Word: gossipist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beloved Infidel (20th Century-Fox) takes its title and its central situation from Gerold Frank's bestselling biography (TIME, Nov. 24, 1958) of Hollywood Gossipist Sheilah Graham, who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's girl friend during the last sad years of his life as a Hollywood hack. The book pretended, with some authority, to be the hard, straight stuff-novelist on the rocks. But Producer Jerry (The Best of Everything) Wald decided that the stuff was too strong for the customers he was after, and he attempted to water the old Fitzgerald down and sweeten...
Like La Rochefoucauld, Mademoiselle was destined to die in bed. But even death did not spare her a final characteristic misadventure. Her body lay in state for several days. Gossipist Saint-Simon describes the "most ridiculous thing" that then happened: "In mid-ceremony, the urn containing the entrails exploded with a frightful noise and a sudden insufferable stink. Instantly, there were the ladies, some of them swooning with horror, others taking flight ... the monks ... in the act of singing psalms, all made for the doors ... the chaos was extreme...
...does many another celebrity, for Columnist Leonard Lyons, 52, has a talent for getting on the right side of the right people. "I'm a good straight man," he says. "They need someone to bounce against." Gossipist Lyons never bounces back, never breaks a confidence, and except for a few personal feuds, notably with Walter Winchell and Bennett Cerf, never spits venom in his column. The gentle and often limp anecdotes of his syndicated "The Lyons Den" (106 newspapers) picture the great as playing a perpetual game of conversational pattyball, in which the backhand blast is taboo...
...story of this love affair together with the tale of her rise from a London slum background that Sheilah Graham tells in Beloved Infidel, or rather, does not tell. For reasons best known to the inscrutable West Coast, Gossipist Graham has chosen to spill the news of her life to Fellow Journalist (Coronet) Gerold Frank, whose ghost-written accounts of lost and love-shorn ladies (Lillian Roth's I'll Cry Tomorrow, Diana Barrymore's Too Much, Too Soon) have made him a leading sob brother. He achieves a confidential tone that rarely confides, a vulgarity that...
...house on Manhattan's unprepossessing West 103rd Street, Mrs. Fred Townley answered the telephone, gave up a small chunk of hard-won anonymity. Married for 25 years to a law-trained businessman, Miss America of 1922 and 1923-the only double winner of the contest-told Gossipist Earl Wilson that she was less than keen about a free trip to this year's rite at Atlantic City (see SHOW BUSINESS). Explained the former Mary Campbell: "I got so tired of the publicity I didn't ever want to hear about Miss America again." Pressed for her life...