And it was owned by Harry Nilsson, who sold it to Pete Townshend for Keith to live in.
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Oh yeah, I remember that!
I thought it was some kind of Hillary Clinton joke.
There was an old UL I heard floated about in junior high school ('81-'84 for me) alternately attached to Elton John, Rod Stewart, David Bowie & Boy George: That the singer in question collapsed onstage, got rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped of an overdose of semen. Then, someone backstage looked in his dressing room refridgerator and found gallons(!) of semen in jars.
And, of course, poor Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. For one thing, the fiddle had not been invented yet. And for another, he was miles away at the time.
Lady Gaga is, depending on the source, a hermaphrodite or a drag queen or a transsexual. Jamie Lee Curtis: also a hermaphrodite.
Either Will Smith or Robert Downey, Jr., (same rumor different subjects) beat his secret gay lover so badly he sent him to the hospital and had to settle a huge amount of money on him.
Same ham sandwich was found by his bed as well.
A Lizzie Borden rumor that appears in many places including several books (including the dreadfully unreliable Wallace/Wallechinsky books) is that she was named in a divorce suit due to her lesbian affair with the man’s wife. While it’s not unlikely she was a lesbian, this seems to have no basis in fact.
The exact events of Jefferson Davis’s capture are disptuted, but best evidence seems to be that he was wearing a raglan (a sort of raincoat) that belonged to his wife and a shawl (which was a unisex item) on his head when captured. He probably was trying to hide his identity, he admitted he was trying to get away, and his wife blurted out “that’s my mother!” which may have led to the “trying to pass as a woman” rumor. Rumors that he was wearing a dress and disguised as a woman are not true.
“Abraham Lincoln was gay” is a rumor that gets repeated a lot. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t, but there’s certainly no strong evidence for it- he shared a bed with a man for four years, but at the time sharing a bed was just the same as being roommates, and later shared a bed with his bodyguard (a man who later married and had 13 kids), which seems a bit less unseemly when you realize what happened when he didn’t have a bodyguard near by.
We heard it about Marc Almond.
The McDonalds funds IRA terrorists myth:
A girl was raped and murdered by a techie when the song ROLLER COASTER was recorded and her screams were left on the album.
Things I remember from the backwards maskingcraze: Olivia Newton John’s LET’S GET PHYSICAL was really “I’ve got demons” and The Doors’ BREAK ON THROUGH claimed “I am Satan” or “We love Satan”.
Another gay rumor (not that there’s anything wrong with being gay): Cary Grant. It’s pretty much just accepted now that he was bisexual or a closeted gay- I even believed it for a long time because it’s in all bio blips- but in fact the only strong evidence he was latently gay was the number of times he was photographed or witnessed not practicing. He was roommates with and then had a lifetime close friendship with Randolph Scott* and that’s about as much hard evidence as you get; his marriages and his affair with Sophia Loren and other women would indicate he was straight. By all accounts he was very weird, but straight.
The most ludicrous of all accounts puts him at Cielo Drive on the night Sharon Tate was murdered having a tryst with the caretaker, a teenaged rentboy he had frequently used since he had lived in the house. In fact the teenager, William Garretson, was not a rentboy and had not lived there when Grant did and says he never once met Cary Grant.
Jim Nabors and Rock Hudson were married. This one began as a Laugh In joke: “If Rock Hudson married Gomer Pyle he’d be Rock Pyle”. In fact other than being at a couple of the same functions over the years they didn’t know each other, but because both had a lot of gay rumors (certainly valid on Rock’s part and probably on Nabors as well) it became gospel.
Jane Fonda most definitely did some shitty things in the '70s- going to Vietnam and posing for propaganda photos and believing everything the VC told her, etc., but the tales of what all she did there are grossly exaggerated. I’ve gotten the story about her taking smuggled messages and handing them to the VC guards after calling the prisoners babykillers more than almost any other urban legend.
Others from history:
Marie Antoinette was not as callous as her “let them eat cake reputation”.
Catherine the Great did not meet her death by horsecrushing.
Caligula may not have been nearly as bad as his reputation. He also never really made his horse a senator or consul- he just threatened to and probably hyperbolically, and while he did declare himself a god it wasn’t that unusual. He was probably a bloody and not great ruler whose reputation got grossly magnified by his biographers. (His uncle and successor Claudius, meanwhile, was not nearly as sweet and innocent as his novel and miniseries based reputation.)
Bruce Ismay’s saving himself on TITANIC was not as cowardly as often reported. He boarded a lifeboat only after all other passengers at that station had boarded and it was being lowered.
*Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda had a lifetime friendship after being roommates as well but there were no such rumors (though I did think when I saw BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN that “if this had been made in 1950 it totally would have starred Stewart and Fonda”).
Well, Grant did manage to sneak in some very obvious (for the time) gay slang and references into Bringing Up Baby that probably wouldn’t have been known outside the gay community (such as it was) at the time.
I never heard that Jamie Lee Curtis was a hermaphrodite…but I have heard it associated with Nicole Kidman. Some elaborate story about someone who knows somebody’s else’s cousin whose friend is a surgeon and went to medical convention where Nicole’s case was examined (with full color slides and all) and everyone was sworn to secrecy under medical confidentiality. :rolleyes:
I also heard that Tom Cruise and John Travolta are devotees to Scientology because they were promised it would cure their gayness. 
And yeah, I am the chick who was over on the Brad and Angelina thread with a gigantic case of verbal diarrhea as to why tabloids are evil. Up until a few years ago I thought that if something appeared in print with quotation marks around it that meant the person being discussed had actually said it. I was wrong. There is no such thing as integrity in journalism anymore, or at least the lines between real journalism and the yellow press is becoming more and more blurred. Besides, the way some of these tabloid lies read, the writer would have to be living in the house with the celebrity in order to have such a blow-by-blow rundown.
I also think the children should be off limits to the covers of supermarket rags. All the speculation about Suri Cruise being father from the frozen sperm of L. Ron Hubbard may be funny for us to snicker over now, but I really do think that kind of stuff is going to be very harmful to an innocent little girl one day when she gets old enough to read and finds out about it.
And popular meteorologist Tony Cavalier from Huntington, WV. I have no idea how that rumor started, but I always heard his name mentioned along with Richard Gere. Funnily enough, I put Tony’s name into the Google search bar, and as soon as I got to “tony cav” the first result to be auto-completed was “tony cavalier gerbil.”
Grant did not write the screenplay, and he hated ad-libbing.
The Mama Cass and ham sandwich was a bit cruel considering that Cass was Jewish and Jews don’t eat ham.
But it does leave open a joke about “How two lives would’ve been saved had Mama Cass just given that ham sandwich to Karen Carpenter.”
She wasn’t kosher though, and there was a ham sandwich in the room, it just didn’t cause her death. By some accounts it had not even been touched. She died of a heart attack brought about by her lifestyle (obesity, smoking, drug use [though I don’t think she had any illegal drugs in her system when she died], busy schedule, etc.).
Apropos of nothing: Mama Cass and Sammy Davis Jr. singing “Rock n’ Roll Music” (sans reference to the Mamas and the Papas).
Speaking of Sammy Davis, Jr., he was rumored to be a Satanist. I think he did do some dilletantish occultism with Anton LaVey but mainly it was a combination of curiosity and wild-side, but I seriously doubt he ever slaughtered a goat or anything like.
Speaking of Anton LaVey: he was a boogie man when I was a kid who headed a satanic empire, had palatial estates and a black jet, was on the 70s equivalent of a speed dial of world leaders and the entertainment elite, etc., and his curse led directly to the decapitation of Jayne Mansfield and his portrayal of Satan in ROSEMARY’S BABY led to the deaths of Sharon Tate and later John Lennon.
It turns out that what he was was a master of self promotion and a pathological liar. His “empire” was a few die hard proto-Goths, his palatial estates consisted of one (1) small old house in San Francisco inherited from his parents and so run down it was condemned after his death, and the Jayne Mansfield business was something he himself started, and he was never anywhere near the set of ROSEMARY’S BABY.
As for evil- there seems to be some evidence there but it’s of a more mundane variety: cruelty to the exotic animals he kept as pets and criminal negligence of his children and grandchildren.
Also, Jayne Mansfield was not decapitated. This was started by an accident scene photograph in which one of her wigs was on the back seat of the car.
Another historical smear campaign: Anne Boleyne had six fingers on one hand and three breasts. More likely she had a bump on her finger and possibly a sixth fingernail (not the whole digit), and a bump somewhere on her body that some called a third nipple (which later became a third breast in the retellings).
Singer/Songwriter Janis Ian claimed, in an article titled “Monumental Mistakes” in Performing Songwriter magazine, to personally having seen Hoover in a dress (PDF) at the gay bath house of which she was part owner:
Mistake # 7
The scenario: A private party at a bathhouse in New York City in the late '70’s.
The players: Myself and several hundred others.
My situation: I’m trying to pass a short, dumpy cross-dresser who’s appeared in front of me and is blocking my way, giggling nervously.
The issue at hand: Whether to smack him or call security.
The discussion: “Who are you and why are you here? This is a private party. How can I talk to you with that boa covering your face? Get out of my way!”
The decision: To avoid this obvious lunatic for the rest of the night, and make a joke of the whole situation with my hosts. Particularly because I own part of the bathhouse.
The result: J. Edgar Hoover, dressed in a beautiful strapless pink evening gown, did not think I was funny.
The consequences: Who knows?
What I’d do now: Ask him for an autographed picture, signed “To Janis, with love”.
My current take: And we thought Clinton was amusing…
Given the rest of the things in her list, and how outrageous some of the others are, and how well established those are, I doubt she’d have any reason to lie about this one.
She wasn’t even Angelina’s private maid. She was an employee of the hotel who sometimes did Angelina’s, or the whole family’s, room as part of her rotation. She was fired last month, and chooses this time to tell her story. Which basically comes down to “Angelina leaves the bathroom in total disarray.” In fact, I think this wave of divorce rumor may have started with her.
Being acquitted doesn’t mean she didn’t do it. So I wouldn’t count it as either misinformation or vicious rumor.
Napoleon was freakishly short !
Marlboro is owned by the Ku Klux Klan, and they embedded racist imagery in their logo ! (check Snopes)
Lewis Carol was a pedophile ! So was Walt Disney !
Washington told one lie in his entire life ! (all right, that one’s not really vicious 
)
The motherlode’s probably the Dreyfus Affair, though.