The story of how four letters on Philip Michael Thomas’s necklace became the entertainment industry’s highest badge of honor is a cautionary tale involving pride, fame, pop-culture folklore, and the Internet. And like the best parables of stardom and naked ambition, it involves an episode of 30 Rock.

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To date, only 12 artists have received full EGOT status: Richard Rodgers (in 1962), Helen Hayes (1977), Rita Moreno (1977), John Gielgud (1991), Audrey Hepburn (1994), Marvin Hamlisch (1995), Jonathan Tunick (1997), Mel Brooks (2001), Mike Nichols (2001), Whoopi Goldberg (2002), Scott Rudin (2012), and Robert Lopez (2014). Only two have won the “triple crown” of three acting awards (Hayes and Moreno). And only two (Rudin and Lopez) achieved EGOT status and realized it at the time, since EGOT didn’t really exist before 2009.

Unless you were Philip Michael Thomas. In the mid-1980s, at the beginning of Miami Vice’s five-season run, Thomas’s EGOT necklace was a frequent object of curiosity for the media. At first, he was open about what it symbolized. In a 1985 Playboy interview conducted alongside his co-star Don Johnson, Thomas discussed how the two actors had bonded before filming began. “We … trained with each other,” he said. “I told Don about my goal, EGOT, which stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony—I want to win or be nominated for each award in the next five years. And he told me about dreams he wanted to develop.”

But toward the end of that year, Thomas began backtracking, notably in an interview with the Miami Herald:

A gold medallion with the letters EGOT is around his neck. He claims it doesn’t stand for the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards he constantly thinks of winning, as reported by the media. “It means Energy, Growth, Opportunity, and Talent. It’s also a character I’ve created. A mythical space character that I’m going to put in one of my videos. He’s an angel of light that comes from outer space. On the way … he passes E.T. going home.” The angel of light eventually descends on the planet, he says, his own cherubic face boyish, open. At one point he says, “I believe in miracles.”

By that point, Miami Vice was a hit. In its second season, it was the ninth most-watched show in America, prompting producers to switch it to a 9 p.m. time slot on Friday, against CBS’s Dallas. The move backfired: Ratings fell, and in its fifth season, the show was cancelled. Thomas appeared in a handful of TV movies, but there were no more mentions of EGOT in interviews. In 2000, the journalist Rob Walker wrote a diary entry for Slate about reading “a 1986 paperback called The Making of Miami Vice,” and being struck by the description of Thomas’s necklace. “Can you imagine?” Walker writes. “Do you think that’s true—he wore a medallion that said EGOT? Does he still have it? I don't think he won any of those awards; in fact I'd be surprised if he was even nominated for any.”