What kind of gossip item is framed as a question and has no names in it, just clues? Free answer: a blind item! Like Norma Desmond, these tidbits were once big, but the newspapers that carried them got small, and they became more like character actors, familiar if faded guest stars occasionally called on to spice up long-running series.
In the new gossip economy these grandes dames of dirt are back in the spotlight, thanks to Instagram accounts like @Deuxmoi and @Diet_Prada, and now they’re fired off, unchecked, by anyone on social media with a celebrity gripe, sighting, or juicy anecdote to share.
The democratization of dish is good news for everyone who enjoys a side of schadenfreude with their breakfast, but it’s also a reminder that the innuendo pulsing through our feeds is most often a crowdsourced effort, like a game of telephone involving very famous characters.
In my day—that is, the 1990s, the golden age of blindies—journalists resorted to this rather genteel form of skewering the rich not to amplify hearsay but because, while they knew the scandalous info to be true, they didn’t yet have full confirmation. The item was a source greaser, it titillated the reader, and, in most cases, it reassured nervous lawyers.
Inspired by the New York Post’s blind item–friendly Page Six, I used to do entire columns of blindies when I worked at the Village Voice. In 1996 I wrote about the grisly murder of drug dealer Angel Melendez by crazed clubbies Robert Riggs and Michael Alig, who were eventually arrested. Page Six’s then-editor, Richard Johnson knew who I meant and used—and credited—my info for the column’s lead story on April 27, 1996 (“Mystery of the Missing Club Kid”), which upped the ante, and eventually led to the arrest of the notorious party monsters. (Alig died this past Christmas.)
My peers and I found that these tabloid delicacies sparked a popular, interactive guessing game. Johnson says he got calls constantly from people asking if their guesses were warm. “I’d say, ‘I can’t reveal anything, but off the record, yes,’ ” he recalls with a chortle. He and others, like the New York Daily News’s George Rush and his wife Joanna Molloy, were upholding a rich tradition that began in 1879 with the Gotham magazine Town Topics and that continued with such notorious midcentury scribes as Walter Winchell.
Rush remembers when a source saw the married Harvey Weinstein canoodling with Georgina Chapman (his next wife), so “Rush/Molloy” ran it as a blind item, calling him a “husky producer.” Recognizing himself, Weinstein sent his staff to buy up every copy of the Daily News on Martha’s Vineyard, where his current spouse was summering. When Weinstein (who, as we later learned, deserved far worse) confronted Rush, he fumed, “You’d have to be blind not to know who that producer was!”
The movie business, with its big egos and bigger indiscretions, is fertile ground for the well-sourced scoop-hound, and Old Hollywood pioneers like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper paved the way for the likes of Ted Casablanca’s old E! online column, The Awful Truth, and Enty, the anonymous entertainment lawyer who terrorizes studio heads on his site Crazy Days and Nights like a Tinseltown Lady Whistledown. Later the blind item began to look quaint in the face of brassier players, like TMZ, that were unafraid to name names and go for the jugular.
These nuggets of mischief might seem coy in today’s nothing-is-secret-or-sacred landscape, but guess who’s been missing them? Me!
So here are three more of my nameless classics: “What late star’s husband went home with a female impersonator dressed as his dead wife?” “What three uptown dames were all Madam Alex prosties who became socialites by marrying their wealthy johns?” And “What actor started that gerbil rumor about that other actor out of rivalry?” Blech. Guess away.
This story appears in the March 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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