Pranksters for parents

Growing up in Westport., Conn., Jennifer Abel knew her father was not like other dads.

There was the time Alan Abel, posing as “Dr. Herbert Strauss,” went on a New York talk show to promote the nutritional value of human hair in the American diet. Or, the press conference where her dad -- with his head swathed in bandages -- claimed that he was the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Or, the time he helped his wife, Jeanne, create the persona of Yetta Bronstein, a Jewish housewife running for U.S. president.

No matter how outlandish the story, Abel always seemed able to get the news media to fall for his hoaxes.

The strange saga of Alan Abel -- often billed as the World’s Greatest Hoaxster -- is retraced in a humorous and highly personal documentary filmed by his daughter, called “Abel Raises Cain.” It is one of about 100 films being screened this week in Park City, Utah as part of the Slamdance Film Festival, the more indie alternative to the much larger Sundance Film Festival, which is also underway.

Jennifer Abel, 31, said the idea for the documentary sprouted when she attended Emerson College in Boston, majoring in video and television production.

“I knew I had to document my parents,” she recalled. “As their only child, I grew up with this totally warped but unique perspective. I don’t think there are many people on the earth like my parents.”

But it wasn’t until 1998 that the project took shape. Two years ago, Jennifer Abel, the producer and director of “Abel Raises Cain,” was joined by Jeff Hockett, her boyfriend and the film’s co-director, in the final push to get the documentary completed.

“Basically, my parents’ memorabilia fills up an entire warehouse space,” she said. “It’s unreal. When Jeff and I started digging, we uncovered 60 tapes of television shows and over 100 hours of raw footage. That was just a slight glimpse” of the materials that her parents had amassed over the years.

Over those years, Alan Abel never held down a traditional job. Instead, he used his hoaxes as the basis for lectures, songs and several books. Perhaps most famously, he and his wife also wrote and directed the bawdy 1971 mock documentary “Is There Sex After Death?,” which follows Dr. Harrison Rogers (Abel) as he goes on a fact-finding tour to discover what Americans think about sex.

Some people “get” the satire in her father’s pranks, Jennifer Abel said. Others react with fury.

Take his TV appearances on behalf of a fictional group called Citizens Against Breastfeeding. He argued that mothers were having erotic experiences during breastfeeding and claimed that many youngsters were growing up to be anti-social because of the long breastfeeding period.

One irate woman who called Abel said: “This message is for whoever is running this organization. Your organization is considered born on the shores of ignorance and your group is fed by the spoon of stupidity.”

There are still news people in America who are angry that her father ensnared them in his hoaxes, Jennifer Abel said.

“If you don’t see it’s the joke, and you think you are the butt of the joke, I can see why people absolutely despise him,” she said.

In retrospect, it is amazing how long some of his pranks went on before the media got wise.

Alan Abel’s career as a hoaxer began in the late 1950s when he was out driving and noticed a bull fornicating on the highway as a line of embarrassed motorists waited and watched.

Abel wrote a satirical piece for the Saturday Evening Post about the need for animals to be clothed, but an all-too-serious editor huffily rejected the article. That’s when Abel launched an organization he called the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA). The charade somehow lasted almost five years until Time magazine blew the whistle on them in 1963.

In 1964, he and Jeanne famously created Bronstein, who ran for U.S. president under the slogan, “Vote for Yetta and things will get betta.” Stories about Bronstein appeared in newspapers around the world. What should have been a red flag to news organizations was the fact that Yetta never appeared in public. Indeed, her voice was supplied by Jeanne Abel and photos of Yetta were actually Jennifer’s grandmother, Ida.

Jennifer even got into her father’s act. In the mid-1970s, he brought her along to appear on a New York talk show.

“He was posing as Dr. Herbert Strauss, a firm believer in the notion that people should consume human hair because it’s high in protein,” she recalled.

After having rehearsed it over and over, Jennifer was supposed to take a bite out of the “hair sandwich” that her dad held in his hand. What the audience didn’t know was that Abel had stuffed hair on only one side of the bun. But when the big moment came for Jenny to bite into the sandwich, she balked.

“The lights made me feel a bit flustered,” she recalled. “I was very aware of the presence of the audience. I could feel all their eyes staring at me. I blew it and I refused to eat the sandwich.”

Her parents didn’t balk at making the documentary.

“If you give him a microphone, it’s kind of like waving a carrot in front of a horse,” Jennifer Abel said. The movie shows Jennifer Abel’s parents as they are today, financially down on their luck, living in a cramped basement apartment located in a friend’s house not far from the home where Jennifer grew up.She and Hockett had initially submitted the film to Sundance, but she said, “in the back of my mind I knew it wouldn’t get in” because the cut was “sloppy.”

“We had two weeks to tighten the cut” for Slamdance, she said. It worked.

She said the film cost “tens of thousands” of dollars to make. “Luckily, we were saved by private investors. This film wouldn’t exist without my parents, but we had financial help.”

The film does not yet have a distributor.

Jennifer Abel said that while she is grateful to have inherited her father’s sense of humor and some of his sarcasm, there were times growing up when he thoroughly embarrassed her.

“One incident I remember distinctly was the eighth-grade dinner dance ... A flier was sent out by the principal asking parents to be chaperons. I begged my dad, ‘Please, don’t sign it,’ ” she recalled. “Of course ... he arrived at the dinner dance with a big paper bag over his head. In marker, he had written on top ‘Unknown Chaperon.’ Essentially, he drew so much attention to himself that everyone obviously knew it was my father. I survived that night, but it was one of those moments I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”