Michael Moore recounts his memories of Gore Vidal.

Longtime friends, colleagues and admirers of Gore Vidal gathered in the currently patriotically decorated Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre—where Mr. Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is playing through September 9—on Thursday afternoon to pay their respects to the recently departed writer. The mood was serious yet not solemn as many who were likely humbled to be counted among Mr. Vidal’s contemporaries took the stage to recount memories and share anecdotes from their own experiences with the man.

Reading selections from his own eulogy for Mr. Vidal and praising his friend’s great wit, Dick Cavett recounted many of Mr. Vidal’s most celebrated one-liners. His favorite, he told the audience: “Success is not enough. One’s friends must fail.”

“Whenever my friend succeeds, I die a little,” was another Vidal aphorism recalled to much laughter, and, reading a line from a message prepared by David Mamet for the memorial, Liz Smith decreed Mr. Vidal “smart enough to see through the self-interest of everyone except himself.” Yet none of this seemed to remotely deter the hordes of successful friends who seemed to be endlessly seeking his advice.

“In 2003, when I determined that I would run for president, Gore was my first call,” explained Dennis Kucinich. “I said, ‘Gore, I’m going to run for president, and I’d like your advice.’ Ever mindful of the great death of the American political state, he said, instantly, ‘You’ve got to do something about your hair.’”

Laughing good-naturedly along with the audience, Mr. Kucinich reenacted the conversation. “Gore, what, then, do you suggest?” he inquired. “A guillotine,” was Mr. Vidal’s response.

Michael Moore also shared some advice Mr. Vidal gave him over lunch in 2003. His 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine had been nominated for an Oscar, and Mr. Vidal wanted to know what Mr. Moore would say in his speech if he won.

“Finally, I said, ‘Listen, Gore, I think all I’m going to do is thank my agent and my stylist and get the hell out of there,” Mr. Moore said, drawing predictable laughs from the audience at the mention of a stylist. “He said, ‘No, no, you must quote Jefferson. He’s never been quoted at the Oscars."

“I thought he was going to give me a bit Jefferson line,” Mr. Moore continued. “And he begins, and he doesn’t end until four or five minutes later, just reciting one continuous Jefferson quote from memory, and he finished this as if I could remember it. And I just looked at him and said ‘If I do win, will you go up and accept it?’ He seemed to like that idea.”

Susan Sarandon took the stage to pass on “one pearl of parenting wisdom” Mr. Vidal had shared with her shortly after the birth of her first child. “I was struggling to be the best mother, and he told me, ‘Darling, it’s inevitable that you give your children neuroses, just make sure they’re productive ones,’” she recounted.

In her own tribute to Mr. Vidal, Elizabeth Ashley referred to a dictionary, explaining, “As many of you may know, after any conversation with Gore a lot of us have to go to the dictionary.” She read aloud the definition of “heretic,” and then asked the audience, “Remind you of anyone?”

“I didn’t meet Gore until the ’70s,” she told the audience, explaining that Tennessee Williams dragged her to the Carlyle to meet the man. “Now, Tennessee and I were in no condition to even be in public, let alone at the Carlyle,” she informed the crowd, laughing and explaining that when they arrived, Mr. Vidal “jumped to his feet, embraced Tennessee and kissed him full on the mouth, to the somewhat dropped-jaw constellation of patrons at the Carlyle in 1974."

“Tennessee and Gore talked for hours, and I just sat and drank,” Ms. Ashley remembered. “When we finally got in a cab, I said to Tennessee, ‘I just feel so stupid,’ and he said, ‘Oh darling, never mind, he’s just an old smarty-pants.’”

Ms. Ashley reached down to the ground to pull out a shot glass. “So here’s to you, old smarty-pants,” she said, raising the glass to the portrait of Mr. Vidal that adorned the stage. “We’re gonna miss the hell outta you.”

While news of Nora Ephron's supposed death hasn't trickled out at all, Liz Smith seemingly eulogized the screenwriter and director in a post on wowOwow. "I won’t say, “Rest in peace, Nora,'" writes Ms. Smith. "I will just ask “What the hell will we do without you?'"

Beloved writer of books like Heartburn and films like When Harry Met Sally..., the 71-year-old Ms. Ephron had a late-career renaissance wheun she directed the 2009 hit Julie and Julia. Ms. Ephron's representatives have issued a blanket no-comment policy on Ms. Smith's post.

UPDATE, 5:46pm: Liz Smith is said to have pulled the piece from wowOwow, though we are still able to access it; the language in the piece is consistently past-tense regarding Ms. Ephron's traits, but never explicitly states she has died. A Times publishing reporter has Tweeted that Ms. Ephron is alive, per Knopf, her publisher.

UPDATE, 6:08pm: TMZ reports that Ms. Ephron is gravely ill, though not dead. The Atlantic Wire states that this was a case of premature publication of the obituary, prepared in advance per media custom.

UPDATE, 7:31pm: Liz Smith has emailed The Observer: "Nora Ephron is not [confirmed] dead. We have killed all pre released material & corrected. One can only say she is deathly ill in New York Hospital.  I am broken-hearted over this but sorry if I misled anyone inadvertently. I did not even know Nora was ill." Per The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Smith had been informed by Jacob Bernstein, Ms. Ephron's son, that the family was planning a funeral.

Joni Mitchell reacts to news of Taylor Swift playing her in film (Getty Images)

This is why you don't get rid of gossip royalty! The New York Post must be hitting itself on the head for missing this scoop, which its former columnist/icon Liz Smith gave instead to New York Social Diary: the one and only Joni Mitchell might be performing a private concert in L.A. for the first time in years.

According to Ms. Smith's post on David Patrick Columbia's site,
David Geffen is trying to get the songbird to perform at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. "Those in the know and/or of a certain age, recall that Joni’s celebrated “Free Man in Paris” song was written with Geffen in mind," writes the grand dame of snooping.

She continues:

Another old pal of Joni’s Herbie Hancock, is also supposedly encouraging this venture, which could include some of the musicians who worked with Joni back in the day. If all that is planned and hoped for comes about, there will be a concert highlight sure to send Mitchell’s fans into delirium — a track by track recreation of the legendary Court and Spark album, which spawned such hits as “Help Me (I Think I’m Falling”) and “Raised on Robbery.”

Coincidentally (or not), this news breaks on the same day that it's announced that Taylor Swift has been sniffing around a bio-doc of the folk singer, Girls Like Us.

Gossip columnist Liz Smith made her way through the dining room of the Monkey Bar on Monday afternoon, where Harvey Weinstein, Diane von Furstenberg and George Stevens, Jr. were hosting a promotional lunch on behalf of The Artist—the black-and-white silent movie that Mr. Weinstein is gently, persuasively shepherding toward an Academy Award for Best Picture—and surveyed the scene, perched side-saddle in a red leather booth. Ms. Smith, who is supposedly in her eighties, looked a few decades younger in a black leather jacket with white stitching from Carlisle.

She said she’d yet to see the film, an endearingly meta mash-note to Golden Age Hollywood, but admitted that her first-ever movie experience was also a silent picture. “Frozen Justice was the name of it, and it starred Lenore Ulric as a half-white, half-Eskimo girl who kept rushing between the igloos and the lights of Nome,” she noted with the astonishing recall of someone who  has written a best-selling memoir (Natural Blonde).

Ms. Smith was just four when she saw the movie, and growing up in Fort Worth, where the Tivoli Theater chain had yet to purchase the requisite equipment for talking pictures. “The movies were the ultimate babysitter, so the maid took me to see it, and I loved it, except when the dogs and the sled fell into a crack in the ice, and I started crying.”

You may have heard there’s a dog in The Artist, too, a Jack Russell terrier named Uggie, who has been ferociously guarding the spotlight like a juicy cut of brisket since his Cannes debut. It’s a task made easier by the fact that his costars, while highly talented, are, you know, from France—as the Coneheads used to say. Actually, Jean Dujardin is; Bérénice Bejo is Argentine. Both attended the luncheon, which was hosted by Dom Pérignon and featured a different vintage (’03, ’00, and ’96) with each course. Director Michel Hazanavicius also showed, as did half the cast of The Book of Mormon and an impressively ecumenical sitcom triumverate: Candice Bergen (Murphy Brown, CBS), Carol Kane (Taxi, ABC), and Dan Hedaya (Cheers, NBC).

Ms. von Furstenberg floated over.

“Well, hello beauty,” Ms. Smith said. “How’s my boyfriend? I sent him a picture of himself with hair.”

“Barry with hair?” replied the designer, who is married to mogul Barry Diller. “That must be a very old picture!”

“I said, ‘You see? You still look better than ever.’”

“I’ve known him 37 years. I’ve never seen him with hair.”

Ms. Smith hedged. “This wasn’t total hair, it was on the sides.”

Ms. von Furstenberg leaned in close. “I told him yesterday,” she said, “‘I’m hosting this event, do you want to come,’ and he said, Maybe. Is the dog coming?’”

“I had never encountered hostility on that level—hostility so organized. It was daunting, it put a dent in me,” the 56-year-old writer told the Daily Transom during an interview at his apartment overlooking Seventh Avenue near Central Park.

Lawyers for socialite and philanthropist Annette de la Renta, a museum board member, threatened to take legal action against Mr. Gross last month over how she is portrayed in the book.

Ms. de la Renta, like almost everyone at the Met, had refused interview requests for the book. (A representative for Ms. de la Renta also declined comment for this article.)

Mr. Gross described his reporting as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” even after two decades of writing about the sordid lives of New York’s high society.

“I’ve gotten homicidal looks from [honorary Met trustee] Anna Wintour, from socialites who are friends of Annette de la Renta’s,” he said.

Mr. Gross understands the dirty looks, but not the curious lack of coverage surrounding his supposed blockbuster.

Gossip columnist Liz Smith, who described his portrayal of Ms. de la Renta as “beyond the pale,” had predicted the book would create “a firestorm of controversy.”

Not so much.

“I thought this book was pretty good,” Mr. Gross told the Daily Transom. “My publisher reacted to it as if it were pretty good. The pre-publication reviews all said it was great. And then, all of a sudden, it was as if it fell off a cliff.”

The quiet could be from any number of factors, but Mr. Gross suspected a particular set of galleys that may have escaped the publisher’s embargo and wound up in the hands of the Met’s powerful trustees. “I know that people like that throw their weight around,” he said. “The silence began right around when that set of galleys jumped the fence. We know Mrs. de la Renta got galleys and not a finished book because the page numbers in the letter [from her attorneys] were in reference to the page numbers in the galleys, not the finished book.”

Mr. Gross said he had heard at least one story of a "supposedly fearless editor" scared off by the threat of a lawsuit. “Once I realized what was going on, I was, as the Brits say, gobsmacked,” he said. “It was like someone just punched me in the face, and I was like, ‘Whoa! That’s what’s happening! Someone just punched me in the face!’ And it actually, curiously, made me feel a lot better. The idea that there was someone out there who wanted to squish my book like a bug—or some group of someones out there who want to squish this book like a bug—curiously made me feel better because now I knew what I was up against.”

For its part, the Met seems to be relishing the relative calm. “You’re the first person to have cared enough to ask for it,” volunteered museum spokesman Harold Holzer, when the Daily Transom called for a statement. The 140-year-old institution formally responded, “A so-called ‘history’ of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that ignores its mission, and blurs the distinction between gossip and fact, is not only insensitive but highly misleading.” (The Met declined to comment on Mr. Gross's specific allegations.)

Mr. Gross said he is prepared to vigorously defend his book, and his style.  “It sometimes shocks me that people don’t understand just how much effect highly visible and powerful people have on the culture in general,” he said, “and that’s why I write the kinds of books I write.”

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.

And sometimes, it even rhymes.

This week's New York features a cover package called My First New York, that starts with a curtain-raising essay by Adam Sternbergh about his first memories of New York ("murder, mayhem, killer clowns, and subway vampires. I’d never been to New York—I was just a little kid at the time—but that’s how the city existed in my mind...") and shorter real-life tales of the city from bold-faced names like Jann Wenner and Chloë Sevigny.

In September 2000, The New York Times Magazine, which at the time was edited by Mr. Moss, offered a cover package called "My First Year in New York," that started with a curtain-raising essay by Kurt Andersen about his first memories of New York ("In retrospect, my childhood in Omaha, a half-mile from a cornfield, looks like a New York 101 distance-learning experiment Every week on TV during the '60s, I watched a couple of movies from the 1930's or 40's, almost all of them glorifications of this city...") and shorter real-life tales of the city from bold-faced names like Liz Smith and Cecily Brown.

Also of note: both magazines pay tribute to model-turned-basic cable food reality competition hostess Padma Lakshmi, who seems to be a sort of lodestone for the city.

In the current New York, she shares the first person tale of coming to New York at 4-years-old in 1974: "I remember landing, and seeing all the big buildings, and being super-excited about this new adventure..."

In The Times Magazine, Ms. Lakshmi popped up in a profile of Salman Rushdie by former Observer contributor D.T. Max headlined The Concrete Beneath His Feet: "I bring up Padma Lakshmi, the Madras-born model he met last August at the inaugural party for Talk magazine. 'Things are very good as far as Padma and I are concerned,' he says. 'We're both happy.'"

Mr. Ashlock has been working since the fall of 2006 at a sleepy boutique literary agency on 96th and Madison, a firm run by an 87-year-old society dame named Marianne Strong, who once wrote a gossip column for The New York World Telegram-Sun and made her name in publishing during the ’70s and ‘80s selling books about the Bouviers and the Kennedys. The arrangement is understandably puzzling to Mr. Ashlock’s parents, a conservative fundamentalist preacher and a “loyal, kind, sweet” mother who read out loud to her children the stories of Maupassant and the essays of Montaigne.

This week, Mr. Ashlock is in the process of getting the word out to editors and publishers all over town that, even though he has only sold about a dozen books in his short agenting career, he is leaving Marianne Strong and opening up his own shop, Moveable Type Literary Group.

This is the third winter Mr. Ashlock has spent in New York. Over Christmas in Jonesboro, his grandfather asked him if he meant to stay. He told him that he did. “He said, ‘you know, I really thought you’d get rolled over, and that you’d come back,’” Mr. Ashlock said. “And I always felt that from him. I always felt like he thought I was just kind of messing around. But it was interesting to hear him say it to my face.”

Mr. Ashlock, whose brown eyes and short, neatly parted hair make him look even younger than he is, knows that there are people in publishing who regard him with that same sort of skepticism. “Some editors still won’t take my calls,” Mr. Ashlock said with a laugh.

He admits it’s a funny time to be starting an agency, considering publishers are cutting staff, shrinking their lists and by most accounts, paying less money for books.

“There is a general sense of gloom—like a palpable sense of gloom,” Mr. Ashlock said. “Maybe I’m just young enough to not care. It’s like the stock market—the people who are just retiring are freaking out, but the people who have 30 years to go, they know it’s gonna be O.K. It’s all long term, and I guess maybe part of it for me is, I’m fresh enough not to be burdened by the past.”

Mr. Ashlock’s first projects as an agent came by way of another, apparently less-driven young man who left Marianne Strong not long after Mr. Ashlock got there. A few of the books the guy left behind—books he had tried and failed to sell—seemed to their inheritor to have a lot of commercial potential, and sure enough, Mr. Ashlock quickly succeeded in placing one—a book of photographs by Roger Moenks called Inheriting Beauty, which consisted of portraits of “beautiful, successful young heiresses around the world”—with a respectable publishing house for a respectable sum of money.

“It was sheer luck, because I didn’t know what I was doing, but it was a huge confidence boost,” Mr. Ashlock said of that first sale. “So I spent the summer really going after people, in a very undeserved fit of confidence, like, I can do this thing. And obviously I got turned down left and right.”

His income was, at the time, unserious, composed as it was of the minimal salary Ms. Strong paid him and the commission he earned on anything he sold. But Mr. Ashlock, who was simultaneously working toward a Ph.D. in American literature at Fordham, earned a little extra on the side assisting with the publication of a scholarly journal about James Joyce, and freelancing at the Oxford University Press, where he was assistant-editing a 10-volume history of the book.

Mr. Ashlock’s wife, meanwhile, got a well-paying job teaching at a charter school in Brooklyn, which is part of what’s allowing her husband and his two business partners, both of whom he worked with at Marianne Strong, to pay for Moveable Type’s Tribeca headquarters. They haven’t borrowed a dime.
As it happened, it was because of his wife that Mr. Ashlock ended up in New York when he did; his original plan, after graduating from Harding College in Arkansas and attending grad school for religion in Memphis, was to go to the University of Illinois to study literature. Ms. Ashlock nixed that idea out of a desire to be in a city, though, so Fordham it was. And then, agenting.

MR. ASHLOCK makes a delightful first impression, a characteristic that should certainly give him some ballast in his endeavors with Moveable Type. Ms. Strong took note of this right away, and was bowled over by Mr. Ashlock’s gentlemanly demeanor when he responded to an ad on Craigslist and came in for an interview. “My common sense dictated it, I guess,” Ms. Strong said Monday. “He’s such a decent person, and he has such wonderful manners. He’s a very elegant person.”

Ms. Strong helped Mr. Ashlock find his bearings in the city, introducing him to her “repertoire of friends and business associates,” among them gossip reporters like her friends Richard Johnson and Liz Smith. “I was an editor on the World Telegram, so I do have a lot of press contacts myself,” Ms. Strong said. “I was a known quantity.”

Mr. Ashlock loved the work right away, and when it came time to decide whether or not he would stay at Fordham to write a dissertation (his planned topic: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and the New York School), he realized he wanted to pursue agenting full time. 

Before long, it became clear to Mr. Ashlock that although Ms. Strong took him to plenty of cocktail parties and treated him regularly to lunch at the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd, her name and her agency could only take him so far. Too often, he found himself pursuing authors and pitching editors too young to know or care about Ms. Strong’s reputation in old New York society—and when he did succeed in nabbing a client or selling a book, he knew it was because of him, not his affiliation.

So he spent his first year or so as an agent chasing small-time celebrities (like the “D.C. Madam,” before she committed suicide) and experts on various topics whom he heard interviewed on the news (like FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, before the whole country discovered him). After briefly considering the possibility of leaving Ms. Strong for another job in publishing—he was turned down for assistant positions at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Hyperion—Mr. Ashlock resolved to set out on his own.

First stop, the Hamptons, where he spent almost every weekend last summer going to parties and looking obsessively for clients.

“I was like, ‘I need to figure out what I’m doing with my life. And if I’m gonna do this, I need to do it now and I gotta do it as hard as I can and as fast as I can,’” Mr. Ashlock said. “So, most people went to the Hamptons to relax, and I went there to sign them up. Which I think worked for everybody, in a way.”

At first, he said, he felt a bit like an alien. On one occasion, he ran into a journalist he’d met a few times in the city, and could tell from his face that he was visibly surprised to see him there.

“I’d had encounters with him before, but it was with Marianne Strong,” Mr. Ashlock said, pausing as if to picture himself. “I looked like a flack. I could tell he was like, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Nevertheless, the young out-of-towner found that plenty of people were willing to help him. Something about “showing the Southern guy around the Hamptons” appealed to them, apparently, and Mr. Ashlock was just fine with that.

“Nobody in the Hamptons ever feels comfortable with their insider status,” he said. “I think if you have an outsider on your arm, it sort of makes it easier. I was always attached to great people, and I was only ever going to a party because I was with somebody who would introduce me to people and show me around. I very quickly found that it kind of all made sense.”

Sitting at the Old Town, he told a couple of fish stories.

“I was on a sailboat in Sag Harbor, and when they docked and I got out, I met a guy who is doing a biography of Billy Joel,” Mr. Ashlock said. “Because he has—well, he lives next to Billy Joel and he goes sailing with Billy Joel. So he’s doing this intimate portrait of the man, the sailor, the islander.”

Another time, he said, he was at a wine tasting at Wolffer Estates, the big vineyard in Southampton, and met local food writer Sylvia Lehrer.

“She’s been out there for two decades writing for [Hampton’s mainstay] Dan’s Papers,” Mr. Ashlock said. “And she had a great cookbook called The Hamptons Table, and it’s beautiful and it’s brilliant and it’s authentic and it’s tied to the land. And it has a foreword by Alan Alda!”

A lot of his clients, he said, he met at Bookhampton, an independent shop founded 40 years ago in Southampton by agent Nat Sobel. “That was a great place to meet people,” Mr. Ashlock said. “After dinner I’d pop in, and I think that was the first time I had a serious talk with Sheri De Borchgrave, who’s a wine, food, and travel columnist. I now have a great novel by her on my plate for February and March.”

Most of his work that summer was done at parties.

“You show up at the right party in the Hamptons, and your credibility comes with you,” Mr. Ashlock explained. “I know that sounds really—I mean, that’s not me. I’m from Memphis. I’m not a Northeastern social game player. But … I just tried to ask everyone I knew to invite me to every party they could get me into. You show up at the right party and meet the right person and you can sign the New York Times writer or the Bravo personality or NBC pundit.”

BY THE END of the summer, Mr. Ashlock and his partners in the new firm—Meredith Dawson and D.C.-based Craig Kayser—had amassed a formidable if predominently commercial client list that includes several editors from Food and Wine, a handful of Time Out New York writers, Alex and Simon from Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City and Pulitzer nominee Sandra Hochman. Since then they have been preparing the necessary paperwork, lining up lawyers and accountants, and fine-tuning the pitch they’re making to editors as they go out with their first submissions.

“We have arrived, as Harold Bloom would say, belatedly,” reads the opening of the informational packet they’re sending out. “The scene is established, the paradigms rigid, the machine stubborn and aging. … We aim, with many of our friends and colleagues, to confront the crisis of the moment, and from the upheaval to design and shape a future.”

The main thing Mr. Ashlock emphasizes when talking about his business plan is that he’s focused on the long term. When people ask him how Moveable Type will make room for itself in what is already a crowded market, he describes a four-step management plan based on contracts with outside publicity firms, speaker bureaus and career counselors that will ensure that the agency’s clients have support regardless of what the publishers they sign with can offer them.

Still, Mr. Ashlock acknowledges that Moveable Type—not to be confused with the software company—faces an uphill battle. And yet,  he sees no other option.

“I’ve had a couple of people say, ‘You should wait,’” he said. “But there are no jobs. Yes, there’s an occasional posting on [industry Web portal] Publishers Marketplace, but the field is flooded. I can’t stay with Marianne, right? So I have to go. But where am I gonna go? There are no jobs, so it’s either stay put and be frustrated and make no money, or launch myself out there and compete against people who have industry experience that is far beyond what I could boast. And so I feel like I either do it on my own, or I go do something else. And I don’t want to go do anything else.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Ms. Norville, who met Ms. Smith during her first stint at CBS, said there was no record of the Vice Presidential candidate ever giving something to charity. "It's just one of the many things we don't know about her," she said. "Actually, her tax papers revealed her and her husband gave a small amount to charity, and their income-" she looked around the room-"is probably different from anyone else's in this room, so it would be much smaller. But it could be significant for her family."

She added: "People ask about Sarah Palin's clothes. Excuse my French, I don't give a rat's you-know-what about her clothes. I care about America. What are they going to do with my health care?" she said. "My kids make fun of me because I buy 48 rolls of toilet paper. I love the feeling of never being without. And I love to clean my closets."

"Your children must be grown by now!" Ms. Smith interjected. "I remember seeing them way back."

After Ms. Norville walked away, Ms. Smith gestured to the Daily Transom. "Slide over here so I can hear you." Nearby a sax was being played nearby along a grand piano. Former ad man Peter Rogers, who appeared to have been born in a tux, came over and offered to get her a glass of wine. Liz pulled his head to hers and sang, "He Vas my Boyfriend." Then they did an adorable duet.

The Daily Transom wanted to know the gentleman's occupation. "Nothing," he said and laughed.

"Oh, Peter's independently wealthy and he paints wonderful portraits," said Ms. Smith. "He used to be an ad man in the '60s." What did he think of Mad Men? "I don't like it," said Mr. Rogers. "I had enough of it back then, and anyway it was nothing like that. I only did luxury."

"Don't listen to him, what does he know?" said Ms. Smith. "I love the show."

Then the Daily Transom moved on to our mutual stock in trade: gossip. "What gossip?" asked Ms. Smith. "There is none anymore. There hasn't been a good gossip story in years. It's all politics now." She continued: "I don't think that really paid off for me," she said, referring to the New York Post, where her column runs. "They don't appreciate me." What of her colleague, Cindy Adams? "We're too old to have rivals, and she's terribly funny." She repeated "terribly funny." Then she said she was tired of using emails because of all the confusion over pronouns. "Now I just call people and say ‘what do you mean?'"

Ms. Bart served as the "social secretary"—aka glorified party planner—to First Lady Nancy Reagan from 1983 to 1985. Richard Burt, Ms. Burt's husband, was the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1985 to 1989 and continues to be a senior adviser at Kissinger McLarty Associates. Sometimes referred to as a Republican socialite (or "one of the chicest women in Washington," as Ms. Smith described her), Ms. Burt is also giving style tips to first lady hopeful Cindy McCain. 

Unlike Michelle Obama--who has worn designers ranging from Thakoon Panichgul to H&M--Ms. Palin and Mrs. McCain have shied away from discussing their wardrobes. And in the case of Ms. Palin in particular, a $2500 Valentino jacket she wore to the convention received the kind of attention that undermined her all-American, hockey mom image.

Still, Ms. Smith notes that the vice-presidential candidate is looking better and better these days. 

"She has makeup sculpting her face for photo advantage, including the subtle lighter foundation stripe down her nose that brings out the cheekbones and narrows the nose. Her suits accentuate her slim waist and hips," she writes. "And she carries no handbag, just like Hillary Clinton, Carla Bruni, Anna Wintour--we seldom see these women with pocketbooks, save for evening dress."

When The Washington Post interviewed Ms. Burt in 1997 about inauguration fashion, she was already well-acquainted with the risks of making candidates or their wives appear too glamorous. 

"For the first Reagan inaugural—and there's a lot more excitement associated with the first—there was a general feeling of we've had it with the down-home style of the Georgia Democrat, and we're going to return to a more glamorous, refined atmosphere. . . .No more peanuts in bowls," Ms. Burt told the paper. "It was reflected in the inaugural because some events were white tie, and it carried over with the Reagan administration."

But Ms. Burt had learned a lesson when time came for the Reagans’ second inauguration. 

"It was a conscious decision to make it black tie," Ms. Burt said at the time. "People had attacked Nancy Reagan in the first term for the china and the tablecloths and things. She was being criticized for being too glamorous, and people were focusing on things that can be presented as frivolous... Every first lady wants to have it right," Ms. Burt. "It sets a tone for herself and for the country and for what the country can expect."