Godfather of gossip honoured
A little black book crammed with phone numbers to die for and the flow of emails from Los Angeles still keeps the Godfather of Gossip David Hartnell spoiled for material.
The 73-year-old former Sunday News gossip columnist has just been awarded the President’s Medallion from the Variety Artists Club of New Zealand after eight years as patron of the 51-year-old alliance of entertainers.
Contacting Hartnell means calling him on his land line.
Cell phone? He doesn’t have one.
He has 136,000 readers online, but social media? He doesn’t do it.
Hartnell harks back to the glory days of Hollywood, finding out what was going on through conversations in the make up room, watching the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins transformed into stars before his eyes.
One of the first he was close to, and an enduring favourite, was Phyllis Diller, one of the first women stand-up comics.
Hartnell said he would never expose an affair, ‘‘unless I was sitting at the foot of the linen battlefield’’, and pregnancies were also off-limits in case something disastrous happened before his words made it to print.
Later, he struck up a warm relationship with actor Michael Barrymore, but he would not divulge what they talked about.
He despised the sort of ‘‘nasty’’ gossip that dominated social media – which he described as bullying at its worst.
And he complained there were no longer the real celebrities of earlier years to talk about.
‘‘Everybody is a gossip columnist these days, and with social media, everything is so instant, and so false, and everybody is a star.
‘‘It’s so disposable now. My gossip was always tongue in cheek, never nasty, and I would never put the knife into anybody. It’s supposed to be fun.’’
Clearly, Hartnell’s definition of what is gossip is a little looser and kinder than others.
‘‘When the words ‘fake news’ came out, people said how terrible it was.
‘‘I said, ‘my dear, I have made a living out of it for 53 years’.’’