The President Flagellates Frogs

After hours of writing and rewriting, I typed the final drafts of the first two rumors on separate three-by-five index cards and handed them proudly to my wife, Wanda Sue, for her reaction.

For the President: The President derives sexual pleasure from the flagellation of frogs, using tiny whips purchased in the North Beach section of San Francisco by special agents of the Secret Service.

For the President's Wife: The President's wife has a small Japanese gentleman living in her hairdo.

"But it isn't true!" Wanda Sue said.

"Of course it isn't true, dear," I said, patiently. "It's all for my dissertation." I was, at that time, a fourth-year graduate student in the School of Communication Arts, University of California at Canoga Park, and my plan was simply to invent two rumors and measure what we called their nonmedia verbal distribution.

"But you just can't go around saying things like that," Wanda Sue insisted. "That's the filthiest thing I ever heard of."

"I didn't say there was anything between the President's wife and the small Japanese gentleman," I said. "He just lives there, quietly."

"Not that one," she said. "The other one. What a disgusting thing to say about the President."

"You mean you don't believe it," I said.

"Well, of course I don't believe it," Wanda Sue said. "Nobody would ever believe anything like that about the President of the United States. It's ridiculous. I mean, how would he explain having all those frogs around? Where would he keep them?"

"He keeps them in the basement," I said, improvising quickly. "Where Calvin (continued on page 132) President Flagellates Frogs (continued from page 123) Coolidge had that secret little film studio for shooting stag movies of his Cabinet."

"Did Calvin Coolidge make stag movies?" she said, suddenly sounding interested.

"Odd that you believe that one so easily," I said, beginning to make a few notes. "You seem to be peculiarly sensitive to the frog participation, for some reason."

She gave me a ferocious look and stomped out of the room.

• • •

In fact, the one potential weakness of the project that had occurred to me was that the rumor about the President might be too easily believed. It had become so routine to speculate about the sex life of whichever President was in office--to the point of explaining foreign policy by a President's supposed exhibitionism or reported impotence--that a rumor had to be fairly bizarre just to capture anybody's attention. Non-media verbal distribution couldn't be measured if people thought a rumor wasn't even worth mentioning. I decided to concoct corollary rumors for those who found the original rumors too commonplace to be noticed.

Corollary for the President: One day, the President's daughter saw a frog in the White House, hopping around in the Rose Garden. The President's daughter was led to believe that if she kissed the frog, the frog would turn into a prince who was also a member of the New York Stock Exchange. She decided to give it a try, but as she was about to kiss the frog, the President burst through the French doors that lead into the Rose Garden from the great oval office and, using the commanding voice he often used to order air strikes, said, "Do not kiss that frog."

"But Daddy," the President's daughter replied. "If I kiss the frog, he will become a prince who is also a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Just what I've been looking for."

"Don't kiss the frog," the President repeated.

"If it's warts you're worried about, they're from toads, not frogs," the President's daughter said.

"I don't want the frog changed from a frog," the President said. "Let's leave it at that."

"But why, Daddy?" the President's daughter asked. "Turning a frog into an aristocrat who is doing well on Wall Street is true to everything you've always believed in."

"A President sometimes bases his decisions on information that is not available to others," the President said.

"You mean the cables, Daddy?" the President's daughter said. "But it just couldn't say anything about frogs in the cables."

The President paused and sighed deeply. "I love that frog," he said, at last. "In my own way."

Corollary for the President's Wife: The President's wife is actually a deaf-mute. All her public statements are really made by the small Japanese gentleman who lives in her hairdo. He is able to approximate a perfectly neutral California accent, a facility he acquired with only six weeks' training, due to the fact that the Japanese can imitate anything.

By chance, the first person I tried to distribute the corollaries to verbally was Wilbur Max Hastings. The most sophisticated student in the School of Communication Arts, Hastings often invited tenured faculty to buffet dinners and was known to be on a first-name basis with three quarters of a rock group and the research assistants of two United States Senators. When I encountered him in the coffee line of the student union, I tried the original rumor first, casually juxtaposing a mention of Presidential frog whipping with an observation that there was something obsessive about American involvement in Southeast Asia.

"Not another one of those theories about how everything goes back to the French policy in Indochina," Hastings said, his voice thick with boredom. "I can't bear another theory about how everything goes back to the French policy in Indochina."

"Not those kinds of frogs," I said. "Real frogs. The President whips them. I thought everybody knew that."

"Oh, those frogs," he said, picking his words carefully. "Well, of course everybody does know that. I was merely saying that trying to explain foreign policy by a little harmless frog whipping seems over-Freudian to me."

"I thought so, too, of course," I said. "Until I happened to hear the other day about an incident in the Rose Garden with a frog and the President's daughter."

Hastings was enchanted by the corollary to the President's rumor, and when I told him how quickly the little Japanese gentleman had picked up his accent, he told me he had it on good authority that the little Japanese gentleman had been transistorized. The very next day, I received my first invitation from Wilbur Max Hastings to a buffet dinner. Wanda Sue refused to go with me. "I'm not going to stand around all evening listening to a lot of locker-room talk," she said.

"Have you heard that one, too?" I said. "About Grover Cleveland in the locker room of the Burning Tree Country Club?"

"Disgusting!" she shouted and marched from the room.

At the buffet dinner, I was amazed to find myself in conversation with Norman Bloomfield, the dean of the School of Communication Arts. Bloomfield, a communications advisor to a giant cereal company and to the Republican National Committee, as well as Milledge Professor of Media, ordinarily spoke to no one below the rank of associate professor.

"Hastings tells me you're quite well informed on the French and the Common Market," said Bloomfield. who had a reputation as an idea man who was often fuzzy on details.

I thought about correcting him and trying out the frog-whipping story again, but somehow at that moment I must have sensed that there was something in store for me more important than the routine academic life of measuring non-media verbal distributions and taking an occasional fling at cereal ads. "Oh, he probably meant the old story about De Gaulle wearing those French height-supplement devices to make him appear taller," I said. "I suppose it's familiar to anyone who has a wide acquaintance on the Continent, such as yourself."

"But wasn't he rather tall to start with?" Bloomfield said.

"Not really," I said, gaining confidence. "If I remember correctly, the general was actually about five foot, six, approximately two inches taller than Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia."

Bloomfield looked impressed. "The Ethiopians are rather shortish," was all he could think to say.

"Well, Selassie, of course, is an Italian," I said, pressing my advantage.

"Haile Selassie! The emperor of Ethiopia! An Italian!"

"In origin," I said. "In origin. Naturally, he is obligated by his position to claim descent from King Solomon, and I don't blame him for that."

"But he led the fight against the Italians," Bloomfield said. "He went to the League of Nations. He was eloquent in denouncing them to the world."

"What better way to hide it?" I said and walked away, triumphant.

• • •

After that first party, I seemed to be invited everywhere. Soon I was in demand even outside the university community. Wanda Sue remained home, sulking. She had taken to calling me Dirty Mouth or, occasionally, Toilet Tongue. One night, I told a visiting English editor that Winston Churchill had smoked cigars only when photographers were present, otherwise preferring a particularly cheap brand of chewing tobacco. The editor said that the Fleet Street crowd had, of course, known that for years. The subject of accents came up that night, as it always does when there's a visitor from England, and everyone listened with respectful attention (concluded on page 186) President Flagellates Frogs (continued from page 132) when I announced that at Groton and St. Paul's School, every entering boy has his jaw broken and wired together at the age of 11, thus accounting for the famed clenched-teeth accent affected by the upper class of the Eastern Seaboard. The ritual, I said, was performed by a special Episcopalian orthopedic surgeon, using a mallet purchased from the same old wood-instrument firm that provides mallets to the Kansas City stockyards for stunning cattle that are about to be slaughtered. In time, I got so I could put forward tantalizing hints that implied I was restraining myself from revealing deeper, dirtier knowledge of the person discussed. "He was a perfectly brilliant Secretary of State, and I've always thought those farm-animal stories were greatly exaggerated," I'd say, and everyone would nod in thoughtful agreement.

I dropped my plans for a doctorate, of course, as soon as the opportunity for a syndicated column presented itself and the television talk-show invitations began to come in. I continue a policy of stating or hinting at outrageous and totally false information about well-known people--never movie stars or other objects of common gossip--and it continues to be assumed that anyone who knows information that revolting must be extraordinarily intimate with The Powerful and The Mighty. Now, of course, not many of the people I mention in my column are better known than I am. Wanda Sue and I have long been parted, which is a shame, but sometimes a wife simply fails to grow with her husband. For a long time, I thought that Wanda Sue was without bitterness; now I'm beginning to wonder. Last week, at the Delegates' Lounge in the United Nations, an ambassador of my acquaintance mentioned to me that they're wearing skirts fuller this year. I passed off the remark as an oversubtle reference to a small item I had invented about the Archbishop of Canterbury concealing a Bren gun under his robes during Christmas Eve and Easter services, when the collections are particularly large at the cathedral. But then, a couple of days later, at my club in Washington, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who likes to joke with his acquaintances about their perversions and their drinking habits told me that my shadow in a miniskirt must set spring back at least 12 weeks. Someone, I have discovered, has been spreading the rumor that I appear in drag every ground-hog day, rain or shine. So far, it hasn't done me much harm; I'm told that some people believe it makes me a more interesting person. What has me worried is what she'll come up with for the corollary.