Taki's Mag

Tinsley Mortimer

Judging from last week’s comments, there are not many Kardashian fans here on Taki’s Mag. Though the fuss was to be expected from our highbrow readership, every rag needs a gossip column. Sure, we could cover the upper crust of East Coast society and the European aristocracy, but you would grumble about them, too. The people worth writing about do everything behind closed doors, anyway, so there wouldn’t be much to say even if we wanted to write about more interesting people. But don’t be so bloody bourgeois! There is nothing more amusing than the lives of those who work tirelessly for attention. If nothing else, you should be grateful for the distraction from all things serious. You might also be reminded of how lucky you are not to be a nitwit like Tinsley Mortimer.

Who is Tinsley Mortimer? Like the tinsel you string on a Christmas tree, she is a gaudy ornament. She is also indefatigable in her pursuit of attention. Tinsley, though I like to call her Tinsel, wishes to be the star on top of the tree, but she will always be the tinsel. She landed in New York in the late 90s and made a name for herself appearing on red carpets and at shop openings. For a long time Tinsley wasn’t famous for anything except having married into a good old American family. Now she is separated (apparently he couldn’t handle the media attention), is designing handbags, and has been on a failed reality show. Clearly, Tinsley is tarnished. Her biggest claim to fame is that she played herself on an episode of Gossip Girl.

Tinsley has recently become a novelist. Tinsley’s thinly veiled fictional account of…Tinsley…is called Southern Charm, and no, she didn’t write it all by herself—a “friend” helped. For a bubble-gum tale aimed at teenage girls, it isn’t badly written, though it isn’t exactly groundbreaking, either. Like all poor little rich girls, the protagonist has an Eloise fantasy, but unlike Kay Thompson’s fictional character who speaks in the most eccentric way and lives at the Plaza Hotel with her nanny, the protagonist Minty speaks in clichés and says things such as, “When I walked into Saks, I felt like a kid in a candy store.”

While Mortimer may have some Southern charm and an eye for fashion, she is the butt of jokes in the inner circle of New York society because she courted publicity before she had anything to sell, much like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Pointless publicity is the big no-no if you want to be taken seriously by high society, by Hollywood, or even by your average Joe.

Let’s hope these girls and up-and-comers like Olivia Palermo are listening, though I doubt they read anything but People magazine. As I don’t either, let me tell you what the fabulous are doing these days.

Linda Evangelista has settled a child-support dispute with her billionaire baby daddy François-Henri Pinault, AKA Mr. Salma Hayek. The model and the mogul spent a week together five years ago when she contracted his silk-stocking sperm. Unfortunately the model who doesn’t “get out of bed for less than $10,000” hasn’t managed to languish in her boudoir like Stephanie Seymour or Natalia Vodianova, both models who managed to snag very rich husbands. Evangelista also dated Peter Morton for a while. Let us hope she finds happiness with $40,000 a month, or whatever she and Pinault finally agreed upon. Evangelista was asking for $46,000. His family is said to be worth $13 billion. He can probably afford it.

For all of you who have been wondering how long that other model, Carla Bruni, will stay with her husband now that he’s no longer president of France, we were wondering the same thing. Even though they just had a child, why would she stay? Her grand ascent was short-lived, despite all the cute pillbox hats and Dior dresses she wore to state functions. Surely she will punish Sarkozy for the humiliation and take up with someone who doesn’t wear lifts. Or maybe not. Sarko wasn’t exactly poor before becoming a politician, but he is likely to make a lot more now that he’s no longer in office. Will the lure of powerful people and more money steady her gaze? Maybe it will so long as she is still carrying around all that baby fat on her face. If all else fails, she can take comfort by stuffing a few more éclairs down her once beautiful and currently disfigured features.

And speaking of fat faces and things shaped like éclairs, poor John Travolta is likely being extorted by some lunatic masseur who claims John grabbed his wang and tried to rub one out in front of him. Travolta says this is a complete fabrication and that he wasn’t even in town when the alleged incident occurred. If this isn’t a lesson in the perils of fame, my God, actors really do deserve the big bucks. I can’t think of anything worse than losing my anonymity and being at the mercy of hysterical fans, stalkers, paparazzi, freeloaders, pushers, and producers. We know it’s nonsense, John, so don’t worry. We still love you even though you are a Scientologist.

Maybe the only thing worse than dealing with stalkers, pushers, and paparazzi is the physical attention that comes with fame. Who knew Jack Nicholson had a 17-year-old daughter with a former waitress he met when she was 20? Now the daughter, Tessa Gourin, is smoking pot and getting busted. Nicholson has anywhere between four and six children, mostly with different women, but it is hard to know exactly how many since he has only acknowledged four publicly. In addition to Tessa, he could have a 40-year-old son called Caleb but nobody knows for sure. Since Nicholson grew up thinking his mother was his sister, we won’t hold him entirely responsible for being confused about turning out children.

Following the famous is mildly amusing and simultaneously demented, I imagine, just like the life. Unless you are a poseur who craves attention why would one want to be famous? All things considered, even the money and the glamour seem like meager compensation. I hope Tinsley will shed some light on this in her next book—don’t you?