A Rose by Any Other Name

Ardley and Maureen Hanemann of New Orleans were not very surprised last December when they heard about the fits their old friend Spiro Pavlovich III was giving all those people up at Harvard. Sure, he was charged with twice bluffing his way into the Law School, but then, "Spiro always did want to see how much he could get away with," Ardley Hanemann says.

Come January, though, the Hanemanns were in for a big shock. Spiro's wife Monette--who was attending the Business School after allegedly faking transcripts--was also arrested by the FBI for falsifying applications for government-insured loans.

The Hanemanns just could not believe Monette was involved. Maureen Hanemann had bumped into Monette at a real estate agency in New Orleans in the summer of 1972. Monette, who was working for the firm, told Maureen she was married to a Tulane medical school student and that her teenage romance with Spiro was a part of her life "she'd rather forget."

It was about that time that Spiro and Monette Pavlovich celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

The Thunderbird Kid And His Girl

Judging from their undergraduate days in the mid-sixties, the match seemed inevitable. Friends remember how Monette, then in a Catholic girls academy, idolized the Loyola College stud. The pair were considered very fast--Maureen Hanemann remembers being shocked when a number of friends found Spiro and Monette out on a levee, zipped up in a sleeping bag together. "At that time [1965] you just didn't do that," she recalls.

Spiro had "a certain aura of being cool," says Emile Lafourcade, secretary of Spiro's fraternity. "Anyone who could drive around in a new T-Bird when everybody else was going around in '59 junk-heaps had something up on the rest of us."

Friends recall being a bit surprised, however, when they saw his house in Plaquemines parish, adjacent to New Orleans. He had told people his father had left him millions and he did have a nice car and lots of spending money, but the house was so . . . modest.

What people remember about Monette was that she was "one hell of a looker"; what they remember about Spiro are the pranks. While at Loyola, he sponsored an expensive formal, and tried to pass off an unknown nightclub singer as Aretha Franklin. The fraud was exposed, but when Hanemann saw Spiro after he transferred to Tulane, there were signs in Spiro's car promoting another Aretha dance. "Spiro, what are these signs?" asked Hanemann. "No, no," Pavlovich assured him, "this time she really is coming."

Act I: Mr. Pavlovich Goes to Cambridge

No one is quite sure how long it was after the second Franklin hoax that Spiro decided to move on to bigger things, even though he had not graduated from Tulane. But in the fall of 1968 he showed up at Harvard Law School, where he spent the next two and a half years. If the swagger and braggadocio were showing then, no one recalls it--in general, he didn't leave enough of a mark for professors to recognize him when he came back as Jason Cord.

George H. Lanier '66 of the King and Spaulding law firm in Louisiana, is proud to have been the first to trip Spiro up. Besides the now-famous lies about turning down the Law Review and writing a thesis on Einstein, Lanier says Pavlovich made other, equally outrageous claims. Spiro said he was the great grand-nephew of Czar Nicholas of Russia, the nephew of a man who "owned most of lower Louisiana," and the godson of Leander Perez, a notoriously powerful and corrupt Plaquemines parish politician. Lanier began to get suspicious, but it was Spiro's statement that he was an avid scuba diver that really destroyed his credibility. One of Lanier's partners was a scuba enthusiast, and fooled Spiro into expanding on the subject, about which Pavlovich knew nothing. The firm contacted Tulane University, then Harvard Law. Harvard asked King and Spaulding if it wished to press charges, but the firm declined--Spiro hadn't even sent them a bill for the hotel. But for the time being the jig was up.

Pavlovich left Harvard with very little fanfare. "We got the impression that he was in psychologically unstable state of mind," Detlev Vagts '49, professor of Law, who had taught Pavlovich, says, and another source remembers Harvard administrators confiding that Spiro was in an institution and that the case would not be pursued.

Act II: Cord and Cabot, Inc.

But Spiro bounced back quickly. That fall he enrolled at the University of New Orleans (formerly Louisiana State University at New Orleans) as a transfer student from Tulane, with an allegedly false transcript. Equipped with a new name, Jason Scott Cord, he completed a very successful stint at UNO. And then it was off to Cambridge again for Round II--this time with Uncle Sam guaranteeing repayment of Harvard's loans.

The second time around, beginning in the fall of 1973, Pavlovich was more at ease here. "Jason knew that a lot of what went on the Law School was bullshit. He knew exactly what you had to do to get through," recalls Charles Simpson, a second year law student who served as Spiro's partner in the Law School's 1974-75 Ames competition. Having gone through the Ames once before, Spiro didn't worry much, and the pair got by without great effort. George Munoz, a member of Pavlovich's small study group, remembers telling Spiro he had "better get on the ball or get out of the group." Pavlovich was bright, but friends say he didn't seem to work very hard and he missed a lot of classes. When he did make it to school, he'd often challenge professor after class--an extraordinarily bold move for a first year student, they thought.

Students by and large saw him as a jet-setter, "an eccentric Southern aristocrat" always "flying off the Rio or something." But Simpson doesn't remember Spiro making outrageous boasts. When newspapers reported Pavlovich as having a silver-blue Mercedes Benz, wearing three-piece suits to class and bragging of a Rhodes Scholarship, Simpson was surprised. When he saw Pavlovich, he says, "He drove a blue Plymouth and wore plain corduroy coats. He said he had studied in England, but not on a Rhodes."

Simpson recalls that Spiro let it slip he had been to Harvard before, and that his name was now different from what it once had been. "He said he hadn't wanted to be associated with Agnew." Why he chose Jason Scott Cord still remains a mystery. Pavlovich told a friend after his arrest that if the newspapers thought the name had come from Jonas Scott Cord, a villain in Harold Robbins The Carpetbaggers, "that was fine," but untrue. No matter what the name, however--nobody suspected.

Vagts, who administers the joint law business program in which Spiro was enrolled during his second time here, says he had "a vague feeling of familiarity" when he saw Pavlovich at a cocktail party, but thought he must just be another "old timer." After the arrest, Vagts was amazed that Pavlovich had enrolled for a second time in his seminar. "A death wish," Vagts calls it.

Apparently Spiro was not worried. During his first or second year, Monette joined him in Cambridge. She was introduced as his wife, Monica Cord from New York, and although few remember her from that period, two recipes by a "Monica Cord" appeared in the Business School Wives Association's 1974-1975 cookbook.

In the fall of 1975, Monette made the transition from Business School wife to Business School student, entering under the name Cary Monica Cabot. Her formidable transcripts, like her husband's, came from UNO, which, according to UNO registrar K. Lance Woodliff, "she attended for a brief time but left without receiving any credit." In the Business School yearbook, however, Monette put Boston as her home town, and Radcliffe and a non-existent Spanish University as her alma maters.

Acquaintances remember Monette speaking occasionally of her fictional undergraduate days. Lucille Sprinkles recalls that Monette told her how disgusted she had been with the lesbianism of Radcliffe women. "She implied she had been a loner then," Sprinkles remembers. "Aloof," "protected," "rich," "prep-schoolish," "snooty" and "very bored and disinterested," is how others who knew her at the Business School describe her.

One reason Monette was bored, according to students in her section, was that she hadn't the foggiest idea of what was going on. "She was either shy or unaware of what we were doing," says Michael Beer, lecturer on Business Administration.

"Everyone in the classroom knew she had neither the brains or the background to be there, so we just kind of assumed she was a Cabot and that was why she was at Harvard," Holly Frost, a member of her section says. "When she did speak," Frost remembers, "it was obvious her statements had come from someplace else. They just didn't fit in--they weren't said at the right time."

No one knows whether or not Spiro was feeding her lines he remembered from his own Business School days. The two were spotted together early in the year at Lincoln's Inn parties and crashing restricted Law School Forum receptions, but later the pair reportedly split up and went out with other students.

Meanwhile, Spiro's boasts continued. Sometimes he told friends he was an ex-Nixon Administration employee--a veteran of undercover work in the fight between "the branches of government;" on other occasions he described himself as a man of "very substantial resources" whose uncle was going to help him buy a 10 million dollar foreign investment firm. One of Pavlovich's last lies before the roof fell in on him concerned his impending trip so Spain for the funeral of Franco and coronation of Prince Juan Carlos, who he claimed was a relative.

Around that time, or perhaps a little before, Spiro had an interview with the prestigious New York firm of Cravath, Swain and Moore. According to a friend, Pavlovich realized the firm's interviewers were suspicious--his claim to being a college placekicker didn't sit well with one of the interviewers who knew his football. Once again, it was the law firm, not the colleges, which did him in; once more boasts of athletic prowess contributed to his downfall.

This time, however, Harvard could not afford to be as lenient as it had been before. His alleged falsification of the federally guaranteed loan application constituted a federal crime. The University turned a handwriting analysis and other evidence over to the FBI, and Spiro was arrested on December 10.

Monette's arrest was not long in coming. After Spiro was caught, she told a reporter from the Law Record she was not married to him, which everyone knew was untrue. Records were checked, suspicions confirmed, and Monette high-tailed it from her Chase Hall room down to New Orleans, where she finally surrendered to the FBI on January 21.

After posting bond, Monette returned to her parents' home in River Ridge, La., where she is now awaiting a removal hearing. Her lawyer says it has been re-scheduled three times because he has "other cases to attend to." He says it has not yet been determined whether the trial (if there is one) will be held in Boston or New Orleans, but she says an arraignment should come soon. Monette's mother will say only that her daughter doesn't wish "to discuss the matter."

Act III: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Although his Homer Ave. apartment has been sublet, Spiro is still living somewhere in Boston. In January, during Law School exams, he showed up "in disguise," as a student said, with a stocking cap pulled down over huge glasses. He paused in the hall to speak with a friend.

"He thought if he could swing a few faculty votes to his side he might ultimately prevail," the friend says. Pavlovich apparently realized plea bargaining was out of the question. He was "acutely aware that his was a precedent-setting case for loan fraud cases," the friend who spoke to him says, adding that Spiro "thinks he's got the whole world against him."

Pavlovich seems to have been confusing his own two identities. "He saw it as the University's mistake for letting him off the first time without making him promise not to come back," the friend says.

Later, though, the story was different. "Everyone just assumes Spiro Pavlovich is real," Spiro Pavlovich told the friend.

Not long after the visit to the Law School, Spiro was in Massachusetts General Hospital, suffering from emotional stress. He emerged in time for a court appearance last month, pleading "Not Guilty," and the court appointed a psychiatrist to examine him. Pretrial motions are in the offing, and Spiro-watchers are betting on a temporary insanity plea. No one knows for sure, of course, because his lawyer William P. Homans '41 is mum on the question.

Whether Pavlovich will come out in the black "after a cost-benefit study of his life," as one student put it, remains to be seen. Many students at Harvard refuse to view Pavlovich as a common felon. One friends says he feels Spiro proved dramatically that "it was unnecessary to go the prep school, Ivy route in order to succeed at Harvard." Meanwhile, a few business students sport "Free Monica Cabot" T-shirts and have written a case study on her. Up at the Law School, the inevitable Spiro jokes are incorporated in the school's annual show.

Even the University computer remembers him. It still prints out that name on class lists for his course on "Law and Business Problems: Jason...Scott...Cord....

KITCHEN DONUTS

"The late Dwight Eisenhower delighted in personally making these for family and friends."

2 Tbs. Butter 1 C. boiled milk1 Tbs. sugar 1 Tbs. light brown sugar 3 C. flour 1 jumbo egg 1 tsp. nutmeg 1 env. dry yeast 1 tsp. salt Oil

Average Yield: about 1 1/2 doz.

Add sugars to the butter. Add in boiling milk and stir. Cool 10 mins. Add the yeast and stir until dissolved. Sift together the salt, nutmeg, and flour. Add 1/2 flour mixture to milk mixture to form a batter. Add the egg and beat well. Stir in the remaining flour mixture. Cover and set aside 1-1 1/4 hrs. Knead the batter gently and roll on a floured board to desired thickness. Cut and cover. Let rise 1/2-1 hr. Fry in hot oil. Sprinkle with sugar or honey. Monica CordNew York

Harvard cooks say the recipe Monette Pavlovich submitted to the Business School Wives' cookbook was not a fraud, but "could be found in any cookbook and is nothing special--just plain donuts."