Someone drove me back to the Chronicle, where it was past deadline. The next day I got busy writing an indignant article. But one of the editors killed my story.

Questions, he said, had arisen about whether the man really was Warhol.

On Oct. 4, two days after the lecture, my photo ran on the front page with the headline, "Warhol Flops, 'Fans' Demand Refund." Because of dissatisfaction with the performance, Paul Cracroft of the U.'s Lectures and Concerts Division withheld Warhol's $1,000 speaker's fee.

Almost four months later an art student, Dick Livingstone, wrote a letter to the editor and brought in a recent photograph of Andy Warhol from the Village Voice, a newspaper in New York City. My picture and the Voice's did not seem to show the same man.

A freshman reporter on the Chrony staff, Angelyn Nelson — today Angelyn Hutchinson, an assistant managing editor at the Deseret Morning News — helped launch an investigation. A Chrony story pointed out differences in the facial features.

Nelson and Kay Israel, assistant editor, pursued the hoax with innumerable telephone calls, tracking Warhol lectures at other universities, attempting to contact Warhol and his manager. They went after the story relentlessly.

After their start, other student papers and a daily in Eugene, Ore., jumped on the story. Finally, on Feb. 7, 1968, a confession emerged.

Warhol had sent a young actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on the lecture tour to the University of Utah, Linfield College in Oregon, the University of Oregon and Montana State University. The U. never paid the lecture fee, and Cracroft declined to invite the real Warhol to Utah.

A Chronicle article by Israel and Nelson, dated Feb. 9, 1968, describes how the hoax was unmasked. This segment refers to the University of Oregon student paper, the Daily Emerald, and its editor, Mike Fancher:

"When asked what was responsible for the actions taken by the Daily Emerald, Fancher relied, 'Well, we picked it up from you. ... It turned out that the local paper (The Eugene Register-Guard) called whoever it was in New York and talked to him.'"

Hutchinson recently said that even after having written or edited thousands of articles since her freshman year at the U., the Warhol investigation is still memorable.

The hoax became big news nationally, and it has since been part of the Warhol mystique analyzed in academic papers by art experts.

As for me, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth — until recently.

The Chronicle reprinted my photo several times in '67 and '68, but as far as I know, only the first time, Oct. 4, 1967, had my credit line. When the hoax was exposed, a national news magazine ran the picture but credited only the Chronicle.