Word: gossiped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...parts. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, charged that there are 20 factual errors in the passages involving her alone. She described the purported Nancy Reagan-Frank Sinatra tryst in the White House as "pure horse manure." Michael Reagan, Nancy's stepson, also jumped to her defense. "Gossip is one thing, and smut is another," he said. "This is smut...
Print the quote, whatever the source. For Kelley, all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating thirdhand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses. (And sometimes more weight.) This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have their own axes to grind...
This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises...
...course all novels are gossip novels, and most are rip-offs, generally of the author's friends and relatives. But the ethics of pilferage becomes woozy when too recognizable caricatures of dead grandees wallow in unlikely misbehavior. Ethical questions waft away, though, when the theft works. Then the stolen characters come to life; for instance, the dead King whom Shakespeare slurred as a bottled spider struts in his play as Richard...
...good. Korda's shabby novel is a snooze, perhaps because, having purloined his characters, he never felt they were really his to order around. The story does not wake up fully even when Felicia, as Desdemona, runs wildly from the theater because she objects to being strangled. The gossip supplied is that Felicia was a victim of incest, Vane a man of pallid sexuality and, oh dear, some great British Shakespeareans were homosexuals. A wholly unbelievable murder clears the stage for a mushy, mope-happily-ever-after ending. Tomorrow is another book...