“I remember early on people would whisper, ‘Don’t tell her anything. She’s Suzy. She writes that column,’” said Aileen Mehle, who for more than five decades, under the pen name Suzy, chronicled the comings and goings, the weddings and divorces, the charity galas and costume balls of international high society, starting at the Miami Daily News in the early 1950s and finishing at Women’s Wear Daily in 2005. She passed away at the age of 98 in November 2016. At the height of her career, her daily column ran in some 90 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada and reached an estimated 30 million readers, according to a 1973 profile in Vogue. For Life magazine she was “easily thebrightest and most widely read society columnist in the country.”
“People didn’t really know me when I started out,” she continued. “And then, they told me everything. That’s what I am doing with you. I swear before God on my son’s life, I have never told people everything I’m telling you . . . Actually, you know more about me than anybody I know.”
