How David Patrick Columbia Broke Into New York's High Society
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
The fascination with the lives of the upper crust is ceaseless. Throughout time, their habits, style, and mannerisms have been heavily documented: from Samual Pepys, a 17th-century English diarist who gave a glimpse of the upper-class life in London, to novelists Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Can high society exist without someone chronicling it? David Patrick Columbia, the founder of the society website New York Social Diary, simply says "no."
Since 2001, Columbia and his website have been the go-to social news source for many of Manhattan's blue bloods. For years, the editor and writer has written about their social calendars from highly glamorous fundraising galas to swanky parties out East. (A "Saint-Simon" of New York's society, according to interior designer Susan Gutfreund). In the upcoming documentary, Last Night in New York directed by Matthew Miele–out on February 14 and available to stream on Amazon and Apple TV/iTunes–Columbia gives viewers a taste of what it's like to party and befriend those that have eaten from a polished silver spoon since the day they were born.
"I think I get a lot of information from people because I'm truly curious and I'm trying to figure out who they are. In other words, instead of making a judgment of someone right away, I try to understand who they are and where they are coming from," Columbia tells Town & Country. "And, actually, if you are sincerely interested, people will practically tell you anything."
But, this is no case in tabloid journalism. Throughout his career, Columbia was not so interested in gossiping or airing anyone's dirty laundry on his website. Instead, he was a pure observer; an anthropologist of a class that he, himself, was not born into. He wrote about and studied society as a historian. "The difference between Dominic Dunne and Truman Capote is that those two were bitchy and miserable men," reporter Blair Sabol says in the documentary. "They resented the world they were covering. And David was a handsome man. Those two guys were trolls."
He eventually became a member of his muses' pack. Within the documentary, several people cite a few attributions: his kindness, charm, and "patrician looks" among them.
"When I started, I said to myself, 'I'd like to write a social column.' But, then I realized, I didn't know anybody," Columbia says. See, Columbia was not born into the society that he's written about for nearly two decades. He was born into a class looking upward to it. "When I was growing up in a little Massachusetts town, I didn't know about social history, but I did know about the neighborhood gossip."
But, this heavily bejeweled world was always brooding in the corner of his life. Columbia's father was his early link to the society stories as he was the personal driver of the Bouviers. In Last Night in New York, Columbia shares a story of a scandalous affair that his father witnessed one night in the Hamptons between Janet Lee Bouvier, Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwell's mother, and another gentleman. "It was the beginning of the end of that marriage," Columbia said.
Before he began writing about society, Columbia wore several other hats: struck broker, a shop owner in Connecticut, a sportswear designer, and a scriptwriter for a television show. Even though he "always knew he wanted to write," his big break didn't come until he worked with Debbie Reynolds on her autobiography in 1988. Then, in 1994, he began writing the social diary for Quest magazine in 1994.
In Last Night in New York, Columbia poses another interesting question: what does society look like today? "Society faded out in the 1980s, in terms of the society Misses Astor created in the 19th century," Columbia says. He cites John Fairchild and his "Nouvelle Society," the group of women which included C.Z. Guest and Pat Buckley, as the last era. Gayfryd Steinberg, a former writer who is often featured in The New York Social Diary, says "There's been a shift. Now, people turn up in styled clothes and borrowed jewelry."
You Might Also Like
