Gossip (18 page)

Like gossips, writers of fiction do not always entirely make things up, at least most of the time they don't. Science fiction, horror tales, romances, detective stories, fantasies, and a few other genres may be almost wholly imagined, but much serious fiction is drawn from life—sometimes from actual events, ofttimes using actual people as life models on whom to create fictional characters.

As a writer of stories, I prefer to invent characters and situations, and often do. But perhaps just as often I have borrowed my stories from events that have taken place in my life, or that I have heard about, and draw characters from acquaintances or people about whom I have heard extraordinary or touching or frightful things. I try to disguise my characters' origins in so-called real life—some I disguise more carefully than others—and sometimes put someone I know through a series of incidents that I know have been undergone by someone else. I have written stories in which only one character is based, however roughly, on someone I have known, while every other, along with the plot of the story, are wholly the work of the imagination. Or I will give an invented character the occupation of someone I know only slightly. Not uncommonly readers have told me that they recognize characters in one or another of my stories; and more often than not, they are wrong. At such times, I try to let them down gently, because when they think they recognize a character as someone they know or have known, they feel a pleasure in it, as if they have broken a code, or, better still, been let in on a juicy bit of gossip.

Many writers of fiction do not go for the minimum disguise of their characters. Saul Bellow seems not to have invented many characters, only to have invented sins to give to characters who, for those in the know, have real-life analogues. Connoisseurs of his novels can point out that this woman was a girlfriend of the author's at Tuley High School, that lawyer botched Bellow's third divorce, this misery of a woman was one of his wives. Bellow was a literary Bluebeard, murdering his former wives not in life but in his fiction, and doing so without mercy. He regularly used his fiction to settle old scores. In his last novel,
Ravelstein,
he has his main character say of another character, who happens to have been a friend of mine, that he was homosexual and smelled bad. Both items are utterly false, but Bellow was repaying my friend for what he took to be many slights when he was still alive. Under the cover of fiction, this is gossip with the clear motive of vengeance behind it.

Biographers and critics of Proust eagerly point out that this character is based on Mme. Georges Aubernon, that on Robert de Montesquiou, another on Comte Henry Greffulhe. The supposition is that in reading about Proust's characters drawn from life we also learn about their life models. Sometimes we do, but sometimes not, as Proust transmogrifies certain of the models on which his characters are based, and sometimes, for his own good artistic reasons, does the reverse, making them less monstrous than they might actually have been in life.

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 an 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.