; Kansas City Girl Strings New Yorkers
Into Believing She Was from Koyukuk, and
Had ’fm Going Till Dad “Spilled the Beans”
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V
NEW YORK,—(Special.) — Louise |
Sachen lias confessed that she had
bent the truth a little here and there
in the 30,000 or 40.000 words she has
told New York in the last week about
how Broadway reacted on a mind
which had previously received im
pressions only of the majestic scenery
ami the primitive human types of the
Kovukuk in the far north and of a
few hamlets of the hinterland through
which she passed on her way from
Juneau to New \ork.
Instead of having lived since child
homi among rough, but open-hearted
characters in bearskins in the much
tilmed wild places of Alaska, Louise
admitted last night that her impres
sions of New York were based on the
solid background of sixteen years of
Kansas City observation and experi
ence. The right way to look at hei
she explained yesterday was an ordin
ary Kansas City girl polished by three
years of life in Alaska.
“Hut, if what l had to say about
New York was good," she asked,
“What did it matter if l had lived in
Kansas City?”
Louise left her family in Kansas
City because she «lid not like them and
went to Alaska for three years. She
returned to Kansas C ity last year,
found she still did not like it and bolt
ed for New York. She wanted to dis
connect herself from Kansas City,
which she did not like, and to identiy
herself with Alaska, which she did
like, so she altered her story slightly
when she came here. As she added
to this little fiction in order to explain
it, under the cross-examination of in
terviewers, she built up the gigantic
and minutely finished tale which has
filled several New York papers for
eight days.
The most interesting part or it
is how she stumbled into fame. There
is plenty of proof that she did not an
ticipate the blaze of glory with which
she was received. A person who, in
tending to set otT a firecracker, touch
ed a match to a Xew Jersey munitions
works could not have been much more
surprised than she was to find her
self competing with Thomas Lawson
and Rae Tanzer for place on front
pages.
When she came to this citv on Jan. J
13 with $120 and a fair wardrobe she
told the hotel clerk she had lived all
her life in Alaska and had never seen
a real city before. The hotel press
agent was calling up hotel reporters a
few minutes later but it was a busy
day and no one paid any attention to
the tip. Sunday was a dull day and
somebody remembered about the girl
from Alaska. She was still at the
hotel and ready to be interviewed
There was plenty of novelty in her
Middle Western viewpoint. Her criti
cism of subways, lapdogs, rouging
and penciling, French cooking,
theatres, New York men’s looks, New
York’s women’s clothes and L* roadway
lights were as i]U&'nt as if they came
fiom a White Eskimo or a man from
Mats. She had plenty of mental en
ergy, and, with expert nelp, produced
brilliant contrasts of crude out true
hearted love-making in the Arctic
with artificial, but thnll'ng wooing in
a large city, extempore treatises on
the double standard of morals, beauty
and health hints, advice on curing
blighted affections by retreating to
vast ness and solitude.
She was photographed mnunteraDie
times. She was filmed as a current
event for a Broadway theatie. She
was invited to address the University
Forum in the Washington Irving .tigh
school, Temple University, Phila
delphia. and other gatherings of in
tellectuals. She got an offer of $850
a week to go into the “movies." Yes
terday, while she mourned because
her father had spoiled everything by
revealing the secret of her life in
Kansas City, she pointed out a stack
of letters from all parts of the East
and as far South as Chattanooga,
where an enterprising patent medi
cine manufacturer named Colson en
treated her to take the agency for
r
Colson’s Baby-Honey in Alaska.
“Oh. Pop certainly spilled the
beans," she mourned. “He certainly
did spill the bean* all right. I wrote
him to say that I died at the age of
2 years, if anybody asked him.
“Why, I was planning to wind a
chain of nuggets around the old man.
1 was going to bring him on as the
Tfid miner that I said was my dad. I
would have got $850 a week if he
had kept quiet. That’s more than he
makes a year as a sparrow nurse in
Kansas City.
“What do you mean by a sparrow
_ «> tt
nurse .
“He is a watchman in the city parks
—head watchman. Can you imagine
it ? He would rather be an dwl
watcher all his life. 1 wrote to my
family today that l never wanted to
have anything more to do with them
and told them never to claim me. I
won’t let anybody call me a Kansas
City girl. 1 am an Alaska girl an<J
if 1 have to go back there to prove it,
1 am going back there.”
Louise said that her parents were
Austrian and that she was one of ten ,
children. Her parents and older
brothers and sisters kept up their
Austrian connections and talked the
language, she said, whereas she be
came Americanized by working as a
telephone girl in Kansas City after
leaving a convent school managed by
Austrian priests.
“They did not have an American
idea,” she said. ‘They thought a girl
ought to marry young, and they want
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SISTER SUPERIOR.
ed me to marry the first Austrian who
came along with $200. 1 wanted to
be an American so I left them and
went to an aunt in Alaska. I worked
as a telephne girl at Juneau.”
Some one who thought Louise
might be deviating again asked her
about the work in Juneau, and she
satisfied him that she was back on
firm ground by the ring of truth in
her answer, “If we felt like it we give
them the number. Otherwise we
would tell them to take out the I
phone.”
It was there she said she met “Jim”
Maloney, who gave her the diamond
earrings and the engage ment ring on
her finger. “He bought the telephone
company and I went with it,” she said
The $1,000 which she brought from
Alaska, she said, consisted of savings
of $20 a month for three years as a
telephone girl. The best evidence
that her fame burst upon her unex
pectedly is in the fact that she tailed
to assume a new name, so that her
week of greatness came to an end as
soon as Kansas City heard about it.
Asked about this fatal error, she said
she was afraid to. She had heard that
it was a penitentiary offense.
“One thing my lather says is abso
1 lutely false," Louise insisted. “That
is that I was a biscuit shooter. I
never waited on table in my life.
Please don’t call me a biscuit shooter.
I have shot plugs in a switchboard
and even won a medal at Juneau for
efficiency in shooting plugs, but that
is all.
Louise said she did not like the
deception she had been practicing, but
that it had caused her to meet a num
ber of nice people and to give her a
start on what she expected to be her
new life, so that she did not have the
heart to say, “I am a liar."
An accomplishment she has hidden
*
during the week, because it did not
go with her delightful simplicity and
ignorance, is that she knows several
languages.
“I know seven more or less,’ she
said, “and I guess they will help me
out here. I learned the Austrian and
Italian at school. I learned Russian,
Belgian and French in Alaska, aiid I
know English and Kansas City."
Louise is still at the McAlpin, hut
she will go to a less pretentious place
—hoarding house—today.
- ■ ' ——
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