NYC's Golden Gossip Era Fades    What, exactly, happened to
Gotham's gossip glory? Here's what we know. Or better yet: This
is what we hear.  Popular culture documented the power and
allure of New York City gossip early: J.J. Hunsecker, Burt
Lancaster's odious Broadway gossip from 1957's Sweet Smell of
Success, was willing to smear his own family to exert power.
Hunsecker wound up No. 35 on the American Film Institute's top
50 movie villains, but screenwriter Ernest Lehman didn't pluck
him out of thin air. The character was based on America's
popular but also widely reviled original gossip, Walter
Winchell. His column, which made its debut in the New York
Evening Graphic in the mid-1920s, prompted The New Yorker to
note his influence on modern journalism as "a spirochete." Since
then, everyone from Madonna to Margaret Thatcher, to the various
Kennedys, Clintons, Yankees, and Giulianis of this city, and far
beyond have appeared, names bold, in Page Six, the Daily News,
Gawker, the Observer, and New York.  Mich