Rumors

As she stared into the book she was reading, my wife’s eyelids began to droop. I figured it was time to give her a break.

“Say, have you heard the rumor about that guy on the Chiefs, Tony Gonzalez? He’s demanding an extra locker next to his, so he can store his hundreds and hundreds of comic books. The Archies. Richie Rich. Superman. Even Prez.”

“Prez?” she asked from the recliner.

It was about a 16-year-old Commander-in-Chief and his with-it administration. Somehow, the frizzy-haired, leftist teen won enough states in the Deep South to get elected. I think he came out in favor of executing atheists. Anyway, Gonzalez likes to read these comic books at halftime, to relieve stress, I told her. Because of this, there aren’t enough lockers, so the punter has to dress in the men’s room.

“I have not heard that,” she said.

“That’s because it’s not true. It’s just a rumor I tried to start last season, to see if it would catch on. But it didn’t catch on.”

“That’s a fairly dull rumor,” she said. “I can see why it bombed.”

I said it was no less dull than the Paul Newman story. In 1990, Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, spent several months in Kansas City filming “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” A rumor spread that when Newman visited a Baskin-Robbins on the Country Club Plaza, one woman was so discombobulated by his presence that she shoved her ice cream cone into her purse. I’d heard it from no fewer than five sources, all of them vouching for its validity.

There seems to be no logical basis for the success of a rumor. One can thrive despite being crummy, as the Newman tale proves, or one can deserve its notoriety. When I was in the third grade, the word on the playground was that a newborn baby had recently proclaimed the world would end on May 5th. A moment later, this infant croaked. It turns out everyone had heard this one, including my wife, who at the time was in kindergarten in Iowa City.

“It was scary and lurid and easy to picture,” she said. “Of course it’d catch on.”

To counter this claim, I told her how my friend who lived in another part of town was party to an equally lurid rumor back then—that our CBS affiliate would convert to an all-nude format. But I had never heard hide nor hair of it. If ever a rumor should stretch from one corner of town to another, it would be that.

She disagreed. She said it was too unbelievable to have legs. Even foolish kids would see through it. Not even Prez would rubber stamp something like that, she said.

I assured her that this kid believed it and was rather shaken by it. He didn’t want to look at a lot of naked people on “The Bill Cosby Show.” But, fortunately, this was in late April, and he was relieved to know that May 5th was just around the corner.