Gossip
The founder gossip columnists covering the London social scene were Nicholas Haslam, Frances Lynn, Stephen Lavers and Amanda Lear.
Haslam, an Old Etonian society decorator, wrote about his British aristocratic and Hollywood movie star friends under the pen name Paul Parsons. Lynn wrote the 'Bitch' gossip column about café society. Lavers, who moonlighted as Head of Films at A&M Records was the Music and Media columnist. Lear gossiped about the international glitterati. Lavers and Lear even interviewed each other. Richard Young was initially hired as Lynn's photographer, but eventually took photographs for all the columns. The four gossip columnists sometimes attended the same parties and wrote about each other. Haslam invited Lynn to all the parties he organised for his celebrity friends like Andy Warhol, so that she could report about them in her column.
Film producer Cat Villiers (then known as Catkin Villiers) began her career on the staff of the periodical.
Although Ritz Newspaper's policy was to avoid paying their contributing editors, established writers like Clive James and Peter York contributed to the magazine, as occasionally did established pop and rock stars such as George Michael.
Read more about this topic: Ritz Newspaper
Famous quotes containing the word gossip:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man’s. It is in the boys’ gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)