Homing Gull

Like a conjurer bringing himself out of a silk hat, a little natty man with a toothbrush mustache entered a Manhattan speakeasy one evening last week very quietly. He knew his getting out of the hat at all was a sensation. Last seen in a Paris jail after a U. S. woman missed a $100 American Express check, Harry F. ("Mike") Gerguson ("Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff"), 42, all-time amateur impostor, ordered a cup of coffee after a six-day fast and sent a note to friends at another table, "Sorry to have disturbed you but I have just landed. Michael R." Talking fast in his baa-baa Oxford accent, with the manner of a man born with a gold spoon in his cheek, he began a new chapter of the famed Gerguson-Romanoff legend.

Facts: Born Gerguson in 1890 in Vilna. Russia. Arrived with parents in U. S. in 1896. Longtime problem child of Manhattan charitable institutions. Bobbed up, his War years a blank, among the newly adrift Russian princes in Western Europe. Gulled Americans in Paris, Manhattan, Newport, Harvard, Hollywood (twice), St. Paul, Phoenix, variously as the late Tsar's brother, cousin, halfbrother, finally (in Mexico) the Tsar himself. Lived with and peacefully served Artist Rockwell Kent at Ausable Forks, N. Y. As drifts of bad checks massed behind him, he smelled out new green pastures. Exposed, he was always super-Romanoff. Last April he showed away first class on S. S. lie de France, princed the passengers, was caught at last. Detailed at Ellis Island for deportation, he gulled immigration officials into sending him to Manhattan under guard to get his wardrobe. When, the guard passed out in a speakeasy, remorseful but following expediency Gerguson abandoned the guard. The U. S. Government, irritated, made a manhunt of it. The newspapers made a field-day. Twice smuggled out of Manhattan by friends, Gerguson twice returned to listen to the hound music, lurking dramatically in speakeasies. The publicity made him a Name but denuded him as a Prince. In France he served his terms to the day. His new fame had yielded him only $100 which The New Yorker's Editor Harold Wallace Ross sent on demand as balm for a five-instalment biography in the magazine. U. S. observers thought Gerguson-Romanoff had come to a blind end.

Last week's legend was that without passport or ticket he had sailed out of Cherbourg into Manhattan on the North

German Lloyd's Europa, traveling first class as usual, sleeping under dinin'g room tables, eating leftover cocktail party sandwiches. Shying off the scarehead name of Romanoff, he posed as a Fox Film Co. executive. He tipped the stewards handsomely with Editor Ross's $100, walked down the gangplank behind actress Marilyn Miller (herself an inadvertent stowaway last month on the S. S. Bremen with her new fiance, Film Actor Don Al-varado). To officials who asked for his ticket, he said he said: "My ticket? I've been asked for it twice and given it up once."

This story immigration officials doubted in toto or in parte, though one Europa passenger quickly enrolled himself as having recognized Prince "Mike" Romanoff on board. Last week, before the reporters came, the stowaway, his thick-lipped, honest face working with self-pity, announced his next stop as Canada. As Michael Romanoff, for want of a better name than Harry F. Gerguson, he said he was writing a book on the "luxury of honesty." Fleeing reporters, he was offered the exit of the servants' entrance, pouted until a friend told him Tsar Nicholas had once used the servants' entrance during the Russian Revolution. Next day Federal immigration officials, refusing the bait, simply declined officially to believe Harry F. Gerguson was in the U. S.

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