Gossip (3 page)

In recent years, sociologists have been widening the definition of the word "gossip," so that it includes the useful passing on of information as well as the older meaning of casual or unconstrained talk about other people, often with at least slightly malicious intent and not necessarily confirmed as true. The latter is of course the traditional gossip that the Bible and the Talmud and every small-town minister inveigh against, generally to negligible effect.

Just as the institution and industry of prostitution took a powerful hit from the easing up of sexual restraints among ordinary women, so has gossip taken a hit from our therapeutic age, which has encouraged the act of easy confession among friends and even acquaintances. If I voluntarily inform you of my own weaknesses and mistakes—my weird sexual habits, my addictions, my deceptions, my vicious acts, my serious and petty vices—it deprives you of the opportunity of hearing it in the intimate, conspiratorial atmosphere of gossip from someone else. Gossip is at its height when it carries a touch of exposé, revealing things not hitherto known, preferably with at least a hint of scandal added. Oscar Wilde remarked that "scandal is gossip made tedious by morality," an odd thing to say for a man whose own life was destroyed by gossip turned into scandal, with nothing tedious about it.

The best gossip also has a private, an exclusive, feeling about it. "You mustn't tell anyone about this, but..." or "Just between us..." or "This must go no farther..." are phrases that, for people who enjoy gossip, carry the equivalent magic of the fairy-tale opening of "Once upon a time." The most enticing gossip is that which is highly feasible, often uncheckable, and deeply damning of the person who is its subject. Should the "item," as Walter Winchell, in his day the world's most famous and powerful gossip columnist, used to call his stories, also turn out to be true, so much the better. The so-called blind item, begun by Winchell, is still in use in our day. Here, from the August 28, 2009, Page Six of the
New York Post,
is a small gathering of such items:

 

WHICH well-liked pro golfer once switched sponsors because he needed several million dollars in hush money? Seems he knocked up a stripper while playing at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio, and had to pay her off to keep their love child a secret ... WHICH cable news anchor should be more careful with his cellphone? After he recently misplaced it, a co-worker opened it up and found a nude photo of the anchor's girlfriend ... WHICH political leader in the Caribbean is under investigation by the US government for using foreign aid to renovate his palatial home? The $443,000 spent was falsely listed as "security and road improvements."

 

Another problem for gossip tossed up by the modern age is sometimes to decide what behavior is damning, let alone deeply so. Given high divorce rates, is marital infidelity, for example, still worthy of gossip? Perhaps so, but even though it is still an act of betrayal, at least if carried on by only one party to the marriage, it no longer has quite the same moral repugnance it once did. People might still be appalled but surely no longer shocked by it. Or nowadays, with people regularly coming out to admit their suppressed homosexuality, is someone who has an undercover homosexual life worth gossiping about? Perhaps, but again, the frisson seems somehow lower than once it might have been. Or what about revealing a person's wealth, or the way he or she came by it? Balzac says that behind every great fortune is a crime; good gossip would speculate on the precise nature of that crime, but in this realm, too, we are perhaps less easily shocked than at any earlier time.

From the standpoint of gossip, there is still something entertaining about a politician notable for his strong stand on family values being caught in the company of a young man or boy with whom he is having what H. L. Mencken used to call "non-Euclidian sex." When Senator Larry Craig, a Republican of Idaho, one such family-values politician, was caught in acts of (homosexual) misconduct in a Minneapolis–St. Paul airport restroom in 2007, people were less shocked, I suspect, than amused to have another hypocrite uncovered. William Bennett, the former secretary of education, writes books on virtue and is revealed to have lost three million dollars on slot machines in Las Vegas. The serious gamblers I know were not shocked but amazed that he would be so foolish as to lose the money playing slots, which notoriously favor the house. These days, it seems, one has only to come out for family values or virtue and scandal is certain to follow.

Here is a bit of gossip I heard not long ago that I think qualifies as gossip-worthy, even in a nearly shockproof culture, and that deserves diagnosis precisely for its shock value. The names must be suppressed in print, as they probably wouldn't be if I were telling this story to you in person, because of fear of libel. (Much gossip is slanderous, the distinction between libel and slander being that the former is usually presented in print or in a movie or some other public version, the latter in speech or conversation.) Someone not long ago told me that a famous American writer had committed incest with her son. I asked the person who told me this whence he came into this notable piece of information, and he said that he heard it from a woman he knows who went to college with the writer's son, and that the son had revealed it to her in a fit of depression.

Incest—surely it still rings the gong of striking gossip. Outside redneck jokes, incest, I confess, gets my attention. The story nicely meets the criteria of the plausible, the uncheckable, and the deeply damning.
Plausible:
The woman about whom this story was told was sexually adventurous, which makes her seem a likely participant in incest.
Uncheckable:
Journalistic criteria of reliable sources would not work here. To go to the woman to whom the son is supposed to have confessed this story of incest with his mother wouldn't be good enough. He could, after all, have been lying to her, if only to make himself seem more exotic. The woman, too, for reasons we don't know, could be lying; she may have a motive that is unavailable to us for spreading such a story. One could go to the son and simply ask him, Did your mother invite you into her bed for sex, and did you take her up on the invitation? He could deny it, either truthfully or by lying. He could also choose to punch one in the nose. The mother could confirm it, but she happens to be dead.
Deeply damning:
So it strikes me, and so I suspect incest strikes most others, too, though I am sure there are lots of people in an unhinged culture ready to say, à la the characters on
Seinfeld,
"Not that there's anything wrong with it."

Gossiping can be a dangerous activity. In 1976, the comedienne Carol Burnett sued the
National Enquirer
for reporting her "boisterous" (a tabloid code word for drunk) behavior in a Manhattan restaurant and acting disruptively around Henry Kissinger and his guests who were dining at the same restaurant. Carol Burnett sued and, after an extended legal battle, won. More recently, in Hooksett, New Hampshire, in the town's building department, office workers began a story about their boss having an affair with an office secretary. The story evidently wasn't true, and the four women most prominent in spreading it were fired by the town council. The women have since sued the Town of Hooksett to get their jobs back.

Many years ago I was in the office at City University of New York of the literary critic Irving Howe. On his desk was a copy of the thick manuscript of a book that he was to call
World of Our Fathers,
which was to bring him considerable commercial success. Howe's reputation in the world of intellectual journalism was at its height, and yet he seemed melancholy. "I sometimes ask myself why bother," he said to me. "What's all this endless work really about?" Then he leaned in and said, "You know, someone not long ago told me that L. C. [I have chosen not to furnish her real name or initials] remarked to her, 'Irving Howe, just another Jewboy in a hurry.'" Now the real gossip content in this story is that L. C., a notably liberal woman, would make so blatantly anti-Semitic a remark. The story isn't about Irving Howe at all, but about L. C. Irving Howe and L. C. are now both dead, and yet, if I spelled out her full name, her reputation would be marred by this shameful remark. At the same time, by not giving her name, I drain this story of much of its value as good gossip.

A story I found in a gossip-rich book called
The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman
will give some sense of what naming people can add to the bite of gossip. In his journal entry for January 6, 1969, Lerman, a man who seemed to have known every celebrity in journalism and the arts in Manhattan and who was for most of his career a writer and editor for Condé Nast magazines, writes: "Onassis likes to fuck women up their asses. Mrs. Kennedy won't do it." Maria Callas—the original source of the story, an earlier lover of Onassis's, and a friend of Lerman's—told some friends that "being fucked up the ass hurt and was boring." This is going perhaps further than most people would prefer to go: gossip about not merely sexual preferences but the gory details of those preferences. Yet its ghastly privateness—that and the celebrity status of the names: Kennedy, Callas, Onassis—qualifies it for what one might call powerful low-grade high-level gossip, or would that be high-grade low-level gossip?

I have an English friend who dines at higher tables than I, who many years ago asked if I could guess with whom Fidel Castro was currently sleeping. Given the wide field of possibilities, I replied that I hadn't a clue. He encouraged me to try. I put forth the names of Indira Gandhi, Dyan Cannon, and Lee Radziwill. Wrong, not even close, are you kidding? were his responses. The answer turned out to be Kathleen Tynan, the wife of the drama critic Kenneth Tynan. Here was this beautiful literary adventuress in the bed of the world's last successful (successful for him; not, unfortunately, successful for his country) revolutionary. Was it true? Plausible it certainly was. The Tynans were very left wing in their sympathies, and Castro would have seemed a great man to them. I made a mental note to ask Fidel about the authenticity of the story the next time I encountered him. Alas, the meeting has yet to come about. I also neglected to ask my friend how he came to know this. Still, the story bears repeating, at least in a book about gossip.

Gossip about people one doesn't know, or was never in close contention of knowing, crops up with some frequency, and not only at the Fidel Castro level. Lots of it is available in published diaries, memoirs, and collections of letters. T. S. Eliot, that most discreet of writers, as a young man wrote to his friend Conrad Aiken that "letters should be indiscretions—otherwise they are simply official bulletins." Autobiography is a form in which one gets to gossip about oneself—often, let me add, with roughly the same degree of truthfulness as gossip generally—and today people do so more and more, specializing in writing about their shortcomings. Why, for an unpleasant example, did Laurence Olivier in his autobiography need to tell us that his premature ejaculations complicated his marriage to Vivien Leigh? Who set the gossip going that Olivier and Danny Kaye were homosexual lovers?

Some gossip about the famous makes its way down the historical grapevine, taking years to arrive. I only recently heard that the dull and dreary Duke of Windsor, in an item of this kind, is supposed to have said that Mrs. Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom he gave up the British crown, was the best fellatrix in Europe; Tennessee Williams claims this in his memoirs. A perfect piece of historical gossip, wonderfully uncheckable, but it also has to be set alongside rivaling gossip that has the Duke of Windsor a not-so-secret homosexual, though one bit of gossip doesn't necessarily eliminate the other. I have myself long been in favor of the notion that the rather androgynous Mrs. Simpson was actually a man, a speculation that, if true, could make both stories work together beautifully.

The gossip about the former British press lord Conrad Black and his wife, Barbara Black, who had been much in the press during the time of the legal charges against Lord Black that he stole money from the shareholders of the media company he began, had to do with his social pretensions and his wife's extravagance. In
The New Yorker,
a former friend is cited remarking that it is a good thing that Conrad has been able to wheedle himself into the House of Lords because it gave him a chance, as the son of a rich man, for the first time in his life to meet some ordinary people. In
Vanity Fair
another anonymous person is quoted as saying that perhaps five or six women in the world are able to dress as expensively as Barbara Black, and she is not one of them. These are both examples of the catty remark as a branch of gossip, and a reminder that malice dipped lightly in wit helps to enliven gossip and send it on its mischievous way.

Here is an item that might come under the category of The Way We Live Now: Someone told me—or did I read it somewhere?—that the sperm used to conceive the photographer Annie Leibovitz's child came from the son of her partner, Susan Sontag (though Ms. Leibovitz maintains that the sperm came from a sperm bank). If true, would this have made Sontag, had she lived, simultaneously the co-mother and grandmother of this child? Again, if true, this may well be something that the parties mentioned would prefer not to have known. Or have contemporary lives, at least those of the moderately celebrated, become so deprivatized, not to say depraved, that the spread of such information wouldn't be in the least troublesome to any of them?

Allow me to pause here to say that I do not feel altogether comfortable purveying all this gossip, much of it acquired at third or fourth hand. I tell myself I am doing it to demonstrate some of the more exotic forms gossip in our day can take. I am using it, too, I suppose, in the hope of drawing you further into this book with the promise of more, even juicer items. My discomfort derives from the fact that there is still a thing called good taste, and I am reasonably sure that I have already outraged it several pages ago.