But Ms. Carpenter would have had to actually EAT that sandwich to benefit from it.
I heard the rumor that Jerry Mathers (Beaver) grew up to Alice Cooper. It seemed to have legs because it was so far-fetched: innocent little Beaver becomes that creepy weirdo. My mother focused on the gender change: she brilliantly asserted that Mathers had been ‘warped’ by the LitB scripts in which he said he didn’t like girls. The miscomprehension, it burns.
Later, I heard the rumor that it was Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell) who grew up to be John Holmes. There was a resemblance, in appearance and voice.
But Alice wasn’t a creepy weirdo.
Of course not, but his image was. This was in the early 1970s, it wasn’t as well known that it was all an act to shock people and get attention. That’s why they called it shock rock.
I think I heard that she gave an interview where she said that the song was actually based on four different individuals, so that if any of them actually thought the song was about them, they were still 75% mistaken. Beatty might have been one of them.
Meta.
I think last year’s eclipse was total in some part of Nova Scotia. I remember wondering if anybody flew their Lear Jet there to see it just for the irony.
That Jeff Goldblum has a poop fetish, and that’s why Geena Davis divorced him.
The theory that in the 1980s, Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue got into a bad car accident, but the band was so big that they had to hire a look alike to replace him on tour. Once Nikki Sixx got better, he took over his old job in Motley Crue again.
Who knows whats true. I don’t think there’s any evidence of it though.
Simon has been cagey over the years about the subject (or, possibly, plural subjects) of the song, but as per Wikipedia:
Vince Neil was definitely in a bad car accident, but he wasn’t replaced by a body double.
Some guy on the internet created a false rumour that Avril Lavigne was replaced by a doppelganger to study the effect of false rumours, but then people started believing it and it became self-perpetuating.
How about Led Zeppelin’s mud shark incident at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle?
It’s been rumored that one of the titular subjects of the song is Mick Jagger, which would be interesting if true, since he sings backup on the song (once you know that, you can never again not hear his voice during the chorus). I wonder, if he was one of the vain ones the song is about, did he agree to sing backup knowing that, or was it kind of a private joke on Simon’s part, having him unknowingly sing backup to a song dissing him?
Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster - I think that’s my favourite. It was the front page of the Sun.
I never believed that she had a torrid affair With Frank Sinatra. Her hair would have broken: his would have fallen off.
And there’s the rumor that the Grateful Dead’s May 8, 1977 Cornell University concert, which has been extensively shared among tape traders, never took place and was, in fact, fabricated by the CIA as part of a mind-control experiment.
I always thought that song was about me.
Kind of hard for it to be “unknowingly”, if he’s so vain that he thinks the song is about him.
You know, that reminds me. I never understood the words of the chorus:
You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
Isn’t the song “about you”? Whoever the “you” is? Like, every single line of it?