Tracy Westmoreland, the actor and former operator of shuttered Hell’s Kitchen watering hole Siberia, called us to chat about his rumored return to Fox’s Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld on Thursday, Feb. 14. (Today, Page Six printed the possible reunion in their “We Hear…” item.)

As Mr. Westmoreland explained it, he recently ran into Red Eye's Greg Gutfeld, panelist Bill Schultz and ombudsman Andy Levy. “We were talking about how I sorta fell through the cracks,” said the bar guru, who was once a regular fixture on the show as its official Nightlife Contributor. “I explained it to them like this: ‘It’s Valentine’s Day; I’m going to send out some love.’ So I’m sending love and happiness out to the people. It’s going to be good,” he said, before adding: “Everything is groovy and it’s all good.”

Though apparently excited about the return visit, Mr. Westmoreland did not seem to know in what capacity he would be appearing. “I don’t know exactly why I’m going back, but I hope it’s the nightlife [beat], because that’s what I do best,” he told us.

We had not forgotten that he called us back in November to announce that Siberia would be reopening soon. And when asked for an update, Mr. Westmoreland would say only that Siberia’s reincarnation was “imminent.

“Here’s the story with that: we’re talking to four different landlords—we got the money—we’re dancing around the whole thing,” he said. “As soon as we hand him the check and we sign the papers, it could happen very soon.”

Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’ bawdy, blogger-friendly 2 a.m. chatfest Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, was smoking outside the Landmark Tavern in Hell’s Kitchen on a recent Sunday night and talking about the changes wrought on his physique since his TV show debuted in February.

“I’ve completely stopped exercising,” he continued. “I have not thought about going to a gym. My diet has gone to hell; I smoke more. I don’t think my drinking has gotten worse; it’s just more intense. I need it—and I’ve never needed it. The one thing I hate about it is, the people around you, who you love, you end up being kind of mean to them. Because you feel they don’t understand. And it’s a very wrong kind of thing.”

Back when Mr. Gutfeld, 42, was editing Men’s Health (fired), Stuff (kicked upstairs) and Maxim UK (contract not renewed), he’d get up at 5:30 a.m. and work out. “You could be as vain and self-absorbed as you wanted,” he said. “I had like 2 percent body fat. I was insane, and I realized I just wasn’t happy. Or something.”

Mr. Gutfeld had been drinking beer since 3 p.m. and had moved on to vodka. Behind his black-framed glasses, his blue eyes were bloodshot. Soon he’d be going home to his two-bedroom co-op and his wife, Elena Moussa, a 25-year-old Russian beauty he met in London.

If Red Eye isn’t quite Fox’s answer to The Daily Show—that distinction belongs to Fox’s truly awful The ½ Hour News Hour—the show’s giddy roster of New York–area media stars and camera-craving bloggers, who are probably unknown and unattractive to the vast majority of Fox viewers, is evidence that Fox wishes to make itself a respectable place to do business for the next-generation New York media elite.

While the show runs largely on jokes, riffs and loopy news bits, it’s prevented from relaxing too much into apolitical anarchy by the hand of Fox News president Roger Ailes, who dropped sultry conservative Toronto Sun columnist Rachel Marsden smack in the middle of the merry band of pranksters to make it clear that politics with a rightward bent is still the Fox brand, particularly if it arrives on long legs.

So far, about 300,000 viewers are tuning in to the show, which is taped at 8:40 p.m. and airs at 2 a.m. The format is unscripted. In the studio with Mr. Gutfeld are his sidekick, Bill Schulz (a Muppet-like fellow that Mr. Gutfeld described as “the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life”); the coltish (and Coulter-ish) Ms. Marsden; and guests, who recently have included gadfly Christopher Hitchens, comic Jackie Mason, blogger Rachel Sklar, Fox News correspondent Laurie Dhue and redneck comedian Larry the Cable Guy. The topics whiz past—most segments barely last a minute. Mr. Gutfeld has a stack of blue cards with things written on them such as “woman’s severed finger found in purse,” and he’ll toss the conversational ball around.

“I feel like I’m a lion tamer holding chain saws,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Because I want to say something funny, but I’m too busy going, O.K., what do I do next?” The surreal feeling of the show blends into the type of commercials running at that insomniac hour—Vermont Teddy Bears, adjustable beds, giant tomatoes.

“It’s somewhat similar to somebody who’s lost his mind,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Because I’m a complete maniac. You may disagree with me, but you can’t stop watching …. I don’t even think you have to like the show to get sucked in.”

“You almost feel like you’re going out and not going out,” said VH1 contributor Michelle Collins. “It’s like being at a bar with your friends and hearing all their opinions—while laying in bed eating Snackwell cookies.”

While Mr. Gutfeld tries to keep the show from idling too long on partisan territory (“They get that 23 hours a day”), his own politics are fairly at home on Fox. He dismisses liberalism as “romantic notions that are false, based on the idea of making yourself look good to other people. That’s why most men—Bill Clinton is a good example—are liberal, because they need to get laid. If you look at most left-wing guys, they’ve made a deal with the devil. They don’t really believe that shit—they’re going against their own innate nature, because liberalism is anti-man. If you believe that peace and love work, you’re not a man, because this world works on war. The only people who respect you are people who are scared of you—and that’s why Reagan was a great President. And the idea that you can negotiate with people who want you dead is a complete lie. That’s why the left is the most self-absorbed, vanity-driven enterprise. These are people who would rather feel good about themselves at a cocktail party that actually protect people’s lives. If you’re at a party and you say, ‘The war on terror is the most important thing in the world’—you won’t get a nod. But if you say, ‘Global warming is the biggest threat,’ you will get laid.”

Jon Stewart?

“His show is an arena built on self-congratulation,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “He meets his audiences’ assumptions, and that makes them feel good. And I think that’s weak. At times he’s funny, but that’s the easiest job in the world—to show up and have people kiss your ass.”

Mr. Gutfeld’s journey from lad-magazine editor to Fox personality happened the way Fox does a lot of things—quickly and without much fuss. Last summer, after his contract at Maxim UK wasn’t renewed, he was living in London, writing for The American Spectator and drinking.

He flew to Los Angeles to visit his friend Andrew Breitbart, a regular contributor at the Drudge Report. Over dinner, a guy from Fox News told Mr. Gutfeld about a new show. “I was drunk enough to say, ‘I’ll be the host!’” said Mr. Gutfeld. “I never probably would have said that otherwise. It was still a vague idea. They didn’t know what they wanted, but they knew that they wanted something.”

He flew to New York and met with Fox News producer John Moody and Fox News president Roger Ailes. “[Ailes] liked me and asked me how much I was making,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “I said, ‘It’s not important—working at Fox is a perfect fit for me, because I’m an outsider and Fox is an outsider.’ In some bizarre way, I charmed them into letting me do this.”

In January, he and his wife moved to New York. He still hadn’t been told by Fox what to do with his show, which was premiering in two weeks.

“All I could think of was, when I worked at Stuff and Maxim, the best part of the day was when I would just stand there and yell at everybody,” he said. “That’s the only thing I know how to do well: stand and yell at people.”

And so he started the routine he still follows. His alarm clock goes off at 10 a.m., and he gets on the Internet in search of stories. He goes to Google News and plugs in words such as “naked,” “deviant” and “strippers.” He gets to his office by noon and holds an ideas meeting. After he and two producers map the show, about 25 stories go into a lineup that is posted on a computer server, so everybody appearing on that night’s show can see it. After recording a cold opening, Mr. Gutfeld hangs out in his office and waits.

“Every day, you know you can do this thing,” he said. “And you’re not nervous when you’re doing it. But you’re nervous from 4 o’clock to 8—nervous that I’m going to fuck up.”

His on-air persona celebrates the pose of the fuck-up. Mr. Gutfeld’s previous boss, Felix Dennis, chairman of Dennis Publishing, once gave him a poem he’d written called “The Fool.”

“I go, ‘Man, that’s me!” Mr. Gutfeld said. “Once you decide that you are an idiot or fool, you have the ultimate freedom to do whatever you want. It actually allows you to be smarter …. I’ve been a fool all my life.”

Greg Gutfeld grew up in San Mateo, Calif. He was an altar boy at St. Gregory’s Catholic school, where he was the smartest kid in class, until an “incredibly handsome” and equally smart boy arrived.

“So I sat there going, ‘My power is gone,’” Mr. Gutfeld recalled. “Being a top student wasn’t working. I was in a classroom, and I was surrounded by people I could no longer control—and I made a joke and everybody laughed, and that was the moment I thought: I’m pretty shy, but I have this thing—I can manipulate people by saying funny things. And at that point, the doors opened.”

He idolized Hollywood Squares fixture Paul Lynde.

“You had no idea what his sexuality was, and he was the funniest, most interesting person on the planet, because he didn’t ascribe to any kind of male role,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “All you knew was, ‘That person’s funny.’ I fucking loved Paul Lynde. I think it was the element of the mystery—that he didn’t act like a normal man made it even funnier, but you didn’t know why. Gay comics you didn’t know were gay, but you knew that they were it. Truman Capote on Mike Douglas? Who is this person?”

At his grandmother’s house, he loved watching Carol Burnett, Laugh-In and the Dean Martin roasts. “I wanted to be the person there that makes the joke,” he said. “When I was sick, my mom would always bring home Mad magazine and National Lampoon and make me a milkshake.”

He said he was somewhat “acerbic” at school—never a bully, but often accused of being one.

“I wasn’t trying to make a joke about somebody being fat,” he said. “Even my closest friends I would make fun of, because I liked them. And they would go home to their parents and say, ‘Greg said this really awful thing,’ and I thought, ‘No, he’s my best friend.’ But I made my best friend cry.”

He got along best with mentally challenged kids.

“In class, I was always bored,” he said, “because my sisters had already taught me to read. So, at recess, I hung out with people who were really mentally disabled and very aggressive. They had what you call ‘retard strength.’ I found their energy interesting. And because I would gravitate toward them, they were fine with me.”

When he was 9, his father, Jack Gutfeld, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer (he would die when Greg was a sophomore in college).

In seventh grade one day, Greg broke his glasses, and his teacher wouldn’t let him sit up front to read the chalkboard. “I said, ‘If I flunk this test, I’m going to kick your ass’—so I got suspended,” he said. “My dad was still pretty healthy—and I didn’t know until two weeks later—he drove to the school, grabbed the teacher, threw him against a car and told him to leave me alone.”

In ninth grade, Greg set off fireworks in a classroom. This time, he was asked to leave St. Gregory’s.

“I said, ‘I can’t—I’m student-body president,’” he recalled. “They said, ‘You have two weeks left before school ends—just don’t come back.’ It was at that point I realized that I wasn’t growing.”

He attended an all-boys high school and got into punk rock thanks to his three older sisters, who turned him on to the Ramones. He went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, thereby making himself a target during a “Women Take Back the Night” march. “I’m just walking along and I’m getting yelled at!” he said. “And it’s like, ‘I didn’t do anything!’ I’ll never forget that. You were in a trench, people hated you—living in a fraternity made you a hated person, and I didn’t even like fraternities.”

There were dates with Berkeley lefty chicks. “The conversation would invariably head toward abortion,” he said. “I would say, ‘I don’t give a damn if you had an abortion or not, but you killed the kid.’ If you can acknowledge that, I can deal with it. But if you can’t acknowledge that, and you dress it up in pro-choice bullshit, that’s a problem for me …. And I always knew I was diminishing my chances of getting laid.”

In 1985, a fraternity brother gave him an issue of the conservative American Spectator. “I thought, “My God, there’s something out there that I understand.”

Mr. Gutfeld’s nickname was “Butt-head.” “He used to get drunk and rage away,” said a frat brother, Bruce Owen. “Rapping at the top of his lungs. Scary shit. He was president and led the charge to steal some bus benches.”

“I got into rap very early,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “I could do every N.W.A song by heart. I got into a lot of fistfights because I was always drunk. I learned to fight at some point, probably because I was short.”

One summer, some female students from Brown University rented the Sigma Chi house; Mr. Gutfeld was the landlord. “They were the most miserable group of girls ever,” he said. One of the girls expressed romantic interest in a long-distance runner named Craig. Mr. Gutfeld, appropriating the plot of the book Alive, told the girls that Craig had once been in a plane crash in the Andes and had to eat some of his teammates.

“They were aghast,” he said. The next day, he enlisted a friend to run down the frat stairwell screaming that there’d been an accident: A pledge had fallen to his death. Mr. Gutfeld was in a room with the Brown girls. “I said, ‘Shit! Shit!’ And then I said, ‘Let’s get Craig!’ The girls were like, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘He’ll eat him! He’ll eat him!’” The girls moved out.

After he graduated in 1987, he received an internship at The American Spectator as assistant to R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., the magazine’s founder. Mr. Gutfeld opened Mr. Tyrell’s mail, got him lunch and spotted him while they lifted weights together. “I kept my mouth shut and listened,” he said.

One day, Mr. Tyrell said to him, “Reagan’s coming—I need you to mow my lawn,” recalled Mr. Gutfeld. “So I went to his house in McLean, mowed his lawn, washed his windows. And I said, ‘Could I meet Reagan?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was a fair trade—I would have fucking cleaned the toilets.

“I’m standing there and there’s this motorcade, and I turn to look and say something—and Reagan is standing next to me,” he said. “He wasn’t in the main car. It was like seeing someone in a Reagan mask. When you see Reagan, you think it’s somebody in a Reagan mask. I remember saying nothing but gibberish. After Reagan left, they were clearing the dishes, and I got Reagan’s dish, and he hadn’t eaten all of his chicken. So I ate all his chicken.”

Mr. Gutfeld was broke, so he applied for a job at Rodale Press’ Prevention magazine. “I met the editor—I had no interest in health, I’d misspelled his name—and he hired me,” he said. He moved up the Rodale ladder: After four years at Prevention, he became a staff writer at Men’s Health, then editor in chief in 1999. He was fired a year later: “I put out amazing magazines, but they wanted Dave Zinczenko to be editor—he’s the perfect face for that magazine.”

The same month he was canned, he was offered a job as editor in chief of Stuff. Over the next three years, circulation increased from 750,000 to 1.2 million. “People thought of it as a lad mag, but the writing was as good as anything on Letterman,” he said.

In 2003, he hired several dwarves to attend a magazine conference, on the topic of “buzz,” in his place. During one of the lectures, they chatted loudly on cell phones and munched potato chips. “The midget thing got me in trouble” he said. “And the reason I didn’t tell anybody about it in advance is because then it wouldn’t have happened. I thought it made perfect sense: There’s a conference on ‘buzz’ by a bunch of self-congratulating idiots—I’ll show you buzz.”

He was kicked upstairs at Dennis and given the title of “brand development.”

“Every time I lost a job, I felt miserable—but something always would happen,” he said. “And I’m a difficult person for people to say, ‘That’s the guy we want.’ I don’t know what makes people do that …. I think there’s a romantic inclination from the people who hire me: They like that I don’t give a shit. And then, at the end of the day, they have to fire me.”

Dennis Publishing didn’t leave him upstairs for long: They tapped him to be the editor of Maxim UK, where he met the photo editor of Maxim Russia, Ms. Moussa. He proposed three months later.

Mr. Gutfeld said that before his stint in London, he’d always been unhappy in New York, because of the relentless pursuit of happiness.

“That’s what you do, but no one’s happy here,” he said. “So if you show up at a restaurant, you expect good service—and when it’s not good, you’re angry. In England, you expect bad service—and when it’s bad, you’re fine. And it’s because it’s a country that has already lost, and they don’t care. Being in England is like being dead. If there is such a thing as heaven, heaven is the end of competition, where you just throw up your hands and go, ‘It’s over!’”

In England, he said, “A guy will come up to you and say, ‘You know what you should do? You should go to Essex.’ And you’ll say, ‘Why?’ And he’ll say, ‘You’ll love it—it’s crap.’ Someone else will say, ‘Oh, no, you should go to Birmingham. You’ll love it.’ And you’ll say, ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s crap.’ And I didn’t understand this—and then I did go, and you realize, ‘This is crap, but I’m having a really good time.’”

He swore he didn’t meet a single unhappy person in England. “The assumption is, life doesn’t get any better than what you’re doing,” he said. “There is no guy next to you who you have to compete with. In New York, it doesn’t matter how much money you make—if you’re making a half-million, there’s a guy making a million, or eight billion. And you can tell that even those guys aren’t happy.”

After a recent Friday-night taping, Mr. Gutfeld was at Rosie O’Grady’s on West 46th Street. There were about 15 people sitting around the table—including the guests from that night’s show: Mike Baker, a former C.I.A. operative; Kevin Godlington, a former British Special Forces soldier; sex writer Julia Allison; and VH1’s Michelle Collins. Almost everyone was drunk. After someone told a joke about Mr. Gutfeld in bed with a donkey, he headed to the bar.

The show had been a good one—they’d riffed on Paris Hilton’s jail time, an Australian woman who wanted human rights for her monkey, the budding friendship between a puppy and a duck in China, actress Julie Delpy’s remark that the French really do stink, and Tyra Banks’ complaint that there are no African-Americans on Girls Gone Wild.

At the bar, Ms. Allison was wearing a short pink skirt suit. Would the show be around in a year?

“Absolutely,” she said. “But because the show is so loose, and because we have such a media-watchdog culture—they could get burned like that. Two words: Don. Imus. You don’t know what’s going to piss people off. And, my God, the shit that we get into—the sex, the bestiality—holy crap! I can’t believe that shit is on Fox News!”

The room was getting raucous. Mr. Gutfeld had to be up early and got ready to leave. I remembered what he’d said another night, when I asked him what it was like to go home to his wife, Ms. Moussa.

“It’s really bad,” he said, “because she is excited to see me, and my brain is in another place. I can’t watch the show unless I’m drunk, and my poor wife will come to me and say, ‘Look what I bought today—isn’t it nice?’ And I can’t deal with it. And then I’ll wake up at 5 a.m. with a thought about the show. But you know you’re doing something you love if you don’t have an appetite and you can’t sleep.”

He said one night a crew member took a piece of black tape and put it around Mr. Gutfeld’s finger. “He said to me, ‘Listen—when you go home and see your wife, you look at that black tape and think, “That’s where the show is.” When you look at that, you don’t talk about the show. You don’t bring that crap home.’ I had that piece of tape on for one day, but it fell off.”

While boxing promoter Don King may have filed a $2.5 billion suit against ESPN back in January for calling him a “snake-oil salesman” and alleging that he “killed not once, but twice,” he didn’t seem to mind when those same sentiments were expressed by Donald Trump and members of the Friars Club in a ballroom at the Hilton on Friday.

In fact, Mr. Trump, who looked unusually handsome onstage at the center of an endless banquet table of battered boxers and old comedians, led the luncheon off with “You know, he killed people,” and went straight to “Don King is a big fat fucking thief. He fucks everyone he touches.”

But a while after the soothing roast schtick of Mr. Trump and of Lisa Lampanelli—“I’ve had more black dick in me than the urinal at the Apollo”—came Paul Moody. Mr. Moody had a harsh rant about the evils of Gulf War II, and yet harsher words for Mr. Trump himself, who once placed newspaper ads that encouraged the death penalty for the perpetrators of the Central Park jogger case. (They were, of course, later found innocent.)

Mr. Moody told a dark joke in which the punning punch line was uttered by one genie to another: “Why would he want to be hung like a nigger?”

He then took Mr. King to task for his enthusiastic support of George W. Bush. This criticism, the only criticism of the afternoon, was the one that Mr. King, when it came time for closing remarks, chose to rebut with a mad flow of words.

“I’ve been the recipient of all this pain,” said Mr. King. He then told a meandering joke about a black man sleeping in a funeral home who was nearly embalmed in the morning by a staffer who said, “The nigger kept saying, ‘I’m alive!’, but you know how those niggers keep lying.”

“He’s rich!” Mr. King said, by way of explaining Mr. Trump.

“George Walker Bush is a revolutionary,” said Mr. King, in a dissertation on the perceptions of black people as lazy. “He did more for black peoples’ image than any other President in the history of the U.S. He took two shiftless, worthless, no-account blacks and made them Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.”

Mr. King continued: “He raised the bar of dignity, pride and hope, and inspiration. He did more against the Klan than anyone. Now they don’t have to slide-grind-slide like Michael Jackson.”

“Symbols,” said Mr. King without apparent humor, “are the strongest thing you could ever have.”

“They don’t have to be what they say they are,” he said.

“So some people got their benefits cut,” he said.

Back he went on track. “I just want blacks to take a stand and look at George Bush,” he said. “He’s a warrior! He says what he means and means what he says. So maybe he can’t be too intelligent. Warriors aren’t always intelligent.”

“Patriotism is the greatest thing in the world,” said Mr. King. “Any intelligent person will say, patriotism, if you analyze it, is insanity.”

One sometimes couldn’t decide whether Mr. King is a genius or an idiot.

“See this button here?,” Mr. King asked the crowd. “I’m a Screaming Eagle! The 101st Airborne! They’re out there defending the freedom we have today!” he exhorted.

“Treat your woman as your equal, not your superior,” reminded Mr. King.

“I love this country! God bless America,” he said in a sudden and triumphant close. “And God bless you, George Walker Bush!”

—Choire Sicha

The Lad Collects

Greg Gutfeld came back to New York to claim his rightful $2,000.

When he moved to London in June 2004, to edit the U.K. edition of Maxim, Mr. Gutfeld sublet his midtown Manhattan apartment to a then-friend. The then-friend forgot, Mr. Gutfeld claimed, to pay $27,000 in rent. After eviction notices and court appearances, the two have mostly settled up, but there’s still $2,000 that Mr. Gutfeld has yet to receive.

Of course, the small matter of this remaining debt (certainly small, no doubt, to the editors in chief of this world) was not the primary reason for Mr. Gutfeld’s visit. But it became clear on Sunday, after a few drinks in the faux-glam lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel where Mr. Gutfeld was staying and where, later that night and cash in hand, [ex-friend’s name REDACTED] was scheduled to appear, the money was certainly foremost in Mr. Gutfeld’s mind.

“He better have it,” Mr. Gutfeld said, nearly muttering to himself.

“What if he doesn’t? Am I going to have to kick his ass?” he asked his companion, U.K. Maxim features editor Dave Whitehouse, who had flown over with Mr. Gutfeld. “Nah,” said the young Mr. Whitehouse, who is barely intelligible underneath his heavy Midlands accent, “I’ll just take off my trousers and have my dick hang out.”

Mr. Gutfeld seemed pleased with this Plan B solution. [REDACTED] had, he said, a brain cyst, and that medical condition caused Mr. Gutfeld to worry about “kicking his ass” in a manner that might cause irreparable damage.

Seasoned fans of the New York media sport might find it interesting that Mr. Gutfeld would have any second thoughts about havoc. The man was ostensibly fired from Men’s Health because he made fun of cats, although he believes the unofficial reason was as simple as Dave Zinczenko wanting the job. He was fired, essentially, from Stuff for sending midgets to a Magazine Publishers of America panel. Most recently, his revival plan for Maxim involved large-scale features on feces and pubic lice; he only pauses in those labors (and only after a few pints) to pepper Arianna Huffington’s liberal brainy blog with talk of biodegradable anal beads. So one might expect Mr. Gutfeld to be a brutish meathead with little or no concern for much beyond securing a woman in his bed and a plateful of meat on his table (or, of course, the other way around).

But upon meeting Mr. Gutfeld, one is thrown off for several reasons. Mr. Gutfeld is short—very short, strikingly so. His diminutive stature is sharply contrasted by his shoulders and pectoral muscles, which are nothing short of hulking; they speak volumes to those long hours of “research” spent as the editor of Men’s Health. He talks incessantly and adoringly of his 24-year-old Russian bride, Elena, and carries with him an envelope chock-full of photos. And, most surprising: a bartender greeted his request for a glass of rosé with a blank stare, and so our hero settled for basic red wine. Rosé? Do you mean to say that the infamous Greg Gutfeld prefers White Zinfandel above all else?

“It’s because of the way they drink in London,” he said, eager to defend his masculinity. “They drink so much and so quickly.” He also noted that were he to drink beer at the typical English rate, his waistline would be considerably greater—“And if I drank liquor at that pace, I’d be through.” His adopted drinking rate is one every 20 minutes, interrupted only by smoke breaks.

Ah, London style. “You don’t have to kiss ass over there,” said Mr. Gutfeld. “The magazine culture there is much faster, they have these tabloids—five or six tabloids every morning. The stories have evil puns, half-naked women, stories of babies eating dogs. And they don’t frown upon people who are interested in going for those stories, and I like that!”

Mr. Gutfeld pulled out a copy of Pick Me Up, which resembled a vintage Tiger Beat that had been assaulted by a thin issue of People. It boasted headlines such as Helpless as my STALKER tried to BURN MY SON ALIVE and Love thy Neighbour: The girl next door sliced my Mel’s head off for £30!

“I love this stuff!” he said breathlessly. He leaned over while The Transom tried to absorb the adorably garish piece of gloss in its lap. It’s just so … different, so light and far more entertaining than the flotsam and jetsam spewed out of our local media machines. What, in God’s name, is New York’s problem?

“I think editors are generally really, really overpaid and coddled,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “They’re used to getting car services, perks. They spend most of their time talking to themselves. If you work at Esquire, you’re trying to impress your friend at GQ. Editors [in New York] like to think they can hold their own with higher media. I’m sure if I meet Jon Stewart, he’ll love me. As if they’re more interesting than the magazine they’re doing—and all these magazines are really boring!”

It was now four drinks into a lovely Sunday afternoon. One could have tried to not keep up with Mr. Gutfeld and Mr. Whitehouse. But: Yes! Boring! Another glass of Pinot Grigio, please! Let’s move to London!

“It’s not a new idea,” Mr. Gutfeld said, “but if you took any of these people outside the bubble of Manhattan, no one would give a fuck about who they are. People care more about their mechanic and the guy who sells them their washing machine than they do about who’s editing The New Yorker. New York incubates that kind of mentality. And you don’t have that in London.” Hello, Tatler? We’ll be at Heathrow in six hours!

But ah, that pesky $2,000. [REDACTED]’s hot date with the slightly intoxicated international collection posse was for the Roosevelt at 6 p.m. The Transom felt as if that confrontation might be most daintily handled without a reporter present.

But the next morning, Mr. Gutfeld called. “He never showed!” he shouted. “He even called multiple times to say he was on his way, so I think he’s a total con man. We waited for him all night. Do you have his name? It’s [R-E-D-A-C-T-E-D].”

—Jessica Coen

Heidi Klum’s Hidden Candy

For most of the night, Heidi Klum’s Sixth Annual Halloween Bash resembled nothing more extraordinary than your sixth-grade Harvest Ball. Debutantes in elaborate feathered hats, a tuxedoed man on stilts and a giant yellow M&M dressed as Darth Vader (complete with light saber), among others, lined either side of the dance floor, sipping their drinks and staring at one another, dancing within their own little spheres of personal space. Everyone was waiting for the celebrities.

And wait they did. A smattering of celebs didn’t begin walking the abrupt red carpet (a span of five steps at most from the curb to the door, nearly resulting in a photog bloodbath) until 10:30 p.m.

Ice T breezed past the crowd in a black leather coat.

“What are you dressed as?” he was asked.

“’Sup,” he said.

Jason Biggs crossed the threshold dressed as Dorothy Gale, with his girlfriend a cute metallic tin woodsman on his arm.

“We decided on Dorothy and Tin Man!” he said, nodding his braided brown wig and brandishing his checkered jumper. “My girlfriend was the Tin Man, so I was stuck wearing the skirt!”

But the real showstopper was Ms. Klum herself, sans baby. She arrived at a quarter to 10 (the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” blaring overhead) in an outrageous black wig that towered three feet above her head, a tight black dress with a blinking red heart over her left breast and thigh-high leather boots. What was at first taken to be a black gossamer cape revealed itself as wings when she bum-rushed the row of cameras, baring her garish faux fangs. Only Ms. Klum somehow managed to make it sexy, not creepy.

“I’m Draculette!” she said. Obviously.

“Seal is in L.A.,” she pouted. “That’s why my heart is bleeding.” Indeed, the glowing red heart on her chest leaked plastic streams of blood across her bodice.

Benji Madden from Good Charlotte cruised in, wearing his usual uniform of black. Black sweatshirt, black hat, black eye makeup.

“I’m not dressed up as anything—no wait,” he said. “I’m dressed up as Benji from Good Charlotte.”

A flurry of activity broke by the door with the whispered rumor that Seal was coming to surprise Ms. Klum. Somehow the news leaked to her—or it was all a clever P.R. stunt—because as Mr. “Kiss from a Rose” himself arrived dressed as a traffic cop, Draculette rushed out the door and embraced him before the cameras outside. His grand entrance was interrupted, however, by a drunk guest passing out inside. She was lifted by a handful of suited security guards and carried outside. No one could see what she was wearing.

Ms. Klum gave Seal’s ass a nice rubdown. They moved their public displays upstairs and started dancing.

A Nancy Drew told The Transom that while Seal was outside, the bodyguards were telling people to clear out of the way—and for a moment, even Valentino was brushed aside. Until he spoke up.

“He was really cool about it,” she said.

—Nicole Pesce and Erin Coe

Caps and frowns: Yesterday, playwright Tony Kushner delivered the keynote address to Columbia's Class of 2004 , while its underachieving, sexually confused sister Barnard had to settle for author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich . Today, they all throw their hats in the air and find out just what that pricey Ivy League education will buy them (try a 300-square-foot studio apt in Bed-Stuy ). In more Ivy League news , authors Andrew Solomon (Yale, Cambridge), Tom Dolby (Yale, scion of that family), publisher David Ebershoff (Brown) and attorney Philip Galanes (Yale) sprinkle themselves with fairy dust and gather at Readings by Out Authors …. Even if the Strokes are no longer what they used to be (svelte, single, superlative), their opening act, composed of Harper (son of Paul) Simon , childhood chum Sean Lennon and Sonic Youth's drum machine Steve Shelley , ought to placate tonight's SummerStage opening-night concert audience sufficiently. Hey, remember Greg Gutfeld , the editor of Stuff magazine who once crashed a Fashion Week show dressed like a bear? Well, Dennis Publishing is shipping its favorite curmudgeon off to jolly olde England to helm British Maxim . "I'm a little nervous because the Brits use different words over there," he told us. "Like instead of 'color,' it's 'colour.' And instead of 'program,' it's 'programme.' And instead of 'armpit sex,' they call it 'bagpiping.'" There goes the nabie! Tonight, he gets piped by former staffers and friends at a sendoff party at the increasingly swampy Marquee .

[Readings by Out Authors, Therapy, upstairs, 348 West 52nd Street, 6 to 9 p.m.; SummerStage opening night, Rumsey Field, Central Park, 6 p.m., by invitation only; Greg Gutfeld's goodbye party, Marquee, 289 10th Avenue, by invitation only, but it's not as if they're gonna keep you out.]

Thursday 20th

Fashionistasofsummer! Memorial Day is next weekend, and you bet your croquet mallet every Annabelle or Claire is gonna be sporting the same Ralph Lauren cricket jumper dress. Pick up some alternatives at today's sample sales: Vivienne Tam (dragons, lace and leather) and Catherine Malandrino (ethereal sweet-pea goddess who we still can't tell apart from Rebecca Taylor and Tracy Reese … ). Need a watch to go with that? Check out discreet Swiss watchmakers IWC's new "Aquatimer" watch at the Time Warner Center, alongside never-before-seen photos of Jacques Cousteau's first voyage . John Mayer-pouty pop star and former boyfriend of Jennifer L. Hewitt- "has, like , seven of them," according to a flack at IWC. Meantime, Ermenegildo Zegna's walls get papered in cashmere to show off baby-sister line Agnona to Senator Hillary Clinton , whose gleeful smile these days may be attributed to the fact that John Kerry ain't exactly surging , which equals "Hillary for Prez 2008!" (By the way, has anyone checked to see if Ms. Clinton was the one who mischievously recommended that peekaboo dress to the lovely Alexandra Kerry at Cannes a few days ago?) Anyway, gilded celebristocrat couples Chris 'n' Tory (cricket jumpers, anyone?), Jamee 'n' Peter , Arie 'n' Coco and Dennisse 'n' Larry host the Zegna bash …. In international news, the 60th anniversary of D-Day is coming up in a few weeks, and the French Institute Alliance Française shows two documentaries : U.S. Through the Scope of French Television and Operation Open Arm . Try to ignore the fact that the French guy next to you has snuck a pestilential pâté sandwich into the theater ….

[Catherine Malandrino Sample Sale, 275 West 39th Street, sixth floor, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., 212-840-0106; Vivienne Tam Sample Sale, 550 Seventh Avenue, 20th floor, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., 212-840-6740; 60th anniversary of D-Day, Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-355-6100.]

Friday 21st

Sound check for the G.O.P.? At Madison Square Garden , the pop station Z100 unleashes a teeny-popper scrum called Zootopia . Who's howling: not-so- Newlywed Jessica Simpson (who's bringing back housewife chic), overly flatironed angsty teen Avril Lavigne , former naughty songstress Liz Phair and so-out-he's-back-in American Idol loser Will ("She Bangs, She Bangs") Hung . The Backstreet Boys slip in the back door to do some a cappella.

[Z100's Zootopia 2004, Madison Square Garden, 7 p.m., www.z100.com for tickets.]

Saturday 22nd

So half of us are tan, half of us are pasty , raising the question of when is it officially O.K. to start fake 'n' baking again? Perhaps inversely proportionate to the Memorial Day rule: After the holiday you can wear white, but should no longer be white? Meantime, the ubiquitous Jessica Simpson (who's taking classes at the Tara Reid School of Tanning Till You Resemble a Photo Negative ) teams up with the tawny gals at Allure for the mag's "Play Safe in the Park" Concert. "Before Jessica sings, there will be a beauty village under tents, so it's tented , and there are little stations and you can kind of jump around getting free makeovers, grabbing products and skin-care advice," said a flack. Playing more dangerously, Tracey Ullman busts out her zany, madcap shtick tonight as host of a bash honoring Lyn and Norman Lear and condiment heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry . It all goes down at the home of producer Richard ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ) Foos. Your green goes to the Friends of CHEC for the Environment .

[ Allure 's "Play Safe in the Park" Concert, Central Park, Rumsey Field, Fifth Avenue at 69th Street entrance, 2 to 5 p.m., www.ticketmaster.com; Friends of CHEC for the Environment party, home of Shari and Richard Foos, some fancy apartment prob'ly on the Upper East Side, 7 p.m., 310-899-9191.]

Sunday 23rd

Before Mom gets into the gin again, take her to Mamapalooza , a mom-honoring music festival with mother artists. Festival organizer and all-around badass Joy Rose (lupis survivor, kidney transplant recipient and the lead singer of Housewives on Prozac) said, "People are astounded by the talent. It's like they think mothers just turn into a big cow and go out to pasture! We have a song called 'Fuzzy Slippers,' the first line of which is, 'I wipe my baby's chin with my college diploma.' And there's another called 'I Only Wanna Pee Alone.'" Then break out the Ritalin, because the latest Harry Potter installment ( Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ) hops a Nimbus 2004 ( bzzzzzzzzz … ! ) and zooms into Rockefeller Center for the world premiere. If they keep cranking the films out this fast, we'll be spared the sight of a 35-year-old Daniel Radcliffe playing a teenager ….

[Mamapalooza, Riverside Park South, enter at the Hudson River at West 68th Street, noon to 4 p.m., 212-477-5262, www.mamapalooza.com; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban premiere, Radio City Music Hall, 1260 Avenue of the Americas, 4 p.m., by invitation only.]

Monday 24th

Jake Gyllenhaal- upon whom an ex professed to have a "man crush", which should have been our first clue -has a new disaster movie, so tonight he stops nuzzling Kirsten Dunst (talk about disasters, how 'bout that haircut? Me-OW! ) and joins Dennis Quaid -the last real man in America-at the premiere of The Day After Tomorro w , a movie which will likely result in paranoid parents all over town rushing to sign their tykes up for swimming lessons …. A few blocks away, Al Gore (who is just about due to start teaching a class at the New School any day now) rides the film's coattails by staging an environmental rally . Want to scare the crap out of the Kerry campaign? Call them up and say, "Great news! Al Gore is about to endorse John Kerry on national television!"

[ The Day After Tomorrow premiere, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, 7 p.m., by invitation only.]

Tuesday 25th

While Bill and Hillary snored …. The trio of banker Jeffery Sachs , former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa Princeton Lyman and do-good cobbler Kenneth Cole host the publication of Greg Behrman's The Invisible People at the pish-posh Harmonie Club . The book is about how the U.S. slept through the global AIDS pandemic . All good boys deserve Cartier: Somewhere in the no man's land of Curry Hill-at the Armory, to be specific-Cartier decided they ought to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Santos (the original trusto watch) by honoring seven disparate individuals for making a difference , just like Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont , original purveyor of the name. For pioneer work in the field of pink high tops and wild boar , Mario Batali ; for pioneer work in the field of harem pants and genius complexes , Zac Posen ; Russell Simmons for veganism and sweatsuits , David LaChapelle for pioneer work in the field of Amanda Lepore and … you get the picture. Now go ask Mummy and Daddy for the watch.

[ The Invisible People book party, the Harmonie Club, 4 East 60th Street, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.; by invitation only; Cartier party, the Armory, 68 Lexington Avenue, by invitation only.]

Wednesday 26th

Hello, sailor ! Pull out the smelling salts, men of Chelsea, it's Fleet Week! The seamen in their starchy whites will be strolling the streets, making even the most spruced-up Wall Streeter look positively naff and surely resulting in a New York Times Styles section "think" piece about how sailors are … sexy ! Uptown, future Westchester moms and their pocketfuls of Xanax flock to Barneys' renovated bridal registry and home-furnishings department, Chelsea Passage. Elle Decor 's editor, Margaret Russell, and Barneys chairman Howard Socol invite you to "frolic, imbibe and jubilate." But please wipe up after. We asked Ms. Russell what her Upper East Side apartment looks like. "Why does everybody always ask me that?" she laughed. "It's very white and loft-like. I'm surrounded by so much stuff in the office, I tend to be pared down at home. I'm not a particularly messy person, and I also travel a lot, which helps keep the whites white."

[Fleet Week, South Street Seaport, www.fleetweek.us; Chelsea Passage grand opening party, Barneys New York, ninth floor, Madison Avenue and 61st Street, 7 to 9 p.m., 212-909-2605.]

Though some of The Journal 's excitement related to its service-driven, lifestyle-oriented "Personal Journal" section, it was the startling additions of color, new typefaces and layouts on page 1- The Journal 's staid, highly recognizable face, barely changed since World War II-that truly signaled a new day for the paper.

Since the spring relaunch, however, business has not gone smoothly for either The Journal or Dow Jones. Dow Jones recently instituted another round of layoffs of over 300 employees. In its most recent earnings report, the company announced an 47 percent decline in profits from fourth quarter 2001. According to a report in the New York Post , Dow Jones chief executive Peter Kann faced a torrent of angry comments during a town-hall meeting with 500 employees in December.

Now this ill will has extended to The Journal 's retooled page 1. Ten months after the relaunch, there remains much skepticism within the paper's newsroom about the new format. There is concern that page 1's new emphasis on the national breaking-news grind has made The Journal read too much like other daily publications and diluted the paper's franchise of investigative, behind-the-scenes business writing. There is also worry that changes in the management of page 1 has diminished the page's fabled autonomy-and its quality.

One Journal newsroom staffer deemed the current state of page 1 a "disaster." "There's been a lot of soul searching over what page 1's become," another staffer said, adding ominously: "What it has become and what it will become has ramifications for the future of the paper."

Of course, the question of what The Journal should or shouldn't be covering, and what a page 1 story is, has lingered ever since Barney Kilgore transformed The Journal from a trader's tip sheet into a stalwart of American journalism over 60 years ago. It's also true that any change to page 1 was going to be an adjustment for readers as well as Journal staffers. Until last year, digging into The Journal was a simple, time-honored ritual: You read the paper's front page vertically. The "What's News" box in columns two and three contained nuggets from the news of the day; the outside columns, or "leaders," often held longer, more in-depth pieces; while the center column-known as the "A-hed"-was reserved for the light stuff. Column five featured columns written from different Journal desks.

But last year, wanting to compete with the likes of The New York Times and the Financial Times , The Journal redesigned page 1 to accommodate four or five news stories with breaking news. While the column-one "leader" remained in place, the paper introduced news stories that ran over two columns on the right side of the page.

On one hand, it would appear understandable that The Journal 's managers might want more breaking news on page 1; nearly every newspaper editor demands the same. But this prioritizing of news, Journal sources said, has impacted the paper's core asset of expansive, investigative storytelling-the kinds of stories that may have been "off the news," but won The Journal both readers and Pulitzers.

"There were things page 1 stories had to have-stories that took you inside the room when the deal was made, when the merger was decided. You got to see all that," one Journal staffer said. "That's missing now."

Said another Journal staffer of page 1: "Most people [here] think it's strayed too far from what its mission was. They've diluted the product."

Angelo Henderson, who became The Journal 's only African-American Pulitzer Prize winner as a writer for page 1 before he left for The Detroit News in December 2001, agreed that the changes were stark.

"It's definitely newsier," Mr. Henderson said. "But it's more predictable. The goal of page 1 was always to surprise, to shock, to challenge a normal reader with topics you wouldn't read in any other papers that day."

In an interview with Off the Record, Mr. Steiger defended the paper's page 1 overhaul and said that any shift away from The Journal 's traditional types of stories was merely "cyclical." He added that the reformatted front page had gotten "favorable" reviews in reader surveys.

"For much of 2002, the flow of the news has been right on our turf: the economy, the markets," Mr. Steiger said. "When that happens, you're going after stories that have a shorter time span. You're breaking more news on the page, rather than doing as many of the long-project features that have always been a part of the page.

"I would acknowledge that there were fewer of those in the last year, but that's because you had people like Charlie Gasparino blasting holes in stories about Wall Street," Mr. Steiger said, referring to Mr. Gasparino's coverage of the Martha Stewart trading scandal and Citigroup chief executive Sandy Weill, among others. "Story after story after story, The Wall Street Journal led the way. If you put it on page 1, that leaves less room for the more offbeat pieces.

"I've been through these cycles before, and they go up and down depending on news flows, and depending on what the reporters are finding," Mr. Steiger said. "I would not be surprised to see, this year, the balance shift a bit-but you never can tell where the news goes. One of the great things about what we do is that news is something you can't often expect."

Some Journal staffers, however, scoff at that explanation, saying that Mr. Steiger's management decisions are more responsible for the page 1 changes than any shift in the news cycle. For much of the job's life, the page 1 editor acted largely as a feudal lord within the paper's kingdom. Reporting only to the managing editor, page 1 editors like Jim Stewart and John Brecher had, for all intents and purposes, complete control.

That is no longer the case, Journal staffers said. After "Marketplace" editor Mike Miller was promoted to page 1 editor in April 2000-two years before the relaunch and redesign-Mr. Steiger put him under the supervision of deputy managing editor Dan Hertzberg, who Journal staffers said is a breaking-news devotee who in the past clashed over the subject with Mr. Brecher. In addition to the constant oversight by Mr. Hertzberg, heavy supervision of Mr. Miller himself, staffers said, has led to "micromanaging."

"Page 1 editors used to be co-creators," one Journal staffer said. "Now, they're glorified copy editors."

Mr. Stewart, Mr. Brecher and Mr. Hertzberg didn't return phone calls seeking comment. Mr. Miller likewise didn't respond to requests seeking comment.

For his part, Mr. Steiger said the now almost three-year-old system of Mr. Miller reporting to Mr. Hertzberg has "worked great."

"The reason why Mike reports to Dan Hertzberg is because I've delegated much of the running of the U.S. Wall Street Journal to Dan Hertzberg," Mr. Steiger said. "It's appropriate that the page 1 editor report to him as well as the news side. I think Mike is a superb page 1 editor in the tradition of great Wall Street Journal page 1 editors. He followed a great editor who followed another great editor, and he has tremendous writing talent himself. He has a sense of how to deal with powerful news as well as the sense of how to identify and call forth a brilliant feature story."

As for the wounded morale of some page 1 staff, Mr. Steiger said: "You can always find frustrations on page 1, because page 1 of The Wall Street Journal is the prime real estate of American journalism. We've got a huge audience, and there are only four stories a day out there-occasionally a fifth. And when you have a tremendous flow of exclusive, powerful stories that are close to the news, there's more time pressure to get those stories into the paper quickly. So that can produce one level of frustration. But at other times, when the news pressures aren't so powerful, you can have backlogs build up, so the reporters get frustrated."

In his brief tenure as the editor in chief of Stuff , Greg Gutfeld has tried to start more fights than Larry McMurtry's roughnecks in Thalia, Tex. In the monthly cartoon accompanying his editor's note, Mr. Gutfeld has mocked the very real-life antics of Playboy 's Hugh Hefner, GQ 's Art Cooper and Hunter S. Thompson. When he lampooned Esquire writer Tom Junod's eulogy to his dog, Mr. Junod threatened to beat his ass.

What can we say? The boy can't help himself.

Recently, Off the Record called Mr. Gutfeld to discuss a book proposal he sent to publishers the week of Jan. 26 entitled Ladworld: An Introduction to Anti-Journalism . After talking about the book, Mr. Gutfeld took time to single out Mr. Cooper's screed on a potential war with Iraq during his Jan. 29 induction speech into the American Society of Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.

"That thing about Art Cooper coming out against Iraq and people calling him 'daring,' that's just bullshit," said Mr. Gutfeld, who was not present during the speech. "That's just an example of how idiotic journalists can be. I was going to buy him a ticket to Baghdad, but I'm too cheap.

"If he were to come out in favor of war in front all those left-wing editors, that would have shown real balls," Mr. Gutfeld continued.

Asked for comment, Mr. Cooper-whose own magazine is reportedly working on a prototype for a younger men's magazine entitled Fahrenheit -said: "I was urging open access and not press briefings. I don't think there's going to be a war. I'm in the minority there, but if there is one, I want to cover it. We have sent people into the hot spots before, and I really don't want to send them again. But if they do go back, I want to be able to cover it.

Mr. Cooper added that he felt the audience was "hardly left-wing," evidenced by the fact that his comments received only scant applause.

"This is coming from a guy that didn't listen to my speech and didn't hear what I was saying about war," Mr. Cooper said. "That is something that is completely alien to that publication. I mean, he doesn't have to think about what's going on in the world, and I'm sure he doesn't. But it's something that every working, thinking journalist has to think about. I just think this guy shouldn't criticize real magazines when he edits-however you want to define whatever junky little thing he does."

In the past year, the New York Post 's franchise-business section has fired media writer Dan Cox and business and markets writer Jessica Sommar. On Thursday, Feb. 6, fashion-business writer Lisa Marsh will officially leave the Post to complete her book House of Klein: America's Last Great Designer .

"I need time to devote to the book," Ms. Marsh said of her decision to quit, "and I can't do both at the same time.

"If a job opens up somewhere, I'd come back," Ms. Marsh added. "But I'm assuming they're going to fill the position as soon as they can."