Free Gossip by Joseph Epstein

certainty—it can be neither proved nor disproved—and its very uncertainty makes it all the richer.
    Such is the extreme candor—or is it utter want of reticence?—of the times in which we live that people often gossip freely about themselves and people they claim to love. The actress Angie Dickinson told the author of a profile of her that ran in the January 2008 issue of
Vanity Fair
that she had a ten-year love affair with Frank Sinatra, the great secret about which is that neither was really crazy about the other; the deepest passions of both were not engaged. They apparently used each other as, in effect, relief stations. "There's a difference," Miss Dickinson says, "between having to have something and wanting something."
    Did Angie Dickinson want John F. Kennedy, with whose name hers has also been linked? In the same
Vanity Fair
profile, she remarks on her distaste for Paul B. Fay, a friend of Kennedy's writing about his and her relationship in his book
The Pleasure of His Company.
Because of her distaste for such gossip about her and Jack Kennedy, we are told, she turned back a six-figure advance to write an autobiography, though she had completed more than a hundred pages, with "all the details intact." In other words, Angie Dickinson seems to be saying, she did have an affair with the president but prefers not to talk about it, at least not in any detail—or is it not at these prices? "I didn't want to let it go out," she tells her interviewer. "They wouldn't believe me if I said it never happened ... Anyway, it's time for everybody to grow up about the Kennedys. It's more important what we lost as a country." Thus do gossip and patriotism live comfortably side by side.
    One view of gossip holds that when it isn't motivated by revenge, it is motivated by egotism and status needs. All the bits of gossip recounted in this chapter can be explained by this view: Barbara Cartland's in her account of the failure of the royal marriage comes across as an insider; Angie Dickinson's in her interview with a journalist comes across as a woman who has been intimate with two of the most powerful men of her time. Might my own gossip from the previous chapter, the items about Joe DiMaggio and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not also be charged up to status needs, for each involves the act of name-dropping—specifically, my dropping the names of Saul Bellow and Pat Moynihan, claiming a relationship with both? Thus do gossip and snobbery also live comfortably side by side.
    Not all gossip need have motive. Some gossip is passed along out of sheer exuberance, with no greater motive than the desire to entertain one's friends. One brings a delicious bit of gossip in the same spirit that one brings a bright new joke, to lay at the feet of people whose point of view is roughly congruent with one's own and who are therefore likely to enjoy it. Not all gossip has a punch line; only some of it is amusing; but both gossip and jokes have in common that they begin with the question, Did you hear this one? (W. H. Auden said that "Did you hear this one?" ought to be the motto for psychology and the head trades generally.) Both enterprises, gossiping and joke telling, suggest the world is less predictable than one might have thought, for a joke whose outcome one can predict is no better than a bit of gossip one already knows.
    The notion of gossip as disinterested information, not always having a deep or dreary motive behind it, is suggested by Jacob Klein, in his day a famous teacher at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. In his essay "The Idea of Liberal Education," Klein referred to gossip as "the soft underbelly of knowledge," calling it "the small tribute that our passionate and appetitive life pays—in very, very small coins—to intellectual life." Gossip may seem chiefly to have to do with idle curiosity, but it can also spark serious curiosity. "It must be granted," Klein wrote, "that it is not always easy to