Gossip (13 page)

—
MILAN KUNDERA

 

W
ITHOUT CELEBRITIES, PUBLIC
gossip would be impossible. But the world has never for long been without celebrities, and therefore not without public gossip either.

Perhaps the first great subject of public gossip, at least in the Western world, was the dashing Alcibiades (c. 450–404
B.C.E.
), the Athenian who, during the Peloponnesian War, switched sides at least twice before finally defecting to the Persians; promoted the Athenians' fateful expedition to Syracuse, but did not lead it because he was thought to have defiled statues of the gods; was said to have been magnificently handsome and physically talented, a grand seducer of men and women alike, the man Socrates chose not to sleep with when Alcibiades offered himself to him on the night that the Platonic dialogue called
The Symposium
takes place—the subject, Alcibiades, of unending rumor and gossip, all of it richly fascinating.

The next great subject of public gossip was probably Alexander the Great. The chief bit of gossip about Alexander, of course, was that he was a god, gossip that the young Macedonian leader, who died at the age of thirty-three, did nothing to discourage. He may have come to believe it himself. Alexander had the press clippings of Achilles, without the dark temper, and the curiosity of Odysseus, without ever losing sight of the main prize, the domination of the known world of his day, which he achieved. "Alexander," writes Leo Braudy, in his history of fame, "deserves to be called the first famous person." Alexander not only had fame; he also cultivated celebrity, which in this sense means the assurance that one's fame is widely disseminated. He traveled with artists, who cast coins with his face upon them and made and erected statues of him in warrior poses. He named numerous, freshly conquered cities Alexandria and Alexandropolis. Unlike Julius and Augustus Caesar, he neglected only to name a month after himself.

How active a role gossip played among the Romans of the empire—that is, at the time of the emperors—cannot with exactitude be known, but from Suetonius (c. 69–130), the chronicler of the Caesars from Julius to Domitian, we get a strong sense that it was exotic and never in short supply. As men with unabashed power, emperors were likely to go in for strange and unchecked behavior, not a little of it lascivious, and this Suetonius recorded with happy enthusiasm. "On retiring to Capreae," he writes of Tiberius, "he made himself a sporting-house, where sexual extravagances were practiced for his secret pleasure. Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as
spintriae,
would copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions." In the paragraph following this, Suetonius writes, "Some aspects of his [Tiberius's] criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe." Suetonius nevertheless goes on to describe them: "Imagine training little boys, whom he called his 'minnows,' to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him."

Suetonius does no less in this line for Nero: "Not satisfied with seducing free-born boys and married women, Nero raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria ... Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him—dowry, bridal veil, and all—took him to his palace with a great crowd in attendance, and treated him as a wife. A rather amusing joke is still going the rounds: the world would have been a happier place had Nero's father Domitius married that sort of wife."

Are such stories about Tiberius and Nero and other wild emperors true, or is Suetonius conveying only gossip? If it is gossip, it is assuredly of a high-quality sort. Suetonius feels it right to report these stories, if only to fill in his portraits of Roman rulers. But here is a case—and there are many such—where history and gossip blur, so that one cannot with certainty know which is which. Oscar Wilde called journalism organized gossip, and sometimes the same may be said of history, at any rate where it deals with undocumented material. The two, gossip and history, often blend into one.

Emperors, kings, and their wives and families long served as the main source of what we would regard as gossip. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, warrior emperors and royalty began to be supplanted by raffish behavior on the part of the merely wellborn. Lord Byron is the stellar example. Though his accomplishments as a poet were genuine enough, he was also a celebrity in a way that no other poet has ever been. George Gordon Noel Byron, the sixth Baron Byron, was a man of talent, courage, wealth, and appetite. In a painting in which he wears the headdress of Greek independence fighters, whose cause he joined in their war against the Turks at the end of his life, he resembles the roguishly handsome Errol Flynn. Of his one physical flaw, a clubfoot, one can only say that on him it looked good, almost, in his day, making a limp fashionable.

Like the best subjects of gossip, Byron was a man about whom almost nothing could be disbelieved. Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many lovers, famously called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Gossip had him pegged variously as bisexual, committing incest with a half-sister, producing illegitimate children, sodomizing choirboys. Wherever he went, Italy, Spain, Greece, his presence caused a stir, one of the side effects of which was a serious case of roundheels in attractive women. Everything about Byron was dashing, not least his verse, so much of which has been taken as autobiographical. "He was not merely a poet," as one of his biographers, Frederic Raphael, wrote, "but also a star, the first modern celebrity, the artist as performer and publicist."

In a brilliant career move, Byron died young. While working in Greece to help outfit the Greek fleet using his own finances, he had what were thought to be two epileptic seizures; a week later, he caught a cold, was leeched by his physicians, and, after slipping into a coma, died on April 19, 1824, at the age of thirty-six. His heart was buried in Messolonghi, Greece, and his body was returned to England, where it was refused burial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, his life having been considered too scandalous to have been accorded such an honor. Byron's funeral cortege was attended by thousands, many of them working class, who became so overcome by emotion that they were said to have been near rioting. Such a display shows the early birth of the cult of celebrity, and celebrity is inevitably linked to gossip. Even today, nearly two centuries after his death, reading about Byron one feels that one is still in the grip of steamy gossip.

Byron was truly lordly, and the English, in the realm of gossip, have been fortunate in having an aristocratic class to supply them with touches of grandeur in this realm. Madcap dukes, drunken earls, knights for whom once a night and with a single sex were never sufficient. The current Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, the man who should but probably never will be King, has shown, through his marriage and subsequent divorce and remarriage, that British royalty is even now an ever-yielding source of the richest zany gossip.

Americans, as I mentioned earlier, have had no such unending resource as an always decadent aristocracy to fall back on for loopy gossip, and we have had to go at things in our own, at first less glamorous, way. In the early days of the republic, politicians were our only national celebrities, and so gossip formed around them, as of course it continues to do in our own time. Politicians are subject to gossip because they have power and, having power, are likely to abuse it by stealing, sexual excess, intemperance, or egregiously jolly hypocrisy. Much political gossip, like celebrity gossip, is about someone, because of his or her fortunate or favored position, going too far. Part of the pleasure in reading it—of seeing the miscreant nailed—is in viewing the mighty fallen. But part of the pleasure, too, is reading or hearing about people with more power than we possess using it to live in outrageous ways that the rest of us are for the most part restricted to dreaming about.

Political scandal has never been scarce. The intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings is a gift that, as they say about guilt, never stops giving. A good bit of gossip in Jefferson's day that has not yet died out in our own, the Jefferson-Hemings story trails on, with books continuing to be written about it and prizes given to some among those who write them. From there the beat goes on: Andrew Jackson's wife lived with him before divorcing her husband; there was talk of James Buchanan being gay; Lincoln was thought to have "Negro" blood, as Franklin Roosevelt was later to be thought Jewish; Grover Cleveland was rumored to have an illegitimate child, and it was whispered that one of his children, his daughter Ruth (after whom the candy bar Baby Ruth was named), was retarded. Gossip had it that Teddy Roosevelt was a heavy boozer and that Woodrow Wilson was a chaser of women. Warren Harding's love affairs in Marion, Ohio, were much gossiped about, and Eisenhower, as did FDR, really did have love affairs while in the White House. Adlai Stevenson was rumored to be both gay and a sedulous skirt chaser, a notorious heterosexual.

Very little of this got into the press. Scuttlebutt is what it was, passed around by word of mouth, thought to be the
emes,
the real McCoy, the inside story. What we now call the mainstream press had, or at least thought of itself as having, too high a standard to engage in innuendo and undocumented gossip about politicians' private lives. When the mayor of New York Jimmy Walker was, as we would say nowadays, sexually very active, he made no attempt to hide his various dalliances, the most notorious being with a British showgirl named Betty Compton, whom he later married. But the New York press, charmed by Walker and his refusal to revert to the least duplicity in these matters, gave him a pass and no one wrote about them.

John F. Kennedy was another politician given a free ride by the press, which he and his coalition of advisers carefully cultivated. Many journalists must have harbored an only barely suppressed wish to be part of the Kennedy gang, and thus forgave the young president everything: not only his heavy philandering, some of it upstairs in the White House, but the trivial facts that he smoked cigarettes and played golf (instructions to the press were that he was never to be photographed doing either). The complicated Bobby Kennedy–Marilyn Monroe nightmare was also suppressed until well after both parties were dead.

Much gossiping, and raking of muck, was done privately, and chiefly by people who hated the figures in question. Thus Franklin Roosevelt was said by his enemies to be both Jewish and homosexual. At a lower level of office than the presidency, gossip, if widely enough circulated, even if not picked up by the press, could stop a man's public career. Such was the case with Sumner Welles, rumors about whose homosexuality were so rampant that they forced Roosevelt to accept Welles's resignation as undersecretary of state and number-two man in the State Department. Welles was, it turned out, in fact gay.

Exposing the private lives of politicians in the press began in earnest with the advent of investigative journalism, which hit its height with the Watergate investigation, after which everything was fair game for exposure. Senator Gary Hart, thought to be a presidential candidate, fell early to the blade of investigative reporting when he was photographed aboard a yacht with a model on his lap. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, about whom rumors of transvestism abounded, was lucky to have died when he did, in 1972, just before open season was declared by the press—soon to be known as the media—on any human flaw or flagrancy that might create a stir. The stories about Hoover's being a cross-dresser remain one of the most wildly amusing of all modern gossip items.

Soon elected officials began falling like dandruff. Politicians known as bottom pinchers, heavy boozers, tax dodgers, and minor and major thieves were written up in the press and quickly thereafter written off. Their wives, too, were potential and real victims of the media gossip grinder. The scrutiny that any public figure is today expected to undergo, a kind of trial by media with public disgrace likely to follow, has meant that many capable people, unwilling to submit to such intense gossip and rumor mongering, steer clear of public office. Such is the indirect power and strong effect of gossip.

"The tone of politics," writes Gail Collins in
Scorpion Tongues: The Irresistible History of Gossip in American Politics,
from which I have acquired some of the material in this chapter, "had become more personal and more vicious." The advent of talk-radio shows, and more recently the Internet, further exacerbated things. Any notion of respect for the office of the presidency, or any other office, was now out the window. The Bill Clinton impeachment saga was more than sufficient evidence; so, too, stories about Hillary Clinton being a lesbian and simultaneously the lover of the Clinton aide Vincent Foster, who committed suicide. Lesbian, heterosexual adulterer—when it comes to gossip, all laws of contradiction are off the books.

"Most people who get their names in gossip columns," Roger Wilkes writes, "are there because they want to be." But is this true? Today one of the often unwanted side effects of celebrity is to leave one exposed as a target of gossip. In the 2009 U.S. Tennis Open, a determined seventeen-year-old girl named Melanie Oudin captured the fancy of the crowd by defeating a few seeded players on her way to (being defeated in) the quarterfinals, which brought her instant celebrity. Alas, it also brought out that her mother had had an affair with Melanie's coach, a matter that, stirred up in the swill of the tabloids, had to have caused much sadness to everyone in her family and drained away some of the pleasure of her triumphs on the court.

Living through others' lives is one of the chief attractions of celebrity gossip, which tends in some ways to be less malignant, because the personal motive is missing, than gossip about people one knows. With the advent of movies, which brought figures whose faces we could see up close, and then television, where the stars came (as the cliché has it) into our living rooms, everyone began to feel that once distant celebrities were more like family, or if not always like family, then better known to us than the quiet man who lives on the sixth floor. Richard Schickel captured this phenomenon in the title of his book
Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America.