tinsley mortimer

TOPPER MORTIMER is 31 years old and has curly blond hair, a job at a hedge fund, a blue-blood pedigree, the ability to recite funny lines from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Caddyshack," and a wife who is New York's pre-eminent young socialite.

Skip to next paragraph

Photograph by David X. Prutting/Patrick McMullan; illustration by The New York Times
MR. INVISIBLE Tinsley Mortimer and her mystery man, a k a Topper.


A DEB IN 1993 Before they were the Mortimers ...
That would be Tinsley Mortimer: the 32-year-old charity-ball staple, model and handbag designer for the Japanese label Samantha Thavasa, "beauty ambassador" for Dior, Women's Wear Daily fixture, all-around bombshell, and ― if attendance is what counts ― consensus choice three years running for post-deb of the year.

She is one of the most visible faces in New York's social scene; Mr. Mortimer, who only rarely accompanies his wife on the town, is something of a mystery.

He is quick to acknowledge that while he is "extremely proud" of his wife's career in the fashion business (this, they both freely admit, is something she attained by leveraging her society presence), he remains skeptical of the degree to which she is so avidly, well, social.

"It's not necessarily the type of goal that anybody should strive for, going out every night for the sake of self-promotion and getting their pictures taken," Mr. Mortimer said in a recent interview. "And I mean, these are girls who went to good colleges. You would think they'd have something better to do."

Mrs. Mortimer has an unusually high ― or rather, broad ― profile for an Upper East Side society woman. In the last three and a half years, the photographer Patrick McMullan has posted nearly 2,000 party pictures of Mrs. Mortimer on his Web site. (By contrast, the site's archive lists only 47 pictures of Mr. Mortimer, and in most of those he is beside his wife.)

She had a cameo ― playing an unnamed version of herself ― in a risqué promotional Web video ad for Holly Peterson's novel "The Manny." Last month, during the Fashion Week runway shows, she wrote a blog for Glamour magazine. She is on several committees for charity events, and she says she is in discussions with a production company to star in her own reality TV show.

"It's worked out well for Tinsley," Mr. Mortimer said. "She's built a great business for herself, she's heading in the direction that she'd like to see herself."

But, he continued, "I don't know that the route to how she got there is what I'd tell my 5-year-old girl to follow if I had one."

An evening with the Mortimers can feel a bit like an outtake from the Bickersons, as cast by No?l Coward.

Late one night in September, they met for a nightcap at the bar of the Gramercy Park Hotel (Mr. Mortimer drank beer; Mrs. Mortimer a berry bellini, no cassis). She had just come from the New Yorkers for Children gala. As he was slightly in his cups, Mr. Mortimer was quick to begin his indictment of the charity circuit.

"What I'm saying is, I want to see some results from all these benefits," he said. "Do you think any of these people would be involved if they didn't get credit for it?"

Mrs. Mortimer said, "Sometimes he forgets, when he's on this subject, like: 'I know one of them. That's my wife.'"

She mentioned that LeAnn Rimes, the singer, had been at that evening's dinner.

"LeAnn Rimes didn't make her bones going to charity parties," he said. "She did something else."

"Topper has this life in New York because he grew up here, so he doesn't need the social thing," she said. "To him, it seems frivolous. His city changed on him. He hates that."

"I'm just saying, when you live for the show of it, you live with an audience," Mr. Mortimer said.

THE Mortimers have been a couple since their days at Lawrenceville, the New Jersey boarding school. Mrs. Mortimer (née Mercer) is the oldest daughter of a prosperous businessman from Richmond, Va. Mr. Mortimer, whose given name is Robert, is the scion of an old-money dynasty. His great-grandfather, Henry Morgan Tilford, was a president of Standard Oil of California, and he is also a descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States.

His father, John Jay Mortimer, is a financier, and his mother, Senga Mortimer, is a longtime editor at House Beautiful.

Topper Mortimer met his future wife the winter of his second year at Lawrenceville, when she was in the 12th grade and he was in the 11th. (She'd spent the previous year training at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida.) "It was a snowfall and she was walking across the campus with a couple of her friends and I just grabbed her and threw her in a snowbank," Mr. Mortimer said. "Anyway, that was my approach. She didn't like it but she was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe."

It's a poorly kept secret among the Mortimers' friends that the following summer, when they were both 18, they drove to a courthouse in Bradenton, Fla., and were married by a justice of the peace. (The once and future Mrs. Mortimer was about to start at the University of North Carolina, and neither she nor Mr. Mortimer, who had a year left at Lawrenceville, could bear the idea of being separated without some kind of legal commitment.)

But the secret was also poorly kept from their parents, who not long afterward arranged for Mr. Mortimer to fly to the Dominican Republic to (most reluctantly) annul the marriage.

She ended up transferring to Columbia, he went on to New York University, and in 2002, they remarried in Richmond.
BEIJING ― Talk about taking fashion to new heights. On Friday, Karl Lagerfeld and Fendi held a monumental fashion show ― atop the Great Wall of China, no less.

The 500 guests ― including Zhang Ziyi, Kate Bosworth, Thandie Newton, Amanda Hearst and Tinsley Mortimer ― climbed the steep steps to witness the extravagant display said to have cost upward of $10 million.

"It's a big sign that China is the place where things are happening today," said Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

As for the fashion, it was an expanded version of Fendi's spring collection recently shown in Milan, featuring about two-thirds new styles. The show was followed by an open-air dinner and party at The Village at SanLiTun, a high-tech, new shopping complex in downtown Beijing.