A hot tale and a good agent can buy fame and fortune. But at what cost?
by Erica Goode, Katia Hetter
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In the late afternoon of Feb. 28, 1994, a 16-year-old boy in faded bluejeans and a white T-shirt walked across the border from Mexico, presenting himself to the immigration agents at the San Ysidro checkpoint, just outside San Diego. Asked his nationality, the boy replied, "U.S.A. citizen." He carried no luggage, could provide no identification or address. What he did have, however, was in some ways more convincing proof of his American citizenship than any document or possession: He had a story to tell.
The first time the boy told his story was over the telephone, to his grandmother in Tennessee. The second time was to a San Diego police officer. But over the next weeks, the story would also be borrowed, for varying lengths of time and varying purposes, by many others: journalists, television anchors, movie executives, book agents, publicists and other middlemen. It would be retold in different voices, with different inflections, massaged for distribution in a variety of markets. A supermarket tabloid would headline the story: "Teen Battles to Free Sister From Mexico Nightmare." A book agent would call it "El Norte Meets The Great Adventure"; a Hollywood entrepreneur, "Oliver Twist Meets Home Alone." For the moment, though, the story still belonged to him alone.
Life's a commodity. "Human kind/Cannot bear much reality," the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote. That was before 95 million Americans watched a white Ford Bronco bearing O.J. Simpson lead police in a bizarre parade down the Los Angeles freeways, before a tawdry Long Island love triangle became the subject of three TV movies, before Tonya and Nancy and John and Lorena and Lyle and Erik, before a daily procession of television dramas, tabloid shows, talk shows and newsmagazines chronicled the scandals and woes of everyday life.
Indeed, the public's appetite for real life, translated into an ever expanding series of electronic echoes, seems insatiable: In 1984, the prime-time lineup featured only two newsmagazines and an early precursor to the "reality" show, "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Ten years later, viewers can select from nine newsmagazines, four full hours of reality programs and countless made-for-TV movies based on "true" stories, in addition to network and cable news coverage of sensational events and hours of chatter about everything dysfunctional. When one genre wears thin -- industry sources say enthusiasm for cop and rescue programs, for example, may be on the wane -- another emerges to take its place: CBS News this season debuted "Before Your Eyes," a series of three two-hour cinema verite documovies, which producer Jonathan Klein calls "a provocative innovation in reality programming."
In this deluge, celebrity scandal is often the centerpiece. But there are hours of airtime to fill and plenty of room for the average Joe who engages in kinky sex, steals his son's girlfriend, severs his wife's head or leaves his infant unattended in the bathtub. The end result is a scenario even Andy Warhol could not have envisioned, life itself traded as a commodity, Americans queuing up for their 15 minutes of fame while the phones ring, the bidding wars rage, the agents circle. Even a moderately compelling tale of woe can be parlayed into a trip to New York or Hollywood and a few nights at a fancy hotel. A truly juicy story can net thousands in movie rights and book contracts.
Yet in the rush to fill the void with eccentricity or pathos, what is really being bought and sold? For the storyteller, says University of Wisconsin Prof. Patricia Mellencamp, author of High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy, the bargain "is always a double edge. When I see some mother on `Rescue 911' telling a heartfelt story about her child almost dying, I always want to ask, `But do you understand you're being exploited?'"
The chase begins. When Alex Beard failed the routine catechism at the border checkpoint, the immigration inspector summoned the San Diego police. At first, the boy lied to the two officers who responded to the call about a "runaway." But eventually, Alex told the officers how 10 years earlier, he and his younger sister had been left in the care of a baby sitter in Tijuana. They waited, he said, but their mother, an American woman with a long history of arrests for prostitution and drugs, never returned. Soon the Mexican authorities stepped in, sending the two young children to a series of orphanages and foster homes. His sister, Adriana, he said, still lived in an orphanage near the small Baja town of San Vincente.
Years passed. Alex swam and rode horseback with other children. He learned to play the piano. As a teenager, he had difficulties at the orphanage and moved on to a series of schools and institutions, his sister staying behind. But deep down, he knew that this was not his country or his language. "I remembered my family and I knew English, so I knew I had to be American," he would later tell a reporter. "But [orphanage officials] told me I was born in Mexico [and that] I was Mexican." In 1992, Alex learned from documents that his family lived in Indiana. And a few years later, working at a business office in Baja, he began to call directory assistance in Indianapolis and its suburbs. "Do you have a number for anyone named Beard?" he would ask.
One day, he dialed a number and a man answered. "Yes, this is Walter Beard," he said. Alex spoke to his grandfather briefly, then waited for a return call from his grandmother, now living in Tennessee. The phone rang. "Thank God, thank God," she said. "Where are you?" The next day he crossed the border. Now he just wanted to go home, he told the police.
"Baloney," responded Officer Bruce Pendleton. "What's the real story?" Alex handed him a torn piece of paper with a Tennessee phone number on it. Soon after, the police officer and his partner bought the boy a "combo" at Rally's, handed him $12 for pocket money and put him on a Greyhound bus for Nashville. Pendleton made two more calls -- one to the police department's media relations officer, the other to an Indiana television station. "It was just such a good story," he later recalled. "I never heard a story like that before."
A few days later, someone else in the San Diego Police Department also picked up the phone, passing the story on to Tom Colbert, president of Industry R&D, a Hollywood firm specializing in feeding "true life" stories to media outlets. Colbert sensed the tale's potential, pegging it as a strong candidate for that week's Tip Sheet, faxed to 17 news organizations, producers, entertainment companies, magazines and book agents who pay IRD a monthly subscriber's fee. In Alex's story, Colbert recognized many of the elements that make stories attractive to his clients: It was a family drama, with strong, "focused" characters whose actions could encapsulate a "lesson" about old-fashioned American values, in this case, "family devotion," or perhaps "fighting for the truth." As described by the source, the boy was blond and blue-eyed -- characteristics, Colbert says, that networks and sponsors find especially attractive. (In reality, Alex has dark hair and eyes.)
Colbert confirmed the basics of the border saga with other San Diego law enforcement sources. On March 18, the IRD Tip Sheet contained 29 stories, each summarized briefly and capped by a headline designed to grab the attention of harried editors and producers. "Chains of Love?" told of a mother who chained down her teenage daughter to keep her out of trouble; "Give the Dogs a Bone" was about two dogs who rescued a Basque shepherd. Yet it was the lead item that stood out:
"LOST AND FOUND: A blond-haired, blue-eyed American boy -- abandoned at 9 years old in a Mexican orphanage -- fought well- meaning foster parents, cops, consulates, even border guards to get back to his Midwestern family. Now, after seven years of searching, he's work
