DEAR PROFESSOR: My cousin's cousin who works in Fine Women's Wear at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills told me this "true" story last Thanksgiving.
He told me that since Neiman's has a very lenient return policy, many wealthy women put $10,000 dresses on their charge accounts, wear them once, have them dry cleaned, and then return them to the store.Someone at the store told him what happened because of this practice one time before he worked there. After a woman returned a very expensive designer dress, another woman bought the same dress and later broke out in a horrible rash while wearing it.
She went to a dermatologist who said he had to treat her skin for exposure to formaldehyde, and so she sued Neiman's for the doctor's charge.
The store traced the dress to the first woman, who admitted that her mother had wanted to be buried in that dress. But the daughter didn't want to bury such an expensive dress, so she got it back from the mortician after the funeral service and returned it to the store.
The second woman had been exposed to formaldehyde that soaked into the fabric from the corpse.
I thought this was true until my girlfriend told me just the other day that her grandmother wouldn't let her buy dresses from thrift shops because of a woman who had died from formaldehyde in a second-hand dress.
So this hot new story turned out to be at least 60 years old! - L.B., LOS ANGELES
As if Neiman Marcus hasn't had enough trouble as the latest target of the old rip-off cookie-recipe story, now the even older "Poison Dress" legend is plaguing the same store. Poor Neiman's! (If one can call such an upscale store "poor.")
Yes, 60 years is just about right for the history of this story as an urban legend, although its prototypes are much older. Back in the 1940s and '50s several folklore journals described a rash of reports, so to speak, of a very similar story.
The tales were especially rampant in the Midwest where expensive department stores in Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and St. Louis were often named as the scene of the scam.
The dangerous fluid that soaked into the dress, however, was most often said to be embalming fluid, leading some folklorists to refer to the story as "Embalmed Alive" or "Dressed to Kill."
Actually, formaldehyde, as I remember well from high-school biology classes, stinks to high heaven; you'd definitely know if you donned a garment soaked with it. Besides, it isn't used for embalming.
As for the threat of real embalming fluid, I once heard from a journalist who had asked a mortician about this point in the story. The mortician opened a bottle of the fluid and splashed some over his own face, saying, "Does this answer your question?"
As for the fatal-garment theme, it's found at least twice in ancient Greek literature. In one myth Hercules is killed when he puts on a shirt given to him by his jealous wife. She had steeped the shirt in the potent blood of a centaur, and the garment horribly burned Hercules' flesh.
Or, for another gory scene of domestic violence, check out the witch Medea's revenge against her former husband's new wife in Euripides' play "Medea." The rejected wife sends the younger woman a cursed robe that causes her excruciating pain as it burns her to death the first time she wears it.
One translation describes how the doomed bride's mouth foamed, her eyeballs rolled back in their sockets, and her face went pale as "from her bones the flesh kept peeling off beneath the gnawing of those secret drugs, a fearsome sight to see."
They don't write 'em like that anymore, and I'll bet the folks at Neiman's are glad.- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.
1992 United Feature Syndicate Inc.