Gawker first broke the rumor of an affair between Caroline Kennedy and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. on May 21, 2008, in a blind item that read: “Which recently separated newspaper publisher has been seen regularly in the company of a woman from an even more famous dynasty? (Okay, so the newly separated newspaper publisher is pretty obvious: the New York Times' moose-loving Arthur Sulzberger. But the identity of his supposed lover is a surprise.)”
It took only a minor leap to ID Caroline Kennedy. And I, along with I assume many other amateur gossips, avidly started to spread the rumor. It was an awesome one on so many levels: scions of great faded dynasties committing adultery with each other; the china doll daughter of history made real; the New York Times caught up in the most human sort of weakness and scandal; the comedy of middle age lust. And, not least of all, the sheer accomplishment of Arthur Sulzberger, being so publicly lame at everything else, and so often ridiculed, snaring the mythical daughter of the slain president. Was this his strategy to save the paper, uniting the two most historic (and hoary) liberal brands? (Curiously, the Times ran a story the other day about how young people don’t even quite know who Caroline Kennedy is.)
I am telling you: The middle-aged media world in New York, trembling with excitement, held its collective breath last spring as it waited to see if this rumor had legs.
It did not. Even with Sulzberger having moved out of his marital abode, the rumor did not achieve life beyond Gawker and New York’s most determined gossipers. This might be because the protagonists themselves continued to operate with an upper-class level of discretion, or because, between them, they have enough media clout to suppress any printed murmur (Arthur has the Times covered; Caroline has juice at News Corp., and is close to Peter Kaplan, the editor at that other prime gossip mover, The New York Observer). Or, most likely, because it wasn’t true.
Among the people I eagerly emailed with the initial report was Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s chief aide, JFK Jr.’s best friend, and Caroline’s confidant (and her representative to Rupert Murdoch). Ginsberg told me he immediately emailed Caroline, teasing her about what the world had come to if all she could manage was Arthur Sulzberger. True, this reflected Murdoch and News Corp. interests in seeing Sulzberger as a weakling, rather than as a romantic hero, but in Ginsberg’s telling, Caroline didn’t stand up for Sulzberger’s manhood either.
And then she decided to campaign for New York’s open Senate seat. On the one hand, this could be seen as more proof that she wasn’t having an affair: You wouldn’t expose yourself like this if you were. On the other hand, it was, if you wanted to really obsess about this story, something she might do if she’d had an affair. That is, she’d already broken the patterns of her life (the remoteness, the inaccessibility, the frozen-in-time thing), and now the world was her oyster.
(AP Image)
Anyway, Gawker continues its campaign to shoe-horn this rumor into mainstream consideration, faulting the Times today for suppressing a user-comment on a Times blog that referenced their connection, and going on to challenge the newspaper to disclose the nature of the publisher’s friendship with a Senatorial candidate (harrumph harrumph shocked shocked).
Honestly, I suspect this is not really even a real rumor—that is, not a serious one—but rather some other category of flimsy report, call it a vexation, something meant specifically to torment its subjects.
But in this, I find, I’m helpless not to contribute.
