July 6, 2009
Are socialites what they once were?
Norman Mailer, who was memorialized at Carnegie Hall yesterday, performed the trick of getting almost as much attention for his public behavior as his writing.
At society gatherings he drank, he stabbed his wife, he fought in public. It was all tabloid fodder, but always counter weighted by his writing.
New York society today has a very different landscape, watchers said. In his time, Mailer combined socializing with harsh social criticism, but now some just see people socializing and giving nothing back.
"The only thing that counts today in New York is M O N E Y," columnist Liz Smith e-mailed in response to a query.
Several luminaries from New York social and cultural pages have passed away in recent years: Brooke Astor, William F. Buckley, Bobby Short and George Plimpton.
Their loss naturally makes people think about takes their place. So what is new? Consider Parkavenuepeerage.com's coverage of the charity ball/red carpet "circuit."
It's latest posting was of Tinsley Mortimer. (She's also on the cover of Page Six Magazine.) Most of the 97 comments on parkavenuepeerage read like this "Tinsley looks super cute and very spring. Love the fun dress." The negative comments are also about her appearance. Other posts talk about new faces on the circuit, in continuation of the "hot or not" model created by Paris Hilton. Other sites like socialiteslapdown.com track their internal feuds.
"It's a copy of Paris Hilton," said David Patrick Columbia who covers New York society on his Web site newyorksocialdiary.com. "But that's not really society, that's girls getting publicity."
Besides Mortimer, one of the most ubiquitous socialites is Lydia Hearst, who is following in the Paris Hilton mold. Smith has tracked New York society from the Café Society of the 1940s to the glamour of the El Morocco and through the riotous '60s and '70s.
"Every 10 years, the ambiance of New York changes itself," she wrote. "Part of this is disintegration of so called 'society.'"
Recently, there was socialiterank.com, a rich kids' version of TMZ, to capture and judge the pratfalls of New York's supposed up-and-coming socialites led Tinsley Mortimer, socialite and "designer."
Columbia blames technology, specifically cell phones. "It's changed the sensibility of everybody," he says. "Nobody pays any attention to anything."
Mailer was invited to Society events as an interesting specimen -- the celebrity, best selling author, said Columbia who often saw him at dinner parties. "He sang for his supper," he said. "He wasn't a bore. Mr. Vanderbilt was a bore, but he would have been invited anyway."
In turn, "Norman was interested in the power people and the system and how it worked," he said, adding that he believed Mailer would have recoiled at being considered a part of high-class Society.
Today, "the lines have become so blurred and become more and more blurred," he said.
Add the Internet to cell phones and attractive faces and "personalities" are sent up to the mountaintop before being quickly pushed over the edge by the person coming up behind. The question is did they leave anything while they were there. For columnist Jimmy Breslin, a close friend of Mailers' who proudly said he's never read a blog, said that Mailer "contributed to the times in which he lives. Most people are too lazy to do that, too unimaginative."
Mailer won two Pulitzers and a National Book Award and co-founded the Village Voice. Has "Society" ceased to produce anything besides handbag designs? It's the question that gets asked whenever someone of cultural and popular stature leaves, who's to replace them? In New York someone is always willing to grab the spotlight or the spotlight or the microphone and there always people waiting to push them off the stage.
""Around here there's a million people replace you," Breslin said. "The line is long."
"Nothing's missing here," Breslin said. "He was terrific. He walked the streets. He leaves a big family to honor his name."
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Copyright © 2009, AM New York