Word: gossipeer
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...lucrative summer weeks playing theaters and supper clubs. Last fall Gladys, now 31, married her second husband, Barry Hankerson, an executive assistant to Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. He calls her by her middle name, Maria-Gladys, after all, is a show business celebrity. In the industry there is some gossip that success has already created a wedge in the Pips' solidarity. "When vocal groups are hungry, you can't split 'em with an ax," Cousin William once remarked. "As soon as success comes, all it takes is a butter cutter." Gladys scoffs, maintaining that she is content...
...hired irreverent Pulitzer-prizewinning Cartoonist Patrick Oliphant away from the Denver Post, added a progressive, young editorial-page editor and dropped a few antediluvian columnists, and proffered readers a daily front-page "Q and A" column (one surprise subject: Post Publisher Katharine Graham) and "The Ear," a brassy capital gossip column...
Anyone who has faith in the veracity of that anecdote may also wish to make a down payment on Waterloo Bridge. As this grab bag of 484 snippets of British literary gossip demonstrates, when the unvarnished truth is lost a lacquered fabrication will do handsomely. Editor Sutherland, a professor at the University of London, may claim to have weeded out proven forgeries and falsehoods. But he readily admits to choosing (when more than one exists) the stylish version of each story, even though "it may have no apparent authority." And why not? As a class, authors may have no more...
...only for a group of wistful paraplegics. Judy's reply: "If they can wheel them in, they can wheel them out." Such anecdotes diminish both biographer and biographee and make the reader wonder why this sorrowful woman was worth 700 pages of heavy industry. Is the neon gossip meant to illuminate the warts, Judy and all? Or is it the mandatory downer for some future wide-screen version of Garland starring, say, Liza Minnelli...
...Gossip was once the province of the fan magazine or the newspaper column. With the diminution of these outlets, the stories have found their way between cloth covers. No matter how thick those covers, they cannot disguise the poverty and pretension of the contents. It may be true, as Edwin Booth observed, that most actors' work is writ on water. Alas, it is truer to say that most actors' lives are rot on paper...