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WHEN HE TOLD his 19-year-old stenographer that they would both be arrested within 15 minutes, she believed him. She got in his car and they fled to Yuma, Ariz. There was no reason to doubt him. Paul Bourgeois was "America's greatest animal trainer," a pioneer cinematographer in the Dutch film industry, the inventor of a new "iceless ice," the promoter of Los Angeles' first full-size skating rink -- and her boss.
In Yuma, Joyce Burns got a telegram from her mother, who told her to come home: It was only Bourgeois who was wanted by police.
"He admitted he had told me I was in danger so that I would come with him," Burns told The Times after she got back to the city Aug. 22, 1916, a few days after absconding. "He told me he loved me and wanted to marry me."
But on returning to L.A., Burns began to learn things about Bourgeois. He had stolen the car and another woman's heart (as well as her money). He had stolen more than that. And he had never explained to anyone how his iceless ice was going to work.
Bourgeois wasn't even his real name: It was Paul Sablon.
His accomplishments in European cinema had earned him a place in early film history, and his Hollywood pictures were hailed in the American press. But from 1916 until his death in 1940, Bourgeois never made another film, and scholars weren't sure why. Archival records reveal the bizarre reason: Looking to take advantage of a new fad for ice skating, Bourgeois pretended to invent an ice that wouldn't melt in Los Angeles, took heaps of investors' money and ran.
That the entertainment industry attracts greedy opportunists loose with the truth will surprise no one. In just the latest example, actor Zachary Horwitz last month agreed to plead guilty to running a massive Ponzi scheme, wheedling more than $650 million out of investors with made-up movie deals at HBO and Netflix. The little-known century-old story of Bourgeois not only shows that it was ever thus but also foregrounds perennial questions that bedevil America (before and after its reality-scammer president). When do benign hucksters become malignant frauds? And why do people fall under their spell?
Bourgeois and his...