Rupert’s Sad Clown

Want to get your perfume launch party mentioned in the Wall Street Journal’s “New York” section? Then invite Marshall Heyman from the paper’s Fluff About Town “Heard and Scene” column and be sure to serve him a big, fruity cocktail. He’ll walk up to the hired models in the tableau vivant and ask dynamic, hard-hitting questions like:

What was it like being in a bed with a stranger as waiters passed around plates of ginger Biscotti?

He’ll also bring a photographer so you can see what Dree Hemmingway looks like (she is Ernest’s great-granddaughter and uses her mother’s maiden name in a desperate attempt to be interesting). There’s also a nonentity named Lady Alice St. Clair Erskine (elder daughter of the seventh Earl of Rosslyn) whose parents have hired a very effective publicist.  Feh.

Rupert Murdoch media strategy is apparently to bury the New York Times with heavy coverage of perfume launches and other fluffogenic pseudo-events. His man Marshall Heyman is rapidly establishing himself as the jowly Jack Black of lightweight metro journalism, a “social diarist” if you will. If he doesn’t stammer too badly Heyman could become a twenty-first century Louella Parsons, or maybe even get a gig on ET.