The social chronicler David Patrick Columbia — whose Web site New York Social Diary has coaxed more Upper East Side ladies onto the Internet than Facebook ever will — did in person the other day what his column does best: expose the anxieties and fascinations of his central subjects, with their willing participation.
The scene was City Harvest’s spring luncheon at the Metropolitan Club, where Mr. Columbia, the honoree and speaker, took questions from guests during dessert (a trio of sorbets).
Eleanora Kennedy, in a khaki suit with her sunglasses resting atop her blonde mane, was the first to raise her hand. Profiled in the New York Social Diary for her efforts to raise awareness of human trafficking, she’d just told her lunch partners, over grilled salmon, about her previous evening, honoring artist Ross Bleckner for doing art therapy with child soldiers in Africa. Her question to Mr. Columbia, however, concerned a topic closer to home: the trial over Brooke Astor’s will.
“The thing that bothers me is the way they’re presenting this couple in a junky, terrible way,” Mr. Columbia said of the defendant Anthony Marshall, Astor’s only child, and his wife, Charlene Marshall. “The trial has become not a question of signatures, but a question of, Aren’t these terrible people who are robbing this saintly character?.… When you get into it, you get into a murkiness that is very human,” he said.
Daniel Boulud’s pr maven, Georgette Farkas, said this positive perspective was refreshing. Her question, though, was about the bad things people do. “Is there any social behavior that shocks or horrifies you?” she said.
“That they called Charlene Miss Piggy,” Mr. Columbia responded, his face red, still worked up about the subject. “Otherwise, no, not after Paris Hilton.”
Someone wanted to know if there was any way left to fall in society?
“Belly dancing down Fifth Avenue?” Mr. Columbia replied, observing that a prominent woman today had done just that in her youth. No, the only way he could think of was to kill someone, he said.
So it went, Mr. Columbia at ease opining in his standard prep-school uniform of chambray shirt, red tie, navy blazer, and tortoise shell glasses, with his audience, mostly women in pastel suits, eating up every word. They nodded when Mr. Columbia said philanthropy had become an engine of social advancement, and again when he mentioned the Web site Old Long Island, about the great estates no one is rich enough to live in anymore. They laughed when Mr. Columbia said that ostentation might return someday, “if there’s any money left.”
No one brought up Bernard Madoff or Ponzi schemes, but Mr. Columbia did mention that the Noel family had not been kicked out of the Round Hill Country Club, as stories on the Internet have recently suggested. A collective sigh of relief was heard from all the people in the room who’ve rubbed shoulders with the Noels at charity galas.
One man asked him about the last time someone had tried to bribe him.
“I get gifts at Christmas. I’m a terrible gift giver, so when they started coming from people I didn’t know, that fascinated me. It’s mostly champagne and chocolates I don’t want. Liz Smith knows a lot more about this subject than I do,” Mr. Columbia said.
At that, the grand dame of dish sprang from her seat, in a bright green suit and blonde coif, causing a bit of a commotion.
“David, I want to say that since you associated me with the word ‘bribery,’ I think I should speak,” Ms. Smith said in a tone just serious enough to suggest she might defend herself — or not. “As a person who lost her job, I should be interested in bribes,” referring to her dismissal from The New York Post. She is now writing at wowowow.com.
A compliment, embedded in a critique of the newspaper editors’ judgment, came next. “I think you know if the New York Times had expanded its social coverage — those tiny little pictures they run every Sunday that are so important to the people in them and so important to their philanthropy —“ Ms. Smith said, “I think if they had done what you do, they’d be in a lot better shape now.”
But Mr. Columbia seems perfectly happy doing what he’s doing on the Web. “The great thing about writing on the Internet,” Mr. Columbia noted earlier in the discussion, “is that when someone gets upset about something I write, I can take that part out, and it’s gone forever.”
Mr. Columbia started writing 30 years ago, after giving up a prosperous business “selling schmatas in Pound Ridge.” To pursue his dream he went to Los Angeles, struggled, and sometimes went hungry, before returning to New York, broke and without a job. At a party at Chanel, he landed his first social writing assignment, a profile for Quest magazine, of which he is now editor.
Jacqueline Weld Drake, an author and chairman of Casita Maria, which provides social services to Hispanics, wanted to know how Mr. Columbia had developed his voice.
The personal journals Mr. Columbia started writing when he was a boy were critical to the voice he later established as a social diarist. “I’d write down embarrassing things about myself to force me to be candid,” Mr. Columbia said. “It was therapy.” These journals were the inspiration and essentially the template for writing a social journal. “It’s the same voice," he said. "I’m still self-conscious about what I write."
Will he write a book, restaurateur Phil Suarez asked. “The idea of writing one is beyond awesome, like moving this building. But I don’t have the time. So no, but if I do, I’ll put you in it,” Mr. Columbia said.
Another interlocutor wondered if he uses Facebook or Twitter. “I don’t even know what tweeting is, and I’ve never been on Facebook,” he said, explaining that running the Diary is enough work already. He credits his 50% business partner, Jeffrey Hirsch, who is 30 years his junior, for getting New York Social Diary on the Web in the first place.
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