Gossip

by Joseph Epstein

  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.

  Lillian Ross, through her gossipy book, has what we today would call "demystified" one of the last century's most interestingly mysterious cultural figures. She has done so by rendering him, as a photograph of Shawn on page 127 of her book displays him, rather a sad, schlumpy little man, a bag of needs and frustrations encased in a dark, vested suit, a pathetic cloth cap atop his large bald head.

  Several reasons for why she would do this to a man she professes to have loved might be adduced, but the background reason is surely that the times permit it, one might even say encourage it. Lillian Ross had an experience of some intensity with a man famous for not being famous, and she felt no obligation to keep it to herself but instead preferred to advertise it to the world, no matter what damage it might have done to William Shawn's family or to the reputation of the man himself.

  Hard to know how aware Lillian Ross is of the extent of that damage. She prides herself on being a pure type of reporter, leaving herself out of her writing, most of which has over the decades appeared in The New Yorker. But it was Lillian Ross who also destroyed the reputation of Ernest Hemingway, in a New Yorker profile, by making him look a buffoon, filled with himself and without the least self-knowledge. "I started out quiet and then I beat Mr. Turgenev," Hemingway declares at one point during his interview. "Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy, unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better." Although Lillian Ross seems to have had no sense of it, after Hemingway opened himself up in front of her, and she wrote and published his foolish pronouncements, it was no longer possible to take him quite seriously as a writer. In her New Yorker profile, she killed Ernest Hemingway more surely than any critic could have done.

  The problem is not over Lillian Ross's having had an affair with William Shawn, or over his affair with her, but with her need to publicize the details while injured parties were still alive. "After forty years," she writes, "our love-making had the same passion, the same energies (alarming to me, at first), ... the same tenderness, the same inventiveness, the same humor, the same textures as it had in the beginning. It never deteriorated, our later wrinkles, blotches, and scars of age notwithstanding." Shawn, who made not hurting the feelings of others one of his first principles, could not have been other than appalled and deeply ashamed had he read his inamorata's book.

  Fifty years ago, Lillian Ross would not have written such a book. If she had, no one would have published it. If against all odds she could have found someone to publish it, reviewers would have demolished it. But now, how different the atmosphere and appetite for such revealing gossip is. Now she, as a reporter, could scarcely hold such a story back. Or so she must have felt. What she seems not to have noticed is that in her book she makes her dearest love out to be a pathetic neurotic and a monster of selfish cruelty.

  Candor has been greatly, perhaps too greatly, heightened in our day. With the stakes of candor everywhere raised, the premium is on the new and edgy. People who write autobiographies or memoirs must have something at least slightly shocking—better of course if it is powerfully shocking—to convey. A writer named Michael Greenberg languishes in relative obscurity until he decides to write a memoir of the nightmare of living with his daughter's manic episodes. But shouldn't it be the daughter's memoir to write, if written it must be? Fiction, to be talked about, now requires a jolt of the wildly unexpected, such as that of a short story in The New Yorker some years ago about a young woman who is planning in vitro fertilization and imagines a bouillabaisse of semen whose contributors include various males whose discrete good qualities—physical, mental, psychological—will go into the making of her child. People who go on talk shows must leap the obstacles of decorum to say something outré charm alone will no longer suffice.

  Gossip, too, has felt the need to become heightened in intensity, wilder, more revealing. "Been there, done that," a phrase that suggests boredom and impatience, is also one of the most damning to hear for anyone hoping to bring something either professionally or privately entertaining to an audience of readers, or even of friends. In an age when it's allowed openly to discuss the sexual appetite and habits of a man who held his privacy dear above all else, anything goes.

  Diary

  I have not often been in possession of information that journalists were eager to have. One occasion when I did was while I was a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, at a time when everything about the Endowment seemed to be in the high flux of controversy. A serious scandal had hit the NEA over the revelation that it had given out grants in connection with such works of putative art as a bottle of urine that also contained a crucifix; photographs that would appear to qualify as obscene, one of which was of a man with a toilet plunger up his rectum; performance artists who smeared chocolate or blood over their bodies; and more such assaultive art. All sorts of interesting questions arose: Should the government sponsor art meant to scandalize? Should taxpayers be asked to pay for it? Shouldn't artists with a taste for épater-ing the establishment do s
o on their own nickel? The NEA and the National Council were torn by such questions, Congress was threatening to cut off funding, artists' groups were outraged at the possible abrogation of artistic freedom—and the debate over these matters was considered fairly high-priority news. All this was made more piquant by the fact that a number of famous artists served on the council: Martha Graham, Robert Joffrey, Celeste Holm, Robert Stack, and others. The questions, moreover, did not allow for neutral answers. Everyone, in and out of the council, myself included, was parti pris.

  For the first and only time in my life, then, I began to get calls from reporters, hoping that I could give them some potent insiderish information—read: gossip—on what was going on at the NEA during these wild times. Because I thought I could say a thing or two to clarify the debate, I responded to a request for an interview from the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, whom I knew to be honest and honorable. Bernstein promised to show me not his finished article but any quotations of mine he planned to use in it before the paper went to press, and he did so. The result was entirely satisfactory: the article was fair, I was allowed to make my points, and an aura of seriousness prevailed.

  My views set out in the Times piece didn't stop other journalists from wanting more from me—on the contrary, it probably encouraged them. I put them all off, politely enough, I hope, by telling them that everything I had to say on the subject I had said to Richard Bernstein. All, that is, but a reporter from the Boston Globe, whose name I am pleased to have forgotten, who insisted that I had an obligation to supply him with more information of a clearly gossipy kind. I said I didn't feel any obligation to do so. "But what about the public's right to know?" he asked. "The public," I said, exasperated by the fellow's persistence. "Of course, I forgot the dear public. Next time you see the public, please tell it to go stick it in its ear," and I hung up.

  17. Snoopin' and Scoopin'

  The first step in good reporting is good snooping.

  —MATT DRUDGE

  EVERYONE KNOWS THAT politicians have been, and continue to be, great subjects for gossip. The Kennedy family has long been a cottage industry of gossip unto itself: all that free-floating fornication, drunkenness, drug abuse, uninvestigated manslaughter, and the rest. Some of the scandalous—which is also to say gossip-worthy—behavior of politicians was in the past concealed by their ability to bring the press onto their side. No longer, given the prevailing atmosphere of the day, can such arrangements be made.

  What is perhaps less well known is the role that gossip plays in the mechanics of politics—its role, that is, in the everyday life of getting deals done or killed, ending electoral hopes, or forcing retirements from public life. I refer to leaks, which are little more than gossip turned to the service and ends of politics. Any historian of American politics of the past fifty or so years who does not take leaks into account is missing a significant part of the motor force of recent American history. So prevalent have leaks become as a way of doing politics that the day may come when we have a Secretary of Leaks, whose job will be plugging, controlling, initiating, and directing the intense traffic of it all.

  Is a political leak actually gossip? What if the leak is true? What if it is used for a good cause? Are such leaks still gossip? Best to remember our root definition of gossip as one party telling another what a third party doesn't want known. A political leak qualifies here. Best to remember, too, that gossip may well be true; and it frequently is true, and is often most destructive when true. Much better, for example, to be accused, in gossip, of adultery one didn't commit than of adultery one has in fact committed. Truth, therefore, does not destroy gossip but often only increases its potency. Not all but much gossip has the tincture of betrayal. And so do many leaks. A leak represents a disloyalty, if not to those people whom the leak will damage, to whom no loyalty may be owed or felt, but often to the code connected with the job one holds that put one in possession of the leaked material to begin with.

  Many people may feel that "Deep Throat," the man who leaked the key information about Watergate to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, did a great service to his country, which he may well have done. But in order to do it, he—and we now know that the man was William Mark Felt Sr., a senior FBI official—had to betray his agency's rule not to leak the information in his possession, about the men who broke into the Democratic National Committee's office at the Watergate complex, which ultimately resulted in President Richard Nixon's resignation.

  Such is the frequency of leaked information in government that there is, as I write, a piece of legislation before Congress called the Free Flow of Information Act, designed to give journalists protection from the law in not having to reveal the names of the sources of information leaked to them. Critics of the legislation claim that it makes political business by leak easier than it already is. Certainly leaks in politics come under the heading of business as usual, or at least have for a long while. Not only are leaks used to help bring down governments—as Deep Throat's leaks did—but they make it much more difficult for the administration in power to carry on business. But, then, administrations in power have themselves been known to leak information that will help disqualify their opponents, or help push forward their own plans and programs.

  Leaks, then, are often little more than well-aimed gossip in political dress. They may always have played a limited role in government, but they came into their own with the advent and rise of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism itself ascended to the level of heroism with Woodward and Bernstein's work exposing Watergate. So much of investigative journalism in the years immediately following their triumph—a best-selling book and commercially successful movie being among the reporters' trophies—had to do with the cultivation of leaks by journalists.

  The question to ask about men and women who initiate leaks, as it is with those who initiate any gossip, is, What's in it for them? Why would a person in possession of ostensibly secret information wish to convey it to a journalist? The motives range from genuine idealism to ugly revenge, with a multiplicity of possible motives in between. Often intense bureaucratic rivalries cause one faction to leak information that will make life difficult for an opposing faction in the same agency or department. One of the differences between leaks and much gossip is that gossip can be merely for entertainment; leaks are always made with a purpose—to bring down or raise up someone in politics or to foil or advance some political plan or party. The relationship between the person providing the leak and the person disseminating it, the journalist, is usually corrupt on both sides; unlike the case of standard gossip, with leaks there are no innocent bystanders or a merely mildly amused audience.

  Seymour Hersh, who has worked for the New York Times and The New Yorker and has won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the murder of civilians in the village of My Lai by American troops during the Vietnam War, is a journalist who has lived off leaks—who without the benefit of leakers might just be out of business. His professional life has been based on the anonymous source. He cultivates sources—that is, people in proximity to power, or formerly in power, who for one reason or another have gone sour or disagree emphatically with current government policy; their sourness or disagreement makes them susceptible to ratting out the people with whom they disagree or simply don't like.

  Hersh's work, most recently in The New Yorker, is studded with comments made by a "high-ranking Pentagon official," "former CIA agent," "administration insider," "retired State Department strategist," and more of the same. The editor of The New Yorker is said to have the actual names of these mystery men who constitute Hersh's sources, but that isn't quite enough to make his brokering of leaks entirely persuasive. (When I read him, to relieve the tedium of all these unnamed sources, I put in their place characters of my own: "disgruntled former wife," "heavily tattooed disowned son," "deeply disappointed mother," "meshuggeneh aunt"; the comic relief, I find, helps.) Like any good gossip, Hersh prefers dramatic over staid stories. A good Hersh p
iece might have the U.S. government secretly financing an Arab terrorist group out of Henry Kissinger's Swiss bank account.

  An additional problem is that Seymour Hersh has a locked-in set of political views. They are left wing, welcoming to all conspiracy theories that make the American government in power look devious, skeptical only of the possibility of honorable motives, rarely considering that untoward events in politics are sometimes owing to simple ineptitude. This makes the leaks he retails seem rather prefabricated. Hersh stories, whatever their subject, have essentially the same theme: the sons of bitches are up to no good.

  Bob Woodward, who, after his reporting days with Carl Bernstein went on to write his own books, has a far less obvious political slant than Hersh. I am less than certain of Woodward's politics; forced to guess, I would describe them as centrist, somewhat liberal. But Woodward is himself so nearly a man of the establishment, no matter which party is in power, that his leak-brokering scarcely has the element of mischievousness and malice that much stirring gossip has. But in the end, gossip it, too, is.