Of course, lying is wrong -- if you get caught

Ever since Clifford Irving popularized literary lying by faking the autobiography of billionaire Howard Hughes, the presentation of fiction as nonfiction has reemerged as yet another method of writing and selling a book.

Although it wasn’t the first time an author used fakery as a ladder to publication, Irving had the bad judgment to get his book published while its subject was still alive, more or less, and able to declare that it was all a bunch of crapola. The revelation sent Irving to prison for 17 months and forced him to return a $750,000 advance.

If it’s any consolation, Irving, like D.B. Cooper, has become a fixture in pop culture, but unlike Cooper, Irving didn’t have to parachute from a plane to do so. He just lied. But movies were made of both exploits, so nothing was wasted. (Irving moved to the mountains of Mexico and went on to write more books.)

Fast forward to the next high-profile scamp and we have James Frey, whose inspirational “A Million Little Pieces,” about his ascent from drugs and alcohol, was the darling of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club until he admitted having faked just about all of it. He blamed the hoax on “the person I had created in my mind.”

This caused an outraged Oprah to haul him up on television and read him out (forgive the pun) with the indignant rage of a fifth-grade teacher. Frey apologized and we forgot him.

And now there’s Margaret Seltzer, a.k.a. Margaret Jones, an innovative Valley Girl whose acclaimed memoir “Love and Consequences” presented her as a half-white, half-Native American raised by black foster parents in South Los Angeles. Seltzer, the book says, earned her candy money by selling drugs for the Bloods, a street gang that nice little girls generally try to avoid.

The truth, we have learned, is that she is an all-white woman who was raised by her biological parents in super-straight Sherman Oaks and graduated from an exclusive private school in the Valley -- hoo-boy!

Seltzer was ratted out by an older sister who had read a laudatory profile in the New York Times. Seltzer admitted the lie, and now she too has apologized and no doubt will reclassify the book as fiction and sell it as a major motion picture.

On the same day that Seltzer did her mea culpa, an article appeared in our newspaper about, of all things, a culinary star who admitted that he had embellished his resume, a less public form of mendacious behavior but lying nonetheless.

Robert Irvine, the star of “Dinner Impossible” on the Food Network, revealed that he had not cooked for members of Britain’s royal family or for various U.S. presidents as he had claimed.

The network pulled his show but said it might hire him back later. I mean, heck, it was a small lie and everyone does it to make himself look good. I once claimed in a bio that while using the name Andre Boucherie, I had cooked for Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco a dinner that featured pork chops, canned okra and a nice beet salad, as I recall. No one questioned it.

Newspaper and magazine writers have gotten themselves fired for faking stories, the most notorious of whom probably was the imaginative Stephen Glass. He must hold some kind of record for writing 23 pieces for Nation magazine that contained partial or total lies. He ended up writing a book about it that became a movie -- not a very good one, but then how many writers have had even bad movies made about them?

The truth is, lying has become an almost acceptable form of rhetoric on many levels. Although fabrications are not always in writing, they are occasionally recorded on tape or film in ways that can trip up a person who is playing hula-hoop with the truth.

Politicians, athletes, government appointees, company executives and sports figures have been forced into memory loss when cornered during testimony before a federal court or a congressional committee.

President Clinton redefined sex to wiggle out of impeachment for lying about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and President Bush just blamed everyone else when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq.

“I can’t recall” is a run for cover that prosecutors dislike, but they are forbidden by law from grabbing a defendant by his lapels and shaking the truth out of him. That’s the process my stepfather used to force me to say I was lying even when I wasn’t, a cop-out utilized in face of the fear that he might shake something loose in my head that would prevent me from becoming a journalist. Maybe he did that, but I became one anyhow.

Given what appears to be a public tolerance of flat-out lying, I am preparing my own memoir of being born in a manger in East Oakland and spending my life administering to strippers, preaching to the criminally insane, raising the dead and turning water into martinis. Whether or not I slept with Mary Magdalene is none of your business.

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almtz13@aol.com