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:
“Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“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)
“The higher, the more exalted the society, the greater is its culture and refinement, and the less does gossip prevail. People in such circles find too much of interest in the world of art and literature and science to discuss, without gloating over the shortcomings of their neighbors.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)