onald Trump and his wife, Melania, were
stationed at the top of the grand staircase
in the Four Seasons Grill Room, a longtime
gathering place for Manhattan’s power bro-
kers in business and the media. The event
had just started, and Trump, then host of
The Apprentice, still had his long black coat
on over his navy suit. Melania was draped
in an airy eggplant-hued cocktail dress.
The party was for veteran Page Six
editor Richard Johnson, who had just
moved to Los Angeles to work for Rupert
Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The
Daily, and New York’s elite were there to
toast him. Katie Couric, Martha Stew-
art, and Jay McInerney mingled with
Page Six reporters as well as publicists
like Ken Sunshine, conversation dinning
over the funky seventies mixes.
Page Six, the gossip column in the New
York Post, is an institution built on tipsters,
anonymous sources, and old-fashioned
reporting. Appearing in it means you ar-
en’t just a success in your line of business;
you are a true boldfaced name. You mat-
ter. Items about movie stars appear along-
side stories about socialites and power
players—as long as you make for good
copy, the playing field is level. The fear
Page Six strikes in its subjects has made it
an indispensable tool for Manhattan’s rich
and powerful.
For Page Six, Trump had long been
the trifecta: boldfaced name, tipster,
and anonymous source. Reporters could
call his personal assistant, Norma Foer-
derer, and within minutes he would call
back personally. When contributor Jared
Paul Stern called him about a story he
was working on concerning Trump’s
January 2000 breakup with Melania, he
told Stern on the record, “It’s bullshit.
It’s not correct.” But the item was pep-
pered with supporting quotes from “one
friend” of Trump’s and a “source close to
Trump.” Stern says those quotes all came
from Trump himself—a practice other for-
mer gossip columnists have confirmed
Trump employed. Trump, disguised as
a friend, said about himself, “He doesn’t
care. It’s not like he’s mar-
ried.... [Melania] is a great girl,
but Donald has to be free for
a while. He didn’t want to get
hooked. He decided to cool it.”
(A White House official says,
“That NY Post story you are re-
ferring to is false,” but wouldn’t
comment on Trump supplying
the anonymous quotes.)
Trump and Johnson were
close—the editor attended
two of Trump’s weddings
and served as a judge for the Miss Uni-
verse pageant when Trump owned the
franchise. But the column was about to
change. The dapper Johnson, who had
been there for a quarter of a century, was
being replaced by Emily Smith, a five-
foot blond Brit. She had become John-
son’s deputy a year earlier after a stint as
the U. S. correspondent for The Sun.
At Johnson’s send-off, in November
2010, Smith, in a simple black sheath
dress, made her way around the room as
guests congratulated her. When she got to
the top of the grand staircase, she was in-
troduced to the Trumps.
“Oh, you’re taking over for Richard
Johnson,” Trump said. “Big shoes to fill.”
“I know—and I’m from England, too,
so I don’t know how I’m going to do it,”
Smith said.
Trump responded, “At least you’re
good-looking.”
That interaction, that party, that col-
lection of boldfaced names gathered to
honor a newspaperman who traded in
gossip seem like a gauzy dream. A moment
before the collapse of the media business
in which Page Six operated. Institutions
crumbled. Social-media companies took
shape, giving rise to a new breed of celeb-
rity and, worse, influencer, who saw little
value in gossip columns. Eventually, the
schmoozy, seemingly harmless gossip at
the top of the stairs became the president
of the United States—impeached, embat-
tled, spoiling for a fight.
But somehow, Page Six—a column in a
newspaper that is printed on paper—has
managed to grow. Yes, it has a website and
a Twitter feed, and there was even a TV
show. But mostly, it’s still something you
flip to rather than something you click on.
#MeToo may have caused it to check its
conscience. TMZ may have made it work
harder. Social media may have given ce-
lebrities more power to control the news,
taking some of the wind out of Page Six’s
guess-what-we-just-saw urgency. And yet
to the people who run the world, or cer-
tain parts of it, Page Six still matters.How did something built upon a flimsy
foundation of celebrity sightings and over-
heard chitchat become an indestructible
mainstay of news and entertainment? So
strong it can keep winning a game in which
backstabbing, horse-trading, secrets, lies,
manipulation, and the occasional fistfight
are pretty much part of the rules?
How does Page Six still thrive?
How does Page Six still exist?hen I moved to New York
from Florida in 2007 for a
job as an associate editor
at the New York Post, I’d
never heard of Page Six. It
quickly became my cheat sheet for how
to be a real New Yorker. Page Six had its
own language and cast of characters that
made it feel like the most exclusive and
exciting version of the city. Every morn-
ing, I’d grab the paper, turn right to Page
Six, and be transported to a world where
finance “honchos” I’d never heard of
were suddenly intriguing, celebrities I did
care about were “canoodling” with one
another, and those who mattered were
“spotted” at Elaine’s, Le Cirque, or Nello,
restaurants I knew only by name and that
in my mind were constantly filled with fa-
mous people swapping air kisses and dirt.
At the paper, the small Page Six team
seemed elusive. They kept to themselves,
stationed in the back corner of the news-
room, buried behind stacks of newsprint
and books. Although the dress code for
tabloid reporters consists mostly of jeans
and crumpled dress shirts, I’d see John-
son, always in his crisp suits and per-
fect flaxen coif, walking silently, regally
around the office. His deputy, Paula Froe-
lich, sometimes napped on a couch in the
photo editor’s office, near my desk.
“Dude, I was exhausted,” Froelich says.
“I used to get in at 9:30, 10:00 in the
morning. I would leave around 8:00 or
8:30 and then immediately go out, some-
times not getting back home until 3:00,
and then six hours later do it again.”
Tara Palmeri, who was at Page Six from
2010 to 2012, says, “You stay up all night
because everyone says that everything
goes down after hours, right? Everyone
says that the end of the night is when you
see people acting up, and that’s when the
real drama happens.”
They were filling two pages a day with a
dozen or more “items,” the small news sto-
ries that constitute Page Six. The column had
grown from a single page because luxury
advertisers like Saks Fifth Avenue wanted
to be placed across from it—and it usually
appeared on page 12 or further back.70 MARCH 2020One publicist says of Page Six, “It’s like doing a deal with the Mafia.”
PRECEDING PAGES: COURTESYNEW YORK POST.BILLY FARRELL/BFA.COM (SMITH). PATRICK MƜMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES (JOHNSON).