When the Unspeakable Happened in the East, Gossip Gave Way to Stunned Silence and Loss

Usually, we are consumed by the happy noise of celebrity chatter. The phones are constantly lit up, the fax machine and e-mail on overload. But as unspeakable events unfolded Tuesday morning in Manhattan and outside Pittsburgh and the nation’s capital, it all stopped. There was only overwhelming silence.

For 48 hours, we received not one call, not one fax, nary an e-mail. The mailbox, usually stuffed to overflowing, stood empty. And we were grateful, because we simply couldn’t have stomached such trivial pursuits in the face of mind-boggling death and destruction. Mariah’s meltdown; who cares? Cher’s in court; so what? Tom and Nicole’s marital property dispute; what did it matter? The Bakley-Blake family feud, totally irrelevant.

We had absolutely nothing to say about any of it. Our usual dishy chat and catty asides seemed wholly inappropriate. The sentiment was shared by most of the nation’s gossip columnists, who suddenly felt useless, silly, frivolous. Most kept occupied by helping newsroom colleagues with stories about the canceled Latin Grammys and Emmy Awards and profiles of prominent people unfortunate enough to board airplanes that turned into weapons in terrorist hands.

The New York Post’s popular Page Six gossip column did not appear for the first time in 25 years. “It’s not possible to write about canoodling supermodels or dyspeptic pop divas when terrorists are killing our friends and relatives and scaring our children,” Richard Johnson sought to explain to readers, in a column spiked for lack of space.

At the New York Daily News, there was no Daily Dish. The Washington Post’s Reliable Source was pre-empted. Nothing moved on the Associated Press entertainment wire. MSNBC removed the gossip link from its Web page. Even the entertainment trade paper Daily Variety, usually atwitter with the comings and goings--inkings and anklings, in Varietyspeak--of the industry’s insiders, took on a somber note on Wednesday: “It was the day the world stopped. The real world and the play world.”

As we wondered whether we could force ourselves to take the pulse of L.A.’s party people at Deep, Moomba and Skybar, Johnson was asking himself the same question in New York. “A friend of mine who distinguished himself in the jungles of Vietnam rushed to the Chelsea Piers to help triage the wounded while I was considering a story about which nightclubs would be closed, or whether this calamity would take the heat off Rep. Gary Condit and Lizzie Grubman,” he said. “No, it doesn’t work. Sept. 11 is the day gossip died.”

Syndicated columnist Liz Smith also pronounced gossip dead as she watched the towers of the World Trade Center burn and crumble from her office window. Now that the unimaginable has occurred, she predicted, gossip and celebrity news will be “driven underground and we won’t have such trivia to kick around anymore.” In a column that was published here, but not in Manhattan, Smith wrote, “I am really incapable of writing such absurdities.... I want to go somewhere and volunteer. To hell with gossip and entertainment.”

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Like everyone else, Hollywood’s publicists and power players were paralyzed. Superflack Pat Kingsley spent two days at the office, her eyes fixed on the television set, her fingers dialing and redialing New York. A-list clients were stranded everywhere since nobody could fly. There was nothing to plug or spin.

Publicist Stan Rosenfield was stuck in Toronto, where he had attended a weekend film festival with clients Danny DeVito, Andy Garcia and Geoffrey Rush. “Talk about leveling the playing field,” he mused. “Everybody’s glued to the television set. Everybody knows the same thing. We know no more than you know. Oh my God! Are you watching ABC right now? They’re showing footage from a satellite of the plane hitting the building.”

Lloyd Grove, who writes the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, was taking a few days off in Los Angeles when his girlfriend called, sobbing, with news that former federal prosecutor and CNN commentator Barbara Olson had been on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon.

The stories of the thousands of people who died, and the tragic ripples that will extend to their friends and families, “makes writing what you and I normally write about seem dissonant,” he said. “I just don’t feel like doing it. We’re part of the same bit of daily life that comes to a halt in national tragedies such as this one.”

Grove paused for a moment, sighed, then continued: “This is obviously without equal in American history, and there’s really no place for us while we’re still trying to sort out our emotions and news of the event. And frankly, I would feel as a person silly and irrelevant if I were doing my column right now. I think my time would be better spent going to a blood bank.”

Stacy Jenel Smith, who writes a syndicated column with Marilyn Beck, kept herself busy sorting through the party cancellations. She found new resolve after talking to a publicist, who reminded her of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s advice: If you allow acts of terror to alter your daily life, then the terrorists have won.

Already, the e-mails are starting to trickle in again. Page Six reappeared in Thursday’s New York Post. At the Daily News, Mitchell Fink said he may resume his Insider column by Monday.

“Not that things are going to be back to normal for a while,” Fink said, “but there will come a time when people will be desperate to read other things. Pretty soon, people are going to want some kind of diversion.”

There’s no such thing as the end of gossip, he said. “It’s on the sidelines for a little while, as it should be.”

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Times staff writers Gina Piccalo and Louise Roug contributed to this column. City of Angles runs Tuesday-Friday. E-mail: angles@latimes.com.