“Gossip is a greasy currency; trading in it can leave one feeling a little unctuous.”

That’s former gossip guy Ben Widdicombe, writing in the new Bergdorf Goodman magazine. Ben, who was a bright light on the New York tattle scene, gave it up some months back. He wasn’t pushed off his nosy perch. He jumped! Ben had been a columnist for ten years, and apparently a decade was enough. At least for now. He elaborates: “The downside of the lowdown is that you traffic in an awful lot of bad news. Who’s having an affair, who’s been caught with his hand in the till, who’s bleaching her brain with drugs. There comes a point when the latest pictures of so-and-so slumped in a chemical haze no longer seem like front-page news. You just want to give them a hug and tell them it’s going to be all right.

“At least, that’s how I came to feel … I began empathizing with the victims and consequences … and who needs a gossip columnist like that?”

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Well, Mr. Widdicombe, I’d say in this day and age of such ferocious gossip, we do need a columnist with some heart! I think Ben’s problem is that he began his career as the “entertainment” culture was sliding into 24/7 coverage and had taken on an altogether meaner perspective.

I, on the other hand, began my column in 1976 when gossip seemed on the downslide. I doubted I could make a go of it, six days a week. Gossip soon began to flourish again, but although I indulged in some classic aspects of the trade, I was allowed by my editors and publisher to wax philosophical if I wanted, to review books, theater, movies. I was allowed a political point of view. I wrote about AIDS when nobody else did. And yes, I empathized. I was often castigated for too much empathy, not enough Hedda/Louella/Rona Barrett bitchiness. Well, I went my own way — and this is not to say I couldn’t be critical — and it paid off. I am still at a place where the biggest stars in the world — Tom Cruise, Cher, Madonna, my old friend Elizabeth Taylor and many others, pick up the phone and dial me direct. I have lured more flies with honey than vinegar.

Although, when I’ve poured the vinegar, it gets me things like Sean Connery telling me to put my column where the sun don’t shine, or Frank Sinatra making me well-known by attacking me from the stage. (It was during one of these diatribes that somebody yelled out the famous line, “Shut up and sing!” Later, he and I became good friends.)

So, just like Frank Sinatra, who famously “retired” only to come back full force within a year, I expect we have not heard the last from Ben Widdicombe.

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Speaking of empathy, I’ve exercised a lot of it over the past several years on Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, two troubled young women, who had worked hard and diligently since childhood, and then when adolescence kicked in — along with tabloid attention — they seemed to go haywire.

I gave these girls the benefit of the doubt, and when that was not possible because their public antics became too extreme, I still couldn’t condemn. The rest of the media did plenty of that. You’d think Britney and Lindsay had brought bubonic plague into the country. Nothing they did, or said, or wore or didn’t wear could stop the avalanche of negative press. These two were their own worst enemies.

During the really bad days — which seemed to go on forever! — I approached various people attempting to “handle” the wayward stars. “Don’t they want to tell their side? Wouldn’t they rather have it here than somewhere that would start out with a let’s-kill-her point of view?” Nothing came of this offer, and I realized that things were so out-of-control the reps couldn’t even trust my objectivity!

I actually worried about Lindsay and Britney. I think Miss Lohan is a terrific actress, and a genuine beauty with a lot of star quality, an inherent dramatic quotient. And not a dummy. Almost everyone who worked with her, including Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep, felt similarly. I couldn’t believe she was throwing away her life and a potentially brilliant career.

Miss Spears’s talent was less obvious, but she seemed the perfect pop music star, and certainly wildly successful. Her issues were even more extreme — the marriages, the back-to-back pregnancies, the high emotions and what appeared to be crushingly low self-esteem. (I mean, really — Kevin Federline?!) Her acting-out is now part of tabloid legend. (Head shaving, attacking paparazzi, middle-of-the-night hospital dashes.)