Psst!Wait Till You Hear This

By John Leo

Have you heard? There's a Belgian beer that makes you impotent, the Chinese once caught President Nixon pocketing a priceless teacup, and dim-witted ecologists are renting airplanes to drop poisonous snakes on the forests of France.

Dedicated Rumormonger Jean-Noel Kapferer, 38, has heard those spurious stories and some 10,000 other tales. A Parisian academic, Kapferer, in 1984, created the Foundation for the Study of Rumors. His office, not far from the Paris Stock Exchange, runs a 24-hour hotline dedicated to collecting examples of tattle while they are still fresh. "It's very important to hear about them the instant they start," he says. "A rumor is like a fire. You have to be on the spot. Otherwise you find yourself working on hearsay about hearsay."

The rumor mill is a semicovert part of the information media, says Kapferer, who holds an American Ph.D. in social psychology from Northwestern University and teaches at France's School for Advanced Commercial Studies. He believes rumors reveal the desires, fears and obsessions of a society. "They are," he says, "an echo of ourselves."

Kapferer assumes that rumors, which he defines rather woodenly as nonofficial information circulating within a social group, are not just idle tales. Long-lived rumors of snakes or spiders coming out of clumps of bananas or children's teddy bears, he believes, probably have a strong xenophobic component -- fear of Africa, where bananas grow, or Asia, where stuffed animals are made.

Hearsay can bring psychic benefits to speaker and listener alike. A case in point is the false teacup story about President Nixon, which Kapferer says was spread by the official Chinese press. Instead of challenging the President, so the story goes, authorities arranged to have a performing magician pull the cup out of Nixon's briefcase and replace it with a cheap imitation. Kapferer thinks this rumor offered folk wisdom on how to deal with foreigners. "It showed the essential traits of the image the Chinese have of themselves," he explains, "the final victory of the resourceful Chinese over the crafty foreigner, and the ability of the Chinese to know how to act without having anyone lose face." The tale that ecologists were using airplanes to drop vipers into the woods of Perigord (as prey for endangered hawks) expressed provincial contempt for ecologists as impractical outsiders. "No one bothered to ask whether it wouldn't be cheaper to rent a car or truck to release the snakes," says Kapferer, "or whether the snakes would survive a fall from an airplane."

Some stories voice new and realistic fears in coded form. A wild rumor that McDonald's was mixing earthworms into its hamburger meat spread across the U.S. as concern about junk food was rising. "The worm represented, on the one hand, the garbage food," says Kapferer, "and, on the other hand, the internal destruction that comes when you eat it. Far from being an aberration on the part of a bunch of crazies, this rumor was a cry of alarm."

Among the other businesses that have been threatened by rumors are Proctor & Gamble (the notion that the company's moon-and-stars symbol was related to Satanism), a Belgian beer that had to ride out a phony report that it caused impotence, and France's margarine industry, the victim of gossip that the lower-price spread was full of dangerous contaminants. Kapferer thinks French housewives got behind the margarine rumor as an excuse to keep buying butter. One margarine company fought back with an ad slogan describing the story as the "rumor that costs you dearly."

Kapferer says injured parties should be careful about how they fight back, since some rumors seem irrefutable. As an example, he cites Sheila, a celebrated French pop singer. Her delivery of a baby did nothing to dampen rumors that she was a male transvestite.

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris