D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A She’s the only columnist, society or otherwise, who looked like a movie star – spotlight and all. And her rapier-like champagne wit was the bubbles that drew you back for more. That was how New York (and the world) perceived a social column. Although the Suzy column was perhaps the apotheosis, social columns (always known as society columns) reflecting the notion of the high life have been popular in American journalism throughout the late 19th century up until the late 20th century. It was apparent in those early days of the New York Social Diary that the scene was changing. Social celeb-
rity had become more mainstream. Even Mrs. Mehle’s column had frequent jottings about the comings and goings of movie and television actors and actresses. Change is always expected, although the motivation is often seen only in retrospect. In 1992, for example, no one talked about the Internet. The computer had come into our lives. Writers were abandoning the IBM Selectric typewriter for any number of computers. My first computer, which I got in1986, was basically a super-typewriter (with printer attached). Four years later, in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee published a proposal for the
World Wide Web, but few of us even heard about it. It is easy to see now how that cyber-technology has altered our lives radically, ultimately changing modes of ordinary behavior and social habits. But in retrospect, that “innovation,” while being celebrated for its possibilities, was a novelty that invited financial fantasy more than anything else. It was easy to realize that communication would bring us (and the world) closer together, but few imagined that, paradoxically, it would isolate us from one another in many ways also. Starting a column. The first Social Diary I published was
about the summer in Southampton that had just passed. The characters in the copy were mainly members of old New York families or the men and women of Nouvelle Society of the Roaring ’80s and the Reagan days. These two separate factions had united as the New Money consciously took on the patina (and the club memberships) of the Old Guard. Aside from the party calendar and the visiting dignitaries, the big news for a summertime social column was frequently an extra-marital affair among the natives in the estate section of Southampton. However, there were a couple of teenage sisters named Paris and Nicky
W E D D I N G AT C O N YE R S FA R M , G R E E N W I C H
QUE ST, OCTOBER 1990
Nicole de Kwiatkowski and Laurent Timonier
Heather Cohane and Henry de Kwiatowski 30 QUEST
Gerry and Mita Bland with their daughter
Thomas Kempner
Jan and Minot Amory
Barbara de Kwiatowski
Whitney Tower, Jr., with his son, Peanut