May 09, 2012
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.
