Inger McCabe Elliott, who rose to fame as a victim of scammers, dies at the age of 90

Inger McCabe Elliott, a photographer and designer who, along with her husband, was scammed in her Manhattan home by a smooth-talking 19-year-old posing as Sidney Poitier's son – an incident that inspired John Guare to write his celebrated play “Six Degrees of Separation” – died Jan. 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.

Her son, Alec McCabe, confirmed the death.

It was a bizarre story from New York.

In early October 1983, Mrs. Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek and then dean of the Columbia University Graduate 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 robbers had stolen his money and a thesis he had written on 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 he was not involved in “Dreamgirls.”)

Charmed, 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 so he could go jogging.

The Elliotts were unable to reach Kari McCabe that evening to confirm Mr Hampton's claim that they were friends. (She had no idea who he was, they later discovered.)

The next morning, Ms. Elliott found Mr. Hampton in bed with a man he had smuggled into the apartment.

“David lazily turns around, points to the man and says, 'This is Malcolm Forbes' cousin who got locked out,'” Alec McCabe said in a telephone interview, recalling the story his mother and stepfather told him. who was commonly known as Oz. “Oz threw him out by the scruff of the neck – and he asked to borrow $50 to buy flowers for Inger.”

Shocked by the event, Ms. Elliott called her attorney, Lea Iselin, whose husband, John Jay Iselin, was the president of the New York public television station Channel 13.

“She said to Lea, 'Something crazy just happened,' and Lea said, 'I think he was at our house the night before,'” Kari McCabe said on the phone.

The Iselins had also let Mr. Hampton stay overnight in their apartment and given him money. Mr. Iselin's suspicions about the young man increased 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 Elliotts' and Iselins' children.

Mr. Hampton was arrested on October 18, 1983 and charged with burglary and criminal impersonation for the incidents involving the Elliotts, the Iselins and other prominent New Yorkers. He eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, attempted a burglary and served 21 months in prison.

By then, Mr. Guare had been friends with Ms. Elliott for about a decade. The Elliotts told him about Mr. Hampton's scam shortly after the incident, when they were all in England.

“She called me and said, 'We just arrived in London and we have a story for you,'” Mr. Guare said in a telephone interview. “'Meet us tonight and we'll tell you everything.'”

They met at dusk in the garden of the home of British editor Simon Jenkins and his wife, actress Gayle Hunnicutt.

“The storytelling began at dusk,” Mr. Guare recalled, “and we listened to their voices in the dark.”

The yarn did not immediately compel Mr. Guare to write “Six Degrees”; it was six years before he returned to the story.

“When I came back to it, there had been a lot of stories about him,” Mr. Guare said, referring to Mr. Hampton, “and I heard it had happened to other people.”

The play premiered in 1990, first on 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, managed the home.

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 Railroad to Vladivostok and then continued to Japan and the United States.

The family stayed in Joliet, Illinois, for about a year, where Dr. Abrahamsen had found work in a prison before settling in New York.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1954 with a bachelor's degree in history, Inger received a master's degree, also in history, from Radcliffe College three years later. She worked briefly as a high school teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts. She then changed careers and became 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 reporting in Vietnam – she photographed there from a helicopter while eight months pregnant with Alec – and visits to film sets, where she worked for Vogue, Life, Esquire and Time magazines. In Hong Kong, the McCabes adopted two Chinese refugees, brothers Bing and Pui Wong.

When her magazine work dried up, Ms. Elliott turned to fashion design, creating skirts with striking patterns that became popular sellers at department stores such as Henri Bendel and Bonwit Teller.

In the early 1970s, she opened a company, China Seas, which imported intricately dyed batik fabrics from Indonesia. She later expanded it into a design company, collaborating with Javanese and Chinese batik artists in developing her own designs. She wrote books about batik, including “Batik: Fabled Cloth of Java” (1984). She sold her company in the early 1990s and donated fabrics from her private collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Mrs. Elliott designed her wedding dress when she married Mr. Elliott in 1973: a light blue and white organdy creation with an Indonesian batik bodice over a casing of light brown Japanese silk.

In addition to her son Alec and daughter Kari, Mrs. Elliott is survived by another daughter, Marit McCabe; her son Bing Wong; her stepdaughters, Diana Lidofsky 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 intrusion into 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 outlaw who claims to be Mr. Poitier's son, turns the lives of Ouisa and Flan Kittredge and several other people upside down. It is Ouisa who relishes the idea that it takes a chain of just 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 direction by Jerry Zaks. In 1993, Mr. Guare made it into a film, in which Will Smith played Paul and Stockard Channing reprized her role as Ouisa from the Broadway production, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Mr. Hampton unsuccessfully sued Mr. Guare, the Lincoln Center Theater and other parties for $100 million in damages for the play's use of incidents from his life, and left death threats on Mr. Guare's answering machine. Mr. Hampton died in 2003 at the age of 39 in a small room he occupied in an AIDS residence at a New York hospital.

Mr. Guare said that while his piece was inspired by the Elliotts' experience of being cheated on, Ouisa, an East Side hostess, was not based on Ms. Elliott.

“Ouisa was not Inger,” he said. “She was the character the play needed.”