The Great Impostor-
Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. (1921 – 1982) was known as “the Great Impostor.” He was the subject of a 1961 movie, The Great Impostor, in which he was played by Tony Curtis. The NBC drama The Pretender (1996–2000) was inspired by the life of Ferdinand Demara. Demara’s “careers” included being a ship’s doctor, a civil engineer, a sheriff’s deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher.
Many of Demara’s unsuspecting employers, under other circumstances, would have been satisfied with Demara as an employee. Demara was said to possess a true photographic memory and was widely reputed to have an extraordinary IQ. He was apparently able to memorize necessary techniques from textbooks and worked on two cardinal rules: The burden of proof is on the accuser and when in danger, attack. He described his own motivation as “Rascality, pure rascality”.
EARLY YEARS
Demara was born in Lawrence, Mass. in 1921. His father worked in Lawrence’s old Theatre District as a motion picture operator. In those days, his father did financially well and they lived on Jackson Street in Lawrence, an upper class district with many larger-size, finer homes. However it was his uncle, Napoleon Louis Demara, Sr. who owned those theatres. During the earlier stages of the 1930′s depression, his father lost virtually all he had and the family moved to poorer districts in the city. This was thought to have left a lasting mark on Demara. He ran away from home at age 16 to join Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, where he stayed for several years. He joined the U.S. Army in 1941.
THE MANY LIVES OF FERDINAND DEMARA
The following year Demara began his new lives by borrowing the name of Anthony Ignolia, an army buddy, and went AWOL. After two more tries in monasteries he joined the Navy. He did not reach the position he wanted, faked his suicide and borrowed another name, Robert Linton French, and became a religiously-oriented psychologist. He taught psychology in a Pennsylvania college, served as an orderly in a Los Angeles sanitarium, as an instructor in St. Martin’s College in the state of Washington. The FBI caught him eventually and he served 18 months in prison for desertion.
After his release he assu
med another fake identity, and studied law at night at Northeastern University, then joined the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Maine, a Roman Catholic order.
While at the Brothers of Christian Instruction, he became acquainted with a young doctor named Joseph C. Cyr. That led to his most famous exploit, in which he masqueraded as Dr. Cyr, working as a trauma surgeon aboard HMCS Cayuga, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer, during the Korean War. He managed to improvise successful major surgeries, and fend off infection with generous amounts of penicillin.
His most notable surgical practices were performed on some 16 Korean combat casualties who were loaded onto the Cayuga. Demara, the only “surgeon” on board, realized that several of the casualties would require major surgery or certainly die. After ordering personnel to transport these variously injured patients into the ship’s operating room and prep them for surgery, Demara disappeared to his room with a textbook on general surgery. He proceeded to speed-read the various surgeries he was now forced to perform, including major chest surgery. None of the casualties died as a result of Demara’s surgeries. Apparently, the removal of a bullet from a wounded man ended up in Canadian newspapers. One person reading the reports was the mother of the real Dr. Joseph Cyr. Her son was actually practicing medicine in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. When news of the impostor reached the Cayuga, still on duty off Korea, Captain James Plomer at first refused to believe Demara was not Dr. Joseph Cyr. The Canadian Navy chose not to press charges, and Demara returned to the United States.
FOUNDING A COLLEGE
During one of his impersonations—as Brother John Payne of the Christian Brothers of Instruction —Demara came up with the idea of making the religious teaching order more prominent by founding a college in Alfred, Maine. Demara proceeded on his own and actually got the college chartered by the state. He then promptly left that religious order in 1951 when 1) the Christian Brothers of Instruction offended him by not naming him as rector or chancellor of the new college and 2) chose what Demara considered was a terrible name, LaMennais College. The college existed from 1951 (when Demara left) through 1959 when it moved to Canton, Ohio and in 1960 changed its name to Walsh University.
After leaving the order, he sold his tale to Life magazine and worked in short-term jobs. He continued to use new aliases but as a result of his self-generated publicity, impersonation was harder to accomplish than before. In 1960, as a publicity stunt, Demara was given a small acting role in the horror film The Hypnotic Eye. He appears briefly in the film as a hospital surgeon.
In the early 60s Demara worked as a counselor at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles. In 1967 he received a Graduate 
Certificate in Bible from Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon. Demara had various friendships with a wide variety of notable people during his life. This included a close relationship with actor Steve McQueen, to whom Demara delivered last rites in November 1980.
When Demara’s past exploits and infamy were discovered in the late 1970s, he was almost dismissed from the Good Samaritan Hospital of Orange County in Anaheim, California, where he worked as a visiting chaplain. Chief of Staff Dr. Philip S. Cifarelli, who had developed a close personal friendship with Demara, personally vouched for him and Demara was allowed to remain as Chaplain. Due to limited financial resources and his friendship with Cifarelli, Demara was allowed to live in the hospital until his death, even after illness forced him to stop working for them in 1980.
Demara died on June 7, 1982 at the age of 60 due to heart failure and complications from his diabetic condition which required both of his legs to be amputated.
THE WHY AND HOW
Demara told his biographer that he was successful in his roles because he expanded into a vacuum where no other person existed to fill the void. The following excerpt offers a revealing look into Demara’s psyche:
He had come to two beliefs. One was that in any organization there is always a lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without alienating anyone.
The second rule is, if you want power and want to expand, never encroach on anyone else’s domain; open up new ones.
“I call it ‘Expanding into the power vacuum’” Demara proudly explains. “It works this way. If you come into a new situation (there’s a nice word for it) don’t join some other professor’s committee and try to make your mark by moving up in that committee. You’ll, one, have a long haul and two, make an enemy.”
Demara’s technique is to found your own committee.
“That way there’s no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren’t running a top outfit? And then there’s no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into the power vacuum!”
Editor Phil Robertson is an award-wining journalist and graphic designer. With a degree from the University of Florida’s School of Journalism, his career in journalism and publishing spans over 30 years, and includes positions as editor and publisher for several newspapers and magazines. During his career he has received a first-place award for investigative journalism from the Society of Newspaper Editors, and five ADDY awards for advertising design.
