SHOCK HORROR! Gossip-mongers are nothing new

Social media; that is, recorded, written-down, gossipy tattle, made widely available for others to read and pass on (and pass judgement on) is really nothing new. Some 3,500 years before the internet, before newspaper columnists and party pages in magazines, before Popbitch, Perez Hilton, YouTubers and Instagrammers, a logo-syllabic ‘cuneiform’ tablet dating from 1500 BC chronicled a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. The muck-spreading author’s name is not known (and the stone was perhaps too heavy for his particular neolithic nugget of scurrilous concubinage to ‘go viral’ across the Tigris–Euphrates massive) however, it did start something of a trend.

Before long, the cattier tranches of Roman society were at it too; historians have nicknamed Marcus Valerius Martialis ‘Rome’s Original Gossip Columnist’; ‘Martial’ was a mixer and on the town night after night looking for scandalous material then regurgitating it via the medium of satirical epigrammatic districts.

Centuries later, it was Britain who led the way with both ‘godsib’ (a portmanteau of ‘god’ and ‘sibb’), originating from the Old English for godparent or spiritual sponsor, referring to a close friend or confidant) and the modern gossip magazine format itself. In 1709, the Tatler journal was founded by Anglo-Irish writer, playwright and politician Sir Richard Steele (also co-founder of The Spectator) who, employing a cast of playful nom de plumes (eg ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’), reported on colourful chatter and ‘lucubrations’ overheard in London’s coffee houses. Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift was a regular contributor.

Over in the USA, Hollywood scandals, the misbehaviour of Gilded Age Deep Southerners and wealthy New Yorkers’ indiscretions provided stellar column fodder. Newspaper proprietor James Gordon Bennett Sr. is credited with creating the first society page at the New York Herald in 1840, while the antics of his son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., who took over the Herald in 1867, spawned a lasting catchphrase; ‘Gordon Bennett’ becoming a synonym for incredulity and outrage.

In the 1930s, the baton was passed to Walter Winchell, a New York Daily Mirror writer who told stories about gangsters, show girls and Jazz Age celebrities and became the author of America’s first syndicated gossip column. It was so widely read that he even got a namecheck in the Frank Sinatra standard The Lady Is A Tramp (‘I follow Winchell and read every line’). During the 1950s, Confidential, a New York-based quarterly, peddled Hollywood scandal and gossip – Liberace, Zsa Zsa Gabor, etc – selling five million copies at its peak (Confidential was also the inspiration for Hush-Hush magazine in the 1997 neo-noir movie L.A. Confidential).

Soon, every news-sheet from London to Los Angeles had its own scandaliser; Hedda Hopper, Liz Smith, Nigel Dempster, the Tatler Girls and party doyenne Betty Kenward author of ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in Tatler, then Queen and then Harpers & Queen) became household names.

Today, innuendo, rumour and infidelity is the stuff of the internet, X and Instagram. Stories of indiscretions, kinks, power struggles and professional rivalries are spread globally, at lightning speed. Gossip – lurid, ephemeral and fast-forgotten – is measured in ‘likes’... not column inches.