Word: gossipers
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...what gossip travels faster than gossip about newsmagazine stories about gossip? . . . Last Tuesday senior editor Claudia Wallis brought up the idea for this week's cover with managing editor Henry Muller and executive editor Edward Jamieson . . . Less than two hours after the cover was scheduled, a New York Post reporter called to ask if it was true that TIME was working on a cover story about gossip . . . Like peanut butter and Cheez Whiz, gossip sure has a way of spreading...
Admit it. No matter how interested you are in serious news, every so often you glance at a gossip column, scanning its staccato list of items and bold- faced names to see if there is anything of interest . . . Yet, is American society becoming too obsessed with gossip, too absorbed with the private lives of public people? . . . For Naushad Mehta, interviewing columnist Liz Smith and her brethren for this week's cover stories was an amusing change of pace . . . Though Mehta kept asking about the troublesome issues raised by our national infatuation with the trivial, her subjects kept changing the topic...
Mary Cronin probed the public relations trade . . . "Flacks guiding clients up the social ladder," she says, "protect them as if they were atomic secrets" . . . In Washington, Michael Riley rang up Diana McLellan, the doyen of D.C. gossips . . . "She breathlessly picked up the receiver and talked without stopping. And she was doing her nails, causing her to lose her train of thought several times" . . . In Los Angeles, Jeanne McDowell concluded that gossip levels there approach the toxic because so many people have car phones . . . Stuck in traffic? Call a friend and talk about Cher...
History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes...
According to Oscar Wilde, who had plenty of reason to think so, all history is gossip. By that definition, Liz Smith is one of America's premier historians. From Palm Beach, Fla., to Santa Barbara, Calif., via her syndicated column and New York City television show, she catalogs the follies and the triumphs of the famous, able in the wink of a cliche to make careers and unwrap reputations. Some folks can't wait to lap up her latest morsels; others think she ought to have her typewriter confiscated. "She has the power to get people to pay attention," says...