Gossip

by Joseph Epstein

  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."

  Coward is especially good on actresses: "Marlene [Dietrich] made an entrance looking ravishing and was quite entrancing for an hour. Then she became boring and over-egocentric ... I suddenly feel a wave of relief that I hadn't agreed to do an Australian tour with her. I am quite sure she would have driven me barmy." He travels to Chicago to see Tallulah Bankhead in his play Private Lives and reports in a letter to a friend that "I understand Tallulah does everything but stuff a kipper up her twot but is playing to smash capacity!" The next evening, he reports seeing her in the play in the company of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and when Fontanne congratulates her in her dressing room, Tallulah replies: "'I don't give a fuck about you and Alfred. It's only Noël I am worrying about.' She said it in no way maliciously but merely as a statement of fact! Fortunately it was all such a gel of effusiveness and fun that nobody minded but I thought you would like to know it as an example of Dix-Huitième courtesy and tact." There, I would say, one has the best of gay gossip, exhibiting, in one sweep, outrageousness, comedy, and charm.

  What can make gay gossip so wild and amusing is that homosexual men, having long thought themselves outside the realm of middle-class respectability, have achieved a nice distancing, a spectatorial view of so-called normal life, which is at heart comic. This same distancing, viewing everything through different binoculars, often results in lending gossip a witty twist. It gives the best gay gossip its mordancy, suggesting as it often does that life really is a sham, don't you know, and how amusing it is to pierce it by observing people playing out their hopeless little pageants of pretense and hypocris
y. Oscar Wilde's entire oeuvre seems to be about little else.

  Tennessee Williams, whose plays are so heavy in their symbolic earnestness, had the light gay gossip touch to a fine degree. "He loved sexual gossip, especially about other writers," reported his friend Dotson Rader. Williams repeats a story about William Faulkner's being broken up because Jean Stein, the daughter of Jules Stein, who controlled Universal Pictures, wouldn't marry him. "Of course," he concludes, putting aside Faulkner's belief that Jean Stein rejected him because he wasn't Jewish, that the real story was "Jean didn't want to marry him because he was a hell of a lot older than her, was a drunk, and she didn't look forward to spending her married life in Oxford, Mississippi, where the only thing to do is watch the cows go by."

  Williams recounts the story of Clifton Webb's grief over the death of his mother, and his claim that the reason he, Webb, remained a bachelor until well into his seventies was because his marrying would have hurt her. "Shock's more like it," Williams says. "Clifton Webb didn't marry because he was as gay as the Seventh Fleet, and everybody knew it, including him." Webb apparently made a great thing about his sorrow at his mother's death, until Noël Coward "shook Cliffy and said, 'Darling, pull yourself together! It is not unreasonable to be orphaned at seventy.'"

  The Clifton Webb story elides nicely into a story about one Jimmy Donohue, who "was a very rich, very nice queen who was a Woolworth heiress and had had a short-lived affair with Cliffy many years ago. And then for a few years he was the boyfriend of the Duchess of Windsor, although it was strictly nonphysical." Such gay gossip holds out the promise of pulling back the curtain on an intimate scene, which one may or may not believe but is nonetheless amusing to contemplate. The entire operation assumes that people are everywhere leading secret lives, that appearance and reality are wildly incongruent.

  Gay gossip took a tragic turn when AIDS cut its black swath through gay life, and gossip often centered on who had AIDS and who was hiding it. The great dancer Rudolf Nureyev, for example, denied he had AIDS, and then died of it. In an instance of gossip through fiction, in Saul Bellow's novel Ravelstein, the eponymous hero, a figure not merely based on but to everyone's knowledge precisely the philosopher and University of Chicago teacher Allan Bloom, is homosexual and described as dying of AIDS. When the book was published, many of Bloom's friends and former students were outraged that Bellow would portray Bloom in this way, arguing that he died instead from the effects of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an auto-immune disease affecting the nervous system, from which he had earlier suffered. No one ever said it aloud, but it was important to Bloom's friends, none of whom denied his homosexuality, that he died of an auto-immune disease rather than one associated with sexual promiscuity. They preferred Bloom to have been an important intellectual figure who also happened to be gay, rather than a gay man who also happened to be an important intellectual figure. Did Bellow know for sure that Bloom died of AIDS, or was he engaging in that form of speculation also known as gossip? The question of the cause of Allan Bloom's death has yet to be cleared up with any certainty, and it dallies in the limbo of gossip.

  In a culture in which people rather enjoy gossiping about themselves, gossip itself changes radically. In gay gossip, these changes are on emphatic display in the writing of Edmund White, a gay writer a generation younger than Williams, Capote, Lerman, and Coward. Previously people who were gay tended to keep their homosexuality off to the side—they didn't feature it, even when they had no difficulty owning up to it—but we now have people who, like the character in the play Purlie Victorious, might almost be said to be in the homosexual profession, and Edmund White is one of them. White writes about his own homosexuality freely and prolifically; without it he would be deprived of a subject, wouldn't really quite exist as a writer.

  All but agreeing with this, White, in a recent memoir called City Boy (2009), writes that if he had been straight, "I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others." White gossips as much about himself as he does about others. In this memoir the young Edmund White, freshly out of the closet, recounts his move to New York in the 1960s and a life of nearly full-time promiscuity. "Brandy Alexander, a famous drag queen, said to me at a party, 'Ed White, everyone wants you, you're the universal ball.'" He describes some of the wilder gay bars and discos and leather scenes, remarking almost by the way that "sado-masochism [in the late 1960s] still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky—sort of New Jersey." He offers brief accounts of the generation of gay and lesbian writers and artists just ahead of his own (White was born in 1940). Among those he mentions are Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Morris, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, James Merrill, and Harold Brodkey.

  White's own sexual propensities are filled in. He informs us that he is "a bottom" and had "always been an apostle of promiscuity." Prose snapshots of his homosexual bouts are provided: "I went to bed with John [Hohnsbeen, previously the lover of the architect Philip Johnson] once, but I'm afraid that I wasn't aggressive enough to interest him." Bruce Chatwin, a writer who attracted much literary attention until his death from AIDS in 1989, "with his bright, hard eyes and his odorless WASP body and flickering, ironic smile and his general derring-do instantly groped me while we were still standing just inside the door, and a minute later we'd shed our clothes and were still standing. We had sex in the most efficient way, we put our clothes back on, and we never repeated the experience with each other." White mentions, in passing, having gone to bed with a drunk John Ashbery and his boyfriend.

  But in the end candor does not in itself create interest and is devoid of allure. A man gossiping about himself is always insufficiently amusing. This is because self-gossip violates the equation that holds that gossip is two or more people telling things about a third that the latter would prefer not be known. Edmund White is one person telling about himself, and he wants everyone to know about it. Charm departs and, as the old song has it, the thrill is gone.

  Diary

  Mortimer Adler, the founder with Robert Hutchins of the publishing project called Great Books of the Western World, held firmly to the belief that everyone was, in his word, "educable." And not educable merely, but able to read and benefit from the richly complex Great Books. This, for him, was a matter of faith, an article of belief. His entire career was founded upon it.

  I worked for a few years for Adler when he took over the intellectual redesign of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He was an intellectual bully and a man with an impressively blind eye to the environment in which he operated. But one of the side benefits of working for this very energetic, too deeply concentrated man of high but rough-hewn intellect was having a coign of vantage on his irrationality. This irrationality was especially amusing in light of Adler's powerful insistence on the crucial element of reason and logic in life.

  Plentiful were the anecdotes of Adler's comic irrationality. There was the story of his wife's asking him to hang a picture in their Chicago Gold Coast apartment, and Adler, owning no hammer, walking out to swank Michigan Avenue to buy one. No hardware store being available, he stepped into Dunhill, a favorite haunt, and bought instead a gold-plated showerhead, which he brought home to hammer in the nail needed to hang the picture.

  There was the story of Adler's pursuing a young woman and setting out to write a love poem to her. His secretary noticed him composing on a yellow legal pad, scribbling madly away, crumpling up sheet after sheet of failed efforts. Finally the poet manqué declared he was off for lunch at the Tavern Club. His secretary, her curiosity piqued by what he may have been writing, looked down at the pad on Adler's desk, upon which she discovered a single word, the beginning of his love poem: "Whereas."

  But the best story, one long kept under wraps, was told to me by a man who was Adler's assistant when he had his office in San Francisco. Unhappy in his first marriage, Adler one day called his wife from a hotel room to inform her that he wanted a divorce. (Phoning in your di
vorce is a nice touch.) Not long thereafter he was seen in the company of a woman much younger and quite a bit gaudier than he. The philosopher of the Great Books, one of the leading exponents of the doctrines of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man of doubtless towering IQ, was clearly smitten. He soon announced his intention to marry this woman.

  Adler's friends were suspicious, and hired detectives to follow the young woman and the man she called her brother. Adler meanwhile took out a large insurance policy naming her as sole beneficiary. You will have anticipated me here when I report that the young woman's brother was her boyfriend, and the two were plotting to kill the philosopher. The police were called in, Adler was informed of the plot, the woman and her boyfriend were dealt with, and everything was hushed up lest scandal result. The moral of the story? Might it be that, after all, perhaps not everyone is entirely educable?

  GREAT GOSSIPS OF THE WESTERN WORLD, III

  The Yenta

  She thinks of herself as a journalist, and, true enough, she has worked for the news divisions of the major television networks. She has interviewed twelve—perhaps by now it is thirteen—American presidents and countless leaders of foreign countries. For a time she worked as a television news anchor—a job held by Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and John Chancellor, respected figures who gave the impression of high seriousness—and was the first woman to do so. Her connections, her credentials, her bona fides, her impressively high ratings, all are there, perfectly in order. Why then, in spite of all this, and after a long and successful career, money and accolades flowing in, does she nonetheless seem like nothing so much as a yenta, a female blabbermouth and busybody.