Why did Ann Birstein wait until her husband's death to defame him so enthusiastically? Perhaps she feared direct revenge when he was alive. (When Philip Roth's second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote about what a wretched husband and stepfather Roth was, he responded by drawing a crushingly cruel portrait of her in a thinly veiled novel called I Married a Communist.) Perhaps, who knows, she feared more beatings, or litigation. But she has given that small portion of the world that cares about her and her dead ex-husband much in the way of richly vicious gossip to contemplate, and I now seem to be passing it along.
The rise, some have called it the triumph, of psychotherapy in modern life has provided people one more subject—along with sex, money, and moral hypocrisy—about which to gossip: that of a person's psychic state. As amateur therapists, gossips analyze other people for their psychological weaknesses, not to say deformities. "She's very insecure," two people might casually say about a third. Or "He's obviously paranoid." Or "His relationship with his mother has always been fundamentally skewed." Or "She exhibits all the behavior patterns of the nymphomaniac." All this kind of talk, even in the hands of a professional therapist—and "therapist," if you insert a space after the e, spells "the rapist"—is pure speculation. In the hands of a gossip, it can also be speculation with intent to wound.
If much of gossip is speculation, almost all of it requires interpretation. One must examine a piece of gossip as one would a novel; the more subtle the gossip, the more subtle the interpretation needed. Some gossip is crude, its intention obvious, and no training in literary criticism is required to unpack its meaning. Other gossip can be Proustian in its subtlety, and calls for refined interpretation.
Nearly all human acts outside the most basic ones call for interpretation. One recalls here Metternich, the great Austrian diplomatist who, when informed that the Russian ambassador would not be attending the Congress of Verona because of his death, asked, "I wonder why he did that?" Not all speculation need be as cunning as Metternich's, but certain incidents, events, and bits of randomly acquired information call forth speculation of a kind aligned to gossip. "Perhaps the urge to participate in gossip comes from knowledge of the impossibility of knowing," writes Patricia Meyer Spacks in Gossip, her study of the connections between gossip and literature. "We continue to talk about others precisely because we cannot finally understand them."
Speculation is nearly inseparable from gossip. One sees a married man in what appears to be intimate conversation with an attractive woman much younger than he, and one must, it strikes me, speculate on who she might be and what is the nature of their relationship. One has a neighbor, a man in his forties, who doesn't seem to go to work yet lives exceedingly well: travels frequently, dresses expensively, has tickets to lots of concerts and other cultural events. What is he living on? An inheritance? A trust fund? Earnings from something illicit? A woman in her early thirties has had a number of affairs with men her age, living serially with them for extended periods. She has often talked about wanting children but is not ready to do so without a husband. What is it about her that has made finding a husband, at least thus far, impossible? Invitations to gossip, under the banner of speculation, all of these.
It may well be that our married man with the younger woman is in reality meeting his attractive niece, the young man living large with no visible means of support is a skilled day trader, the woman in her thirties with serial lovers has less wrong with her than is wrong with so many men in midlife who are terrified of commitment. It may well be, in other words, that all one's gossipy suspicions were flat-out wrong, proving that a dirty mind never sleeps but perhaps from time to time ought to.
But is it a dirty mind or, less balefully, a merely curious one that invites such speculation? Encountering unconventional or ambiguous behavior, one naturally seeks an explanation for it. The search often requires knowledge of facts that are unavailable, which leaves one having to settle for speculation about these unknown facts.
Curiosity—"one of the lowest of the human faculties," E. M. Forster said—more often than not trumps honor, and does so most frequently in the form of gossip, which in turn is ready to betray secrets, circulate slander, and violate privacy, all to satisfy the beast of curiosity. At any sophisticated level, curiosity operates under the assumption that appearances and reality are usually very different, and gossip, often with the aid of daring speculation, sets out to fill in the discrepancy between the two. Sometimes it does so accurately, sometimes mistakenly yet charmingly, and sometimes meanly and disastrously. But whatever its intention, whatever its subtlety or want of subtlety, whatever its effect, whether it issues out of envy or voyeurism, revenge or the desire to entertain friends, gossip will not be suppressed.
II. PUBLIC GOSSIP
9. Gossip Goes Public
Gentlemen, if you continue to publish slanderous pieces about me, I shall feel compelled to cancel my subscription.
—GROUCHO MARX to Confidential magazine
ONCE A LEISURE-TIME pursuit, an activity carried on between individuals in the agora or the forum or the drafty halls of Versailles or (much later) over the backyard fence in small towns, gossip officially went public with the advent of the printing press, the rise and spread of literacy, and the resulting proliferation of newspapers and journals, most of which were only too pleased to carry it. Once print, in the form of journalism, became available to larger and larger segments of every national population, gossip ceased to be entirely a mouth-to-ear private transaction and became more and more a public business. Gossip itself soon became professionalized: people made their livelihood by gathering and spreading it.
As this happened, gossip also became strangely impersonalized. The best gossip, as far as the gossip writers were concerned, wasn't about the family next door, but about the famous: royalty, the rich, politicians, successful artists, great athletes, and, in our time, movie stars. But before gossip in the newspapers became democratic breakfast fare for the family, it had to overcome considerable resistance from people who valued their privacy. For at the level of journalism, gossip is, always and everywhere, an invasion of privacy.
Gossip has played a central role in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. But the first novel in which, in its professionalized role, it occupies a central place is The Reverberator (1888), one of Henry James's lesser novels on the subject of his international theme: Americans abroad in their exchanges with Europeans and their older, more complexly layered culture. The Americans in the novel are one of those solid but unsophisticated, invariably well-to-do families, the Dossons, from Boston, consisting of a father and his two daughters on an extended visit to France. In the early pages, the Dossons are accompanied around Paris, shown a few of the velvet ropes, by a go-get-'em American named, appropriately, George Flack, who is a society reporter for a newspaper in the United States called the Reverberator.
Far from being in any way ashamed of his work, Flack feels he is on to a very good thing, the coming thing, the Next Big Thing in fact. He tells Miss Francie Dosson, on whom he has romantic designs, that the paper for which he works is "a big thing already and I mean to make it bigger: the most universal society-paper the world has seen. That's where the future lies, and the man who sees it first is the man who'll make his pile. It's a field for enlightened enterprise that hasn't yet begun to be worked." Flack before long will demonstrate how far he is willing to go to work it. He also believes that privacy is dead, and remarks: "It ain't going to be possible to keep anywhere out of the light of the press. Now what I'm going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then."
Flack learns that the Dosson girls have made a connection with the Proberts, an older American family that has been living in France since the time of Louis-Philippe, who was King of France between 1830 and 1848, and have assimilated themselves entirely to French culture. He sets out to get the Proberts' story and write it up for the Reverberator. He will
subsequently be aided in this plan when Francie Dosson becomes engaged to young Gaston Probert, and, in her American innocence, blithely tells Flack everything he wants to know about the exclusive Probert family, including the fact that one of its members suffers from kleptomania.
Francie supplies Flack with precisely what he wants: "genuine, first-hand information, straight from the tap." He, as his job requires, goes on to write it up for the Reverberator's large American audience. When word of this unwanted publicity gets back to the Probert family, they are devastated. As Mme. de Brécourt, one of Gaston Probert's sisters, puts it, "Everything is at an end, we have been served up to the rabble, we shall have to leave Paris." The story is the old Jamesian one of two sets of people operating under different standards of conduct: the Europeans greatly value their privacy, and the Americans don't quite see the problem in losing it.
The working out of the plot is of less interest—Francie Dosson and Gaston Probert do, after much fairly conventional Sturm und Drang, marry—than the mechanics of gossip illustrated by the story. As Delia, the other Dosson sister, says, not so much in defense as in explanation of the behavior of George Flack: "He says that's what they like over there [in America] and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you've got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you've got to be with the people." All too true, as the history of American and British journalism has borne out. Between the privacy that dignity requires and the publicity that newspaper reading requires, privacy goes down to defeat nearly every time.
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.
Diary
I was among the people awarded an honorary degree—my only such degree, and I neith
er 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."
10. Gossip Goes Center Ring
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"
SOMETIMES, 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?
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