You Must Have Been Misinformed

Captain Renault: “What in Heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?” Rick: “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, where we gull you into submitting personal anecdotes — the more humiliating the better— in exchange for cheap entertainment.

Today, it is going to be about Misconceptions You Have Spread.

This subject is like a broad-spectrum antibiotic: It offers personal healing from a disparate range of delusions — errors of fact large, medium and small. We’re accepting all types so long as they are funny and true.

Small: A good friend of mine, currently in her forties, is something of a know-it-all. If she were a he, she’d qualify as a mansplainer, though not an obnoxious one: It is almost painful for her to reveal truths to the unfortunately unaware. She is a polite pedant.

The fact is, she is widely read, has a phenomenal memory, and is almost always right in a dispute. She just Knows Stuff across a wide range of disciplines. Part of it is that she grew up as the kid sister of a polymath who knew even more. Her smarts are in part a defense mechanism.

One of the truths she publicly dispensed for a long time is that cauliflower is the unripe stage of broccoli, a fascinating little fact that does not happen to be accurate. She doesn’t recall the precise source of this misinformation, though it likely follows from the similar — but actually true — fact that red bell peppers are a mature form of green bell peppers. She has stated the cauliflower thing many, many times, and was shamefaced when she discovered it was bushwah.

Very, very large: I have told this story about myself once before, though in a wholly different context. It is about the decades during which I unintentionally slandered a great man. It will take a little explaining. It is funny. And absolutely mortifying.

Back in the 1980s, I was the editor of Tropic, the Sunday magazine of The Miami Herald. On May 28, 1989, Tropic ran a cover article by Bill Cosford, the Herald's highly talented film critic. In "Confessions of a Movie Critic — a Life in the Dark," Cosford mercilessly pilloried his craft (he awarded his own story just 3 and a half stars, right on the cover). Among the others he took to task were Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who had patented the too-cute-by-half "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" reviewing conceit. Cosford wrote:

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are film critics so famous that they frequently appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and they are the principal reason why people pay attention to movie critics these days. So that’s OK.

They are also the principal reason that people think movie critics are buffoons, which is not so good. . . . The truth is that they're the best movie reviewers on TV. But they dress badly and allow themselves to be cast as celebrity goofballs. . . . Their show has long since stopped being about what makes movies work and what makes them fail in favor of being about their occasional choreographed disputes. For years, the quote blurb, "Two thumbs up!" hung like a gas cloud over movie promotion. As the night follows the day, "Two thumbs up!" was followed, eventually, by "Two big thumbs up!" And recently there appeared the escalation, "Two thumbs WAY up!", which is either a new frontier in praise or an anatomical possibility best left unexplored.

In either case, would YOU shake hands with these guys?

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So, Bill’s story was amusing and touched on an uncomfortable truth — albeit uncharitably.

Not long afterward, as I have giddily recalled many times to friends and colleagues at cocktail parties and other gatherings over the past quarter-century, Tropic received a long letter to the editor from Ebert, trashing Cosford and defending his and Siskel’s oeuvre. It was unbearably pompous. Ebert even bragged about his Pulitzer Prize, which is something no writer should ever do, and I say that as a two-time Pulitzer winner.

(See how bad that sounded? It’s always a mistake.)

The Tropic staff debated what to do with this letter — whether to publish it, at what length and whether to respond to it in print.

Then staff writer Joel Achenbach came up with an idea. He wasn’t serious. During those years at Tropic, intra-office jokes often wound up in print. As the magazine’s top editor, I was also its least mature employee, which is not an ideal corporate situation.

And so, as I recalled, we ran the letter to the editor at considerable length, so readers could grasp how conceited Ebert was.

And then we appended a response from Cosford. (It was actually a response Achenbach had come up with. But Cosford graciously — gleefully — let us print it.) So after Ebert’s long, self-congratulatory letter, this single line appeared:

“Mr. Cosford responds: Are you the bald one or the fat one?”

So there it is. I dined out on this story for decades. After Roger Ebert died on April 4, 2013, I went back into the archives to find that letter. And there it was. Which is when I discovered that I had been casually slandering this magnificent, generous, exhaustively brilliant man for decades.

The letter was every bit as bloated and self-righteous as I remembered it (“Over the years we have been at the forefront of criticism…” and “Cosford probably resents our success and influence…” and so forth). But Ebert hadn’t written it — Siskel had. It was Siskel who referred to Ebert’s Pulitzer, stating that he, Siskel, was envious of it, and theorizing that Cosford was, too.

Auuugh. Bleaarghhh. I finally was able correct this egregious error in print, and apologize for it, if a quarter century and one life too late.

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So that’s your challenge. What have you done? Your slander or misinformed fact can be large or small, personal or not. Have you passed along something wrong about a celeb you never met? That would be fine. I, for example, once concluded that Graig Nettles, the Yankees third baseman whose skills I had deeply admired, was an unrepentant antisemite. I cannot recall where I got this notion, but I definitely spread it, and at least once in print. Untrue. (It was true that Nettles tended to interrupt locker room birthday cake ceremonies by getting naked and sitting on the cake, but that’s a whole different thing of which I approve.)

I am sorry for the Nazi implications, Graig. Heh heh. No real harm done, right? Heh heh. Man, you could really pick it at third base! Heh heh. Gulp.

As always, send your stuff here, to this Orange Stuff Receptacle.

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And finally, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

See you all on Tuesday. It will be wild.

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