Columbia grew up in Westfield, Mass., the son of a machinist who at one time had been a driver for Black Jack Bouvier, father of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. The Westfield household was a tense one, according to Columbia, except when his parents talked about their early years in New York City.

The world that they talked about was a very magical world for this little boy who grew up in a very cold house where people were fighting with each other all the time. And we lived on the edge of poverty. This was a world where people lived in very grand houses and grand apartments and had chauffeur-driven cars and sailed on yachts. When my mother and father talked about it, they talked about it with a kind of wonder and a reverence."

A half-century later, their son would, too.

But the route that led Columbia to the world of the wealthy was a circuitous one. Columbia, who acknowledged his homosexuality long after college, recalled himself as an effeminate young boy who always felt like an outsider. He decided early on to cover up that part of his makeup and to behave in a way that would allow him to advance socially. "I don’t mean society-wise," Columbia said. "I just mean as a social animal. And I succeeded. My first success was at Colby."

He was rushed by and pledged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, then a fraternity of privileged students and sports captains. Columbia, who was neither, said being a Deke was his first experience of "being inside." It also was a perhaps-chance encounter as a Deke that affirmed his ability as a writer, he said. A fraternity brother and hockey star, Frank Stephenson ’62, thrust a paper into Columbia’s hand as they passed on the path to the DKE house. The paper was a flyer for a play-writing contest and Stephenson said Columbia should enter. He did, and with Professor James Gillespie in the cast, the play won.

The prize was $100. Shortly after that, at the end of first semester of his junior year, Columbia added to his string of flunked science courses and was asked to leave Colby. He moved to New York; the $100 was his seed money. His first stop was a fellow student’s mother’s apartment–16 rooms on Park Avenue with a maid and cook and Columbia’s first look at a world from which he would later forge a career.

But he spent years floundering, he says. He tried acting but quit after flubbing lines in a summer-stock production in Lake Placid. He married, became a stockbroker. By 1971 he had left Wall Street and opened a head shop in Pound Ridge, N.Y. It was a flop until a friend suggested he sell designer sportswear. "The same mothers who wouldn’t buy a T-shirt for three dollars would say, ‘Two hundred thirty-nine dollars for a sweater set? How fabulous.’"