On Feb. 26, at 7 p.m., Jill Kopelman stepped out of a
chauffeured Mercedes station wagon at the School of American Ballet at Lincoln
Center, where a black-tie awards dinner was honoring legendary ballerina Maria
Tallchief and Richard S. Braddock, chairmanof Priceline.com. Ms. Kopelman, 26,
and her mother, Coco, were there as longtime S.A.B. supporters, their matching
Chanel bags and diamond Chanel rings flashing as they shook hands with friends
in the receiving line. But tonight, Ms. Kopelman was also there to work. She
was using the dull family outing-enlivened only by the presence of Chelsea
Clinton-as fodder for her new column, “Eye Spy: The Whirlwind Diary of a Social
Scribe,” on Style.com, the joint Web site of Vogue and W that draws 11
million bored Condé Nast assistants, gossipy fashion addicts and Elisabeth
Kieselstein-Cord stalkers to its pages each month.
Ms. Kopelman’s bimonthly column, which was launched in
December and will go weekly this spring, is being billed as the
Hilton-sisters-era answer to “Suzy,” W magazine’s
high-society chronicle that has been written by Aileen Mehle since 1991.While
Ms. Mehle, a society pet who once dated Frank Sinatra, goes out regularly to
detail the social migrations of the rich and thin, Ms. Kopelman, the daughter
of Chanel president Arie Kopelman, writes about how much she’d rather be under
her duvet, inserting the boldfaced names of acquaintances between accounts of
what she just scored from the hors d’oeuvres tray.
In November, when Ms. Kopelman landed her job, editors at W nicknamed her “Little Suzy.” But the
seventysomething original, who has been writing under her pseudonym since 1951,
didn’t find the reference so amusing. So Suzy 2.0 was named after Ms. Mehle’s
“Eye” column in Women’s Wear Daily.
When called for a comment about Ms. Kopelman, Ms. Mehle
said, “I’m not online,” and hung up.
Perhaps Ms. Mehle is miffed that anyone-let alone the
daughter of a couple that appears regularly in her column-is being groomed as
her heir. Then again, these days it’s the offspring of society staples that are
getting the most ink-or online hits-as they misbehave at corporate-sponsored
events. Ms. Mehle endeared herself to her subjects by reporting on a dinner
party’s menu rather than the hosts’ pending divorce. “People felt safe with
her,” said Dominick Dunne, who has known Ms. Mehle for decades. “She’s part of
it, but she’s not part of it at the same time. The ‘not’ part of her is the
writer of it all.”
Ms. Kopelman is a part of society, but she’d rather not be.
The “not” part-plus her knack for social observation, teen-mag-inflected
writing and a personality that’s more Woody Allen than Beth Rudin de
Woody-makes her an unusual yet almost logical choice as Little Suzy.
“No one could ever replace Aileen Mehle,” said Ms. Kopelman,
who added that her column and Suzy’s don’t really overlap. “I’m covering a
different scene; I try to mix in a drag show in the Village with something
that’s happening at the Frick. I don’t feel at all that I’m stepping on her
toes.”
Though she was born with gold interlocking C’s in her mouth,
Ms. Kopelman doesn’t want readers to know it. Her column comes off as being
written by the goofy girl lurking in the corner, amazed by the stupidity she’s
forced to endure. She may have been skimming the society pages of Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar and Women’s
Wear Daily when she was in first grade, attending Spence with Gwyneth
Paltrow (she helped fix Ms. Paltrow up with her godbrother, ketchup heir Chris
Heinz, last summer) and spending spring breaks in the front row of the Chanel
shows in Paris, but she goes to great lengths to differentiate herself. Rather
than join Equinox, she walks from her East 76th Street apartment to Brooklyn to
“touch Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s gate” while listening to Howard Stern.
Instead of borrowing a Burberry gown for the recent Tartan Ball at the Frick,
she bought $6 worth of plaid fabric in the Garment District and pinned it to
her cheap black dress. (She also paid $400 for two tickets, even though her
press status would have gotten her in free.) While other socialites attend
Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s benefit parties, Ms. Kopelman visits cancer patients
there every Monday. And she wasn’t allowed to wear Chanel until she turned 21.
(“I didn’t want to spoil her,” said Mr. Kopelman.) She’s still only granted one
Chanel outfit a year, and she can’t borrow samples for events because she’s
proudly “not a sample size.”
“Sometimes I want to be Skeletor,” she said, reaching for a
squash-and-mozzarella tidbit at the S.A.B. gala. “But it’s not worth it.” She
insisted that she’s a size eight by choice. Ms. Kopelman’s use of the word
“Skeletor”-the name of the bad guy in the cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe -is just one of many
Kopelisms, a private dialect of pop-culture vernacular, abbreviations and
dropped pronouns. “I’m like camel,” she said as she took a second glass of
water from a silver tray at Lincoln Center.
In her column, Ms. Kopelman has invented words like
“glamissima” to describe socialite Susan Fales-Hill and called herself a “roe
ho” for loitering by a caviar table “avec toast points.” (Food and body image
factor strongly into her column, ranging from the boastful-“I jammed back one
more of Susan Fales-Hill’s delicious chocolate-chip cookies”-to the self-loathing:
“Hey, can a normal Rubenesque [read: obese] girl get a drink around here?” she
wrote after attending the launch party for Shoshanna Lonstein’s swimwear line.)
Readers over 40 might also trip over such terms as “social peeps,” “cocktail
rager” and “total nugget.” “I find store openings very decaf,” she wrote of a
party filled with “overbred and underfed sprockets.” And it’s hard to imagine
Suzy closing a column with, “All my crappy worries vanished, like hemlines on a
Hilton sister.”
“She was our own private dinner theater,” said Mrs.
Kopelman, beaming as her daughter cracked jokes and dropped phrases like
“Raging with the ex-Prezzie!” after Peter Martins, S.A.B.’s chairman of faculty
and a family friend, said that he and Bill Clinton would be in Denmark at the
same time, hitting the bars. Ms. Kopelman said she got her sense of humor from
her father, who was once a Borscht Belt comedian. “We’re always laughing and
telling dirty jokes like weird wackos,” she said. “I had a really great
childhood. I didn’t have any dark moments. So many writers, you read these
beautiful things and you know they endured tragedies. I’m reading Pat Conroy’s Beach Music and I’m just like, ‘Oh my
God, I have nothing to offer! Who am I to write a novel?’ I never considered
myself a journalist. I write little puff pieces, but I try to make them funny.
I’ve always wanted to do comedy.”
In 1995, after Ms. Kopelman had graduated from Yale in just
three years and moved in with her parents on Park Avenue and 65th Street, she
would entertain them over dinner with stories of her surreal days as an
editorial assistant at Interview ,
where her duties included writing about music and art as well as comforting
editor in chief Ingrid Sischy when Gianni Versace died, and taking care of the
$3,000 worth of roses that Elton John sent after he and Ms. Sischy had a tiff.
When Ms. Kopelman would complain about her job to her father, he would simply
tell her to “remember the Holocaust.”
Ms. Sischy described Ms. Kopelman as smart, funny and “a
real social observer.” She said it was no secret that Ms. Kopelman’s father was
the honcho of Chanel (an Interview
advertiser), but she never let her sense of entitlement show. “She never
wielded a mallet that said, ‘Hey, my father is someone. You need to listen to
me,'” she said. “She has always been discreet about that and acted like an
editorial assistant.”
She might have responded differently had she seen Intern , the movie Ms. Kopelman co-wrote
with her friend Caroline Doyle (whose mother, Kathleen Doyle, owns the auction
house William Doyle Galleries) when they were practically still interns
themselves. An early New York Times
article about the project sent a chill through the magazines about to be
blasted onscreen-by a couple of rich mail-openers, no less-but the movie bombed
after brief openings in New York and Los Angeles last August. Intern takes one scene-in which an
editor demands that the intern update his Rolodex, no matter whether the people
are dead or alive-from Ms. Kopelman’s experience at Interview . Ms. Kopelman also parodied her experiences at Mademoiselle , Harper’s Bazaar and MTV, including a time when a fittings editor at
Mademoiselle publicly vomited a
cappuccino when she found out it was made with two-percent milk instead of
skim.
On a chilly February afternoon at the Regency Hotel on Park
Avenue and 61st Street, Ms. Kopelman-wrapped in a frumpy black hat, scarf and
sweater-described the experience of being on set during the filming of Intern as “horrible.”
“I was disappointed with the product,” she said, sipping her
hot chocolate and reaching for peanut M&M’s. “They sort of pumiced out all
the really true, New York-y, thorny moments.” Ms. Kopelman is particularly
disappointed that she never got paid for Intern ,
which lost between $40,000 and $100,000, depending on whether you ask Ms.
Kopelman or the film’s producers. She’s miffed because she wrangled many of the
film’s celebrity cameos (many of whom were family friends), including Ms.
Paltrow, Kenneth Cole, Karl Lagerfeld, Frédéric Fekkai, Diane von Furstenberg,
André Leon Talley, Cynthia Rowley and Tommy Hilfiger. “We never got paid, which
is why we’re probably going to litigation,” she said.
The film’s producer, Galt Niederhoffer, 25, a friend of one
of Ms. Kopelman’s Spence classmates, said Ms. Kopelman was not suing her,
though the two did file a complaint on JudgeJudy.com in January. “It is
unfortunate that Jill is disappointed with the poor reception of her film and
has resorted to such unprofessional and tasteless muckraking,” said Ms. Niederhoffer,
who sounded weary of discussing the film. “This movie has neither made money
nor garnered critical praise; would that we all had the luxury of blaming
someone else for its failure.”
Failure or not, Intern
helped Ms. Kopelman land her current job. Last fall, W and Vogue editors
familiar with her writing (and, some might sniff, with Chanel) asked her to
interview for the “Eye Spy” stint. The next day, she dropped off a copy of the Intern script per their request. After
writing four samples, her first column debuted in December.
Robert Haskell, who edits Ms. Mehle’s “Eye” column for W as well as Ms. Kopelman’s column, said
he knew Ms. Kopelman from Yale and thought she’d be perfect to write the young
new society page for Style.com. “She’s not cut from the same cloth, but at the
same time she obviously grew up in a world full of fashion and society, so she
knows what she’s talking about, even though she tries to pretend she’s just an
outsider looking in,” said Mr. Haskell.
“I really don’t go up to strangers and say, ‘Hi, can I
interview you?'” said Ms. Kopelman, who often reports-without notepad or tape
recorder-from her vantage point “in the corner.” She added: “I don’t really
consider myself as this journalist getting the scoops. I really just survey. I
feel sometimes like a loner at these parties,” she said. “I’m not into
air-kissing everybody.” Her Jan. 12 column moaned, “But even in my anti-social,
let-me-stay-at-home-avec-remote-control state, I battled the piercing cold and
hit a lovely soiree ….”
“I’m not a party girl,” she said. “I get exhausted and am in
bed by 11 p.m. to watch Law & Order
every single night.” Her favorite bar is Marie’s Crisis, a piano bar in the
West Village where she sings along to show tunes with her girlfriends. “It’s
like gay Cheers ,” she said.
Ms. Kopelman pokes fun at her world in “Eye Spy,” but for
those familiar with her connections, her choice of parties has raised more than
one eyebrow. One week she mocked the “Muffies” at the opening of the Winter
Antiques Show at the Armory on Park Avenue, though it’s a committee her father
chairs. (A photograph of her at the party also turned up in the March issue of Quest .) The previous column gushed
about a Winter Antiques Show preview dinner, hosted at her friend socialite
Marjorie Gubelmann’s home. In an act of dizzying cross-nepotism, she covered
the December event for S.A.B.’s junior benefit committee-which Ms. Kopelman
co-founded in 1999-at the new Chanel boutique in Soho. This time she added a
disclaimer, stating, “My dad works for Chanel, but I swear I’d rip on it if it
was lame.” And in the May issue of W ,
Ms. Kopelman will appear in an advertising spread for De Beers jewelers
featuring “it girls” (read: celebrity offspring), including Kidada Jones, China
Chow, Zoë Cassavetes and Kate Driver. She wore a Chanel gown for the shoot.
In addition to her column, Ms. Kopelman, who works out of
her apartment, is keeping busy with “10 jobs,” which include writing editorial
content for Polo.com and adapting a children’s story for Nickelodeon. She’s
also writing a novel, tentatively titled Resilient
Little Muscle , after the last line in Ms. Kopelman’s favorite movie, Hannah and Her Sisters . Ms. Kopelman and
Ms. Doyle have also finished three more screenplays, one of which, Delayed Reaction , was recently optioned
by Indyssey, a film company owned by Katrina Pavlos, a socialite who appeared
in one of Ms. Kopelman’s columns.
“I’m happy to do it for
a while,” Ms. Kopelman said of “Eye Spy” via e-mail. “I do totally feel like
it’s great for material. I always love parlaying over-the-top personalities
into characters, because honestly, some people in New York are stranger than
fiction.”
