Absurd letters could be Jerry Seinfeld's comeback

It might be Jerry Seinfeld's long-rumoured, long-awaited return to the small screen. It sounds as if it could be the sort of thing that a comedian who has spent most of the past four years at home with his wife and 18-month-old daughter, might get up to, just to ward off boredom.

Whatever, whoever, it's got gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson very, very mad, and much of America musing.

Our story starts back in the mid-90s, when a number of American hotel managers, tourist attraction and airline executives began to receive polite letters from customers with odd requests.

The writer might be a prospective guest with special requirements - would it be all right if he dressed as a giant shrimp while gambling on blackjack at the Flamingo Hilton, Las Vegas? Could he travel on a Greyhound bus dressed as a slab of butter, for professional reasons? Or on a Hawaiian airline dressed as a rotting radish?

Sometimes he had lost something on his recent visit. Once it was a Prussian sword that had fallen out of his trousers while he was using the urinals at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago.

He asked the Baseball Hall of Fame if it would like a star player's toenail clippings for display.

Each letter was typed and signed, in spidery writing, by Ted L. Nancy.

The letters are funny not so much for their requests as for the polite, earnest and absurd replies that "Nancy" gets from America's corporates, dedicated to pleasing the customer's every whim.

He told one hotel that he looked identical to Abraham Lincoln, so would it be all right if a special section of the coffee shop was closed off for him to keep curious fans at bay? He was promised "the same respect that has been given to many of our other celebrity guests".

He asked to attend an LA Lakers basketball match wearing trousers with a hole in the back, for medical reasons. Fearing a lawsuit, the Lakers wrote back, "Yes."

When Nancy wrote to the Las Vegas Hilton to ask for tickets to Elvis Presley's concert in September 1996, the hotel replied that would be impossible because Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express was the show that month. Any other possible reasons for Elvis not being in the building were not mentioned.

Many have speculated but no one knows who Nancy is, which has boosted sales of three books containing his letters.

Over the past fortnight, one of Nancy's "victims" has lost his sense of humour: Thompson, the high priest of gonzo journalism. Often portrayed as a man in need of anger-management techniques, Thompson exploded at Nancy's written request for his toenail clippings to be displayed in a Hunter S. Thompson mausoleum he planned to open.

Now, Thompson says, he has been asked to sign a form allowing the letter and his ... err, corrosive correspondence to be used in a Ted Nancy television show.

So who is Ted L. Nancy?

He may be Seinfeld, planning his return to telly with a show based around the letters and their responses. That is Thompson's theory, anyway.

Reporters have tracked Nancy's letters to the return address and found it is a private box in a shopping mall in Thousand Oaks, California. The owner, Rosemary Afara, has told reporters that she has never seen anyone come to collect letters from the box and that a cash payment for its use is left inside it.

Nancy has talked to her on the telephone. "It's the same voice every time, and it doesn't sound like Jerry," she said.

Seinfeld is involved in a forthcoming ABC show - he was spotted at meetings with the television network earlier this year - and he has written introductions to the three books of Nancy letters.

But he has always denied being Nancy. He says he thinks he may have met the man himself when he was watching television at a friend's house and picked up a stack of letters that someone had left on the coffee table.

Realising their comedy potential, he says, he sent them on to his literary agency, but not before reading them to other guests. Everyone laughed except one man, "who just kind of nodded approvingly as each letter was read," he said in an interview. "I guess I didn't realise it at the time, but I am convinced that that man was the real Ted L. Nancy."

The literary agency denies any further knowledge.

ABC is calming down reporters with a statement promising that the forthcoming series would "recreate Mr Nancy's adventures as a compulsive letter-writer who sends seemingly serious, yet totally absurd, requests to corporate honchos [and] celebrities".

- AGENCIES