When exactly was the decline of the socialite, who once ruled the world from her throne among the ladies who lunched in such hallowed places as The Colony or Le Pavillon in New York City—and at the right table, dressed in Mainbocher or any custom number worthy of a Cecil Beaton portrait, and with just the right company like Truman Capote?
The dictionary definition of socialite is lame, “a person who is well-known in fashionable society and is fond of social activities and entertainment.” On the internet, it is still a raging topic, but the questions are even more lame, if not downright stupid, questions like “Is a socialite a social climber? What is the difference between a socialite and a courtesan? Is it a difficult job, being a socialite?” But what is a socialite?
“There is no one definitive answer to this,” said a girl named Catriona in an internet forum. “[It’s] simply a person thrust (sometimes unwillingly) into a particular role. In my case it was something that fell on me when I married a very ambitious man with delusions of social grandeur.”
She intimated what being a socialite had been like for her, in retrospect, since her marriage to this “delusional” man had ended. “My days consisted of worrying about whether I was up to the planning and presentation of his facade. Did I know how to make the latest cocktail? If not, could I find someone who did on a moment’s notice?” she confessed, which sounded to me so much like an ordeal. “Was our home filled with the best… and decorated to impress…? I am not an extrovert and it was pretty much the seventh level of hell having to discover what each of my husband’s guests was likely to want to talk about, and learning all I could about it, whether it was the restoration of Samurai swords, the writing of HTML code, the makes and models of Boeing aircraft, or the likelihood of a stock market crash in the next 18 months.”
Babe Paley, is that you?
But Babe Paley, as you know, ever the doyenne of the New York social scene, Truman Capote’s foremost swan, and best dressed of all time, would never dare say such a thing about her husband, CBS founder William Paley, whom the rumor mill portrayed as a womanizer and whom Truman Capote revealed in his roman à clef
"La Côte Basque 1965" as the cause of Babe’s broken, never mended heart. Neither would she have said anything remotely similar to what Catriona said of her erstwhile husband. The socialite would find it so inelegant, if not so vulgar, to wash dirty linen in public.
The fascination is still there, for sure. It persists in me, who grew up on the pages of my mother’s copies of Vogue, where the world, for the most part, was a trove of treasures in the form of a snow-covered chalet in Gstaad, breakfast champagne at the Grand Hotel in Rome, a beach trip to Coopers Beach at the Hamptons, and dressed for show, say, in the case of the Hamptons, in Emilio Pucci swimwear.
The socialite was the personification of polite society, the embodiment of a collective aspiration to graceful living, though it has become a kind of nostalgia, no longer a living thing, alive only in memory or history, in black and white pictures.
But before we digress further, other than being a celebrity or royalty, who is much in demand at parties, how does one become a socialite? First to come to mind is that one at least has to be an object of beauty, arm candy on some man or walker to a lady, or—in the case of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, who said, “I'm nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.”—command attention. Imelda Marcos once told me, “You sense beauty more than you see it. I know. Anywhere I go, when I walk into a room, people turn to look at me. We don’t have eyes on our backs, do we?”
You could say a socialite has to be rich, but not really, like Truman Capote, who was welcomed into the sanctum sanctorum of New York’s upper crust. If you can’t be rich, then you ought to have rich friends, who can fly you to the moon on their Gulfstream G700, or sail you across the seven seas on their luxury yacht, or drive you around on their Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail. Before you say “social climber,” remember that you can be as rich as the friends you hang around with and because you are friends, you get to stay for free in a villa that is owned by one of them in a historic building in the Campo San Polo in Venice, just as any of your friends can stay free of charge in your duplex at 220 Central Park South in Manhattan.
Supposing you have no private jet, sailboat, or luxury car to share with your bosom buddies, then to be a socialite, you must have something else to bring to the table—your wit, for instance, or your personal style, your social charm, your sense of humor, or your golden friendship.
Back in the day, you couldn’t be a socialite, unless the media took notice of you, unless you landed in the pages of uppity magazines or in the newspaper headlines.
I might be wrong, but pop culture has guillotined the socialite just as the French Revolution killed Marie Antoinette.
In just the same way as possession obsession, all that waltzing around in a dazzling display of wealth, nod-nodding to consumerism and inconspicuous consumption, has been exhausted by such pop culture movies as The Devil Wears Prada, Zoolander, even documentaries like The September Issue or The Grey Gardens, the socialite has been dragged back to earth by the seemingly innocuous raiding of her closets in Gossip Girl, The Nanny Diaries, Downton Abbey, W.E., even Mean Girls.
In its obsession with exposés and BTS, the 1980s thrust the socialite under a magnifying glass and we all looked in and gasped: “You’re no different than us, you’re just like every last one of us!”
And then social media took over, democratizing everything, where a single viral post could catapult you to the A-list—for how long, who knows?—in much the same way as, just a decade before Instagram ruled the world, winning a reality show could turn you into a household name, whether or not you were beautiful, elegant, sophisticated, graceful, world-wise, or stylish.
It doesn’t really matter now how you look, speak, move, think, or behave, as long as you fetch the numbers in terms of views, likes, follows, or shares.
The socialite is dead.