"The World Is One Big Put-On"

In one of his more memorable stunts, Yippie Abbie Hoffman gleefully showered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange--pour epater le bourgeois, to freak out the straights. Michael James Brody Jr. can work on a grander scale. He began by passing out $25,000 in tips during his honeymoon in Jamaica. Back in New York by way of a 707 jet chartered for $7,066, Brody announced that he had $25 million to give away to anyone who asked.

People believed him, for when he passed his 21st birthday last October, Brody came into an inheritance from his grandfather, John F. Jelke, who became a millionaire producing Good Luck margarine. * Brody came on with a whacked-out messianism, a combination of Terry Southern's Guy Grand in The Magic Christian and Kurt Vonnegut's saintly, alcoholic millionaire in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Brody passed out $100 bills to children in Harlem, laid $500 on a heroin addict. "You want love? You'll get love," he proclaimed. "Money. Cars. If you want my death, you can have that too."

As he frenetically distributed his wealth ($60,000 in one day, by his own accounting), the poor, the greedy, the curious and the con men swarmed to his house in Scarsdale, N.Y., to stand in the 10DEG cold, waiting for handouts. The telephone company finally had to give him a new, unlisted phone number; incoming calls were paralyzing the local switchboard. In Manhattan, Brody rented an office on Broadway as a clearinghouse for his largesse. Ed Sullivan introduced him on television as "the wonderfully generous Michael James Brody," and the lad loosely strummed his guitar and sang a Bob Dylan song.

Destroy or Create. But as rapidly as Brody had cracked into the consciousness of America, the fac,ade began to flake. His bank enigmatically refused to honor Brody's checks "at this time." What was Brody really worth? "I've got a hundred billion," he said. "No, that was yesterday. Maybe I'm worth a trillion today." Actually, Brody inherited only a part of the income on the $6,881,000 estate his grandfather left in 1965. Estimates of Brody's worth range from half a million dollars to as much as $3,000,000 or $4,000,000.

Brody began elevating what had started as grandiose charity to a form of free-associating, hallucinatory good will. "I can cure cancer," he said. "Anyone who believes in me can never die. I need seven days, and I'll save the world." He turned up at the gates of the White House to see the President about his plan to end the war. Then, rather weirdly, he told a television interviewer: "I would suggest that Nixon make me a general in the United States Army and I'll go [to Viet Nam]. I can destroy as well as I can create." He claimed to have 48 missiles with which to destroy the world and threatened to "sell out the New York Stock Exchange and create the greatest depression in the world." As suppliants trailed him around the streets of Manhattan, Brody alternated between hurling four-letter abuse at them and kneeling before them to show his empty wallet.

Freakily Foxy. Many concluded that Brody was either a manic depressive or almost transcendentally zonked on drugs. He boasted of having taken over 400 trips on LSD. Everywhere he went, Brody was accompanied by his 20-year-old bride Renee, a quiet, fey brunette who says she met the heir last December when she was dealing some hashish to a friend of his. On an impulse excursion to Puerto Rico last week, Mike and Renee trailed a cloud of marijuana smoke behind them.

Others claimed that Brody, foxily freaky, was simply promoting a singing career for himself. Indeed, last week he signed a contract for more than $10,000 with RCA Records; as soon as he had cashed the check, he distributed every dollar of it to office workers whom he met in corridors.

The less amusing part of the caper involved the poor who believed that Brody could really offer them some hope. Wrote Columnist Pete Hamill, whose prose sometimes savors of Killarney chicken fat: "The hopes he aroused will be lying around our streets for more than a few seasons, wormy with betrayal, like the carcasses of abandoned dogs." As for Brody, he explained in a bellow to TIME'S Len Levitt: "I'll never be happy as long as there are wars, starving children. I'm just a big put-on. The world is one big put-on.''

-Another Jelke, Brody's Uncle Mickey, enjoyed brief fame in 1955, when he was convicted of running an expensive call-girl service on Manhattan's East Side.

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