How L.A. Was Wowed by the ‘Woo Woo Boy’

The news last month that a 35-year-old elementary school teacher, the daughter of a firebrand conservative former Orange County congressman, had been having sex with a 13-year-old former student and given birth to his child showed the public once again that although it was news, there is nothing new under the sun.

There was a time during World War II when a similar story in Los Angeles even shared space on Page One with Adolf Hitler.

Women were on assembly lines, meat and gas rationing was the daily grumble, and a Japanese invasion of Southern California--by sea or by air--was a common fear. Angelenos needed a diversion, and that’s just what they got, 33 days before D-day.

On May 4, 1944, the story of 14-year-old Ellsworth “Sonny” Wisecarver, who eloped with a 21-year-old mother of two, made front-page headlines. And when, a year later, he unrepentantly ran off with the glamorous 25-year-old mother of two and wife of a much-decorated soldier, Sonny became part of local folklore, the stuff of Bob Hope jokes.

He was labeled an underage seducer of women. The press dubbed him the “Compton Casanova,” the “Love Bandit” and the “L.A. Lothario.” But Life magazine came up with the nickname that stuck: “The Woo Woo Boy, the world’s greatest lover.”

In later years, some called him “America’s first liberated man.” Comedian Alan Sherman, writing satirically about the sexual revolution, said it began with Sonny Wisecarver.

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The lean, lanky teenager--who came in fact from Willowbrook, but that didn’t go with “Casanova” as well as nearby Compton did--wasn’t exactly the passive party suggested by the early headline “Mother of Two Faces Charge of Stealing Neighbor’s Son, 14.”

It was he who had wooed and won Elaine Ludlum, and the two ran off in the car of her live-in boyfriend, James Monfredi. Sonny and Ludlum were married in Arizona, where he presented the preacher with a forged note from his mother purporting that he was of legal age. “Age makes no difference. Sonny acts old for 14. We like the same foods, the same music and everything. We just click, that’s all,” Ludlum later said.

When they found out, Sonny’s working-class parents objected, and one week into the Colorado honeymoon, the marriage was annulled.

Ludlum was legally freed of “malice, fraud or force” charges by a judge and sentenced to three years’ probation. She was ordered to go to a church of her own choosing at least once a month to obtain “moral training.” She was also ordered to repay the county $194.66 for the cost of transporting the couple back from Colorado, where police found them.

Sonny was sent to live with an aunt in Northern California, and ordered to stay away from his former wife. Ludlum said she still loved him, that “his kisses make my heart stand still,” and she’d be waiting for him when he turned 18.

But Sonny soon lost interest in Ludlum and in school, and moved back to L.A., getting a job at a fish cannery. Within 18 months, he was at it again, running off this time with a soldier’s wife named Eleanor Deveny. She, too, had two toddlers and called Sonny “the kind of a guy every girl dreams about but seldom finds.”

The public was more titillated than outraged by Sonny’s romantic prowess, but the authorities were not amused. A judge ruled him incorrigible and sent him to a youth camp. Deveny was sentenced to three years’ probation for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and fined $250. “Your husband still loves you . . . and is willing to forgive and hopes that you can have a chance to atone for your wrongdoings,” said Superior Court Judge Edward R. Brand.

Sonny made big news after the war, too.

“Wisecarver Still at Large,” read the headlines after Sonny escaped in 1946 from youth camp; the screaming news was almost a warning for men to get their wives off the street.

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While Sonny was on the lam, Hollywood producers approached his parents hoping to make a movie about him, with Eddie Albert as Sonny. But the Wisecarvers wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1947, at age 17, as a scofflaw and a busboy at a Las Vegas hotel, Sonny got married again, this time to theater usherette Betty Reber, who, surprisingly to Sonny’s public, was also 17.

After honeymooning for a year in a $40-a-month trailer in Las Vegas, Sonny tired of running from the law and turned himself in. Three months later and after several psychiatric exams, the California Youth Authority released Sonny into the arms of his teenage wife, who would stay with him on and off for 22 years.

The adult Sonny drifted through life, spending time in and out of jail for misdeeds including breaking parole, traffic violations, trespassing and selling pornographic material in a bookstore. He got married for a third time when he was 40 to a woman of 20, who dumped him 12 years later.

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If he had pursued his escapades 30 years later, his movie rights alone would have made him rich. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that his big break came at last, from a novice screenwriting team who bought the rights to his story for $500, plus 7% of whatever they made on the 1987 film “In the Mood,” starring Patrick Dempsey. Sonny made a cameo appearance, playing a mailman who delivered one line when asked what he thought of the Woo Woo Boy. “I think he’s a pervert and quite possibly a Communist too.”

When Sonny showed up to work on the film, he brought his 11-year-old son, Michael, to witness, he said, that a film was being made of his dad’s life.

Everybody on the set described Sonny as modest, a good guy who deserved better than he got. But those weren’t the qualities that had made him irresistible to older women more than half a century ago.

“He’s just the grandest guy I ever met. He doesn’t drink or use profanity, and he has respect for a woman. That’s a combination that’s hard to find these days, you know,” Sonny’s first wife once remarked.