Word: gerguson
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...fitting footnote to the life of a legendary impostor who at various times passed himself off as Rasputin's assassin, the son of Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone and a cousin of Czar Nicholas II. Actually, there is evidence that he was born Harry F. Gerguson, the son of Russian immigrants. After trying his hand at farming, peddling papers and bumming, the flamboyant phony with the Oxbridge accent migrated West in 1927. In Hollywood, Romanoff was accepted as an off-camera actor in an actor's town; he opened his first restaurant there...
Never in Public. His name was Harry Gerguson alias Arthur Wellesley alias Count Gladstone alias Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, cousin and occasionally half brother of Nicholas II, last Czar of all the Russias. After preparing at Eton, he had been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Heidelberg, Oxford and Cambridge. Since, in fact, he was born in the New York area of indeterminate parentage, he always refused to speak Russian in public. But he was scrupulously elegant, with a camel's hair accent and a mill-racing brain. He lived on both coasts of North America and made occasional...
...with fiction, frequently with his aid and consent, that the history of Mike Romanoff had solidified into an almost impenetrable legend. Although U.S. immigration authorities and some friends insist he is not an American, the most persistently recurring version of his background is that he was born Harry F. Gerguson in Brooklyn some time before the turn of the century, that he escaped from six successive orphanages, that he was farmed out to various individuals who tried to straighten him out, that he once worked in London, that he often landed in jail after scrapes with the law, that...
...framer of this apothegm is the proprietor of both a good restaurant and an unusual personality. He is the self-styled Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, once a Brooklyn-born orphan boy named Harry Gerguson, who spent half his life amiably panhandling the rich of two continents. But in Hollywood, where Mike Romanoff settled after being immortalized in a five-part New Yorker profile, he finally cashed in on the fact that he is one of the few genuine, 24-carat phonies in a city where thin plating has often been known to pose for the real thing...
Married. Mike Romanoff (real name: Harry F. Gerguson), sixtyish, bugle-nosed, professional phony (he has claimed to be the assassin of Rasputin, a son of Victorian Prime Minister Gladstone, a cousin of Czar Nicholas), now a Beverly Hills restaurateur, who gave his age as 48; and Gloria Lister, 24, his ex-secretary; each for the first time; in Las Vegas...