Soon Columbia had two stores and a rented estate. But the kid who won the Colby playwriting contest was still inside Columbia the businessman.

Columbia’s anecdotes are full of "names," and by this time in his life the names already smacked of celebrity. Eric Preminger, son of director Otto Preminger and Gypsy Rose Lee, was a good friend. He suggested Columbia pursue his writing. The mother of a friend was married to one of the biggest movie studio heads in Hollywood. Columbia had written a screenplay and the friend got it to Sherry Lansing, then a producer, later chairman of Paramount Pictures. Lansing read the screenplay and told Columbia he should be in Hollywood, he says. He sold the business and headed west. "That’s all I needed," he said. "Sherry Lansing never spoke to me again."

But with Columbia and his serendipitous social contacts, one thing seems to always lead to another. He worked for a movie producer, freelanced (Esquire published his firsthand account of one of Truman Capote’s "lost weekends" in Hollywood), wrote stories for a movie magazine, scripts for a courtroom television show. In 1986 a book-editor friend pointed him in the direction of another editor looking for a writer to collaborate with Debbie Reynolds on her autobiography. Columbia signed on and the book Debbie: My Life was published by William Morrow in 1988. Its success led to contracts to do other celebrity biographies–the Cushing sisters of Boston, a noted jazz singer–though neither of those projects was completed.

Then Columbia’s long-time partner left him. It was a bitter breakup, and Columbia packed a few belongings and his dogs into his Volkswagen convertible and drove from L.A. to New York. He still was tinkering with the jazz-singer book when the owner of Quest magazine asked him to write for her. Columbia wrote about 50 profiles of society figures from 1994 to 1997, walking out when he felt his editor had become heavy-handed. Eventually he signed on at Avenue, another society magazine, but by then Columbia had his eye on a different venue–the Internet.

"I could see that was the future for me," he said. "Because what I write about is not of great interest to everybody, but those who find it interesting are everywhere and they are devoted."

And are there people who are part of this world and people who are merely fascinated by it? "Yeah, and of course the people who are in it are also fascinated by the people who are in it," Columbia said. "There are people who run toward the nearest photographer to make sure their picture is taken. . . . It’s really interesting because when I moved to California, if you went to a big party or a big benefit or a première, there were always photographers and there were always movie stars and the movie stars were always camera ready. Whenever there was a camera around there was a pose and they looked really good. They just know how to do it. It was just a curious thing for me to see because I had never seen people so attuned to the lens. But when I came back to New York in the early Nineties, I found that everybody in the whole street was like that. Everybody is camera ready."

He readily acknowledges that many of the people who look at his magazine (75,000 circulation) or Web site (400,000 hits a week) look at the pictures and skip his prose. "The nature of the time we’re living in," he remarked, citing Louis Mumford’s Pentagon of Power, which he read at Colby. "Basically what Mr. Mumford was saying is that we’ve become so mechanized that we’re losing our humanistic qualities," he said. "And I do think it’s really come to pass."