Gossip (12 page)

Suddenly in the gossip paragraphs of the racier English press lesbian relations were hinted at, as were ill-timed pregnancies and intemperate drinking and bad debts. The human-interest story began to suffuse newspapers, and what could be more human than the private lives, with a heavy emphasis on their miscreant behavior, of the rich and famous. Judgment was implicit in all personal gossip. Gossip writers ultimately set themselves up as judges of character. In the 1930s, the English critic Cyril Connolly would refer to "the gossip-writers who play Jesus for twenty-five pounds a week," but such writers got their start a full century earlier.

In America, the first gossip columnist was Benjamin Franklin, who under the heading "Busy-Body" in his own newspaper ran whatever items he could dig up about the foibles of folk in Philadelphia and beyond. "As most people delight in censure, when they are not the objects of it," he wrote, "if any are offended by my publicity exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of their good friends and neighbors in the same circumstances." Rather boastful talk, this, and as it turned out, Franklin failed to deliver on his promise, and his gossip column soon petered out.

In the realm of public gossip, America had over Britain the advantage, as mentioned earlier, of more lenient libel laws. Truth was a defense against libel in America, which means that if the person committing the libel believed the libelous statement to be true, he could mount a defense against litigation; if a person who felt himself libeled could prove that what was said about him, in print or (later) over radio or television, was untrue, he would win a lawsuit, with appropriate fines and punishment to follow. In England, a plaintiff feeling he had been libeled need not prove that what was said about him was untrue but prove only that the libel had damaged his professional, business, or family life to cause him to win damages. In England, therefore, you can tell the truth about someone and still be guilty of libel.

Such go-go, given-them-what-they-want American newspaper publishers as James Gordon Bennett of the
New York Herald,
the man who sent Henry Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone, pressed home this advantage by running interviews with celebrities and profiles about their lives at home. Americans who considered themselves well bred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had nothing to do with such stuff. John D. Rockefeller, for example, hired a public relations man, Ivy Lee, whose main job was to keep his name out of the press.

Soon it became evident that the best stories were those that people didn't want out in the open. (Here we return to our earlier definition of gossip as something someone doesn't want known.) The hottest subjects for gossip were those who were most vulnerable—those, that is, with the most to hide. America, however, did not have an aristocracy through whose peepholes gossip columnists might profitably gaze. But it did have an ever-replenishing plutocracy, whose children were notable for marrying badly, drinking incontinently, acting stupid generally. A rising celebrity class, created by newspapers to begin with, came into being. This class increased vastly when, with the aid of newspapers, there was less and less connection between achievement and fame; a celebrity became, in Daniel J. Boorstin's formulation, someone known for his well-knownness. Newspapers, even serious ones, understood that if they were to stay in business they must not only inform but entertain. And not many things were thought more entertaining than gossip about the rich, the wellborn, and the celebrated.

Some gossip writers felt that they were in fact offering moral instruction. A Civil War hero who fought at Gettysburg, Colonel William d'Alton Mann arrived in New York in the late nineteenth century and published a sheet called
Town Topics.
He claimed he printed gossip "for the sake of the country," adding that the people he wrote about were "an element so shallow and unhealthy that it deserves to be derided almost incessantly." Later, Nigel Dempster, an English gossip columnist, remarked about his own discovery and spread of gossip about politicians that they much deserved to be exposed, since they were all "liars, cheats, and fools," a point not easily disputed.

Curiosity about wealth itself became a regular feature of American gossip columns. A columnist named Maury Paul, who wrote under the name Cholly Knickerbocker for William Randolph Hearst's
New York American,
specialized in this realm. He coined the term "café society" to describe those wealthy and celebrated people, chiefly living in New York, who conducted their social lives in the tonier clubs and restaurants of Manhattan. For Paul and other gossip writers, the increase of divorce among the wealthy and celebrated enriched the content of their columns.

In England, many of the people who themselves might once have served as subjects of gossip became purveyors of it. The wellborn Nancy Mitford, daughter of Lord Redesdale, supplied gossip for British newspapers. Later, Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, would do the same. A man named Patrick Balfour, who went to Eton and thence to Oxford, wrote gossip about his contemporaries, the so-called Bright Young Things, who also became the subjects of the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. In America, Igor Cassini, the brother of Jacqueline Kennedy's designer Oleg Cassini, took over the Cholly Knickerbocker column, and through his Kennedy connection had lots of inside dope to peddle to his readers. He coined the phrase "jet set," which became the replacement for café society.

A strange change had meanwhile taken place: people in fast sets, in both England and America, began to crave being gossiped about; their names in the gossip columns reassured them of their own importance, or at least of their own with-it-ness. They befriended the columnists, who had become celebrities in their own right and who found themselves invited to the dinners and parties, to make sure that everyone there received proper mention in the next day's columns.

One of the most successful of the twentieth-century British gossip columns was that written under the pseudonym William Hickey, and one of the most readable scribblers to work under the Hickey name was Tom Driberg. Driberg was uncomplicatedly, even militantly, gay, very left wing, and a spy for the Soviet Union; he may also have been a double agent. The people he wrote about and by and large trashed, the so-called smart set, were fine fodder for his Marxisant
views—look what swinish people capitalism has turned up now—simultaneously amusing and stirring up class hatred in his readers. The only rule he followed was that laid down by his boss, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the
Evening Standard
and
Sunday Express,
in which Driberg's columns appeared. The rule was "All fucking is private," so sex wasn't to be mentioned in the column, which may on balance have been a good thing, since Driberg himself was more than once picked up for propositioning men in public lavatories.

Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the
Daily Mail,
defined the essentially gossipy nature of contemporary news: "what people talked about in kitchen, parlour, drawing room and over the garden wall: namely, other people." In the realm of gossip, England had over the United States the advantage of the royal family and their antics. Various Princes of Wales seemed to specialize in outrageous behavior, beginning with Queen Victoria's son, later Edward VII, a man who passed the decades waiting for his long-lived mother to die by entertaining himself with several mistresses. His grandson David, by all accounts a very boring man, made the hottest gossip writer's item of the twentieth century by giving up the throne for Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée of less than obvious charms, physical or spiritual. More recently the gossip writers have been able to feast on the current, and also very long-standing, Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, who seems to specialize in saying unfortunate things. His divorce from his wife, Diana, who was herself expert in disposing the gossip writers in her favor, gave the tabloid press one of its greatest field days of all. Whether Charles and Diana's sons, William and Harry, will, to the gossip columnists' delight, be scandal-prone remains to be seen.

By the late 1930s, American movie stars had become great magnets for gossip. The Hollywood gossip beat was divided between Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper—with Jimmie Fidler and Sheilah Graham (F. Scott Fitzgerald's great good friend) comprising the second team—though both women were, in effect, in the pay of the movie studios, and released gossip of a kind that would titillate interest in, but rarely set out to destroy, the valuable property that movie stars had become. Hopper and Parsons also tried to enlarge their compasses to take in world affairs, à la Walter Winchell, but neither was ever able to bring it off. In their day, though, their power was genuine. "Only Hollywood," David Niven wrote in his memoirs, "could have spawned such a couple, and only Hollywood, headline-hunting, self-inflating, riddled with fear and insecurity, could have allowed itself to be dominated by them for so long."

The leading gossip sheet of the 1950s was the magazine
Confidential,
published by a man named Robert Harrison, whose background was in girlie, or so-called one-hand, magazines.
Confidential
specialized in Hollywood shenanigans, the raunchier the better. The magazine ran stories on Frank Sinatra's presumably prodigious sexual appetites, Robert Mitchum's pot smoking and other antics, Desi Arnaz's philandering, Sammy Davis Jr.'s passion for blondes, and the secret gay lives of ostensibly heterosexual romantic leads, Rock Hudson among them. Some of the stories in
Confidential
were true, some possibly true but not provable—no one has ever worked out the truth-to-falsehood ratio in this magazine that everyone scorned and nearly everyone felt he or she had to read. Only a series of exhausting lawsuits caused its eventual demise.

The 1960s changed the nature of gossip in the press. Things began gaudily with the Profumo Affair of 1963 in England, in which John Profumo, a cabinet member of the Tory government, was shown to be connected with prostitutes and Soviet spies in a way that was thought to compromise national security. From a professional gossip's point of view, the scandal had everything: aristocratic country estates, luscious hookers, international intrigue, kinky sex as only the English can do it. The Profumo Affair had much to do with bringing down the government of Harold Macmillan and elevated the interest in gossip as reported in the press. But long before this, nearly every large-circulation newspaper, British or American, felt it could not function without a gossip columnist.

In the United States, the
National Enquirer
picked up the scandal-mongering flag and ran with it—as it continues to do in our day. Paying for its stories and for insider photographs—cash on the barrelhead, and serious sums, too—it came up with relentless stories about secret love affairs, homosexual outings, AIDS roll calls, and much more. It supplied full-court coverage of such American sad freak shows as the death of Elvis Presley and the murder of O. J. Simpson's wife and her boyfriend.

People
magazine, Time Inc.'s entry into the field, started out to be gossip with a friendly face. The original plan was to feature the private lives of public people, but with the emphasis more on intimacy—that is, on the genial private lives of celebrities—than on exposé. Soon other entrants joined the field—
Star, Us, Life & Style, In Touch, OK!, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair
—and turned up the heat on
People.
No more Mr. Nice Mag, now it, too, goes in for dishing the dirt on celebrities wherever it can find it.

But the larger problem, the one with which this chapter began, is how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism. More and more newspapers such as the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
are given over to stories that are little more than gossipy in their intent. The earnest-seeming television show
60 Minutes,
with its celebrity interviews and political and corporate exposés, is increasingly gossipy in its impulse and interest. Television news generally, with its headline-and-pictures approach to the news, much of the time resembles nothing so much as tabloid raggery. Everywhere one looks in show business, politics, even business, gossip creeps more and more into the foreground. Once the freak show in journalism, gossip has now become center ring.

So Marlene Dietrich, in Washington to pick up an award from the Jewish War Veterans for her wartime work with Jewish refugees, pays a call on John F. Kennedy at the White House. She is shown into his private rooms. A bottle of wine is in a cooler. The president walks in, shows her the view from the balcony, says that he hopes she is able to pay a leisurely visit. Actually, she tells him, she has only an hour or so. "That doesn't give us much time, does it?" says Kennedy, and with that he leads her down a corridor and into a bedroom. He promptly begins undressing. (Later, Dietrich recalled his unraveling rolls of bandages, there to shore up his bad back, from around his body.) In bed, it is all over fairly quickly, and the leader of the free world promptly falls asleep. Dietrich soon wakes him, reminding him that she has to be at the gathering of two thousand Jewish veterans. Wrapping himself in a towel, he accompanies her down the corridor to an elevator, where he says, "There's just one thing I'd like to know." When she asks what it is, he replies, "Did you ever make it with my father?" She tells him that she did not. "Well," he says, "that's one place I'm in first." They never saw each other again.

We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life ... Without secrecy, nothing is possible—not love, not friendship.