Tabloid Tidbits
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Tabloid Tidbits For fullest satisfaction from those stories about the Reagans and the Kennedys, you have to be able to lick your lips and cluck your tongue at...
...Think of Gerald and Betty...
...Only the oldest kind...
...Nobody could stand listening to him crooning 'Strangers in the Night' all afternoon...
...Everybody gets a kick from the secret drinking, the adulteries, the neglected kids, the peculiar relatives, the nasty habits of the men and women up there...
...after a night of drinking is no reason why she shouldn't charge him with rape...
...Can you believe the one about Nancy and Frankie having it off...
...Irresistible...
...Some people say we are like vultures, but others, who couldn't get on camera, complain the story is being suppressed...
...One thing you have to grant Ted is that when it's 3 a.m., he knows where his children are...
...Long before reporters took to calling themselves diplomatic correspondents and media critics, they were digging the dirt about President Cleveland's bastard child and President Harding's closet mistress...
...Sure, what we need to know about the Reagan Administration is how it handled or mishandled the nation's books, not how Nancy made book on the heavens...
...Think of Franklin and Eleanor...
...Nancy Reagan has had her share of smoochy coverage from the same newspapers and news shows that have spent so much air time and ink regurgitating tidbits from her unauthorized biography...
...Now let's get back to the stories, which is where reporters will get no matter what their pretensions...
...Or: "Just because a young woman well past the age of consent accepts an invitation to go home with a young man around 3:30 a.m...
...they did it right there in the White House so the staff would be able to give Kitty Kelley the dope when the time came...
...In this democracy, entertainment has always been part of the function of political personages, especially the First Family...
...And what we need to know about Senator Kennedy are his plans for spreading the nation's wealth, not how he throws around his own at trendy joints...
...I have learned exclusively that the missing urn was a present to Ted from Nancy, who swiped it from a grandchild...
...A favored high-low road is to defend one or another of the principals...
...Expect like pieties on Op Ed pages and at seminars on journalistic ethics for months to come...
...All right, Ike may not have produced many laughs, but there was always Mamie...
...Having it both ways animates much of the press as it plugs along day after day with less to cover than the Kennedy T-shirt: "Palm Beach is crawling with journalists, including yours truly, sticking a mike in the face of anybody who ever saw any Kennedy picking up a sixpack at the local overpriced deli...
...And how can we expect people to enter public life if they know they are going to be hounded for every private peccadillo, like being on the premises of, maybe, a rape...
...Or: "If Ron had spent as much time as Ted hanging out with the kids, he would have had a much more rewarding family life...
...Let her take comfort: In all the years of her prominence, she has not given as much pleasure to as many people as during these past few weeks...
...At least nobody has said Senator Ted Kennedy himself was involved, but who can forget Chappaquiddick, especially with local news shows carrying clips from back then, though of course it is not fair to dredge up middle-aged hijinks...
...The abiding attraction of tabloidism is its insistence that there is no gulf between the biggest shots and the commonest man...
...This naturally requires elaborating on the charges: "So what if Nancy and Ron sneaked a joint together...
...It can't be true...
...In the tabloid world, everybody is common...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Tabloid Tidbits For fullest satisfaction from those stories about the Reagans and the Kennedys, you have to be able to lick your lips and cluck your tongue at the same time: "Tch, tch, shame on the Kitty Kelley creature for cashing in on backstairs gossip about a former First Lady...
...Probably it never happened, and anyway, for seniors it's medicinal...
...There are possibilities for a partisan approach: "At least when Nancy and Ron were fooling around with other people, they didn't drive across any bridges...
...Is this stuff journalism...
...As for Senator Ted, the carryings-on of the Kennedy clan have long since passed beyond scandal into farce...
...They are constantly being exposed as our representatives in ways not anticipated in the Constitution...
...Such an odd coupling...
...No, lament the professors of communications, the media ought to be giving the public not what it wants to know but what it needs to know...
...Maybe, thanks to Kitty Kelley, she will go down in history as a bundle of laughs instead of as a rack for free gowns...
Vol. 74 • April 1991 • No. 5
