Yup. As an early TV show Leave it to Beaver was fertile ground for nonsense. Remember “Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night.”
Wait, there’s an Arkansas preacher pretending to be Elvis and obviously raking in money from his followers? Wouldn’t the lawyers of the Elvis Presley family/estate go down like hawks on this obvious imposter?
Any number of celebrity deaths have been falsely blamed on Covid vaccination.
Sometimes those purportedly killed by the vaccine are alive and well. Comedian Heather McDonald fainted on stage and wound up featured in the trailer to the movie “Died Suddenly”, despite still being of this world.
Football player Damar Hamlin of the Bills notoriously collapsed on the field during a game and was resuscitated. Talk show host and conspiracy theorist Stew Peters (the producer of “Died Suddenly”) insisted that Hamlin had been replaced by a body double.
I don’t know how well she’s known in the US, in Europe at least she’s very famous: there have been rumors for over 50 years about Amanda Lear, model, singer and formerly Salvador Dali muse, that she’s a biological male. Her voice is very deep and she has a very lean body, so this settled the deal for many people. I call bullshit, though I don’t care anyway.
The poor guy has nothing to do with it and continually denies he is Elvis…but, of course, that’s exactly what the real Elvis would say.
Oh, well, that’s even stranger. Only in America…
He’s not The King, he’s a naughty boy!
(if the rumors are to be believed very naughty,)
Dinah Shore was haunted for years by ULs that she had a black baby and/or was part black herself. The latter is fairly easy to debunk since her parents were Orthodox Jews from Russia. The former dies due to lack of anything remotely considered evidence.
Nowadays such lies spread so easily and are hard to stamp out with facts. Back then, even without the Internet, things were nearly as bad. The old “friend of a friend told me” rumor mill was surprisingly powerful.
Old Dope thread.
No doubt there were a lot of similar rumors about the celebs of the day.
This kind of rumor predates modern show business. Sears and Roebuck started printing their faces on the covers of their eponymous catalogs in the 1800s (very technically innovative at the time) because store owners were spreading rumors they were black.
“Three Men and Baby” showed the ghost of a child who committed suicide in the New York apartment. I remember repeatedly pausing the VHS to “show” people.
It was a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson in a soundstage in Toronto.
See also the rumors that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite:
King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) had two endings. In the USA version: Kong won. If you saw it in Japan, Godzilla won.
I remember that from that Ian Thorne orange book we all had in our school libraries. While the USA version added and cut a lot of scenes, the outcome of the battle did not have two versions.
I like to spread the story that Bjork and I made love. Is it true? My goal is to get Bjork and I in the same room and have neither of us know for sure.
I did the same! Now what I really want to know is where did I get that information, because I sure can’t remember, and it was very much pre-internet (for me, at least).
I recall a story (my cousin’s wife’s friend’s daughter worked in the ER, I swear it’s true) about Richard Gere and a gerbil…
Yeah these kind of rumors were a fixture of my (pre-social media) teenage years, along with the other “Celebrity X was secretly rushed to hospital to have their stomach pumped and was later discovered to have N different people’s semen in their stomach”. In retrospect I am amazed that was plausible even to a virgin hetrosexual teenager. I mean even 15 year old me know semen was non-toxic. No matter how big a number N is, would it really produce too much volume for a human stomach to handle? Why would they test the semen anyway?
The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz has a whole host of rumors associated with it, including the image of an actor who played a Munchkin who committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the background. The facts about this incident are sort of lost in a maelstrom of other rumors about the production. The official story is that a large crane (bird) was loose on the set and that’s all that is seen. Books have been written about the rumors and legends associated with that film, including an alleged little person orgy.
Oh my God, I remember this one too, it was said of Billy Idol (of all people) when I was in high school. It’s a pretty preposterous idea, isn’t it?
(Spoilered for vulgarity): It’s conceivable somebody could pull SUCH a long train that their stomach filled up with cum, and more power to them if that’s their thing. But long before you got to the stomach-rupture stage or whatever (semen’s not toxic), wouldn’t you just barf it up? It’s not like accidentally swallowing too much Seconal or something.
Actual Showbiz Conspiracies
Studio heads hid the fact that Rock Hudson was gay for decades.
A studio exec was less successful in hiding the fact that Milli Vanilli weren’t the singers of their albums.
And let’s not forget the infamous scream that can be heard on the Ohio Players’ track “Love Rollercoaster.” Rumor had it that a woman was being murdered while the band was recording. But Wikipedia quotes drummer Jimmy “Diamond” Williams:
There is a part in the song where there’s a breakdown. It’s guitars and it’s right before the second verse and Billy Beck does one of those inhaling-type screeches like Minnie Riperton did to reach her high note or Mariah Carey does to go octaves above. The DJ made this crack and it swept the country. People were asking us, “Did you kill this girl in the studio?” The band took a vow of silence because you sell more records that way.