Jerry Seinfeld is behind a series of prank letters sent to hotels and celebrities. Or so Hunter S. Thompson thinks - and he's not laughing, reports Oliver Burkeman
The letters first started arriving in the mid-1990s - showing up in the in-trays of hotel managers, tourist attractions and airline customer-service departments across the US. In some cases, the writer was a prospective guest with special requirements - could he dress as a giant shrimp while gambling at the Flamingo Hilton Inn in Las Vegas, for example? (The answer was no: "We feel that, because of the high level of activity created by the outfit, it might be too distractive.") Could he travel on a Greyhound bus dressed as a slab of butter, for professional reasons? (Yes.) Or on a Hawaiian airline dressed as a rotting radish? Other times, would the Baseball Hall of Fame be interested in receiving the toenail clippings of a certain star player? (They would indeed.) But in every case, they bore the same spidery signature: Ted L. Nancy.
The mystery of Nancy's identity has come to prominence more than ever this week thanks to the furious intervention of one of Nancy's "victims", Hunter S. Thompson, the high priest of gonzo journalism. Thompson exploded at Nancy's written request for (spot the running joke) toenail clippings to be displayed in a Hunter S. Thompson mausoleum he planned to open. And now, Thompson says, he has just been asked to sign a form allowing the correspondence to be used in a Ted Nancy television show.
"This is a poisonous bucket of rocks we've got on our hands, bucko," Thompson snarled at his agent in a letter leaked to the US media this week. "Because those letters are full of pure foul-hearted rage. . ." So who is Ted L. Nancy? He is a 2ft-high circus performer called Pip the Mighty Squeak, writing to the Beverly Hills Hotel to demand a 3ft bed and a 1ft-high dresser - "so I can reach" - along with a low-hanging showerhead because "a regular showerhead blows me all over the tub". And he is a pair of conjoined twins looking for two jobs at Kinko's, the 24-hour photocopying chain.
He may also be Jerry Seinfeld. "Don't give me any more of yr. dunce-shrugs, either," he wrote to his agent, "because after a few nights of heavy facsimile exchange and pre-dawn phone calls, I discovered that this Nancy Tar-Baby is actually Jerry Seinfeld & this whole whore-faced pissing contest I've been roped into revolved around some addled-brained TV scheme he's pitched to ABC . . . will not permit my name to be used by Seinfeld or any other hackneyed comedic lint-head he's in bed with." What makes the Nancy letters unique are the impeccably polite replies he gets.
He told one hotelier he looked identical to Abraham Lincoln, so would it be all right if the coffee shop was sectioned off for him to keep fans at bay? He was immediately promised "the same respect that has been given to many of our other celebrity guests".
The circumstantial evidence is strong, though. Seinfeld is definitely involved in the forthcoming ABC show and he has written introductions to the three books of Nancy letters.
But he has steadfastly denied actually being Nancy. Instead, he says, he thinks he may have met the man at a friend's house when he picked up a stack of letters on the coffee table.
Realising their comedic potential, he says, he sent them on to his literary agency, but not before reading them out loud to the assembled guests. Everyone laughed except one man, "who just kind of nodded approvingly as each letter was read", he said in a television interview. "I guess I didn't realise it at the time, but I am convinced that that man was the real Ted L. Nancy." The agency denies any further knowledge, while ABC was swatting away reporters this week with a statement promising that the forthcoming series would "recreate Mr Nancy's adventures as a compulsive letter writer who sends seemingly serious, yet totally absurd, requests to corporate honchos \ celebrities". Thompson, meanwhile, ended his infuriated note by threatening Seinfeld with "buckshot castration". And Thompson likes his guns.
- Guardian Service