There she was, blond and bedizened and bravely unbowed, pictured on the front page of the newspaper to which she had confided her most private conversations. No, not Ivana Trump. The woman standing next to her, the one commanding equal attention in that come-to-tell-all photo: syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News, the shoulder La Trump chose to cry on when she wanted to tell the whole world what she thought of the man who had left her. They stood side by side, equals and friends and newsmakers, the aspirant to a jumbo settlement and the journalist turned dispenser of social eclat. While ordinary footsore reporters waited outside a restaurant for crumbs of comment, Mizz Liz sailed in to console Ivana in the guise of boon companion, swapped expressions of abiding misery, then hurried out to whip intimate confidences into a souffle of salaciousness and scandal. Not that Ivana felt betrayed -- the whole friendship, like nearly every friendship between gossips and the gossiped-about, was based on mutual exploitation, an exchange of private trust before an audience of millions of strangers.
Right across town, hours later, the New York Post's Cindy Adams, a darker and doughtier and even more decked-out doyen of dirt, was marinating in Donald Trump's self-righteous anger at being blamed for that saddest of commonplaces, a divorce. He was just as eager as his wife to hash out in public a story that seemed certain to do him no good, proving again the quirky fact that keeps all gossip columns in business: for some people, there is just no such thing as bad publicity. In Adams' published stories she too stood front and center, a principal voice if not quite a front-page face in what somehow was being treated as the biggest news of a singularly newsy time.
The Soviet Union was in the midst of disempowering the Communist Party. Germany was hurtling toward unification. Nelson Mandela was transforming the future of South Africa, and Drexel Burnham Lambert was pronouncing obsequies over the go-go greed of the '80s. But the connubial bust-up of the billionaire New Yorkers was the talk of the town. For that matter, of practically every town. Their story made the network newscasts and countless columns across the U.S., and once the split became a fait accompli, gossipists gleefully predicted that ramifications -- from a rowdy settlement battle to the wooing of new partners -- might drag on deliciously for, oh, a decade. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they're only made of clay, but gossip is heaven-sent and here to stay.
Clamoring to get into the Trump affray were such professional tattletales and partygoers as Aileen Mehle, veteran writer of the Post's "Suzy" column, syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, plus Smith's Daily News colleague William Norwich, New York Newsday's James Revson and a phalanx of others from all over. Even London dailies were grabbing at the story, pursuing the angle of Ivana's brief first marriage to an Austrian ski pal. We're not talking just the wacky supermarket scandal sheets, whose more enticing headlines last week included JAMES DEAN IS ALIVE!, CHEERS STAR'S FATHER IS NAMED AS JFK KILLER, WORLD WAR II BOMBER FOUND ON MOON. Gossip is booming on television, in magazines, in nonfiction books, in docudrama TV movies and mini-series.