Gossip - 13 February 1976

I've thrashed for years, and just about given up thrashing, over the difference between news and gossip.

Now we have all known, since childhood, that news is good and responsible, even when it's bad, and gossip is mischievous and irresponsible. But maybe this is not a universe idea at all.

Maybe there are nations that wouldn’t know what we are talking about when we make this pious distinction. Perhaps there are languages that contain no word either for news or gossip. I remember a linguistic wizard once told me that in the earliest form of the Persian language there was no word for an old man, and none for a boy.

Well, in view of the well-known lamentable fact that the end of life is death, those are a couple of words that you'd think would be indispensable in any language. But the history of the Persians had been such an endless see-saw of invading and being invaded, that what they had to express youth and old age was a single word: soldier. You inflected it one way and it meant, too old to be a soldier; you inflected it another way, and it meant, too young to be a soldier.

So, it’s at least possible that our prim view of what is news and what is gossip is something dinned into us Anglo Saxons by the serious Romans, when they came invading, and lifted us up by our strips of wode and made us over from chattering cavemen into serious human beings able to embark on such civilised undertakings as highway building, taking baths, making money and making war.

Well, at this point, I think I will seize the life-line offered by the blessed Oxford English dictionary. And, if you will allow me, here it is. And what a find. If you think the Persians have minds that work in a peculiar way, look at us. Gossip, it turns out, stems directly not from the devil, but from God – it’s an old English word God-sib, which mates the word God with the word sib, meaning a blood relations sibling, as we now say, and originally meant a godfather, or godmother, the social sponsor, if you like, of a child. And from there, it did what most indispensable words do, stretched its meaning – it came to mean, in Middle English, a familiar acquaintance, friend or chum – as in "listen gossip".

At some point in our rough island story it was stretched again, when people told each other things they would normally keep only in the family. By the sixteenth century it had come to mean, and I quote the ghastly male chauvinist entry, from 1566, "a person, usually a woman, who delights in idle talk, a tatler". And, a single sentence, no author specified, gives us a swift indelible picture of you and me, dropping in on a friend or excitedly reaching for the phone to retail some juicy bits of scandal usually. This revealing entry comes down to us from 1560, "she is to her gossips gone, to make merry".

There comes to my mind in a flash what – I must conclude from the quickness of the flash – is my most immediate vivid memory of a bit of gossip. In 1929 I was stag- struck, and during my college vacations during the long summer holiday, I fished around for a job in the theatre. And I was lucky enough to get a non-speaking part with, in turn, a touring opera company, in which I performed as a non-singing monk, and then with the company of a famous actor-manager who was just then having a provincial try-out of a play that would eventually come, and came, to London.

The play was called Jew Suss, made from a whopping bestseller and I went up in the theatrical scale: I became a Stuttgart courier, with one line. It was subsequently taken away from me, by the time we got to Manchester or, Birmingham, I forget which. But, better than all the lines in the world, I was assigned the job of catching the beautiful young heroine as she made a suicidal plunge from an old battlement, all of six feet, on to a backstage mattress. Breaking her fall, I suppose, would be a better description of my job, but it was very nice breaking, and if Miss, then Peggy, Ashcroft, has no memory of it, believe me it's enshrined in my memory, as one of the breathtaking (literally) theatrical performances of the 1920s.

Well I was given a dressing room with a stage manager, a snapdragon of a gossip if ever there was one. Every night he came in with a gleam in his eye, and a bit of tasty scandal on his tongue. And, for some reason so buried in my unconscious that it never well be dug out, the moment you say the word gossip, I remember the night he came fairly jigging into the dressing room to retail the bombshell about two very famous West End stars.

I am afraid though both of them are dead there may be family survivors so I must camouflage the names. Anyway this diabolically engaging man, pranced in and said, "What" – as our transatlantic cousins have it – "do you know... Dorothy Star has abandoned her husband and the twins and gone off with Edward Blank he of the urbane profile and the army record". It was shocking, and it had not yet reached the papers, and it was delicious.

Now, I can’t help it if this item seems to you, unworthy of a responsible reporter of news. I have tentatively decided that news becomes gossip when it’s hot and when you know it before anybody else and it doesn’t matter if it’s about a cabbage or a king, if it’s about the collapse of the government, or the end of a love affair. I don’t believe that anyone listening ever seals a lip when he or she is fairly certain of knowing something ahead of a close friend, or what the old English call a gossip.

Now this Freudian dredging operation, you will be surprised to hear, was prompted by none other than a man who had lived for a couple of years at the very nerve centre of Washington gossip. He lived, you might say, night and day making gossip, and telling it in secret to his buddies or "god-sips" and he eventually was too clever for his own good, for he made the mistake of committing all his confidences to a tape recorder, which he fatally forget to turn off – yes, Richard M Nixon.

Well a week ago – ten days was it? – a friend came in for a drink and he was impatient to spill the beans as that old stage manager. "Guess what," he said. "Mao Tse Tung has invited Nixon to China, and he’s going". Frankly, I was floored. Of course we’d heard for a year or more that Mr Nixon cloaking himself in whatever shreds of dignity he could pull together, talked importantly of performing some public service, aching to become – gossip had it – a kind of American roving ambassador. But this was preposterous, like Napoleon at St Helena saying he wouldn’t mind taking on the job of being the French ambassador to Great Britain.

Everybody has agreed, since Mr Nixon closeted himself in the crumbling estate in San Clemente, California, that he was going nowhere politically again, and that it was all right, though it was pathetic if he kept his toes warm in the evening with delusions of grand diplomatic missions. But it’s one thing for him to yearn to be acceptable in the old national capitals and quite another for those capitals to invite him and welcome him. And so far as I can recall, nobody has ever been invited without a lot of preliminary cadging and arm twisting, by the lord and master of China himself.

To say that when the bomb fell in the White House it caused everyone there to jump is a very mild understatement. President Ford was thunderstruck, and therefore – after all, he never said Nixon had done any wrong – he struck us with thunder when he so precipitously came through with the presidential pardon. Therefore, President Ford allowed his press secretary Mr Nessen to express the official view.

Mr Nessen was immediately asked by a reporter, what is obviously the truth, whether Mr Nixon’s visit to Peking wouldn’t be cause for embarrassment to President Ford? Mr Nesson was vehement in his instant denial of any such embarrassment. Too vehement, reminding us of another remark of good old Dr Freud, "when the patient insists with much emotion that such an idea is absurd when he says no, no, no.. the doctor has come on the place to dig".

If the White House had not been embarrassed Mr Nessen would have chuckled. On the contrary he was agog, with indignation... the very idea. The formal statement was left to the unflappable Dr Kissinger, who thereupon got off one of the blandest remarks in the history of bland diplomacy. "No aspect of United States foreign policy," he said, "is more important than China, Mr Nixon’s visit as a private citizen will symbolise that relationship."

But private citizens can never be symbols of any country's foreign policy. Well, I don’t remember an incident that has so acutely embarrassed a sitting president of the United States – certainly no action ever taken by a former American politician who had been safely put out to pasture.

Consider, Mr Ford himself was in China not so long ago and had a very chilly reception. Mr Ford is the keeper, if not the maker, of American foreign policy. In any ordinary year he might just sit back and say nothing and let the scandal blow over, as President Truman did when the fired General MacArthur came wading in at San Francisco, stripped of all his specific commands and insisted on addressing rallies around the country, not least making a speech before a joint session of Congress.

It seemed a very dangerous risk for Mr Truman, to take. For in spite of an old soldier's promise just to fade away, McArthur looked for a time as if he might sprout into a Roman emperor. But Mr Truman’s instinct was canny – McArthur talked himself out, and fulfilled the irreverent fate, predicted by H L Mencken, "He is a dreadful old fraud, but appears to be fading satisfactorily."

But this is not an ordinary year, it’s a presidential election year, and Mr Ford has to go on the hustings. Mr Nixon will be proclaiming the triumph of his meeting with Mao and no doubt we shall see lots of smiling pictures, just when Mr Ford is going through the ordeal of the first test of the New Hampshire primary. So Mr Ford, who has been up there in the snows already, is going to have to go back again and somehow try to smother the headlines out of Peking, with impressive headlines of his own.

So now, to the threat of a beating by Ronald Reagan, must be added the threat of being beaten by a disgraced ex-president junketing on Tuesday week with the king of Asia. And if that is not a definition of embarrassment, the word has no meaning.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.