In Praise Of The Blind Item

I want to know less about more people.

Admittedly, I’m partial. In researching and writing my new novel, Another Side of Paradise, I became thoroughly acquainted with Sheilah Graham, a columnist who pioneered gentle gossip even as she was the story, the last love of the very married (sorry, Zelda) F. Scott Fitzgerald. Call Sheilah’s reportage style was a catch-more-flies-with-honey approach that worked. By 1966, her column appeared in more than twice as many newspapers as her worthy competitors, Louella Parsons (the fat one) and Hedda Harper (the hat one.)

I came to admire the whispering, rather than shouting, that was Sheilah’s trademark. A newspaper reader could savor her tattletale du jour over a second cup of coffee, leisurely speculating on, say, why “the Errol Flynns have yet again decided to call it a day on their marriage.” I might have pictured Mrs. F. schtupping her chauffer and Mr. F. being sued by a porn star–or maybe it would be the reverse. I don’t need to be confronted by a complete dossier, with video footage, of their sexcapades. I have an imagination. Please let me use it.

A nip of gossip about a few people I actually give a damn about is, for me–and I imagine, many others–an adequate fix. (I’m a sucker for Harry and Meaghan.). I can happily live without reading or hearing every explicit detail about Kendall Jenner’s extended and often offended family. In fact, in their case, I’m happy to know nothing at all. What sane person isn’t fed up with today’s always-breaking news cycle, where the chyron on the screen vies for our attention while the squawking head above it retells tales we heard ten minutes ago? With every available stone turned, (not to mention with a president who came from reality TV) we’re in a constant state of overwhelm. Too many people know too much, and say it, every chance they get.

May we have a moment of silence, please, and while we’re at it, let’s honor the old-time gossip columnists’ staple, the blind item? I’d just as soon be unaware of Sir Paul McCartney making guests pay for their own drinks at a party he threw for his wife. I prefer Sheilah’s account from eighty years ago, that an actress “believes every dollar unspent is a dollar saved. Her long-distance calls are invariably ‘collect’—even when the distance is no greater than from Beverly Hills to Palm Spring, costing 80 cents.”

Graham’s silky blind items titillated. “At Paramount’s gala honoring Adolph Zukor’s 25th anniversary in motion picture…Dorothy Lamour and Jack Benny came through with flying colors,” Graham wrote in 1937. “Not so several other ‘biggies,’ ……” Who were the disrespectful “biggies?” Gable? Garbo? Cooper? Damn if I’m not curious. Sheilah–like Hedda and Louella–was an artful fan dancer who understood the value of the slow- or no-reveal.

Sheilah, in particular, had reasons for proceeding with caution about what she revealed: she wanted to keep her own story numb. She wasn’t “Sheilah Graham” at all, but a slum kid who re-invented herself in Gatsby-esque fashion. After moving to Hollywood, she broke her engagement to a titled English gentleman, and in truth-is-stranger-than fiction fashion, fell in love with Gatsby’s creator and became the iconic author’s girlfriend, muse and champion.

Many readers, of course, were in on the game—about Sheilah and most everyone else. It was an open secret that Cary Grant flounced prettily in his Malibu hideaway, which he shared with a boyfriend, or that nobody darned socks at Marlene Dietrich’s sewing circles. But the columnists stopped at calling out homosexuals. That Van Johnson, for example, was gay seems to have been widely accepted in film circles, yet his proclivities never made it into the columns. The closest he came to being outed was Louella saying, “Van is 30-years-old and has never come close to marrying, regardless of what has been written about his romances.” Wink, wink. People who got what she implied enjoyed a sense of private superiority.

Gossip columnists of the past teased and obscured, turning a story into seductive foreplay. Today, it’s one loud, in-our-face quickie after the next. Who lost their job today due to sexual harassment? Chew it up and spit it out fast, before something tastier comes along. The news will be forgotten tomorrow, so don’t bother savoring it.

Not that yesterday’s Gossip Girls were softies. They competed hard for exclusives, and because there were only three of them, these women had undiluted power, affecting which Hollywood projects got greenlit. This Unholy Trio, as they called themselves, could help make–or break–careers. If you dissed any one of these tattle queens, you risked having your box office star vilified or sentenced to press Siberia. Ingrid Bergman, for example, paid dearly for denying to Hedda Hopper that she was pregnant with Roberto Rossellini’s baby. Hedda got her revenge by smearing Bergman’s name every chance she got, then ignoring her.

In the script for an HBO documentary about Arthur Miller, Rebecca Miller, the playwright’s daughter and the film’s director, originally included a scene about Marilyn Monroe’s pregnancy during Some Like It Hot and Monroe’s subsequent miscarriage. Reconsidering, she cut it. “It’s that line of ‘what’s gossip and what’s getting to the meat of the matter?’” Miller recently said to Maureen Dowd.

Most celebrity reporting these days is miles past “gossip,” with the meat of the matter is left to rot in a roar. Maybe it’s time to quiet down, find the meat and fact-check it. And if some eager journalist wants to return to the decency of the blind item, I will praise them for it loudly, in detail and by name. With eyes wide open.

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Sally Koslow is the author of the forthcoming (Harper, May 2018) novel Another Side of Paradise about Sheilah Graham and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/sallykoslow

Find out more about her on her website http://sallykoslow.com/

About ANOTHER SIDE OF PARADISE

In 1937 Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham’s star is on the rise, while literary wonder boy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career is slowly drowning in booze. But the once-famous author, desperate to make money penning scripts for the silver screen, is charismatic enough to attract the gorgeous Miss Graham, a woman who exposes the secrets of others while carefully guarding her own. Like Fitzgerald’s hero Jay Gatsby, Graham has meticulously constructed a life far removed from the poverty of her childhood in London’s slums. And like Gatsby, the onetime guttersnipe learned early how to use her charms to become a hardworking success; she is feted and feared by both the movie studios and their luminaries.

A notorious drunk famously married to the doomed Zelda, Fitzgerald fell hard for his “Shielah” (he never learned to spell her name), a shrewd yet softhearted woman—both a fool for love and nobody’s fool—who would stay with him and help revive his career until his tragic death three years later. Working from Sheilah’s memoirs, interviews, and letters, Sally Koslow revisits their scandalous love affair and Graham’s dramatic transformation in London, bringing Graham and Fitzgerald gloriously to life with the color, glitter, magic, and passion of 1930s Hollywood.

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing