Gossip (14 page)

Up to roughly 1950, when television became an integral part of American domestic life, the number of national celebrities in the United States was distinctly limited: perhaps sixty or seventy of them were movie stars, another thirty or so were athletes, and perhaps twenty-five or so were national politicians.

At the national celebrity level, gossip itself tended to be more controlled, especially in Hollywood, the chief celebrity-making manufactory of the time. Yet some gossip-causing scandals were too large to be prevented: the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle alleged rape and murder case in 1921 is a notorious example. But in the Hollywood of the 1930s and '40s, the two leading gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, lived off the sufferance of the major studios, which parceled out tidbits to them, usually of a fairly mild kind: engagements, the pregnancies of stars or the wives of stars, the lending of one studio star to another studio for a special movie. Very little talk of drunkenness, adultery, homosexuality, or divorce was permitted. Stories did seep out—about Randolph Scott's alleged homosexuality, John Barrymore's boozing, Errol Flynn's sexual hijinks—but not by the means they do today: through the diligent work of the scavengers known as gossip columnists.

The great movie stars of the early Hollywood era were supposed to be just like the rest of us, but somehow luckier, because more gifted with talent and good looks, than the rest of us. Stories of monstrous behavior were out of bounds, while stories of their normality were encouraged. So we have the anodyne tales of movie stars coming from small towns (Ronald Reagan), being discovered at drugstore counters (Lana Turner), and other mythic beginnings of richly rewarded careers. We have Mickey Rooney playing Andy Hardy, that sweet, innocent kid down the street in small-town America, though the reality was that the late-adolescent Rooney chased every woman on the lot, and, to hear him tell it, caught quite a few. Once chosen, the movie star must not violate his mythic status as a normal human being by behavior thought abnormal. Charlie Chaplin, one of the few authentic geniuses in the history of Hollywood, violated this iron law of the normality of stars with his penchant for too young women and, later, his left-wing politics. When Gene Kelly's wife, Betsy Blair, who as a fellow traveler of the American Communist Party was in danger of exposure by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kelly had no choice but to depart Hollywood and work for a number of years in Europe. Aberrations, political, sexual, or any other, were verboten.

Politicians may once again have regained preeminent standing in the creation of gossip. Today's Hollywood stars, rock musicians, and comedians no longer generate the intense interest that older movie stars did. This has to do with America no longer having the unified culture it once did. Up through the 1960s, a movie star or a popular singer tended to be a popular figure for the entire country, not just a segment of it, as is currently the case. Rock singers, for example, are of interest only to those who listen to rock. Bruce Springsteen may have an audience of several million fans, which is no small thing, but everyone was presumed to be interested in Frank Sinatra. The segmentation of mass culture—divided now by age, often by race, sometimes by geography—has divided up the national interest. Far from everyone cares about Madonna; no one failed to care about Marilyn Monroe. Not everyone knows who Will Smith is, no matter how grand the box office receipts of his movies; but it would have been difficult to find people who, when he was in his long prime, didn't know who Edward G. Robinson was. In the course of celebrity being divided in this way—ethnically, by age, by special interest—it has also become diluted.

Further dilution has occurred with the widening of celebrity through cable television, with its various soap operas, reality shows, and political chat shows. Liz Smith, perhaps the last of the old-line gossip columnists, not long ago remarked: "There aren't any big stars anymore. It's very diminished in quality, I guess is what I'd say, the quality of stardom. Because I don't know who most of these people are. I'm not kidding. I read Page Six [devoted to gossip in the
New York Post
] mystified every day, and everybody I talk to agrees with me. They don't know who anybody is."

Explaining this, the critic and editor John Podhoretz notes that the rise in gossip magazines and gossip television shows is partly responsible for this thinning out of celebrity. Lots more people are celebrated, but only for a short time: the current bachelor on the reality show
The Bachelor,
the professional dancer on
Dancing with the Stars,
the couple suspected of murdering their child, the plagiarist who flogged his book on
Oprah,
the male prostitute who turns in the not-out-of-the-closet state governor. Celebrities, each and all of them, famous for being famous, however briefly; but famous, too, because, as Podhoretz puts it, the organs of celebrity, print and electronic, need a continuing supply of names to "feed this inexhaustible maw." He adds that the "older methods of celebrity manufacture"—the Hollywood studios' public relations departments—"no longer suffice." With the old publicity machine of Hollywood inadequate to fill all the magazines and television shows (
Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood,
and the rest) devoted to celebrity, Podhoretz concludes, "celebrity and notoriety are indistinguishable, and the phenomenon of stardom, like so many American institutions, has been delegitimized."

Another component worth mentioning in all this is that the only way to large-scale celebrity today is through regular appearances on television or in movies or national politics. No matter your achievements, if you are not often seen doing what you do on the tube, or today possibly on YouTube, you may eventually acquire fame, but celebrity will elude you.

One of the great advantages that Hollywood celebrities of an earlier time had over those of the current day is that they didn't regularly appear on television talk shows to promote their films or their careers; this meant that they were excused from exposing their stupidities. Who today knows how smart or dopey James Cagney or Myrna Loy might have been? What can be known is that movie stars, and a great many others, gain in allure from our ignorance about them, for in the absence of any real knowledge we have, they are as smart and glamorous as we wish them to be.

A large part of the pleasure of contemporary gossip about celebrities has to do with that ugly little emotion that goes by the German word
Schadenfreude,
or pleasure in another's fall. Nice to think, is it not, that people gifted with good looks or acting ability or musical talent, rewarded for them with vast quantities of money, also have many of the problems that the rest of us might have, and often a few extra thrown in: children who didn't work out, struggles with diet, marital discord dragged out in public, bankruptcy, and so much more. If in some sense the cult of celebrity is about common people worshiping people luckier than themselves, owing to the good offices of gossip, a way has been found of evening the score, at least a little, by showing that in the end the very lucky often have it no better than we, and sometimes, thanks to the gods of fate and the merchants of gossip, it turns out that they have it even worse.

The playwright Lillian Hellman was sitting in a restaurant with a friend of mine when Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian and chronicler of the Kennedy family, walked in with his then new, much taller than he, wife. It seemed to be the season for men obsessed with politics to marry women much taller than themselves. (Henry Kissinger also married a woman much taller than he, and so did the columnist George F. Will.)

"There is Arthur with his new wife," Lillian said to my friend. "Extraordinary how much taller she is than he. Do you suppose Arthur goes up on her?"

 

G
ROB,
a Yiddish word meaning coarse, crude, rough, pushy, nicely describes the family into which Walter Winchell, for decades the most famous and perhaps most influential of all American journalists, was born. The family's original name was Weinschel, or Winschel, its city of origin Bialystok, in northeastern Poland near the border of what is now Belarus. Winchell's grandfather Chaim settled in America in 1881. He and his wife lived on the Lower East Side and raised a family of nine children. The firstborn, Jacob, was Winchell's father, but the second son, George, who acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, was considered the head of the family in its second generation. Jacob was passed over because he was thought brash, a man of dubious taste, a bust-out, an embarrassment to his brothers and sisters who yearned for assimilated gentility.
Grob.

Jacob's first child, Walter, was born, in 1897, into the black-sheep branch of his extended family, poor, with a father who never really gained a financial foothold and a mother who had no compunction about making her husband aware of her extreme disappointment in him. Jacob's philandering didn't ease matters. Extreme emotional instability and fear of poverty were the heavy pollutants of young Walter's life.

The result was that Walter Winchell, no matter how great his success in later years, tended permanently to view himself as an underdog, one of the insulted of the earth and a man always worried about money, though he earned a lot of it. Early in the game he decided that no one gives you anything for nothing, and that the world was divided between winners and losers, so a person had no choice but to scrap like mad to gain the upper hand in all things, little and large, and join the winners. Life, in Winchell's reading of it, was combat, full time, no holds barred.

The first move in Winchell's larger game plan was to get the hell out of his family's dreary home. He quit school at thirteen and left his family at the same time. Ernest Cuneo, who became a legal assistant to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and later a power on the Democratic National Committee during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years and who was a longtime friend of Winchell's—the last not an easy thing to do—claimed that his rough upbringing "had left him with four inches of scar tissue around his heart, and with a heart full of fear, [and] instead of some love, the fear of being broke."

Like many another of the New York Jewish kids of his generation who had no family business to fall back on, no interest in school or politics or culture, Winchell went into show business. He became a song plugger, then went onstage in vaudeville, as part of a trio that included a man named Jack Weiner, and George Jessel, later known as America's "toastmaster general" and a monumental bore of astounding self-importance.

Winchell's career as a song-and-dance man went onward but not all that far upward. He had the ambition, he had the energy—only the talent was missing. He worked the lesser vaudeville circuits. He teamed up with a young dancer named Rita Greene, whom he eventually married. A hoofer by trade, he was a hustler in spirit, and he hustled much better than he hoofed. He had also during these years discovered his true métier. He began, almost as a hobby, collecting gossipy items about vaudevillians, writing them up, then posting his typewritten sheets backstage, where people could discover who was making whoopie with whom and other intramural secrets about the interior wheelings and dealings of show biz. He had a newshound's sense of where to find fresh items—he was, that is to say, a natural snoop—and a genuine knack for turning these items into lively reading. Before long, Winchell would give up his tap shoes for tapping out tidbits on a typewriter.

Vaudeville, though, forged Walter Winchell, his spirit of competitiveness, his understanding that no greater sin exists than being dull in public. Neal Gabler, Winchell's excellent biographer, writes: "Vaudeville made Walter an entertainer for life and in life. Growing up in vaudeville as he did, he not only absorbed its diversity, its energy, its nihilism, and then deployed them in his journalism, but learned how to create his journalism
from
them: journalism as vaudeville." He understood journalism, in other words, to be essentially a form of entertainment.

Winchell's climb up the rickety rungs of journalism's ladder—working for
Vaudeville News, Billboard,
the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden's
New York Graphic,
eventually landing as the Broadway columnist on Joseph Medill Patterson's flagship paper, the
New York Daily News
—need not detain us. The important point is that Winchell made this climb through personal toughness and an impressive insensitivity to the feelings of everyone he wrote about or worked with. Jimmy Walker, when mayor of New York, told Winchell that "you can keep your friends and be a failure—or lose them and be a success." In Winchell's case this advice was easily heeded by a man who, in the most profound sense, was always in business solely for himself.

Winchell had a strong instinct for what caught the attention of the average man or woman. He invented a rat-a-tat prose style, punctuated by ellipses, laced with energetic slang, and sprinkled with neologisms of his own devising: booze in his columns became "giggle-water," mistresses "keptives," Broadway was "the Main Stem" or "Coffee Pot Canyon," "Chicagorilla" was a thug from the Second City, "apartache" stood for divorcing couples, and "Renovate" referred to a man or woman going off to Reno for a divorce, while couples expecting a child were "infanticipating."

Winchell's rise ran parallel with the rise of interest in personality in American journalism and in celebrity in the country at large—an interest that has only increased, if become more diffuse, in our own day. Winchell knew how to plumb this interest for all it could yield. Attacking large names was one of his specialties: early in his career he went after the Schubert brothers, then powerful satraps in Broadway theater. He also had an instinct for the weaknesses of the famous in New York, where fame could sometimes have the shelf life of cottage cheese, and where ever-fresh exposure to publicity, required by the constant stoking of a reputation, was required. "What can you get on the other fellow?" Winchell wrote. "What do you know about him? Is he doing something he'd be ashamed of, and how much is there in it for me?"