Did you ever hear the J. Edgar Hoover/Vivian Vance story?
It's a gem.
Here, as told by Tim Gunn on Wait Wait from NPR:
http://jezebel.com/5690562/tim-gunn-saw-j-edgar-hoover-cross-dress
I was a big I Love Lucy fan. I still am. And we would, my sister and I would visit dad at the FBI headquarters about once a year and we would have the whole tour. On this one particular day, for the tour, Dad said to us, 'You're going to get the biggest kick out of this. Guess who's in Mr. Hoover's office?' 'Who!' 'Ethel Mertz. Vivian Vance!' 'No! Really?' He says yes — would you like to meet her? And I of course, I would love to meet her. But I was also terrified. So, my sister and I were escorted in, and we met Miss Vance, who was lovely. And I never forgot it. However in the late '80s, when these stories were coming out about Hoover and the cross-dressing, it was actually, apropos of our season, at the Thanksgiving dinner table because the family had assembled and my mother was talking about, oh, this terrible press, and these atrocious stories and how could this be. And I turned to my sister and I said, 'Do you remember the time we visited Mr. Hoover in his office and met Vivian Vance?' And she said yes. And I said, 'You know, it strikes me now as really weird that Mr. Hoover wasn't in the office!' And those of you who know what Hoover looked like — picture J. Edgar Hoover. Picture Ethel Mertz. Picture them side by side.
Gunn went on to say that his publisher, Simon & Schuster, had a legal team that "did their due diligence with this story. They researched the guest logs at the FBI — no Vivian Vance. They talked to Vivian Vance's two biographers. They'd never heard the story. Interesting." The crowd laughed. "I can't prove it — but it was odd."
Enjoy!
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