EVERYONE HAS A DOUBLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 46, 23 February 1929, Page 10

EVERYONE HAS A DOUBLE.

SIMILARITY SKIN DEEP.

GENE TUNNEY AND BEETHOVEN.

Everyone has a double somewhere in the world. The'marked similarity, however, is invariably skin dec-p. Many reigning monarehs and presidents have used doubles to advantage. It is authoritatively stated that King Alfonso of Spain employed a double to appear for him in his younger days at numerous public ceremonials at Madrid. It is believed to have been for that reason that an assassin attempted to blow up the bridal carriage, for he knew that the King could not very well get married by proxy. Count d'lstria, first president of the new Greek Republic in 1828, hired a peasant who was his living image to drive through the streets in the State carriage. A few months later the map was murdered in the carriage. Another double shared the same fateA Then no one could be found to take the job under any consideration, and finally the jwunt himself succumbed to an assassin.

President Roosevelt hal a very unusual face, yet ho had two doubles— Senator Mangus Johnson and Frank Hopper, the actor. A New York man named Fleming was refused a life insurance policy during the war because he looked so much like President Wilson. Even the typically Coolidge countenance has its replica in that of Charles Holz, a Philadelphia waiter. Indeed the resemblance is so marked that Holz has been asked to take the part of the President in a motion picture. An actor who took the part of Lincoln in a play some years back was a double of the Great Emancipator. Impressed by his own impersonation he began to delude himself with tho idea that lie actually was Lincoln. He grew a full beard, he assumed tho Lincolnian mannerisms of dress, gait, speech and personal habits, and, in time, he seemed to believe that his appearance ought to have been greeted with the respect due so important a personage. So painstakingly did lie imitate Lincoln that a cynical friend finally remarked, "That actor will never be satisfied until someone assassinates him." The most recent discovery in doubles is that Gene Tunney, the world's champion boxer, is a double for Beethoven. .

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