Gossip Read online

  Not all gossip is engaged in for the purpose of hurting people. Gossip can be wildly entertaining. Sometimes analyzing the problems, flaws, and weaknesses of friends, even dear friends, sweeps one up and carries one away in sheer exuberance for the game. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, not everyone's idea of a whimsical fellow, thought gossip trivial and shallow and falsely authoritative, denying that it had much educational value. Yet I have been in gossip sessions where people delved into the motives of others in a manner that provided more in the way of knowledge than the highly opaque works of Herr Heidegger. Heidegger himself—notably his siding with the Nazis and then trying to cover it up, his love affair while married with his student Hannah Arendt—was the subject of some scorching, demoralizing, and highly entertaining gossip, and there was even more so after his death.

  If ever there was a mixed bag, gossip provides it: it can be mean, ugly, vicious, but also witty, daring, entirely charming. It can be damning, dampening (of the spirits), dreary, but also exhilarating, entertaining, highly educational. It pops up in backwater villages among primitive tribes and in great cultural capitals. The only thing missing from the Garden of Eden was a third person for Adam and Eve to gossip about. Despite much railing against gossip, it doesn't look to be going away, not now, probably not ever.

  Diary

  Late on the dark afternoon of a cold day, I stepped into the Peet's coffee shop down the block from my apartment. Book in hand, I was expecting to read while sitting alone drinking my coffee. But then I saw'S. L., the one person I taught with in the English department at Northwestern University for whom I retained a high regard. Still attractive, she had been twice divorced and had no children. She had a reputation for seriousness and for fearlessness; for academics, fearlessness meant saying precisely what one thought, a rare thing. She was said to be a no-nonsense teacher of whom students were at first terrified and then came to reverence. Although we were never close—never met alone for lunches or drinks, never really engaged in extended conversation—I hoped that she respected me as I did her.

  She was by herself at a table near the window. She spotted me, and I waved from my place in line. When I was given my coffee, she signaled me to join her, which I did. I had retired from teaching four years earlier. She, though my contemporary, was, I gathered, still at it.

  "Miss teaching at all?" she asked after I had taken off my coat and sat down across from her.

  "Not a bit," I said. "I had a fairly decent run, but enough is enough. A teacher, as I suspect you've noticed, is a person who never says anything once."

  "I have noticed," she replied with a slight sigh, "though I prefer the definition of a teacher as someone who talks in other people's sleep. Auden said that, I think."

  "The same cast of immensely attractive characters still at work in the English department?" I asked.

  "Yep," she said, "the three D's, as I like to think of them: the depressed, the disappointed, and the deranged."

  "Speaking of the latter, is it true that poor Ardis Lawrenson committed suicide?" I asked.

  "Yep. She'd been an alcoholic for years, and they found her dead in her bathtub. Like Seneca, she had opened her veins."

  "Jesus!"

  "Yes, Jesus, mother, and Mary. I thought she was merely another secret academic drunk. I wouldn't have guessed she was wacky enough to take her life."

  "Is Baumgartner still around?" Louis Baumgartner was one of the great figures in the department, a short man with muttonchops, a Renaissance English scholar whom a fatuous dean had been able to pry away from Stanford twenty or so years ago.

  "Yes," she said. "Baumgartner and the missus, the Bummies, the dreary duo."

  "Did you know that the students used to call Lily Baumgartner, with her considerable avoirdupois and her black bangs and her more than a hint of a mustache, 'Ollie,' after Oliver Hardy?"

  "I never heard that one," she said. "The little bastards can be cruel, but here is a touch of creative cruelty I much admire."

  "I suppose Baumgartner is by now too old to arrange for further offers from other universities, which he used to do to leverage up his own salary."

  "No man—or woman either—is ever too old to be greedy and crummy," she said, "especially academic men and women. But did I ever tell you my story about Erich Heller and the Baumgartners?" Erich Heller was a Czech literary critic, Jewish and gay, of deep Teutonic culture, who taught in the German department and until his death was one of the most distinguished people at the university.

  "No, never. I liked Erich a lot. Toward the end of his life, I used to go to lunch with him every three weeks or so. Even his snobbery—he used to talk about his good friend Isaiah Berlin a bit too much and with too great reverence for my taste—didn't bother me. But tell me about Erich and the Baumgartners."

  "We were at lunch together not long after the Baumgartners arrived at Northwestern. Erich leaned over and asked me if I knew the Baumgartners, which in his thick accent came out sounding like 'the Bum's Gardeners.' I said yes, that I had met them a time or two.

  "'Last night I was with them at Rudy's [the dean of the arts college at the time],' Erich said, giving the R a pretty good workout, 'and I was seated next to this Mrs. Bum's Gardener. An excruciatingly boring woman, let me assure you. What a creature! I am not an unimaginative man, but try though I might, I couldn't imagine making love to such a woman. I couldn't imagine it, I tell you, I just couldn't.' His voice grew shrill. He seemed terrified at the prospect of being thrown in bed with Lily Baumgartner. I patted his hand. 'Don't worry, Erich,' I said to him. 'No one is ever going to ask you to do so.'"

  "The story suggests to me," I said, "that perhaps Baumgartner deserved all those raises for nothing more than sleeping with Mrs. Baumgartner all these years."

  We went on to talk about the other people in the department. S. L. knew where all the bodies were buried. She anatomized the extravagant vanity of the poets—turning out, as she said, "their hopeless little dribblings." I mentioned the poet who regularly sent out e-mails announcing he had won some new negligible prize.

  "God, yes," she said. "All his dubious achievements must be made known. I keep waiting for him to send a university-wide e-mail announcing that he had an excellent bowel movement over the previous weekend."

  She went on to puncture the exaggerated pretensions of the "so-called" (her qualification) scholars in the department. She knew who had attempted suicide, who was living with a lesbian partner, who had a secret drinking problem, who spoke against a putative friend at a closed meeting who was up for tenure, who attained to new heights of pomposity and unreality in his or her behavior. I added my own, on the whole less rich, bits to this splendid stew of gossip.

  We were at this game for perhaps an hour and a half. S. L. served up her items with a fine rinse of cold irony. I laughed as I listened to her take the air out of many of my former colleagues' pretensions. (Had she ever, I couldn't help for a fearful moment wondering, turned in a similar demolition job on me?) Over ninety or so minutes not a positive word was uttered, no attempt at fair assessment ventured; it was purely slash and burn, with lots of salt poured on wounds.

  I couldn't remember when I had had such a delightful time.

  2. Feasible, Uncheckable, Deeply Damning

  If people really knew what others said about them, there would not be two friends left in the world.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  THE MOST ARRESTING news, at least as journalists tend to look at the matter these days, is what someone doesn't want known. Hence all the current interest in investigative journalism, which is a dignified phrase for the activity of muckraking, whose goal is exposé. Gossip is very close to, and all but perfectly congruent with, this conception of the news: it, too, is almost always about what someone doesn't want known. In its baldest sense, gossip is revealing the secrets of others, though, as we shall see, it is not that alone.

  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, Lerm
an, 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.