I’m a terrible gossip monger; I am the first to admit it. But what I really mean to convey by that statement is that I’m probably no greater a gossip monger than the average person on this green Earth, but that I am less ashamed to say so. (Yes, this is what we call a humble-brag. I’m a prideful and egocentric gossip monger.) Pope Francis has said repeatedly that gossip is a plague worse than Covid-19 and that speaking ill of others is a poison that destroys the Holy Peace, but I’m fairly sure Pope Francis would also tell you that we all have our faults, and it seems obvious that 99 percent of human beings have this particular one: We gossip. When someone claims they don’t talk about other people behind their backs, don’t believe them. It’s almost never true.
We are social animals, and we feed on the nitty-gritty of what other social animals are doing. Gossiping is — as they say in poorly written magazine articles — hardwired into us, part of our DNA. We may not truly need the information we get from gossip, but our deep-cortex brains think we need it, as we need air and water, to survive. Gossip is a deep-down, atavistic fascination. We crave details when it appears someone in our circle has broken one of the unspoken rules that bind society together. That’s all it is. In today’s world, our addled brains perceive celebrities as friends and relations by extension. We need to know all about them. We need to know.
Indeed — wading now into the waters of things I am in no position to write about, but newspaper columns are more interesting when they are frank, so here goes — the only person I know who says they don’t gossip and holds true to that word is a friend who is autistic. He says he doesn’t gossip and he actually doesn’t gossip. He’s the only person I know. His autism, it seems to me, grants him a certain moral clarity: He expects what one says to match up with what one does. I’m not sure if it’s wrong of me to say so. (Perhaps this is evolution. I once heard Greta Thunberg describe her activism as having been sparked by the same need for accord between word and deed. Why were the adults blah-blah-blahing about climate change but still leaving the lights on when they left the room? She made a hand-painted sign and stood outside Parliament.)
I’m not so evolved. I started reading Star Magazine, the supermarket tabloid, weekly when I was a teenager. I read Star Magazine at Butler Library at Columbia University, I read Star Magazine on the L train wearing ridiculous rock and roll rags and tatters, I read Star Magazine eating fries with gravy at Tom’s Diner. Sometimes I read its main competitor, The National Enquirer, too, but the Enquirer wasn’t as reliably entertaining.
I’m not talking about the Globe or the Weekly World News, the smudgy-newsprint tabloids with the cover headlines out of science fiction — “World’s Fattest Man Marries World’s Thinnest Woman!” or “Were-Baboon Strikes Again!” or “Snake With Human Head Found in Arkansas!” Star Magazine has never printed fictional stories about alien babies or Nascar drivers who’d been reincarnated as cans of creamed corn. Star’s meat and potatoes, in those days, were investigations into the real-world, back-room, basement-tiki-bar private lives of country-western singers, soap opera divas, game-show hosts, and the fading stars of television and the silver screen, the more fading the better.
It didn’t diminish my interest that, at Greta Thunberg’s age, I only had a vague concept of who Conway Twitty or Suzanne Pleshette was; I still wanted to know what weird food and drink (cans of Tab and jars of pickles and nothing else) they kept in their refrigerator. I wanted to know about the weird model
heifer farm, constructed to look like a Swiss alpine dairy, owned by the actor who played Gomer Pyle. I just needed to know. Star Magazine, in those days, sent reporters to dig through trash cans in the stars’ driveways, to discover that a minor Sinatra or member of the Partridge Family had an apparent addiction to Robitussin.
Disclaimer: None of the above is true. None of the above celebrities are addicted to Robitussin or own a faux Swiss dairy. I’m just trying to give you the flavor. Sometimes Star’s coverage was a bit spicy — I remember a certain top comedian said to have a foot fetish — but it was the more mundane stuff that, perversely, was most interesting. The peeks into others’ real lives. We lapped up pictures of the interior décor of celebrities’ homes, their color-coordinated bedroom sets with bedside mini-fridges, their white pianos, custom-built pet beds, and nude tabletop statuary. Heaven.
Star Magazine invaded celebrities’ privacy and hurt many feelings, I’m sure, but it was not nearly as mean as the gossip websites of today, for example, Perez Hilton, the first major gossip columnist of the internet age. I’m still mad at Perez Hilton for mocking Debbie Harry’s aging appearance about 10 years ago, when she — one of the inventors of punk, a bona fide songwriting genius, and one of the greatest beauties to ever top the charts — was in her mid-60s. (Take a look in the mirror, Perez Hilton. You never wrote “Union City Blue.”)
Star Magazine in the 1990s had a hilariously acid-tongued fashion critic on staff who should have won a Pulitzer. Not an actual fashion critic, in the Women’s Wear Daily sense, mind you, but some uncredited someone who wrote headlines and captions that cracked me the hell up. Never has there been a better description for a badly fitting petal-satin tube dress than “two pigs fighting under a blanket.” Star gloried in awful outfits and candid photos of stars looking their worst. Another howler from its glory days: a multi-photo spread of a morning television host with his finger up his nose, “Digging for Gold!”
Naturally, all of this fun was destroyed by the bland-zation of corporate media conglomeration.
David Pecker, the Trumpist publishing boss who became famous later for the “catch and kill” scandal, acquired American Media in 1999 and moved the headquarters of Star and the Enquirer from Tarrytown to Boca Raton, Fla. Most of the old-school gossip writers and Dumpster-diving investigators jumped ship, refusing to move to Florida. I watched it all unfold in horror. Star was reimagined and redesigned as a generic entertainment magazine and it was immediately terrible. Godawful.
Star Magazine’s new editors, who obviously had no taste, more than once after that attempted to go further in the direction of what they’d probably call “upscale” and “classy.” They failed at each turn. We, the one-time readership, the lost readership, laughed. We heaped scorn. We shook our fists in the direction of Star Magazine’s thicker, glossier paper stock.
Today, Star Magazine is all but indistinguishable from Us or InTouch. Too much of a bore to read, even in a dentist’s office. These homogenized entertainment magazines all follow the same formulas and write about the same stable of omnipresent stars: Bella Hadid, Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Harry Styles, et al. The stars all wear the same clothes. They’ve all dyed their hair blue or pink at some point as a gesture of rebellion, they’ve all overcome body-image issues. What’s kept in their refrigerator is carefully curated. The variety is gone. (And here I glance upon one of my favorite topics, a topic that explains everything, the fall of the world, and that is: the homogenizing power of global capitalism, which promotes an unwholesome, unhealthy, and dangerous uniformity — a dangerous uniformity in the monocrops of big agribusiness, a boring sameness of TikTok dance memes and the way the world wears its jeans, a winnowing away of fish species around the Great Barrier Reef. Monoculture.) I hold Pecker personally responsible for ruining a great American publishing tradition and if I ever meet him at a party I’ll tell him so.
I was a senior editor at Vogue when Star Magazine went down, and secretly wished someone would have noticed me and hired me for a relocation to the Gold Coast, but it wasn’t to be. No more pickles and nitty-gritty. Gossip tabloids, rest in peace.