Gossip (20 page)

Coward is especially good on actresses: "Marlene [Dietrich] made an entrance looking ravishing and was quite entrancing for an hour. Then she became boring and over-egocentric ... I suddenly feel a wave of relief that I hadn't agreed to do an Australian tour with her. I am quite sure she would have driven me barmy." He travels to Chicago to see Tallulah Bankhead in his play
Private Lives
and reports in a letter to a friend that "I understand Tallulah does everything but stuff a kipper up her twot but is playing to smash capacity!" The next evening, he reports seeing her in the play in the company of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and when Fontanne congratulates her in her dressing room, Tallulah replies: "'I don't give a fuck about you and Alfred. It's only Noël I am worrying about.' She said it in no way maliciously but merely as a statement of fact! Fortunately it was all such a gel of effusiveness and fun that nobody minded but I thought you would like to know it as an example of Dix-Huitième courtesy and tact." There, I would say, one has the best of gay gossip, exhibiting, in one sweep, outrageousness, comedy, and charm.

What can make gay gossip so wild and amusing is that homosexual men, having long thought themselves outside the realm of middle-class respectability, have achieved a nice distancing, a spectatorial view of so-called normal life, which is at heart comic. This same distancing, viewing everything through different binoculars, often results in lending gossip a witty twist. It gives the best gay gossip its mordancy, suggesting as it often does that life really is a sham, don't you know, and how amusing it is to pierce it by observing people playing out their hopeless little pageants of pretense and hypocrisy. Oscar Wilde's entire oeuvre seems to be about little else.

Tennessee Williams, whose plays are so heavy in their symbolic earnestness, had the light gay gossip touch to a fine degree. "He loved sexual gossip, especially about other writers," reported his friend Dotson Rader. Williams repeats a story about William Faulkner's being broken up because Jean Stein, the daughter of Jules Stein, who controlled Universal Pictures, wouldn't marry him. "Of course," he concludes, putting aside Faulkner's belief that Jean Stein rejected him because he wasn't Jewish, that the real story was "Jean didn't want to marry him because he was a hell of a lot older than her, was a drunk, and she didn't look forward to spending her married life in Oxford, Mississippi, where the only thing to do is watch the cows go by."

Williams recounts the story of Clifton Webb's grief over the death of his mother, and his claim that the reason he, Webb, remained a bachelor until well into his seventies was because his marrying would have hurt her. "
Shock's
more like it," Williams says. "Clifton Webb didn't marry because he was as gay as the Seventh Fleet, and everybody knew it, including him." Webb apparently made a great thing about his sorrow at his mother's death, until Noël Coward "shook Cliffy and said, 'Darling, pull yourself together! It is not unreasonable to be orphaned at seventy.'"

The Clifton Webb story elides nicely into a story about one Jimmy Donohue, who "was a very rich, very nice queen who was a Woolworth heiress and had had a short-lived affair with Cliffy many years ago. And then for a few years he was the boyfriend of the Duchess of Windsor, although it was strictly nonphysical." Such gay gossip holds out the promise of pulling back the curtain on an intimate scene, which one may or may not believe but is nonetheless amusing to contemplate. The entire operation assumes that people are everywhere leading secret lives, that appearance and reality are wildly incongruent.

Gay gossip took a tragic turn when AIDS cut its black swath through gay life, and gossip often centered on who had AIDS and who was hiding it. The great dancer Rudolf Nureyev, for example, denied he had AIDS, and then died of it. In an instance of gossip through fiction, in Saul Bellow's novel
Ravelstein,
the eponymous hero, a figure not merely based on but to everyone's knowledge precisely the philosopher and University of Chicago teacher Allan Bloom, is homosexual and described as dying of AIDS. When the book was published, many of Bloom's friends and former students were outraged that Bellow would portray Bloom in this way, arguing that he died instead from the effects of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an auto-immune disease affecting the nervous system, from which he had earlier suffered. No one ever said it aloud, but it was important to Bloom's friends, none of whom denied his homosexuality, that he died of an auto-immune disease rather than one associated with sexual promiscuity. They preferred Bloom to have been an important intellectual figure who also happened to be gay, rather than a gay man who also happened to be an important intellectual figure. Did Bellow know for sure that Bloom died of AIDS, or was he engaging in that form of speculation also known as gossip? The question of the cause of Allan Bloom's death has yet to be cleared up with any certainty, and it dallies in the limbo of gossip.

In a culture in which people rather enjoy gossiping about themselves, gossip itself changes radically. In gay gossip, these changes are on emphatic display in the writing of Edmund White, a gay writer a generation younger than Williams, Capote, Lerman, and Coward. Previously people who were gay tended to keep their homosexuality off to the side—they didn't feature it, even when they had no difficulty owning up to it—but we now have people who, like the character in the play
Purlie Victorious,
might almost be said to be in the homosexual profession, and Edmund White is one of them. White writes about his own homosexuality freely and prolifically; without it he would be deprived of a subject, wouldn't really quite exist as a writer.

All but agreeing with this, White, in a recent memoir called
City Boy
(2009), writes that if he had been straight, "I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others." White gossips as much about himself as he does about others. In this memoir the young Edmund White, freshly out of the closet, recounts his move to New York in the 1960s and a life of nearly full-time promiscuity. "Brandy Alexander, a famous drag queen, said to me at a party, 'Ed White, everyone wants you, you're the universal ball.'" He describes some of the wilder gay bars and discos and leather scenes, remarking almost by the way that "sado-masochism [in the late 1960s] still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky—sort of New Jersey." He offers brief accounts of the generation of gay and lesbian writers and artists just ahead of his own (White was born in 1940). Among those he mentions are Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Morris, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, James Merrill, and Harold Brodkey.

White's own sexual propensities are filled in. He informs us that he is "a bottom" and had "always been an apostle of promiscuity." Prose snapshots of his homosexual bouts are provided: "I went to bed with John [Hohnsbeen, previously the lover of the architect Philip Johnson] once, but I'm afraid that I wasn't aggressive enough to interest him." Bruce Chatwin, a writer who attracted much literary attention until his death from AIDS in 1989, "with his bright, hard eyes and his odorless
WASP
body and flickering, ironic smile and his general derring-do instantly groped me while we were still standing just inside the door, and a minute later we'd shed our clothes and were still standing. We had sex in the most efficient way, we put our clothes back on, and we never repeated the experience with each other." White mentions, in passing, having gone to bed with a drunk John Ashbery and his boyfriend.

But in the end candor does not in itself create interest and is devoid of allure. A man gossiping about himself is always insufficiently amusing. This is because self-gossip violates the equation that holds that gossip is two or more people telling things about a third that the latter would prefer not be known. Edmund White is one person telling about himself, and he wants everyone to know about it. Charm departs and, as the old song has it, the thrill is gone.

Mortimer Adler, the founder with Robert Hutchins of the publishing project called Great Books of the Western World, held firmly to the belief that everyone was, in his word, "educable." And not educable merely, but able to read and benefit from the richly complex Great Books. This, for him, was a matter of faith, an article of belief. His entire career was founded upon it.

I worked for a few years for Adler when he took over the intellectual redesign of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He was an intellectual bully and a man with an impressively blind eye to the environment in which he operated. But one of the side benefits of working for this very energetic, too deeply concentrated man of high but rough-hewn intellect was having a coign of vantage on his irrationality. This irrationality was especially amusing in light of Adler's powerful insistence on the crucial element of reason and logic in life.

Plentiful were the anecdotes of Adler's comic irrationality. There was the story of his wife's asking him to hang a picture in their Chicago Gold Coast apartment, and Adler, owning no hammer, walking out to swank Michigan Avenue to buy one. No hardware store being available, he stepped into Dunhill, a favorite haunt, and bought instead a gold-plated showerhead, which he brought home to hammer in the nail needed to hang the picture.

There was the story of Adler's pursuing a young woman and setting out to write a love poem to her. His secretary noticed him composing on a yellow legal pad, scribbling madly away, crumpling up sheet after sheet of failed efforts. Finally the poet manqué declared he was off for lunch at the Tavern Club. His secretary, her curiosity piqued by what he may have been writing, looked down at the pad on Adler's desk, upon which she discovered a single word, the beginning of his love poem: "Whereas."

But the best story, one long kept under wraps, was told to me by a man who was Adler's assistant when he had his office in San Francisco. Unhappy in his first marriage, Adler one day called his wife from a hotel room to inform her that he wanted a divorce. (Phoning in your divorce is a nice touch.) Not long thereafter he was seen in the company of a woman much younger and quite a bit gaudier than he. The philosopher of the Great Books, one of the leading exponents of the doctrines of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man of doubtless towering IQ, was clearly smitten. He soon announced his intention to marry this woman.

Adler's friends were suspicious, and hired detectives to follow the young woman and the man she called her brother. Adler meanwhile took out a large insurance policy naming her as sole beneficiary. You will have anticipated me here when I report that the young woman's brother was her boyfriend, and the two were plotting to kill the philosopher. The police were called in, Adler was informed of the plot, the woman and her boyfriend were dealt with, and everything was hushed up lest scandal result. The moral of the story? Might it be that, after all, perhaps not everyone is entirely educable?

She thinks of herself as a journalist, and, true enough, she has worked for the news divisions of the major television networks. She has interviewed twelve—perhaps by now it is thirteen—American presidents and countless leaders of foreign countries. For a time she worked as a television news anchor—a job held by Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and John Chancellor, respected figures who gave the impression of high seriousness—and was the first woman to do so. Her connections, her credentials, her bona fides, her impressively high ratings, all are there, perfectly in order. Why then, in spite of all this, and after a long and successful career, money and accolades flowing in, does she nonetheless seem like nothing so much as a yenta, a female blabbermouth and busybody.

She,
of course, is Barbara Walters.

Barbara Walters was the daughter of Lou Walters, a nightclub impresario famous in his day, the 1930s through the 1940s, for founding and running the nightclubs in Manhattan and Miami called the Latin Quarter. A high roller, Lou Walters, and like most such men, his fortunes, roller-coaster-like, went up and down. The ride was not always easy on his womenfolk: Barbara's mother, her three-years-older retarded sister Jackie, and Barbara herself. Guilt and insecurity are the leitmotifs of the memoir Barbara published called
Audition,
a title meant to suggest that she is perpetually in the tenuous condition of trying out for a part, no matter how fully arrived she may seem to everyone else. Barbara, as she herself recounts, was always worried about not doing enough for her family, especially her sister, and was no less worried about being knocked down from the greasy pole of her profession up which she has so persistently and aggressively climbed.

Troubled, to put it gently, was Barbara's childhood: many moves from apartment to apartment owing to her father's rocky business, not seeing enough of her father who worked late hours, feeling the frightening reverberations from the tensions of her parents' shaky marriage, having to drag along her sister, of whom she was half ashamed and fully guilty for the shame she felt. Fearful of rejection, Barbara didn't run with the first circle of girls in school, but chose the second circle. Later, when she wanted to go to Wellesley, she was put on the waiting list. She wound up at Sarah Lawrence, another second-circle choice.

Sarah Lawrence College, in the late 1940s and early '50s, turned out to be just the right school for Barbara. Progressive in its aims, it was more than progressive, it was wonderfully avant-cuckoo in its methods. In those days Barbara wanted to be an actress, so she majored in theater. Her classes, as she describes them, sound very soft, spongy really. The one science course she took was The Psychology of Art, for which she wrote a term paper on love. The classes were small: six to no more than a dozen students. "What we did," she reports of Sarah Lawrence, "was talk. And discuss. And talk some more. I learned to ask questions and to listen." Sounds, the whole four years, rather like an extended Barbara Walters special. "I learned never to be afraid of speaking up. Every student's point of view was taken seriously, and no one ever said, 'That's stupid' or 'That's irrelevant.'" Perhaps someone should have done; Walters's career might have turned out very differently.