Shankar Vedantam

He was a born salesman.

He once boasted that he could have started his own religion.

Your hair is red, your eyes are blue.

I swapped my horse and dog for you.

Riley was also a hustler in his personal life, where the consequences of his actions were more serious.

Marion Kiminick knows this well.

She was adopted at birth.

As an adult, she searched for and found her biological mother.

From her, Marion learned that her father was Riley Shepard.

Marion's mother had met him while working as an actress in Chicago.

She got pregnant.

That, she told Marion, wasn't supposed to happen.

He told her he was sterile.

And from what I understand, he told every woman he was with that he was sterile.

By then, Riley had picked up and moved on to the West Coast.

Guilty hearts, oh, guilty hearts.

He first went to Oregon and then to California.

He told Kevin he gave up the music business so he could turn his attention to a new project, an encyclopedia of folk music.

But Kevin thinks years of lying and cheating and breaking contracts had simply caught up with him.

It's perhaps fitting that the place Riley landed for the next chapter of his life was Hollywood.