What is this?

Adding to this confusion is the strange hodge-podge of articles that are thrown into the magazine helmed by Jay Fielden. At times, the entirety of T&C is seemingly comprised of an island of misfit articles; rejects from other Hearst publications for one reason or another. Since Town & Country still needs to keep up the pretense of being a monthly glossy in order to keep the brand alive (the Wedding and Homes editions are still lucrative, and let's not forget that it's the oldest magazine in America!) we end up with a subscription that puts Greta Gerwig and Audrey Plaza on the cover one month, and summer camp fun the next.

Unfortunately, Town & Country is not online for us to link to articles, so here are this month's articles featured in the curiously oddball society magazine, in no particular order:

1. Cover story about how summer camps are making a comeback. (Along with skirts, we assume.)

2. Emily Gould discussing the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey...sort of. She begins by talking about how the E.L. James' bestseller fits into her concept of Sexy Books (as opposed for Erotica or Romance novels which Ms. Gould knows about since she used to write back covers for Harlequin's Red Dress Ink Imprint, FYI), and concludes with an idea stolen from an SNL sketch about how moms only want to read the book on a Kindle. (pg. 48)

3. An advertorial spread on the art of packing, photographed by Tom Schierlitz. (pg. 113-121)

4. Hamptons' book review (pg. 36-38)

5. Michael Lindsay-Hogg's cardboard cutouts of Wes Anderson characters. (pg. 40-41)

6. A tribute to the club sandwich (pg. 122-123)

7. An investigative report on Polo Club founder John Goodman, who recently adopted his girlfriend. (pg. 125-131)

8. Two articles about skin purity in the Beauty section, including an essay by 32-year-old Florence Kane on why it was necessary (and perhaps frugal) to spend $1,000 on a White Caviar facial to get rid of "sunspots." (Otherwise known as freckles.) The end result? "Hard to say for sure if those brown spots are fading." (pg. 60-65)

9. Henry Alfodrs etiquette guide to having poor friends. Tips on "Bridging the gap" include bonding over truffle oil, salmon roe, and Prosecco.
10. Cats that live in hotels. (pg. 34)

Mr. Fielden and Mr. Benson

“This isn’t my real work,” photojournalist Harry Benson told Off the Record, gesturing at a wall of his photographs.

He was surrounded by intimate candids of bold-face names, taken over the course of his 40-year career at magazines like Life and Vanity Fair. All together they tell a colorful history of New York society, but he’d rather be known for his photographs of U.S. presidents.

“Every one since Eisenhower,” he said.

Even his lesser work was enough to draw a crowd to Hearst Tower Thursday, where, despite freezing rain and about a hundred other holiday parties occurring across the city, Mr. Benson was toasted by former subjects, like Muffie Potter Aston, members of the Hearst family, such as Gillian Hearst-Shaw and Anne Hearst, and Jay McInerney, who qualifies as both. (He also wrote the book’s introduction.)

The tower’s mezzanine had been converted into a private exhibition of photographs from Mr. Benson’s forthcoming tome, New York, New York, hosted by Town & Country editor in chief Jay Fielden. The book’s text was written by Quest and Q magazine society writer Hilary Geary Ross, who said deciding which photographs to include had been a highly daunting process.

“There are too many good characters in New York,” she said. (She and her husband, the leveraged buyout billionaire Wilbur Ross, did end up making the cut.)

Mr. Ross added that her decision process had been to lay out all the large prints in contention across their penthouse floor.

“All across multiple rooms,” he said.

Mario Buatta, the “Prince of Chintz” who designed the Ross’s Upper East Side abode, approached us, eager to share one of his own snapshots. In his wallet he had a blurry, black and white ink-jet printout of a young boy, no older than 10, smoking a cigarette.

“I was a precocious child,” Mr. Buatta said.

Host Mr. Fielden’s Town & Country editor’s portrait was taken by Mr. Benson, and  featured prominently  in the exhibit, just above a photo of Mayor Bloomberg riding the subway.

We found the former Men’s Vogue editor by the bar, dressed in a tidy checked suit a shade not far off from his coppery hair. He was mired in polite conversation with a former freelancer, Warren Kolbacker, who explained that he moonlights as an oyster farmer.

“The gentleman farmer,” Mr. Fielden remarked, “that’s very T&C.”

Another self-styled man of the land, the British rancher/hotelier Nicholas Gold, lurked nearby, with a Stetson on his head and a publicist on his arm.

Off the Record extricated Mr. Fielden from his supplicants long enough to ask what it was like to be photographed by Mr. Benson.

“I felt a little sheepish about it,” he admitted, adding that he had been put at ease by Mr. Benson and his low-maintenance process.

“He didn’t like it at first, he didn’t even want to use it,” Mr. Benson told Off the Record of Mr. Fielden’s portrait. “But then his wife tells him that it’s his best photograph, he looks natural.”

Mr. Benson said the feeling commonly afflicts the subjects of photographs, including him.

“You look stupid until a year later, when you think, ‘Not bad. What was I complaining about?’”

Hannah Bronfman, Bard alumna

Before Matt Taibbi was a heroin-addicted, horse semen-throwing expatriate editor of Moscow's eXile (and way before he was a coffee-throwing, Vampire Squid-coining, National Magazine Award-winning journalist) he was just a mopey kid at mopey kid-paradise Bard college. Although he did always have a thing for the Russians.

In the September issue of the new, Jay Fielden-edited Town & Country, Mr. Taibbi reflects on his undergraduate years in the hopes of answering the question, "Is Bard the New Brown?"

" It’s a tender piece for Matt, I would say. I think we’ve found his softer side," Mr. Fielden told WWD's Amy Wicks before it was published.

The piece comes to no definitive conclusion about the status of limousine liberal schools, but it does reveal a mushier, still-forming Mr. Taibbi.

"Back then, when I wasn’t plunging into deep bouts of terror/depression about what I was going to do with my life, I was taking long walks through the campus and this outlying wilderness. I knew by heart all the trails that cross the incredible rambling waterfall behind the alabaster-white Blithewood Mansion, all the winding and muddy paths down to the river (at certain times of year there are spots down there where you will always find deer), all the best trees to sit under while I read the books by Tolstoy and Gogol and Chekhov that were my escape at that time."

Obsessed with Russian literature, Mr. Taibbi was admitted to an exchange program, only to back out mid-agoraphobic breakdown. An influential professor forced him to go.

"So I went, and that trip changed my life. I would end up living in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia for 10 years and becoming not a novelist but a journalist, describing a society in total, violent upheaval, a place that couldn’t possibly have been more different from the relative serenity and peace of Bard College. But what carried me through that experience was a fascination with the country and its people that began in my Bard days and was nurtured by my teachers there."

Journalism is glad for it! The thing is, Bard has gone really soft since Mr. Taibbi's time there. It got state of the art labs, a Frank Gehry building, and incoming classes of celebrity-born or wealthy international students. Alumni stopped being ashamed to come back. Angst dissipated.

After documenting all of the above, what says our generation's Hunter S. Thompson?

"I don’t know how I feel about this. Bard was a huge part of my life. Its unique and hauntingly odd atmosphere is still with me all the time, and I know many of my classmates feel the same way—they have an emotional connection to this place, which seemed cut off from the normal world and made just for us not-yet-normal kids. It was a strange little hidden paradise that is now no longer hidden and perhaps also not all that strange anymore. But that might not be such a bad thing after all."

Any other ending would be a disservice to the model-gorgeous Bardians and bold faced alumni the piece features. But Mr. Taibbi, who sold a new book "crime, finance, and the new class divide," to Spiegel & Grau earlier this month, told The Observer he truly thinks shiny, smiling students are at least a mixed blessing.

“As interesting and as idiosyncratic as it was back in the day, most of us, if we had the chance would have preferred to be happy, motivated, successful, going-somewhere kids,” Mr. Taibbi said. But then would he have been the aggro journo we know and love?

Mr. Taibbi will resume throwing bombs, this time at the SEC, in the next issue of Rolling Stone.

Ina Garten and Frank Newbold (Patrick McMullan)

The well-fed friends of Ina Garten convened in the Hamptons on Saturday for a "Barefoot Under The Stars" fundraiser for the conservationist Group for the East End. (Nevermind that it was more like "In Heels Under A White Tent Indistinguishable From The Miserable Cloud Cover".) Among them were the Ina Industrial Complex, i.e. power couple Stephen Drucker and Frank Newbold.

Ms. Garten wrote a column for House Beautiful when Mr. Drucker was editor-in-chief,  as well as one for Martha Stewart Living during his tenure there. Martha Stewart is one of Ms. Garten's mentors and Mr. Newbold is Ms. Garten's business partner. When Mr. Drucker left Town & Country after editing it for a brief nine months, some speculated that his tangled affiliation with the Barefoot Contessa was to blame.

Now that her favorite editor's a free agent, The Observer asked Ms. Garten if she was planning on collaborating with Mr. Drucker.

"We always do!" she said, "I admire him and I trust his advice so much. I don't do anything in media without checking with him."

Ms. Garten said she had no immediate plans in media, but that she's working on figuring out social media.

"I really want to take the time to understand it and do that," she said.

(Her twitter satirist has a handle on it.)

Ms. Garten's Hamptons bona fides need no defense, but it turns out she's a legitimate environmentalist, too. Did you know that "[in] 1978, Ina Garten found herself working in the White House on nuclear energy policy and thinking, 'There's got to be more to life than this!'?"

Nicole Miller, Ina Garten, Alec Baldwin (Patrick McMullan)

Also-serious environmentalist Alec Baldwin was there too, sporting long hair and a white beard. It might have been for a role, but it also fits his Hamptons persona. A couple years back he told the New Yorker:

“In East Hampton, I’m a nudist and I eat meat,” Baldwin [said]. “I shoot deer with a bow and arrow. I smoke the deer meat and eat it every morning with my eggs and toast. I am a homosexual. I listen to rock music, loud.”

Perhaps we should get used to this side of Mr. Baldwin. He told Interview he'd become a permanent Hamptons resident in order to avoid NYC income taxes.

Publishing is a bit more nuanced.

As a result, Hearst’s takeover of Hachette Filipacchi Media is going to lead to some awkward elevator run-ins. Take, for instance, the expected reunion between Marie Claire fashion director Nina Garcia and her former colleagues at Elle. She was fired by the magazine amid rumors of an iffy endorsement deal but landed safely at the rival mag. The move allowed her to maintain her more visible gig as a judge on Project Runway, which also made the switch from Elle to Marie Claire.

Things might get equally uncomfortable for Kevin Martinez, who defected from Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar to become Elle’s publisher a little over a year ago. Mr. Martinez has been bumped down the ladder to associate publisher to make way for Kevin O’Malley, the former publisher of Esquire, now publisher and chief revenue officer of Elle. Meanwhile, Mr. Martinez’s former boss at Harper’s Bazaar, Valerie Salembier, has moved to Town & Country.

And another Elle alumnus, Carol Smith, who most recently did a half-baked stint at Condé Nast’s food group, has been brought in to replace her. There’s more: James B. Meigs, who was fired from his job as editor of Hachette’s Premiere a decade ago, eventually becoming editor of Popular Mechanics, will now oversee the popular-among-mechanics former Hachette titles Car and Driver and Road and Track, in the newly created position of editorial director, men’s enthusiast group.

Sounds a little claustrophobic! Fortunately, Off the Record hears, some Hearst-Hachette staff will spill over from the $500 million tower to the building next door, the Sheffield condominiums. Hearst had the foresight to purchase at least six floors of the Sheffield back in 2007, before Hachette was even a glimmer in David Carey’s eye.

The Sheffield condominiums, formerly known as Sheffield57, long suffered from management problems under developer Kent Swig, but there’s at least one tenant who must feel right at home: socialite and publishing heiress Lydia Hearst bought a place there in 2008.

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

The Observer ran into Mr. Drucker at Hearst's Fashion Week kick-off party (that is, David Carey's debut) last night. We asked him what he had in the works at Town & Country.

"If you're gonna have a new magazine, you have to shake it up," Mr. Drucker said. "You have to stay tuned. This is what we do. This is what editors do. We shake things up."

Mr. Kelly points out that House Beautiful's newsstand take grew more than 30 percent in the first half of 2010 as Mr. Drucker was finishing up his tenure.