The gossip column is dead. With one exception. In November of 1976, right after Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post, he tasked James Brady with executing his broad concept for a full page of short news items filed by a variety of contributors and edited with a consistent, and consistently cheeky, voice. Brady and a few stringers quickly pulled together what Brady named Page Six because that’s the page where the column initially ran. Nearly 50 years after its debut, Page Six is the only gossip column still standing among those it competed with back then. It is also the most successful original brand to emerge from the Post, as well known as the paper itself; in the past week alone, Page Six appeared in an answer on Jeopardy! and figured into a plot line on Only Murders in the Building.
We both worked on Page Six — Susan Mulcahy from 1978-1985 and Frank DiGiacomo from 1989-1993 — at very different times in the paper’s history. Susan was there during the initial Murdoch years; Frank, when it was owned by the real estate developer, Peter Kalikow. We have incorporated our experiences, along with those of more than 240 former and current staffers, story subjects and astute media observers into Paper of Wreckage, our oral history of the Post, just published by Atria Books. But as reporters, we prefer asking questions to answering them. So, we decided to interview ourselves.
Has anyone ever died as the result of a Page Six item?
Susan Mulcahy: I can’t say for sure, but Bobby Zarem, the publicist who represented people like Jack Nicholson, Cher and Woody Allen and who resembled Larry from The Three Stooges, regularly threatened suicide if an item he was pitching did not appear on Page Six. Zarem died in 2021, but not from failing to place an item in the column.
Frank DiGiacomo: Not that I recall, although I once wrote an item that referred to the late Soupy Sales. The next day, the phone rang. A very distressed Soupy Sales was calling to say that he was very much alive. “At least we’ll get a second item out of it,” Richard Johnson told me.
What about the Post’s Cindy Adams? Isn’t she a gossip columnist?
Mulcahy: At this point, Cindy is more of a personality-driven opinion columnist, like a Borscht Belt Maureen Dowd.
DiGiacomo: I won’t write a book about Cindy, but I could. You know her tag line, “Only in New York”? She is exactly that. She’s a unique creature of this city and there will never be another columnist like her. It’s why when she got sick in 2010, Col Allan refused to hire a stand-in or a replacement. He just stopped running the column. She’s also formidable. Invade her turf or slight her or her loved ones and she’ll go medieval on you. When I started at Page Six, I was very naïve. Her husband Joey Adams hosted some event, and I was instructed to write an item and thinking that including a Post columnist in the item would be poor form. So, I left Joey out. A few days later, I got a call from Raoul Lionel Felder, a prominent divorce attorney then who loved to see his name in the columns. “Cindy is trying to get you fired,” he said. I was incredulous that she would try to kill me, but it was a real possibility. Cindy is a Post institution, and I was a freelancer — not a union member — and could have easily been kicked to the curb. So, Felder brokered a détente, in part, I suspect, so I would owe him a favor.
The first edition of Page Six, in the Jan. 3, 1977, issue of the New York Post.
Courtesy
Were you ever confronted by a celebrity who didn’t like you or the Post?
Mulcahy: Sure. It hurt more if you admired the celeb. I once approached Paul Newman at a party, so dazzled I momentarily forgot he was on the Post’s shit list, his name never to appear in the paper at all, even in the review of a film he starred in, because of his regular criticisms of the Post. “I don’t like your newspaper or your newspaper’s owner,” he said. “And I don’t have to talk to you.” Another time, I called a number I thought was Katharine Hepburn’s office to find out why she had given “special permission” for her photo to be used on a greeting card. A distinctive voice answered, which, upon hearing my question, said, “What a silly ass thing to be calling me about.” Click.
DiGiacomo: The only encounter I remember is the time I was covering entertainment attorney Allen Grubman’s wedding at the New York Public Library in 1991. The reception was a sea of fame and power: David Geffen, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Clive Davis, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell. I’m rubbernecking my way through the crowd, and I spot Sony Music chairman/CEO Tommy Mottola, who I knew a bit. He was talking to Robert De Niro and attempted to introduce us. When De Niro heard my name, he said, “Where do you work?” “Page Six,” I replied. De Niro responded, “Page Six? You fucking prick.”
Why does Page Six write about professions not usually associated with celebrity?
Mulcahy: From the start, Page Six was interested in power — who had it and who was trying to acquire it. And those people are often behind the scenes. In the late 1970s, it made a celebrity out of Fred Silverman, a schlubby but powerful television executive. And as it began writing about political consultants, some became as well known as the pols they worked with. Bob Squier, a Democrat, and Roger Ailes, a Republican, appeared as dueling talking heads on the Today show in the 1980s in part because their profiles had been elevated by regular appearances on Page Six. As for celebrity dentists, podiatrists, lawyers and others whose names were not traditionally boldfaced, they were part of the celebrity ecosphere, so why not? And if you mentioned a celebrity dermatologist once in a while, they could become a source.
DiGiacomo: Exactly. The mainstream press badmouthed us while they were stealing our stories and ideas with very little credit. Condé Nast magazine editors got daily “gossip packs,” which compiled photocopies of the day’s gossip columns. I’m sure TV had the equivalent. Boldfaced names who appeared on Page Six got the attention of editors and producers with national platforms. Page Six — and New York’s tabloids — played a large role in vaulting Donald Trump to national attention. We also brought a lot of attention to midget bowling.
Who were sources for Page Six?
Mulcahy: There are two kinds: personal sources and column sources. When a Page Six editor leaves, their personal sources — mostly people they’d known before they began writing the column, or those who became actual friends — go with them. But a Page Six editor needs to be realistic. Most sources care only about the column and not the person behind it. When an editor leaves, they quickly move on to his or her replacement. Which is why Murdoch’s original concept was so brilliant. The column is the star, not its editor.
DiGiacomo: One of my favorite sources was Sy Presten, a press agent who represented the Stork Club and the Copacabana in their glory days. Walter Winchell had once tried to buy his typewriter because he liked the look of the pages of items that Sy sent him every week. Sy turned him down, and based on the manually typed press releases he would send us, he never stopped using it. When I met Sy, he had this crazy quilt of clients that included the attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who invented palimony; Bob Guccione and his Penthouse publishing empire; the racy-for-its-time musical, Oh! Calcutta!, Midge Moore’s Midtown Tennis Club, and the owner of the Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shop chain. (By the ’90s, there was just one left in New York.) Sy would often combine his clients into a single item — called them “chunks” — say, “Bob Guccione and Marvin Mitchelson played a few matches at Midge Moore’s Midtown Tennis Club to celebrate the new issue of Penthouse, and we would run them. I’ll admit that I often wondered if these mash-ups actually happened, but here’s the thing. Sy gave us great, exclusive stories — stories that had nothing to do with his clients and made national headlines — in exchange for his chunks. He became one of my most trusted sources and eventually a close friend. Sy died in 2022, at the age of 98. One of his last wishes was to create an archive with his papers. I have them in storage, and it’s on my short list of things to do.
How does the Page Six of today compare with your time there?
Mulcahy: The internet, especially social media, has turned celebrities themselves into competition for Page Six. And as the Page Six brand has expanded, so as its audience outside New York. To feed that beast, Page Six has to focus more on reality television stars and less on the only-in-New York characters who populated the column in its early incarnation.
DiGiacomo: And since the early 2000s, websites have been popping up that specialize in many subjects that were once Page Six’s domain: politics, Hollywood, media, restaurants, real estate and so on. It’s harder than ever to get a real scoop.
What is one thing that’s the same about Page Six then and now?
Mulcahy: You can often tell who planted an item. If Page Six writes about what happened at an event at, say, the Metropolitan Museum, and Melinda Gates, Nicole Kidman, Bono and attorney Shelly Bernstein are among the guests, guess who gave them the item?
DiGiacomo One thing I like is that the Page is witty again. There was a long stretch where it was a bit just-the-facts. I’m guessing it’s Ian Mohr who’s brought the fun back. I regularly laugh out loud at items these days. When I was there, writing a funny item and using clever wordplay — like “courtus interruptus” to describe a trial that was disrupted in a case that had sexual undertones was just as important as getting scoops. And look, they’re getting Elon Musk to return their calls or emails, and they’ve done great stuff on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. I’m pretty sure Page Six broke that story — at the very least, I read about it there first. That is power today.
Were the editors of Page Six crazy characters themselves?
Mulcahy: Filling a column with eight to 12 stories a day, and these days, even more, does not allow for excess eccentricity. But Richard Johnson, who was Page Six’s iron man — he worked for me for three years as reporter and then was editor of the column for something like 25 — comes closest. A debonair man about town, Richard was always getting calls from glamorous-sounding women with accents and names like Bettina and Graziella. And though he always arrived at the office on time and reliably did his work, he sometimes took long lunches, which led us to speculate that his midday breaks were nooners. But in interviewing him for Paper of Wreckage, we learned that, instead of passionate encounters with Bettina or Graziella, his long lunches were spent recovering from a night out with a nap on one of the benches behind the Post’s old building on 210 South Street.
DiGiacomo: Richard was a bit of a performance artist when it came to fielding calls from pesky publicists who would inundate us with the most dubious of stories. One of my favorites: a flack calls him, probably for the fifth time, and I hear Richard say, “Yes, I got your press release. It’s at the bottom of my pile.” And then hung up. He also knew that feuds were good for readership. His back-and-forth with Mickey Rourke was particularly amusing. Rourke did not like the items we were publishing about him, and at one point challenged Richard to a boxing match. Richard accepted but Rourke eventually dropped out. Their feud lasted a long time, and I don’t remember if Richard wrote this at Page Six or the Daily News column he had when he left the Post: “The only thing Mickey Rourke is fit to box is pizza.”
One strange cat who worked at the Page was Alan Whitney. He was assigned to be our copy editor, which was the equivalent of Siberia because he was in hot water with management for sexual harassment. He would leave panties on the desks and chairs of women reporters on their birthdays and was always trying to spank them. Before my time there, he would sometimes affix devil horns to his head.
Were you ever sued on Page Six?
Mulcahy: Lawsuits were threatened, but none filed. Not when I was there anyway. We didn’t make mistakes that often and when we did, we corrected them quickly. Page Six items were reported like any legitimate news story. The higher-ups at the Post may have played fast and loose with accuracy in other parts of the paper, but not on Page Six. Ironic, given Page Six’s “gossip” label. But somehow the Post’s editors knew that if Page Six started to be filled with inaccuracies, it would lose its luster.
DiGiacomo I was named in a lawsuit once for a story I helped report, but it was published in the news well, not Page Six. I can’t remember the thrust of the story, but it involved Marla Maples’ publicist. For a while, I thought every strange face was a process server — until the publicist called me up and said that he was dropping my name from the suit. As for Page Six, my experience was the same as Susan’s. We were threatened a lot — I could have wallpapered my apartment with all the snarling letters Page Six got from attorney Marty Singer threatening litigation if we wrote about the celebrity who had just retained him — but our mandate was accuracy, and when any part of a story was potentially actionable, we ran it by our lawyers.
How did Page Six affect you personally?
Mulcahy: In good and bad ways. It’s hard to complain about covering Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party or a ballooning weekend at Malcolm Forbes’ chateau in France, but I was typecast as the editor of Page Six to such an extent, it became a challenge to find work doing anything else. I remember interviewing for a job in the L.A. bureau of the Wall Street Journal. I broke a lot of Hollywood boardroom stories, and Norm Pearlstine, who was running the Journal in the ‘80s, thought I might be a good addition to that office. But the bureau chief was disgusted that he’d even been asked to speak with me. He acted as though I was a lower life form. I did not get the job.
DiGiacomo: I had the same experience when it came to job-hunting. In addition to the condescension, I would get, “I can’t tell if you can write” because a typical Page Six item is like 100 words long. Also, working there made me paranoid for a while. When you field countless phone calls from people who are dropping dimes on people they know — friends even — and from trusted sources who are always on the lookout for some celebrity’s epic fail, you start to think that the walls have eyes. Took quite a bit of therapy to get past that. The best part is that I came away with a valuable understanding of who wielded power — and who the posers were — in New York and Hollywood. If I hadn’t worked at Page Six, I suspect my career path would have been different.