Gossip (11 page)

The issue—publicity (sometimes justified as the public's right to know; sometimes, as in the United States, dressed out in the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech) versus the privacy requisite for reasonable dignity—remains central to this day, and is unlikely to disappear soon.

As recently as the summer of 2008, an English court dealt with a lurid case in which it came out favoring privacy over publicity. Max Mosley, the sixty-eight-year-old son of Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain's fascist party during World War Two, a man made wealthy by his clever promotion of Formula One auto racing, was discovered enacting sexual fantasies with five prostitutes. The women were wearing Nazi uniforms, and film captures Mosley participating in, among other activities, a mock lice inspection of his hair and spanking one of the prostitutes, counting off the number of strokes in a German accent.

Not, let us agree, everybody's idea of a good time, but sexual wackiness has always been a staple of the British gutter press. "Never underestimate the appetite of the English for prurient sexual gossip," the critic Robert Gottlieb noted. But in the instance of Max Mosley this wasn't a matter of the gutter press stumbling on his sporting activities; in fact, the incident was set up by a tabloid called
News of the World,
which not only hired one of the prostitutes to film the fetid festivities, with a camera the size of a sugar cube hidden in her bra, but also offered her $50,000 to write it up. The paper printed the story under the front-page headline "My Nazi Orgy with F1 Boss."

The case of Max Mosley versus
News of the World
is another of those disputes in which one's own antipathies are evenly divided. Mosley, as it turns out, won the case, the judge deciding that, uncomely though his taste in sexual games might be, it did not involve an element of criminality, and hence to expose it to the public was viewed as a violation of Mosley's right to privacy. The case is thought to have set a precedent in England for more stringent enforcement of privacy laws. Whether or not it will remains to be seen.

So much in the realm of gossip remains to be seen. Sometimes "remains to be seen" can ruin a career. On August 7, 2008, the
New York Times
printed a lengthy front-page story with the headline "Accusations of Sex Abuse Trail Doctor," with the subhead of "Advocate for Students—He Issues Denial." The story itself, which runs for sixty-three column-inches and contains a color photograph of the physician and another of the back of the head of one of his accusers, recounts in squalid detail the charges against the physician. A pediatrician specializing in helping children who don't do well in school, the accused wrote successful books on the subject. He also happened to have one of those perfect résumés: Rhodes scholar, Harvard Medical School graduate,
New York Times
best-selling author, highly thought of in his field. He denied all the charges against him.

Which didn't stop the
Times
from rehearsing the charges in lavish detail. He was supposed to have given physicals to boys between the ages of five and thirteen in which, in their nakedness, he touched their private parts; he was also supposed to have asked them the contents of their nocturnal emissions. "Dr. X [as I shall call him] would always examine [her son's] testicles while [his] penis touched or was very close to the doctor's cheek," the mother of one of the plaintiffs averred. Five of his former patients, now men, filed lawsuits against him. They were represented by the powerhouse attorney who had sued the Boston archdiocese in the case against sexual abuse by priests.

One can feel the effort of the
Times
reporter straining to be fair, to tell both sides of this story: a number of the accused physician's colleagues were quoted on his behalf, remarking on his good character and the importance of his work. But isn't the true question, Should such a story be told at all? Why not let it work its way through the courts and then report on the verdict? In his novel
The Last Puritan,
George Santayana has a character who was accused of a crime, and later acquitted, say, "Being acquitted is nothing in this world. Being accused is what makes all the difference." The only reason for telling the story of the respected pediatrician was perhaps the fear that someone would come along and tell it before the
Times
did—the fear, in other words, of being scooped. As it stands, the article was really little more than gossip, and, owing to its sexual content and its potential consequences, most unpleasant gossip. The story was, finally, ruinous. Even if the doctor is found not guilty in court, his reputation will be destroyed, in good part owing to this article. He will always be the man about whom those nasty stories were told—and told in no less significant a place than the
New York Times.

What gives this sad tale a touch of piquancy is that while the
New York Times
was going to press with it, it was laying off a much larger, in the gossip term much juicier, story: that of the extramarital affair of John Edwards, John Kerry's running mate for the presidency in 2004 and himself a presidential candidate in 2008. Perhaps one reason the paper ignored this story was that, a few months earlier, it had been burned printing a piece with insufficient evidence about Senator John McCain, then running for president, having an affair with a campaign worker. The apparent reason that the
Times
steered clear of the Edwards story was probably not the paper's often-cited liberal bias, but more likely its provenance in the
infra dig National Enquirer,
which had been on John Edwards's trail for a long while, accusing him not only of conducting an affair while his wife had cancer, but of fathering a child with his illicit lover, accusations that proved to be true.

In the end, the squalid
National Enquirer
got it right and the earnest and prestige-laden
New York Times
got it wrong. The
Times
's "public editor," who is hired to sit in judgment of the everyday running of the paper, concluded that the
Times
was incorrect to fear slumming, by taking up a story first unearthed by a gaudy tabloid. Meanwhile, one of the paper's assistant managing editors, Richard Berke, apropos of the paper's dilemma in going after hot, gossipy stories such as John Edwards's behavior provided, said: "We run the risk of looking like we're totally out of it, or we're just like the rest of them—we have no standards."

Yet a greater question is at stake. Why worry about slippage in standards when it comes to hypocritical politicians and then have no hesitation about possibly destroying a serious medical career? Such has been the pervasiveness of gossip, and its extension in our day to all departments of life, that the question of standards in journalism has become more slippery than the cavorting of a sleek, philandering politician.

I was among the people awarded an honorary degree—my only such degree, and I neither want nor expect nor need another—at a university of no great distinction. My most notable fellow honorees were the choreographer Agnes de Mille, the writer Cynthia Ozick, and a documentary filmmaker. I remember very little about the latter except that he had a young—much younger than he—beautiful, and kindly wife. Over drinks, I told a trustee of the university, in what I hope was not a lascivious way, that this young woman (she was French, as was the filmmaker) seemed dazzling. "Oh," said the trustee, a man in possession of the lowdown on every artist and intellectual on two continents, "you mustn't be in the least envious of him. For ten years he had to sleep with Simone de Beauvoir. So he has, you see, earned every moment with his charming young wife."

Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle or the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.

—
LOUIS BRANDEIS AND SAMUEL D. WARREN,
"The Right to Privacy"

 

S
OMETIMES, THERE'S NEWS IN THE GUTTER
" was the condescending headline of the public editor's piece on the
New York Times
's failure to pick up the adultery story of John Edwards, the item on which the previous chapter closed. I write "condescending" because, as anyone who reads the daily press and watches television cannot fail to recognize, journalism, electronic and print, is itself everywhere more and more in the gutter. The day on which I write this, the
Times
has a small item in its Arts section about the actor Richard Dreyfuss suing his father and uncle for return of an $870,000 loan he made them in 1984. Why is that, in a serious newspaper, news, and what does it have to do with the arts? Isn't this a matter among Dreyfuss, his family, and the law courts, and distinctly not that of the
New York Times
?

Apparently not, at least not so long as Richard Dreyfuss has achieved modest celebrity in his career as a movie actor. Because of the way we now live, Dreyfuss is probably better known to lots of Americans than people who live down the block from them in the suburbs or one floor below them in an urban high-rise. One of the dubious rewards of celebrity is that strangers become interested in aspects of your private life that, strictly speaking, are none of their business.

How this came about is a long and complicated story. Let us consider a drastically shortened version, limited to the spread of the professionalization of gossip only in Britain and America. It begins, as noted earlier, with the rise of printing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The growth of literacy soon enough created a hunger for news, and the news for which new readers hungered most was that of the bad behavior of their betters.

Grub Street, as the lowlife journalist fraternity in England collectively was known, was quick to supply this demand. As early as 1681, a London newspaper reported a ménage à trois with a woman, her maid, and her dog, a large mastiff. After 1695, the Licensing Act was revoked, which put an end to censorship and stimulated the advent of more newspapers, many of them purveying scuttlebutt, much of it of a scurrilous sort. Daniel Defoe, author of
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders,
was among the writers who trafficked in this realm, and was himself placed in the public pillory (for three days, in 1703), thence to Newgate Prison, for publishing libelous material. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's
Spectator,
much read in the coffeehouses of London, a paper that stakes a claim as genuine literature and survives to our day, also appeared in these years, the beginning of the second decade of the eighteenth century, and it, too, went in for gossip.

Many of the new specialists in gossip, Defoe among them, camouflaged their victims by describing them but not mentioning their names. Much of this new journalism divided itself by political party, with Whig publications digging up dirt about Tories, and Tory publications doing the same with Whigs. Then there were the calumniators who worked gossip for purposes of blackmail, threatening to release damaging information about a person unless he or she agreed to pay to suppress it. (
In The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon
,
Robert Darnton has shown how a similar operation was at work in France.) Retaliation could be vigorous. The professional gossip in those days had to know how to use his fists and be an adept duelist.

With the spread of literacy to the lower classes, the great subject for gossip, in those days as in ours, was the wretched behavior of the rich and wellborn, going from royalty on down to patricians, simple gentry, writers, and actors. The point, for the readers of such stuff, was to show that one's betters weren't, at bottom, really any better at all; they were rather worse, actually, perhaps no surprise given that they had more money and more gracious margins of leisure along which to behave badly.

Female readers supplied a new audience for gossip, and their news interests were not always the standard ones of politics and crime. They preferred the details of everyday and of private life, with a special interest in the so-called polite world and its denizens: who was seen with whom at assemblies, playhouses, operas, and the rest of it. Naturally, anything scurrilous that could be turned up was a bonus, and as such much welcomed.

James Boswell, author of the
Life of Johnson,
put in his days as a gossip columnist, and wrote some seventy columns under the name "The Hypochondriack," between 1777 and 1783, for the
London Magazine.
In his excellent book
Scandal: A Scurrilous History of Gossip,
the English writer Roger Wilkes recounts Boswell's subject matter, which ran from public hangings to the soup-swilling habits of Scots lairds. Very little that was human was alien to Boswell, who was himself a grand carouser and whoremonger, which gave him a natural instinct for gossip. This he supplied to his readers, like the gossip columnists of our day, in short, chatty paragraphs.

Later, Charles Lamb wrote gossip paragraphs for the press. Charles Dickens hired one of the first women, Lady Blessington, who was a member of the nobility, to supply gossip items for his newspaper, the
Daily News.
William Hazlitt, having been made the victim of gossip by the Tory press, strongly disapproved of gossip; so did Anthony Trollope. And Henry James loathed it, at least in its public version, though he gained much good material for his stories from private gossip picked up at the tables of the rich, with whom he often dined in London and at their country estates.

The nineteenth century, Roger Wilkes notes, ushered in the "age of personality in journalism." The advent in 1814 of the steam-powered press, making it easier to print great numbers of newspapers, gave gossip an additional boost. Readers wanted the inside story, which meant the personal story behind events. The personal story meant the details of private lives. Creating sensations became as important to the mission of the press as conveying information—best of all was information that made for sensation.