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The Great Ice-Cream-Cone-Caper of 1986 was an embarrassing example of news reporting gone awry when confronted with an emerging urban legend. As Art Nauman, ombudsman of the Sacramento Bee , wrote in September, “Just when you think journalism has reached a state of perfection, along comes an episode like this to restore your faith.”

For a few months that year, the story was everywhere, including local and national newspapers, the wire services, magazines, network television, and radio talk shows coast to coast. A UPI story, circulated on September 12, rightly characterized it as “in the class with contemporary myths like The Vanishing Hitchhiker.”

In case you stayed home that summer with the plug pulled on your TV and all the papers canceled, here’s how the cone caper went. Either Paul Newman in Wes-port, Connecticut (or Jack Nicholson in Cohasset, Massachusets, or Robert Redford in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or even Tom Brokaw somewhere else), is in a local ice cream store. A woman comes in and recognizes the star. She is on the verge of swooning with ecstasy, but she is determined to remain calm and not disgrace herself or invade the star’s privacy. So she buys a cone and departs without saying anything, but outside the store she realizes that, while she has her change, she’s missing her ice-cream cone. She goes back in to claim what is rightly hers, whereupon the celebrity—licking his own cone—comments, “You’ll find it in your purse, ma’am—right where you put it.”

Some journalists made unsuccessful attempts to check the story out with Paul Newman himself (who, by the way, does live in Westport). Others approached Robert Redford, who was in fact filming a movie in Santa Fe at the time, or Jack Nicholson, who had recently filmed in Cohasset. These grains of truth made the story seem plausible to some, but I recognized at once that it was too good—and had too many variations—to be true.

Yet also, as Steven Slosberg of the New London (Connecticut) Day commented, it was a story “too good not to share.” Numerous papers ran the story, analyzed it (and retracted it), but obviously at the same time enjoyed it tremendously. Headline writers had fun with the story, dreaming up phrases about putting the episode on ice, scooping the competition, providing more poop on the scoop, following a melting story, keeping one’s cool, and so forth.

Even the mentioned celebrities eventually got into the act as transmitters of the ice-cream-cone caper, with Nicholson slyly saying that perhaps it had, indeed, happened to him sometime that summer, and Newman being quoted in USA Today saying that he felt like suing Nicholson and Redford because the tale was his false story of the summer.

Most people tell such stories as having happened to a friend of a friend (a FOAF, for short). And most of them do, indeed, believe the tale to be true; after all, someone else told them it happened to a FOAF, and so they pass it on, giving a FOAF as the source, as does the next person, and so on. That elusive “friend of a friend,” the ultimate source of the story, always seems to be just a few storytellers back. But if you try to trace it, the trail usually just keeps going and going …. until it’s gone.

A few facts eventually came out showing how the ice cream-cone caper got into print, though its origin as an oral tale remained hidden.

Hartford (Connecticut) Courant reader representative Henry McNulty found the earliest printed version of the ice-cream-cone story in the Greenwich (Connecticut) News in a June 5, 1986, column mentioning the star as being Paul Newman. The story was written by columnist Jerry Dumas, who heard it from his wife, who heard it from another woman, to whom it supposedly happened. But when Dumas went to check it out, it turned out that the woman actually had heard it from another woman, who heard it from a minister, who heard it from …. Well, Dumas never was able to get back to the original source.

In USA Today , a reporter is mentioned who heard it at a party from a businessman, who “heard it from a broker, who heard it from a client, whose secretary was supposedly the lady in question.”

The Boston Business Journal described another reporter who got it from his wife, who got it from a friend, who got it from a minister. And a journalist from St. Louis told me she knew a source who had heard it told at choir practice and was indignant to learn that the story was probably not true.

In late August, Hollywood columnist Marilyn Beck gave national publicity to the Jack Nicholson version. By October, oral transmission had returned the story to California, except that by then it was said to be either Redford in Beverly Hills or Newman and Joanne Woodward (his wife) in a Hollywood ice-cream store.

The Los Angeles Times , in an editorial published on September 15 headlined “The Stuff of Legends,” invoked yours truly as an urban-legend expert and concluded, “Sounds tailor-made for his collection.”

I shall restrain myself from drawing from the ice cream-cone caper any ponderous lessons about the gullibility or deviousness of the press (or, perhaps, press agents). Nor shall I offer a Freudian interpretation of the story, even though at least one other columnist did so (“The cone and purse take on a little obvious symbolism”). Could be, could be. I won’t deny it.

However, our star-oriented culture eats up stories like this precisely because they address something that so many of us think about: “Oh, my god! What would I do if I met Paul Newman?” (or Madonna, or Robert Redford, or whomever). The very foolishness of the people in these stories constitutes their appeal. We’re so relieved that we weren’t personally involved, we remember the story and repeat it, putting the onus of star-struck idiocy on someone else. It’s a neat catharsis for our own petty fears.

This all confirms the conclusion of the aforementioned Los Angeles Times editorial, that such stories are “just plausible enough to assume a life of their own, even though they are not true.”