Gossip Read online

  Saint-Simon claimed to write "the history of my own times, which, from the beginning, has been my sole purpose." He also reports that "you will find no scandals in these memoirs except where they are needed to explain the general situation," which is not true. He reports, to cite but one example of hundreds, of one Bentivoglio, a papal nuncio, that "he thought nothing of keeping an opera-singer, and of having two daughters by her, who were known to be such, and went by the nicknames of 'La Constitution' and 'La Legende.'"

  In the end, it is the personal details, much more than the broad sweep of Saint-Simon's political or religious views or his general narrative, that make the Memoirs so enticing. Much of our pleasure in reading him derives from such items as learning that, when Peter the Great visited Paris and Versailles, "it did not suit the Czar or his staff to restrain himself in any way." Or in his telling us about a fellow named Arouet who "was sent to the Bastille for writing scurrilous verses," who was "the son of my father's notary," and that "nothing could be done with this dissolute son, whose rake's progress ended by his making a fortune under the name of Voltaire, which he took in order to conceal his true name." Or of the miser Pecoil, who dies locked in his own vault, contemplating his money. Or of the thoroughly unpleasant Marquis de Thury, felled by a leg of mutton wielded by the Duc d'Elbeuf at table, "leaving a permanent scar on his most unpleasing countenance, though at the time he did not retaliate."

  Saint-Simon claimed his Memoirs were "authoritative and first-hand," which is so. He did not claim impartiality, for, as he puts it, "one is attracted by honorable and truthful persons; provoked by the rogues who swarm at Court, and made still more angry by those who do one harm." He was correct, too, in writing of his Memoirs that "none heretofore has contained so wide a range of subjects, treated more thoroughly, in greater detail, or combined to form so instructive and curious a whole." Gossip was never practiced with a surer hand or at a higher power than it was by le petit duc, who turned it into literature.

  5. The Truth Defense

  Men are children. They must be pardoned for everything, except malice.

  —JOSEPH JOUBERT

  IN TURGENEV'S NOVEL Virgin Soil, a character named Valentina Mihalovna Sipyagina reports in a letter to her brother "an 'amusing' piece of news": she discovered that his friend Nezhdanov is in love with Marianna, her niece and the object of her brother's love, and that Marianna, moreover, is in love with Nezhdanov. "She was not repeating gossip," Turgenev recounts Valentina Mihalovna adding, "but had seen it all with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears. Markelova's [her brother's] face grew dark as night." What Valentina Mihalovna writes to her brother is factually true; and it is true, too, that she really did witness what she reports. Does the truth factor, then, justify Valentina Mihalovna's claim that she is not indulging in gossip?

  Is truth a defense in gossip as it is in libel cases in the United States? If one is telling something that, though it has all the other components of gossip, is true, does it cease to be gossip and instead become that more dignified phenomenon, information? Things would be much less complicated if it were, but it isn't. Just because something is true does not indemnify the person who passes it along from the charge of gossiping; just because it is true doesn't mean it isn't also gossip. In gossip, intent counts for a great deal—sometimes for everything.

  In the example from Turgenev's novel, Valentina Mihalovna dislikes her niece Marianna and has not had her own usual success in charming Nezhdanov, her son's tutor. She is, strictly speaking, telling the truth, but she obviously takes much more pleasure in the truth she has to tell than simply passing along information normally brings: by telling her brother this sad news, she is also diminishing in his eyes his friend Nezhdanov and the woman he loves, thus scoring points off both. Valentina Mihalovna is, in a game she is entirely aware of, happily throwing the darts of gossip. Malice here is aforethought and brings her genuine pleasure; and it is this mixture of malice and the pleasure she takes in it that is behind the gossip she brings her brother. Pure gossip it is, malevolent division.

  When Tina Brown's book about Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, was published in 2007 more than one reviewer mentioned the romance novelist Barbara Cartland's speculation, reported in Brown's book, on the breakup of Diana's marriage to Prince Charles: "Of course," Miss Cartland said, "you know where it all went wrong. She [Diana] wouldn't do oral sex." The old admirable English reticence is apparently done for; in England fellatio, or the absence thereof, is being spoken about openly, and by the upper classes. But more to the point, is what Barbara Cartland reported true?

  What led her to this gaudy speculation? One possible motive is that she wasn't invited to Diana and Charles's wedding, because, Tina Brown recounts, she and her daughter Raine were deemed too garish for so grand an event. But motive aside, how could Cartland know whereof she spoke? Might Princess Diana have told her about this little problem she had? Might, much less likely, the Prince of Wales have lodged a complaint with her about his wife, or in her presence? Might it have been someone whom one or the other told and who subsequently told Cartland, who then told Brown? (The notes on sources in The Diana Chronicles do not help on this point.) Might Barbara Cartland, the author of more than seven hundred novels of the sort known as bodice rippers, and hence a woman not without sexual imagination, have made it up? Whatever the case, as a gossipologist one has to admire the aesthetic perfection of the item itself, suggesting as it does a certain girlish squeamishness in the young princess, a brutishness in her older husband.

  The item has everything, featuring as it does the Prince and Princess of Wales, two of the most prominent face cards in Europe. Terribly intimate it is, too, about as intimate as gossip can get. Does it have the feeling of plausibility? A sophisticated woman I mentioned it to said she doubted it. "Diana was a very modern girl," she added. But it is a bit of gossip that does not admit of certainty—it can be neither proved nor disproved—and its very uncertainty makes it all the richer.

  Such is the extreme candor—or is it utter want of reticence?—of the times in which we live that people often gossip freely about themselves and people they claim to love. The actress Angie Dickinson told the author of a profile of her that ran in the January 2008 issue of Vanity Fair that she had a ten-year love affair with Frank Sinatra, the great secret about which is that neither was really crazy about the other; the deepest passions of both were not engaged. They apparently used each other as, in effect, relief stations. "There's a difference," Miss Dickinson says, "between having to have something and wanting something."

  Did Angie Dickinson want John F. Kennedy, with whose name hers has also been linked? In the same Vanity Fair profile, she remarks on her distaste for Paul B. Fay, a friend of Kennedy's writing about his and her relationship in his book The Pleasure of His Company. Because of her distaste for such gossip about her and Jack Kennedy, we are told, she turned back a six-figure advance to write an autobiography, though she had completed more than a hundred pages, with "all the details intact." In other words, Angie Dickinson seems to be saying, she did have an affair with the president but prefers not to talk about it, at least not in any detail—or is it not at these prices? "I didn't want to let it go out," she tells her interviewer. "They wouldn't believe me if I said it never happened ... Anyway, it's time for everybody to grow up about the Kennedys. It's more important what we lost as a country." Thus do gossip and patriotism live comfortably side by side.

  One view of gossip holds that when it isn't motivated by revenge, it is motivated by egotism and status needs. All the bits of gossip recounted in this chapter can be explained by this view: Barbara Cartland's in her account of the failure of the royal marriage comes across as an insider; Angie Dickinson's in her interview with a journalist comes across as a woman who has been intimate with two of the most powerful men of her time. Might my own gossip from the previous chapter, the items about Joe DiMaggio and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not also be charged up to status needs, for each invo
lves the act of name-dropping—specifically, my dropping the names of Saul Bellow and Pat Moynihan, claiming a relationship with both? Thus do gossip and snobbery also live comfortably side by side.

  Not all gossip need have motive. Some gossip is passed along out of sheer exuberance, with no greater motive than the desire to entertain one's friends. One brings a delicious bit of gossip in the same spirit that one brings a bright new joke, to lay at the feet of people whose point of view is roughly congruent with one's own and who are therefore likely to enjoy it. Not all gossip has a punch line; only some of it is amusing; but both gossip and jokes have in common that they begin with the question, Did you hear this one? (W. H. Auden said that "Did you hear this one?" ought to be the motto for psychology and the head trades generally.) Both enterprises, gossiping and joke telling, suggest the world is less predictable than one might have thought, for a joke whose outcome one can predict is no better than a bit of gossip one already knows.

  The notion of gossip as disinterested information, not always having a deep or dreary motive behind it, is suggested by Jacob Klein, in his day a famous teacher at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. In his essay "The Idea of Liberal Education," Klein referred to gossip as "the soft underbelly of knowledge," calling it "the small tribute that our passionate and appetitive life pays—in very, very small coins—to intellectual life." Gossip may seem chiefly to have to do with idle curiosity, but it can also spark serious curiosity. "It must be granted," Klein wrote, "that it is not always easy to draw the line between idle curiosity and this nobler kind of curiosity." Reading this, I am reminded that, in his splendid biography of the philosopher Pascal, Morris Bishop complains that "gossips have told us too little" of Pascal's daily affairs.

  A severe definition of gossip might be that of passing along information that is really nobody's business. But who is to say what does or does not fall into this broad category? A man or woman without any interest in gossip may be impressive in his or her restraint, but also wanting in curiosity, uninterested in the variousness of human nature, dead to the wildly abundant oddity of life, and thereby, in some central way, deficient.

  Diary

  When my friend Hilton Kramer was the principal art critic of the New York Times, from 1965 to 1982, he was a fount of wonderful gossipy stories about the idiocies of its various editors and reporters, most of them having to do with their self-importance.

  One such story had to do with a famous Times columnist who, during the Vietnam War, had recently returned from Hanoi to the paper's London bureau, where Hilton was at the time, covering some art events in England. Hilton had just learned that there were serious storms in the American Northeast, with a real possibility of flooding in Connecticut, where he had left his wife alone in their house in Westport. When the Times columnist saw Hilton, he noted his worried look. Hilton explained it was there owing to his concern about the prospect of flooding in Connecticut. "Oh," said the columnist, "I've just returned from Hanoi, and after seeing what I saw there, I must say, flooding in Connecticut strikes me as pretty trivial stuff." "Moral prig," Hilton thought, "arrogant bastard," but he said nothing.

  Three days later, Hilton ran into the columnist again, who was now himself looking worried. When Hilton asked him what was troubling him, he said that he had just heard that there might be flooding in Virginia, where he had a house and family. Hilton considered holding back, but then couldn't resist. "Oh," he said, "maybe you ought to return to Hanoi, where you can easily take your mind off such trivial stuff."

  6. The Gossip Transaction

  Gossip is like a butterfly, namely, the more you chase it, the more it will fly away from you. If you sit still, it will land on your shoulder.

  —FILIPINO SAYING

  IN YIDDISH, A yachneh is a coarse, loudmouthed woman, while a yenta, only slightly less odious, is a gabby, talkative woman, a blabbermouth. Do yachnehs tell gossip to yentas, who then spread it around where it can do real damage? Or is it the other way around, yentas to yachnehs? How does gossip get going, and what keeps it alive?

  A good joke, they say, requires three people: one person to tell it, another to appreciate it, and a third who doesn't get it. Gossip, too, needs three people: one person to initiate it, another to hear it and (perhaps) pass it on, and a third who is its subject or victim. But gossip also needs a setting, a basic understanding among the gossipers, an agreement about what is of interest in the vast array of the world's information.

  The origin of the word "gossip" is in the designation of a godparent for one's child, the person designated being a "god sib," or relative made through religion. More important, this godparent status implied a closeness, an intimacy, so that the god sib is a man or woman in on a family's inner workings and hence someone very much in the know. Another etymology of the word, variously attributed to General George Washington and others, is connected with Washington's instructions during the Revolutionary War to American spies to "go sip" with the enemy in taverns and learn what their military plans are. "Go sip" could also refer to the gossipy talk that goes on in coffee klatches. (Klatsch is the German word for gossip.)

  One does not gossip with just anybody. A person purveying gossip has to show some discrimination in choosing an audience for his gossip. That person—or persons—must be someone who roughly shares one's view of the importance or the amusement of the information being passed along to him. He must inhabit the same general realm of interest, of temperament, of taste. One doesn't tell a scandalous story about a three-star French restaurant to the guy at the Jiffy Lube, nor does the guy at the Jiffy Lube tell the suburban gourmand about the rich female customer he has been bonking for the past four months while her husband is busy earning $1.6 million a year at his white-shoe law firm.

  The person conveying the gossip also has to be reasonably certain that the person he is telling it to is ready to receive it. If one is thoroughly pleased with one's ophthalmologist, one is probably not eager to hear how he supposedly botched five conventional cataract surgeries. If one adores a coworker, one is, similarly, less than delighted to learn that she badly neglects her young children and is filing for bankruptcy.

  No matter how deep his delight in gossip, the originator of it must never seem as if he worked hard at acquiring the information he is passing on. He might want to stress its exclusivity (no one else knows this) or its intrinsic importance (this can strongly affect your fate), but he must avoid the appearance of seeming to have done any serious sleuthing to come into possession of the item he is now vouchsafing to you. Were he to do so, he would come across as that most miserable of creatures, a damned busybody. The difference between the busybody and the gossip, at least to the onlooker, may come down to little more than style and sang-froid, with the busybody not having much of either.

  The person receiving the gossip has to stake out his position with some nicety. He mustn't seem preternaturally interested in what might be salacious, slanderous, or generally scandalous material, lest he resemble the man in the tan raincoat coming out of the pornographic movie theater at 3 p.m. At the same time that he must appear somewhat cool at the reception of the gossip, he is also under the obligation to seem appreciative. When hearing the item, he must measure its truth quotient, and know how to respond to it. Sometimes he may wish to prompt more information from the person purveying the gossip, wanting gaps in the narrative filled in, foggy points in the story clarified, contradictions resolved.

  A complicated transaction, then, that between the person telling the gossip and the person to whom he is telling it—a dance of a sort, really. A quid pro quo is also often entailed. If you regale me with two enticing items of gossip, oughtn't I to come up with at least one for you? "Gossip," the satirist Wilhelm Busch, in an admirable aphorism, said, "is the confession of other people's sins," which it frequently enough is. But to accept gossip from another person is also to enter into intimacy of a complex kind: the bestowal of the gossip along with its acceptance implies the acknowledgment that
we are both men or women of the world, both operate in the same moral universe, both find the same things funny, outrageous, insuperable.

  Although almost all gossip speaks to one or another form of moral contamination, by no means does all gossip require the response of moral indignation. My own preference as a recipient of gossip is for items that feature the comedy of human behavior: the comedy, that is, of people trying to live up to their own probably too high pretensions. The best gossip for me is that which confirms my own views of the essential fraudulence of certain people, especially people who present themselves as a touch—and usually more than a touch—more moral than the rest of us. Thus I reveled in the gossip a number of years back, subsequently printed without denial in a national magazine, about the intellectual who found everyone whose political posiktions did not agree with his own morally contemptible, but who was himself discovered to be stealing and selling review copies of books from the magazine he worked for to support a cocaine habit.

  Good gossip is much aided by the existence of a human typology, by which slightly obscure formulation I mean that gossip is best when it demonstrates people acting not merely badly but to type. In the story earlier told about the New York Times columnist freshly returned from Hanoi, the type is that of the Hypocrite Virtucrat, the person professing virtue without really possessing it. The item I reported earlier about the painter who did not know who Dick Cheney was demonstrates the type of the entirely Self-Absorbed Artist. Other happy types, all hardy perennials, are the Old Lecher, the ignorant Culture Vulture, the Social Climber, the Secret (or Not So) Drinker, the Aging Hippie, the Oblivious Wealthy, the Happy Philistine, and many others. Such types resemble the characters in a medieval morality play. Gossip about them almost always satisfies.