WHERE DID ALL THE GOSSIP GO?

When Ernest Hemingway was declared officially dead, the first call his wife Mary made was to gossip columnist Leonard Lyons. . . .

When Carole Lombard and Clark Gable announced their engagement publicly--and not exclusively, or first, to Louella Parsons--the couple had hell to pay. The newlyweds, to salvage their relationship with Louella, had her master bathroom mirrored and paid for new plumbing to her john.

When Bette Davis went into seclusion in Laguna after the birth of a daughter in 1947, Los Angeles Times columnist Hedda Hopper doggedly took herself to Laguna for an unexpected postpartum interview with the new mother--only to be scolded in print by Louella. (“Bette Davis is getting so many unwelcome visitors in Laguna she’s had to change the locks,” wrote Louella in her syndicated column.) . . .

When Sheilah Graham reported on Mutual Radio that Jane Wyman was “antisocial and wore high-collar blouses to disguise a rash,” Wyman instructed attorney Gregson Bautzer to begin legal proceedings; instead, Graham lost her radio show, due partly--Graham insists--to pressure from Wyman. . . .

When Norma Shearer decided she would sign a prenuptial agreement with her younger ski-instructor fiance Marty Arrouge, she made sure Louella was the first to know. . . .

The day George Bernard Shaw turned 90, he gave one interview, to the New York Post’s Leonard Lyons. . . .

Once upon a time in this country, gossip columnists wielded power with iron wands. Hedda Hopper was on the cover of Time magazine at a time when the cover meant the world. The magic and muscle of gossip columns in America began in the Great Depression; 1929 saw the rise of Walter Winchell as Manhattan’s most powerful columnist, and Winchell spawned more offspring on both coasts than the Rockefellers and Kennedys combined.

By 1965 the era was over. That year Louella moved to a retirement home, and Dorothy Kilgallen’s berth in the Journal-American was handed to Jack O’Brian, whose domain was smaller. (He didn’t review movies or plays.) Names like Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham and Earl Wilson and Harrison Carroll suddenly evoked nostalgia. As London Daily Mail gossipist Nigel Dempster put it recently: “American gossip was geriatrics writing about geriatrics. There was more collusion than intrusion.”

There was also no powerful second act to the Winchell-Kilgallen era. If Winchell abolished privacy forever, he also groomed no successors. (Hollywood did better with successors than New York: Hedda Hopper was succeeded in the L.A. Times by Joyce Haber and Louella Parsons by Dorothy Manners.)

The big switch in gossip in the last two decades is easily defined: Major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and the L.A. Times rely increasingly on columns of attribution , not innuendo. Rather than taking the word of one star voice, editors went the other direction--toward non-bylined columns. Examples: the N.Y. Times’ “Broadway” and “Evening Hours” columns, which use various bylines. The Post’s “Ear” column. (The Post buys Liz Smith but doesn’t run her, prompting Smith’s assistant, St. Clair Pugh, to speculate: “They buy it because Sally Quinn, wife of Post editor Ben Bradlee, likes to read it.”

Show business in the L.A. Times is covered by a variety of columns, ranging from Outtakes to the industry coverage of Jack Mathews to the celebrity coverage of Roderick Mann, whose pieces are based on direct quotes.

Even Manhattan has a plethora of people, albeit none of them on a Winchell level: The N.Y. Post features Cindy Adams along with Suzy and “Page Six,” a column that has seen several writers over the years.

Both the Herald Examiner and the Orange Country Register buy the Liz Smith column but use it primarily “for fodder.” As Register entertainment editor C.P. Smith puts it: “We use bits and pieces of Liz to brighten up our ‘People’ column.” Similarly, the Herald Examiner buys the column to use occasional items for Page 2, the daily feature written by Gregg Kilday.

At the Daily News, movie critic Kirk Honeycutt remembers “six or seven years ago running Liz Smith,” but now the Daily News relies on Marilyn Beck’s syndicated column and Frank Swertlow’s daily “Hollywood Freeway.”

The trade papers, Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter, between them employ half a dozen columnists with Variety’s Army Archerd being (33 years into the job) the long-distance runner. Show business reporters on TV, of course, are a breed unto themselves. Rona Barrett, who invented the genre in the ‘60s on KABC Channel 7, is now broadcasting on Mutual Radio; her imitators on shows such as “Entertainment Tonight” and “Showbiz Today” have yet to make any major noise.

“A show-business column today is a kind of hybrid,” says the Register’s C.P. Smith. “Since the ‘50s two things have happened--the proliferation of TV talk shows that let celebrities tell their own secrets, and the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll--which doesn’t thrive on print gossip like Old Hollywood. Also we’re all shockproof.” As an example, Smith cites a recent Liz Smith column on Gary Busey. “In her fourth sentence Liz had something about Busey having licked a cocaine problem. Even 10 years ago the coke would be the news. But Busey himself has delivered the news on-camera to interviewers.”

The question is, what is gossip today? Websters defines gossip as “a person who chatters and repeats idle talk or rumors, especially about the private lives of others.” How do some of the practitioners define themselves?

Marilyn Beck says she is a “news columnist, not a gossip columnist. I am a show business news reporter.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s popular Herb Caen sees his column as “more chitchat than gossip.” Suzy at the N.Y. Post demurs: “Anytime you talk or write about people it’s gossip.” London’s Nigel Dempster insists: “Gossip must be nasty.” Several newspaper editors interviewed recently agreed that gossip today must be a mix of data from both the private and professional spheres. Liz Smith is as apt to write about a takeover of CBS Records as she is to dip into the relationship of CBS founder William Paley and socialite Evangeline Bruce.

“You can’t be all things to all people,” says Marilyn Beck, whose syndication (through Chicago Tribune Enterprises) is probably strongest of all modern show business columnists. “My own strength going in was that my column was about breaking news first. News is more important to me than my own personality being reflected. I feel I compete with wire services, and my column is something of a tip sheet. That means you need a staff of four, you get gray hair early and you give up social lunches. News is the only way a columnist can survive today.”

Other observers point out that since Watergate no columnist has the time to out-scoop the kind of gossip reporting that comes from, say, the Mary Cunningham brouhaha at Bendix, reported at length in Fortune magazine. Or the gossip-cum-reportage David McClintick did on the book “Indecent Exposure” on the David Begelman scandal or Steven Bach’s “Final Cut,” the very detailed documenting of “Heaven’s Gate.”

The first gossips, according to Roman legend, were “godmothers” who attended baptisms and passed along information to media-less communities. Items like The clergyman got drunk and spilled water on the baby got passed along, and the godmothers were labeled gossips. In America the first gossip sheet, a society paper called “Town Topics,” appeared during the Civil War; its inventor, Louis Keller, also thought up the Social Register. By the 1920s scribes like Cholly Knickerbocker and Elsa Maxwell were toiling, but not until Winchell in 1929 did gossip take off.

But what about gossip in the ‘80s? And the legacy of Louella? One of Winchell’s editors at the now-defunct Journal American was quoted in the ‘60s: “We like Walter, but how can you publish a paper that looks like the 1930s?” In fact, a time-warp may just be happening unwittingly. Columns like “Page Six” in New York and “Ear” in Washington have become so localized, so town crier-like in filling the need for local color, that syndication isn’t even considered.

Even Liz Smith--who’s had the best chance of carrying the torch of “syndicated gossip queen’--sees the impossibility of becoming a household name. “It’s a losing, expensive battle to go national,” she says. “It’s no wonder we look like a vanishing breed. The editors who run bits and pieces of a column miss the point entirely. For a reader to be devoted to a column, he must see it every day--in toto. We may live to see the return of the three-dot column, as editors run out of space. Less really may be more.”