Pssst...Did You Hear About?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

There she was, blond and bedizened and bravely unbowed, pictured on the front page of the newspaper to which she had confided her most private conversations. No, not Ivana Trump. The woman standing next to her, the one commanding equal attention in that come-to-tell-all photo: syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News, the shoulder La Trump chose to cry on when she wanted to tell the whole world what she thought of the man who had left her. They stood side by side, equals and friends and newsmakers, the aspirant to a jumbo settlement and the journalist turned dispenser of social eclat. While ordinary footsore reporters waited outside a restaurant for crumbs of comment, Mizz Liz sailed in to console Ivana in the guise of boon companion, swapped expressions of abiding misery, then hurried out to whip intimate confidences into a souffle of salaciousness and scandal. Not that Ivana felt betrayed -- the whole friendship, like nearly every friendship between gossips and the gossiped-about, was based on mutual exploitation, an exchange of private trust before an audience of millions of strangers.

Right across town, hours later, the New York Post's Cindy Adams, a darker and doughtier and even more decked-out doyen of dirt, was marinating in Donald Trump's self-righteous anger at being blamed for that saddest of commonplaces, a divorce. He was just as eager as his wife to hash out in public a story that seemed certain to do him no good, proving again the quirky fact that keeps all gossip columns in business: for some people, there is just no such thing as bad publicity. In Adams' published stories she too stood front and center, a principal voice if not quite a front-page face in what somehow was being treated as the biggest news of a singularly newsy time.

The Soviet Union was in the midst of disempowering the Communist Party. Germany was hurtling toward unification. Nelson Mandela was transforming the future of South Africa, and Drexel Burnham Lambert was pronouncing obsequies over the go-go greed of the '80s. But the connubial bust-up of the billionaire New Yorkers was the talk of the town. For that matter, of practically every town. Their story made the network newscasts and countless columns across the U.S., and once the split became a fait accompli, gossipists gleefully predicted that ramifications -- from a rowdy settlement battle to the wooing of new partners -- might drag on deliciously for, oh, a decade. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they're only made of clay, but gossip is heaven-sent and here to stay.

Clamoring to get into the Trump affray were such professional tattletales and partygoers as Aileen Mehle, veteran writer of the Post's "Suzy" column, syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, plus Smith's Daily News colleague William Norwich, New York Newsday's James Revson and a phalanx of others from all over. Even London dailies were grabbing at the story, pursuing the angle of Ivana's brief first marriage to an Austrian ski pal. We're not talking just the wacky supermarket scandal sheets, whose more enticing headlines last week included JAMES DEAN IS ALIVE!, CHEERS STAR'S FATHER IS NAMED AS JFK KILLER, WORLD WAR II BOMBER FOUND ON MOON. Gossip is booming on television, in magazines, in nonfiction books, in docudrama TV movies and mini-series.

From Bess Myerson's messy romance to Malcolm Forbes' birthday party, from Roseanne Barr's backstage tempests to William Hurt's palimony trial, the private doings of public figures preoccupy the supposedly serious mainstream press. Decades after Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and their ilk went the way of the dodo, their patented elixir of career hype, marital comings and goings, feuds, fortunes and celebrity pratfalls has become the journalistic cocktail of choice. In the great public circus of American life, gossip is back in the center ring.

New York City, the U.S. media capital, has become a metropolis where most of the newspapers offer not just one gossip page but three or four. They feature glimpses of everyone from sitcom heroes and sports stars to obscure if self- important entertainment and publishing executives, social-climbing plastic surgeons and dress designers, deposed royalty, offspring of ousted dictators and legions of the nouveaux riches or, rather, nouveaux gauches.

Gossip columns may even feature other gossip columnists. Although most practitioners are too competitive to mention one another, they all take frequent note of Claudia Cohen, who moved from "Page Six" at the Post to the I, Claudia column at the Daily News to her current bully pulpit, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee on ABC-TV. Along the way she vaulted into the ranks of privilege by marrying an A-list name, corporate raider Ron Perelman.

In Los Angeles the names often come from studios and talent agencies; in Washington, from government and politics; in Chicago, from local pro sports teams, although any item about talk hostess Oprah Winfrey will do; in St. Louis, from Busch brewery heirs; in Boston, from the corridors of the state house and city hall, the Kennedy clan and the remnants of the Cabot-and-Lowell Brahmin aristocracy. In every city there is an inevitable reliance on local TV personalities. A few elite names are good anywhere, anytime, whether they have done something recently or not. Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Onassis and Barbra Streisand are always news; so are Frank Sinatra and Teddy Kennedy and Sylvester Stallone. Some celebrities, like Sean Penn or Robin Givens, may prove ephemeral, but are omnipresent for their moment. Some celebrities become famous for doing something. Others, like Malcolm Forbes -- who died suddenly of a heart attack last week -- are famous for how lavishly they've spent in the company of celebrity friends.

Many gossip-column names, like the Trump clan, become famous primarily for being famous. Long before Trump ranked as one of the wealthiest Americans, he made himself one of the best known simply by trying. He followed a social path that one public relations counselor says is available to any Manhattan couple with about $100,000 to squander, "not counting the jewelry." He and his wife adopted the right charities, made sure they were photographed at the proper < benefits and balls, acquired well-publicized luxury possessions and set up holiday homes at fashionable times and places.

On the celebrity watch, the security of established names needs constant replenishment with the fizz of the new. Gossipists need people to write about. Attention seekers yearn for celebrity. Out of this mutual need, a cafe society is born and then, by some curious alchemy, is taken seriously by millions of bystanders. The publicity-mad among the moneyed cultivate the gossip columnists to gain one thing that money cannot buy without the aid of a little limelight: the envy of others. In a nation where television has taught the masses to live vicariously, the gossipists and their chosen chums train a beacon on themselves.

Harder to detect but just as essential to the process are the silent partners in the gossip industry, public relations counselors, who now serve everybody from models and movie stars to lawyers and landlords. While news consumers often feel sorry for the victims of media intrusion, many who face an onslaught of cameras and microphones have actually invited it. Unlike the bereaved survivors of a household fire or plane crash, the people written about in gossip columns typically have no desire for privacy. They aim to be public figures. While they may seek to control what is written, attention is what they crave. "Society people really fear no press," says Newsday's Revson. "What they want ideally is a steady flow of publicity, like a thin layer of butter, spread evenly throughout the year." In times of trouble, press agents smooth out the lumps, making sure their clients are not caught on the defensive.

Thus Ivana Trump's first move, after consulting Liz Smith, was to hire a flack to tout her version of the breakup. She chose John Scanlon, the public relations counsel retained by CBS when it was being sued for libel by General William Westmoreland. During the first days of the split, Scanlon's strategy included fax messages carefully crafted to be usable by a reporter without a gossip columnist's easy access. Philosophized Scanlon: "This has been a liturgical acting out of what is probably one of the single most commonplace experiences of all people, that is, domestic rows, the very thing that brought down the house of Troy. If you look through literature and history, we've always been fascinated with those things." Not to be outdone in the battle for the public's hearts and minds, Donald hired a mouthpiece too, Howard Rubinstein, who has represented erstwhile New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch and embattled hotel queen Leona Helmsley.

The notion of having a personal publicist may seem redolent of show business, where the art has been brought to its tawdriest heights. Many Hollywood flacks specialize in planting premature if not downright phony stories of projects launched and deals done, all in hopes of making the lies turn true. They often haggle over how stories are to be played, what topics may be discussed in an interview, even whether the client can review and change the quotes. In one not-so-extreme case, during Dolly Parton's heftier phase a few years ago, her agent required a New York City publication's photo editor to touch up 30 of the 38 photographs approved from a session, "slimming" or "trimming" as many as six body regions per photo, "omitting" eye wrinkles, "smoothing out" her neck and "lightening under the wig line." Yes, even photographs lie.

Nowadays not just singers and actors but opticians hire press agents. So do restaurateurs, resort owners, novelists and increasing numbers of socialites. Nor is the phenomenon restricted to the East and West coasts. Says society writer Bill Zwecker of the Chicago weekly Skyline, who grew up in the business (his mother was a fashion columnist): "I'm finding more and more individuals who have public relations people."

To be sure, a lot of the gossip reported in Chicago and elsewhere is about people who are based in New York City or Los Angeles and who thereby attract national attention. "The people who crave the publicity in Chicago in the way the Trumps do," explains Zwecker, "aren't in his league financially. The people in his league financially go to bed at 9 p.m., lead a simpler life and don't care if they're in my column." Something of the same is true in the home of the bean and the cod, according to Boston Herald gossipist Norma Nathan, whose column "The Eye" is the paper's best-read feature. "Boston has no celebrities," she says. "The best items are the ones that have big names" -- actors in town to shoot a movie -- "mingling with the people here."

Where do column items come from? Though the particulars vary from city to city, the tricks of the trade are fairly constant. Sources must be cultivated, glamorous friends coddled, and, of course, press agents heeded as they relentlessly push tips. Certain restaurants are musts. In Los Angeles it's Le Dome or the Ivy for lunch, Morton's or Spago for dinner. In Chicago the image- conscious can be found at the Establishment-oriented Pump Room or the more hip Eccentric, partly owned by Oprah. In New York City the Russian Tea Room is best for the show-business throng, Elaine's for the print glitterati, Le Cirque for the well-heeled ladies who lunch. But to endure on the job, a gossipmonger must also be a tireless attender of parties. Syndicated columnist Karen Feld, who writes from Washington, attends six to eight events a night and dowses for dirt on the tennis court, at teas and on the embassy circuit. Says Feld: "I do think columnists like me can make or break people."

That is open to debate. Some columnists point out that there is little one can say today that can ruin a person. Extramarital affairs, divorce, children out of wedlock are no longer utterly shocking (though they may bring harsher judgments on politicians than, say, screen stars, because indiscretions call character and judgment into question). "There is no one today who has the power of, say, Louella Parsons," observes novelist Nora Ephron. "Those people could really punish you." When Parsons revealed in 1949 that Ingrid Bergman had left her husband for director Roberto Rossellini, the scandal kept her from making movies in Hollywood for more than five years.

Apart from the change in national morals, the power of any individual gossip is limited by the proliferation of competing media outlets. Liz Smith's distribution to about 60 newspapers, her local TV appearances in New York City, and her proposed syndicated TV series, for example, fall far short of the astounding ability Walter Winchell had to reach almost 90% of the adult U.S. population during the 1930s. His six-days-a-week column appeared in almost a thousand newspapers with total daily circulation of 50 million. His Sunday-night radio broadcast reached 21 million. Parsons and her rival, Hedda Hopper, between them appeared in practically every consequential newspaper in the nation. On the other hand, while there are many more competitors on the celebrity beat than in Winchell's or Hopper's heyday, they tend to be editorial copycats. Thus an item from Liz Smith or PEOPLE magazine or Entertainment Tonight gets picked up and trumpeted by dozens or even hundreds of publications and broadcasts.

Some scholars argue that today's gossip columnists are more powerful than Winchell because audiences care more. American society has become so much more media conscious. While film and radio gave the public a sense of connection with stars, nothing compares with television for affording a false sense of intimacy. TV personalities become surrogate friends or family members, and faces glimpsed in the news or on talk shows become significant presences in the lives of many viewers. Their private lives thus seem a genuine public concern. This is reflected, according to Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, in the news media's "increased blurring of the entertainment and information function."

One veteran film publicist terms today's gossip columnists "more professional than they used to be, more fact oriented, less careless, less reliant on hearsay." In Winchell's day, he notes, columnists ran more blind items in which no names were used, and thus were more apt to take a chance on a tip. Today's scribes are more likely to seek confirmation, though they will still rely on a hunch. Last fall Washington Times gossip writer Charlotte Hays heard that actress Kelly McGillis, who had signed for the season at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger, was pregnant and would leave months early. "The accuracy of the rumor was obvious from the way the Folger reacted. They said, 'Oh dear, she'll have to talk to you.' " Even though McGillis didn't call back, Hays confidently went ahead, and the item was soon confirmed.

Gossip columnists admit they will haggle for a story. According to Mitchell Fink, a PEOPLE magazine columnist and Fox Entertainment News commentator, a smart flack will serve up several good items having nothing to do with his clients -- though maybe a juicy expose about someone else's -- before offering a tidbit designed to make a client look good. "How can I say no," Fink asks, "when they have sent me other blockbuster items?" Smart press agents know how to manipulate a client's image by choosing what charities and causes to support. However inconvenient the information that is circulating about oneself or one's client, it is considered a big mistake to lie outright. Some Hollywood observers were critical of Tom Cruise for going out of his way, in the weeks preceding the breakup of his marriage, to proclaim the relationship solid.

Whether today's gossips are more or less powerful than those of the past, they certainly operate by a different set of ethical rules. For one thing, they can rarely be bought for a straight cash subsidy, as their forebears often were. The combination of greater financial sophistication and less puritanical attitudes among readers has led to increased emphasis on items about power and deals and a downplaying of items about love affairs and illegitimate babies. At the same time, contemporary society's heightened candor about sex has tended to make possible publication of items that were once unthinkable, such as hints of extramarital dalliance or homosexual affairs. Says Daily Variety's Army Archerd, who has covered the beat for 45 years and who broke the 1985 story that Rock Hudson had AIDS: "News about who is sleeping with whom was never covered in the old movie magazines. Now it's common family dinner conversation."

Michael Gross, 37, of New York magazine, attributes some of the change in standards to the emergence of a new generation not only of columnists but also of news subjects. "To an extent," he says, "the right of privacy has been redefined by all these personalities -- company raiders, nouvelle society -- begging for attention and promoting themselves through the gossip columns." Gross also points to Spy, the impertinent monthly lampoon of New York City society launched in 1986, as having pushed toward new and fiercer standards of what is allowable. Many of its stories have been enterprising and funny, but some have been simply meanspirited, mocking people's physical shortcomings or purporting to detail their sex lives.

Even in venues where gossip does not exploit the new, more lax standards of taste and propriety, it always operates a bit outside normal press ethics. Objectivity is not required. Where a theater critic or sportswriter who socialized with a news subject would probably be expected to abstain from writing about that friend, most gossip columnists write about friends every day of the year. Says Liz Smith: "One way to work is to have access and do a very insider kind of thing. The other is to be totally removed and dispassionate, completely uninvolved with the people you write about. I wouldn't be good at that."

Accuracy too is not as highly prized in gossip as on the news pages. Columnists expect to be wrong fairly frequently, and correct themselves only grudgingly. If a gossip columnist has the essence of a story right, he or she often doesn't mind that many of the details are in error, a situation that would make most reporters flinch. In one egregious episode, Suzy of the New York Post published a March 1988 description of the celebrity guests at a ( party, only to have it exposed that many of them had not been there, and neither had she. She wrote up the event in advance from a press release, then took off for a Caribbean vacation. Post editor Jerry Nachman says that gossip "exists in a netherworld where the traditional tests that would hold in the rest of the newspaper get flexed a bit." He adds that if he had his way, every gossip column everywhere would appear beneath the following disclaimer: "The normal rules of journalism don't apply here." ABC media critic Jeff Greenfield says, "Gossip is the id rather than the superego of journalism. We just love this kind of stuff."

The real question is whether celebrity journalism or its sub-category gossip poses a genuine threat to taste and morals, or whether it is instead harmless airhead fun. The fear in the intellectual marketplace, as in the mercantile one, is always that cheap currency will debase good. Yet the truth is that even at the height of Trump mania, Bess mania, Malcolm mania or any of the other periodic explosions of silliness, those who wanted to know the weightier news of the world had no real difficulty in learning it. And unseemly as that front-page photo may have appeared, Liz Smith's injection of herself into the Trump tempest was no more outrageous than Stanley's stunts in quest of Livingstone, Nellie Bly's travels and impersonations, John Reed's reportage turned revolution in Lenin's Russia or Barbara Walters' on-air diplomacy to help launch the Camp David negotiations between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Journalists just like to grandstand.

The truly troubling thing about the resurgence of gossip is not what it displays about journalists but what it implies about their audiences. The story of the Trumps could, to be sure, be offered as a cautionary morality tale. But for the most part, it wasn't. It was freestyle wrestling, with attention fixed firmly on the pot of gold rather than on the end of the rainbow. Instead of finding moment and meaning in their own lives, Americans were encouraged to live in daydreams about the life-styles of the rich and famous, to emphasize the material over the spiritual. Gossip can be marketed so as to make the listener feel smugly superior to those being talked about. But in the gossip journalism of today, Liz wants to be Ivana, Ivana wants to be Liz, and nobody even pretends to want to be the gentle reader.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Naushad S. Mehta/New York, with other bureaus