How many times have you hoped to have a chance meeting like this one?
While traveling on a highway, a driver spots a person whose car is pulled over by the side of the road and stops to help. The stranded motorist turns out to be a celebrity. Grateful for the help, the celebrity later buys the Good Samaritan a new car as a thank-you gift.
In the most common version of this legend, the driver stops to help a woman stranded on the shoulder of a Los Angeles freeway. The woman turns out to be Mrs. Nat King Cole, who later sends the driver a new car—a Cadillac, a Lincoln, or even a Rolls-Royce.
Another celebrity whose car is always breaking down, in legends at least, is Perry Como. One report of Como’s car troubles comes from Toronto, where a stranger allegedly changed a flat tire for the crooner and received a set of car keys in the mail a few days later. And I’ve collected accounts of other Como breakdowns on highways all over the United States.
In one, it’s Como’s wife who winds up stranded on a highway in Georgia while on her way to join her husband at an engagement in Florida. She sends the helpful driver a color TV or tickets to an upcoming concert.
A reader in Ann Arbor, Michigan, heard, while living in Minneapolis in the 1960s, that someone driving there late at night stopped to help a stranded motorist and later received a TV set from a grateful Louis Armstrong.
And a reader in Des Moines, Iowa, heard one about a truck driver in Nebraska who helped two women change a flat tire on a brand-new Cadillac. The driver politely refused any payment, even after one of the women
identified
herself as Mrs. Leon Spinks. She later sent him two tickets for her husband’s upcoming fight in New Orleans.
All these variations ought to convince you that “The Celebrity’s Car Breakdown” is an urban legend. Even if it resembles real life—Elvis Presley, for instance, was known to give new Cadillacs to strangers—such an incident hardly could have happened to all these celebrities, in all these places.
This legend may also borrow from the popular “Elevator Incident” story in which a sports or entertainment star—usually black—pays for someone’s meal or hotel room in apology for giving her a fright when he enters an elevator with his dog.
The most detailed account of a roadside brush with fame comes from T.S. of Fairbanks, Alaska, who heard this story a decade ago in Butte, Montana. This time it’s the celebrity who renders the aid:
“Sometime in early 1978 I was hitchhiking near Butte when I received a ride from a man in a large black American car,” T.S. remembers. “The conversation got around to [motorcycle daredevil] Evel Knievel, a Butte boy.
“The man claimed that one day he had had a flat tire on a back road near Butte. Lacking a spare, he had been at a loss as to what to do next—until Knievel miraculously appeared on his motorcycle and offered to help.
“Around Butte, this guy told me, Evel was a sort of Robin Hood figure. He was a real hell-raiser, but also a protector of those in a jam.
“Evel told the driver to wait for him, saying he would be back soon. Sure enough, some time later he returned with a shiny wheel and tire to match those on the car. Tossing them onto the ground, Evel wished the driver good luck and roared off down the road.”
This one nicely updates the Old West tradition of the mysterious stranger who comes out of nowhere to the
rescue, then rides off into the sunset. But how did Knievel find matching parts?
“He had cruised around until he found the car he needed, then swiped the tire and wheel,” T.S. explains. “Since the car he took them from was in town, the inconvenience would be minimal.”
Still, the Evel Knievel story has a few holes in it. Why would the driver of a big car not carry a spare tire? How could Evel manage to jack up a car in town undetected and steal the spare? And if Evel made a habit of helping people in this way, wouldn’t he have alienated the folks around Butte from whom he stole car parts to the same degree that he impressed other folks whom he rescued?
But urban legend plots need not be airtight and logical, merely plausible and entertaining.