Edition: U.S. / Global

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Presidential Gossip's Long Tradition

Published: April 15, 1998


Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics

By Gail Collins

322 pages. William Morrow. $25.

The timing is perfect. Today there's a journalistic feeding frenzy every time a new scandal pops up -- especially a political scandal -- and, lo and behold, Gail Collins has written a lively, informative history of gossip in which she assesses a celebrity culture gone haywire.

She defines gossip as ''unverified information about a person's private life that he or she might prefer to keep hidden.'' She says that ''gossip answers a wide range of human needs'' and that ''it bonds both teller and listener together with a sense of sharing something slightly forbidden.''

Ms. Collins, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, concludes that Americans' appetite for gossip is now insatiable because we no longer have much privacy and yet we yearn for intimacy and a sense of connection that's all but disappeared in this era of fast food and E-mail. And she doesn't forget, either, the subtext of gossip: how invading the private lives of our politicians and entertainers empowers both the tale carrier and the recipient.

Americans have always liked to dish. Lies, rumors and tall stories have been part of our political process since the first elections in the 1780's, when George Washington's enemies alleged that he had fathered an illegitimate son.

There's a quite wonderful chapter devoted to Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory, the commander of the Tennessee Volunteers in the War of 1812. Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans was such a triumph, Ms. Collins writes, ''that it changed the nation's self-image.'' He became a great hero and wanted to run for President on the issue of character, so his opponents created a savage campaign to smear him and his wife, Rachel, as adulterers. When Rachel read the vicious lies about both of them in the newspapers, she had heart failure and died. Jackson was inconsolable. He did win the election, but he always maintained that gossip had killed his wife.

Usually, Ms. Collins writes, all sorts of unsubstantiated gossip swirled around the elections of those times. For example, when John Fremont ran for President in 1856, he was rumored to be not only a Catholic but also a cannibal. The public was terrified that a papist might take over the White House. Fremont was, in truth, an Episcopalian. Later, when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, he was immediately rumored to have ''Negro blood.''

By the 1900's muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell had begun to expose industrial corruption at Standard Oil and elsewhere. But Ms. Collins ignores them and concentrates on the rise of the entertainment celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. The public was discovering movies, and political gossip decreased, she notes.

Our definition of reality was starting to be altered. In fact, the public would start dealing with two realities, the mundane reality of daily life at home and in offices and factories and the other reality, the one the public read about in newspapers and saw in films.

From then on through the 1950's, movie stars and sports figures existed in a kind of separate, dreamlike heightened reality. In time movies became a mirror to our culture and the public became totally caught up in celebrities' lives, and an enormous amount of psychic energy and attention was focused on the rich and famous.

Ms. Collins deftly sketches mini-portraits of some of yesterday's idols whose continuing dramas figured heavily in gossip columns over the years, including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. A great deal of space is given to politicians and their drinking habits. Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt were moderate drinkers but were rumored to be terrible alcoholics; so was Mamie Eisenhower.

Ms. Collins ends the book with chapters called ''Gossip Armageddon'' and ''Endless Exposure.'' At this point, cable television, 24-hour news and the Internet (''A vanity press for the demented,'' says Lars Nelson of The Daily News) were all flourishing. The information glut was such that reporters were scrambling to unearth as many new dirty secrets as possible. And of course politicians and entertainers alike were competing on television to promote themselves.

And then comes our latest, greatest supercelebrity, Bill Clinton, the only President who ever talked about his underwear on MTV. His character had nothing to do with his popularity, Ms. Collins says. From the day he first ran for office, the public knew all about his flaws. ''People react angrily to shocking stories about a famous person's private life only when the gossip is out of sync with their image of his or her character,'' Ms. Collins writes. Mr. Clinton's good qualities, his intelligence, his energy, his ability to keep going under terrible pressure, made the public support him.

The gossip about the President continues unabated, and the public eats it up. News often seems to entertain as much as it informs. Or as Ms. Collins puts it: ''The public seems to have adapted to seeing their politicians in raw reality. Unfortunately, in the case of Clinton, they soon discovered that the package they bought into might have been a little rawer than they'd bargained for. On the cusp of a new millennium, the nation might be spiraling down into deeper and deeper levels of insensitivity to bad behavior, which could make even gossip irrelevant. It's impossible, after all, for people to speculate about who is breaking the rules behind closed doors when there seem to be no rules left that matter.''

Photo: Gail Collins. (Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times)