In 1983 a silver-tongued teenager contacted a prominent Manhattan couple and claimed to be the son of Sidney Poitier.
The 19-year-old introduced himself as David Poitier, a classmate of Inger McCabe Elliott’s daughter, Kari. He explained that he had been mugged while in New York to meet his father, who was directing a film version of the Broadway musical Dreamgirls. All his money was stolen, as was his university thesis on unfairness in the criminal justice system.
McCabe Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, generously invited the young man to spend the night at their apartment and gave him $50 and some clothes while they attempted to confirm his identity. At the time it would have been less than straightforward to learn what today would require only a cursory internet search: Sidney Poitier had no sons.
“He was dressed perfectly nicely,” McCabe Elliott recalled. “We had a long discussion of what it was like to be the son of a famous actor. Then he started talking about how awful Malibu was.” That the story was pure fiction became obvious when the Elliotts found their guest in bed the next morning with a man he had sneaked into the apartment. They were unconvinced by his explanation that the stranger was the nephew of the publisher of Forbes magazine and had been locked out of his house.
Osborn Elliott (obituary, October 24, 2008), a former editor of Newsweek who at the time was dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, threw out the conman. In one version of events, as he left he asked if he might borrow some money to send flowers to McCabe Elliott.
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She called a friend who was married to a television executive, who replied that the swindler sounded just like a man who had contacted them and also received a meal, a bed and some money.
It later emerged that he was a serial impostor who had been ejected from Andy Warhol’s office by the artist and had also approached the actor Gary Sinise, claiming to be a confidant of the actress Melanie Griffith. Another attempted victim told The New York Times that he appeared to be the same man who in 1986 had posed as an equerry to Prince Philip, adopting a British accent and asking for $500 to get back to England because his wallet had been taken.
In reality, he hailed from upstate New York, his name was David Hampton, and the tale of a handsome young middle-class black man who tricked his way into the homes of Manhattan’s white elites would be turned into a hit play by a friend of the Elliotts.
On a visit to London they met up with the American playwright John Guare. “Do we have a story for you!” McCabe Elliott told him. Guare put the incident to the back of his mind, but about six years later he rediscovered some newspaper clippings about Hampton that fired his creative instincts. He rushed to a bookshop to buy a Poitier biography to find out if the actor had any sons, then wrote Six Degrees of Separation, a play inspired by the events.
It was a critically acclaimed triumph on its Broadway debut in 1990 and ran for 485 performances. The London premiere of Six Degrees of Separation took place in 1992 and won the Olivier award for play of the year in 1993. Will Smith, Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing starred in a film adaptation that year.
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Six Degrees popularised the notion that all of humanity is socially linked at a distance of no more than six people. “I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people,” as one of Guare’s characters says in the play. “The president of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names.”
Inger Abrahamsen was born in Oslo in 1933, to David, a noted Jewish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author, and Lova (née Katz), a stay-at-home mother. In 1940 David fled Nazi-occupied Norway for the UK, then the United States. Lova, Inger and her sister, Anne-Marie, joined him the following year, escaping to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway and reaching the US via Japan.
Inger earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Cornell University in New York state then a master’s in history from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. After a short spell as a teacher she became a photojournalist and in 1960 married Robert McCabe, a budding foreign correspondent, after they met on a ski trip. With no guarantee of work they moved to Hong Kong, where she covered the Vietnam War, on one assignment taking photographs from a helicopter while heavily pregnant with her son, Alec.
The McCabes adopted two Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, brothers named Bing and Pui Wong. Bing, a financial adviser, survives her along with her three children with McCabe: a son, Alec, a journalist, and two daughters, Marit, an independent consultant, and Kari, an interior designer. The union ended in divorce and she married Elliott in 1973. She is also survived by her sister and three stepdaughters, Diana, a psychotherapist, Cynthia, former president of a cultural centre in New York, and Dorinda, a journalist and China studies specialist.
She worked for magazines including Life and Vogue and shot images of Hollywood stars including Marlon Brando, Ingrid Bergman, Steve McQueen and Peter O’Toole, whom she persuaded to act as godfather — albeit an absentee one — to her son, Alec. Back in New York, she became a fashion and fabric designer in the early Seventies. Relishing the chance to work with vibrant colours after years of black-and-white photography, she founded a textile import and design business, China Seas, specialising in batik cloth decorations, an Indonesian wax dyeing method about which she wrote books.
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McCabe Elliott donated more than 700 batik pieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her Manhattan apartment and summer home, a converted Baptist church in Connecticut, were strikingly decorated in hues such as orange and purple and filled with Asian art and furniture. She also directed monthly art discussions at Sotheby’s in New York.
Hampton’s schemes soon made the press. “Conning to Dinner: ‘Poitier’s Son’ Tricks New York’s Upper Crust” read a Washington Post headline. “He described the inside of Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment, which I’ve been in,” McCabe Elliott told the newspaper. “He knew where John Kennedy Jr lived. He talked of Nina and Lenny Bernstein.”
He read one of the stories and telephoned McCabe Elliott, who had been in touch with detectives. She agreed to meet him outside a cinema in Greenwich Village but when she arrived he had already been arrested. Hampton pleaded guilty to attempted burglary and served 21 months in prison.
The success of the play infuriated him. Insisting he deserved payment for the use of his life story, Hampton filed an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding $100 million in damages. He made death threats against Guare and was ordered by a judge to stay away from the playwright. Suffering from Aids, Hampton died aged 39 in 2003.
Initially wary of all the attention, McCabe Elliott “came to embrace” her role in the genesis of Six Degrees, said her son, Alec. “It was big news and she played a big part in that saga,” he said. The impeccably connected McCabe Elliott ultimately managed to reach Sidney Poitier in California. “He was terribly nice about it,” she said.
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Inger McCabe Elliott, designer and photojournalist, was born on February 23, 1933. She died of a cardiac arrest on January 29, 2024, aged 90