Gossip (5 page)

 

I don't believe that the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World. Even if you add Ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside, takes many forms which are not easily recognizable as Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every Inner Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, avoidance of routine duties, evasion of discipline. But all these would not satisfy us if we did not get in addition the delicious sense of secret intimacy ... But we don't value the intimacy only for the sake of convenience; quite equally we value the convenience as a proof of the intimacy.

 

Lewis's point about our seeking acceptance in Inner Rings makes one wonder if one hasn't oneself, out of a weak yearning for social acceptance, told other people gossip, possibly damning gossip, for no other reason than the desire for their approval. Providing gossip is after all one of the ways that may help a person get into an Inner Ring of one's yearning. Having people inside the Ring share gossip with one may also signify that one has at last arrived as a member in good standing of the Inner Ring. Of course, as Lewis underscores, it is better not to be so insecure, so weak, as to be worried about being accepted by the right people in the first place, but alas, most of us are.

The most delicious gossip penetrates privacy; the assumption behind all gossip is that secret behavior is being uncovered. When it spreads in a way that gets out of control, gossip can result in the loss of income for the person gossiped about, the destruction of a marriage or an important friendship, public humiliation, jail, even suicide. Gossip can be dangerous.

Yet why is hidden bad behavior more pleasing to contemplate in the realm of gossip than modest good behavior? People tend to act badly not always because they are intrinsically bad but often because they are weak or in some way deficient. Bad behavior of this kind sounds like the adult version of categories that used to appear on the right-hand, or deportment, side of old grammar school report cards: does not work well with others, untidy, poor work habits. In the report card of adult gossip the categories have been changed: sleeps with women other than his wife, does drugs or is a secret boozer, is hooked on cosmetic surgery, business failing owing to extravagance, surreptitiously suppresses (or releases) his true sexual orientation.

Being gossiped about is one of the potential penalties one pays for bad, or sometimes merely unorthodox, behavior. If one does things that are unethical, devious, or mean, if one acts in ways that go against the grain of one's own pretensions to decent behavior, or through one's behavior attacks the reigning values of one's time, then, if caught out at any of these things, one shouldn't be surprised to find oneself the subject of gossip. The notorious and the infamous are always prime subjects for gossip; it is, in fact, one of gossip's main tasks to turn people notorious and infamous.

Gossip about people judged to be acting badly can also be gossip that, as the social scientists have it, enforces a community's norms. Although this is rarely its motive, gossip can act as a potential barrier to bad behavior, and in this sense can be a useful deterrent to such behavior. Some people will be restrained from acting badly if only because they fear that their conduct will be talked about behind their backs. Everything here depends, of course, on the quality of the community's norms. If these norms are far from admirable, gossip of this kind turns naturally ugly. Illustrations of the effects of this kind of gossip are available in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
and, much later, in Sinclair Lewis's novels
Babbitt
and
Main Street,
where conformity to a community's norms is crucial to one's adjustment to adult life, though often, as both Hawthorne and Lewis make clear, at the exorbitant price of the loss of one's true spirit and authentic personality.

Gossip can work the other way around, and loosen a community's norms, in a positive sense, by increasing tolerance. Reading about the behavior of the famous in gossip columns, people begin to think that their behavior, though it goes beyond established boundaries, perhaps isn't so terrible after all. In the 1970s and '80s, for example, famous athletes and movie stars—Muhammad Ali, Woody Allen, and others—began to have children out of wedlock. Whether one thinks this a good or a bad idea—I myself don't think it is such a hot idea—the fact is that by the public knowledge of the famous having had such children, birth out of wedlock among the unfamous became, for better and worse, gradually less disgraceful.

In his essay "The Ethics of Gossiping," the philosopher Emrys Westacott writes: "I do not believe there is a single general principle that by itself enables us to distinguish between permissible and impermissible talk about others." Context for the gossip can be—usually is—crucial. Perhaps even more crucial is motive. What did the person who set the gossip loose in the world have in mind? Here are only a few of the many possibilities:

The first, and most miserable, is that he wants to do dirt to the person he is gossiping about; he wants his reputation besmirched. He dislikes him, is envious of him, or feels that he has somewhere along the line made his life worse and finds gossip a splendid weapon of revenge. He is therefore quite willing to stretch the truth, even to lie, through the medium of gossip. Propelled by malice, such gossip is obviously ethically unacceptable, which doesn't mean that it hasn't always existed, or figures soon to desist.

Another, less direct motive for gossip is sheer jolly prurience. Here the item one hears about is simply too juicy not to pass along. Usually, though not always, such items are about sex: someone is secretly gay, or having affairs with a mother and her daughter simultaneously, or was caught by a husband
in flagrante,
or is contemplating a sex-change operation. One gossips about such things because one feels fairly confident that they will capture people's attention, will bring pleasure through titillation. Most of us have a taste for hearing about things we ourselves dare not do. Being seduced into listening to such items of gossip is the conversational equivalent of luscious-looking but, one discovers upon eating them, slightly waxy chocolates. One probably should refrain, but ... oh, what the hell.

A third motive for gossip is the purely informational, though the context may be highly personal. A friend is contemplating a divorce, or on the verge of losing his business, or has become so depressed that she has resorted to electroconvulsive therapy. Here, without malice aforethought, the view is that key people ought to know about such matters.

A fourth motive for gossip may be the simple appetite for analysis of other men and women, friends included. Two friends begin talking about a third friend whom both like. What a good person she is, they both agree. No question, yet isn't it odd that at her age she seems unable to break away from her parents? And why, in her three marriages, has she never had children of her own? People said to have had unhappy childhoods are themselves less likely to want to bring children into the world to suffer as they did as kids. Do you suppose that is the reason she never had children? Or is she perhaps unable to reproduce for some physiological reason? And if so, which one? Well, you see where a taste for pure analysis, even of good friends, can lead. Directly, it turns out, to where the Talmudic quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests it might.

But the motives for passing along gossip are perhaps beyond counting. The next time you find yourself setting an item of gossip in play, or just passing along such an item, you might do well to ask why you are doing so. What have you gained—or at least think you have gained—from your gossiping? What, in other words, is in it for you? As a man who gossips as much as most people, I have begun to ask myself this question, sometimes with interesting, sometimes with somewhat sadly degrading, results, none of which, be assured, has come near causing me to stop.

In the late 1960s, when racial integration was still thought an issue—and not yet largely viewed as a just aspiration, even in large northern American cities—the word got back to me, through the wife of a local minister, that gossip was going around in the all-white neighborhood I was then living in that I was looking for a Negro (as the word then was) buyer for the house I had put on the market. The neighborhood was working class. I, a Jew who had helped to organize a town meeting on integration, was thought to be very left wing. Rumor and gossip rode nicely in tandem here; it all made sense. Why wouldn't I look for a black family to sell my house to? Except that the story was entirely groundless. I was looking for any buyer I could find.

Here was a case of gossip having the reverse effect of reinforcing the community's norms. Learning about this gossip made me, in fact, hope for a black buyer, and left me more than a touch disappointed that none ever showed up to make an offer.

He [John F. Kennedy] adored gossip, and I could tell him what was going on around town. You must understand that—that was one reason he liked you.

—
BEN BRADLEE

 

T
O BE A
person on whom nothing is lost is the ideal established by Henry James in his exquisitely subtle novels. Gossip is a strong element in many of these novels, and the weighing and final assessment of the gossip, along with an examination of the motives behind it, is usually crucial to their denouements. But many people who have never read Henry James, or perhaps have never heard of him, wish to approximate, as best they can, his ideal of being a person on whom nothing is lost. They indulge in gossip in the hope that nothing significant or salacious or amusing or outrageous is going on in their worlds, or in worlds beyond their own, without their knowing about it.

To be out of it, in the dark, clueless, this is a condition to which no one but a saint, and maybe not even a saint, would aspire. To be in the know, up on the real lowdown, in the loop, in possession of the
emes,
the real skinny, the true gen, this is the condition to which most of us aspire. And here gossip is a sometimes dubious but often necessary resource. Carefully weighed, its origin thoughtfully considered, gossip can connect the dots, fill in the blanks, in otherwise incomplete and sometimes incomprehensible pictures.

In an example from public life, I recall being surprised in 1965 that Arthur Goldberg allowed himself to be persuaded by then President Lyndon Johnson to resign his seat on the Supreme Court to replace the recently deceased Adlai Stevenson in the post of American ambassador to the United Nations. The question any sensible person asked at the time was, Why would Goldberg agree to exchange one of the most distinguished jobs in the nation, one providing lifetime tenure, a full-salary pension, and an important role in the history of the nation, for a job of secondary importance where anything resembling permanent achievement was unlikely? The best answer I could come up with at the time was that Goldberg's willingness to make this switch could be explained only by the high-pressure salesmanship of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Then the other day, in conversation with a journalist, Arthur Goldberg's name came up in some peripheral connection. I happened to mention that I never understood why Goldberg gave up his Supreme Court seat for the U.N. ambassadorship. "I know something about that," the journalist said. And she proceeded to tell me that an influential Chicago lawyer she knew, who was a good friend of Goldberg's, told her that Johnson wanted to give Goldberg's seat on the Court to his friend Abe Fortas, and he was able to get Goldberg to step down because he had something on him from his days in the labor movement. What it was that Johnson had on Arthur Goldberg she didn't know, so hers remains a tantalizing but still incomplete piece of gossip. Yet I find in it a more plausible explanation than the one that has Lyndon Johnson simply able to talk Goldberg out of his Supreme Court seat.

Some people seem to be magnets for gossip: the Kennedys, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, the Clintons. Soon after Marilyn Monroe died—and before all the rumors of the cause of her death began to circulate—I mentioned to the novelist Saul Bellow, with whom I was friendly at the time, that I thought Joe DiMaggio, Monroe's second husband, seemed very grand in taking over the complex details of her funeral. "Yes," Bellow said to me, "but then of course when they were married, he used to beat her up fairly regularly, or so Arthur Miller [Monroe's third husband] told me."

Is this, do you suppose, true? Surely it's plausible. Joe DiMaggio was a very physical type; Marilyn Monroe was neurotic, self-absorbed, and doubtless difficult to live with. She presumably told Arthur Miller, who told Saul Bellow, who told me, who is now telling you that DiMaggio used to beat her up. Is this gossip or merely reporting something deeply unpleasant? Or is this a distinction without a difference?

Vanity Fair
recently ran a story reporting that Arthur Miller had had a Down syndrome child with his third wife, the Swedish photographer Inge Morath. Soon after his birth, Miller clapped the boy into a less than first-class institution and didn't deign (I believe "deign" is the precise word) to see him ever again. The existence of the boy was revealed only after Miller's death, when it came time to divide his estate among his children, including this son, who was by then forty-one years old. Sorry though I feel for the son, I like this bit of gossip because it illustrates deep hypocrisy, and since the best gossip tends to be about hidden behavior, this qualifies, with four oak leaf clusters. The hypocrisy involved is that of Arthur Miller, a man always ready to offer moral lessons to others, to entire nations in fact, when he himself had done something in his personal life most people would consider morally repugnant. Miller often fell into a sermonizing mode. He was never uncomfortable instructing people how to live, or governments how to conduct their business. He spoke at all times with an unrestrained moral authority, dispensing advice on right conduct. Pity he didn't take that advice to heart with his own son instead of dispensing it so generously to the rest of us. All saints must be judged guilty before proven innocent, as George Orwell noted, and Arthur Miller, a false saint, fails the test.