Weird People of History: Beatrice Sparks

Don't ask Alice

Beatrice Sparks holds the copyright to and is almost certainly the author of Go Ask Alice, a diary claimed to be the anonymous diary of a teenage drug addict. (Please note that this blog post contains discussion of suicide and descriptions of gross behavior, and that Sparks is a morally bankrupt person to a pretty depressing degree.)

Because Sparks was a compulsive liar, it is difficult to figure out any of the details of her life. She was born January 1917, when her mother was on a train. Sparks's mother allegedly found a porter, told him to watch her two small children, and told the children to behave and she'd pick them up at their destination. Then Sparks’s mother got off at the next stop, which was a mining camp, found the doctor, and told him she was giving birth.

When Sparks was fifteen, in the middle of the Great Depression, her father walked out to live with a woman half his age. The heavily Mormon town blamed Sparks’s mother: a good man doesn’t walk out unless his wife gives him a reason. Sparks had to drop out of high school and wait tables for a living. At seventeen, tired of the shame and gossip, she left for San Francisco.

Sparks married young. Her husband LaVorn was an early investor in oil in Texas, and by thirty Sparks was quite rich. She took up writing, mostly for publications which didn’t have the money to pay her. She began to invent the story of her life. For example, under her pen name, she wrote a profile of herself, citing only a different article which she also wrote under a different pen name, which called her a promising young poet because of two poems she had published in a vanity press. Her advice column for a poorly-selling romance comic was astonishingly popular. Mysteriously, a lot of the people writing letters to her column were named after Sparks’s relatives and sounded exactly like Sparks. Who can say, really.

When Sparks was fifty, she and LaVorn moved to Provo, Utah. Here, she reinvented herself as a screenwriter with a degree from UCLA. Sparks and her husband networked skillfully. Beatrice joined many women’s clubs; LaVorn was heavily involved in Republican politics. The Provo newspaper filled with stories about their fundraising and speeches.

Sparks got a job writing for a multilevel marketing company, Family Achievement Industries. Family Achievement Industries sold five-album sets of vinyl records filled with uplifting stories, spiritual wisdom, and parenting advice. (One of Sparks’s coworkers was Stephen Covey, of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame.) The face of the company and narrator of the albums was Ark Linkletter, today best known for the television segments and book Kids Say The Darndest Things! Family Achievement Industries folded, but in Linkletter Beatrice had made a connection that would change her life.

Linkletter’s daughter killed herself. Before she die, she told a friend that she was suicidal because she'd never been able to have a job that she'd earned in her own right and wasn't because she was Linkletter's daughter; she was worried she would always be in his shadow. Like many grieving parents, Linkletter was desperate for an explanation that wasn’t his fault. Because his daughter had taken LSD before, Linkletter concluded that she had had an LSD flashback and committed suicide during the flashback. Linkletter became a committed drug warrior: he gave speeches about how he wanted to strangle Timothy Leary to death; Richard Nixon exploited his grief to provide justification for the war on drugs.¹

And then Beatrice Sparks showed up with the most amazing book.

Go Ask Alice was the allegedly true story of a fifteen-year-old drug addict. Alice is a normal, wholesome girl: white, Christian, suburban, and middle-class. She has ordinary teenage-girl problems, like pimples, weight fluctuations and mood swings. When Alice feels socially isolated after a move, she’s invited to a party where some of the drinks are spiked with LSD. Alice is happy to have been drugged, because she never would have tried LSD on her own, and it was the most beautiful experience of her life. Three days later, she meets a boy, injects speed, and loses her virginity. When she’s worried about the experience making her pregnant, she steals sleeping pills from her grandfather. Alice concludes that her parents lied to her about drugs, that drugs are the only thing that stops the pain when life hurts, and that she should be skeptical of everything else her parents told her.

Alice and a friend begin dating a pair of college-age dealers. The girls are high constantly; they sell drugs at middle and high schools to support their habit. The girls discover their boyfriends in bed together and realize that they were beards intended to take the fall if there were a drug bust. The girls call the cops on their boyfriends and run away to San Francisco in order to get clean. This doesn’t work. Alice is raped. She hitchhikes around the West Coast, does sex work to earn money, sleeps outdoors, and wants nothing but the next fix. She finally returns home and gets sober. Her old friends think getting clean is selling out and spike her snacks with LSD. She has a bad trip and wakes up in a psych ward. Alice decides to cut ties with all her drug-using friends so that they can’t drug her again. She believes she’s really going to stay clean this time: she has her family, her faith, and the prospect of love with a former boyfriend. She decides to stop keeping the journal so she isn’t living in her head. Three weeks later, she is found dead of an overdose.

If Linkletter weren’t mad with grief, he would have asked questions like “who injects speed for the first time before smoking pot for the first time?” and “three days from LSD to injecting drugs?” and “who goes to San Francisco in order to get sober?” and "where was a homeless addict getting pens and paper with which to keep her diary?" and "what kind of homeless addict does a journal entry every day, anyway?"and "where are this girl's parents?” and "is publishing this book legal?" and "does this girl, in fact, exist?"

But he was, and the similarity to his daughter’s story only added to the plausibility for him. This was happening to everyone. He wasn’t alone.

Linkletter was technically a literary agent and acquired the book for his agency; his coagent who did all the work sold the book. The coagent sensed that Beatrice was a fraud. Her story kept shifting: she attended UCLA or graduated it, was a psychotherapist or psychologist or psychiatrist, had taught at Brigham Young or hadn’t, got the diary from Alice or Alice’s parents. The coagent couldn’t kill the project—it was Linkletter’s baby—but he at least ensured that Sparks’s name wasn’t on the book. If people knew Sparks had written Go Ask Alice, she’d give interviews, and they’d know it was a fraud. Anyway, by her own account, Sparks had only assembled the dead girl’s writing. The editor who was editing it was doing all the work. Sparks was just the courier. She didn’t need credit! She should be happy with the royalties she was getting! It was insane that she was getting anything at all!

Go Ask Alice received fantastic reviews: it was considered to be suspenseful and an important insight into drug culture. Most reviewers took it seriously as nonfiction, although a few classified it as fiction. It was compared to Anne Frank’s Diary. 18,000 copies were preordered by the week before publication-- more than three times the usual lifetime sales of a hardcover nonfiction book. Bookstores couldn’t keep it in stock; library waitlists stretched for weeks or months.

But perhaps one of the most important figures for Go Ask Alice’s success was llinois State Representative Webber Borchers.

Borchers’s hobbies, other than censorship, included making sexual jokes at work and claiming that differences in earwax meant black people and white people were different species. When he read Go Ask Alice, he discovered that its characters took drugs, swore, had sex, and had a rather cavalier attitude towards abortion. The part where Alice died was good (he is on the record as saying), but he would not stand for all this sex! And Go Ask Alice was in the children’s section, even though it was basically pornography. He successfully campaigned to have it reshelved into the adults’ section and for no one under the age of fourteen to be allowed to read it, even with parental permission.

You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

Sparks was livid about Go Ask Alice’s success. She’d written one of the most famous novels in America and no one knew it. Not even her local newspaper talked to her. Her second book, a memoir of raising a foster child, didn’t sell, possibly because of her all caps shouting, multiple exclamation points, and chains of adjectives. With her third book, she had returned to form by claiming implausibly that it was a series of interviews with runaways, but readers seemed uninterested.

And then Sparks realized that, while her name wasn’t on the cover of Go Ask Alice, no one was stopping her from giving interviews claiming to be its author. Her first interview was with the Provo Daily Herald, and it was read by Marcella Barrett.

Marcella’s son, Alden Barrett, was brilliant but troubled and had recently committed suicide. Marcella thought it was fate. Sparks was a fellow Mormon, a mother of three, a psychologist, and the author of Go Ask Alice—and she lived just nine miles away. Maybe this was why God had allowed Alden to die, so Sparks could arrange for his journal to be published and help people.

Sparks agreed to publich the journal, but decided that it needed to be punched up a bit. Sex, drugs, and suicide was all very well, but this was the eve of the Satanic Panic. What people were really looking for was the occult.

Sparks used more than two dozen entries from Alden's journal, some verbatim, then changed his name to Jay and added 190 new entries. Jay is baptized in blood and urine; he mutilates a cow and drinks a bucket of its blood. The real-life deaths of Alden’s friends in car accidents are attributed to demons. Alden’s tender journal entries about his girlfriend are interspersed with fictional entries about drug-fueled orgies in which he punches and kicks her while she feeds him her blood and calls him “Master.” Alden’s sweet description of his secret wedding with his girlfriend was revised to include:

By the single little black candle, which we certainly didn't need for light, we went through the ritual of eternal slavery to one another, although I, the male, would technically always be the master. Then we cut our tongues and let our blood pour into each other's mouths. It was Nirvana. We were one!

Then, of course, a wedding guest murders a kitten.

Sparks was an incompetent anonymizer. The book obviously took place in Utah County. She kept the name of the radio station where Alden interned the same. Sparks gave pseudonyms to Alden's friends John, Mike, and Kim, then invented a new set of friends named John, Mike, and Kim. Sparks included a letter from Marcella that was obviously in Marcella’s writing style for anyone who knew her. As you might expect, the year Jay’s Journal came out, Alden’s school’s yearbook said that Jay’s Journal was Alden’s story taken from his personal journal.

Marcella first learned that Jay’s Journal came out when a friend called her to congratulate her. Far from keeping her promise to let Marcella read the journal before publication, Sparks hadn’t even told her it was going to be published. When the Barrett family confronted her to tell her to publish Alden’s diary without the occult nonsense, Sparks said-- I am not making this up-- the brass balls of this lady-- that that would make the book a dishonest fabrication.

Marcella assumed that no one would believe this book. It was crazy. There was levitation! There were possessed housecats! Jay talked to a literal demon!

Unfortunately, a lot of Christian reviewers were gullible. They accepted Sparks’s claims that she’d confirmed the diary by talking to the teenagers and watching them levitate notebooks and pull spoons across tables. One reviewer wrote "it's hard to remember that this is not fiction.” Even the secular Chronicle of Higher Education praised Jay’s Journal’s “ring of authenticity.”

Alden’s gravesite was vandalized. Alden's brother and sister had to deal with rumors about their brother planning to dose the town with LSD, or a green light surrounding his tombstone, or a secret chamber under the high school where covens gathered to cast spells. Jay’s Journal haunted the family for the rest of their lives.

Sparks’s next book was It Happened To Nancy, about a fourteen-year-old girl who falls for an older man who gives her a spiked wine cooler and rapes her. The man has AIDS, so Nancy contracts AIDS. After a struggle with depression, Nancy finds her faith and dies in peace. Luckily, before she dies, Nancy gets her last wish: meeting her favorite author, Beatrice Sparks.

Nancy went from infection to death in just twenty-three months, which you might think is implausible, since normally the latency period for HIV is five to ten years. But apparently Nancy... already had a lowered immune system. Yes. Beatrice Sparks has solved it.

Nancy, of course, spoke exactly like both Alice and Jay. The editor caught on that Sparks kept adding in long passages that weren't there before; Sparks claimed that the diary was compiled from the diary itself, other scribblings of Nancy's, and interviews with Nancy's family and friends and teachers, so it was okay if new stuff showed up. Like Emily Dickinson, Nancy kept her diary exclusively on small scraps of paper organized in esoteric ways.²

Sparks obtained back cover quotes for It Happened To Nancy that must be read to be believed:

“Only when one has been intimately involved with a real AIDS-infected person like Nancy can one slightly comprehend the overwhelmingness of the disease.” —Milton Norbaum, MD, AIDS Specialist

“It Happened to Nancy is a deeply disturbing book because it faces AIDS honestly, realistically and head-on. Up to 30 percent of people who have AIDS are diagnosed in their twenties, which means most were infected in their teens.” —Dorean Hadley Staudacher, Psychiatrist working with AIDS

Not only is there no Doctor Milton Norbaum, not only is there no living Milton Norbaum, but in fact there is no Milton Norbaum on record as existing in the history of the United States.

In the following decades, Sparks would publish four more diaries. She had worked out an answer to "how does one woman keep finding so many fucking diaries?” They're case studies! From her psychology practice! This could have been disproved with one phone call, because Sparks was not a licensed psychotherapist in the state of Utah or, indeed, in any other state. Further, publishing your patients’ diaries is profoundly unethical and maybe illegal. But the publishers didn’t object.

Beatrice Sparks died at the age of 95. She left numerous unfinished projects, including another book allegedly drawing on audiotaped case studies with Sparks' patients and a self-help book for adults. Although not finished, her self-help book already had two ringing endorsements from nonexistent doctors.

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries. By Rich Emerson. Published 2022. 384 pages. $12.99.

1. Later in his life, as he came to terms with his daughter’s death, Linkletter became an advocate for access to substance abuse treatment and decriminalization of soft drugs.

2. I stole this sentence from my coparent Elliot, known Emily Dickinson fancier.