TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030590/0305222.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 21.5 KB | 421 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 46

COVER STORIES

Pssst...Did You Hear About?


Ivana and Donald . . . Madonna and Warren . . . Where does
gossip come from? How much is true? And why does America love
it?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los
Angeles and Naushad S. Mehta/New York, with other bureaus


    There she was, blond and bedizened and bravely unbowed,
pictured on the front page of the newspaper to which she had
confided her most private conversations. No, not Ivana Trump.
The woman standing next to her, the one commanding equal
attention in that come-to-tell-all photo: syndicated gossip
columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News, the shoulder
La Trump chose to cry on when she wanted to tell the whole
world what she thought of the man who had left her. They stood
side by side, equals and friends and newsmakers, the aspirant
to a jumbo settlement and the journalist turned dispenser of
social eclat. While ordinary footsore reporters waited outside
a restaurant for crumbs of comment, Mizz Liz sailed in to
console Ivana in the guise of boon companion, swapped
expressions of abiding misery, then hurried out to whip
intimate confidences into a souffle of salaciousness and
scandal. Not that Ivana felt betrayed -- the whole friendship,
like nearly every friendship between gossips and the
gossiped-about, was based on mutual exploitation, an exchange
of private trust before an audience of millions of strangers.

    Right across town, hours later, the New York Post's Cindy
Adams, a darker and doughtier and even more decked-out doyen
of dirt, was marinating in Donald Trump's self-righteous anger
at being blamed for that saddest of commonplaces, a divorce.
He was just as eager as his wife to hash out in public a story
that seemed certain to do him no good, proving again the quirky
fact that keeps all gossip columns in business: for some
people, there is just no such thing as bad publicity. In Adams'
published stories she too stood front and center, a principal
voice if not quite a front-page face in what somehow was being
treated as the biggest news of a singularly newsy time.

    The Soviet Union was in the midst of disempowering the
Communist Party. Germany was hurtling toward unification.
Nelson Mandela was transforming the future of South Africa, and
Drexel Burnham Lambert was pronouncing obsequies over the go-go
greed of the '80s. But the connubial bust-up of the billionaire
New Yorkers was the talk of the town. For that matter, of
practically every town. Their story made the network newscasts
and countless columns across the U.S., and once the split
became a fait accompli, gossipists gleefully predicted that
ramifications -- from a rowdy settlement battle to the wooing
of new partners -- might drag on deliciously for, oh, a
decade. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they're
only made of clay, but gossip is heaven-sent and here to stay.

    Clamoring to get into the Trump affray were such
professional tattletales and partygoers as Aileen Mehle,
veteran writer of the Post's "Suzy" column, syndicated to more
than 100 newspapers, plus Smith's Daily News colleague William
Norwich, New York Newsday's James Revson and a phalanx of
others from all over. Even London dailies were grabbing at the
story, pursuing the angle of Ivana's brief first marriage to
an Austrian ski pal. We're not talking just the wacky
supermarket scandal sheets, whose more enticing headlines last
week included JAMES DEAN IS ALIVE!, CHEERS STAR'S FATHER IS
NAMED AS JFK KILLER, WORLD WAR II BOMBER FOUND ON MOON. Gossip
is booming on television, in magazines, in nonfiction books,
in docudrama TV movies and mini-series.

    From Bess Myerson's messy romance to Malcolm Forbes'
birthday party, from Roseanne Barr's backstage tempests to
William Hurt's palimony trial, the private doings of public
figures preoccupy the supposedly serious mainstream press.
Decades after Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper
and their ilk went the way of the dodo, their patented elixir
of career hype, marital comings and goings, feuds, fortunes and
celebrity pratfalls has become the journalistic cocktail of
choice. In the great public circus of American life, gossip is
back in the center ring.

    New York City, the U.S. media capital, has become a
metropolis where most of the newspapers offer not just one
gossip page but three or four. They feature glimpses of
everyone from sitcom heroes and sports stars to obscure if
self-important entertainment and publishing executives,
social-climbing plastic surgeons and dress designers, deposed
royalty, offspring of ousted dictators and legions of the
nouveaux riches or, rather, nouveaux gauches.

    Gossip columns may even feature other gossip columnists.
Although most practitioners are too competitive to mention one
another, they all take frequent note of Claudia Cohen, who
moved from "Page Six" at the Post to the I, Claudia column at
the Daily News to her current bully pulpit, Live with Regis and
Kathie Lee on ABC-TV. Along the way she vaulted into the ranks
of privilege by marrying an A-list name, corporate raider Ron
Perelman.

    In Los Angeles the names often come from studios and talent
agencies; in Washington, from government and politics; in
Chicago, from local pro sports teams, although any item about
talk hostess Oprah Winfrey will do; in St. Louis, from Busch
brewery heirs; in Boston, from the corridors of the state house
and city hall, the Kennedy clan and the remnants of the
Cabot-and-Lowell Brahmin aristocracy. In every city there is
an inevitable reliance on local TV personalities. A few elite
names are good anywhere, anytime, whether they have done
something recently or not. Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis
and Barbra Streisand are always news; so are Frank Sinatra and
Teddy Kennedy and Sylvester Stallone. Some celebrities, like
Sean Penn or Robin Givens, may prove ephemeral, but are
omnipresent for their moment. Some celebrities become famous
for doing something. Others, like Malcolm Forbes -- who died
suddenly of a heart attack last week -- are famous for how
lavishly they've spent in the company of celebrity friends.

    Many gossip-column names, like the Trump clan, become famous
primarily for being famous. Long before Trump ranked as one of
the wealthiest Americans, he made himself one of the best known
simply by trying. He followed a social path that one public
relations counselor says is available to any Manhattan couple
with about $100,000 to squander, "not counting the jewelry."
He and his wife adopted the right charities, made sure they
were photographed at the proper benefits and balls, acquired
well-publicized luxury possessions and set up holiday homes at
fashionable times and places.

    On the celebrity watch, the security of established names
needs constant replenishment with the fizz of the new.
Gossipists need people to write about. Attention seekers yearn
for celebrity. Out of this mutual need, a cafe society is born
and then, by some curious alchemy, is taken seriously by
millions of bystanders. The publicity-mad among the moneyed
cultivate the gossip columnists to gain one thing that money
cannot buy without the aid of a little limelight: the envy of
others. In a nation where television has taught the masses to
live vicariously, the gossipists and their chosen chums train
a beacon on themselves.

    Harder to detect but just as essential to the process are
the silent partners in the gossip industry, public relations
counselors, who now serve everybody from models and movie stars
to lawyers and landlords. While news consumers often feel sorry
for the victims of media intrusion, many who face an onslaught
of cameras and microphones have actually invited it. Unlike the
bereaved survivors of a household fire or plane crash, the
people written about in gossip columns typically have no desire
for privacy. They aim to be public figures. While they may seek
to control what is written, attention is what they crave.
"Society people really fear no press," says Newsday's Revson.

a thin layer of butter, spread evenly throughout the year." In
times of trouble, press agents smooth out the lumps, making
sure their clients are not caught on the defensive.

    Thus Ivana Trump's first move, after consulting Liz Smith,
was to hire a flack to tout her version of the breakup. She
chose John Scanlon, the public relations counsel retained by
CBS when it was being sued for libel by General William
Westmoreland. During the first days of the split, Scanlon's
strategy included fax messages carefully crafted to be usable
by a reporter without a gossip columnist's easy access.
Philosophized Scanlon: "This has been a liturgical acting out
of what is probably one of the single most commonplace
experiences of all people, that is, domestic rows, the very
thing that brought down the house of Troy. If you look through
literature and history, we've always been fascinated with those
things." Not to be outdone in the battle for the public's
hearts and minds, Donald hired a mouthpiece too, Howard
Rubinstein, who has represented erstwhile New York Post owner
Rupert Murdoch and embattled hotel queen Leona Helmsley.

    The notion of having a personal publicist may seem redolent
of show business, where the art has been brought to its
tawdriest heights. Many Hollywood flacks specialize in planting
premature if not downright phony stories of projects launched
and deals done, all in hopes of making the lies turn true. They
often haggle over how stories are to be played, what topics may
be discussed in an interview, even whether the client can
review and change the quotes. In one not-so-extreme case,
during Dolly Parton's heftier phase a few years ago, her agent
required a New York City publication's photo editor to touch
up 30 of the 38 photographs approved from a session, "slimming"
or "trimming" as many as six body regions per photo, "omitting"
eye wrinkles, "smoothing out" her neck and "lightening under
the wig line." Yes, even photographs lie.

    Nowadays not just singers and actors but opticians hire
press agents. So do restaurateurs, resort owners, novelists and
increasing numbers of socialites. Nor is the phenomenon
restricted to the East and West coasts. Says society writer
Bill Zwecker of the Chicago weekly Skyline, who grew up in the
business (his mother was a fashion columnist): "I'm finding
more and more individuals who have public relations people."

    To be sure, a lot of the gossip reported in Chicago and
elsewhere is about people who are based in New York City or Los
Angeles and who thereby attract national attention. "The people
who crave the publicity in Chicago in the way the Trumps do,"
explains Zwecker, "aren't in his league financially. The people
in his league financially go to bed at 9 p.m., lead a simpler
life and don't care if they're in my column." Something of the
same is true in the home of the bean and the cod, according to
Boston Herald gossipist Norma Nathan, whose column "The Eye"
is the paper's best-read feature. "Boston has no celebrities,"
she says. "The best items are the ones that have big names" --
actors in town to shoot a movie -- "mingling with the people
here."

    Where do column items come from? Though the particulars vary
from city to city, the tricks of the trade are fairly constant.
Sources must be cultivated, glamorous friends coddled, and, of
course, press agents heeded as they relentlessly push tips.
Certain restaurants are musts. In Los Angeles it's Le Dome or
the Ivy for lunch, Morton's or Spago for dinner. In Chicago the
image-conscious can be found at the Establishment-oriented Pump
Room or the more hip Eccentric, partly owned by Oprah. In New
York City the Russian Tea Room is best for the show-business
throng, Elaine's for the print glitterati, Le Cirque for the
well-heeled ladies who lunch. But to endure on the job, a
gossipmonger must also be a tireless attender of parties.
Syndicated columnist Karen Feld, who writes from Washington,
attends six to eight events a night and dowses for dirt on the
tennis court, at teas and on the embassy circuit. Says Feld:
"I do think columnists like me can make or break people."

    That is open to debate. Some columnists point out that there
is little one can say today that can ruin a person.
Extramarital affairs, divorce, children out of wedlock are no
longer utterly shocking (though they may bring harsher
judgments on politicians than, say, screen stars, because
indiscretions call character and judgment into question).
"There is no one today who has the power of, say, Louella
Parsons," observes novelist Nora Ephron. "Those people could
really punish you." When Parsons revealed in 1949 that Ingrid
Bergman had left her husband for director Roberto Rossellini,
the scandal kept her from making movies in Hollywood for more
than five years.

    Apart from the change in national morals, the power of any
individual gossip is limited by the proliferation of competing
media outlets. Liz Smith's distribution to about 60 newspapers,
her local TV appearances in New York City, and her proposed
syndicated TV series, for example, fall far short of the
astounding ability Walter Winchell had to reach almost 90% of
the adult U.S. population during the 1930s. His six-days-a-week
column appeared in almost a thousand newspapers with total
daily circulation of 50 million. His Sunday-night radio
broadcast reached 21 million. Parsons and her rival, Hedda
Hopper, between them appeared in practically every
consequential newspaper in the nation. On the other hand, while
there are many more competitors on the celebrity beat than in
Winchell's or Hopper's heyday, they tend to be editorial
copycats. Thus an item from Liz Smith or PEOPLE magazine or
Entertainment Tonight gets picked up and trumpeted by dozens
or even hundreds of publications and broadcasts.

    Some scholars argue that today's gossip columnists are more
powerful than Winchell because audiences care more. American
society has become so much more media conscious. While film and
radio gave the public a sense of connection with stars, nothing
compares with television for affording a false sense of
intimacy. TV personalities become surrogate friends or family
members, and faces glimpsed in the news or on talk shows become
significant presences in the lives of many viewers. Their
private lives thus seem a genuine public concern. This is
reflected, according to Everette Dennis, executive director of
the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, in
the news media's "increased blurring of the entertainment and
information function."

    One veteran film publicist terms today's gossip columnists
"more professional than they used to be, more fact oriented,
less careless, less reliant on hearsay." In Winchell's day, he
notes, columnists ran more blind items in which no names were
used, and thus were more apt to take a chance on a tip. Today's
scribes are more likely to seek confirmation, though they will
still rely on a hunch. Last fall Washington Times gossip writer
Charlotte Hays heard that actress Kelly McGillis, who had
signed for the season at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger,
was pregnant and would leave months early. "The accuracy of the
rumor was obvious from the way the Folger reacted. They said,
`Oh dear, she'll have to talk to you.'" Even though McGillis
didn't call back, Hays confidently went ahead, and the item was
soon confirmed.

    Gossip columnists admit they will haggle for a story.
According to Mitchell Fink, a PEOPLE magazine columnist and Fox
Entertainment News commentator, a smart flack will serve up
several good items having nothing to do with his clients --
though maybe a juicy expose about someone else's -- before
offering a tidbit designed to make a client look good. "How can
I say no," Fink asks, "when they have sent me other blockbuster
items?" Smart press agents know how to manipulate a client's
image by choosing what charities and causes to support. However
inconvenient the information that is circulating about oneself
or one's client, it is considered a big mistake to lie
outright. Some Hollywood observers were critical of Tom Cruise
for going out of his way, in the weeks preceding the breakup
of his marriage, to proclaim the relationship solid.

    Whether today's gossips are more or less powerful than those
of the past, they certainly operate by a different set of
ethical rules. For one thing, they can rarely be bought for a
straight cash subsidy, as their forebears often were. The
combination of greater financial sophistication and less
puritanical attitudes among readers has led to increased
emphasis on items about power and deals and a downplaying of
items about love affairs and illegitimate babies. At the same
time, contemporary society's heightened candor about sex has
tended to make possible publication of items that were once
unthinkable, such as hints of extramarital dalliance or
homosexual affairs. Says Daily Variety's Army Archerd, who has
covered the beat for 45 years and who broke the 1985 story that
Rock Hudson had AIDS: "News about who is sleeping with whom was
never covered in the old movie magazines. Now it's common
family dinner conversation."

    Michael Gross, 37, of New York magazine, attributes some of
the change in standards to the emergence of a new generation
not only of columnists but also of news subjects. "To an
extent," he says, "the right of privacy has been redefined by
all these personalities -- company raiders, nouvelle society
-- begging for attention and promoting themselves through the
gossip columns." Gross also points to Spy, the impertinent
monthly lampoon of New York City society launched in 1986, as
having pushed toward new and fiercer standards of what is
allowable. Many of its stories have been enterprising and funny,
but some have been simply meanspirited, mocking people's
physical shortcomings or purporting to detail their sex lives.

    Even in venues where gossip does not exploit the new, more
lax standards of taste and propriety, it always operates a bit
outside normal press ethics. Objectivity is not required. Where
a theater critic or sportswriter who socialized with a news
subject would probably be expected to abstain from writing
about that friend, most gossip columnists write about friends
every day of the year. Says Liz Smith: "One way to work is to
have access and do a very insider kind of thing. The other is
to be totally removed and dispassionate, completely uninvolved
with the people you write about. I wouldn't be good at that."

    Accuracy too is not as highly prized in gossip as on the
news pages. Columnists expect to be wrong fairly frequently,
and correct themselves only grudgingly. If a gossip columnist
has the essence of a story right, he or she often doesn't mind
that many of the details are in error, a situation that would
make most reporters flinch. In one egregious episode, Suzy of
the New York Post published a March 1988 description of the
celebrity guests at a party, only to have it exposed that many
of them had not been there, and neither had she. She wrote up
the event in advance from a press release, then took off for a
Caribbean vacation. Post editor Jerry Nachman says that gossip
"exists in a netherworld where the traditional tests that would
hold in the rest of the newspaper get flexed a bit." He adds
that if he had his way, every gossip column everywhere would
appear beneath the following disclaimer: "The normal rules of
journalism don't apply here." ABC media critic Jeff Greenfield
says, "Gossip is the id rather than the superego of journalism.
We just love this kind of stuff."

    The real question is whether celebrity journalism or its
sub-category gossip poses a genuine threat to taste and morals,
or whether it is instead harmless airhead fun. The fear in the
intellectual marketplace, as in the mercantile one, is always
that cheap currency will debase good. Yet the truth is that
even at the height of Trump mania, Bess mania, Malcolm mania
or any of the other periodic explosions of silliness, those who
wanted to know the weightier news of the world had no real
difficulty in learning it. And unseemly as that front-page photo
may have appeared, Liz Smith's injection of herself into the
Trump tempest was no more outrageous than Stanley's stunts in
quest of Livingstone, Nellie Bly's travels and impersonations,
John Reed's reportage turned revolution in Lenin's Russia or
Barbara Walters' on-air diplomacy to help launch the Camp David
negotiations between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.
Journalists just like to grandstand.

    The truly troubling thing about the resurgence of gossip is
not what it displays about journalists but what it implies
about their audiences. The story of the Trumps could, to be
sure, be offered as a cautionary morality tale. But for the
most part, it wasn't. It was freestyle wrestling, with
attention fixed firmly on the pot of gold rather than on the
end of the rainbow. Instead of finding moment and meaning in
their own lives, Americans were encouraged to live in daydreams
about the life-styles of the rich and famous, to emphasize the
material over the spiritual. Gossip can be marketed so as to
make the listener feel smugly superior to those being talked
about. But in the gossip journalism of today, Liz wants to be
Ivana, Ivana wants to be Liz, and nobody even pretends to want
to be the gentle reader.