Here we have an episode of the game show To Tell the Truth that originally ran on October 23, 1973. They play two games in this half-hour and in each, three people all claim to be the same person and are quizzed by the panel. The real person with that name is supposed to answer honestly (hence the name of the show) and the two impostors, if they don't know the real answers, are allowed to lie.
And what's interesting to me about this episode is that I don't think anyone was telling the truth.
The first game is built around a man named L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the term of President John F. Kennedy. Colonel Prouty's name is well known to folks who've studied the assassination of President Kennedy. Prouty was one of the major sources of conspiracy theories about that murder. In the Oliver Stone movie J.F.K., there was a mysterious informant character called "Mr. X" who was based to a great extent on Prouty.
Vince Bugliosi, in his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, lists many of Prouty's wilder and debunked claims and describes him as…
…a right-wing zany who was a member of the Liberty Lobby, the…group that supported neo-Nazi David Duke's 1988 candidacy for president and embraces the notion that the Holocaust is really a Jewish hoax. He also served as a consultant to Lyndon LaRouche's right-wing National Democratic Policy Committee at a conference of which he provided a presentation comparing the U.S. Government's prosecution of LaRouche (for conspiracy and mail fraud) to the prosecution of Socrates.
So that's the first guest supposedly telling the truth. Nineteen minutes into the show, we come to the second subject…Mayo Kaan. Mr. Kaan was a one-time body builder who popped up in the early seventies claiming that he was the model for Superman. And he did have a photo of himself from earlier decades posing in a makeshift Superman costume.
But I personally heard both Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster say they'd never heard of him and had never been where Kaan claimed they discovered and hired him. This appearance on To Tell the Truth was part of Mr. Kaan's personal publicity campaign. He died in 2002 but many years before, he seems to have stopped promoting himself as The First Superman because so many reporters were poking holes in his claims.
In this segment, he claims he went to Hollywood and starred in one of the first Superman movies for Warner Brothers. If you know anything about the Man of Steel, you know that Warner Brothers didn't make a Superman movie until 1978 and it starred Christopher Reeve. The first screen appearance of Superman played by a real person, as opposed to a cartoon, was a serial made in 1948 by Columbia Pictures where he was played by Kirk Alyn. Some of the other claims Mr. Kaan made here and elsewhere didn't seem to match reality either.
Fans and collectors have offered various theories on what part of Kaan's story might be true. That photo of him in the homemade Superman suit — which is shown after they reveal which of the three men is the real Mayo Kaan — is just about all the evidence he had. It could have been as simple as him dressing up that way for publicity or maybe to submit himself to DC Comics to play Superman. It has also been theorized that he was hired to play Superman for some personal appearances, as were others. Me, I think it's enough that Siegel and Shuster (who are never mentioned in this segment) said they never heard of him.
Also in the show, you'll hear panelist Gene Rayburn insist that in the Superman movie or TV show, the Daily Planet building was actually a shot of some building in Providence, RI. Also not true. I believe the building in the Kirk Alyn serial was one then located at Wilshire and La Brea here in Los Angeles. And in the George Reeves TV series, they used the Los Angeles City Hall.
So here's the factually-challenged episode of To Tell the Truth. Let me know if you hear anyone get anything right…