At the dawn of my career as a tabloid gossip columnist, I rang Lachlan Murdoch’s office to inquire whether he was still engaged to Kate Harbin. The two had met at Princeton but I’d heard the relationship was not progressing. Anticipating a “no comment”, I started mapping out my story and was startled to pick up the phone to an unfailingly polite Lachlan Murdoch himself. The 24-year-old confirmed that the engagement was off.
Flustered, I urgently tried to summon the right etiquette for the call before awkwardly commiserating with him and asking what had gone wrong. Perhaps it was the distance?
It felt grubby asking such personal questions of one so young, even the son of Rupert Murdoch, AKA the Dirty Digger – owner of some of the world’s most titillating titles.
Such is the life of a professional gossip, whose terrain must crisscross personal boundaries. I would eventually become quite nimble at stepping into places where I was not welcome.
Gossip often gets a bad rap but I always approached it in the way I would any other news story – by seeking comment from those involved. I believe it also has a valuable role to play in our society. It has probably been going on since the beginning of civilisation. Gossip is innate in human nature. Those Egyptian hieroglyphs? Perhaps they were one of the world’s first gossip columns. Scurrilous tales are proof that no matter how rich, famous and talented you may be, you will not be immune to the same emotional upheavals as the rest of us. It’s is a great leveller.
But when it comes to public approval ratings, gossip columnists are nudging the bottom of a pile of less desirable careers. Often referred to as “muckrakers”, we give garbage collectors a bad name (they at least perform a visible public service while athletically clinging on to the back of a truck like). Gossip column writing only requires a measure of grit and thermal layers of thick skin.
For the next two decades in Sydney, my name became synonymous with gossip. Each Sunday I marshalled an army of bold type names in my column (if people weren’t known to the public, I had little interest in writing about them – it took too long to explain their relevance).
The grist to my gossip mill was the rich and famous behaving badly, as well as celebrity engagements, weddings and public bust-ups. In 1998 when James Packer and Kate Fischer’s engagement was called off, I was outside their Bondi home, trying to interview Kate over the intercom.
Later when he married Jodhi Meares in October 1999, I took up my position in the pouring rain around Packer’s Bellevue Hill driveway, trying to see who was arriving through fogged-up car windows. It was a glamorous life.
Some of my time was spent trying to persuade people to tell me everything, promising to handle their story in a sensitive way. But then a newspaper banner would be my undoing: for example, “Billionaire’s mistress tells all”.
I learned never to pick up the phone on Sundays. It was better that people had time to cool off.
Throughout the course of my career, several high-profile businessmen tried to have me sacked; one offered to clean my apartment, if I would not write about his liaison with a certain woman. In that instance, they were both single, so they were fair game – I tried to make it a rule not to break the news of a marital infidelity to a clueless husband or wife.
It seemed that everyone had my number then and my phone rang hot with callers, mostly from private numbers. They wanted to be anonymous as they dumped on their friends and lovers. My receiver was almost dripping in vitriol that not even the most sterile wipes could clean.
Once I was woken at 4am by a woman who was in bed with her new lover and wanted to announce that they were officially a couple. My phone was never off but after this call it was turned to silent as I slept.
At other times my trolley was corralled in the supermarket by people with tasty titbits that they wanted to tell me. Grubby pieces of paper were passed into the palm of my hand. I was banned from getting a blow dry from two different hairdressing salons as my presence made their clients uneasy. I thought this was unfair as I usually spent my time there catching up on my reading.
While I was never sued for defamation, there were several stories that I regretted writing over the years. Friendships and trust that had been broken. But I bowed to the pressure of delivering the goods each Sunday.
The only thing worse than being a gossip columnist was being a bad gossip columnist and writing a dull column. That’s when people would start muttering that I had gone soft.
My motivation was just staying in my job and supporting my family as a single mother. The most terrifying time of the week was not facing my nemesis on the red carpet but attending the paper’s weekly editorial conferences and having nothing to contribute. If a rival columnist beat me to a big story I would almost become a social pariah in my own newsroom.
It all came to an end in the final months of 2015 when I was retrenched. For a little while I was in shock but strangely liberated from no longer having to pry into other people’s affairs. I changed my phone number and gave away many of the cocktail outfits that I had worn to A-list events like coats of armour to disguise the real person underneath. I started looking for a new career.
Since then there’s been a subtle shift away from the cult of the gossip columnist. Gossip pages and columns have gradually disappeared from publications not only in Australia but around the world.
This doesn’t mean that our appetite for salacious stories about the private lives and transgressions of high-profile people has diminished, only that information is available to us now 24/7, with entire news sites devoted to gossipy stories. Some celebrities like to control their own narrative through social media with a constant stream of videos and photos. Keeping themselves in the public eye makes them more valuable as talent. Fame is addictive.
Even the beloved social pages have all but disappeared, to be replaced by Instagram with hashtags and video grabs. We follow superstar influencers through the lenses of their cameras to product launches, fashion shows and parties.
In certain circles, gossip columnists can seem as dated as the legendary Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who once ruled Hollywood.
I’m not sad that it’s coming to an end. My own column writing was an entree to a completely different world infused with expensive fragrances and big budget blowouts, where the French champagne always flowed but not so much the conversations: at these glittering events, everyone was always looking past each other’s shoulders to see who had just arrived and what they were almost wearing.
After nearly 20 years I was becoming jaded. Time for me to leave and move on at a gentler pace.
