n a dreary afternoon this past
December, Smith has just come
from the Post’s daily 2:30 pitch
meeting. The editor in chief,
Stephen Lynch, listens as an ed-
itor from each section presents
the day’s list-lines—summaries
of stories their reporters are
chasing. On this particular af-
ternoon, Page Six is working on
a tasty lede about NFL Network
correspondent Jane Slater find-
ing out an ex had been cheating thanks to
his Fitbit showing a bump in his heart rate
at 4:00 A.M.
The race-car-red walls of the news-
room, on the tenth floor of the News
Corp. building in midtown Manhattan, en-
close stark white clusters of desks. CNN,
CBS, and Fox News play soundlessly on
TVs lining the perimeter.
Smith usually sits at a small desk
among her reporters, but she leads me
to a conference room on the corner of
the floor. She rarely sits for interviews.
“Oh, it’s deeply uncomfortable! Because
the star is Page Six; it’s not me,” she says,
shaking her head.
In her early days at Page Six, it wasn’t
unusual for Smith to go from an all-night
event she was covering straight to the office
at 6:00 or 7:00 A.M. “I went to everything
and I stayed out all night and just made a
point to meet everyone. That was before I
became a mother,” says Smith, who has a
four-year-old. “It really hasn’t changed. I
still go out quite a lot. It’s getting in earlier
and not staying out and thinking, Oh, let’s
go on to a nightclub and Let’s go to a karaoke
bar, or Let’s go back to someone’s house.”
The room we’re sitting in used to be
Johnson’s office. “I had to clear the whole
thing out, and there were old faxes from
Donald Trump in there,” Smith says.
Trump would famously fax angry letters
to anyone he feuded with—Jerry Seinfeld,
Rosie O’Donnell—and simultaneously fax
over a copy to Page Six. “I kept some of
them, but I wish I’d kept all of them.”
The afternoon I visited the Post offices,
Murdoch made his way through the news-
room alone with his head down, trans-
fixed by his phone. He wore a navy suit
with a crisp open-collared white dress
shirt and bright-blue sneakers that ap-
peared to be the trendy brand Allbirds.
Smith raised a finger his way and said,
“Hey, the boss!”
Page Six may not be thought of as a
sober journalistic enterprise, but its re-
porters have broken significant stories
over the past forty-three years, and Smith
sprinkles the conversation with bomb-shells she and her team have unearthed.
Page Six was the first to report Joe Biden’s
son Hunter having a romantic relation-
ship with his brother Beau’s widow. It was
there when Trump staffers Hope Hicks
and Corey Lewandowski got into a public
screaming match, an early sign of chaos
within the administration.
In the early 2000s, the Internet be-
came an increasingly threatening source
of competition. In 2004, a blogger named
Perez Hilton launched a site called
PageSixSixSix.com—a name he had to
change after the Post sued him. Gawker
.com started in 2002 with its own snarky
style of gossip—poking fun, sometimes
viciously, at the media establishment, in-
cluding Page Six.
The differentiator? Reporting. Page Six
had more experience at it.
“Gawker was pretty much nothing com-
pared to Page Six. Page Six broke news ev-
ery day and night and worked their butts
off, while Gawker was busy doing their hair
or something,” says former Gawker editor
Choire Sicha, who now runs the New York
Times Styles desk. “Page Six knew the an-
swer to gossip blind items that we didn’t
even know enough to ask. There was some
sort of enemyship and friendship relation-
ship between Gawker and Page Six over
the years, but Page Six was always the
big dog. Sometimes the big, bad dog. Of
course, Page Six was at times as corrupt
as any media outfit could possibly be. It
did very reprehensibly bad things over the
years. But it also had an honor and a pa-
nache that I’ll always admire.”
In 2006, there was an explosive allega-
tion of corruption against Page Six. Stern
was accused of extortion involving billion-
aire supermarket magnate Ron Burkle—
demanding money to keep negative in-
formation about him out of the column.later—unless you gave her a
paper bag with $5,000 in
it. The reason I did that is
I knew it would end up in
Page Six or one of the oth-
er gossip columns.” (A rep
for Kim Kardashian West
says, “Kim actually doesn’t
remember this at all.”)
An often unspoken
tactic of gossip reporters
is the trade: The column
will mention a publicist’s client—a restau-
rant, for example—in exchange for other,
more valuable gossip.
“It’s like doing a deal with the Mafia.
They’ll lend you a dollar if you pay them
back four,” says publicist Kelly Cutrone.
“I made a rule with myself about gossip,
that I didn’t place gossip that I didn’t
know to be true or that could ruin some-
body’s life and family.”
In addition to the tipsters, another class
of valuable source is the unbiased verifier.
“My role has been of a verifier,” says ubiq-
uitous society photographer Patrick McMul-
lan, who says he never calls in tips himself
but has been a reliable ally because he’s so
often at parties and events with the bold-
faced. “Like somebody would say, ‘You were
in the room. Was Charlize Theron there?’ I
would say, ‘Yes, she was.’ I guess maybe be-
cause I didn’t have a horse in the race, I was
a very good person to get the truth from.”
The host of Bravo’s Watch What Hap-
pens Live, Andy Cohen, reads Page Six on
the Post app, which can assuage his ego
when he’s the one being written about.
“The great thing [about the app] is when
they put something up about me that I
don’t like, I know that it’s going to scroll
down as the day goes on,” says Cohen.
When the item appears in print, some-
how the sting can be worse.
“One time, Kim Cattrall told me that I
should get a respectable job, that I should
work at Roybers. Like, R-O-Y-B-E-R-S,”
says Palmeri. “She meant Reuters.”
There was the time Joss Sackler texted
reporter Oli Coleman nothing but a middle-
finger emoji after the column’s coverage of
her New York Fashion Week show.
Another Page Six reporter says, “Puff
Daddy’s publicist called me in tears because
she heard I was doing a spread about how
he was afraid of clowns and supposedly suf-
fered from this thing called coulrophobia. I
was like, I can’t not do this. I don’t care if
it ruins the relationship.” (“We remember
this to be one of the more laughable calls
we received daily from Page Six, who were
obsessed with Diddy,” says a member of the
artist’s former press team.)
ABOVE: TIMOTHÉE CHA-
LAMET’S FIRST TIME AS A
BOLDFACED NAME WAS
AS A TEEN WHEN HE
DATED LOURDES LEON.
LEFT: BRITNEY SPEARS
WEARS A PAGE SIXSIX-
SIX SHIRT IN 2003.72 MARCH 2020ELDER ORDONEZ/INFPHOTO.COM (CHALAMET AND LEON). D STEINBERG/BEI/SHUTTERSTOCK (SPEARS).