Igor Cassini

Igor Cassini (September 15, 1915 – January 5, 2002) was an American syndicated gossip columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain. He was the second journalist to write the Cholly Knickerbocker column.

Born as Count Igor Cassini Loiewski, younger son of Count Alexander Loiewski, a Russian diplomat. He worked as a publicist, ran the Celebrity Register, edited a short-lived magazine called Status, was a co-director of the fashion company House of Cassini, founded by his elder brother, Oleg Cassini, and was a television personality in the 1950s and 1960s, until he was convicted of being a paid agent of the dictator of the Dominican Republic without registering, as required by U.S. law.

Cassini's first attention at a national level was achieved in the Summer of 1939 when, as a result of a column he wrote that upset members of Virginia high society, he was kidnapped, tarred and feathered by a trio of locals near Warrenton, Virginia. Cassini himself later reflected, "From an obscure junior society columnist always worried as to how I would ever find enough material to fill the space I was grudgingly given, I became national news overnight."

Cassini's height of influence was in the 1950s, when the Hearst chain claimed 20,000,000 readership for papers that carried his column. He coined the term "Jet set" to describe the global movements of what had been "café society" — those who entertained at restaurants and night clubs and hobnobbed with the stars of the entertainment industry. His pen name evoked the fictional quintessential New Yorker, "Diedrich Knickerbocker", who was created by Washington Irving. The term "café society" had been invented by Maury Paul, Cassini's predecessor as "Cholly Knickerbocker" at the New York Journal American.

Later in his career, Igor, who was known as "Ghighi", hired a young assistant from Texas named Liz Smith. He also was the host of The Igor Cassini Show, an interview program that aired on the DuMont Television Network from October 25, 1953, to February 28, 1954, as well as another television program, Igor Cassini's Million Dollar Showcase.

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