'WE WON'T rest until we send you back to Washington on a stretcher." I hadn't even written my first word for the Daily News, and already the gossip gang-bangers at the rival New York Post were unsheathing their imaginary switchblades.
That was a little over three years ago. Manhattan real estate baron Mortimer B. Zuckerman had recruited me from the Washington Post to start a new franchise, called Lowdown, at his venerable tabloid. The fellow trying to rattle me was Jared Paul Stern of the Post's notorious Page Six column, who later became the target of an FBI investigation when he was accused of squeezing Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle for protection money in return for quashing embarrassing items about him.
Stern, of course, was fired -- and I outlasted him by a good five months before my contract ran out. In New York City, as the Page Six scandal proved, gossip is not just a blood sport, it's a potentially criminal enterprise.
But I have also learned, after nearly eight years of writing a daily column in both D.C. and N.Y.C., that gossip can be good for society -- don't laugh -- and can even, perish the thought, be legitimate journalism. All it takes, beyond being insanely competitive, is an honest heart, a keen eye, a strong stomach and a thick skin.
I'd been developing all of the above during my four years (1999-2003) writing the Reliable Source column, which the Washington Post, being a serious newspaper, declined to call "gossip." You haven't lived until you've been snapped at by the president of the United States (Bill Clinton, who was mightily annoyed when, at a Georgetown cocktail party, I handed him a copy of one of his college philosophy papers and pointed out that it had received only a B+: "But I got an A in the course!" he responded). Or until you've been bodily threatened by a very tall movie star (Tim Robbins, who warned me at a black-tie event: "If you ever write about my family again, I will [bleeping] find you, and I will [bleeping] hurt you!").
But I also got confidential tips from the legendary Katharine Graham. Despite the minimal enthusiasm of some of her editors, Mrs. Graham believed strongly that her newspaper should carry a sharp, funny and reliable column about VIPs. From time to time, distinguished papers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have ventured into this frisky territory, but have usually ended their walk on the wild side in a hand-wringing identity crisis: Can we be serious journalists and still publish a gossip column?
