No one was out of bounds: With...

No one was out of bounds: With so many scandals involving college athletes, we’re happy to deflate a rumor about the 1927 USC football team. That’s the rumor that the entire starting lineup had sex with actress Clara Bow.

The yarn is mentioned in the book “Hollywood Babylon,� which isn’t known as a model of research excellence. But David Stenn, author of the recent biography “Clara Bow Runnin’ Wild� makes it clear that the It Girl wasn’t that wild.

The 22-year-old Bow, who came to symbolize the flapper era, did phone USC star Morley Drury at his Sigma Chi fraternity house and arrange a date. But Drury told Stenn that neither he nor a frat brother (who was paired with a friend of Bow’s) “got involved in a ‘bedroom scene.’ . . . We were too damn innocent.�

USC players were subsequently invited to several parties at Bow’s Beverly Hills home. (So was an injured former prospect named Marion Morrison--later to become John Wayne.) There was dancing but no liquor, Stenn writes.

At one bash, however, Bow asked Trojan lineman Jesse Hibbs to show her how to tackle and inadvertently “broke his thumb.� Trojan coach Howard Jones then ordered the team “to stay away from Clara Bow ‘individually and collectively.’ �

Not to sound a sour note but . . . Ernani Bernardi’s mayoral bid is just a memory now (he finished 10th). Still, we can’t help but wonder how well the onetime big-band musician would have fared had he taken our suggestion and played his sax on the Arsenio Hall show.

Dueling signs: Actually, Steven Mandell and his daughter Joanna came upon an even rarer variety, a self-dueling sign, at a store in West L.A.

No wonder there were so many candidates!V. Cooper of North Hollywood writes to ask whether the next mayor will “get Mayor Bradley’s frequent-flier miles.�

miscelLAny:

The Friends of the L.A. River will conduct the fourth annual cleanup of the river May 1 from 9 a.m. to noon. Volunteers will gather at six riverbank locations to remove plastic containers and other debris. Volunteers are also warned that, even though it’s the L.A. River, there’s a possibility that they may get their shoes wet.