Spencer Morgan is a very good writer for the New York Observer, and another thing about Spencer Morgan is that 100% of his articles are designed to get you mad. Usually they make you mad because he writes about men who are objectionable in one way or another. Then once in a while Spencer Morgan is like "Hey, for a change of pace I think I will play like an objectionable man, myself." This is a pose and it is how he wins, as a journalist. A mad reader is an engaged reader!

So today Spencer Morgan goes and writes a story that is clearly preposterous, on its face, inventing this new made-up term "cheetah" to describe a lady that is not as old as a "cougar" but still likes to "prey" on weak men, and fuck them, for sex, when they are drunk or otherwise vulnerable. He makes sure to say "fuck" and "pussy" a few times, right there in the story, and to quote a bunch of NYC blogger scene guys (AJ Daulerio! John Carney! Lockhart Steele!) breaking down THE GAME, and how Cheetah Women run it on men, just to underscore the very important subtext of this story, which is: "Here is a caricature of the 'Cougar' type of story, which, preposterously, is taken seriously, in the media." Whereas some fake trend stories attempt to get one over on you by making you actually believe a fake trend exists, this story does not. The headline of this story should be, "I Really Hope Many People Get Very Vocally Mad About This Story, And Talk About Sexism, Because Then It Would Be Funny How Seriously They Took This Story." (It's a bit unwieldy, yes).

Rachel Sklar is so mad about this story!

Spencer Morgan: Winning by making people mad.

[Disclosure: I am a male though. Pic via]

Spencer Morgan digs into the fairy tale romance of Tinsley and Topper, a romance that began as prep school teenagers with an aggressive make-out session in the fluffy white New Jersey snow, managed to survive years of Topper's drunken floosy-nailing and Tinsley's relentless social climbing, but effectively ended when a pair of men's dress shoes went undelivered in Palm Beach this past April.

As Morgan tells it, Topper was in Florida for the wedding of one of his longtime moneyed bros. Tinsley, the little trollop, was supposed to join him later at the rehearsal dinner and bring shoes for him to wear. That's where the trouble started.

But before the rehearsal dinner, Tinsley texted Topper to say she couldn't come. Mr. Mortimer was devastated.

"The guy was emotionally bottomed-out," said a lifelong friend who was at the wedding. He had to borrow shoes. He kept luring people away from the party, off to side rooms and corridors at the Jupiter Island Club, to ask their opinion on the situation. People he hardly knew. "I guess at one point he called Tinsley and he got the weird European delayed-ring sound-so he knew she was with this other guy. Then up on the altar he was gazing off into who the hell knows where. It was ridiculous."

Tinsley had run off to get boned by a German aristocrat/prince named Casimir Wittgenstein-Sayn, news Topper shared with some of the couple's friends.

Topper e-mailed his friends to explain: "I know I have involved you guys in our problems and that was wrong. Tinsley is at fault of course but Casi [sic] never gave her a chance to breathe even when I asked him to give us space. He was manipulative and overbearing. I love my wife and we are going to do what we can to salvage this marriage."

Apparently, the Europeans play dirty in the game of love and don't give a shit about proper American aristocratic etiquette, which seems to hold that the other party to an affair is supposed to stand down when the cuckold issues an "I say good man, could you please refrain from sexing with my wife for a while" request, something Tinsley's mother seems downright horrified over.

"Casimir is a handsome, charming, urbane, and glib man. Topper asked him to step aside and give him (Topper) a chance to reclaim his marriage. Though he told Topper he would do this, he has NOT. I believe that Tinsley is confused, and she needs time by herself to sort things out."

But despite it all, Morgan says that an exceedingly distressed Topper isn't ready to give up on putting the pieces back together again.

He's become a full-time smoker. He's lost weight. He wakes up at precisely 3:25 every morning and plays over and over the reality show his life became. Still, he hasn't entirely abandoned the idea that she'll come back. "I love my wife" is all he'll tell me.

Perhaps a duel is in order here?

Finally, I should note that reading Morgan's piece is much more fun when you read the quotes in a voice similar to that of the aristocratic characters at the table during the dining room scene in Titanic. You should go over and give it a try.

In order to get into character [for Death in Love], Mr. Lucas committed to being crazy for 25 days. Like the character, he avoided all things beneficial or healthy.
"I tried to do everything to be beaten and rundown, a sense of feeling that pain. I purposefully did not do yoga or go to the dog park or hang out in bright, beautiful places."

Yoga or the dog park. It's called sacrifice, kids. After those dark days, Josh had to immediately re-calm himself. With yoga.

He also switched from Bikram yoga, which is intense hot yoga, to Kundalini yoga. Sometimes, he says, "it's as esoteric as sitting there with your hands in a strange posture and just quietly breathing.

Doing yoga is a thing Josh Lucas likes to do. Yoga. Just be thankful that Josh Lucas found yoga—before he went over the edge:

"It's funny, I was doing yoga the other day, and it must have been a fire truck that pulled up and started blasting its horn because the cars wouldn't move out of its way, and I actually burst out laughing, 'cause I was like, ‘This is incredible.' I was like, ‘Thank God I'm doing yoga right now, because otherwise I might not be laughing, I might be screaming.'"

If you see Josh Lucas doing anything other than yoga, call the police at once.
[NYO. Pic: Getty]

John Mahdessian prefers not to be called a dry cleaner.

"That's a fuckin' insult," he said, between pulls off a Marlboro Light on a recently Sunday morning. "That's like calling a world-renowned surgeon a doctor."

That tells you all you need to know about John Mahdessian (pictured), president of the "world's leading custom couture cleaner," the man responsible for rescuing Barbara Walters' black and white sequinned Armani jacket from the ravages of red wine.

Spencer, the assholes—but in shades of grey—of Manhattan (and those who gawk at them) will be poorer without you.
[NYO. Pic via]

Mike Nelson is the big dude who's the subject of the FindHeMan.com stalker blog. But the joke is it's not that hard to find Mike really cause he spends a lot of time in Madison Square Park, sunning the guns and the lats and the chest and the other important He-Man parts. He lost one eye in a fight with cops and used to be a druggie but cleaned up. Now he doesn't do acid or coke or heroin or rob cemeteries for skulls any more; he just lives with his girl and works out and hangs out and basically goes with the flow:

"I took care of rabbits as a kid," Mr. Nelson recalled. Big smile. "So it taught me how to be a little more affectionate as I got older."

Not surprisingly, this exhibitionist ex-junkie bodybuilder who could go down on women "all day" is one of the least annoying people Spencer Morgan has profiled in the past year.
[NYO]

One night when David was tagging along to a party, he came down the stairs wearing a light blue shirt and light blue pants.

"Andy was like, ‘You're not going to wear that out, are you?'" said David. "I was like, ‘Yeah, why, what's wrong with it?' And he was like, ‘Well, it doesn't match.' I was like, ‘Dude! What're you talking about, it's light blue and light blue-what could match more than that?'" (David says these days his brother occasionally asks him if he's still dressing like a "Hollywood jackass.")

This is from Spencer Morgan's weekly "Profile of some quirkyannoying dude in Manhattan," which this week is rather more meandering and aimless than usual, although there's David Spade, right in the middle of it all, still talking. [NYO; Pic via]

His dad, the elder Taki, is a big old rich horndog who likes to talk about fucking younger girls all the time; the younger Taki, known as J.T., is a bike messenger and an artist who works in the Nokia cameraphone medium and lives in his own place in Red Hook and he has two kids with a totally hot wife but they're separated and he went to prep school and smoked weed and "messed with" girls and lost his virginity and then got really into graffiti and lived in Paris for a while and got in a fight with Puffy in St. Tropez and met his totally hot wife in Gstaad and now he really just wants to chill and ride his bike and smoke weed and do his art, okay.

Spencer Morgan is now working on a purely conceptual level. [NYO]

Trend angle: during this recession, everybody has to compromise on their dreams. Neil S., for example, had to compromise on his dream of a full-on hypnotherapy practice by whittling it down to just sexy hypnosis. Oh well! At least he's not a boring banker in Buenos Aires.

NEIL S. WANTS a certain degree of anonymity-though feel free to give him a ring at 718-687-3347-and so he was guarded about his backstory. He said that he spent a good part of his childhood in a suburb outside of Washington, D.C., and became fascinated by hypnosis after seeing it employed in cartoons such as Superman, Batman, even Bugs Bunny...

About a year ago, he helped a guy realize that fantasy. "I created a scene where he was a superhero and he was tied up and the only way to release his bonds was to ejaculate and that would melt the bonds or whatever. And that worked pretty nicely."

Super. Neil's an IT guy turned erotic hypnotist with a bunch of good sexy hypnosis stories to share, and a man, Spencer Morgan, who is ready and waiting to take down those stories and spin them into a charming tale of quirk, for your reading pleasure, which we will then condense and comment upon, for the reading pleasure of the lazies among you. I guess you could say that everybody wins in this new recession-plagued gay hypnosex trend era. Except for whoever picked up Neil S.'s couch off the sidewalk:

Before he bought his place uptown, he lived in Chelsea for seven years, which is where he began hosting his sessions. He had a very comfortable couch there, which he had to throw out when he moved because of all the stains.

[NYO]

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Is this really a trend? Eh, doesn't really matter.

Used to be that just about every guy was circumcised but now it's more like half! Plus other guys are using all types of contraptions to "restore" their foreskins, by yanking skin up over their dicks for extended periods of time. Now that the facts are out of the way, marvel at Spencer Morgan's penis wordplay:

the hooded snake dragon...playing pop goes the weasel...the anteater variety...stare the weasel in the eye...tugger-plugger...precious stones...the turtleneck...a mouthful of limp skin.

But Spencer, where is your trademark "Allow someone to painfully kill themself with quotes" graf, in this case at the expense of a 37 year-old guy who proudly wears a foreskin-extending "device?"

"The main thing that's motivating me is-I'm not married and I'm not in a relationship now-but I think it's really a quality of the sexual experience for my partner, my potential partner. I'm heterosexual, and everything I've read, it's really, really important to the mechanics of sex," he said...

"I'm also very much an amateur psychologist," he continued. "I'm a virgin partly because of the church, but I've also read lots of research that backs up the argument that this sexual experience is such an intimate and intense thing, and at the same time marriage is such a difficult thing to make work-that you need to give yourself every benefit possible."

Oh there it is. This is masterful work, penis-wise. [NYO]

Sorgatz's comments to the Observer seemed to many an open bid to ratchet up his microcelebrity at the expense of accuracy and good taste. Some of the budding media mogul's critics will surely say his more recent comments are designed to keep the controversy.

Perhaps that's unfair: Sorgatz issued a clear and early apology to Rachel Sklar, the former Huffington Post writer who he dated for six months and then referred to in the Observer as "an exit strategy" to his tendency to date younger women.

I’m really sorry about how Rachel came across in that story. Most of you know her, so it doesn’t need to be said that she’s awesome. She’s taught me more about media and New York and maybe myself than anyone in my life. I appreciate her so much more than the story lets on, and I’m so sorry any of this happened like this.

There are also clear admissions in Sorgatz's most recent post on the matter. He admits he did not "technically" found the High Plains Reader, as he apparently told the Observer. "I tend to say I was there at the beginning because I actually was working with them from the start, waiting for my days at the student paper to end," he wrote.

Um, sure, but did you get $100,000 when the paper sold? Seems unlikely: there were four founders, two active at the paper when it sold for $150,000.

Sorgatz also confirms he had ownership of Web Guide, despite using the title of editor. Did he "start" the magazine, as the Observer reported? Not clear.

Sorgatz says he did in fact own a condo in Minneapolis, despite that one anonymous former (self-described) roomate who said otherwise.

One thing Sorgatz doesn't have to take any flack for: The erroneous assertion that he bought Wii game consoles for his nephews, when in fact he has only nieces. The Observer's Sencer Morgan has taken the fall for that error, telling us, "I regret that I mixed up nieces and nephews, it's always been an issue for me."

(Photo via Sorgatz's Flickr stream.)

The interview, for me, went clearly haywire right about here:

“I’ve tried to stay fit, you know, because it’s my instrument, this is my violin,” he said, gesturing over his body. “I play the violin. So I want to keep it tuned up …. So I work out there during the day, and then I write.”

This is my instrument? Surely profile author Spencer Morgan left out a "with a chuckle" or "jokingly" somewhere. Like, say, at the end of this:

“I go in spurts,” he said. Upcoming Goot pictures include Mojave Phone Booth, about a phone booth in the middle of the desert, and Major Movie Star, in which he plays Jessica Simpson’s dad. “I guess that’s just an artist’s life,” he said, gazing out over the park [and making that jack-off motion with his fingers?? and ironically holding up a copy of Police Academy 4: Citizens Patrol and grinning like a maniac?].

Guttenberg also says, seemingly appropos of nothing, after calling himself a "seducer," that "the meek will inherit the earth... so be nice to the meek. The old man spitting on the corner. The janitor cleaning up. The man behind the counter at the convenience store. Those are our people—that guy driving that truck—they make the world go."

That non-sequitur is still ringing in your ears (along with the cheesy, swelling orchestral score you'd expect to accompany Guttenberg's soliloquy at the end of some cornball flick from, yes, the 1980s) when the actor starts spilling his guts about his drinking:

“I indulge in wine, and I love vodka, I do,” he said. “And I love scotch, you know. And I love weed. And I love women. And I do have, you know, those … Addiction is such an overused word."

Um....

I’ll go out with women, because it’ll make me feel better. Women that I shouldn’t be around, but maybe they’ll make me feel better.”
He estimated that he’s dated some 600 women, but still hasn’t found Mrs. Right.

Steve, maybe you should end the interview before you dig yourself in any dee...

“I’ll lie to make myself feel better,” he said. “If I feel shitty, and someone says, ‘What are you working on,’ I’ll get really pissed off and go, ‘Yeah I’m doing a thriller with, you know, George Clooney.’ I make myself feel better by that—that’s an addiction to whatever that is, to make myself feel better, to take the pain away.”

OK, well, it's time to update Wikipedia or something, because none of this is in there. Anyway, Steve, it's been nice catching up, great seeing you, catch you maybe at the 30-year reunion and, hey, don't ever change old buddy!

[Observer]

Two things to know about Morgan: (1) His granddad is Harry "Colonel Sherman Potter" Morgan from MASH; (2) he awesomely slapped fruitini-sipping Men's Vogue writer Hudson Morgan in the face for talking shit. He is also known to haunt media happenings and quote indiscrete journos when they're horrifically drunk and should know better, which often makes for great copy.

Alexis "is a daughter of Lucia R. Brandt and Shelby Bryan, both of Houston. The bride’s father is a venture capitalist. From 1999 to 2001, he was a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Her mother retired as the editor of River Oaks Magazine in Houston. The bride is a stepdaughter of Louis K. Brandt." Mr. Bryan is also Vogue editrix Anna Wintour's boyfriend. And Alexis' brother, Jack, is a film student whose documentary on famed media watering hole Siberia is being screened at famed media watering hole Soho House later this month. (Your weekend editor is in it. And he's drunk!) [NYT]

The scene: last night, around midnight, at the Beatrice Inn, the low-ceilinged West Village bar and nightclub. The characters: Hud Morgan from Men's Vogue, pictured left, and his friend and rival, Spencer Morgan of the once-elite New York Observer. Off-camera: 17-year-old blonde starlet, Leven Rambin, who, incidentally, plays a troubled starlet in tonight's Lipstick Jungle. There's the sound of a slap.

It's not the first time the Men's Vogue writer lost his temper after a long night at the Beatrice. Earlier this month, he berated Julia Allison because the Star magazine talking bosom posted up a picture of herself with a red-scarfed Hud, which ended up on Gawker. He blamed her for pulling him in to her vortex of bad publicity.

But Hud has a vortex all of his own. The bullying of Allison provided a perfect excuse for gossip blogs like this to reveal Hud was dating the "little sister" whom Allison adopted until the 17-year-old actress, Leven Rambin from All My Children, stole her then-boyfriend, libertarian geek Jakob Lodwick. (Confused? There's a diagram).

And about a week ago, we hear, Hud and Spencer had a big argument on the phone. The two Morgans are friends and, yes, they are often mistaken for eachother, because they're in a similar line of work and share the same surname. Spencer Morgan, who recently acquired a fiancee after years as a man-about-town, was in Los Angeles last week for the Oscars. "Did you know that Hud Morgan got engaged?" he was asked. But the two differ in one crucial respect: Hud, for a former gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, has an extremely thin skin.

In the phone conversation, Hud asked Spencer how the engagement was working out. Spencer, having heard about Hud's new girlfriend, 17-year-old Leven Rambin of All My Children, ribbed him about her age. "How old did you say she was?" he asked, or words to that effect. You'd have thought that the polo-player-worshipping fruitini drinker would embrace the proof of his rampant heterosexuality. But no: Hud, embarrassed by the earlier Gawker item on his jailbait girlfriend, said he wanted a timeout on their friendship.

And last night? In a group with Radar's recently liberated Chris Tennant and other journalists, the argument resumed. According to witnesses, the conversation went something like this.

Spencer: "Dude, why didn't you respond to my email?" (He had apologized for the insult to Hud's teen girlfriend.)

Hud: "Do you want me to drop you?"

Spencer: "Yeah, sure. That's a good idea."

Hud walks down the stairs. Spencer follows, bitchslaps him, later telling friends: "He needed a dose of reality."

Hud, to the bouncers: "He punched me! He assaulted me! I want him removed!"

Spencer, explaining the slap: "He wasn't worth a punch."

Bouncers escort Spencer to the side room to the right of the entrance, with the couches. The red handprint on Hud's face gradually fades. Consensus verdict: Spencer's game. Close scene.

• Manhattan media clusterfuck map

Gurley is engaged to his longtime ladyfriend Hilly, who recently said in their therapy sessions, "You know what I'm sick of? I hate the stigma of feeling like one of these sucker-punched spinster loser Manhattan hags with a million cats and a stack of New Yorkers. I'm sick of it! I just want it done."

Well, sister, it's done! Or is it? According to one source, Gurley says the ring was just a gift and that they're not actually engaged. But at least Hilly no longer looks like a sucker-punched spinster loser Manhattan hag! We're sure we'll read allllll about that soon enough.

Our sincere congratulations to all the young lovers.

"Mr. Grodin definitely enjoys hearing himself talk," says Morgan, "much more than his wife or kids do. He allows that when he's got a captive audience, he likes to take full advantage." Though if I got a $300,000 advance for writing a book about all the mistakes my friends made, I'd think my words were golden too.
Morgan learns that Grodin

recently finished another play, At Home With Bill, inspired by his frustration with trying to get his wife and two children to listen to his work. "About two years ago, I came downstairs, and I said, 'Listen to this,' and I started reading, and I noticed that my wife headed upstairs a little sooner than usual," Mr. Grodin said. "So I thought to myself, 'You know, I'll bet anything if Shakespeare came downstairs and said, 'Listen to this,' then his wife or whoever would ... In other words, you could be Shakespeare and you still don't want to sit there and say, 'Yes, William.'"

On the way to the train station, Spencer "asked Mr. Grodin how he feels about the snarks at Gawker who try to make fun of him for being an old man. 'What?! Tell them to come to me when they've got a contract with Johnny Carson.'" Grodin also notes that "he was the only contract guest of Carson's who was never tapped to host the show when Carson was on vacation." Well, Chuck G., Choire's on vacation and we've been tapped to host Gawker, does that count? I'll just go ahead and book my tickets up to Westport now.

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• "Blind" item from gossip marm Ben Widdicombe: "Which druggy young actress, who commands in the solid seven figures per role, is infamous for pocketing the rolled-up bills of her pals after snorting cocaine?" Hmm. [Gatecrasher, last item]
  
• Faye Dunaway wears plastic gloves to dissect and weigh her fast food. [Page Six]
  
• Fashion week: It may suffer from a dearth of A-list stars! Oh noes! [Page Six]