From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Admit it. No matter how interested you are in serious news, every so often you glance at a gossip column, scanning its staccato list of items and bold- faced names to see if there is anything of interest . . . Yet, is American society becoming too obsessed with gossip, too absorbed with the private lives of public people? . . . For Naushad Mehta, interviewing columnist Liz Smith and her brethren for this week's cover stories was an amusing change of pace . . . Though Mehta kept asking about the troublesome issues raised by our national infatuation with the trivial, her subjects kept changing the topic to . . . you guessed it. Says Mehta: "They usually prefaced their gossip with the words 'Don't quote me on this, but . . .' "

Mary Cronin probed the public relations trade . . . "Flacks guiding clients up the social ladder," she says, "protect them as if they were atomic secrets" . . . In Washington, Michael Riley rang up Diana McLellan, the doyen of D.C. gossips . . . "She breathlessly picked up the receiver and talked without stopping. And she was doing her nails, causing her to lose her train of thought several times" . . . In Los Angeles, Jeanne McDowell concluded that gossip levels there approach the toxic because so many people have car phones . . . Stuck in traffic? Call a friend and talk about Cher.

As the motto embroidered on a pillow in Alice Roosevelt Longworth's sitting room said, "If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me" . . . That's certainly not the credo of William A. Henry III, who wrote the main story. But the Pulitzer-prizewinning Henry understands the appeal of a juicy tale . . . "Whenever friends get together in a room," he observes, "the conversation may start out with East Germany or nuclear energy, but it gets around to people's divorces pretty quickly."

And what gossip travels faster than gossip about newsmagazine stories about gossip? . . . Last Tuesday senior editor Claudia Wallis brought up the idea for this week's cover with managing editor Henry Muller and executive editor Edward Jamieson . . . Less than two hours after the cover was scheduled, a New York Post reporter called to ask if it was true that TIME was working on a cover story about gossip . . . Like peanut butter and Cheez Whiz, gossip sure has a way of spreading.