Gossip (19 page)

Tom Wolfe could of course have been crueler, for he left out altogether Leonard Bernstein's homosexuality, a well-known but not then generally proclaimed fact, for the date of "Radical Chic" was well before the age of outing, though I suspect Wolfe is too much the gent to have gone in for gay-bashing, especially when so much richer material was at hand.

In the loose form of literature known as the memoir, many people have taken to outing themselves, and not just on the subject of sexual preference. The memoir, as a form of self-gossip, taking time out to gossip about others, has become one of the common forms of recent years. In a notably egregious example, a former female associate of Bernard Madoff's not only admits to a love affair with the Ponzi specialist but informs us that his sexual apparatus was less than impressive.
Charmant!
A failed novelist describes his nervous breakdown. A woman writes about being sexually abused by her father. Another woman discourses at book length about her lifelong bout with depression, sparing no details. There's a lot of it going around, and it doesn't figure to end soon, the confession in which one often ends up confessing other people's sins, which comes to little more than gossip in a self-serving form. The phenomenon is reminiscent of a story I heard long ago of a man getting up in church in a small Arkansas town, the spirit upon him, confessing to having an affair with another woman, also in the congregation and sitting only a few pews away. He was saved for the Lord, but she, poor woman, had to leave town.

The first bit of public gossip—gossip, that is, about someone I did not know personally—that I can recall hearing arrived sometime in my early adolescence. Was I fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? I am not sure. Nor do I remember who told it to me. I do remember the words: "Randolph Scott is queerer than a three-dollar bill. Everybody knows that." This was the first such gossip about someone being secretly homosexual that I had ever heard. In those good/bad old days homosexual males were accommodatingly effeminate, on the model of Truman Capote, if not more flamboyant still. You didn't need a scorecard to tell the players. On the Capote standard, a more unlikely subject for such gossip than Randolph Scott could scarcely be imagined. Bronco-busting, fist-smashing, lean, leathery-faced, six feet two, Scott was the ideal type of the cowboy in American westerns, in which he was cast as the hero in more than a dozen.

Randolph Scott, homosexual—this was not an easy piece of gossip to digest. Yet everyone seemed to be in on it; it was apparently commonplace knowledge, like feeding a cold and starving a fever (or is it the other way around?), an urban legend that everyone was ready to believe but about which no one had persuasive proof, or at least any that I have ever heard.

In this instance the gossip about Randolph Scott's being gay acquired legs, as the journalists say, when he and Cary Grant moved in together in a house they called Bachelor Hall. Both men were said to be famously cheap, which is one possible reason they decided to share digs. Scott had been married (Grant married five times), and his adopted son Christopher wrote a book about him in which he devoted much space to denying the rampant gossip about his father's homosexuality. As for Cary Grant, he said that he "had nothing against gays, I'm just not one myself." Budd Boetticher, who directed Randolph Scott in six films, called the gossip about him, not to put too fine a point on it, "bullshit."

And there it remains: Randolph Scott, gay for eternity. Who knows the truth of the matter? "Ye shall know the truth," according to John 8:32, "and the truth shall make you free." Perhaps so, but sometimes it takes an awful long while.

...the predatory and innuendo-filled air of the homosexual hothouse.

—
ROGER SCRUTON

 

W
HILE NOT ALL
homosexuals specialize in hot gossip, or even necessarily go in for it in a modest way, there is nonetheless a strain in gay culture that is rife with gossip, and for reasons that aren't difficult to understand. Until recent years, so many homosexuals—gay men especially—had had to hide the true nature of their sexuality and in doing so naturally developed a strong taste for spying out the hidden element in life; for those gay men whose homosexuality had not been revealed, few things could have been more significant than what was hidden. Leo Lerman, long the editorial director for Condé Nast magazines, who kept a gossip-laden journal for many years, wrote, in explanation of his doing so, that it was "because I am always interested in the disparity between the surface and what goes on underneath." This is, of course, the justification for most gossip: to tell what goes on underneath.

For the most part, the best gay gossip is, evidence suggests, conducted intramurally, guy to guy, or gay to gay. But then, this is true among all ethnic or in-groups. Thus the Jewish Isaiah Berlin to his mother about a fellow passenger on a transatlantic ship: "He belongs to the vigorous pushing Jewish type which achieves a lot, and was illuminating both about Russia and about his own very gentlemanly people there." Thus in his play
Purlie Victorious,
the black playwright Ossie Davis has one of his black characters refer to another as "a disgrace to the Negro profession." One of the small but genuine benefits of belonging to a minority group is that one can put down and gossip about one's fellow group members with a clear conscience, an act not permitted to nonmembers of the group.

So gay men can mock one another, and also non-homosexual men and women, among themselves, often in a gay (in the old sense) and amusing spirit. Gay gossip can also seem more daring, more unashamed, in its wild playfulness. A gay character in Francis Wyndham's novella
The Other Garden
offers the following speculation:

 

"Bet you dollars to doughnuts he's [said of another character in the novel] really queer as a coot (you can't fool Mother, dear!), but when I said so to Kay she got rather heated and swore it wasn't true. My guess is he's the pseudo-hearty kind who pretend to be normal and talk about the place being terribly, terribly manly.
Mee-ow!
I sound just like Ros Russell in
The Women.
I can't think why I said that about Sandy—it just popped out! I've always sworn I would never turn into one of those dreary old queens who try to make out that everybody else is queer too—no, dear, that sort of behaviour is definitely not my
tasse de thé
—so I take it all back."

 

Later in the novella the same character reports:

 

"I've got lots of fascinating scandal to tell you ... I picked up a Yank the other day who worked in a big actors' agency in Hollywood before he was drafted, and he told me all the dirt about the sex life of the stars. I bet you'll never guess what Joan Crawford's favorite kind is.
Well,
my dear ... this person says that what she really likes best is to pee on people! An actor friend of his had an affair with her and was simply terrified when she suddenly stood up on the bed and loomed above him with her legs apart. When it dawned on him what she was going to do, he said, 'Wait just one moment, please,' and dashed off to the bathroom to fetch one of those waterproof shower-caps!"

 

In his day, Truman Capote was one of the finest purveyors of gay gossip. "Truman," wrote Leo Lerman in his journal, "told me so many dreadful things about everybody. It's wonderful how Truman acquires bits of information and then passes them off as his own." Capote's letters are a cornucopia of candor aimed at amusing. "Jackie [Kennedy] et moi spent the whole night talking about sex" is a nice specimen. Capote, in a gossipy letter, claims a dalliance with Montgomery Clift. His most gossip-rich letters are written to gay friends. "I've liked it here [in Portofino]," he writes to a friend named Andrew Lyndon, "and have done a lot of work, but in August [of 1953] everything became too social—and I
do
mean social—the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her [Vivien Leigh] out [of an insane asylum]), Daisy Fellowes [heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune] ...—then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arthur Lopez's yacht—whence I've just come back. Oh, yes, I forgot Noël Coward." In his diary for the same date, Noël Coward notes, "We have gossiped with Truman Capote," and one can only imagine how wild that conversation might have been.

Gossip among what Truman Capote called "the whole Lavender Hill mob" tends to be at its most wicked when a strong whiff of hatred is admixed. Gore Vidal, a man much of whose writing is stoked by hatred, always went out of his way to say vicious gossipy things about Capote, so much so that once, during the filming of
Murder by Death,
in which Capote had an acting part, when a six-hundred-pound chandelier came loose from the ceiling and smashed a table on the set, Capote remarked, "Gore's got to be somewhere in the wings."

Vidal lashes Capote unrelentingly through gossip, sometimes inserted into his book reviewing, more often through the many interviews he has given over the years. (The envenomed gossipy interview, usually on a television talk show, is a Gore Vidal specialty.) Writing about Tennessee Williams, Vidal takes time out to recall that Capote used to entertain the playwright and him with "mischievous fantasies about the great. Apparently the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to tumble out of unsuspected closets. When Capote refused to surrender his virtue to a drunk Errol Flynn, '
Errol threw all my suitcases out of the window of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel!
'" Vidal caps the story by adding, "I should note here that the young Capote was no less attractive in his person then than he is today," when, of course, he was distinctly unbeautiful. Vidal also reports Tennessee Williams once noting that Capote could be a fine companion, and had not yet "turned bitchy."

On a bitchy note of his own, Vidal, in 1974 to an interviewer from the magazine
Fag Rag,
complains that the only kind of homosexual writer the American reading public is willing "to put up with is a freak like Capote, who has the mind of a Kansas housewife, likes gossip, and gets all shuddery when she thinks about boys murdering people" (this last a reference to Capote's
In Cold Blood,
a better and more widely read book than any Vidal ever wrote). When asked by another interviewer about Capote's wealth, Vidal replies that Capote has no real money but lives as if he had: "He thinks he's Bunny Mellon ... He thinks he's a very rich Society Lady, and spends a great deal of money." As for Capote's gifts, "a gift for publicity is the most glittering star in his diadem." He's "our literature's Suzy [Knickerbocker]" and "wears with a certain panache the boa of the late Louella Parsons." (Any of this said by a heterosexual would have resulted in mass protests.) Capote is also "ruthlessly unoriginal," Vidal writes, and "plundered Carson McCullers for
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
abducted Isherwood's Sally Bowles for
Breakfast at Tiffany's,
" and then turned to journalism, "the natural realm of those without creative imagination."

One of Capote's own specialties was gossiping in public; the more public the place, the more it seemed to stimulate him. On
The Tonight Show,
he told Johnny Carson and an audience of millions that he thought the best-selling novelist Jacqueline Susann looked like nothing so much as "a truck driver in drag." At the time when Sammy Davis Jr. was riding high as an entertainer, Capote, from the comfort of Carson's couch, announced that "I find him excruciatingly boring" and went on to say that he couldn't possibly understand what anyone could see in so overly energetic but otherwise unoriginal a man.

When Capote published a chapter of a novel long in progress called
Unanswered Prayers
in
Esquire,
a chapter mocking and reporting gossip about the thinly disguised wealthy women—Babe Paley, Nan Kemperer, Slim Keith, and others—into whose company he had worked so hard to insinuate himself, these same women cut him off, leaving him puzzled and crushed. Why they would do so seemed to have baffled Capote, who never completed his novel and whose brain had by then probably been stewed to mush by alcohol and pills.

Leo Lerman's, like much old-line gay gossip, specializes in the lowdown on divas, operatic and otherwise, and who is secretly gay, or possibly bisexual. He informs us that Yul Brynner was bisexual, having had a fling with Hurd Hatfield, the star of the movie
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
From the horse's (that would be Truman Capote's) mouth, so, according to Lerman, was Steve McQueen bisexual. Arturo Toscanini did not approve of his daughter's marriage to Vladimir Horowitz, who, in any case, "didn't love her, since he wanted men." While "talking to his children, Lenny [Bernstein] pinched my ass a lot."

In the heterosexual world, Lerman reports that Aristotle Onassis slept with Lee Radziwill, before "Jackie grabbed him." Mary McCarthy, he recounts, made an unsuccessful attempt to seduce Lionel Trilling, in the hope of rising to the top of the world of New York intellectuals. Diana Trilling believed her son hated her. Lerman tells about the heavy drinking of Dixie Lee Crosby, the wife of Bing, who one day while drunk "kicked one of her little boys in the stomach so hard that he had to have an operation."

A more charming class of gay gossip comes from Noël Coward, whose information didn't seem soaked in the poisonous waters of personal animosity. In his diary—and diaries, by their nature, are a form of gossip, for as the English diarist Chips Channon wrote, "What is more dull than a discreet diary?"—Coward speaks of Vivien Leigh's carrying on after Laurence Olivier leaves her for the actress Joan Plowright: "Vivien has appeared in London and is busily employed in making a cracking ass of herself. She is right round the bend again, as I suspected, and looks ghastly. I suspect there is far less mental instability about it than most people seem to think ... She is almost inarticulate with drink and spitting vitriol about everyone and everything."