The Bull Market in Personal Secrets

By Frank Trippett

In those days I think she'd experiment sexually with anything and she was absolutely open about it.

--Tallulah, Darling, by Denis Brian

I told Marlon to hurry and get all his clothes together and go up on the roof because I didn't know whether Burt would come back up the elevator or run up the stairs.

--Shelley, by Shelley Winters

Tidbits of such an odor would have caused gasps if they had been mentioned in private chats not long ago, or full-blown scandals if they had appeared in print. Today nobody bothers to lift an eyebrow at the seamiest intimate tale, not even when it is about the life of a President. The reason is plain: tidings of intimate goings-on have become as common as junk food in the U.S. In fact, the country has developed what looks like an enduring bull market in personal secrets.

Tattletale stories have always been around, true, but never so numerously, so brazenly, so unrelentingly as today. The personal travails and bedroom vagaries of real people are blared forth in newspapers and magazines, on television and in movies. Biographies and autobiographies about and by celebrities actually deliver the shadowy scandals that fan magazines used to promise in misleading blurbs. And so many books are rattling once closeted skeletons that even gamy chronicles about the likes of Tallulah and Shelley have to fight for attention. Ordinary Americans, moreover, tend increasingly to litter casual small talk with personal secrets of a sort that only priests and the most trusted confidants once enjoyed.

The public traffic in what used to be respected as intimate lore is conspicuous and feverish enough to have provoked some thought about the implications of the trend. Something more than a mere departure from decorum must be involved when a society begins to live habitually in a blizzard of under-the-rug sweepings. Only the simple-minded could shrug it off as nothing more than a side effect of the open and permissive social mode that emerged in the 1960s. Letting it all hang out may be refreshing and even healthy, but not under all circumstances; neither honesty nor candor requires that anybody's, let alone everybody's, intimate life be ventilated on the village green. The booming commerce in intimacies is extraordinary if only because U.S. society so strongly cherished the personal preserve in the past. The American's home may still be his castle, but, given the drift of things, it is easy to imagine that a peering, leering crowd is gathered at the window.

The personally sacred realm used to enclose a great deal that went on at home and at large; there were reasons for confidentiality between doctor and patient. But the variety of intimate matters now bandied about is without apparent limits. On talk shows like Phil Donahue's, ordinary people regularly recount stories of emotional disturbance, marital discord, incest. Men chat about their vasectomies, women about their hysterectomies. The spectacle of Lyndon B. Johnson flashing his surgical scar to the world, so vulgar at the time, seems comparatively genteel in retrospect.

The revelatory fever has only recently reached an epidemic scale. Only seven years ago, Americans were astonished, shocked and dismayed--as well as fascinated--when public television presented An American Family, an exhibition of the personal trials and griefs of the family of Bill and Pat Loud, including their on-the-air breakup. But the Loud show's tell-all mode clearly proved infectious. Since then, the traffic in intimate secrets has become almost a staple of popular entertainment. Consider:

In Bittersweet, Actress Susan Strasberg tattles about her adolescent affair with Actor Richard Burton, and exposes gritty, drug-fueled scenes from her marriage to Actor Christopher Jones. In Haywire, a memoir that has become a TV film, Brooke Hayward (daughter of Actress Margaret Sullavan and Producer Leland Hayward) immortalizes a family history of divorce, breakdown, suicide. In Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford depicts her mother, Actress Joan Crawford, as a promiscuous lush given to brutal child abuse. In I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, TV Producer Barbara Gordon publicizes the story of her ad diction to Valium. In Memoir of a Gambler, Play wright Jack Richardson details his flings with Las Vegas whores. Rhythm and Blues Singer Marvin Gaye has even turned the bitter themes of a painful 14-year marriage into a hit record album, Here, My Dear. Author-Director Bob Fosse has let it be known that his own life is echoed in his film All That Jazz, a tale about a lecherous choreographer.

The demand for exposed intimacies is easier to understand than the supply. The public hunger for spilled beans is just more of the craving for news, the yen to be titillated, touched or amused by the foibles and agonies of others. Squalid and sleazy tales may reinforce the smug superiority of the righteous or provide perverse comfort for the miscreant. But Americans of all stripes have al ways had, though not uniquely, what University of Chicago Law Professor Philip Kurland calls a "public commitment to voyeurism." Still, why is the voyeuristic hunger suddenly being so abundantly pandered to? Why are so many people revealing personal secrets so casually?

The wish for money and attention stands at the top of a confusion of reasons. Yet venality and exhibitionism together do not account satisfactorily for the eruption of personal intimacies that marks this era, no more than simple curiosity can account for the greedy consumption of them. The traffic in intimacies may be a naive, if elaborate, response to the generalized loneliness and isolation that are characteristic of the times: it may represent a form of sharing, though a desperate form. Many psychologists attest that lonely people have an extra-special wish to know what other lives are like, and that those who disclose their inner lives basically crave acceptance. Public confession has increased, says University of Chicago Theologian Martin Marty, as the popular sense of God has diminished. Says Marty: "When you can't talk to God, you've got to tell a million people." That insight parallels one offered by Sociology Professor Todd Gitlin of the University of California at Berkeley: "The public has become the new priesthood of the confessional."

The trend, finally, suggests the working of human cur rents more fundamental than a shift in manners and mores.

Serious observers have long worried about the capacity of modern technical civilization to manipulate mass society partly by exposing and trivializing personal values that were once held secret and sacred. Twenty-six years ago, in fact, French Sociologist Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society, forecast: "Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited." The great is of secrets is, finally, more than amazing. It is also a bit ominous. --By Frank Trippett

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.