Essay: Of Rumor, Myth and a Beatle

LONDON AP—Paul McCartney vigorously denied today the rumor that he is alive and well. At a resurrection ceremony held at London’s Highgate Cemetery, the 24-year-old Beatle, who would have been 27 had he lived, emerged from his tomb to insist that he was decapitated in a car accident three years ago.

“This is the sort of thing one doesn’t get over,” he told a crowd estimated by Scotland Yard at 3,500. “If I were really alive, wouldn’t I be the first to admit it?” Amid a chorus of anguished protest from the audience, McCartney re-entered his crypt and was seen to bolt it from the inside.

Despite this brief reincarnation, the rumor persists that McCartney lives, strengthened by the report that a new Beatles movie, in which he appears, will be issued next year.

SILLY as this imaginary news dispatch may seem, it is not much sillier than the rumor, currently sweeping U.S. college campuses, that Paul McCartney is dead. As with most rumors, no one really knows its source. It has been variously traced to a thesis by an Ohio Wesleyan University student, a satirical but deadpan story in the Oct. 14 issue of the University of Michigan Daily, and a Detroit disk jockey who spread much the same nonsense over radio station WKNR. Since the rumor spread, Beatle fans have diligently parsed the albums of their heroes for clues corroborating what they already wanted to believe; of course, they found them, usually in forced interpretations of Beatle lyrics. That is another characteristic of rumor. It does not require—indeed, it commonly rejects—the discipline of reason.

As McCartney proved by appearing at a Glasgow airport last week, he is indisputably alive. But so is the baseless report that he is not. What is more, the rumor is not likely to die before he does; after the event, which could occur 50 or so years from now, the last surviving mongers of this particular rumor will triumphantly crow: “I told you so.” For reasons that go back to the origins of man, the human intellect craves to discover more meaning than facts can supply. What it does not know it will guess at. Airborne by ignorance and insecurity, that supposition will almost always defy the attempts of reason to shoot it down.

Two conditions are essential to the survival of a rumor. One is ambiguity, which can stem from many different sources: a shortage of dependable information, events beyond ordinary understanding. The other condition is man’s dislike of ambiguity in situations that vitally affect him.

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These two conditions are handsomely fulfilled by an age in which not only events but their meaning strain human understanding. Merely to live with the omnipotence of science and technology is enough to send man back to the safe harbor of primitive myth. Just as myth was the predecessor of science and religion, so may rumor have been the precursor of myth. Long before man registered his thoughts on the pages of history, he committed his anxieties and his faith to rumor—that welcome channel of information and misinformation that made sense of senselessness.

In satisfying the human need for reassurance, rumor plays a role that truth not always can. It goes through three distinct stages. In the first, the fact content is reduced, partly because of the porosity of human memory, partly because of man’s inclination to simplify. The Great Blackout of 1965 was a cause of countless rumors; some people immediately assumed that it was the result of a Communist sabotage plot; others believed that it was an unannounced air-raid test by the U.S. Government. In the next stage, the rumormonger accents certain parts of the story that appeal to him. Last year in Washington, D.C., a rumor swept the black ghetto that Soul Singer James Brown had been killed shortly after finishing a concert in the city. As it happened, Brown had simply flown off for another appearance; because of the ugly connotations of the story, Brown was traced to Los Angeles and persuaded to record a statement declaring that he was still alive. In this case, the rumor suited the sentiment of a bitter, riot-prone community better than the truth.

In the third and final stage of a rumor’s life, the information is tailored to suit the vendor’s interests and emotional needs. Those who believe that McCartney is dead, for instance, are in part sublimating their fear of the grave. For whenever death visits another person, it must delay its appointment in Samarra with you. Frequently, the death of a public figure breeds a host of rumors about the supposed deaths of other public figures. Within hours after Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, rumors falsely consigned General George Marshall, Bing Crosby and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to the same end. John Kennedy’s assassination touched off false stories that Lyndon Johnson had immediately succumbed to a heart attack. Conversely, ambiguous evidence of a public figure’s death will almost certainly provoke rumors that he is alive. Some people believe that Hitler is still at large in Argentina or Paraguay; others contend that J.F.K. carries on a vegetable-like existence in a well-guarded private hospital. Long after his death, many of his fans believed that he was alive, but hopelessly disfigured, in a hospital somewhere.

It is almost impossible for people in the public eye to escape from rumors. That paragon of puritanical virtue, Queen Victoria, was thought by some of her contemporaries to be the secret wife of Disraeli or the secret mistress of her Scottish gillie, John Brown. Since rumor sometimes represents vicarious wish fulfillment, certain movie stars have been popularly credited with sexual exploits that defy physical ability.

Politics and government are simply inconceivable without the ubiquitous presence of rumor; it is a fixture of every state polity. In the form of trial balloons, rumors are deliberately lofted to survey popular sentiment. Before Gutenberg, word of mouth constituted man’s principal means for exchanging knowledge, and it would be difficult to prove that modern instruments of communication have improved things much. If legend and myth are solidified rumor, so may be the printed picture and word—secondhand hearsay that is susceptible to the same kind of distortion that rumor undergoes in its journey from one willing ear to the next.

Not even Paul McCartney would claim that the rumor of his death has injured him in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. It has filled the headlines with his name and generated a bull market for the new Beatle album, Abbey Road. Nor is it surprising, really, that such a morbid thought could take root and grow in the public consciousness. The Beatles are a modern and enviable public myth: four young nobodies from Liverpool who, through accident as much as art, caught the public fancy at a moment when there was a need for the society-challenging antihero.

Among other things, the McCartney death story shows that it is impossible for a man to get through life without hearing a lot of rumors, believing some of them and starting or at least embroidering a few himself. It is all so easy. Take, for example, the story that Jackie Onassis has secretly fallen in love with a New York Daily News photographer . . .