Social Distancing May Mean the End of Gossip As We Know It
Cindy Adams is running out of things to write. The reigning doyenne of New York City chatter has been stuck inside her Park Avenue penthouse for more than two weeks and the tongues of the city’s tipsters have noticeably slowed their wagging. “Soon,” she says, “I’m going to have to reprise an exclusive sit down I once had with Abraham Lincoln.”
It would be a problem for anyone in her position. With an unprecedented number of people practicing social distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus, an entire ecosystem of cocktail parties, opening-night soirees, and VIP-room antics has ground to a halt. Restaurants are closed, events are canceled, Broadway shows are dark. So, how do you gossip when everyone’s stuck inside?
“What can you write? It’s an impossibility,” says Adams, whose dishy column runs four times a week in the New York Post. “People I once ignored and avoided, I’m now thrilled to speak to. If they’re giving me something to write about, they’re great. And I’m making a list of those who called me and those who didn’t, so I will know who to be nice to in the future.”
Gossip reporters aren't used to sitting home. “When I was at ‘Page Six,’ it wouldn’t be unusual to have a breakfast meeting, a lunch event, a cocktail party, a dinner, and then four events a night," says a former reporter for the Post’s legendary daily column. "I’d say at least 85% of what I wrote about came from being at a club or out to dinner with someone.”
These days, while columns are still publishing original stories—like a recent "Page Six" scoop about the birth of Hunter Biden’s son—items seem just as likely to originate from a star’s Instagram account as they are from working the phones. And if there’s bad behavior going on, it’s probably more under wraps than ever. “I’m sure there will still be powerful people having dinner parties,” the former reporter says, “but nobody savvy will admit to having attended.”
It’s a tough time for dirt. Not only are the starlets and tycoons whose misdeeds make for scintillating copy currently cooling their heels—a practice that has paparazzi photographers scrambling—but some veterans of the gossip game think that the public’s appetite for scandal has waned. “The question you might ask is whether people even want gossip right now—and I would say they don’t,” says one social observer.
Still, others posit that while the newspaper columns and celebrity weeklies might soft pedal for a bit, they’re likely just biding their time until they can once again bare their teeth. “Gossip,” a New York writer says, “will return in the form of privileged people doing shitty things to benefit themselves at other people’s expense.”
Until it does, “columnists and readers are going to have to adapt,” advises Michael Musto, the former Village Voice gossip who writes the “Musto Unfiltered” column for NewNowNext.com. “I’m somebody whose life involves running around to a million things every night and trying to make sense of it the next day. That’s changed, but I understand the need for the change.”
What exactly does that change look like? For Musto, it’s raiding his own archives or writing columns based on concepts instead of interviews. For others, it’s covering the ways that the rich and powerful are reacting to the public-health crisis, whether that’s David Geffen’s now-deleted Instagram post about quarantine on his 454-foot yacht or puff pieces about good deeds in the face of the adversity.
In some cases, reporters are tasked with becoming part of the story themselves. “Ron Howard is doing a documentary on me,” Adams says, “and obviously they can’t come in with a camera crew at the moment. So, they asked me if I could have my housekeeper photograph me cleaning out my files. They said they’d teach her how to hold a camera. Teacher her how to hold a camera? She can’t even make coffee.”
Of course, enterprising outlets are also finding ways to work around new challenges. “You’ve lost a layer of tips, and it’s harder to get in touch with sources who you need to speak to in person, or who need to see the person they’re talking about,” says a celebrity weekly staffer. “There’s still an exchange of information, but the randomness of overhearing or seeing something intriguing has been lost.”
Instead, some say, leaks are starting to come in from well-placed spies who’ve picked up on juicy tidbits during VIP videoconferences or from gatherings on apps like HouseParty.
And nobody’s giving up using the telephone. “People are feeling pent up, and I’m finding that they're reaching out all the time—gossip can be their only source of real excitement during the day,” says publicist R. Couri Hay. “Besides, talking on the phone is one of the few things you can do and not risk getting sick. It creates distance, so nobody knows if you’re blushing revealing a secret, but it’s also very intimate—because it’s just the two of us talking right now, isn’t it?”
No matter how they’re sourced, juicy stories still have a habit of finding their way out. “[Billionaire businessman] John Catsimatidis recently sent me a video I thought was quite amusing,” Cindy Adams says. “He was sitting at a poker table with four other men, but instead of chips piled up it was rolls of toilet paper. That was good, I used it.”
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