It's time to clear the air to give the bare facts, as it were - about the "legend" of the bachelor caught in the nude. I discussed this story in one of my earliest columns, and I received a pile of mail that I've never written about until now.
I guess I was too unsettled by the proof provided by readers that what I thought of as purely folklore could also be fact.My lead paragraph in April 1987 referred to Jim Davis, creator of the popular "Garfield" comic strip, who had just (I assumed) retold "a classic urban legend."
I went on about how Davis' strip had modified the familiar story of the man who, after his morning shower, decides to step outside and pick up the newspaper. The door locks behind him, stranding him outside in the nude.
I went on about the folkloric background of "The Nude Bachelor," a story that had been told for some 20 years, both in Europe and the United States, describing the supposed misadventure of a friend of a friend.
Davis had "added to the legend," I thought, with the details of Garfield slamming the door on his owner, Jon, and Jon being partly covered with a towel.
The first problem with this theory was that Davis, when asked about the origin of this strip, responded, "I honestly had never heard the story before." The second problem was that several people sent me firsthand accounts of similar incidents.
One reader in Fort Wayne, Ind., said it had happened to him in zero-degree weather. But was "it" exactly the legend, or merely something similar?
A second reader wrote that he himself was once caught in the nude after starting his shower and stepping out to put his clothes into the laundry basket. A neighbor woman saw him just as he stepped around the corner.
Another man wrote to me about his embarrassing experience in 1971, when he was a senior at the University of Wisconsin. He got locked out after a shower and could find only a small dishtowel for cover while he went down seven floors in an elevator to get the manager with a master key.
The building manager told him that the locked-out-naked routine happened a couple of times a year.
Then a Seattle reader wrote to me telling about the time his mom and one of her friends shared a hotel room the night before starting their trip to Australia. The friend showered and came out nude; next Mom went into the shower.
At that point, the friend wanted a snack from the tray that Mom had placed outside the door. So she opened the door, tried to hold it with her foot and stretched to reach the tray. Of course, she leaned too far, the door slammed shut, and this naked 65-year-old woman was locked out.
She had to wait until her roommate got out of the shower and heard her knocking before she got back in.
I received several other such personal accounts, as well as two versions involving celebrities. One man wrote:
"On `The Jack Paar Show' some time ago Hermione Gingold told the story of how, stark naked, she peeked out into the hallway from her hotel suite and, finding the coast clear, stepped out to pick something up she had dropped. The draft blew the door shut, and it locked her out."
The clincher that proved, for me at least, that incidents like this really occur came when someone pointed out the entry for Dec. 16, 1960, in John Kenneth Galbraith's book "Ambassador's Journal." Sure enough, the nude escapade had also happened to the then "aspiring diplomat," as Galbraith termed himself.
Attempting to return an item left in his room by a visitor who was still waiting for the elevator to arrive, Galbraith, who had undressed for a shower, suddenly found himself "inelegantly and utterly naked in the hall of a sizable hotel."
How did he get out of the jam? Well, very diplomatically. But that part is certainly not a legend, and I don't have space to repeat it here anyway.
Let me just conclude by admitting that "The Nude Bachelor" seems to be just as much fact as folklore, or in Jim Davis' case, it also became a piece of original fiction."Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.
1992 United Feature Syndicate Inc.