Gossip Read online

  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.

  Someone writing a book on gossip—or on any subject for that matter—ought to be as clear as he can about his fundamental attitude to the subject. Does he find gossip amusing or largely pernicious, entertaining or chiefly in bad taste? Or does he hold all these words to be meaningless in connection with gossip, because he finds it another of those aspects of human nature about which we simultaneously ought not to be excessively proud and yet understand that there isn't the least hope for reform?

  I cannot condemn gossip, at any rate not with a good conscience, if only because I enjoy it too heartily, even while I understand that too much of it lowers the tone of any society (later I shall take up the question of whether this has actually happened) in which it takes place, not to say often ruins reputations and destroys lives. Yet all my life I have delighted in hearing delicious gossip, and I have also felt the strange but genuine pleasure of passing it along and, on occasion, purveying original gossip. Are these guilty pleasures, or pleasures that require no apology? Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford don famous for his social fluency, in a letter to Marion Frankfurter, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, wrote: "I can never actually stop myself from saying what I want to say either about or to people—if I do life immediately loses all possible savour and I see no point in carrying on at all." Shameless, perfectly shameless, yet I do believe I know whereof Sir Isaiah spoke, and perhaps you do, too.

  Diary

  Dinner in Washington that night in 1991 was supposed to be a foursome: Irving and Bea Kristol (who is also Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian of Victorian intellectual life), the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and I. The Kristols had been living in Washington for some while; Helen and I were in town for a meeting of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, of which we were at the time both members. Dinner was scheduled for 7 p.m. in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel.

  At 5 p.m. Bea called to ask if it would be all right if Dick and Lynne Cheney joined us after dinner for coffee and dessert. I said of course, it was fine with me. Dick Cheney was then the secretary of defense and successfully conducting the Persian Gulf War against Iraq and not yet the great ogre that his political adversaries enjoy making of him; Lynne was then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lynne, Bea Kristol said, would appreciate the opportunity to talk to Helen and me about how things were run at the Endowment for the Arts.

  The Cheneys arrived a bit after eight. The Secret Service men with their walkie-talkies accompanying them waited out in the foyer of the restaurant. Dick and Lynne Cheney had come from a movie, shown especially for them at the American Film Institute, for the kind of fame that Dick Cheney had at that moment did not allow him to take his wife to an ordinary movie theater. I remember how self-effacing, how modest, Dick Cheney seemed that night. At one point a congressman with a Mittel European accent, Tom Lantos by name, came up to the table to shake his hand and tell him how well he was running the Gulf War. At another point, our waiter arrived to say that someone in the room wished to buy champagne for our table in honor of Dick Cheney's efforts, but Cheney refused, quietly asking the waiter to thank the man who had made the offer.

  Much of the talk over coffee and dessert was among Lynne Cheney, Helen Frankenthaler, and me. She asked us a number of questions about the NEA, which we answered as best we could. Her husband didn't seem to mind her dominating the talk at table. Perhaps it was a relief to be silent after crowded days at the Pentagon and after appearing so frequently on television, which he did, almost hourly it seemed, with Colin Powell at his side, to answer questions on how the war was going.

  After ninety minutes or so, the Cheneys left the restaurant. I found myself much impressed by them. So, too, did Helen Frankenthaler, who said: "She is a very bright woman. Her questions were genuinely penetrating. Very impressive. Really smart, Lynne Cheney. But tell me, her husband, what does he do?"

  Bea, Irving, and I looked at one another.

  "Actually," I said, "he's secretary of defense."

  I don't recall Helen's response. I do recall the graciousness of the Kristols at not lingering over this, and that the rest of our evening together went along just fine.

  3. When Is It All Right to Gossip?

  Don't speak well of your friend, for although you will start with his good traits, the discussion might turn to his bad traits.

  —THE TALMUD

  IF GOSSIP IS telling things about other people that they would rather
not have known, then gossip also means, in plainer words, breaching secrets. Benjamin Franklin said, "Three may keep a secret if two are dead." Most people feel that they can keep secrets; probably few really can. Because of this, gossip, I think we may be assured, will never go out of business.

  "Hardly any men but born gentlemen or men of culture are capable of keeping a secret," wrote La Bruyère, though some of the most cultured people I know have the largest appetites for gossip of the secret-breaking kind. In an earlier age, a lady or a gentleman was not supposed to engage in the purveying of secrets in the form of gossip, either telling it or receiving it; good taste argued against doing so. Gossip was another word for idle or loose talk, and was thought to be petty and mean. It was—incorrectly—viewed as an act engaged in chiefly by women who had nothing better to do with their time. Most people who have looked into the matter conclude that men gossip just as much as women, with the same frequency, intensity, and relish.

  The gossip spectrum runs from acts of disloyalty at a maximum to those of mild indiscretion at a minimum. (Discreet Indiscretions is the title of a useful monograph on gossip by the German sociologist Jörg Bergmann.) The disloyalty fades and the indiscretion lessens the further the remove of the gossiper from the actual parties being gossiped about. Someone recently told me, for example, that a gynecologist told him that when his patient Elizabeth Taylor came in for a minor surgical procedure she brought along security men to make sure that all her pubic hair, some of which needed to be shaved, would be swept up and properly disposed of, lest any of the nurses or orderlies on the job attempted to scoop it up and offer it for sale on eBay. This story feels mightily like gossip, yet I do not feel the least disloyalty in passing it along; instead I feel myself merely lapsing into wretched bad taste in retelling it. I also feel that, in the current age, it is probably a true story.

  Gossip is, of course, a form of news. A character in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's novel about journalism, says of the news that it is what people want to read, except once it's printed it's no longer news and hence not of much interest. The less widespread, the less well known, the news, the more potent, by virtue of its exclusivity, and the more interesting it is. Serious gossip ought to be an intimate affair, one person telling another, two or three others at most, something hitherto unknown about an absent person. Too widely broadcast, gossip, like the news once printed, no longer holds much interest. (Not that this stops the tabloid press from running the same stories—about Oprah's weight loss and gain, Brad Pitt's boredom in marriage, and the rest—over and over again. Enquiring minds, it seems, can take lots of tedious repetition.) And like the news itself, gossip is generally of interest only if it is bad news.

  "No one," Bertrand Russell remarked, "gossips about other people's secret virtues." Although rare, gossip about goodness is, theoretically, possible. Revealing the name of a large anonymous donor to an unequivocally excellent charity would be an example of such gossip. Other, smaller acts of generosity and kindness, which would seem bragging if told by the person who committed these acts, are best recounted as gossip: A tells B about an act of extraordinary selflessness on the part of C, who is much too modest to tell it herself. Gossip of this sort, the reverse of mischievous, is doing, one might say, the Lord's work in reminding people that there is much unmotivated goodness in the world. Yet even in these instances it is in the nature of gossip to find behind the most altruistic acts low motives—expiating guilt, moral exhibitionism, tax write-offs. Perhaps here the Talmudic injunction that provides the epigraph for this chapter comes into play: saying nice things about people can lead, in the natural rhythms of intimate conversation, to negative gossip.

  Sociologists have for some while been at work on a rescue operation on gossip, attempting to uncover and point up its various social uses. In certain settings—the workplace, in large corporate offices, in government, in universities—gossip, as a source of funneling rumors recounting what is happening in the inner sanctum of an institution, may be the only way that workers have of finding out beforehand decisions that might have momentous effects on their future. Gossip can also be a relatively efficient way in which to acquire knowledge of the character of colleagues. Surely it would be invaluable to know that the woman with whom one is in competition for an important corporate vice presidency is sleeping with the CEO.

  Universities are unimaginable without gossip, about who is to be promoted, whose ambitions have been denied, who is making what salary, who secretly loathes whom, or what new positions are about to be on offer, not to mention who is bedding down with whom. Being in on such gossip can be crucial to a successful academic career.

  I recently went to dinner with good neighbors in the condominium building in which I live, where I learned, via what I suppose must be called gossip, the following: that another neighbor hadn't died exercising on his bicycle, as I'd thought, but by having an artery nicked during an angiogram; that a new couple who had recently moved in were in fact married, despite the woman's using a different last name than her husband; that another neighbor, a bachelor in his early sixties who had recently moved out of the building, was happily resettled in his new neighborhood and that lots of women in the building where he now lived were in mild pursuit of him; that a disagreeable neighbor was in a losing rivalry with a brother who had done much better in the world than he, which may be behind his general aggressiveness; that the janitor of the building is, after twenty-five years of marriage, going through a divorce; that another neighbor, after a stomach-reduction surgery, had had to go back into the hospital for a number of corrective surgeries.

  My neighbor was reporting things that the people who had undergone them were unlikely to report to me, perhaps because they, mistakenly, take me to be uninterested in such information. Quite as likely, I am less successfully inquisitive than the neighbor, a bright and lively woman, who filled me in on these useful items. All this is gossip without the edge of malice; it is gossip as useful information, and I was pleased to be in possession of it.

  As such, it is a confirming instance of the notion of sociologists and anthropologists that being let in on gossip not only gives people a surer sense of what is going on but allows them to feel better integrated in the life around them. Social scientists in recent years have begun to find the role of gossip in groups a research-worthy subject. According to David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University, "gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behavior in a group and defining group membership." If one is having trouble with a boss or coworker, this argument runs, it helps to learn that other people are having similar difficulties—it makes one feel less odd, less alone. Sarah R. Wert, a psychologist at the University of Colorado adds: "We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy. Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal." Yet in a paper called "A Social Comparison Account of Gossip," in the Review of General Psychology, Professor Wert and her colleague Peter Salovey allow that "gossip is overlooked by psychologists, both as an interesting phenomenon itself and as a promising venue for studying social comparison, stereotyping, in-group/out-group processes, attributional processes, and many other psychological phenomena."

  Most people in corporate, governmental, and academic institutions have no other way of finding things out besides through gossip. Rumors stimulate gossip, of course: the company's headquarters are being moved to Phoenix and the CEO isn't going to make the move. Gossip of this kind doesn't usually violate anyone's rights; it isn't purveyed maliciously. Doubtless there is a good deal else that qualifies as useful and harmless gossip—gossip, that is, which doesn't betray other people's personal secrets or doesn't diminish or disparage them, even if conveyed behind their backs. Yet it goes to the heart of the matter to as
k why good or useful gossip is, in the minds of most people, not what gossip is really about.

  Lots of gossip floats in the ether of the morally gray. Consider the possibility that a good friend has the beginnings of serious depression, or worse, is entering into dementia. Ought one to discuss this behind his back with other of this friend's friends? And even if one has his best interests at heart, isn't one nevertheless gossiping—telling things he would hate having told about himself behind his back? And yet not to do so is to render his friends sadly, if not dangerously, ignorant of a matter about which they at least need to be informed. Not to talk—not to gossip, really—about this is to withhold significant information.

  Gossip can also be useful for checking one's own status. In 1944 C. S. Lewis delivered a lecture to undergraduates at the University of London called "The Inner Ring." In this lecture Lewis argues that most of us imagine cliques or groups to which we yearn to belong; from the outside we see these inner circles as immensely appealing, and are ready to go to great lengths to be admitted to them: