HARVEY MATUSOW

CHARACTER SKETCH DETAIL

28, shape-shifting fabulist, glutton for attention, self-styled seeker of “truth.” Eccentric, charming, grandstanding, boisterous, emotionally naive, wholly unpredictable.

In the short span of five years, Harvey has amazingly been a soldier, failed magician, communist, FBI informer, Congressional star witness, spokesman for Joseph McCarthy, Washington, DC socialite, womanizer, husband, outcast, religious convert, poet, drifter, and pariah. Now he plans a tell-all memoir purportedly exposing the lies he and others told on behalf of the government. Or maybe it’s all just another lie. Only Harvey knows, and he isn’t telling.

What does Harvey believe? Anything he tells himself. He’s a man enthralled by the mythology of his own unique abilities and accomplishments. Every transformation he goes through serves to enhance this romantic sense of himself and his conviction that the twists and turns of his journey are of some divine origin, rather than the product of whim, convenience, and selfishness.

Harvey is brash, boorish and full of bravado. He’s never met a room he didn’t want to monopolize or a woman he didn’t want to seduce. He’s charming until he’s not, and lord knows he loves the sound of his own voice. Yet beneath the bluster is the heart of a little boy, one who just wants to play act within his own fanciful dreams, and painfully yearns to be liked and accepted.

When FOOL THEM ONCE opens, Harvey is a mysterious, oddball figure, sought by many, truly known by few, his existence evidenced only by a trail of destruction and bizarre episodes crossing the country. Not more than two years ago, he was a traveling celebrity, capitalizing on the sudden hero-worshiping of ex-communists and paid informants. Now on a vision quest across Texas and New Mexico, Harvey’s picking cotton, performing puppet shows for the children of traveling revivalist tent churches, getting busted with prostitutes, and claiming to be a priest.

Harvey doesn’t realize it yet, but Albert will challenge him to transform into the one shape he’s never taken — an accountable adult. And when the time comes, Harvey will do what he has always done, distract, deflect and resist growing up. Until then, he’ll keep the truth about his motives close to his chest. The jester with the kingdom’s secrets.

STAKES

Harvey risks public persecution and governmental prosecution over the recantation of his lies.

CHARACTER ARC

Harvey largely begins as much a mystery to the audience as he is to Albert, and to even himself. As we collectively come to understand what makes him tick over time, we see that his erratic antics and penchant for attention are the product of a deep-seeded need to be loved within a man-child suffering from arrested development. The trials of FOOL THEM ONCE will force Harvey through a period of painful growth, one fraught with missteps and emotional relapses, but one ultimately resulting in his taking accountability for the sins he’s committed.

BIO NOTES

Born in 1926 in the Bronx, Harvey was the second son of first generation Jewish Russian immigrants.  When his beloved big brother whom he always emulated, Danny, went missing on an Air Force mission over Nuremberg during World War II, a teenage Harvey enlisted in the infantry to find him - only to receive news once in theater that his brother had died. Harvey made his way to his brother’s grave site as the war was drawing to a close.

Harvey returned to the States a changed man. After drifting in and out of various career options, including that of a children’s puppeteer and magician, Harvey fell into work as a young communist organizer, where he found purpose, focus, and plenty of available young women to pursue. But when the tide of American public opinion turned against communism, Harvey opportunistically switched sides and became an informer for the FBI, snitching on friends and their political activities across the country. At the Vincent Ranch in New Mexico, Harvey made friends and called square dances by day, and by night reported on everyone to his FBI handlers. The Vincent Ranch was the site of Harvey’s infamous introduction to Clint Jencks, which Harvey later used against him at trial, fabricating tales of Clint’s confessed allegiance to communism and a desire to sabotage the American war effort in Korea by staging a strike at New Mexican copper mine.

Harvey’s tenure with the FBI was short lived. After the Communist Party expelled him for alleged embezzling, Harvey soon ran out of actionable intelligence and the FBI cut him loose. He quickly set his sights on cashing in on the public craze around ex-communist informers. Looking for his share of the many book, radio, television and film deals being handed out, he began climbing the ladder of star government witnesses, largely by making up his own allegations about alleged communists. Before long, he found himself a prominent voice in government trials, a valued consultant on national hiring practices, and an in-demand anti-communist speaker. Harvey often promoted himself as the former “leader of Kremlin’s youth movement in this country” with stories of diabolical Soviet schemes to lure American children with sex and corruption. This notoriety landed him in parties among the conservative elite, in a marriage to millionaire socialite Arvilla Bentley, and in a clandestine pact to fabricate testimony with a young Roy Cohn who was rising through the ranks of the US Attorney’s office. Soon, each found his way to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inner circle, where Harvey acted as McCarthy’s campaign surrogate on tour across America.

The sudden decline in McCarthy’s power, thanks to the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings, marked the beginning of a political sea change in America. Coincidence or not, it was at this time that Harvey claimed a religious conversion and began toying with the idea of writing a bombshell exposé detailing his lies for the government and those complicit — none among them more notorious than Roy Cohn. This is where we find Harvey at the beginning of FOOL THEM ONCE.

The accusations Harvey made on the stand in support of his memoir False Witness landed him in prison for five years. In the 1960s, he relocated to England, where he was an active figure in the counterculture movement. He participated in filmmaking, music festivals, and underground magazines. By the time Harvey passed away in 2002, he had returned to the United States, converted to Mormonism, changed his name to Job, lived on communes, run a public access television station in Utah, founded a circus, played host to the Dalai Lama, had a daughter, and claimed to have been married to nine women twelve times.