Gossip (28 page)

Out of boredom, or bubbling-over ambition, or perhaps sensing that she had gone as far as she could on Si Newhouse's money, in 1998 Tina Brown departed
The New Yorker
to begin a new magazine. Called
Talk,
which is how most gossip begins, it had the backing of Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, the movie studio. This time out, Tina would be creating something entirely her own, not building upon or resuscitating the work of precursors. Relying on roughly the same formula—that of gossip about the rich and famous—the plan was to make
Talk
sexy, racy, buzzy, and more insiderly than Napoleon's duodenum.

Talk
never came off. Part of the problem may have been the reader, whom Tina imagined as "a woman in her thirties who wears Prada, watches Miramax movies, and uses Urbanfetch to order a Harry Potter book"—in other words, a woman who sounds a lot like Tina Brown. Part of the problem was staffing, getting the right editors and writers to fulfill her fantasy of a hot magazine. Moreover, the connection with Miramax was supposed to result in lots of pieces in
Talk
being used as fodder for Miramax movies. Didn't, as they say, happen.

Celebrity journalism is not usually directly deflationary or iconoclastic, but
Talk
was to have a strong touch of this to give it kick. A young editor at the magazine called one day to tell me that a department on reputations was planned, and Tina would love it if I were to take down some overrated figure in American life. I suggested Arthur Miller. "He's a terrible writer and even less impressive as a guru or a political saint," I said. The young editor thought it a swell idea, and said he would get back to me after he had run it by Tina. The next day he called to say that an Arthur Miller piece didn't feel quite right to Tina, but did I have any other ideas. "How about Walter Cronkite," I said, "a man with a face only a nation could love, and a genuinely unintelligent man, though the confident cadences of his broadcaster's fluency served to camouflage this over a long and hugely successful career." Great idea, the young editor said. The next day he called to say that Walter Cronkite didn't seem quite right to Tina, either.

Although she may have judged such subjects less than buzzy, my reading of these decisions was that Tina Brown thought these men too important to attack, whatever stir it might have caused. She was in fact only half an iconoclast, the other half a woman still on the way up and still in need of the aid of important people to get to higher places. We finally settled, the young editor, Tina Brown, and I, on the pompous literary critic Harold Bloom. I wrote the article, it was accepted and paid for ($5,000), but it never ran because
Talk
went out of business soon after I completed it.

The many people whose enmity Tina Brown earned were pleased at her failure with
Talk.
They bruited it about that the main reason for the flop was that Tina had lost whatever magic she had in reading her old friend the Zeitgeist, that she was now herself out of all the important loops, and no longer a player, a contender for the kind of buzzy attention she was so expert at creating. Hillary Clinton, whom Tina supposedly admired, once remarked that "Tina is the junk food of journalism."

If Tina Brown may not truly be the lovable, huggable Miss Brown, she is surely, to cite not a song but a full musical, the Unsinkable Tina Brown. In 2003, a year after the collapse of
Talk,
she began a less than successful talk show on cable television, which lasted two years. She wrote a book on the poor dead airhead Princess Diana, filled with gossipy anecdotes.

As some women are good at finding husbands, Tina Brown has always been good at finding backers. Before long, with the financial support of Barry Diller, the movie and media man, she began the
Daily Beast,
a website known in the business as a news aggregator; she took stories from other newspapers and magazines and television stations, copied videos from talk and interview shows and YouTube, and hired a small staff of writers with a nose for gossip and controversy to contribute other items on subjects she thought hot or amusing. "I want this to be a speedy read that captures the Zeitgeist," she said. "We'll be smart and opinionated, looking to help cut through the volume [of news and information] with a keen sensibility. We're aiming for a curious, upscale and global audience who love politics, news and the media world."

The
Daily Beast
is Tina Brown's attempt to become the Mme. Récamier of the Twitter age. The website offers, she says, "a guided sensibility, with attitude." It's a site "that's really about tapping into the Zeitgeist"; it is "to move where the Zeitgeist is." As for its politics, it is to be "polypartisan," which means that it will attempt to be outside party politics: not disinterested, necessarily, but chiefly interested in the stories that best allow for insiderliness: the scandals, the defeats, just about anything, in other words, that can be personalized. "My bias is," Tina said, "is it interesting, is it provocative, is it amusing ... does it go against received wisdom."

She clearly hopes that the
Daily Beast
will at last be the white ass upon which she will ride into Jerusalem. It's possible. But there are many competitors floating out there in cyberspace: the
Huffington Post,
the
Atlantic Wire,
and many more. Still, with her bounteous energy, as she approaches sixty, she's not a woman to be counted out.

She demonstrated that yet again when, toward the end of 2010, she helped engineer a partnership between the
Daily Beast
and the all but defunct
Newsweek,
which had been bought for its debt by a ninety-two-year-old audio manufacturer named Sidney Harman. "It means that the
Daily Beast
's animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company," Tina announced in the
Daily Beast.
"As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief's chair at both the
Daily Beast
and
Newsweek.
" Call her indefatigable, call her undefeatable, with her energy for hype, her robust false enthusiasm for the nonexistent (
Newsweek
"legendary"?), her really quite charming ability to pump up sugar daddies and exaggerate possibilities, Tina Brown, like her or not, is a phenomenon unto herself.

"We are living," she has said, "in an age where everyone wants to know everything about you." Her great skill has been to encourage a fundamental unseriousness in her readers. The serious after all requires thoughtful effort, even some brooding on subjects; on occasion it forces one to take painful, usually moral positions; and sometimes, yes, it can be quite boring. Tina Brown peddles entertainment, which is not against the law, but ought to be recognized for what it is: distraction. Master at psyching out the Zeitgeist, she has become very much part of that same Zeitgeist, the purest type we have of the contemporary journalist, a woman whose goal, though she may not know it, is the excruciatingly boring state where everything is merely interesting and nothing finally is important.

She adored his writing, absolutely worshiped it. So when he was to give a reading at her university, she was the first to show up at the auditorium where he was to appear. She was standing in the back of the room when he approached her.

"Excuse me," he said in his greenhorn's English, "are you here for the reading?"

"I am," she said. "You're Mr. Singer, aren't you? I can't tell you how much I admire your writing. You are the only author today whose work will be read a hundred years from now. I am so honored to meet you."

"Thank you," he said. "But tell me, are you Jewish?"

"I am," she said.

"And where, if I may ask, is your family from in Europe?"

"Bialystok," she said, "on both my parents' sides."

"Oh," he said, "I know a great deal about Bialystok. Maybe we might meet after the reading and you can tell me what you know about your family's history in that fascinating city."

"That would be very nice," she said.

He was completely charming at his reading, for which the auditorium was filled. And he was even more so during the question-and-answer session. Someone asked him if he believed in free will. "Of course I believe in free will," he replied. "What choice have I?"

She went to the reception after the reading, where, after forty or so minutes, he disengaged himself from his admirers and came up to her.

"If you'd like to tell me what you know about your family's history in the city of Bialystok, I have some rooms in this building. We could do it now."

She followed him to the small apartment the university provided him: a sitting room with a couch, two chairs, a round table with a bowl of fruit on it, and a bedroom behind a closed door.

She sat on one end of the couch, he at the other end. He was small and hairless—did he suffer from alopecia? she wondered—but with the coloring of a former redhead. He was wearing a shirt with small green polka dots and a black knit tie with a thick knot.

"So,
nu,
tell me what you know about Bialystok."

She began to rattle off the few facts in her possession, and hadn't got more than three minutes into it when he made his move.

"Excuse me," he said, leaning slightly forward. "May I kiss you?"

Good God, she thought, how naïve she was to let herself get into this situation. She recalled how sexy so many of his stories and novels are. Such realistic descriptions didn't come from nowhere. But the thought of being in bed with this man, who was at least thirty years older than she, and who reminded her of no one so much as her grandfather, was, beyond chilling, unthinkable.

"Oh, Mr. Singer," she said, "I am honored, please believe me, but I have to tell you that I have only recently begun my second marriage, and I don't really—"

He put up his hand, signaling her to cease all further explanations.

"No, no, no," he said with a smile. "Don't worry. Here"— he pointed to the bowl on the table—"take some fruit to your husband."

She got up from the couch, went over to the bowl, and picked out an immense Delicious apple and a green banana. When she looked back toward the couch, he was gone.

I never repeat gossip, so listen carefully.

—
LIZ SMITH

 

A
LL RELIGIONS CLAIM
to abhor gossip, but Judaism, to my knowledge, is the only religion to have codified its abhorrence.
Lashon hara,
or evil tongue, is a high-ranking Jewish sin about which a great deal has been written. A book,
Chafetz Chaim
(
Seeker of Life
), by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, is devoted entirely to guiding the reader on correct speech and the avoidance of slander. The subject is one that brings out all that is best, and worst, in the Talmudic mind, a mind that, capable of astonishing feats of memory and intellectual penetration, can sometimes also exult in the finest of hairsplitting.

The Talmudists take passages from Psalms ("Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking guile," 34:13), from Exodus ("You shall not utter a false report," 23:1, and "From a false matter you shall distance yourself," 23:7), and two from Leviticus ("In righteousness shall you judge your kinsman," 19:15, and "Do not go about as a tale bearer among your people," 19:16), and run with them, really take off. Lots of supporting scripture is sometimes brought to bear in the argument against
lashon hara.
As many as 31 of the 613
mitzvot,
or rules and principles of law and ethics, set out in Jewish law, are shown to be violated through the act of gossip. The main drift of the argument is clear enough: it is sinful to initiate gossip and quite as sinful to repeat it, and it is even a sin to listen to it.

Reading rabbinic instruction on the spiritual dangers of
lashon hara
and on the complexity entailed in avoiding it, one recognizes afresh the high degree of virtue required of anyone who can completely omit the evident, one is inclined to say natural, pleasure that gossip gives. "Mrs. [Isabella Stewart] Gardner," George Santayana wrote in
Persons and Places
of the great Boston art patron, "though she defied prudery, practiced the virtue most difficult for a brilliant woman in a hostile society: she spoke ill of no one." Not many Mrs. Gardners around in our day.

Coming away from reading about gossip in the Talmud, one recognizes how much a part of human nature gossip seems. But then the role of religion has never been to accept raw human nature as a completed enterprise, but to attempt to tame, alter, hone, and refine the coarseness of human nature into something grander than it is. Religion may take credit for much in the way of civilizing human beings, but in the realm of gossip it hasn't, I think it fair to say, made much headway.

"I really believe," says Bonnie Fuller, who has edited
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, US Weekly,
and other gossipy magazines, "we all have a gossip gene." Bonnie Fuller is no geneticist, but is in fact a gossip professional who currently runs Hollywoodlife.com, a celebrity website, and when the word "celebrity" is used as an adjective, the safe assumption is that gossip is what it is about. But whether we have something resembling a gossip gene or not, anyone who has a wide curiosity, or merely wishes to understand the world, or wishes merely to carry on with normal social life, has from time to time to listen to gossip, and after listening to it will feel the need to contribute a squib or two of it on his or her own. Gossip, perhaps almost as much as money, makes the social world go round.

I was not long ago talking baseball with a friend, and lamenting, as Chicagoans are wont to do, the wretchedness of the Cubs. I brought up the team's many foolish trades of players who went on to become superstars on other teams. One of the worst of such trades was getting rid of the slugger Rafael Palmeiro, who—with the aid of steroids, to be sure—went on to hit more than five hundred home runs for the Texas Rangers and Baltimore Orioles. "Here they really had no choice," my friend said. "Palmeiro was having a fling with X's"—and here he mentioned the team's most popular player, who later got into the Hall of Fame—"first wife, and this was obviously a potential disaster, so the front office decided to get rid of Palmeiro and keep X. No other way they could go."