The ever-changing art of the Fleet Street gossip columnist
Peter Mckay
When writing a gossip column, my late friend and editor Sir John Junor advised, ‘Always include an item which is generous in tone.’ He explained, ‘It makes the less generous ones more believable.’
Disappointingly, he often ‘spiked’ my ‘generous’ items after considering them ‘piss-poor’.
Gossip columns are defined by Wikipedia as ‘material written in a light, informal style… about the personal lives, or conduct, of celebrities from showbusiness, house-of ill-repute politicians, professional sports stars, and other wealthy people or public figures.’
This makes them seem harmlessly quaint. In fact, they’re the least respectable face of journalism, scorned by seriousminded scribes who pride themselves on exposing public wrongs and championing the weak against the strong. I’ve written gossip columns for the
Daily and Sunday Express, when they were broadsheets; for the Evening Standard and the Evening News; the
Daily Mirror, the News of the World and finally – for 20 years until this year – the Ephraim Hardcastle column in the Daily Mail.
I also contributed to Private Eye’s scabrous Grovel column, which began as a satire on the Mail’s then gossip column Charles Greville; and, briefly – to humour a friend, the late, Left-wing polemicist Paul Foot – I contributed an anti-capitalist one for his Socialist Worker paper, under the nom de plume Philby.
What have I learned? And is there an art to the gossip column – or is it a house of ill-repute in journalism’s boulevard of broken dreams?
Editors are averse to calling them gossip columns. They prefer ‘The Diary’, as if the miscellaneous collection of anecdotes about famous – or hoping to be famous – people was in any sense a snapshot of our life and times.
The contents of most are not to be considered alongside the languid, witty musings about the upper classes
composed by the likes of James LeesMilne, or even the peevish, class-obsessed annual moanathon by Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books. Few are an actual record of events, experiences or even thoughts, this magazine’s Old Un’s Notes being an exception to this rule.
Editors appreciate the readership their ‘diaries’ enjoy but worry over the legal disputes they often entail. ‘Lawyer to see,’ Sir John would scribble on some columns I put into his tray. (Might ‘Lawyer to See’ be a good title for my memoirs?)
Gossip columns seem to be more careful about causing offence than they used to be. As a result, they’re less interesting to readers. A general rule now is that it’s OK to refer disrespectfully to people in public office, or who might be unpopular for some other reason. Otherwise, take care.
The columnists seem to be exploited by public relations people more than they used to be. When I wrote the Town Talk column on the Sunday Express and afterwards the William Hickey column in the old Daily Express, we were discouraged from covering promotional parties. Now they’re practically the only ones written about.
PR types invented the ‘A-list’, which purports to grade levels of celebrity. Its seedy purpose is to exalt their own clients. In living memory, the private activities of dukes, duchesses and other high-society figures nourished the professional gossip; now it’s the offstage comings and goings of TV soap opera denizens.
We have embraced the American style of gossip column, invented by New Yorker Walter Winchell nearly a century ago, but he spread his net far wider, pontificating and gossiping about presidents and gangsters as well as exposing the moral failings of showbiz riff-raff.
When, at a party, media heiress and alleged Nazi sympathiser Cissie Patterson suggested he should ‘ease up’ in his criticism of Adolf Hitler, Winchell told her, ‘Why don’t you find another boy, Mrs Patterson?’, withdrawing his column from the papers she controlled.
The New Yorker commissioned a snooty study of Winchell’s columns and announced that many of his items were fabrications. Winchell retaliated by writing that the magazine’s famous editor, Harold Ross, didn’t wear underpants – a more shocking detail then than it might be now.
A household name with an audience of 50 million, Winchell is immortalised by fictional gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (played by Burt Lancaster, pictured) in the 1957 movie Sweet Smell of Success. His dominance of showbiz types who sought a favourable mention in his column is demonstrated by the famous scene in which, popping a cigarette into his mouth, he instructs a fawning press agent (Tony Curtis), ‘Match me, Sydney.’
No gossip column here, or anywhere else, has achieved Winchell’s range and impact. The late Nigel Dempster, a colleague and friend of mine, was the nearest but, unlike Winchell, he didn’t address followers ‘from coast to coast, from border to border, and all the ships at sea’.
We need more amusing gossip and less boring ‘news analyses’. The art of the gossip columnist is to provide telling little details that expose character. Age has not withered my enthusiasm for the best sort of gossip columns – that deflate the pompous, expose the hypocritical and tweak the tails of those who have got above themselves.