Gossip From 2006

I've been reading the Heilemann/Halperin book on the 2008 presidential election, GAME CHANGE.

Their account begins in 2006, focusing on how the Obama and Clinton families and associates made key decisions and started to align their forces.

On the Clinton side of that divide, there is some juicy gossip. Senator Clinton's advisers, especially her "war room" devoted to tracking and responding to nasty stuff in the press, were worried that the ex-prez husband's infamous libido might have created new troubles for them. They created a "war room inside the war room" to look into three stories in particular.

Bill was thought -- by somebody or other somewhere -- to be having or to recently have had an affair with:

Belinda Stronach then a member of Canada's Parliament;

Julie Tauber McMahon a wealthy neighbor of the Clintons in Chappaqua, New York; and

Gina Gershon, an actress who played a lawyer for CBS in the 1999 Russell Crowe vehicle, The Insider.

I don't remember hearing about any of these rumors at the time. Of course Hillaryland included people whose special talent is hearing such rumblings before they get to obtuse folks like me, so this is not too surprising.

Anyway, Solis Doyle, the Senator's right hand woman, was perturbed, Heilemann and Halperin tell us, "by the caliber of the people indulging in the speculation." It wasn't Clinton enemies or gossip mongers. Natural political allies and heavy-hitting contributors were discussing these stories on conference calls. Thus the creation of the war room within the war room.

And what did the WR/WR discover? That at least with regard to one woman the rumors were true, thus as GAME CHANGE puts it "Bill was indeed having an affair -- and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship."

The authors soon thereafter drop the subject, without telling us whether the one was in fact one of the three women listed a couple of pages before, or someone else.

Your guess is as good as mine. Now I feel up to date on gossip, the "date" being 2006, and am content for another five years.

New Voltaire biography

Ian Davidson has written a biography of Voltaire, published by Profile.

The desire to be candid(e) requires me to report that none of the reviews of this book that I have thus far encountered leave me wanting to to buy or read the thing. Here are three examples:

Susan Elkin, in The Independent, makes it seem as if the book is about celebrity gossip -- with whom was Voltaire sleeping when.

Andrew Hussey, in the Financial Times, says that Ian Davidson "makes the point that much of Voltaire's massive literary output is now out-of-date when it is not simply tedious."

Sam Leith, in The Spectator, tells me that Davidson makes Voltaire seem like "a starlet perpetually leaving sex tapes out where the builders can find them."

I wish Davidson good luck with this book, but I personally will sit this one out.

"Radioactive Bucket of Stress"

Well, this blog is not usually a forum for celebrity gossip, but I like the expression "radioactive bucket of stress." I'm going to take to using it myself when the chance arises. Which, I hope, will not be often.

The fact that the phrase came to my attention through a bit of celebrity gossip is, then, incidental.

Salman Rushdie, the renowned novelist who has written Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008) along with much else, has been romantically linked of late to Pia Glenn.

Thereafter, in the big 8th grade corridor that is the modern celebrity world, Salman and Pia had a falling out, and it was Pia who first saw fit to tell the world about it.

The world being, of course, best informed through Page Six of The New York Post.

Some novelists of Salman's stature might have seen fit to refuse to dignify that with an answer, and maybe to write a nasty caricature of Pia into one's next novel. But Rushdie is apparently made of more contentious stuff.

Here's the relevant link from Gawker. [Link fixed - ed.]

Okay, there's no reason for anybody to care. But I didn't have any other great ideas for a blog entry today anyway. And, as I say, the whole exchange did produce the expression "radioactive bucket of stress." That's writing. [See Cicily's comment below to get the proper context for that phrase.]