Socialite stages a comeback

Dethroned New York society queen Tinsley Mortimer tries to rise again

It was a bleak afternoon on the outskirts of Manhattan’s garment district. At street level, wholesalers peddled costume jewellery and satin prom gowns.

At the same time, in a converted loft eight floors up, Tinsley Mortimer was also selling something aspirational: herself. “The whole point is to expand my brand,” said Ms Mortimer, the former New York social queen. Dethroned in 2010 after a series of missteps — including a derided reality show and a separation from her blue-blooded husband — Ms Mortimer had been lying low. But those days are over.

She has enlisted agents, a manager and a publicist to engineer her comeback.

Her latest promotional initiative is Southern Charm, a a novel that is to be published in May. It follows Minty through hurtful feuds, a marriage gone awry and multiple costume changes.

It’s a world she knows well. Born Tinsley Randolph Mercer, she married Robert Mortimer, a New York scion known as Topper, in 2002. In New York, a city of blackclad minimalists, Ms Mortimer, in her candy-colored dresses, was exotic. She was nice. Above all, she was photogenic. By the mid-2000s she was omnipresent at parties and fashion shows, No. 1 on the young socialite who’swho lists.

But in 2009, she separated from Topper and starred in the reality show High Society. Some of her peers said the show and its supporting cast of odious hangers-on was her death-knell. “People didn’t want her at their parties,” said an acquaintance. That fall, the acquaintance attended a dinner at Lavo, a Midtown restaurant. “Tinsley was at a table in the front, and I saw her and said, ‘Why aren’t you back there with everybody?’ She said, ‘I wasn’t invited.’ But all of her friends were there.”

— NYT