Tonight Show appearance of Frank Abagnale (1978)
I had no idea he appeared so long ago. This interview was put on YouTube 6/14/22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIYtKR24LQs
That is a very entertaining video. Thanks for posting it. The guy was truly charming and you can see why he was a good confidence man. The question is whether he’s conning Johnny with his stories. It was great to hear his own telling of the events that appeared in the movie and Johnny was clearly enamored. But some investigative journalists and agencies have proven some of those stories apocryphal. There is a post on the YouTube video that says, “Johnny was so riveted and engaged […] that he extended [Abagnale] to 3 segments” on the fly during the first commercial break which required bumping the musical guest for that night. It also says Abagnale was so popular that he made several other appearances on The Tonight Show thereafter. If he was making up the majority of his stories out of thin air, the guy essentially conned his way into TV late night
shareI just took a look at the Wikipedia article on him and it is worse than I thought--in terms of him not actually, not really, revealing the truth about his claims after he supposedly came clean. Some of this is due to a 2020 book about him debunking his claims. I remember watching a Google talk he gave, I'll re-watch to see if as recent as 2017 he is still exaggerating or outright lying. [links below]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale
https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Hoax-Earth-Catching-Truth-ebook/dp/B08P3X22K5/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI
I had not heard of the book but went to the Amazon link you posted and read the comments. Some were made by people who personally knew Abagnale. Imagine having an Amazon webpage dedicated to revealing you’re a liar and your life story a hoax. The Amazon comments led me to an article about what the book uncovered.
https://www.theirishworld.com/frank-abagnale/
The devastating conclusion is that at best, Abagnale’s exploits amounted to walking around “dress[ed] as a Pan Am pilot for three months….”
The book also bursts the fiction that Abagnale’s money cons only involved big corporations and no real victims. The truth is he “Ripped off ordinary hard-working people”