Ben Widdicombe, a former columnist for the New York Daily News, perhaps puts it best: “Gossip is frequently disparaged, . .And I understand the reasons why. But the trashy stuff connects to the bigger picture, and we ignore it at our peril.”
Cindy Adams in Gossip, a four-part series concerned with the brash, throaty New York tabloids at the intersection of wealth, politics and Hollywood. Photograph: Courtesy of SHOWTIME
‘The trashy stuff connects to the bigger picture’: the gossip-ification of America
Gossip, a four-part docuseries, traces the culture-shaping influence of the New York Post, Cindy Adams, and Rupert Murdoch’s transformation of American media
Gossip, the series, proceeds on two intertwined chronological tracks: the first, Murdoch’s steering of the Post, which he purchased in 1976, into a biting bully pulpit with a conservative bent and a knack for courting readership through sensationalism and fault lines of race, class and political belief. Murdoch pioneered a slicker, seemlier gossip page by committee in the Post – Page Six, which launched in January 1977. Circulation shot upwards. Lurid scandal, sex, crime, shame – as numerous tabloid authors such as Michael Musto, AJ Benza, former Page Six editor Paula Froelich, the New York Daily News’s George Rush and former New York Post editor-in-chief and Murdoch confidante Col Allan testify, Murdoch knew that gossip sold.
The second is Adams’ journey from pageant queen and commercial model to commenter on the rich, powerful and influential. . .Throughout the 60s and 70s, Adams built a career as a news anchor-cum-performer representing New York’s who’s-who. . .She became a regular columnist in 1981, where she continued relaying the sides of disreputable figures: Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos, convicted of stealing billions before she and her husband Ferdinand Marcos were deposed in 1986; New York hotelier and convicted tax evader Leona Helmsley (that Cindy Adams called "The Queen of Mean") . . .
Throughout the series, Adams defends her relationships with figures who have inflicted an incalculable toll on other lives as both a matter of fiercely cherished, reciprocal personal loyalty and the potential for an exclusive. If everyone hates someone, she says in a later episode, then their side is the one story not being told . .
A CAUTIONARY TALE OF SORTS BUT THAT IS WAY-TOO-SIMPLE A CONCLUSION: “Who are we giving so much time, so much print, so much television coverage, so much internet coverage to?”
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NEXT: From New York Magazine via The Cut
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"The penthouse that gossip built looms above Park Avenue guarded by a one-and-a-half-year-old Yorkie, Jellybean, who was sososososososoexcited to have a guest, and a 91-year-old New York Post columnist, Cindy Adams, who was not.
“What is it you’re looking for?” she asked me. “What do you want?!”
The occasion for my visit was Gossip, the four-part Showtime documentary series, out August 22, in which director Jenny Carchman tells the story of the New York Post and the Murdochization of American media through the newspaper’s most enduring star, who has for almost 40 years devoted five hours a day, six days a week, to crafting her column.
“I would never leave the Post,” Adams told me, “because I’m very loyal and because the New York Post is the flavor of New York. If you go to the Hamptons — I sold my house there, I don’t want to go to the Hamptons — they say that you can’t go to dinner unless you first go to the newsstand and pick up the Post. I don’t know about Colorado. I don’t care about Arkansas; I don’t even know where they are — but if you’re in New York, it’s the New York Post.”
. . .Adams has a term for the distinct manner in which she communicates: “I write smartmouth,” she said.
“I write like a city person. My English is perfect, but I don’t write that way. I write the way a New Yorker sounds.” New York’s city editor, Christopher Bonanos, assessed the Adams style this way: “She’s the last known survivor of the art she practices, and the last person on the island who speaks the language of a lost population — that rat-a-tat thing of Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons — and she’s got to write it down to pass it on.”
It’s all very simple to Adams, who views the world as divided between “somebodies” and “nobodies.” And, as she explained it to me, “I’m not gonna write about nobody!” I guess I wanted to understand why. . ."
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Next UP space of the week
Where Gossip Never Sleeps
Cindy Adams bought Doris Duke’s Park Avenue apartment 22 years ago, and even today the phone doesn’t stop ringing.
"I thought if it was good enough for Doris Duke, it’s good enough for me,” Cindy Adams says, striding through the foyer of the Park Avenue penthouse she purchased in 1997 — with her own money, she wants you to know — and today shares with her 17-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Juicy. “Three and a half pounds of pure selfish,” she calls her. (Translation: the most beloved thing in her life.)
They live in theatrical splendor, with the phone ringing off the hook as if it were the pre-texting era and people still knew that the best stories are whispered directly into an understanding ear...She moved into the place with her husband, the comedian Joey Adams, at a time when he was ailing and having difficulty navigating their previous “much nicer” apartment on Fifth Avenue. Adams is a New York girl, born in 1930, who grew up on the Upper West Side. She dropped out of high school over a requirement that she take a sewing class, she says, and was working as a photographer’s model when she met Joey on a radio program (they married in 1952). He was her mother’s age. “I would have loved to have been a six-foot-tall blonde model and married a brainy man,” Adams says. She was pretty and charismatic — a pageant queen, the onetime Miss Bagel — but six feet tall and blonde she was not. . .
After joking (I think) to our photographer that she’ll ruin him if she doesn’t like his picture of her, Adams has to go. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and she has to get back to her office, surrounded by her front-page scoops. . ."
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