N.Y. Gossip Columnists Dish Dirt . . . at Each Other

NEW YORK —  Tabloid newspaper wars are old hat in this town, but they’ve escalated to new heights with an all-out battle of the gossips.

One of the leading columnists has just denounced an up-and-coming rival in print as “the liar and snake”--and even worse.

The town is enthralled!

Rival columnists are potent ammunition in the all-out war here between the Daily News, the Post and New York Newsday.

But up until now, the salvos were short, if not necessarily sweet.

Then Newsday columnist James A. Revson--now known to readers of the New York Daily Post as “a know-nothing who has aspirations of writing a social column”--noticed something, well, a little strange about New York Post columnist Suzy’s account of a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala last week.

It seems that Revson--yes, he is part of the Revlon cosmetics clan--went to the same party and saw only a dozen of the 32 famous people whom Suzy (her real name is Aileen Mehle) said were there. The “sad truth,” he wrote in his column last Thursday, was that one of the most venerated society columnists wrote her material from a press release.

“I want Suzy’s job,” he wrote. “It’s fun. It’s simple. It’s such a breeze. She doesn’t even have to leave the house.”

As soon as she got back from a Caribbean vacation, Suzy let Revson have it. “That slime oozed from a jerk at Newsday, someone no one I know ever heard of--including me,” she wrote Wednesday.

And there was such a simple explanation for her previous column, she added. You see, in her rush to get away, she didn’t want to overlook an important social event, so she just rewrote the news release, “hoping that the people listed wouldn’t get the flu or forget to come or whatever.”

To “Rat Revson,” she had this retort: “You want Suzy’s job, do you? . . . Maybe they could use a spare janitor around the place. Except they’d have to lock up the brooms, wouldn’t they?”

Her rebuke was so scathing that by the end of the day Revson had heard from just about every local TV station, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and “The Tonight Show.”