Word: gossip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...call Richard Rovere a political reporter would be to call Tocqueville a travel writer or Boswell a gossip columnist. "I'm really not especially interested in politics," Rovere insists in this posthumous collection of previously unpublished reflections and autobiographical snippets. Instead; his quarry is "American life in all its wonder and looniness...
Misunderstandings like this can be compounded by the gutter press (MICHAEL JACKSON?MORE OF HIS INTIMATE SECRETS; MICHAEL'S AGONIZING TUG OF LOVE) and by the putative inside-track show-biz gossip. Jackson wants a sex-change operation; Jackson has gone under the knife for extensive plastic surgery; Jackson has been shot full of female hormones to keep his face pretty and his voice soaring high. "Not true," says Riggs. "I'm his voice teacher, and I'd know. He started out with a high voice, and I've taken it even higher. He can sing low?down...
Show business accepts innocence only if it can be sentimentalized; Jackson's world of fantasy is easier to dismiss with malicious gossip than understand with sympathy. "On some level, I don't even know whether it's conscious or not, Michael knows that he has to stand off the demands of reality and protect himself," Jane Fonda points out. Jackson spent more than a week with Fonda on the set of On Golden Pond, talking far into the night about "acting, life, everything. Afrinight about "acting, life, everything. Africa. Issues. We talked and talked and talked. His intelligence is instinctual...
...needy, Andrea pursues the job with a worldly resignation that contrasts to good dramatic effect with his rival's cookie-tossing eagerness for it. Luciano Odorisio's Dear Maestro is not much to look at, but it is shrewd in its examination of how envious small-town gossip exacerbates a contest that neither participant wants, compassionate about men standing on the cusp of middle age, still scrambling to keep their dreams glimmering, and pleasingly ironic in the way it works out its story...
...perceives. Her four earlier books were heartfelt documentaries about depressed villages and their degraded women; here she addresses the flip side of the country's trials. Her most winning character is, in a sense, the lazy, sunlit hill town of San Felice Val Gufo, whose main industry is gossip and main activity leisure. Its happy-go-lucky air is eminently well suited to the semi-elegant foreign riffraff-lascivious artists, terminal good-for-nothings, dotty Brits, retired CIA agents and indiscriminate snobs-who haunt the area. So blundering and blustering are the idle expatriates that the locals are moved...