Gossip writer Paula Froelich opened the front door to her one-bedroom Soho apartment on a recent evening, wearing a flattering emerald dress with puffy sleeves and woolly, moccasin-style slippers.

She had one hour, she warned, before she had to run out and meet Daily Candy founder Dany Levy and socialite Gigi Howard for an 8 p.m. dinner at Minetta Tavern. But she wanted to make sure the Daily Transom had a chance to drop by her apartment.

“I’m obsessed with this building,” she said of the Sullivan Street walk-up, described in detail in her new novel, Mercury in Retrograde, due out in early June from Atria Books.

She bent down to feed her dachshund, Karl, who was milling about at her feet after being dropped off by a doggy daycare sitter. “It’s like a mini neighborhood. That’s the thing about New York isn’t it? There are so many people behind the walls. They’re like cockroaches!”

Ms. Froelich’s novel, crammed with designer names and winking society references, is of the Manhattan chick lit genre. It is about three women brought together at 148 Sullivan (the author’s actual address) by a series of unfortunate events. Penelope Mercury (read: Paula Froelich) is a resident in the building who quits her job as a door-stepping reporter at a tabloid called the New York Telegraph. Lena “Lipstick” Lippencrass, a socialite, moves into the building after getting cut off by her father. And Dana Gluck, a corporate lawyer, takes the penthouse after her investment banker husband leaves her for a Russian model.

“They’re all composites of me,” said Ms. Froelich, sitting back in a gray velvet armchair in her cozy living room accented by a furry white rug and Hamptons-style coffee table books. Ms. Froelich speaks loudly, confidently, with a perpetual sense of sarcasm that makes her, at times, a little intimidating and, almost always, impossible to read.

“I knew I wanted to write a women’s book, but what bothers me about women’s books is that a lot of them are like, ‘And they gave themselves one year to get married!’” she said with a mocking, fairy-tale inflection in her voice. “It’s really misogynistic in a way.” (The characters in Mercury pursue love interests, but only after their respective lives and jobs are settled.)

Ms. Froelich, 35, has spent almost a decade as a Page Six reporter. She moved to the city 11 years ago from Los Angeles where she took the bus to a clerk job at Ace Hardware—“I moved here for the public transportation,” she said—and briefly worked at the Queens Gazette, at Institutional Investor writing a newsletter called Derivatives Week, and at Dow Jones newswires covering the same beat. Then someone recommended she apply for a job at Page Six.

“I was like, Page Six? What’s that?” she recalled. Ms. Froelich applied and got the job despite lacking experience outside the finance beat. For the next two years, she went out every night. Then she suffered a crack-up, she said, and slept for approximately a month.

Given the demanding lifestyle of a gossip reporter, Ms. Froelich’s personal life—much like her characters’—hasn’t gone exactly as she planned.

“I’m from Ohio. I thought I would be married with three kids by now,” she said. “But I’m really glad I’m not. I look back at the men I’ve dated, with the exception of one guy, and I think, ‘Wow, that would have been the biggest mistake.’”

Ms. Froelich said there was that one time when she was close to getting married. So what happened? “Well, you never want to get into something where you think, ‘Well, there’s always divorce!'”

In recent years, Ms. Froelich has slowed down a bit and doesn’t go out quite as much. Still, the near decade she’s spent collecting anecdotes about the conquests, failures, and public embarrassments of New York’s powerfuls proved useful when it came time to write her novel.

“I have a sick rolodex,” she bragged, stroking mascara into her eyelashes at the bathroom mirror. “Page Six has given me a Ph.D. in human psychology. Take any person and, within five minutes, I can tell you what’s going on, what they’re thinking, where they’re from, and how they’re dressed. And I’m usually 99 percent right.”

While Ms. Froelich insisted that her book is not a roman a clef, certain characters in the novel sound eerily familiar. There are socialites named Muffy and Fabiola and Ivanka; a New York politician disgraced by his regular visits to prostitutes; a blond socialite with corkscrew curls rated No. 1 on a Web site called Socialstatus.com; and a powerful publicist who crashes her SUV into a crowd of people lined up outside a club in the Hamptons.

“She’s a com-pah-zit!” Ms. Froelich said out about the car-crashing character inspired by famous flack Lizzie Grubman. “You write about what you know, but it’s not a thinly veiled thing at all. Even the characters at the newspaper are not anyone who works at the Post.”

Socialite Lydia Hearst is one of the few society girls called out by name in the book for her relentless self-promotion. Upon seeing Ms. Hearst on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, an older socialite says, “Just look at those tacky Hearsts.”

“That, actually, someone said to me. One of the old society matrons was appalled,” explained Ms. Froelich. “I actually like Lydia. She makes me laugh. I used to save her Page Six Magazine columns and read them out loud in character.”

Ms. Froelich was applying blush now and lining her eyes with a dark pencil.

“I think society is pretty much dead,” she said. “Nan Kempner and Brooke Astor would be rolling in their graves. It’s all about girls who talk about careers, but really they just want to be aligned with a brand. Who knew you could make a career out of posing for Patrick McMullan?”

Unlike other gossip writers, Ms. Froelich said she’s always firmly understood the difference between being a reporter and becoming subject for gossip columns herself.

“This is a job and you cannot be good at your job if you want to be the person you’re covering,” she said.  “There was a time a few years ago when people were passing out fame like subway passes, but I think most of them have been weeded out.”

Being “good” at her job sometimes means writing about people she is friendly with socially. But, according to Ms. Froelich, she rarely regrets the stories she reports. “I sleep just fine,” she said.

Ms. Froelich, who has survived departed Page Six colleagues like Ian Spiegelman and Chris Wilson, is one of those media people that everyone always says has been at their jobs forever. And according to Ms. Froelich, she has no plans of moving on. (She is, however, working on a sequel to Mercury and is in talks with Cynthia Eagan, head of the Poppy imprint at Little, Brown Book Group, who acquired the Gossip Girl books, to write a young adult novel about her time attending high school at a convent in Kentucky.)

“At first I thought, yes, after two years, I’ll do something else, but the Post has been really good to me. There was no reason to go,” said Ms. Froelich. “I wanted to take my time and figure out what I wanted to do. I know I’m not Liz [Smith] and I’m not Cindy [Adams]. Otherwise, I’m not real sure. So until I figure it out, it’s good.”

But has Ms. Froelich ever grown tired of covering the same beat?

Ms. Froelich looked to the side and tensed up her lips in a pucker for a moment. “Honey, people get tired of everything,” she finally said. “Ask me how I feel tomorrow.”

She slipped on a pair of Miu Miu shoes and signaled the Daily Transom to file out of her apartment. She had a dinner to get to.

Ever since his novel Everyone’s Burning, which explores the drugged-out lives of disaffected kids in Bayside, was picked up by the Moscow publishing house AST in April of 2004, Mr. Spiegelman has been eagerly anticipating the day the Russian-language version would occupy a spot on his shelf. “It’s not like I thought I was going to make any money off this,” said Mr. Spiegelman, who is from strong Slavic stock himself. “I just thought it would be cool to see my book translated in Russian.”

But last month, at the London Book Fair, AST editor in chief Nikolay Naumenko told Mr. Spiegelman’s American representative, Markus Hoffmann of Regal Literary, that his company would not be allowed to publish Everyone’s Burning, in accordance with Russia’s new campaign “to discourage drug use and the glamorization of drug use in other media,” as Mr. Hoffmann put it.

“Everyone in the book either dies, gets impotent or goes insane,” complained Mr. Spiegelman, who’s currently co-writing a book with Allen Raymond about how Mr. Raymond and the Republicans stole the 2002 Senatorial elections for John Sununu. “How is that glamorizing drugs?”

At least he’s in good literary company: Irvine Welsh’s award-winning novel Trainspotting is also on AST’s banned list.

Those fickle billionaires behind Door—that’s the nightclub on 23rd Street where you have to be either really rich or a model to get in—may have already decided to slam shut their notorious peephole for good.

“The landlords tried to hike the rent and they decided it wasn’t worth it,” said a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation. “It was never really open on a regular basis, and obviously it was never really about making money. But in that kind of a place you need a certain kind of staff, you know, people who are sworn to secrecy and everything. You can’t sustain that with a club that’s open once in a while on a whim.”

The source says that Door’s demise became official when the managers of the property sent out a mass text message inviting people to come party at “Suede”—which is the previous name of the club at 161 West 23rd Street.

The source said he’d partied in the exclusive club five or six times, and had seen a millionaire break a bottle and “throw it in a girl’s face.”

“Every time I was there, Ron Burkle was there,” said the source. “My sense was there wasn’t a party unless he was in town.”

Mr. Burkle’s spokesperson said that the supermarket billionaire had “absolutely nothing” to do with financing the place. Too bad.

The Transom’s efforts to confirm the shuttering with Door promoter Danny A. were met with a deafening silence.

Are you closed?

“No comment,” said Mr. A.

Are you still open?

“No comment.”

Are there still only billionaires and models allowed?

“Sir, sir, no comment!”

—Spencer Morgan

The Daily Gossip

In the kitchen of Ben Widdicombe’s East Village apartment—2BR/1B, floor-through, classic E.V. block, top floor, owner-occupied small building, needs fresh coat of paint—wieners were the hot topic of conversation.

“Ooo, I think that one was uncircumcised,” said a guest, after sampling the first batch of Mr. Widdicombe’s favored hors d’oeuvres. “It was a little salty.”

“The wieners are really important because Ben’s really fond of pigs in blankets, so any party that Ben’s involved with or that Ben goes to, there will always be pigs in blankets,” said Mr. Widdicombe’s best friend, Mark Ellwood. “Our other friend Amy DiLuna, who also works at the Daily News, she is coming later with a job lot of wieners. Like a double serving, because we know they’re really crucial.”

It was Saturday, Jan. 6. Mr. Widdicombe threw the party for himself. He had turned 36, he said, on Dec. 28, during that hazy clump of days between Christmas and New Year’s. Also, Mr. Widdicombe’s Gatecrasher column in the Daily News had been bumped up from a weekend column to a daily.

“I’m thrilled that I will have much more of a chance to cause mischief than I have had so far,” said Mr. Widdicombe, who wore a gingham shirt, jeans and sneakers. “It’s been frustrating having to hold on to stray items until the weekend.”

Mr. Widdicombe, an Australian, arrived in New York nine years ago. His first job was serving hot dogs on the street at Columbus and 77th Street. He was later a gallery boy at Wessel & O’Connor.

“The News has always had two gossip columns—we’ve had Mitchell Fink, Michael Gross,” Mr. Widdicombe said, and he mentioned Richard Johnson and A.J. Benza as he prepared another try of puff pastries and wieners. “So there’s always been at least two gossip columns at the Daily News. Rush & Molloy is the one that has survived, and there has kind of been a revolving door of second gossip columns. And I’m thrilled to have my chance, and I plan to stick around.”

Amy DiLuna, the News’ fashion editor, joined the crowd in the kitchen. She wore a gray Anthropologie wrap dress decorated with a few specks of marinara sauce. As promised, she brought with her a double dose of pigs in blankets. “It is a long time coming. We get a daily Ben column just working in the office, and also we get to know who all the blind items are about and no one else does! They’re all as good as you think.”

Former Rush & Molloy boy Chris Rovzar was getting a drink at the makeshift bar in living room. “There’s a dearth of catty gay voices in the tabloids, and I don’t include Cindy Adams in that,” he said. Mr. Rovzar was back in town from his Fulbright scholarship in Spain, where he was studying gay marriage. “So to have someone daily indoctrinating the youth of the outer boroughs of New York, I think is a real improvement in terms of the tabloid landscape.”

The newly installed editor of Seventeen magazine, Ann Shoket, was there, flanked by her publicist. “Ben is the most charming, most dashing …. ”

Right, right, now what are you wearing?

“What? Oh no, I don’t want to tell you that,” she gasped. She wore a tube top and jeans. “Now I’m starting to get into trouble with my publicity department. They’re like, ‘Don’t talk to anybody.’”

Her publicist, Scott Gorenstein, stepped in. “She’s wearing an appropriate outfit for a humid evening in the East Village.”

The apartment had become filled, mostly with journalists. But wait, a celebrity! Project Runway winner Jay McCarroll was gabbing with Lisa Marsh in a bedroom. “I am so proud of our little Ben Widdicombe,” said Mr. McCarroll, who was layered in sweatshirts and wore his trademark oversized sunglasses. “It’s good because now he can spread his bullshit just a little bit thinner every day.”

Then he had a question of his own for The Transom. “Have you ever been sucked off by another guy?”

Former Page Sixer Lisa Marsh chimed in. “Ben is basically the male version of me, but of course Ben deserves a daily column because he was writing circles around Lloyd Grove way back before.”

George Rush himself arrived bearing gifts. “I hear you’re staying at the Standard for the Oscars this year. So this is the calendar they sent us with notations from, I think, some ex-boyfriends,” he said to Mr. Widdicombe. “And here is an epiphany cake. You are gifted with epiphanies. So you find the treasure inside and then you can put on your crown.” He handed him a gold paper crown.

“We cannot wait for this guy to man the barricades of gossip,” he said.

—S.M.

G.T.A.: Booze City

Two weeks before the New Year, Ian Spiegelman, the novelist, ghostwriter and infamous former Page Sixer, sent out an “advance notice” e-mail imploring friends to mark their calendars for his upcoming birthday. “Join me to celebrate my 33rd birthday at 2A on Friday, January 5th starting at 7:00 and going until I pass out and must be carried to a cab or an ambulance,” it read.

The Transom headed over at 10 p.m. But Mr. Spiegelman was still relatively sober.

“I bought a PlayStation two weeks ago to give me something to do at night aside from drink,” he said. “And the best game I bought is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And in the last seven or eight days, I am hit-man level on the machine pistol, gangster level with the pistol, my stamina is about 1,000 percent. I basically ignore the missions now and just go out and kill about 20 or 30 gang members, take their guns and their money. I started out with $200, I haven’t completed any missions worth any money, but I have $17,000 in my bank now. My favorite thing is to kill off a whole squadron of cops and then just stay into the night. It’s a really wonderful game. One night my favorite thing was just to drive around all of their fake city for an hour and a half. Just driving! Once in a while I’d crash and I’d steal another car or ambulance or a fire truck and just keep driving. Once in a while I’d come across some hoodlum and have to get out and shoot him, take his gun. But it’s helping me not drink too much.”

“I knew from back when I was a kid that any video game that you show me I can spend eight hours on it and not drink. So I figure I need something to go from about 6 p.m. to about 4 in the morning. Those are the horrible hours.

“Most of the nights I won’t drink anything, but a couple of the nights I’ll have like two drinks and be like, ‘O.K., now I’m calmer. I can defeat this mission.’ And I am actually better at driving the car, killing the guys with a couple drinks in me.”

Mr. Spiegelman said that his recent life change was brought on by ghosts of Christmas past paying a harsh visit to his liver and kidneys.

“On Christmas Day, I went to my Italian family’s [place] in New Jersey and I had three drinks before dinner, and then I ate dinner, and then I got back to my own apartment and the power of just those three drinks—finally my liver and my kidneys were just like, ‘We can’t do this any more!’ And I puked, and so I didn’t drink for the rest of the week. And then I started talking to my psychiatrist about finding ways to not drink so much, and the first thing that came across the board was PlayStation 2.”

“When I’m done with this, and it finally comes to fruition and I’m finally clean or as clean as I want to be, my plan will rival the 12 steps.”

At roughly 10:45, Mr. Spiegelman left his own party and put himself in a cab.

“I’m proud of Ian,” said his friend blog empress Elizabeth Spiers. “I think he’s going to be the next Tony Robbins with this new self-help program. ’Cause I think we’ve been waiting for a dark, cynical Tony Robbins, and I think Ian might be the man. I also think a lot of people have been looking for a higher purpose for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Ian may have found it.”

—S.M.

The Transom Also Hears ….

Business is booming at the Waverly Inn, the restaurant co-owned by Vanity Fair honcho Graydon Carter. But one social gal was disappointed with her recent visit. “The mice were running up the walls,” she I.M.’d The Transom on Jan. 9.

Well: She saw two mice. She also said she and her dining companion both were as ill as could be later—though that could have been anything. Still! “The mouse almost fell into my tablemate’s hair!” the lass claimed. Ah, well. She’ll be back!

—S.M.

Mr. Stern, the fallen gossip columnist, has sold a nonfiction book to Touchstone Fireside, a division of Simon & Schuster.

“But we’re not writing it for them,” Mr. Stern said, of that majority of his former readers in the New York Post’s Page Six.

The book—working title: Stern Measures—is expected to be published near the end of 2007. Word of the deal broke on Gawker the afternoon of Oct. 17. Mr. Stern’s manuscript is due, by his account, in early 2007. His publisher said he thought it might be expected at the end of this year.

The book will describe what goes on “inside the sausage factory” of gossip journalism, said Mr. Stern.

Mr. Stern, 35, spent 11 years in the trade—grinding meat, gristle and odd bits—before losing his freelance job at the Post on April 21. He was let go because billionaire supermarket magnate and Sean John investor Ron Burkle made video recordings of conversations between himself and Mr. Stern. The New York Daily News and the New York F.B.I. each came into possession of all or part of those recordings. The Daily News printed a partial transcript and indicated it only had six minutes of tape. Those six minutes, according to the transcript, included Mr. Stern saying, “I wouldn’t be asking you for this kind of money if I didn’t think I could help you when it is needed.”

The first act of the story played out in gossip time: a flurry of extortion accusations and entrapment counteraccusations, Mr. Stern’s ouster, some speculation about the future consequences and a quick curtain. Britney had another baby or two. Mel Gibson got boozy and anti-Semitic. Joe Francis slugged a reporter. Jared Paul who?

Within two months of his dismissal, a book proposal by Mr. Stern was circulating. “There will obviously be no shortage of media attention for this project,” the proposal promised. John Brockman served as his agent.

But was there publishing attention? “Yeah, I mean, I considered it briefly,” said Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove Atlantic. “I took a quick look at it.” He passed.

Then Mark Gompertz and Mr. Stern met for the first time at the Simon & Schuster offices, on July 5, at 11 a.m. “He was wearing a perfect hat, as I thought he might,” Mr. Gompertz said. They met again on Aug. 4, at Mexican Radio, in Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Stern had the fish tacos and a few margaritas, and wore a shirt of his own design.

Mr. Gompertz, 52, the publisher of Touchstone Fireside, purchased the book for himself. “I thought I’d shake things up a little bit,” he said. “My life was really dull. I didn’t have anyone sniffing through my garbage, so I thought I’d fix that.” He generally only purchases three or four books a year himself; his imprint and its editors publish 75 books a year. Last year, he bought and handled a memoir by Robert Klein.

The price of the sale would not be disclosed. “I can’t say,” said Mr. Gompertz. Mr. Stern said the money would pay the bills “for a little while.”

The book is not Mr. Stern’s only project. He said he also plans to sue Mr. Burkle, and other parties.

“There’s no reason for me not to sue,” Mr. Stern said.

Mr. Stern has until April 2007 to bring a suit on the grounds of defamation. “If privacy is an issue for him,” Mr. Stern’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said of Mr. Burkle, “he doesn’t want to be subjected to a discovery process. And I think that’s something that’s going to be coming his way.”

Unless agreed by both parties or ordered by the court, a depositions is limited to seven hours on one day. “It’s hard to figure out how to get all the material I want to use in a seven-hour deposition period,” Mr. Tacopina said. “That’s going to be my big challenge.”

In the last six months, Mr. Stern has worked little—lending credence to a defamation pro se claim of injury in his trade. Only recently has he found part-time employment as books editor under the new regime at BlackBook, a downtown magazine now under the editorship of an old friend, Steve Garbarino. “Right now, he’s been legally damaged to the point where his revenue has been all but halted,” Mr. Tacopina said.

His circumstances were so reduced that his wife, Ruth (Snoodles) Gutman, began to work. “That’s true,” Mr. Stern said. “She is working at a local company that makes, like, gourmet foods.” The couple lives in Oak Hill, N.Y.

And what did Mr. Gompertz think about the future of the book if Mr. Stern were to be charged, and prosecuted?

“I don’t know!” he said. “That’s a good question. I guess he’ll have more time to write it.”

“As you probably suspect, we can’t confirm or deny the existence of an investigation,” said Heather Tasker, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, this week. “Sorry about that!”

Two sources with knowledge of the investigation said there was reason to believe it was ongoing or, at least, not terminated. Mr. Tacopina said he had several hours of conversation six months ago and, since then, “we’ve heard nothing from them.”

“To my knowledge, no one’s ever confirmed an investigation,” Mr. Tacopina said.

While Mr. Burkle, or the F.B.I., or both, dangle videotapes over his head, or over the New York Post, Mr. Stern now has a potential weapon of his own against the Post. Both, or one, or neither may have any damaging goods at all.

Mr. Tacopina disputed the analogy. “I don’t think Jared’s holding anything over anyone’s head.”

And what would Mr. Stern reveal in the book? Should Page Six honcho Richard Johnson be concerned?

Mr. Stern said, “I never saw any crimes being committed.

“No murders,” he qualified.

“Richard hasn’t done anything that bad,” said Mr. Stern’s friend Ian Spiegelman, himself a former Page Six employee. “Richard has done some stuff that is questionable. But there are extenuating circumstances to every time he’s done it.”

“Through all of my experiences there, he always advised me to do the right thing,” he said. Mr. Spiegelman was terminated in 2004 for writing pugnacious e-mails to a subject.

Employees of the New York Post are forbidden from talking to the press regarding the Stern incident. Ron Burkle has been asked by the F.B.I. not to comment or release information.

Mr. Stern and Mr. Spiegelman both believe that the institution of the New York gossip column has been undone, both by the changing times and by the Post’s cumulative reaction to employee misbehavior.

“A long time ago, there was a gentlemen’s agreement between Page Six and Rush and Molloy,” Mr. Stern said. When the Daily News gossips would refer to Richard Johnson, he was called Mr. X. The gossip rules have changed.

Gentlemanly behavior—as in “boys will be boys”—is now no longer the rule. When Mr. Stern ended up in trouble, Page Six “abandoned ship and left him to die,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “He’s been vilified; he’s been made poor. Ruth is working at a fucking factory.”

In the old days—just a few years ago—freebies were common. Mr. Stern described one colleague as “notorious for never paying for a meal.”

“You could have gone through life like that and have eaten a lot of crappy meals,” Mr. Stern said.

Mr. Stern said that “my linen closet is full of towels that say Evian and Nautica and fuck knows. I’ve got enough Kiehl’s to last 10 years. But big deal.” The first time he took a junket for the Post, he wrote a column about it for the paper, published in 2001, saying that freebies were worth about what one paid for them.

Page Six has been heavily remade since Mr. Stern departed. Two other Page Six freelancers were let go shortly after he was terminated; another left at the same time. Mr. Johnson courted more than a dozen prospective replacements before hiring Bill Hofmann from within the Post. Longtime Page Sixer Chris Wilson recently departed for Maxim.

Mr. Stern and Mr. Spiegelman both believe there’s little reason a young reporter would be attracted to work for Page Six. “The fact that they fired that poor bitch who hadn’t even started yet?” Mr. Spiegelman said. “And the bitch who got sanctioned? That’s bullshit. That’s how Page Six works.” The former was Sarah Polonsky, a former National Enquirer reporter, who Radar reported on Sept. 28 had received a free massage and had attempted to receive a free dinner. She was terminated promptly.

The latter was new Page Six hire Corynne Steindler, who was to have a sponsored party at Thom Bar.

It was both astonishing that the paper would reprimand Ms. Steindler for throwing a sponsored party and that Ms. Steindler was so out of touch with the paper’s emotional temperature that she had such an arrangement.

“It makes me sick,” said Mr. Spiegelman of the Post’s new uptightness.

“It was never really easy to find good people,” Mr. Stern said. “But for every Paula Froelich, there were a lot of people who were there for a short time. They couldn’t hack it. Art Buchwald’s daughter!”

Meanwhile, Mr. Stern is spending money to—possibly—make money. “I’m not aiding his financial predicament. But I’m certainly not bankrupting him,” Mr. Tacopina said. “I won’t get into who’s bankrolling his legal fees.”

“It’s not cheap,” said Mr. Stern. “But I’m not going to be poor forever.”

“I’m really, really hoping it’ll open up a great discussion about this whole idea of what are we doing in this society,” Mr. Gompertz said of the forthcoming book, “this feeding frenzy around scandal and celebrity that does dominate print and electronic media.”

“Jared knows everything,” Mr. Spiegelman said.

At the New York Post, “the only thing the writers and editors care about is the 2 percent who are in the Manhattan media,” Mr. Stern said. “Who are writing about us—and they’re reading it at a different level, and they’re under no illusion about people getting free massages and what goes in the column.”

“You have to step back from that world to realize how small it is,” he said.

At quarter past midnight, in the early hours of Oct. 17, Mr. Burkle was at Crobar, where his friend Sean (Diddy) Combs was throwing his first-ever Black Party.

Mr. Burkle was in the V.I.P. section, standing—and occasionally bopping his head to the beats—at a table of several young-model types. Abiding by the dress code, he wore a black polo shirt, black jeans and black sneakers. When asked if he preferred the Black Party to Mr. Combs’ earlier White Party, Mr. Burkle replied, “Oh, this is a totally different thing, but he throws great parties.” He declined to answer any other questions.

—with additional reporting by Spencer Morgan

Judge to Rule on Secret Sources Times Suit: Here We Go Again Whoever We Might Be

The New York Times’ ability to shield confidential sources is under yet another legal challenge. On Oct. 13, attorneys representing Dr. Steven Hatfill filed a motion in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., seeking to compel The Times to identify five sources used by op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.

The motion is part a defamation lawsuit against The Times resulting from Mr. Kristof’s coverage of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Dr. Hatfill was identified as a “person of interest” in the anthrax case by then–Attorney General John Ashcroft in August of 2002.

Earlier in 2002, Mr. Kristof had written a series of columns criticizing the pace of the anthrax investigation and describing—but not naming—a suspect, “Mr. Z.” After Mr. Ashcroft’s announcement, Mr. Kristof wrote that Mr. Z was Dr. Hatfill.

Mr. Kristof “essentially made the accusation that Dr. Hatfill was the anthrax murderer,” said Thomas Connolly, an attorney for Dr. Hatfill.

In a July 2006 deposition, Mr. Kristof declined to identify his sources by name, according to the plaintiff’s memorandum in the case. He provided only basic descriptions: an “anthrax expert,” two F.B.I. employees, a friend of Dr. Hatfill’s and a “scientist.”

“Dr. Hatfill’s ability to question Mr. Kristof’s sources directly is central to establishing the degree of fault The Times bears for publishing the false and defamatory columns about Dr. Hatfill,” reads the plaintiff’s memorandum.

Magistrate Judge Liam O’Grady presided over the 40-minute hearing and is expected to make a ruling this week, according to Mr. Connolly. Mr. O’Grady declined to comment.

The losing side will have 10 days to appeal. The lawsuit itself was dismissed after being filed in 2004, only to be reinstated by a federal appeals court. In March of 2006, the Supreme Court declined to hear The Times’ final appeal of that decision.

The Times is represented by the firm of Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz. Attorney David Schultz argued on The Times’ behalf during the hearing, but did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Kristof, who is not personally liable in the case, didn’t return calls for comment.

—Michael Calderone

Rachel Sklar was in an effusive mood, her rockin' bod swaying slightly with the off-genre Soho House soundtrack. She warmly greeted the overly well-dressed reporter Greg Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay brushed aside compliments on his tan, the result of long hours this summer spent on the fun-loving eastern side of Ocean Beach. Remy Stern rolled his eyes roofdeck-ward almost imperceptibly as Jessica Coen made a crack about the cokey bathrooms of Soho House.

They were all trapped in the so-called "library" room, which contains no books. It was a room too small to contain such egos.

Early enough, Mr. Young's ploy came to fruition. He, and his co-hosts, had invited both Ian Spiegelman and Doug Dechert. The two feuding gentlemen had clearly been in training for this party: both had obviously been consuming massive amounts of carbohydrates in preparation for this moment.

Spencer Morgan in The New York Observer, February 20, 2006:

And so the boys, at last, shoved each other a wee bit. One question remains: How did Jared Paul Stern, in town just for the night and looking natty, not get any ink out of this party yet?