulu, booksellers struggled to keep the book in stock. At the launch party, celebrities and high-society types gathered on the ocean liner Île de France.Griffith was there, as was the adventurer Robert Ripley and the editor John Farrar. “Gee,I can’t tell you how happy I am,” Lowell wrote to her publishers. “I feel as I used to feel on the ship when we were in the center of a hurricane,and the air suddenly becomes still and every heart-throb sounds like a canon.”

That metaphor, wiht its unspoken promise of imminent peril, proved apt. Ten days after the book’s publication,the Herald tribune printed Colcord’s review,under the innocuous headline “Sea Movie.” Colcord wrote that, based on her descriptions of sailing, Lowell was “far from being a real seaman.” he argued her book-destined to be the biggest memoir of 1929-read like an elaborate hoax.

After the review appeared, reporters investigated. Joan Lowell, they discovered, was not her real name-she had been born Helen Joan Wagner. The Minnie A. Caine had not burned at sea; it was docked in oakland, California, and remained intact. Four acquaintances stated Lowell had attended school with them in Berkeley through middle and high school. An old neighbor said Lowell was “not gone for extended periods.” A classmate showed the Herald Tribune a p