Then, of course, there are the straight romans à clef, or (literally) novels with a key, which are only very thinly disguised portraits from life, meant to fool no one, with knowledge of the real-life characters supplying the key. Whenever the spirit of roman à clef is at work in fiction, the all but irresistible temptation is to extrapolate from the book back into life. The pleasure is in feeling that one is getting the real inside view of famous people, truth that cannot be spoken except through the veil of fiction—a purely gossipy pleasure.
Often such fiction serves as scarcely more than a legal prophylactic against libel. The first roman à clef I encountered as a younger reader was Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, a novel based on the French existentialists of the 1940s, including most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir herself, and Albert Camus, and others. The Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, with whom de Beauvoir had an affair on a visit she made to America, also appears, all too transparently, in The Mandarins, a fact that Algren came to view as little more than an embarrassment and a nuisance, suggesting on more than one occasion that the affair seemed to mean a lot more to Mlle. de Beauvoir than it did to him. E. I. Lonoff, the key figure in Philip Roth's novel The Ghost Writer, is everywhere taken to be the novelist Bernard Malamud—so much so that a recent biographer of Malamud's takes it to be a life drawing, even though much else in the novel is invention. E. L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel is about the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for spying for the Soviet Union. In this instance, the obvious roman à clef permits the novelist to make his case for what he feels: the injustice and terrible human consequences of the execution.
The possibilities for mischief here are considerable. Being portrayed as a vile character in someone's novel cannot be a pleasant experience. Impotent anger must be the result if one is portrayed as villainous, mild distaste even if one is portrayed favorably yet vulgarly. Isaiah Berlin was apparently used as a model for the central character in a series of detective stories by the writer Jocelyn Davey (the pseudonym for Chaim Raphael), which much put him off. "To appear in a novel of this kind," Berlin wrote to a colleague, "is rather like appearing in other people's dreams: and one cannot exactly avoid doing so, nor is one responsible for the shape one takes, and yet the results inevitably offend one. I wish people left one alone." But people won't leave one alone, especially if one is famous, even mildly so—at least they won't in the new era of widening gossip.
Soon enough the roman was dropped, making the clef unnecessary, and in the late 1960s a group of writers began to employ the techniques of fiction to write about famous people in a novelistic way under their true names, usually to their detriment. The enterprise was called the New Journalism, and though it is now far from new, and hasn't, truth be told, worn all that well, the phenomenon greatly lowered the bar on privacy and what it was permissible to say about people in print.
One of the most famous early pieces of the New Journalism is Gay Talese's Esquire article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (1966). Immensely readable, it gives the feeling that one is a privileged member of Sinatra's entourage. Talese is careful to show the deep contradictions in Sinatra, his generosity and his cruelty, his loyalty and how easily he slips into the role of bully. One assumed Sinatra was a monster, but after reading the article one feels certain he was. My guess is that what probably most excited readers of the article is the bits of gossip that arise out of it: Sinatra's manner with women, his twenty-six hairpieces (and the then impressive $400-a-week salary he paid a woman to tend them, toting them around in attaché cases), the Mafia don–like relations he has with so many people who seem to fear and revere him in roughly though not quite equal parts, his relations with his ex-wives and other women. All this is the stuff of good gossip, and the chief impression the article conveys—and this may have been the reigning virtue of the New Journalism generally—is that it was purveying the behind-the-scenes truth about real lives, which is of course what gossip claims for itself.
Another early specimen of the New Journalism is an article that the movie critic Rex Reed wrote on Ava Gardner (also in Esquire, in 1968), just as the beautiful movie star's career had begun its slide. In the piece Reed seems to be just hanging out with Miss Gardner, to have earned her trust, which he will soon enough betray by writing about her in a gossip-feeding way. He records the extent of her drinking, which is prodigious, and her sense of her own failure as an actress, which is sad. Here is a sample paragraph:
She rolls her sleeves higher than the elbows and pours two more champagne glasses full [one with cognac, the other with Dom Pérignon]. There is nothing about the way she looks, up close, to suggest the life she has led: press conferences accompanied by dim lights and an orchestra; bullfighters writing poems about her in the press; rubbing Vaseline between her bosoms to emphasize the cleavage; roaming restlessly around Europe like a woman without a country, a Pandora with her suitcases full of cognac and Hershey bars ("for quick energy"). None of the ravaged, ruinous grape-colored lines to suggest the affairs or the brawls that bring the police in the middle of the night or the dancing on tabletops in Madrid cellars till dawn.
Reed has caught Ava Gardner drunk—later in the evening she will down three iced tea–size glasses of tequila, hold the salt—which gives him an opening to ask her about her famous husbands: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. When he mentions Sinatra's marriage to Mia Farrow, she laughs: "Hah, I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy." She allows that her accomplishments as an actress have been pitiful: "Hell, baby, after twenty-five years in this business, if all you've got to show for it is Mogambo and The Hucksters you might as well give up." When Reed jots something in his notebook, she retorts: "Don't tell me you're one of those people who always go around scribbling everything on little pieces of paper. Get rid of that. Don't take notes. Don't ask questions either because I probably won't answer any of them anyway. Just let Mama do all the talking." And she does, alas, to her own ruination. A gentleman, a standing for which not many writers qualify, would never have permitted so beautiful a woman, or even a very homely one, to expose herself to such sad disadvantage and then recount it for the public.
Tom Wolfe, who with Gay Talese is (or perhaps was, since he has long since turned to the novel as his genre of choice) one of the chief progenitors and exponents of the New Journalism, wrote what is perhaps its most famous single composition, "Radical Chic," about the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia's party at their thirteen-room Park Avenue penthouse to raise money for twenty-one Black Panthers in prison for allegedly planning to blow up five New York department stores, New Haven Railroad facilities, and the Bronx botanical garden in the late 1960s. The result is as close as journalism is permitted to come to genius, dazzling in its detail, devastating in its effect. For some people, "Radical Chic" put an end to the rich unselfconsciously displaying their empty virtue by siding with the very people who, should their dreams come true, would be only too pleased to lead them to the guillotine.
That evening at the Bernsteins' apartment was an occasion on which some of the richest and most celebrated New Yorkers demonstrated how far from reality wealth and celebrity could place one. A journalist in the middle of the apartment—fellow name of Tom Wolfe—diligently taking notes on their foolishness, would eventually let everyone not there in on just how silly they were. He named names, some quite glittering names: Otto Preminger, Jean vanden Heuvel, Peter and Cheray Duchin, Barbara Walters, Bob Silvers, Mrs. Richard Avedon, Mrs. Arthur Penn, Richard Feigen, Frank and Donna Stanton, Elinor Guggenheimer, Julie Belafonte, Gail Lumet, Sheldon Harnick, and many others. At the end of Wolfe's account one is glad—delighted is more like it—not to have been among them.
Social hypocrisy has always been one of Tom Wolfe's great subjects, and it was never more perfectly placed in his kitchen, as the baseball sluggers say, than when he found himself in the Bernsteins' living room that evening. His fine eye for the nuttiness of social status was given a
n exhilarating workout. Here's Wolfe on the problem of finding the right servants for a party to raise money for a radical black organization:
But it's all right. They're white servants, not Claude and Maude, but white South Americans. Lenny and Felicia are geniuses ... Obviously, if you are giving a party for the Black Panthers, as Lenny and Felicia are this evening, and Richard Baron, the publisher, did before that; or for the Chicago Eight, such as the party Jean vanden Heuvel gave; or for the grape workers or Bernadette Devlin, such as the parties Andrew Stein gave; or the party for the Young Lords, such as the party Ellie Guggenheimer is giving next week in her Park Avenue duplex; or for the Indians or the SDS or the G.I. coffee shops or even for the Friends of the Earth—well, then, obviously you can't have a Negro butler and maid, Claude and Maude, in uniform, circulating through the living room, the library, and the main hall serving drinks and canapés ... Anyway, [the Bernsteins] have a house staff of three white South American servants ... Can one comprehend how perfect that is, given ... the times? Well, many of their friends can, and they ring up the Bernsteins and ask them to get South American servants for them, and the Bernsteins are so generous about it, so obliging, that people refer to them, good-naturedly and gratefully, as "the Spic and Span Employment Agency," with an easygoing humor, of course.
In an earlier day, a writer, coming upon a plum of such high human foolishness of the kind Tom Wolfe encountered at the Bernsteins' penthouse, might have turned the same material into fiction, providing a key for the knowing to unlock and thereby discover the true personages at the event. But in fiction it would be nowhere near so successful, so perfect, so, to choose an adjective that often appears before "gossip," juicy.
The element of self-abasement on Leonard Bernstein's part is nicely captured by Wolfe when he overhears the conductor say to one of the Panthers: "'When you walk into this house, into this building'"—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doorman downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front—"'when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!'"
Bernstein's reputation—not as a composer but as a serious person—never survived Wolfe's account of that evening. His music is still played on classical music stations, where anniversaries of his birth and death are duly noted. His place in the line of twentieth-century composers and conductors remains reasonably high and has not been altered. But the journalistic account of his and his wife's behavior that night set him for eternity into that saddest of all social categories, a damn fool, too rich and famous to have the vaguest sense of how the world really works. "Radical Chic" is great journalism, but also gossip to the highest power. In fact, the two, in the hands of the New Journalists, seemed one and the same thing.
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.
Diary
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.
14. Gay Gossip
...the predatory and innuendo-filled air of the homosexual hothouse.
—ROGER SCRUTON
WHILE 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 cons
cience, 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!"
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