Esquire magazine's November 1996 cover featured Allegra Coleman, said to be a hot new star taking Hollywood by storm. "Forget Gwyneth, Forget Mira," the cover declared. "Here's Hollywood's next Dream Girl."

The feature article inside described the buzz building around her. David Schwimmer, star of Friends, was said to be her on-again, off-again boyfriend, although he was getting some competition from Quentin Tarantino who had apparently dumped Mira Sorvino to go out with her. It was even rumored that Woody Allen had completely overhauled his next movie so that she could star in it. "The real thing," the article gushed. "She has it." More >>>

In 1961 an advertisement appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune for a Broadway play titled "Subways Are For Sleeping." The play had not been doing very well at the box office. Nevertheless, judging by the ad, it appeared that the play was a critical success. The names of seven well-known theater critics appeared in the ad, and accompanying their names were the rave reviews they had given the play.

The ad would have appeared in all the leading New York City papers, but an editor at one paper noticed something puzzling about it before he gave the okay to publish it. Small pictures of the theatre critics accompanied their quotations. However, the picture of Richard Watts showed a black man, and the editor knew that Richard Watts, the theater critic, was white... More >>>

During the 1950s Twenty One was one of the most popular quiz shows on TV. Its ratings soared when Charles Van Doren, son of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, appeared as a contestant on the show in late 1956. Van Doren seemed unbeatable. For week after week he answered every question correctly, winning a total of $129,000. But in 1957 a previous contestant, Herbert Stempel, revealed that the entire show was rigged. Van Doren, it turned out, was being fed the correct answers. A congressional investigation followed, and NBC, the producer of the show, issued an embarrassed confession.

At 3 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, April 1, 1950 the 22-year-old French actress Nicole Riche (no relation to Nicole Richie) walked into a Paris police station dressed in a flimsy white negligee. She had been missing for over two days. When the police questioned her about where she had been, she spilled forth a bizarre tale about being kidnapped by "Puritans" who kept her in a room without food while they lectured her about the immorality of her life. Finally, she said, her captors abandoned her in the Fontainebleau Forest, where she was found and helped to safety by kindly gypsies. The police believed none of her tale, and rightly so. Her "kidnapping" turned out to have been an elaborate publicity stunt designed to promote Paris's infamous Grand Guignol theater. More >>>

On October 30, 1938, thousands of people fled in panic after hearing CBS Radio report that Martian invaders had landed in New Jersey and were marching across the country, using heat rays and poisonous gas to kill Earthlings. But as soon became clear, Martians hadn't really invaded New Jersey. What people had heard (and mistook for a real news broadcast) was a radio version of H.G. Wells's story The War of the Worlds, performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater. More >>>

During the early twentieth century, Fritz Kreisler was considered to be one of the leading violinists of his time. Part of his popularity stemmed from his rediscovery of many 'lost classics' by famous composers. He explained he had found these works tucked away in libraries and monasteries throughout Europe. He would play these lost classics (which included pieces by masters such as Pugnani and Vivaldi) during his concerts, much to his audiences' delight. This became a signature part of his act. Over time many of these works became popular in their own right and entered the repertoire of other performers besides Kreisler.

By the time he was approaching the age of 60, Kreisler could look back on a highly successful career in which he had won acclaim and accolades, even though it was acclaim for playing other people's work. Then on February 2, 1935, his 60th birthday, New York Times music critic Olin Downes sent him a cable wishing him a happy birthday. In the cable she jokingly asked if he himself was actually the composer of all those 'lost classics' that had made him so famous. To her shock, he casually responded that, in fact, he was.

The revelation shocked the music industry. Half the industry heaped scorn on him for the deception, while the other half praised him. But Kreisler remained unrepentant. He pointed out that it should make no difference who wrote the works as long as people enjoyed them. He also claimed, quite rightly, that no one would have paid any attention to these works if he had identified them as his own. The public apparently agreed with him, because his popularity remained undiminished after the scandal.

In the Summer of 1907 a performer named "Sober Sue" began to appear onstage at Hammerstein's Roof Garden, located above the Victoria Theater in New York City. Sober Sue was billed as the girl who never laughed.

The theater offered a prize of $100 to anyone who could make Sober Sue laugh. People from the audience, as well as professional comedians, all accepted the challenge, but all failed. Sober Sue never so much as cracked a smile. Her routine became extremely popular.

Various theories were advanced to explain Sober Sue's amazing ability to keep a straight face. Critics theorized that perhaps she was deaf or partially blind. The truth was only revealed after her run at the Roof Garden had finished. It was impossible for her to laugh because her facial muscles were paralyzed.

The Roof Garden was managed by Willie Hammerstein. He paid Sober Sue very little, a mere $20 a week, but his unwinnable challenge managed to lure top-rank comedians into performing for free. Thus, for him the act proved extremely lucrative. However, the comedians who had been conned into performing for free never forgave him. More >>>

The most famous performer managed by P.T. Barnum was the diminutive Charles Sherwood Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb. 19th-century audiences were enthralled by the sight of him parading around dressed as Napoleon.

On February 10, 1863 Tom married Lavinia Warren, a woman equally small in size. The two then toured together through Europe as husband and wife. To complete the scene of domestic bliss, Barnum often had Lavinia pose holding a baby.

It was claimed that this was the child of Lavinia and Tom, but in fact it was simply an orphaned baby Barnum had provided them with. Because of her size, Lavinia was incapable of having a baby of her own. Unfortunately, as the baby grew it soon began to overshadow Lavinia. Therefore Barnum switched the infant with a smaller one. He repeated this practice whenever each successive baby grew too large for its 'parents.'

Posters that appeared around New York City in the summer of 1843 advertised a "Grand Buffalo Hunt" that would take place across the river in Hoboken on August 31, 1843. For the entertainment of the crowd, which would be protected behind thick double-rail fencing, cowboys would pretend to hunt and lasso a herd of wild buffalo imported from New Mexico. Best of all, the event would take place free of charge.

The organizer of this event was the showman P.T. Barnum, and naturally he had a scheme to make money from it. He had secretly cut a deal with the operators of the Hoboken ferry, so that he would receive half of their net receipts. The more people he could entice to make the trip to Hoboken, the more cash he would pocket. He expected around 16,000 to make the trip, but 24,000 people showed up, unable to resist the lure of a "free" show. Barnum ended up pocketing a profit of $3500 for the day.

However, the show proved to be not quite what it had been advertised. Instead of a herd of wild, dangerous buffalo, the crowd was greeted by a ragtag group of scrawny, malnourished creatures that Barnum had bought from a local merchant for $700. When the crowd started hooting and hollering, the buffalo became frightened and broke through the "thick double-rail fencing" (which was really just a flimsy barrier) and escaped into the surrounding swampland.

Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) described himself as the "Prince of Humbug," an epithet he more than earned during his long career as a showman. Barnum is best remembered today for the circus that still bears his name (and for the animal crackers named after him), but before the circus he was the proprietor of a New York museum, and it was this museum that initially made him rich and famous.

Barnum's career as a showman was marked by a variety of sensational publicity stunts, hoaxes, and plain-old false advertising which he used to attract visitors to his bizarre exhibits. His promotional techniques often tested the boundaries of what the emerging nineteenth-century middle class was willing to accept, but he was somehow able to convince audiences that he was selling them entertainment, not fraud. An indication that people viewed him as a kind of lovable con-artist is the fact that the phrase, "There's a sucker born every minute," will forever be attributed to him, even though he was not the one who said it.

His money-making schemes included a series of relatively small-scale humbugs. For instance, he boasted that one of the attractions at his museum was the "Great Model of Niagara Falls with Real Water." What his visitors found, however, was just an 18-inch miniature model through which a trickle of water recirculated.

Then there was his so-called "Captain Cook Club." It was supposedly the actual club that killed Captain Cook, though it looked suspiciously like a mislabeled Indian war club.

Perhaps his most famous leg-pull was his "This Way to the Egress" sign. Curiosity seekers, thinking the 'egress' was some kind of unusual exhibit, followed the signs to it until they came, eventually, to a door that led them outside. Then they had to pay admission to get back in.

For a more complete list of his hoaxes, see The Hoaxes of P.T. Barnum

Joice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Heth entertained audiences with tales about the young George Washington, and her exhibition drew substantial attention.

When the public's interest in her waned, Barnum rekindled its curiosity by spreading a rumor that Joice Heth was actually not a person at all, but instead a mechanical automaton. People then revisited the exhibit to determine for themselves whether she was an automaton or a real person. Barnum displayed her until February 19, 1836, on which day she died.

But even in death Barnum continued to use her to draw crowds. He allowed a public autopsy to be performed on her body, supposedly for the purpose of verifying her age. Unfortunately for Barnum, the doctor who performed the autopsy declared she could not have been older than eighty. Barnum struck back by planting a story in the New York Herald (February 27, 1836) explaining that the body that had been autopsied had not actually been the body of Joice Heth.

Barnum's collaborator in the scheme, Levi Lyman, later added another chapter to the saga by supplying the Herald with what he claimed was the real Joice Heth story. This ran in the Herald beginning on September 8, 1836 in a series of six articles. In this article, Lyman claimed that Barnum had discovered the elderly black woman on a plantation and had taught her to pretend she had been George Washington's nurse. But again, this story was also false. The truth was that Barnum had not found Heth on his own. Instead, he had simply bought the rights to exhibit Joice Heth from another showman. He had never coached her.

As literacy rates rose during the eighteenth century, a kind of cult-like reverence for the work of William Shakespeare emerged. Theaters staged his plays repeatedly, and collectors eagerly sought out any relics related to his life.

The bookseller Samuel Ireland was one of the most passionate of these Shakespeare-worshiping relic hunters. He devoted his life to the pursuit of Shakespeariana, in the process neglecting his talented young son, William Henry Ireland (1777-1835). That is, until his son brought home from the law office where he worked a mortgage document apparently signed by Shakespeare himself. More >>>

Centuries before IBM built Deep Blue, its chess-playing supercomputer, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed was a "thinking machine" that could play chess against human opponents. Not only that, but it consistently won.

Kempelen, a Hungarian nobleman, unveiled his chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it. He exhibited it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. The machine consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (for which reason it was popularly known as "The Turk") whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. The figure would play chess after its clockwork machinery was wound up.

There was much speculation about how the machine worked. Many theorized there was a dwarf hidden inside it. However, Kempelen always insisted that it really was a thinking machine.

Kempelen dismantled the machine in 1790, but it was subsequently acquired by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who toured throughout Europe and America with it during the first decades of the nineteenth century. On its American tour, Edgar Allan Poe observed it and wrote an article in which he attempted to solve its mystery. Poe theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the Turk. He was almost right. The truth was that a full-size man was hidden in the machine, but he was concealed in the wooden box, not in the torso of the wooden figure. The hidden man could control the Turk via a series of levers and wires. He was also usually a chess master, which is why the Turk consistently won its matches. More >>>

In 1749 several British noblemen, the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield, were discussing the gullibility of the public. They decided to test its credulity by designing a test. The Duke bet the Earl that if he advertised that an impossible feat would be performed — a man jumping into a quart bottle — they would still "find fools enough in London to fill a playhouse and pay handsomely for the privilege of being there." The Earl accepted the bet. More >>>