Essay: Of Rumor, Myth and a Beatle

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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 . . .