Gossip (24 page)

In fact my mother, whatever her reasons, didn't want to talk about her father's suicide, and apparently felt no overpowering need to do so. She must have viewed it as a terrible event in her life about which nothing was to be done, with no point in talking it to death. Since my mother was among the least neurotic people I have known, she was obviously living with this sadness, keeping it to herself, without any apparent distress or inner turmoil. Why talk about it? Why rehash it? What was to be gained? Nothing, evidently, that she could see. Reticence about the matter was more dignified, made more sense. And I find I love my mother all the more for her ability to live without the need to drag her sadness out into the open.

But I see that in telling this story, I am gossiping about my own mother, telling a tale she would not even now want told. What do you call a man who gossips about his own mother? At the very least, a writer, but also someone who, in regard to gossip, is not the man his mother was.

Journalism is organized gossip.

—
OSCAR WILDE

 

T
HE JOB OF THE JOURNALIST
, every journalist, is to spy and to pry, to find out things that people, for various reasons, would rather not have revealed. Ordinary people spy and pry, too, at least some among us do, in the hope of getting beneath the unconvincing surface of things. But journalists earn their living spying and prying, which makes a substantial difference. They are professionals; they get paid for it; they are whores of information.

Why would anyone wish to talk to journalists, aid them in their undignified tasks? Because, the short answer is, they often have their own known, just as often unknown, motives for doing so. Manifold these motives may be. They might wish to pass along information to a journalist that would undo or short-circuit the plans of a rival or enemy. People might enjoy the brief glare of publicity journalism provides, thinking it lends significance to their lives. They might be concealing hidden (possibly devious) agendas behind such in-print identifications as "unacknowledged source," or "high-ranking Pentagon official," or "neighbor who did not wish to be identified."

Journalism was always a rough trade, not for the faint-hearted or sensitive. In
Child of the Century,
Ben Hecht recounts, during his days as a young journalist in Chicago, visiting the families of the recently deceased so that he could steal family photographs—and on one notable occasion an oil painting—so that his paper could have a likeness of the dead to accompany its obituary. Journalists have also been famously cold-blooded, a point heavily underscored in Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play
The Front Page.
The play is a caricature, but journalists have not been especially noted for their kindness or mercy. Once set out on a hot story, journalists tend not to care how many innocent parties, or civilians, get hurt.

If whores they be, no one has ever accused them of being whores with hearts of gold. And the new dispensation under which journalism operates—about which more presently—has not made them any larger-hearted or observant of people's feelings or what they hold sacred.

Of course today in public life there is no longer anything staked out as sacred, and thus inviolable to journalistic poking. Think of the publicity logjam that hit Tiger Woods when, in the winter of 2009–10, his scandal of philandering became the main item in the national news. What began as gossip about Woods turned out to be quite true—truer, or, more precisely, wilder, than anyone might have imagined. Wrong though Woods was, and deceitful into the bargain, one has to have been without imagination not to have shuddered, if only slightly, at the klieg-light glare to which his antics were exposed. He should have known better, we confidently say. He was a fraud, we all agree. Yet are we entitled to know so much about the scandal, or about the man himself, as eventually was revealed?

Some people think we are. In the
Wall Street Journal
a psychology professor named Nicholas DiFonzo, who has written a book about office gossip called
The Watercooler Effect,
is among those who do. "The Tiger gossip is replete with moral messages and motivations that are compelling, instructive and powerful," he wrote. "Moral guidance can often sound like a collection of tired bromides when expressed in the abstract. But when told as part of a compelling drama—as gossip—it can appear as an eloquent demarcation of good behavior." One wonders if DiFonzo thinks it was moral instruction that the journalists so relentless on Woods's case had in mind.

Tina Brown, the former editor of
Vanity Fair
and of
The New Yorker,
is someone else who feels that exposure through gossip can on balance be a good thing. "We live in a culture of destructive transparency," Brown wrote on her website the
Daily Beast
in connection with the leakage of a story about Mel Gibson abusing an ex-girlfriend. "Text messages leaked. Phone calls taped. Pictures uploaded in real time, and sound bites exploding on unsuspecting careers. But there's an upside to our leaky, sneaky world. Vile, fraudulent bullies like Mel Gibson or free-range sex addicts like Tiger Woods can be exposed at last to the censure—and ridicule—they deserve."

Athletes of earlier days never underwent such intense scrutiny as did Woods. The antics of Babe Ruth with women, though much talked about in a sub-rosa way, were never the stuff of the daily, even the tabloid, press. The great tennis champion Bill Tilden's homosexuality, also known to people inside the sport of tennis, was blunted, though he was charged with "lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor" and served a seven-month prison sentence for such conduct. The private life of athletes was pretty much their own. I remember as a boy reading, in
Sport
magazine, an article about Yogi Berra, the great Yankee catcher, that included the following sentence, which has stuck in my mind all these years: "Yogi enjoys plenty of pizza in the off-season, when he can usually be found at his pal Phil Rizzuto's bowling alley." Nothing more in the article was said about Yogi's private life, which was considered either of no interest or nobody's business.

No longer.
TMZ,
the celebrity gossip television show, having made great hay with its coverage of the Tiger Woods story, has recently begun a sports blog, TMZsports.com, dedicated to pursuing the delinquencies of athletes, of which, one may be sure, there will be no shortage. How could it be otherwise when you have a large number of undereducated young men, unused to people saying no to them, earning vast sums of money, out on the loose. Bad behavior of all sorts can be the only result. And with
TMZ
offering money for tips to such stories, the stories themselves are likely to come flooding in, about wife beating, gun toting, illegitimate children, minor crimes, major breaches of decorum and decency. It promises to be a field day, on a field athletes have not hitherto been asked to play.

Are celebrities—in sports, show business, politics—by the very nature of their celebrity, not entitled to the least privacy? Apparently not if caught out at bad behavior. The press used to talk about the public's right to know. But does this right extend to details, really quite grubby if not positively lurid details? Is it not enough to know that a man committed adultery? Do we also need to know he did so with a woman with a tramp stamp above her behind, her bra size, and that together they did this, that, and the other no fewer than three times while Rolling Stones music played on the hotel room stereo? Doesn't more and more exposure of this kind, in its cumulative effect, lower the tone of the society in which it takes place?

The change of social tone was a slow one, an accumulation of many bridges being lowered, gates opened, walls allowed to crumble. When was the first time an athlete said "pissed off" or "kick ass" on television, a woman said "fuck" at a middle-class dinner party table, kids took to using the phrase "it sucks" for things they didn't like, permission given to run ads for Viagra and other erection-inducing pills on prime-time television? When was the first time that older people deciding to live together without marrying, lest marriage reduce their Social Security checks, became respectable; the first time a comedian (Robin Williams?) did skits about cunnilingus on cable television; the first time
The New Yorker
permitted the word "bullshit" in its pages, with phrases such as "cunty fingers" (thank you, John Updike) in its fiction; the first time a politician, his timorous wife by his side, publicly apologized for having been caught out at having sex with another woman or young man?

All these undated events of the past three or so decades have helped to bring down the decorum that was a strong feature of—let us call it—square society. Not many people around today to defend square society, with all its rules and inhibitions. Square society could be stuffy, boring, dreary. Not many laughs there, and no titillation whatsoever. Yet in regard to gossip, it could be much subtler than the blatant exposure that has come to pervade contemporary life. In a John O'Hara story called "The General," published in his book
Waiting for Winter
(1966), O'Hara has a retired army officer return home to find his wife, Sophie, and her female friends gathered for afternoon tea. He assumes that these women had been gossiping before his arrival from his club.

 

Any real gossip Sophie had picked up would be duly passed on to him when they were alone, in language of the utmost purity but with illustrative gestures, and as completely descriptive as a police report. He had never asked her how her women friends were able to communicate details without using the language of the gutter or of the physicians; they would not repeat naughty words, and they were ignorant of medical terminology. Nevertheless Sophie and her friends made their stories graphically real, and there was nothing in the calendar of sin that she had not at some time been able to convey to him in the telling of an episode.

 

The decorum of square society established with some clarity what was permissible, what could and could not be said in public and, as the O'Hara story conveys, in private. If square society had a standard, it found it in the realm of taste. People of good taste simply did not do, say, or even think certain things.

One did of course think untasteful things, and in the privacy of one's home, or the intimacy of one's closest friendships, one also said tasteless things. But they weren't printed, at least not in such erstwhile respectable places as the
New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York,
and elsewhere. Nor were they shown on television or said in mixed company. It took decades—one of these decades, that of the 1960s, was especially significant in this regard—for the old standards of decorum to be set aside. The increased brashness of gossip columns helped. So, too, did the changed relationships between men and women, so that things once permitted to be talked about only in exclusively male company now made it to the dinner-party table. The breakdown of censorship in literature, once one of the great and worthy causes of liberalism, brought with it the dreary consequences of adult bookstores and easy access to pornography on the Internet. For many people the defeat of decorum and the rise of candor represents pure progress. Others, toting up the side effects, are not so sure.

The New Yorker
is in some ways a good gauge of the change in social arrangements that has paved the way for public discussion of things once thought best discussed, if at all, in private. In its pages, under an earlier editor, William Shawn, no profane language was permitted, nor was fiction that included the description of sex allowed. Until Shawn's enforced retirement in 1987, at the age of eighty, if one saw a story by John Cheever or John Updike published elsewhere than in
The New Yorker,
one could be sure that sex was going to be described in it. Was Shawn a prude? Whether he was or not is perhaps up for argument, but what isn't is the fact that he was a great editor, perhaps the greatest magazine editor of the past century. His good taste—or, if you prefer, his puritanism—in matters of language and risqué subject matter didn't seem to get in the way of that; it may even have had something to do with his greatness.

After William Shawn died, in 1992, Lillian Ross, a longtime reporter at
The New Yorker,
wrote a memoir in which she described her decades-long love affair with the married Mr. Shawn.
Here but Not Here
(1998) the memoir is called, and it was published while Cecille Shawn, Shawn's wife, was still alive. Before Lillian Ross's book, William Shawn was a figure of mystery, elusive, self-effacing to the point of near nonexistence.

Except that he distinctly did exist, and no single man or woman over the past fifty or so years had more books dedicated to him by grateful writers or was featured so emphatically in authors' acknowledgments. Had he his druthers, Shawn would probably have preferred that all these writers allow him to go without mention. He claimed not to like to see his name in print, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. This was a man who turned down honorary degrees from, among other places, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and Michigan; he had attended the last-named school for two years before dropping out. Shawn was also a man with lots of phobias—he refused to fly in a plane, he panicked in elevators and crowds, he couldn't bear smoke, alcohol made him nervous, fast cars made him anxious, he was always cold, even in warmest summer—and this is merely the icing on a rich cake of his neuroses.

If Lillian Ross's account is to be believed, William Shawn would have been happier never to have been the editor of
The New Yorker
in the first place. What he really wanted to be was a writer. Working so closely with and on behalf of other writers cost him, Miss Ross tells us, the sense of "his own existence." His marriage brought him no happiness, either; nor, one gathers, did his being the father of three children, one of them a twin girl who is deeply autistic. All this, of course, according to Lillian Ross. If Shawn was self-effacing, Ross is self-aggrandizing, certainly in her privacy-destroying memoir
Here but Not Here,
a title that comes from Shawn's frequently telling her that, when in his marital home, he was "there but not there." That, when she first read it—and one hopes she never did—could not have come as cheering news to Mrs. Shawn.