Inger McCabe Elliott, a photographer and designer who, with her husband, was tricked into their Manhattan home by a 19-year-old posing as Sidney Poitier’s son—an incident that helped inspire John Guare to write his famous work “Six Degrees of Separation” — died on January 29 at her home in Manhattan. It was 90.
Her son, Alec McCabe, confirmed the death.
It was a strange New York story.
In early October 1983, Mrs. Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, a former Newsweek editor who was then dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, received a phone call from a young man who introduced himself as David Poitier. .
He said he was a friend of Ms Elliott’s daughter, Kari McCabe, and that thieves had stolen his money and a term paper he had written about the criminal justice system. He needed a place to stay, he said, until his father arrived in Manhattan the next day to direct scenes for the film version of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls.” (Mr. Poitier had six daughters but no sons and had no involvement in “Dreamgirls.”)
Fascinated, the Elliotts invited the young man — his real name was David Hampton, they later learned — to spend the night at their East Side apartment and gave him $50 and some clothes. He asked Mrs. Elliott to wake him up early the next morning to go jogging.
The Elliotts were unable to reach Kari McCabe that night to confirm Mr Hampton’s claim that they were friends. (She had no idea who he was, they found out later.)
The next morning, Mrs. Elliott found Mr. Hampton in bed with a man she had smuggled into the apartment.
“David rolls around, points at the man and says, ‘That’s Malcolm Forbes’ nephew who was locked out of his house,'” Alec McCabe said in a telephone interview, recalling the story his mother had told him. and his stepfather. who was known as Oz. “Oz threw him out of his neck – and asked to borrow $50 to buy flowers for Inger.”
Shocked by the episode, Ms. Elliott called her lawyer, Lea Iselin, whose husband, John Jay Iselin, was president of New York’s public broadcaster Channel 13.
“He said to Lea, ‘The craziest thing just happened,’ and Lea said, ‘I think he was at our house the other night,'” Kari McCabe said by phone.
The Iselins had also let Mr. Hampton stay overnight in their apartment and gave him money. Mr. Iselin’s suspicions about the young man grew when he could not confirm his story that Sidney Poitier would be staying at the Pierre Hotel and filming outside the Plaza. He told Mr. Hampton to leave.
Mr. Hampton had apparently found the names of the Elliotts and the Iselins in an address book he had stolen from a student at Connecticut College. the student had attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, with some of the children of the Elliotts and Iselins.
Mr. Hampton was arrested on October 18, 1983, and charged with burglary and criminal impersonation in the incidents involving the Elliotts, the Iselins and other prominent New Yorkers. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, attempted burglary, and served 21 months in prison.
By then, Mr. Guare had been friends with Ms. Elliott for about a decade. The Eliots told him of Mr. Hampton’s fraud immediately after the incident, when they were all in England.
“He called me and said, ‘We just got to London and we have a story for you,'” Mr. Guare said in a telephone interview. “Meet us tonight and we’ll tell you all.”
They met at dusk in the garden of the home of British editor Simon Jenkins and his wife, actress Gayle Hunnicutt.
“The story started at dusk,” Mr. Guare recalls, “and we could hear their voices in the dark.”
The thread didn’t prompt Mr. Guare to start writing “Six Degrees” right away. six years passed before he returned to history.
“When I came back to it, there were a lot of stories about him,” Mr. Guare said, referring to Mr. Hampton, “and I heard it had happened to other people.”
The play opened in 1990, first Off Broadway at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and several months later on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, both at Lincoln Center.
Inger Abrahamsen was born on February 23, 1933 in Oslo. Her father, David, who came from a prominent Jewish family, was a psychoanalyst. Her mother, Lova (Katz) Abrahamsen, ran the household.
Dr. Abrahamsen fled the Nazis in 1940 and was followed a year later by his wife and their two daughters, Inger and Anne-Marie. They traveled east on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok and then continued on to Japan and the United States.
The family stayed for about a year in Joliet, Ill., where Dr. Abrahamsen had found work in a correctional institution before settling in New York.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in history, Inger earned a master’s degree, also in history, three years later at Radcliffe College. She worked briefly as a Middle School teacher in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. He then changed careers, becoming a photojournalist under the tutelage of photographer Ken Heyman, who was known for his collaboration with anthropologist Margaret Mead on a trip to Bali in 1957.
She moved to Hong Kong in the early 1960s with her first husband, Robert McCabe, a journalist. Her assignments included war coverage in Vietnam – shooting from a helicopter there while eight months pregnant with Alec – as well as visiting sets, working for Vogue, Life, Esquire and Time magazines. In Hong Kong, the McCabes adopted two Chinese refugees, brothers Bing and Pui Wong.
With her magazine winding down, Ms. Elliott turned to fashion design, creating bold patterned skirts that became popular sellers at department stores such as Henri Bendel and Bonwit Teller.
In the early 1970s, he opened a business, China Seas, which imported intricately dyed batik fabrics from Indonesia. She later expanded this into a design company, working with Javanese and Chinese batik artists to develop her own designs. He wrote books on batik, including “Batik: Fabled Cloth of Java” (1984). She sold her company in the early 1990s and donated textiles from her private collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Ms. Elliott designed her wedding dress when she married Mr. Elliott in 1973 — a light blue and white organic creation with an Indonesian batik bodice over a tan Japanese silk sheath.
In addition to her son Alec and daughter Kari, Mrs Elliott has another daughter, Marit McCabe. her son Bing Wong; her stepdaughters, Diana Lidowski and Dorinda and Cynthia Elliott; her sister, Anne-Marie Foltz; 14 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Her marriage to Mr McCabe ended in divorce. Mr Elliott died in 2008, Pui Wong in 2020.
Mr. Guare turned David Hampton’s invasion of Ms. Elliott’s life into a lively social satire that ran on Broadway for 485 performances at the Beaumont. In the play, Paul, the young con artist who claims to be Mr. Poitier’s son, turns the lives of Ouiza and Flan Kittridge and several other people upside down. It’s Ouisa who revels in the idea that it only takes a chain of six people to connect anyone on the planet to anyone else.
“Six Degrees” was nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Play, and won for Jerry Zaks’ direction. In 1993, Mr. Guare made it into a movie, in which Will Smith played Paul and Stockard Channing reprized her role as Ouisa from the Broadway production, earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Mr. Hampton unsuccessfully sued Mr. Guare, the Lincoln Center Theater and other parties for $100 million in damages for using incidents from his life in the play and left death threats on Mr. Guare’s voicemail. Mr. Hampton died in 2003 at age 39 in a small room in an AIDS residence at a New York hospital.
Mr. Guare said that although his play was inspired by Elliott’s experience of being cheated on, Uiza, an East Side hostess, was not based on Ms. Elliott.
“Uiza wasn’t Inger,” he said. “He was the character the play needed.”